Last Life in Taipei

A layover on the island because of engine trouble. I had a whole night to walk around a city that I only knew from the movies of Tsai Ming Lang and Hou Hsiao Hsien, movies I got from the library or video stores and watched during my summer breaks in high school. All I could see outside were flashes of neon, the outline of an office tower or overpass. Every one of Hou’s movies seems to begin with trains wrapping around bends or pulling through tunnels or into some isolated station of the interior, and I wondered what this obsession with trains was, his characters crisscrossing the country back and forth, going to Taipei for work or chasing an ex-girlfriend down at Kaoshiung or returning from school for the holidays. On the platforms in lush jungle valleys, a high whistle and a puff of smoke and always overcast, permanent monsoon.

Every place was temporary; the village abandoned. They were floating between empires. Someone at the death dial would flinch eventually, an itchy finger and they would be the first pawn to fall. 

They all seemed to want to return to the mainland (which was impossible) or escape into another future altogether. In a static shot of an interior or village square some event barges in—a death in the family, the loss of a job, a son’s arrest for sedition. Constant agitation. The characters had to be on their toes or else the White Terror would come for them too—a boy has to study at his desk, but really he wants to run to the pond and catch frogs, the old men play mahjong under a tree, but soon a shopkeeper will chase a thief and trip over the table, the office worker plays with a letter opener at her desk and slips and cuts her finger, the old woman seems to be sleeping on the floor, but when you get closer, you see ants crawling over her hand. 

Anti-Newtonianism. Nothing is at rest behind the stillness. One good thing about not planning to come here is that I can get lost without feeling I should head to someplace in particular, and other than what I remember from those movies, I didn’t know anything about the city so there was no way it could disappoint me. A night was long enough for me to pretend like I lived there without ever having to actually stay. I could be one of those extras in A Time to Live, A Time to Die or Dust in the Wind, waiting on the platform or pacing a rice-paddy road, trapped inside the frame, nameless, faceless. 

I recognize the agitation from Hou’s images. Look into this camera. Walk to this gate. Now grab your bag and go to the escalator. Sit down. No, not there. Here. Ok, now stand. The main station is on the Red Line. Can you remember that? That’s like the system’s artery. Start walking from there in any direction, let’s say southeast, or trust your instincts and choose a street based on whether you like the sound of its name, or how the archways over the sidewalk collapse into shadows or how close the banyans drop their tears onto roots that are strong enough to burst right through the concrete and grapple with the walls. 

Down Qingdao the melody from Tsai’s Rebels of the Neon God gets in my head. The theme song with a brooding synth that plods along through the opening shot while one of the main characters, this young guy who robs pinball machines with his buddy, rides a scooter through the streets at night. Just the bass keys and a cymbal and then after you go through the melody a few times, you get the full string accompaniment. The first time I heard it, it seemed so familiar, but I knew I’d never seen the movie before. 

They pass by pixelated arcades and billboards with diamond rings, phone booths, diesel buses. Like it is now, my nostalgia was incurable back then. What other disease alleviates its own symptoms? Is the solace of it really that empty? Is it nothing more than flickering pictures on a wall in a dark room? I was surprised the city didn’t look too different than it did in those films. The fantasy is what you know, so you choose it and tell yourself that it’s true. Those concrete apartments, clotheslines strung across the balcony, plants sprawling down. And all the neon. They thought it would be the light of the future except now it’s a vision of the past—the water stains and rusted metal bars on the windows only make it more obvious. Where else was there to go except for stumbling into the next goodbye? But that wasn’t the right question. 

How did I get here is the better question, at the end of restlessness, in a past that belonged to no one, in a city seen in flashes, or in the mist, without any direct light, a restaurant down a side street off Zhongzheng that had fish tanks in the window and tall plants between it tables, straight out of one of those movies, where a character, a student, works bussing tables, with all the motorcycles out front, and steam from the gutters. 

With fantasy you only get to set the limits of your own prison, and maybe it stretches out and seems endless, but everything in front of you gets drenched in rain, the colours constantly change—people, motorcycles, the downpour move at a faster tempo. Where’s the shame in being a nostalgist? To want to preserve the tiled apartment buildings along the train tracks with their water stains and rusted cages, the plants overflowing from a window and white laundry strung up between the bars, freeze it there in its generosity and grime—why does it matter if the city’s preserved? The future always looks like the past eventually.

A lot of those characters from the Taiwanese New Wave movies acted like they didn’t want to be here, and why would they? It was either here or a firing squad on the mainland and besides, here was where their Ghost Leader had gone, this rival refuge that keeps echoing back to its lost origin. 

Outside the restaurant lingers a group looking at their phones like think they’ll transport them to the home they were promised, somewhere faraway from doomed empires and reeducation, the motherland before Mao, but after no one, or maybe their own Ghost Leader lit up in neon, flashing in the rain, a totem for an impossible return. Neon was the fantasy of a generation always caught in between, the last of the raw, the last who would remember a time before the digital age, like we would be some repository of ancient lore that no one would be able understand because its language has been forgotten.

The apostles of the future claimed that cities were to be draped in tangles and gridwork of neon, that it would stretch into the clouds. The artisans who specialize in its design don’t number in the thousands like was once predicted. In my country, whenever you see it, it’s used more as an ironic relic, some quaint hipsterism, but here, although it’s been around for decades, dulled by rain and grimy, it still somehow retains a transcendent glow that moves faster than light (like in that story by another nostalgist) and contains every conceivable possibility of experience within it, not just of this moment, standing under the flickering sign, but of every other moment, every NOW that could’ve ever taken place. 

Another restaurant down the alley has a neon sign with blinking characters, the same piercing light, and up ahead is a hotel with another sign made of it, and a medical clinic has a red cross like the one on the spires in Daegu except smaller. Sometimes while walking I see a sign at the top of a stairwell and stand there for a while, looking up before reminding myself that I only have a few hours left, and what I really wanted to do was wander more through the alleys, all numbered and coiled up and leading into smaller ones until they get so narrow you have to turn sideways to pass. From one window you could see directly into the building across the alley, the kind of place where the main kid in Rebels of a Neon God eats noodles in silence with his mom and dad while it rains outside. 

I propose a new name for the movement Tsai, and Hou, and the maestro Ed Yang belonged to, not the Taiwanese New Wave, but the Neon Wave, because after all they made their movies during the boom times. They still had hope they could ride the crest into a greater autonomy, but over the last thirty years, the boom flatlined, their sovereign neighbour tightened its circumference and someday will most likely decide to liquidate its holdings, turn it into a microchip labour colony or a giant theme park with a golf course.

If I ever return here, it will probably be a part of somewhere else. I have eighty-nine more days left to my name here. I could rent a room at the top of some stairs where neon flickers and couples who rent by the hour wake me up with their laughter at 4 in the morning, when I forget where I am for a few minutes and let the fan soothe me back to sleep. I could walk under the dripping banyans every night, jump over the puddles, close my umbrella when I step out from the archways and open it again when I take cover. I must’ve been here before. It’s the extension of another city, another section of the wall between a past that never existed and a more brutal goodbye, one I was repeating to myself just to get the word right, that sincere inflection.

On a dark street with puddles between the awnings and a porcelain dog that stands beside a stairwell and a room at the top where I’ll stay for years, in a city where you never expected to end up, a place just as good as any other, which is the only reason to stay anywhere—not because it preserves the decade of my birth or because it was already a pseudo-noir jungle backdrop for a whole cinematic movement, but because I was here when I decided to reconcile the agitation and wander in my mind, imagine every conceivable possibility of experience, drift easily where Shen Fu dreamed of visiting, go down towards Kaoshiung or in the interior, to a town surrounded by mountains, over to Keelung and the village of Jiufen from A City of Sadness, and maybe the Korean could visit once her doctor reduces her therapy sessions. Quarantined on this island from a world I renounced with a joyful shedding away of any need to hesitate about where to go or what to do next. It was already decided. Here I’d been sent, stranded, the place where I could return to when everywhere else had disappeared into the future.

I get under the awning of a shoe store because the rain has picked up. Across the street, I could see a temple. What harm would one prayer do? Would Joe hold it against me? Its doors open, it looked warm inside with smoke rising through the columns. Up to the wide gold altar with it packets of cookies and oranges and framed photos, then down a hall under the lanterns where there’s a tree dangling with ribbons and dragons carved around the door, their tongues sticking out and little flames in the whites of their eyes. No one could sincerely call this place a refuge like it would protect you from the city outside. The gate was most likely there to keep what was inside from ever leaving. 

Prayers won’t help. The statue standing in front of me, neither man nor woman, human or god or animal, it won’t protect me either. With so many hands outstretched, I get dizzy looking at it and convince myself that one of those hands could help me, so fearless in its poise. If I bowed to it and bring alms to shatter on the stone, I would be guided, protected by the sword in its grip, although I didn’t come here for answers, or to remember what questions led me astray like those cats slinking against the wall. Whoever was a sinner before still stands a sinner, and whoever harbored impure thoughts is still a paraphiliac at heart, and I was never here, and I was never born, and I keep forgetting my life before I ever arrived on this island.

Next to me a monk and a few other people pray. No one wants to remember how trapped they are, how whatever they thought they escaped from is still there, straight ahead, agitation, restlessness, staring at them, and the sword stays right where it is, and the empty hand, the one held highest, will it lift me up, save me when I get kicked out of my room at the top of the stairs, and when they throw your belongings out the window, will it catch them before they shatter on the street? Only after I admit that the future won’t carry me anywhere different or deliver another name and origin. 

Where else is there to go in the smoke stumbling while someone somewhere is offering me compassion? Behind a glass case, a woman wears a tiara of gold—the undemanding mother. Others close their eyes except for the monk who still watches me. No one can expect her to do anything for you but listen—you invite trouble, you always will, by not telling her what’s really going on. Can you even formulate the words to yourself? If you want her compassion, then take it, but first understand what it is you’re asking for, and what you’re going to do if she asks for it back, because it’s not one-sided—all you can do is shatter your alms on the threshold and remember here lies the wreckage of any escape you could hope to have from this city.

What’s the price of a few prayers? Your attention. What’s the price of a few minutes? If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t be here. None of us would. We’re here because we don’t have a minute to spare. We submit to her not because we’re scared. How could we be, look at her smile, without malice, like she’s never had an impure thought, like she understands, but doesn’t ever acknowledge it, a knowing smile stretched thin, with her shimmering robe, the reflection of the lamps that surround her in the glass, a halo atop the tiara, shimmering also, neither asking me to look at her or warding me away either? The gift she offers can’t be forgotten or spent or wasted, and once you accept it—and by looking at her, you’ve accepted it—you can never look away. Her love is but the thrill of never asking for more. Every possible life has already been lived, there is nowhere else to go, she’s the gatekeeper, and all you can do for now is sit here and wait—not even wait, because waiting implies some expectation, some end. Even if the island budges an inch, it’s not drifting back to a lost homeland. This isn’t some Pangea-in-the-making we’re a part of here, we only drift farther out to sea.

She’s heard all of my stories and questions, my meandering, the sound of my snoring, of me scratching myself in the morning, the most pristine dialogical reasoning I could ever muster, which is no more convincing than if I get on my knees to beg. She hears it all, and nothing changes that smile, like she’s about to draw the gate to sever me in half and later feed me to the dogs that guard the gates stretched behind her, each one also with another gatekeeper waiting for me to pass, and in the folds of her robe I can see the gold sheen getting brighter to a polished blue and red and yellow neon, the tiara crumbling in front of her face that’s drawing farther away, or getting closer, it’s hard to tell. The glass fogs up and melts down across the bannister protecting me from her or her from me, and in the stillness of her command I retreat farther, knowing that if I could see the gate that belongs to me for what it is, I’d be able to step right through it.