I hadn’t intended to play chicken with a train that day. Like most things in my life to that point, it just sort of happened.

I wasn’t even supposed to be there, in the cypress forests of Taiwan — I hadn’t planned to be in Taiwan at all. Until just a few weeks earlier, I’d been expecting to spend that summer — the summer of 1989 — in Beijing, as part of a group of 25 students who would cap a year of Chinese language study with a summer spent in China’s capital.

I passed the spring term of my freshman year at Dartmouth reading newspapers and watching TV news intently for the first time in my life. Physically, I was in New England, but in spirit I was with the student protesters 10,000 miles away in Tiananmen Square. 

In spite of the obviously mounting tension, I wasn’t any more worried about political volatility in China than I was about speeding or attending keg parties at home. There might theoretically be some real danger, but not to me. Anything bad that happened would happen to other people, grownups probably, people who weren’t young and nimble enough to get out of harm’s way. (And if this sounds callous, let me stress that by “bad,” I was thinking along the lines of, at worst, police detention. Genocide never entered into my naïve thinking.) I imagined spending the summer scampering among the bands of students camped out in Tiananmen Square, giving impromptu talks on the nature of liberty and serving as an eyewitness to history. My 600-word vocabulary and facility with Chinese culture (I knew to take my shoes off in a Chinese home, and was pretty handy with chopsticks) would afford me access to student leaders that the talking heads could only dream about. I’d probably come home from the revolution with a flak vest and my own regular spot on CNN.

I continued to believe that my very eighteen-ness would protect — and maybe even reward me — right up until the tanks rolled through the square on June 4th. In a testament to denial that shocks me now, I continued to believe it for some time afterward. Informed that my professor had cashed in her guan xi to get all of us into a Mandarin program at Taiwan’s Tunghai University (and had arranged for all new plane tickets and visas), I didn’t react with the gratitude I now realize I should have. Actually, I was less than grateful. I was personally wounded. It seemed like the cruelest bait-and-switch imaginable. Instead of China, a destination I’d been fascinated by as long as I could remember, I was being sent to a place even the U.N. didn’t recognize as a real country.

It was hard for me to imagine it as one either. I knew Taiwan as the source of the cheap plastic toys of my childhood. I pictured it as a sort of giant factory floating in the ocean, trailing Cracker Jack prizes and noisemakers in its wake. I didn’t even know exactly where it was. I owned an old globe — it had been my father’s when he was a boy — and Taiwan wasn’t anywhere to be found on it. There was a largish island off the coast of China in what seemed like just about the right place, but it was labeled “Formosa,” so that couldn’t be right. Maybe Taiwan was too small and insignificant to show up on the 12-inch globe. “Great,” I thought to myself, feeling simultaneously the disappointment of a woman who’s had a career setback, and the secret terror of a girl who was going to take her teddy bear with her to Asia.

Less than three weeks after I got the news, I was waving down a Toyota Cedric cab at Chiang Kai-Shek International Airport with three of my classmates, the humidity draped over my shoulders like a sodden stole. A smoky, pungent aroma like smoldering leaves and soy sauce made the atmosphere seem even weightier. I wondered how I could survive this for nine weeks.

The cab launched itself toward the downtown Taipei hostel where we would spend the night en route to the university. The driver laughed when we asked where the seatbelts were. As the car screeched around corners, we rattled, wild-eyed, around the back seat. The windows were open and waves air slapped at us like tendrils of seaweed. Outside, moped headlights and restaurant signs flashed past. The sensory overload was alarming, but one thing was clear: Taiwan was not going to be boring.

The Tunghai campus, a few hours southwest of Taipei, was its own kind of exotic. It had wide swaths of weedy concrete where my college had lawns, and scrubby, feral bushes where I expected groomed privet. The frying-pan flat enclave was barely recognizable to me as a college campus, and after a few weeks I began to crave a change in elevation. My classmate Sarah had the same idea, and despite having only a passing acquaintance, we decided to travel to the Alishan National Scenic Area together the next weekend. (It seems odd to me now that I have no clear recollection of the conversation that began what is now one of my longest friendships.)

Saturday morning Sarah and I threw ourselves into the back seat of a long-distance bus. As we rumbled toward the mountainous center of the country, we also headed up, toward the nearly mile-high Zhongzheng Village in the heart of Alishan. As the bus climbed, the steamy humidity of sea level congealed into thick mist. It was like churning through a Chinese landscape painting in a cement truck, the shuddering old bus rattling around turns in a road seemingly narrower than the vehicle itself. Sitting in the window seat, I was often able to look 1,000 feet straight down, and I tried not to think about how close the wheels must be to the void.

The haze soon became nearly white-out thick, and I couldn’t see the landscape around us — or guess how far the bus would plummet in a worst-case situation. But as we hair-pinned still higher, ears popping, the opaque cloud cover began to brighten, and I got the sensation of swimming up toward the surface of a lake after a deep dive. Strange darker patches stood out against the glare. At first I took them to be thicker pockets of mist, or optical illusions. Eventually, however, the truth dawned on me: The bus wasn’t climbing an isolated peak; we were surrounded by impossibly tall mountains, and had been for some time.

How could I have not seen an entire mountain range? As the mist began to thin, jagged peaks faded in and out of view. A sharp spire of rock would reveal itself in my peripheral vision, and almost before I’d turned to get a good look, it would disappear behind a silky veil of cloud. As the mist thinned further, the mountains lingered in view slightly longer, like stray cats getting used to the presence of people. Finally we burst through the last of the cloud layer and the peaks stayed put, revealing themselves in all their soaring glory. They weren’t unusually tall by Asian mountain standards; only a few summits poked above 8,000 feet, and there was no trace of snow. The illusion of Himalayan height came from their slender, cathedral-like shapes, craggy but graceful, like aging dancers draped in green veils.

Soon after breaking through the clouds, we arrived at Zhongzheng Village. The air was cool and the sky was a brilliant blue. Energized, we bounded up the first path we came to, not even bothering to make arrangements for the night.

The path led directly to the first of Alishan’s two tourist draws: the Guangwu Cypress, an enormous tree surrounded by hawkers selling cheap plastic trinkets. (At least something about Taiwan had turned out as I’d imagined). We paid a few cents to have our picture taken in front of the tree — two ponytailed young women in t-shirts and shorts dwarfed by a tree the size of a respectable redwood.

Several hundred yards down the trail we found an even larger tree. We also found that the path crossed a set of railroad tracks. Hoping that fewer souvenir stands lay this way, and hearing a train in the distance, we decided we would follow the rails as soon as the train had passed. To amuse myself while we waited, I pulled my wallet and camera out of my knapsack, shook out a few one-kuai pieces, and placed the coins on the oddly narrow tracks. I held my camera up to my face, imagining how I would frame the shot when the train eventually came into view. To my horror, it was suddenly there in my viewfinder, moving far faster than I had anticipated.

I later discovered that I had squeezed off a shot of the train before jumping out of the way. It shows an absurdly small locomotive, looking more like it should be chugging around a petting zoo than transporting fully-grown people. What Sarah and I had taken for a mighty freight train in the distance had actually been this Little Engine That Could, rapidly approaching. Its load of passengers was headed up to the park’s other big tourist draw: the panoramic view at the 8,041-foot summit of Mount Zhu.

Collecting the kuai, now smeared thin in the middle, General Chiang’s head stretched into the shape of a peanut, we shrugged off the encounter with uneasy laughter, feeling like we’d just been attacked by a swarm of ladybugs: Real danger might have been involved, but who’d believe it? There seemed to be nothing to do but set out along the tracks in the same direction as the train, listening carefully every time we came to a bridge. The tracks passed through a cool, shady cypress and rhododendron forest. Occasionally at a bend in the tracks a misty vista like the ones we’d been treated to that morning would open up, only to be swallowed by the forest a few steps later.

Fueled by the jolt of nervous energy, Sarah and I chattered brightly, as if we could make up for eighteen years of not knowing each other in one afternoon. “So what brought you to Dartmouth?” Sarah asked. “The foreign language programs,” I told her, though in my head I was answering a different question. “How did you get into college?” seemed to be the implicit question, and the answer was: I wasn’t sure anymore. I knew I hadn’t done much this summer to prove I belonged. I was struggling in Chinese class. Unlike a lot of my more directed peers, I had no idea what I was going to do after college. It was obvious from the way I was tottering and wheezing along the tracks that I had been no one’s athletic recruit. And I knew for a fact it wasn’t my skill at oral persuasion that had gotten me into school — due to an administrative glitch, I’d never formally interviewed. The one and only thing I could think of that I might have done right was my essay.

The moment the topic of writing popped into my mind, a realization struck me. It wasn’t one of those thunderous, scales falling from the eyes epiphanies. It was more an acknowledgement of something I had always sort of known, or at least should have noticed: I was a writer. This was what I would grow up to do. It might just be all I could do.

A moment earlier, I hadn’t understood this about myself. Now the thought of my future career as a writer was looming before me like the proverbial tree blocking my view of the forest. Far from depressing me, though, the thought of having a single job option was energizing, given that it was one possibility more than I’d had a moment before. It wasn’t unlike the startling sensation of the mist parting and offering a sharp, clear view of what lay ahead.

Sarah and I hiked along the tracks for several hours that afternoon. I didn’t mention my little vision directly, since I hadn’t properly digested it myself, but I did try on my new identity by working into the conversation the comment that I might like to be a writer when I grew up.

“Yeah? What do your parents do?” Sarah asked. I said my father was a pilot who had also done a lot of writing about aviation. “Oh, so that makes sense that you’d want to be a writer, too” she said. And it did.

I can’t say that everything in my life became clear that day. By the time I went to bed that night, I had a belly full of foods I couldn’t identify, for one thing. I never learned the names of all my dining companions at the railway worker’s home where we rented a room, and where I first heard Sarah refer to me as her peng you, her friend. I hardly understood the obsession with China that had made me want to study in Beijing, and nobody really had a clear picture of the massacre in Tiananmen Square that had rerouted me to the island formerly known as Formosa.

So it’s true that I was still, in many ways, the same baffled teenager who had gotten on a bus with a near stranger that morning. I still barely knew where I was or how I got there. But for the first time in my life, I had some idea of where I was going.