The manager hands her a book on how to speak Korean and leaves, and Tzuyu, the sole mandarin speaker of the group, watched in disbelief as she left the room, coloring her perception in red.

It's not like she has help: she is the only foreigner in this newly formed group who doesn’t has any sort of country mates. Alas, it is her and these books. She eyes the Japanese trio, and they eye her back, full of distrust. They stay out of each others way, and it's better like this. 

As such, Tzuyu sat down on her room - shared with three strangers older than her, but not by much: classmates without the mate part. Not friends, barely that. Tzuyu studied and kept her head down in-between practices and singing lessons, trying to do her best, trying to understand what happened around her, drowning without water.

The other members of the group simply looked at her, like she was a thing instead of a person, and stayed out of Tzuyu's way.  Well, all except for one. 

Jihyo sat down by her side and watched, face in hands, intently, eyes shining and huge. It unnerved Tzuyu to be observed like such, like a specimen underneath a microscope, but she lacked the words to make Jihyo go away. 

It's when she stumbles over the first word that Jihyo perks up and corrects her in the most gentle of tones. Tzuyu eyed her, careful, and repeated the word slowly, like Jihyo had said, and that made Jihyo smile and congratulate her in the worst mandarin Tzuyu had ever to hear; the worst mangling of her name, too - Zhewi . That isn’t her. That isn’t her name. Is this her fate? To have her name mangled in terrible ways? To not be her own self? It's too much. 

And yet she grins and bears it, because it's what she has. For Tzuyu, it's either this grinning stranger with the mangled mandarin, or the loneliness the books offer, and she has never coped well with being alone. She has, therefore, no choice but to accept what is being offered.

She keeps studying and Jihyo keeps correcting her - Tzuyu corrects her broken mandarin as well, at first out of pettiness, and then out of sheer necessity: as much as she dislikes it, it’s the human interaction she so craves, it’s talking to someone outside her head, it’s speaking and being understood.

Is it enough, Tzuyu wonders.

At fansigns, Tzuyu - shaky Korean at best, but she can speak, she can talk with fans and smile and laugh, even if her reactions are a bit slow compared to others. Jihyo beams at her every time she speaks with confidence, and Tzuyu smiles at her, interacts and plays and gets all the affection she craves. 

Later, when they’re all spent, tired of a long day of attention - the fans spoke in mandarin with her, and Tzuyu smiled at them like they’d given her the entire world in a silver platter -, Jihyo comes to her bed, sits down, and pats Tzuyu’s head. She looked at Jihyo with half-lidded eyes, too tired to open them fully, and leaned into the touch.

“Good girl, Zhewi .” Jihyo purred, in mandarin (still accented, still getting her name wrong, even after this long), and Tzuyu felt a warm sense of pride bloom into her chest.

So if she hung off Jihyo’s arm, smiles to her and pretend that these feelings in her chest were anything more than what they were, it was alright, right? It was okay to see Jihyo smile at her stumbled words in tv shows and vlives and smile back, right? It was alright to see how her smile had become Jihyo's, right, a mirror that she did not wish for?

Emotions were suppressed because to explore them was to suffer through an existential crisis of being Tzuyu versus being Jihyo’s Zhewi ; to be the product of her own self or to be the product of a created being, a false mask that would nuzzle and smile and be affectionate, like a too grown puppy. Both felt unrealistic for different reasons.

(doesn’t mean she won’t look at the other girls and wish she was as open as they were, doesn't mean she won't wish she was real)

Then Jihyo would waltz in and say something and Tzuyu would forget her own name, just to be Zhewi . If she has forgotten how to speak her own name, it’s a tragedy no one needs to know but herself.