After a Christmas spent back home

Coming back after two weeks in Italy, Taiwan feels different. Yesterday I’ve arrived in the early afternoon, and headed straight home. I didn’t see my neighbourhood on a workday afternoon in so long, it almost felt like I was visiting it again for the first time. Then I unpacked my luggage and passed out from tiredness on my bed. I woke up at half-past one in the morning to a call from my mom: I forgot to let them know I was home. Then I haven’t been able to fall back asleep.

I’ve had breakfast at the usual “four seas” place, in front of my house. Being there earlier than 6 in the morning, the sun hadn’t risen up yet and the sky was still pitch black. The street where I live felt too quiet: it was a Saturday morning, nobody was going to work, the only people awake were the elderly and the few who stayed up since last night. In the market, some grandmas were chopping the last chunks of pork to be prepared for that day. In front of the breakfast shop, the hot white steam of the dumplings rose up from the wooden baskets placed on the benches outside, creating a beautiful contrast with the bleak darkness that embraced everything around. A crowd of tiny black eyes stared at the waiter indoors, awaiting in cold air the moment to be served, their pupils reflecting the electrical blueish light that came from within the shop. Despite the early hours, you still need to queue up a bit to have breakfast here.

I am not sure if these two weeks spent back home have represented a sort of turning point. Seeing my parents and all of my oldest friends again felt strange. When I first met my parents, at the railway station of Bovisa, where I had gotten to from the airport, it felt like I had never left. I have noticed that we are all starting to look older. Since I see them less and less often, the changes appear more evidently. After the madness that was Christmas with all its preparations, I actually had the time to make a few very meaningful encounters. I’ve met Jing., my old-time friend and language partner, who was invited by her former landlord to spend Christmas in Milan. She is now studying for a PhD in Stockholm. Just like back in the days of our first grade of Master’s, three years ago, talking to her felt like opening the windows of a room that had been kept closed for a long time, to let the fresh air come in. During the few hours that we spent together, there was almost no topic that we did not cover, from the usual discussion on the recent politics of China - which now incorporated a lengthy digression on the issue of Taiwan and its identity - to the different ways in which people from Beijing and people from Guizhou perceive the idea of romance. It would be difficult for me to reconstruct the details of this last conversation. But what I do remember is that Jing attributed to Beijing people a sort of rational approach to dating, as opposed to a more primitive idea of romance, which countryside kids like her still chose to believe in. This contrast reminded me of the notion that there is no love in Tokyo, as I once heard one guy say. Talking to Jing also helped me face a certain feeling of nostalgia, which had been accompanying me since my arrival in Italy. I asked her, like I do to many of my friends recently, how she dealt with living so many years so far away from home, and seeing her friends and parents so infrequently. Asking this question to a Chinese, I should have remembered that, like many in her generation, she had stopped living with her parents as a 6th-grader, and had moved to a different city, 2000 kms away from her birthplace, at the age of 18. Her bond with loneliness was deeply rooted, and dated way longer than mine. She reassured me that ‘our diaspora is beautiful and necessary, and the melancholy you are feeling is actually a beautiful emotion’. Her capacity to portray negative emotions with human dignity is, I believe, one of the keys to the particular state of happiness she seems to have achieved, and needless to say, one of the reasons I like to spend time with her.

Secondly, I met my Chinese teacher, who is also my only teacher at the moment. She arranged a meeting at a restaurant near the Chinese street of Milan, the 华人街, as I’ve discovered I should say recently. We had a complete meal, in a setting that reminded me indeed of a restaurant one could have found, say, in Qing dynasty China. The interior hall was separated into multiple narrow cabins, with slim walls reaching not quite the full height of the room, but tall enough to guarantee adequate privacy to the customer’s conversation. As my teacher explained to me, it is good manners in Chinese etiquette that when one invites a guest to dine, it should be the latter who orders meals first. Only when the guest refuses to choose will the host be allowed to order, and they will be forced by manners to order the most expensive items on the menu. I freed my teacher from this responsibility by picking almost every single dish we had to eat that day: a portion of 空心菜 (a vegetable whose name literally signifies “greens with an empty heart”, meaning that the inside of the stem is hollow) stir-fried with garlic and fermented bean curd; a portion of pork belly braised in soy sauce over stir-fried 雪菜; steamed fish, and lastly, a spicy hot pot with pork meat and green onions. Once again, since our lunch lasted a few hours, it would be quite hard for me to recall all the topics covered in the course of our conversation. I do remember confessing to her the reason for the feeling of melancholy and nostalgia mentioned above: and that is, the realization that I will not be back in Milan for at least one more year. At the point in life where you start living alone, and especially if you leave your birthplace to move elsewhere, you suddenly start to ask yourself a very scary question, and that is: how much time do I have left? How many more times will I see this or that person again, etc. etc. My teacher just replied by saying, 不该这么说, “you shouldn’t say this”. She has been living in Europe for over 30 years, while her mother likely never left Shanghai: she must know very well what I mean.

I also met Linh, a girl whom I had dated before leaving Italy, now almost one year ago. I asked her if she wanted to meet up way in advance, when I was still in Taiwan, and her seemingly excited positive answer made me suppose she would have been still single. In fact, as she revealed to me only after a couple of hours of smooth, polite catch-up conversation, she has been dating another guy for about nine months. That’s about the time I was away, but she still says it took her a long time to move on from me. It’s very funny that, at the time we stopped dating, back in January, she told me she did not care I was leaving, I could do anything I wanted with her. And, since I was literally the first guy she ever dated, and knowing that I would have left soon, I decided I wouldn’t. I am not sure if I would still have the same kind of grace now. As the time of my life goes on, I feel that an old prophecy (or rather a curse) once pronounced by a girl I was breaking up with is gradually becoming true. She told me she could see my future, the succession of steps my life would have taken. I would have ended up with a black heart.

All in all, the most unpleasant bit of this short holiday was the realization that there are conversations that just cannot be replaced by a simple video call. I found this first with my parents, and then with my friend Palla, who was the last person I met before leaving. Reaching the last days before my flight back, I was sort of regretting not having been able to initiate deeper conversations with my closest friends, the people whom in fact I know the best. The same goes for my parents: I felt that there were many questions that, before going back to Italy, where already in my head, waiting to be posed at the right moment during a chill lunch or afternoon tea, just for the purpose of starting a discussion and find out their opinion about some of the concerns that currently occupy my mind. But with this insane carousel of festivities: Christmas, Saint Stephen’s, New Year’s… there just wasn’t enough time to talk. And every day I had to meet someone else. In the end, when the moment of our last lunch together arrived, I finally shoot my shot. While we were talking, for some reason, about my grandparents, I made a comment that I often make: that their generation, despite being substantially less free than ours in terms of life choices, despite having substantially lesser opportunities (and maybe because of that), had their life already figured out way earlier than all of us. My grandpa had his first child at 21, and married my grandma at that age. It is unthinkable for me to be married at my age, let alone five years ago. This comment initiated a lovely discussion with my mom and dad, which went on for at least one hour. It was that sweet part of the day where people have finished eating their meal, and not wanting the end their mundane activities just yet, choose to prolong the conversation with the excuse of drinking a tiny cup of coffee. A single shot of espresso can indeed fuel hours and hours of conversation, maybe just until dinner time.

In the end, this last “real” talk with my parents left me with the bittersweet feeling of having obtained just what I wished, hours before departing. Very quickly, I had to pack my stuff and jump on a plane that would have brought me about nine thousand kilometres away. Back in Taiwan, I really feel something has changed. These narrow streets that I cross every day with my scooter have not changed: maybe I have changed a bit. I am somehow happier. Maybe recognizing how indeed fleeting life is will help me cherish moments that can only happen every few times in one’s lifetime, like that after-lunch exchange with my parents. I keep repeating myself an idiom that I’ve read somewhere, maybe it was part of the innumerable calligraphies I’ve seen at the Museum in Taipei:

人生如朝露。

Life is but a morning’s dew.

P.S. I caught a cold in Italy. It’s the first time in three years that I’m sick with something different that the dreaded virus. It’s very odd, but the way my smell has been altered is the same of when I caught mononucleosis in Korea, back in winter/spring 2019. Because in my brain that odour is associated to Korea, I now randomly, an unexplainably, feel like I was in Korea again. It’s a surprisingly pleasant sensation: I have noticed that the illusion is even more credible when I walk by a shop selling fried doughs. It must be due to the innumerable bakeries that crowd Seoul’s subway stations.