a week ago, when we were alone and watching the sunset and pretending it wasn’t a romantic thing to do, Wei said, “We should do something before my flight. Go to Philly or something.”

I’d only known him for one month. Every community has its designated activity for meeting mutual friends: bar hopping, dinner parties, beer and barbecue on the beach. For Taiwanese people in New York City, it was karaoke in Flushing.

     Wei had arrived late and proceeded to talk to every girl in the room.

     “Nice necklace,” he said when it was my turn.

     “My boyfriend brought it from Korea.”

     “He’s Korean?”

     “American,” I said, then added, “White.”

     Wei was tall and slender. He had nice eyes—one might think he’d gotten eyelash extensions. But his eyebrows were a tangled smudge. I didn’t think he was my type at all.

     Then his JJ Lin song came on, and he nailed every note. It was the way the blue lights flashed over his tilted head, like lightning, that helped me decide, upon learning that he was part of my neighborhood run club, that I could add running to my yoga routine.

     He didn’t look as fresh when he showed up at the run club the following week. There were shadows under his eyes. His legs looked even skinnier in the full sun, and I felt reassured, almost smug, that his looks had been but a trick of the light.

     I said, lightly, “Did you ask out anyone from karaoke?”

     “I went on a date with Lily, but we had zero chemistry.”

     I snorted. “You’d turn down Angelina Jolie herself.”

     “I’m only dating Taiwanese right now,” he said, taking my comment literally.

     “I’d like to preserve the option of going home.”

     Preserve the option. Like it was a pickle. I couldn’t stand people who came all the way to New York just to date within their own group—it was close-minded, even wasteful.

Miss Tang was a plump woman in her thirties and our seventh-grade homeroom teacher. She had a kind, matronly smile, but sprung into tantrums over trifles. Her punishment of choice was meditation. After school, we’d sit at our desks with straight backs, knee-bound palms, and closed-tight eyes while Miss Tang surveilled us from the podium and doled out minutes for minor infractions.

    Coming from slap-happy elementary schools where we ran free, Taipei Municipal Ming Ri Junior High was a letdown. In addition to having sadistic teachers, it was fifteen minutes uphill from the hospital. It was ugly, too: building tiles peeled off in patches, leaving mottled surfaces like chewed corn; spotty hedges and royal palms merged into monochrome green; moss dribbled down concrete in streaks of olive; and heart-shaped vines died on the arched trellises, sun-beaten and brown.
    We quickly bonded over our disappointment. We pitched crumpled notes at one another during exams. We ditched class before the last bell to stake a claim on the basketball court. When the school minimart banned sugar, we stuffed our backpacks at convenience stores with sodas and juices and candies and gum and resold them in the hallways. We spent our profits on gummy worms, toy nunchucks, mini box-cutters, plastic spirographs, retractable measuring tape, candy cigarettes, and fake cockroaches and centipedes—they brought out an onslaught of tantrums from Miss Tang. To suppress our mischief, she sentenced the whole class to half an hour of daily group meditation, barking, “Five more minutes if a single person moves a hair! Five more minutes for everyone!”

You now stand at the heart of Moravany, the town square. Here is the bell tower, the cathedral, and the eight-hundred-year old town hall. But you’re not here for that today—you’re here for the legends, aren’t you?
    A little about the old theater: nowadays they host daily concerts, but originally it was built by and for a circus—a traveling circus that loved Moravany so much they decided to stay. After they went bankrupt, Moravany inherited their animals. Today you can still see the monkeys, the Bengal tiger, and the ponies—but the dancing bear from Russia died last year from heatstroke.