I sometimes have this sort of panic strike that I feel like I have to divert my life on to a totally different direction. Unfortunately, while I wish I could get on a plane and land wherever I feel right anytime I want, and begin a fabulous life with a Kenny G hairdo, I simply can’t afford that. What I do, I take arbitrary turns in the city, green light, I go right ahead, red light, I turn, until I get it out of my system and feel like I can breathe again, or when I start to get a little bit hungry. Then I’ll try to find my way back, back to the life, not so long ago, I try everything to run away from.
Dearest friends,
I have a question. If I were to leave, and I don’t mean going on a vacation or something, I mean for good, never to return, what would I take? If I were to take a long and hard journey to some place I don’t know and didn’t even know when I’d get settled, what would I bring? I look around my shabbily yet cozily put together apartment. Then I try to make a mental list.
I always need a comfortable place to live, a place of my own. Some people can crash on friends’ couches or live in a hotel, but not me. I literally need a room of my own, which I can move my furniture in with me, and create an atmosphere as if the place has been there for me the whole time, even if it’s a leased accommodation, it wouldn’t feel like a strange place, and I’d feel somehow protected. “The walls protect the dreamers.” I always like the line.
I kinda moved out in a way when I was fifteen. I got my first apartment when I hit eighteen. And ever since then, I’ve been building up a place I call home for the real one I lack. So when I feel like I was drifting away from the world, there’s at least a place I can call my own. I like to see this home of mine as a moving castle. I bring everything with me when I move. And reconstruct a new one in a new place.
My first apartment was this rather dark studio room in Kaohsiung, not so far away from the city’s fancy department store district. The room only got light in the early morning. So it’s always dark. It smelt of pets when I first moved in. But surprisingly, the landlady was right, the place was warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Anyway, I got my writing desk here in Kaohsiung.
I always like the concept of writing desk. It feels so refined and sophisticated and old-fashion, like back in the years of the Bronte sisters. And the idea is almost holy to think anybody would ever need a piece of elaborately crafted furniture with details of almost useless design for the single and seemingly non-productive purpose, writing.
My writing desk was made from cherry wood, so the dealer told me, I personally have no idea what the difference is. Despite its of-yore color, it came with a foldable design and a ridiculously tiny drawer that could only hold three pens and two seals and reminds me of a mahjongg table. I put it in my study in front of twelve framed black-and-white photographs of New York on the wall painted with a color called Morocco Spices. I put broken mugs on it to hold pens and other stationary. I also put an unfinished painting of a Taiwanese aboriginal lunch box as an inspiration and a ticking clock to remind me of the time to distract myself back to reality. Next to it is an elevated futon where I can rest and dose a little bit after a day’s hard reading except that I do it without the reading. The desk is a little rickety. And the top was stained with wax while I blew out candles too violently and didn’t clean it up immediately (I was “occupied”, you see). I do my account books on it. I write my diary on it. I use my MacBook on it. When I write, I like the sensation of stopping once in a while and dipping my pen in the ink, looking thoughtful, sensitive, like a Dickens character without the candlelight and the injustice. So alongside the clock and the painting are two ink bottles, one black, the other deep dark blue.
I next moved to a place in Keelung called Chi-du meaning the seventh levee in Chinese. The apartment was spacious and bright. And after that, I can’t no longer stand a bathroom without a window, nor a place without a kitchen.
The apartment had a huge open space between the living room and the kitchen. I used a large desk you see in an executive’s office as a center counter. And built a kitchen somewhat well-equipped, compared to the scale of its outcome. I bought two electric ovens, cake pans and plates of different shapes, several of them still virgin to this day, different gears to brew a cup of coffee, and matching ladles, knives, spatulas and bottle opener. To be frank, I think my obsession with kitchen gears stops at the aspect of these ridiculously expensive kitchenware lining up neatly against the spotless wall, spotless not because I clean like a maniac, but because I seldom use the facility to its fullest extent. I spent a lot on these trinkets, so to speak, while I make something like fried rice that only requires a wok and a wooden spoon, and I eat directly from the wok with the wooden spoon in front of the stove.
Compared to how much time I now spend in the kitchen, don’t you think I must be out of my mind to bother to have a kitchen at all? Yes, it’s true. But what’s also true is that, despite the pointlessness, it makes me feel like a family man. I don’t know why, but that seems to be a big deal, to me, and especially, to readers of GQ from all over the world.
I have a two-seat couch in the living room. I bought it from Ikea in 2005 when I moved from Kee-long to Xizhi. Xizhi means the place where the flood stops so that you get the idea of its geographical landscape. But what it doesn’t tell you is that the place where the flood stops is still, with all due respect, flooded. It seems like the age of the great Ark is about to start again every time it rains, and you just can’t help but wondering angrily, “what the hxll is wrong with this place?!”
Oh! The couch! Don’t you think it’s just the greatest invention of all time? It’s philosophy really. An object created to offer human beings and cats a three dimensional space to sit on, sleep on and do nothing. Yet all are satisfied to his heart’s content by the meaninglessness. God must be really upset by this very idea of idleness.
The couch I have is very deep. So one can curl up on it watching movies over a bottle of beer without one’s knees sticking out to the air feeling neglected. You can actually roll on it if you maneuver your body really carefully.
“The kingdom of God is inside you, right around you. Split the woods, I’m there. Lift the stone, and then you’ll find me.” I’m not religious, maybe a little bit when it comes to rock and roll. But that line just make me feel enchanted nevertheless.
Hualien is a county in Eastern Taiwan. It’s a perfect place for people who already found their soul mates and don’t want anything exciting from life, otherwise, it’s a living hell for every single “single” person. Try to find a hot date on this turf? You might as well drown yourself. And that’s what its beautiful Pacific coastline is for.
I first got in Hualien at the dead of the night. So I didn’t really take in her massive beauty at the first sight. But the next morning, I stepped out to the freshest air I’d ever breathed and was stunned by the great Central Mountain rising up to heaven looking down at me. Boy, it made me wanna kneel down, confess all my sins, and vow to live on nothing but plain water from then on. In the summer, the wind brings the scent of the ocean far into land whether you can see the great water or not. At night, down town looks like piles of glittering gems buried deep in the sea when you see it afar. When you walk in the woods, or stroll around on you scoter, the soft scenic breeze creeps up every pole on your skin, tickling your sense of being at peace.
A week after a typhoon strikes, all pieces of wood floated on shore is open for the public to obtain for whether personal or commercial use. That might seem odd. But apart from that period, even picking up a fallen branch or a tiniest stone on the beach is against the law, that’s how Hualien puts out to protect her environment, although kinda stupid from some aspect. So whenever a natural disaster takes place, you see swarms of crazy and greedy looking people pour in from all direction to pick up storm washed wood. When it may seem priceless in a negative way, it’s actually a business here in Hualien. For with careful and artistic transformation, the forsaken and disgusting looking pieces of dump is then turn into pieces of fine art and sold with priceless manner in a very positive way.
Being a super villain as I am, of course I got several of these unpolished treasure in my house, even the rocks, always forbidden at all time. Some I turned into lamps, but most I just put on top the coffee table or shelves to represent the I-am-a-bad-ass-and-a-hatchet-swinging-threat appeal. You should really see me trying to get these heaps of extremely heavy and enormous material home on my fragile broken-down secondhand scoter. I thought I was going to make the local newspaper headline. “The impossible accomplished: local man tries an act of suicide and doesn’t die.”
Looking back at it now. I suppose I’d always had a rather comfortable life although it didn’t come with much security. But yet I always crave for more. Maybe I ask too much, and should be content with what I already got. That’s the thing it does to you when you move in a big city. It wears you out with the need of making a living. And it leads you to view yourself from a different point of view, and question things you could have done differently. I moved to Taipei shortly after I returned from New York in 2009. I worked hard. But all that I slaved in was withdrawn to pay for the roof above my head and food on the table.
I bought an oil painting from an artist I knew in Hualien. The painting called Broken Scenery was done in a rather bizarre style, and often makes people shrink at the sight of it when they’re not warned beforehand of its content. The painting cost me quite some money. And it was the first painting the artist ever sold. It has two identical humanlike creature staring at the viewers with their bright red hair soaring up and covering the sky and deathlike greenish skin reminds you of rotten corpse. I like the painting a lot. And it makes me feel serene at times just to look at it. In the city, I suppose it’s pretty common to make people feel like monsters, involuntarily turned into the likes of mankind they despise when they were still young and unmarked by the world of reality. Each monster created was the one and only individual of its species. They weren’t made to understand the others. I am a monster. But I’ve found no one to relate to. Yet, when I look at the painting, I got the feeling that she, might understand, the anger and void inside the man that stands before her.
I also got a picture of Flatiron Building district printed on rough canvas the size of a Pollock classic. I hung it in my bedroom in front of my bed. You can see the Virgin music store on the upper brink of the black-and-white image and Broadway crossing 5th Avenue on the lower side. It must be what it looks like if I were floating above Manhattan deep into night, well, maybe a little more buzzing orange than the melancholy grayscale.
Now back to that question. If I were to fleet from the grasp of the invisible avalanche moving steadily and slowly downhill, if I were to jump and declare that I wouldn’t accept a life of fruitless compromise, what should I bring with me on my heroic escape? Well, I certainly wouldn’t need a writing table, just think of the image and the comedy it creates when a superhero sits down before the desk and says to himself “I’m gonna write a little poem called ‘I love you, blooming daisy’.” And I probably wouldn’t need the cooking appliances since I hardly use them in the first place. The sofa is a tough decision, but I guess I have to say goodbye to it, too. And the pieces of wood and piles of rocks, what am I gonna do with them? I already got the painting and images of New York inside my head. So I guess that leaves me nothing to pack. Isn’t it ironic? After all these years, all the money I spent, all the time painting the walls, over and over again. When it comes down to this, the only thing I’d take with me, is a pair of cowboy boots, and it’s already on my feet.
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