I WENT TO TAIWAN TO SAY GOODBYE

To my grandmother, and perhaps. the country whose resilience she shares

- KATHERINE HU

It wasn't a great time to visit Taiwan. Nancy Pelosi's layover in Taipei in early August had heightened tensions with China, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine had people asking whether Taiwan faced a similar threat.

My father and I scrolled through news of aggressive Chinese military drills and endless U.S. delegations-and debated whether it was safe to go. But when weighed against a hypothetical, the reality of my grandmother's cancer won out. She was refusing chemotherapy. We left in September; better to be early than late.

Upon landing, I found the Taiwan of my childhood  ummers largely unchanged. I felt silly for expecting otherwise. Almost everything was as I remembered my grandmother's 13th-floor apartment near Taipei's bustling Shilin Night Market; the department store where my father's family had run a small leather-goods shop; that one stall with gua bao, fluffy white buns stuffed with tender pork belly, and the owner who gets bossier each time I see her. The only hint of tumult was a copy of the Taipei Times in the snack aisle of a convenience store with the headline "China Unlikely to Invade Taiwan Soon." The media had described the atmosphere as "defiant" but, to me, it just felt normal. At More Fine, an optical shop in the central district of Gongguan where my parents and I always get our glasses, my father asked the owner why everyone seemed so calm. "It's numbness," he called from the back of the shop. "What else is there to do?"