Natural Disaster Jogs the Memory
I've just finished cooking tomato pasta in my neglected Taiwanese kitchen, after stabbing open a can of Heinz after buying it unthinkingly at the Wellcome (I have not kept my kitchen stocked! I have a bottle opener but no can opener). Long lines of non-cooks harried in the midst of their typhoon preparations, and a gaggle of people at the Blockbuster counter across the way, hoarding DVDs in expectation of the next 24 hours trapped inside their apartments. Cabbage hiked up to NT$50 as Nicky warned us many months ago. Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to force you to reclaim your life from the automated machine of our modern age.
It is not exactly gourmet I am cooking tonight (I own one pot and no cutting board, I had to be modest in my aspirations!), but it feels as though I am clutching a reclaimed friend as I bring a glass of red wine to my lips after eating something I've made with my own two hands, however simple. I realized one reason why I have so much more time on my hands here - I don't cook. It's too "convenient" to go out to eat. (Since when have I chosen convenience when it comes to food?) I berate myself as I remember the good ol' days in my Halifax apartment: racing Eva to the food prep, spending an entire evening on a whim to make roti paratha from scratch, daydreaming in class about a trip to the grocery store and what culinary inspiration might come of it, poring over Jamie Oliver tomes, drooling as much over the food as the man.
It feels good to slip into old shoes(what is it that I used to do? Who am I? Oh yes, I cook, and I write, now I am reminded, transfixed by the sheets of rain which rattle my glass doors dangerously). As I slurp spaghettini in my nightie and blog, I think, "Tomorrow's typhoon will be like wrapping myself in a warm blanket of snow".
fashion statement
Went to a punk-rock cafe hidden in an alleyway in our neighbourhood called "Vicious Circle". Some days I am amazed at how well Western images travel: the walls were festooned with vinyl album covers of classic American and British rock. Images though, being the keyword. The cultural movements that spawn those images are consistently left behind in this borrowing of Western culture, as though souls were heavier than shells. The feel was right, a dank basement bar with a gig stage and walls painted black, mannequin heads and other requisite art hall knick knacks adorning the display shelves.
We found the place following an address on the back of a business card from a punk T-shirt shop: the card was black gloss, with just the cafe name in small type on the front, and a byline: "ethical food and drinks". A half hour after we arrived, we were served microwave pizza, a club sandwich made with canned ham and Kraft singles, and tea sweetened with processed sugar. The sound system was blasting Blink 182 and Green Day.
It is the same with everything here. Waifish pretty boys dress in punk hairstyles and leather pants. When they get on stage, they sing like just another boy band. Beyond the fashion (bought rather than owned, in a culture of consumerism), there is no understanding that sets them apart. Unsuspecting poseurs, sad only because they lack a youth culture of their own making, from their own place in the world, a place where there remains so much room for fresh questioning of the status quo, and so many centuries of history and rebellion to draw from, borrow, revive, or react against. But the thing that sets them apart from the poseurs back home (a fact which perhaps redeems them more than it condemns), is that they are innocently oblivious to the irony of their fashion statement. In their unassuming eyes, the West simply is a shell of its own images, but unfalteringly cool, still; imitable, still, because these youngsters never knew there was (is) anything more to our culture than the fashion it spawns.
A lesson for us more than them.
