![]() ![]() It was as if the city, having been in a state of anticipation for a future on hold, for too long, had refused to let go but also refused to move forward and so it gave up and turned into itself. At dusk, the sky turned a particular shade of blue - the deep, elusive blue of a broken television screen or of the horizon. Walking in Taipei in the early evening felt like I had a pair of noise-cancelling headphones on, insulated from the rest of the world. The whinny tune of a Chinese opera number followed a 2005 Gwen Stefani hit. A man in an ultramarine Iverson basketball jersey hacked away at the carcass of a pig with a butcher’s knife at the wet market stall. There was an uncanniness about the Taipei streetscape that created a kind of pre-emptive nostalgia - a yearning for something that I had never experienced and yet felt like I had. If futurism, a later Wikipedia search that night revealed to me, is the anticipation of what will come, retro-futurism is a remembrance of that anticipation. “Like a retro-futuristic film set,” specified J.T after I pointed this out to him. Walking through Gongguan after dinner indeed felt like walking through a film set, straight out of a scene from Blade Runner, all blue-tinged and mist-filled, soft neon lights, chrome façades and 80s fonts. “Everything is undecided.” This was for an interview on his blockbuster Life of Pi, which depicts the story of a young Indian man who survives a shipwreck and lives adrift on a lifeboat at sea, shot almost entirely in Taiwan. “It doesn’t have a definite identity,” the Taiwanese film director Ang Lee once said of his hometown, an island unrecognized by the United Nations and subject to the whims of the American government and the Chinese Communist Party. We were like the floating, leaf-shaped island of Taiwan itself, in limbo, pseudo-independent and unsure of its place in the world. Weird, perpetual adult summer camp.” JT was twenty-eight he was already deep into his “summer camp” years, by which I assumed he meant not simply our language program, but the lonely and nebulous period of twenty-something, when at any given point of any given day, nobody would know or care where we were, or what we were doing with our lives. “Because you realize that it’s gonna be like this for a while. “You gotta do some of the same shit every day to get through,” he explained. would walk out alone straight to the noodle vendor with an unshakeable sense of purpose. used to justify his Sichuanese noodle bowl routine. The phrase “adult summer camp” was what my new friend J.T. We were a culturally assorted group of college and graduate students (some Brits, Koreans, New Zealanders, a smattering of Singaporeans and a handful of Americans), with an arbitrary array of interests (contemporary art, 1920s Shanghainese history, cross-straits military policy), drawn together by the shared decision to spend the summer memorizing Chinese sentence structures for six hours a day at what could only be understood as adult summer camp. By the end of the summer, he had rows of CC Lemons lined up on his desk, as if he were a castaway etching marks into a stone wall, tracking the days of his existence.Īside from our strange fixation with routine, we had little in common with each other. On his way home, Michael bought a CC Lemon - a saccharine, fizzy lemonade - and kept the empty bottle. Late afternoon, the last thunderclouds rolled out, throngs of scooters cruised home, and we walked back to the apartment complex where we lived, earnestly named Taipei Paradise. went to the same Sichuanese noodle stall, refusing offers to go anywhere else. Alex got two boiled eggs and a yogurt at Seven-Eleven Franco ate religiously at the self-serve buffet of the Girl’s Dorm cafeteria J.T. ![]() ![]() ![]() During lunch break, we crossed the street to eat at our favorite vendors. Every morning started the same way: wake to stream of subtropical sunlight through the curtains, vocab skim with breakfast, U-bike ride through the palm-lined streets of the National Taiwan University campus. That summer in Taipei, clinging to routine, we became suckers for ritual. ![]()
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