Today in Taipei, Briefly

It’s early evening, it’s perfectly warm, the sky is perfectly pink and blue and fading into a gentle night, and lights are starting to come on in the buildings around Sun Yatsen Memorial Park creating a ring of blue and yellow constellations over the tops of the trees.

I spent all day trying to go to stores that were closed in spite of their hours listed online, walking and walking and walking, and sitting in various beautiful cafes. Not a terrible way to spend the day, although a little disappointing and frustrating compared to the rest of the trip this far.

Late this afternoon I went into the Sun Yatsen Memorial Hall in between other destinations. Since early on in university I’ve had a big interest in Sun Yatsen, and I spent a lot of time on him in my thesis. I could write a ton on my thoughts about him, but that’s another post for another time I think.

I was lucky enough to walk in as they were doing something that appeared to be a changing of the guard ceremony.

Several guards in white, stamping metal-bottomed boots rhythmically, marched slowly at everyone watching, fists raised, guns at their sides. They stopped about two feet from me and my heart jumped.

The performance of nationalism is something I’m really interested in about Taiwan as well, but again, another post, another time perhaps.

Right now I’m sitting outside the hall where there was recently a flag lowering ceremony, where people came and bowed to the memorial before the guard ceremony, and I’m watching groups of kids hip hop dancing on the veranda.  They all have portable stereos playing American music, and they dance as they talk to each other, twitching their shoulders, shuffling their feet, rolling their wrists.

People are out in the memoria grounds sitting and talking, flying kites, playing Pokemon Go.

The lights on Taipei 101 have come on and the scalloped edges are illuminated in red.

I went to a temple this morning that’s famous for divination, and I thought, I should go back tomorrow. People go and drop divination stones after giving their personal information and asking a question they need help on.

I thought I should go back tomorrow and ask, Where should I go?  What should I be doing?  How can I untangle all the wires in my life that are working themselves into increasingly intricate knots every day, every moment?

Coming to Taipei was a vacation in a number of different ways, but those questions snuck across international borders, across an ocean, nestled in some pocket.

Right now, though, I can imagine it’s enough to watch these kids dance to Rihanna, and I can watch Taipei 101 get brighter and brighter, and I can sit under this sky with everyone else in the park and relax.

Taipei So Far: A Listicle

• Number of bubble teas: 4
• Times I’ve listened to the same 2 albums: I lost count
• Times I’ve eaten in an actual restaurant: 0
• Times I’ve texted someone saying I’m moving to Taipei: 3
• Times I’ve spoken Japanese to someone: 1
• Times I’ve spoken Chinese to someone: Lots! 🙂
• Phone charging spots encountered: uncountable! What a thoughtful country!!
• Rainstorms encountered: 3

I bought a ticket to come to Taipei on a whim. I knew I had a week off before school started again and I knew I wanted to go somewhere, but I wasn’t picky about where. Tickets to Taiwan were cheap and I’ve always wanted to go, so here I am.

Taiwan has been tremendously better than I could have anticipated. I’m mostly joking when I text people that I’m moving here and forgetting about Tokyo, mainly because a short trip is very different from actually living and working in a place. However, my impressions of Taipei so far all add up to a lot of evidence that this would be a great place to live.

I was talking to some really cool guys who run a bookstore/cafe/bar last night that I’ve been lowkey trying to move into every night and we started talking about difference between Japan and Taiwan. One of the guys has traveled to Japan and has a big interest in it, and we talked about how the pressure there is incredibly high, how people are very reserved, how the apartments are so so small…

I love Tokyo a lot and it’s definitely one of my favorite places I’ve lived, but thinking about the differences between these two places I can see Taiwan being more agreeable to me.

I definitely wasn’t expecting to come away from vacation with a desire to move countries, but sometimes that’s what happens I suppose.

More to come when I’m back at my proverbial desk in Japan.

xoxo

Places I Am Blacklisting Myself From: A Listicle

• Mitsukoshi/Takashimaya/Matsuya (the department store, not the fast food place actually I might go there right now)
• Tokyu Hands (I almost bought: spray paint to decorate my umbrella, silicon circles for a clothing idea that is in development, fake branches because I honestly don’t know why but the words “decorative Lincoln Logs” did pass through my mind, clay that turns into silver due to sorcery out of which you can make jewelry)
• Seisho Iijiro because I do not not not need expensive cheese or biscuits like??? Come on dude, buy the local food it’s perfectly excellent tasting also!
• The 7/11 next to work because really, I don’t need more rice crackers and I especially don’t need to eat them for lunch and I especially do not need to be eternally scrutinized by my coworkers over my poor eating choices
• Bookstores.  I don’t need that!! I don’t need it!
• Makeup stores.  I always make poor decisions and buy lots of things and sure, I use them, but do I need them?? When these things are 2000 yen? No!!
• H&M and Forever 21 and other major chain clothing stores, including Zara, which really cuts deeply.  Uniqlo is an exception, but otherwise I really want to stop buying super generic clothing from mass production stores where the quality isn’t that good anyway.  Either make shit or buy designer I’m not even kidding.  I can’t afford designer so this is also a very good way to just keep me from shopping.
• Except!!
• When the Kenzo x H&M collab comes out in November, then all bets are off off off.

Little Parallel Lives

Apparently there’s a hurricane going on somewhere near eastern Japan and Tokyo is getting arrhythmic smatterings of intense rain as a result.

I woke up to a perfect blue sky this morning and ended the day doing an intense goose step across a too-wide intersection in Edogawa, carrying fabric swatches and two eggs, wearing sandals that are not meant for the rain.

Now, the wind is blowing through my apartment and the ceiling over my stove is undoubtedly going to start leaking soon.

Weather aside, work is calm these days, almost to the point of sending people into comas.  To give a small report on the day me and my desk neighbor had: 30% staring at nothing, 20% working, 45% reading baseball online/talking about baseball news, 5% making too much coffee or looking for snacks.

But lately, with my downtime at work I’ve been trying to pursue other interests; my own little life that runs parallel to the one I lead at work.  As parallelism indicates, my interest in fashion doesn’t cross with my work.  They have nothing in common, and I usually have to tone down whatever aesthetics I’m into at the moment before I walk through the school gate.

However, a year already having passed I’m starting to think of the future, and letting myself think of a future in an industry that I thought I could never possibly belong to.

Suffice to say, I spend the majority of my time in and out of work now reading about fashion, walking around department stores and fondling clothes I can’t afford, flipping through magazines in convenience stores, and putting on crazy makeup in my bathroom when I get home.  I’ve started keeping a memo on my phone of outfit ideas, and I’ve started embroidering my clothes.

One of the really interesting things I read today came from L’Instant Parisien, which I first came across in Tsutaya a few weeks ago.  They do these really beautiful pieces on snippets of lives in Paris and profiles of designers, gardeners, photographers, bloggers… anyone doing something creative and interesting.

My favorite piece is on Jule, a Japanese woman who sells vintage dresses from Tokyo in Paris.  I particularly liked what she had to say about Japanese fashion and how it differs from Parisian fashion (roughly translated from French):

In Japan, a country full of contrasts, one can (one must) dress in black-white-grey from Monday to Friday… and switch to a totally vintage look on the weekends.  There’s nothing shocking about such a big stylistic gap.  Accordingly, people lead little parallel lives, cultivating their secret gardens.  The imaginary, the interior worlds, allow them to distract themselves from the rigorous life of a salaryman/woman where the uniform is still law.

Personally I have a really hard time keeping parallel lives parallel.  I wish I was better at the separation.  I feel like I give way too much away, but then I’m reminded that, when there’s a language barrier being overly emotional, sharing a lot, will probably get me further than being reserved.  Being a little bit too much is par for the course when living abroad, I really believe. So I have a hard time wearing basically a uniform to work and then wearing what I want on the weekends, and that’s for a couple of reasons.

First, in general people here work constantly, and I average 12 hour days when I’m at school.  That’s a long time not to be wearing your own clothes.  I think schools are also somewhat different as teachers do have a lot of stylistic freedom very often, but the young men in my office all wear suits and women follow very subtle guidelines of what is and is not appropriate.

Second, part of the reason fashion has become even more important to me is that it acts as a wordless form of self-expression, which I desperately need in a country where I am but slowly learning the language.  Fashion is a way to sharply delineate who I am even to people I can’t talk to.  My clothes sometimes say more than I can in Japanese, and help add an extra dimension to the things I say.

But I do find Jule’s conception of Japanese fashion really interesting, and I think L’Instant put it so beautifully, with the interior worlds, the imaginary, the secret gardens.  I think the ability to be so neatly multi-faceted is really impressive and difficult, and I admire that quality in a lot of people.  And it adds another dimension to my limited understanding of Japan, where the personal and the public are sharply divided.  At times it can be frustrating, but it can also be so intimate and rewarding when someone trusts you enough to let you see them transverse both parts of their lives.  Seeing people in their weekend clothes feels like a confidence being given.

I’d really like to write more about fashion, particularly brands and the social power of high fashion, but I’ll leave it here for now.  If you can read French, I highly recommend L’Instant Parisien.  If you can’t they have a lovely Instagram, and sometimes aesthetics speak more fully than words.

How Not to See Kyoto

Since coming back from Kyoto last week I’ve been making my periodic attempt to live off of omiyage, or souvenirs people bring back when they travel, from my coworkers.  I have a nice variety of cookies and very generous bag of macadamia nuts, so things are looking hopeful.

It’s still summer in Tokyo, and it’s accordingly hot and humid, but now that we’re in the middle of August it feels like the summer holidays are already over.  I was talking to the other 22-year-old at work and we were commiserating about summer as an adult, and how tragically short it is.

Luckily I had the chance to travel last week, having mysteriously scheduled three days off in a row for reasons I can’t remember.  And after going to Shizuoka two weeks prior, I had three days left on my rail pass so I thought… why not push it?  Why not go somewhere big?

I decided on Kyoto, having never been but having heard so much about it.  Actually, I had avoided going because I heard it was impossible to see even a fraction of it in a short amount of time.  I was intimated by the long history, the wide variety of cultural sites, the richly colorful landscape that you could spend a lifetime in and still not fully uncover.

So I thought, just go and get it over with.  You won’t see everything the first time anyway.

And the more I read about things to do in Kyoto and the more I asked my coworkers, I realized… I didn’t want to do everything.  Actually, I didn’t want to do most things.

I have a hard time appreciating historical sites that I haven’t already learned in depth about, and temples, while often stunning, don’t inspire any overwhelming feelings in me.  I love going to such places when I’m with people who are really passionate about them, but by myself…

That left me with… not much to do.

And as a result I wasn’t expecting that much of Kyoto, which was perhaps a bit unfair.  In fact, my favorite thing that I did was renting a bike from my hostel and taking off, winding around the city on the wide boulevards, darting into the tiny sidestreets, and wandering up and down and up and down the Kamogawa.

I only spent one day and en evening in Kyoto because my rail pass was limited to ordinary trains, which means it took 8 1/2 hours to reach Kyoto from Tokyo.

That in and of itself was an interesting experience, popping up in small small towns, rushing across even smaller platforms to make perfectly timed transfers.  I brought a book, but spent most of the time looking out the window and listening to music.  I made a list of favorite place names we passed (including 愛野 and 焼津) and saw a torii standing in the middle of a small inlet that let out into the Pacific.  Over one thick tangle of overgrowth hovered a cloud of dragonflies visible even from the train.  The small stops on the way to Izu have become familiar–the crammed rush of buildings down to the sea, the houses stuck into the steeply sloping hills covered in wild greenery, the steam pouring out of the grown in every other town.

After all of that, reaching Kyoto felt like a hard-won triumph.

Especially after the small, functionality-over-form stops on the way to Kyoto, Kyoto station itself was stunning enough to be worth a trip.  Intricate glass and metal geometries coccoon the station proper, and escalators rise out from the track area out of the open mouth of the building to give a beautiful view of the city.

My first impression of Kyoto was highly geometric, and consequently very pleasing.

The first evening, I checked in at the hostel and immediately left again, wandering slowly over a 5k stretch across the northern part of the city to get some famous duck ramen.  Somehow I kept finding myself waiting in line for food in Kyoto, possibly because I didn’t know where to eat and so hastily Googled “京都おすすめグルメ” and went with some options off of the “Top 15 Kyoto Foods” that came up.

In any case, the ramen was great, and the walk over was peaceful.

Just going through average neighborhoods was interesting, getting a feel for the differences between Kyoto and Tokyo in terms of architecture and city design.  Kyoto, in my opinion, is a lot better organized than Tokyo.  The gride is quite neat, and even on the side streets I found it difficult to get lost.  I barely used a map while I was there.

The strange thing was how deserted it was by early evening.  Perhaps everyone was on summer holiday, or perhpas I was in the wrong part of the city, but I didn’t see many people.

One of the few famous places I saw quite by accident was the Imperial Palace, which had immaculate, quiet grounds.

It was at the Imperial Palace that it sunk in more fully, “I’m in Kyoto…!”  It’s still hard to believe that these things are not only possible, but easily achievable.

When I studied in China, during the first week we took an overnight trip to the Great Wall, a more remote part that is known for incredible views during sunrise and quite intense hiking.  My dad, seeing the pictures, told me that, when he was a kid he saw the Great Wall of China in atlasses and textbooks, but it had always seemed some terribly remote place, more myth than reality.  I took weekend trips there sometimes, and casually climbed around.  Now, I take short trips to the old capital of Japan, living in the current capital.  These are places I, too, imagined as being unachievable.  Sometimes, kind of ridiculously, I look around when I’m on the subway or biking by the Bay and I say to myself over and over, “I live here.  I live here now.”

AnotherAnother place that prompted such a kind of feeling was Gion, which is an older part Kyoto renowned for geisha.  I have 0 interest in seeing geisha and think that foreigners who go to look at geisha are 70% of the time highly sketchy but…

The neighborhood was lovely.  The main street was lined with old sweets shops and restaurants (and the site of another hour long wait that I mysteriously ended up enduring for some off the hook glass noodles dipped in a sweet sauce), and the sidestreets were occupied entirely by old wooden buildings opening into back courtyards that were overly bright and deserted during the day.

It was quite a touristy area but… I was a tourist, obviously, and there’s a reason for it.  What I found most interesting was the resemblance to Chinese siheyuan-style neighborhoods where a cluster of buildings huddles around one courtyard once shared by one family, now divided among many.

I spent most of my time slowly walking back and forth through the sidestreets (having been pulled over, naturally, for biking during no-bike hours; I will say, being pulled over in Kyoto was almost pleasant and the policeman made polite and seemingly nervous conversation about the relative strictness of Tokyo traffic laws and told me to be careful when I went back).

I think what I liked most about Kyoto was those intimate clusters of buildings.  From the main streets, neighborhoods appear one way, and when you make one turn down a sidestreet it suddenly becomes something else.  The character totally changes.

Also, the river culture (if that’s a thing).  Many important landmarks (to my limited understanding) grew up around flowing water in Kyoto.  For example, part of Gion was dismantled during the war due to the closely-packed wooden buildings posing a fire hazard in the event of a bombing.  Before that, many of the buildings were perched directly over a small river flowing perpendicular to the Kamogawa, so the water ran beneath the pillows of guests staying in those establishments.  As a result, a lot of poetry was written about that unique architectural feature.

Today, the Kamogawa seems to be a big gathering place.  I saw a lot of people wading into the river and sitting in the shallow water, and many more sitting on the shores playing music, hanging out, dancing.

The night before I left, I went to the oldest sento in the city, which had an electric bath.  I foolishly thought that meant a bath that was powered by electricity (obviously I don’t know how public baths work), but it meant that the bath had electricity flowing through it.  I saw some people enter it, have a Miyazaki-esque hairs-standing-on-end reaction, and then calmly leave.  Personally I was really into it, and sat there for a while running my hands through the electric waves.

After that, though, I decided to bike to the river and maybe sit on the shore for a while, but once I got to the river I figured, I’ll head north for a bit.  And then a bit more and a bit more.

I have learned this about myself–when put on a flat road that continues indefinitely, I will bike indefinitely.  Once put in motion, I stay in motion unless there’s a geographical barrier, which there usually isn’t on riverside paths.

So I biked a bit out of Kyoto into the mountains, to where the name Kamogawa changes in how it’s written.  South of a certain point, it uses the character meaning “duck” and north, it uses different characters.

According to my lazy, hasty research just now (no explanation was found in English, so maybe this isn’t even correct but!), there’s a place called Kamogawa Ohashi, which is a bridge where two separate rivers converge, and that bridge uses the different characters (賀茂川大橋).  Thus, north of the bridge is the 賀茂川 and south is 鴨川 and both are read as Kamogawa.

This was certainly my favorite part of the trip.  All the way up it was dead quiet except for cicadas and the fast flowing river, and pitch dark except for my bike light jostling along.  On the way back down, I passed people sitting quietly in the dark together, and more people sitting in big groups with little fireworks and instruments that sounded like steel drums, pouring gentle music out into the night and across a small delta in the river.

Having gone to Kyoto, I am very glad I live in Tokyo because I still prefer the giant crush of the city and the constant overstimulation.  However, having seen almost nothing that Kyoto is actually known for, I really understand some people’s love of the city.

There’s a really lovely atmosphere, and a worn elegance about the city that beautiful without being outdated.  It has a really cultural feel, if that makes sense.  I really felt like I was walking in a historic place, but it was still very much alive and energetic; relaxing without being dull and well-preserved without being ossified.  It’s also humbling, having so much history and traditional culture woven seamlessly into a contemporary city.  It gives the city an awe-inspiring weight.

I would really love to go back sometime, for a longer period and spend more time stopping in places instead of endlessly wandering, but this past trip far exceeded expectations.  I also spent a ton of time filming, so expect a short Kyoto film soon!

Bullet Point Journal #4

Don’t Think Twice

 

Tokyo summer is hot and wet, and thick, massive clouds race across the sky chasing thunderstorms in and out.

I face human fragility, including my own, in every space of my life as false earthquake alerts bring unwelcome reminders and everyone feels too much pressure from every direction.  Sometimes it feels like everyone is being slowly pushed to the breaking point even when there’s so much lightness and love in our lives.  It’s hard to see that when you have the weight of your own expectations, your family’s, your future, the whole world pressing down on you.

On the recommendation of my coworker who is a lot cooler than me, I ended up Ikejiri Ohashi searching for coffee today.  I stopped in a place that had enough room for one person to order coffee, one person to make coffee, and a record player.

Bob Dylan was on, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” starting as I walked in.  It’s my favorite song, and I listened intently out of love, and because the cafe was so beyond stylish that I felt gauche and out of place, like a clumsily large puzzle piece trying to fit into an otherwise smooth picture.  At one point I spit coffee on my arm in a true feat of grace, and made a hasty retreat to the river.

I don’t regret moving abroad, and my current long-term plan doesn’t include returning to America.  But sometimes I wonder what it means to move abroad.  If the sacrifices are worth the gains.

I think living abroad is one of the best things a person can do, with the right mental approach.  Sometimes people live abroad and come away just as if not more small-minded than when they left home, but I think if you face the situation squarely and take in as much as you can with as much patience and respect as you can it can be the best thing you do.

So I don’t think twice about it, but sometimes I wonder.

My dad is the one who introduced me to Bob Dylan, and hearing Dylan in the cafe reminded me of him.

It’s inevitable for children to move away, out of the house, out of the city, out of the country.  It’s possible to guilt yourself into staying close to home, knowing that it hurts your parents to see you leave, but I don’t think it’s healthy.  I think my parents wish I lived closer, but they want for me what I want for myself and they always have even as it became increasingly clear that what I wanted was always several thousand miles away.

Going home, I don’t feel at home.  I haven’t lived in that house for almost 6 years.  Going home, I feel that life has continued on without me as if I were never there in the first place.  Tokyo is not my home and never will be, but I take comfort and pride in my apartment the size of an actual shoebox.  It has no counter space, the fridge fits maybe 2 things at a time and the freezer is constantly becoming a huge ice block,  and everything is on the floor because I have a kotatsu instead of a table, but it’s mine and no one else’s, and it feels good to come back to.

I love the city, too, and I could see this becoming a long-term thing, living here.  I bought a guidebook for Taiwan today, and was elatedly surprised when I could read almost all of it without dictionary assistance.  At the very least it would be such a waste to spend so much time and energy learning Japanese only to go back to America in a year.

But I do wonder if it’s worth it.

I like it here, but I don’t go with my dad to the opera or ballet every winter anymore.  I don’t wander lower Manhattan with my mom anymore.  We don’t have any of our old routines anymore and we don’t live in the same timezone.  My parents don’t meet my friends anymore, and even if they did some of my friends don’t speak English.  I don’t quietly take over the TV in the living room at night after my dad’s fallen asleep on the couch, changing the channel from gang movies with the volume turned up too high to the kind of pensive, pretentious things I used to watch in high school.

I definitely don’t want to go back in time, and you couldn’t pay me all the money in the world to relive the last 10 years of my life.

But I also don’t walk past the same bar with my dad near the NYU campus where Bob Dylan used to play and listen as he explains the music scene back then, all the anecdotes about Dylan that he has stored up.  And even though he does that every time we walk past that bar (which happens often) I always wanted to listen and I still want to listen.  I would listen to every single story he’s told, no matter how many times I’ve heard it, end to end if I could.

But I can’t do that anymore, and that’s one of the many things lost to that combined process of growing up and moving out.  It happens to everyone, but I think it’s more extreme when you put an ocean between yourself and the people you love.

People here leave, too.  I’m not going home, but other people are, or else they’re carrying on their lives here in other places.  For those who go home, we say we’ll stay in touch and I dearly hope we will, but there’s so much working against that.  For some who recently went home, there’s a sharp sadness when I think of them that I don’t think I’ve felt before and I don’t like the feeling.

For those who are carrying on their lives here separate from mine, I’m the transient one.  And I don’t much like that feeling either.

Beyond the personal, I feel a waxing and waning political responsibility to go back to America.  For the past year I’ve let my politics slide into the background as I tried to get settled here.  But every once in a while there are flare-ups while talking to people where phrases will come back to me from what feels like a distant past, echoes of radical ideology.  When people ask who I support in the election, some part of me wakes up long enough to say, “I’m not sure why we’re discussing the efficacy of an election when we should really be starting a revolution” and leaves me with a vague confusion like I wandered into a room for a reason but can’t remember what the reason was…

America is a raging trainwreck and I’m not arrogant enough to think I’m a necessary component in fixing it, but I’m also not oblivious enough to believe that I don’t have responsibility as an American.  If you have an understanding of class struggle, racism, sexism, the endless list of discrimination and war crimes that our government is responsible for, and you choose to do nothing, hiding away in a foreign country and claiming “apolitical” as an actual life choice, then I believe you are actively doing violence to whatever country you belong to.

That doesn’t mean I want to go back.

Perhaps it’s possible to be political active abroad, and if it is I want to be, but for now I’m counting political activism as something I’ve reluctantly left behind and feel guilt over.

There’s so much to gain, and there’s a whole set of worlds to lose.

After Japan, I’m think France, England, Hong Kong, Sweden.  The changes in me from moving abroad have been tremendous and triumphant and the feeling of having the whole world before me is the headiest, most exciting feeling.  There’s too much to see and to do and life is too short and I want to spend all my energy doing as much as possible.

But I do wonder.

Where do you call home if you always have one foot out the door?   How much love can sustainably grow around you if you’re always leaving?  What kind of life do you have if you live in perpetual motion?