Archive for August 2020
Taiwan & the convenience of travel
Last year, I spent almost two months in Taiwan, or 55 days to be exact.
Earlier this year, I was back again: from February 21 to March 2.
2020 is a leap year so that was 10 days in total. I did very little while I was in Taiwan. I stayed in the same hostel in Taipei, in Shilin district, as I did last year. I went swimming and used the pool’s “spa”. I went to the gym (pay as you go). I went to a second-hand bookstore and bought a novel: David Szalay’s All That Man Is.
I met a local journalist, a Taiwanese-American, who I befriended over Twitter. I met a couple of friends (one of whom I met last year in Singapore, while another is a friend of the blog). I ate at a canteen where you can choose a meat and two veg dishes, from a selection, with rice and free soup — that costs about £1.30.
Mostly, I made sure to eat. I ate delicious beef noodles. Egg pancake things for breakfast. The freshest, best bubble tea on the planet. And I wandered the local night market, stopping at my favourites. Supping on milk papaya. Getting the local delicacy of grilled mushrooms. Trying a shack that did steak with Camembert. And I queued for the best bao I know of. These bao (meat buns) are just so good. I love them.
I was in Taiwan for 10 days and I mostly ventured within a 100 metre radius of my hostel. Why was I in Taiwan?
I was there as a stop-gap. I’d been in Thailand, and I was up on my 30-day tourist visa, and not wishing to extend another 30 days, I decided to fly from Bangkok to Taipei. It cost £68.29 and it’s a 3hr 45min flight. 10 days in Taipei. And then I flew from Taipei to Cebu (Philippines) for £35.70 — a 3hr flight.
I was in the Philippines for 11 days, eventually flying out from Manila to Fukuoka (Japan) for £45.80 — a 4hr flight.
All of this is to say something about how convenient travel is (or was). Some have wondered how I afford to travel like I do, but looking at these airfares you can see that international travel can cost about as much as train fare. In Europe, these airfares can be even cheaper, but Asia is a larger region than the EU.
And going from Thailand to Taiwan to Philippines really did feel more like taking buses to different stops in the land of Asia than it did proper international travel with its boundaries and borders. Planes collapse our sense of distance.
We all might know this in the abstract, but it’s a different thing when it’s lived experience. Looking back at my time in Taiwan, it feels so fleeting, and, in perspective, it was. It was just 10 days. Yet those 10 days, although I didn’t do a lot, shouldn’t be taken for granted. I want to zoom in on that short transit stay and blow it out, to honour it, now that such convenience is a past time. It was fleeting but those days were once my daily reality.
And maybe this interruption, as our society feels now, will one day also feel like it was a short transit to somewhere else, as it indubitably is, and all these months of worry and anxiety will come to be remembered as a fleeting time, but which was once all that you knew.
The wandering writer’s life – part 756
In the late summer of 2012, I was excited and nervous about my upcoming move to Beijing. I had a flight booked for September and I was looking forward to it with trepidation & eagerness. Moving overseas felt like a major threshold, and a threshold that – until it was crossed – remained beyond direct knowledge.
At night, in my parent’s house over that summer, I had vague dreams about how my time in Beijing would unfold. But I had no real insight into the minutiae of this unfolding until I had made the journey into that great beyond.
If these sentences sound vaguely death-like, then moving to Beijing did capture a death of some kind. The passing of an old life and journeying to a new one. New beginnings, and all that. But I never would’ve countenanced that the experience of living in Beijing would be like dying over and over again.
Living in a too-small apartment was like dying. Surviving on too little income was like dying. Feeling lonely and anxious was like dying. Dreaming of succeeding and clutching tight to my ambition was, definitely, like dying. Because once I made it to the other side — moving to a bigger apartment; making more money; gaining a friendship circle; achieving some of my goals — all propelled me to a feeling I had heretofore not known: an utter aliveness.
This journey is so much about migration. How we all migrate: whether it’s from a small village to a big city (from Boscastle to Bristol, let’s say); or from a small town to the capital of China. It is a rite of passage so fundamental that it is wondrous to me that not more people take the opportunity to make such a journey.
Because to remain still, whether metaphorically or literally, is to be in stasis. Moving is the key. And it doesn’t always have to be forwards. Life may seem linear, but there are cul-de-sacs, weird ass wiggly bits, and looping circles. It doesn’t matter.
It’s now been about 18 months since I left Beijing. Since that time I’ve spent eight months at home in England, and about 10 months on the road. Looking ahead, once I’ve finally figured out what the next stage is, I have the feeling that I will come to see this time as a transition period. That this wandering writer’s life I’ve got going on feels like a meandering path, and doesn’t seem in itself like a definite life-stage, is curious. And I won’t draw any conclusions for now.
What is interesting is that I’ve gotten quite good at it. I have now been in Japan since March and I have not only survived but prospered. I’ve done pretty well at landing commissions to do with my host country (and Japan seems like a veritable bounty in terms of story ideas) but I also see how I can improve my freelancing processes. And all this is underpinned by the fact I’ve had to stay put for several months.
Two roads clearly diverged. (Because pandemic.) I was only supposed to stay in Fukuoka for 10 days before flying out to Kuala Lumpur, where I would’ve stayed for a week or two, before flying to Bali. Covid-19 put paid to all that and Japan has been my home since.
And so the meandering path has deposited me here and all I can see are circles ahead and not straightforward roads. But this is how, perhaps, I wanted it to be – secretly, wishfully – all those moons ago.
Lu-Hai Liang 