Taipei: A General Introduction to General Aspects of General Visiting Experiences, with Several Unecessary Tangents
As far as stereotypes go, I’d say I’m some averagely petite Asian chick, college-educated, college-indebted, and vulnerable to certain (at times silly) aesthetic trends (as girls my age usually are)– participatory fashion being defined by me as wearing something other than Uggs, sweats, or pajamas (a middle-school phase that certainly cramped anyone’s style-history). I’m on the bookish side, though– being terribly cursed in the social department, as I am plagued with alcohol allergy that I bravely, foolishly ignore if the occasion calls– it usually doesn’t end well, and results in a vomit-slick leather-top table (the haunting episode at My House, a bar somewhere in the LA Silverlake area).
I can have vomit-free fun, though: I like Eating (note the capital E, and I assure you my eating habits have nothing to do with regurgitation), reading, writing, drawing; obvious facets of Alone Time, which is why I end up writing overly exaggerated and relatively ignored paragraphs about Who I Am. So maybe not so fun.
But this is just an introduction to locate Where I Am (physically, existentially): physically, I am in Taipei, but existentially, I am in a black hole — no– I am the instantaneously impossible hypocritical and vast un-knowing of the Improbability Factor. Having just graduated from a four-year institution, I now know that five credits times three is fifteen, teachers generally like students sitting close but not too close, and that GPAs are bullshit. But I know nothing more about myself– I know more about other people, and what their limitations are, and what prejudices people might have against them, or how, on a sliding 1-6 Kinsey scale, homosexual or heterosexual they might be.
This is supposed to be about Taipei. Very well, I admit: I digress.
Taipei is the capital of the little island of Taiwan, off the coast of East China. In the early centuries of some important number I should have remembered, the Dutch East Indian Trading Company took the island of Formosa for their own purposes; teaching the aboriginals to burn sea water to create salt, they also traded a variety of other things, like– er– edible plant matter, I guess. Anyway, that’s not important. What’s important is that the Dutch were here way-back-when, beautiful, tall white people who had too much decency to dress down their many layers of petticoats in order to survive these sweltering hot summers (I can imagine their charming reactions to our beloved tropical insects). Then came the Japanese. And the moral of my story is, Taiwan has always been a very important port in the economic history of the world, even if we’re mostly pronounced as a mere (but vital!) “stepping stone” into Pacific waters.
Taipei itself is quite the international darling; the shopping vacation spot for Japanese and Chinese tourists alike, taxis run amok doing as they wish, traffic laws aren’t as unenforced as Rome, but lanes are more like guidelines, and the hoards of zippy motorcyclists do as they damn well please. Ah, of course, the sign that a city is truly a city: there are coffeeshops everywhere. More specifically, Starbucks has marked its territory on select street corners (more often competitively across the street from Dante’s, a rival coffee chain) and amazingly enough, the Taiwanese people are just as in love with the white-marked-green cups of coffee-experience as America. Maybe more: every Starbucks I’ve passed in Taipei is alway crowded with the hip and young, or those wishing they were hip and young, or those who want to be seen “doing work”.
There is also the curious popularity of “afternoon tea”– amidst the wealth and luxury of department stores, the experience of being wealthy and luxurious is frosting on a hard day’s work of designer-brand shopping. The prices aren’t bad on the standards of the U.S. dollar; they’re pretty much the usual, where a nicely glazed croissant (just the right size for two girls with low-self esteem to share and not feel guilty) sits with a stale gleam of European appeal in the overly decorated display case. Risotto and small petite plates of pasta and a collection of cute cakes may also be whimsically ordered and gracefully consumed with your very authentically European-traditional coffee or tea.
Maybe I’m being too snide: let me supplicate this seething attitude with another cultural tid-bit: Asians are obsessed with being white.
Cue surprise. Who hasn’t seen the crews of Asian boys and girls, overtaking study halls with their tinkling cell-phone ornaments, outbursts of undecipherable conversation peppered with strange intonations? People dub them “FOBS”– fresh off the boats– and while that is quite offensive, I’m going to assume that dear and few readers endure stereotypes of their own, and that none if it should really matter to you. If it does, than you’re probably one of those people pushing a small delicate croissant away with a pained and horrified face or petitioning for Harry Potter to be placed on a blacklist for references to the Divvil.
So what’s the deal? Asians in America are *so Asian* while Asians in Asia would die to be white. Maybe not die, but they pour an ample amount of time into skin whiteners (lotions and pills), lasering freckles out from their epidermis (my dear, fashionable cuz), and glorifying Abercrombie and Fitch. Pasty is the new black. It means you’re wealthy enough not to work in the sun (and sunlight is a mighty tricky thing to evade on this island) because there are the poor and desolate who cannot avoid but to slave away in the hot exhausting hours of the day. Air-conditioning still exists as a luxury to them.
If I haven’t bored you enough with this subjective and possibly irrelevant analysis of Who I Am and Where, let me marry my previous two subjects in a matrimony of conflict that may as well end in a messy divorce. I obviously place my own values and culture as perpendicular to the people I am currently surrounded with, but then again, my culture and values has a history on a different plane than those who have been raised and live in Taipei, Taiwan. In the compulsive and unending mission to find Who I Am throughout this snap of a lifetime, I cannot help but compare and point out the obvious differences (i.e. I like the tan look). I also have a lot in common, even if these commonalities are more difficult to distinguish– after all, I am a first-generation to grow up and be schooled in America, so my parents were first-rate Asians to the max (my dad opened a Mr. Eggroll in Springfield, Illinois. He had built the place to be shaped like a take-out box, and it stands there to this day as a historical spectacle), so some customs are hard to shake (eating EVERYTHING on your plate, you ungrateful bastard).
On a contradictory note, who cares, right? Because everything in life seems so fluid and hypocritical; the only dependent, reliable, and the fact becomes “it is what it is” or “it isn’t what it is not”, rather than “this is what it’s supposed to be”. The Internet has shrunk the world and made scramble out of our black-and-white morals, as we are more likely to see the radically different lives of others, and the comparison of information becomes way too overwhelming. In Taipei, I can walk down the commercially rich street, encrusted with SoGo department stores boasting dolled up woman batting their 100% fake eyelashes (making sure the white foundation doesn’t glaze their inch-long feathers of pornish sex appeal) while a man with three limbs bellies up and bangs his head against the sidewalk outside to beg for money. The four square feet his weathered body grinds against is of more value in this society than the entirety of his being.
I don’t think I can ever survive a suburb. It’s too safe, too unreal for me; a white picket fence would only serve to keep me in and keep the world out. I feel like I need these worldly contradictions in order to feel alive; I need these challenges of moral conflicts to keep my blood pumping; and that’s something the Taipei I know has discovered within me. Call me out in ten years.
Graceee
