Portrait of Young Taiwanese Woman with Bike

I am sitting in a modern, chic Taiwanese tea shop drinking a cup of wulong tea, studying for my final Chinese exam, my final final of the year, perhaps my final final of Taiwan.

This is a beautiful new tea shop that opened a few months ago, near Taipei City Hall MRT station. There are natural wood tables and beautiful, simple white teapots, Chinese teas and English teas, all tastefully displayed, as if we are in California.

I prefer the Chinese teas. Today, it's a Dong Ding wulong. They serve it to me with a bit of honey on the side. I've never heard of Chinese people putting honey in their wulong tea, so I scoop up the honey with the spoon and eat it like desert.

One of the young girls who works there must be done her shift, I see her walk out of the shop in her street clothes, carrying a small paper bag, one that they put bags of tea in for customers. The automatic door, an impressively finished wide wood door, closes behind her. Most doors to stores in Taiwan open and close like this, either with a light push of a button, or with the movement of your approaching body spotted by a motion detector.

Her bike is parked on the street just in front of the stores, in a space between countless scooters. The scooters of Taiwan.

It's drizzling. Most people are walking with umbrellas, but she doesn't seem to mind. She hangs her bag on one of the handlebars, slowly, and takes out a carefully folded handkerchief, which she carefully unfolds. Then she uses it to dry the seat methodically. First the top, then the sides, then a circle around to make sure she hasn't missed a spot.

As I watch her do this, I realize that this is a uniquely Taiwanese scene. There are no 19 year-old girls in the States who carry around handkerchiefs to wipe dry the seats of their bikes, and if they do, they probably do it really quickly and miss a lot of spots. But not this girl.

She slowly pulls her bike out of the narrow spot. She is moving very slowly. She's doesn't seem like the athletic type, but she is not a prissy lamei (辣妹; hottie). More like the studious type, with a bit of a creative streak. Something says she could make you a really creative and heartfelt birthday card.

By the time she pulls it out of its spot and straightens the bike so it is pointed in the direction of traffic, she notices the rain has gotten the seat wet again, and so she pulls out her handkerchief again.

I realize that I need to get back to studying, and so I continue writing my characters. At my current level, all the vocabulary consists of two-word concepts that are really easy to forget, but sometimes, you can figure out what they mean, words like laolei (勞累).

I look up, looking for her, and she's gone.