My first roommate was Wu Pei-chen, a twenty-six-year-old Taiwanese graphic designer who worked in a small studio near the city center.
She had shoulder-length dark hair, enormous glasses, and a habit of leaving sticky notes on the refrigerator.
The notes began as reminders.
Buy rice.
Pay electricity.
Don't forget garbage collection.
Then she started adding Mandarin translations.
One evening, I discovered a note attached to the kettle.
「水已經煮好了。」
The water has boiled.
I stared at it.
Then looked toward Pei-chen.
She smiled.
“Practice.”
I laughed.
“Are you going to label the entire apartment?”
She considered that.
“Probably.”
Within two weeks, the refrigerator, bathroom mirror, washing machine, and kitchen cabinets had all become part of my language education.
I enrolled in Mandarin classes alongside my engineering work.
I practiced with classmates.
Listened to ordinary conversations.
And asked Pei-chen to correct me when my pronunciation changed the meaning of a word.
Sometimes she laughed so hard she had to sit down.
I tried not to take it personally.
She was equally embarrassed when we practiced English idioms and she accidentally translated them literally.
Eventually, our apartment became a place where both languages mixed naturally.
One evening, after I'd spent three hours struggling through an engineering paper in Chinese, I collapsed onto the sofa.
“I'm never going to understand this language.”
Pei-chen looked up from her laptop.
“You understood the paper?”
“Half of it.”
“Last month you understood none of it.”
I sighed.
“That's not comforting.”
She smiled.
“That's progress.”
I looked toward the ceiling.
For a moment, I thought about Dad.
How he'd insist that small improvements mattered.
Then I smiled.
“Okay.”
Pei-chen nodded.
“Now say it in Mandarin.”