台灣再見

Eight months are left before my departure from Taiwan. I cannot fathom how fast a year passed, and how much has happened since I moved onto this remote and isolated chunk of land in the middle of the Chinese sea. It is difficult to wrap-up my relationship with this place; which is, by now, much more than a simple acquaintance, and yet not a genuine friendship either (I may call it a bond of mutual tolerance and disdain).

I hate almost everything related to my job. Seeing the same, apathetic faces every day is a gruesome experience. Most of my colleagues are middle-aged, male engineers converted to sales, and I am firmly convinced by now in the belief – perhaps justified – that this has to be one of the worst categories of humans that our times have been able to produce. The eyes of these people – the last gleams of light already escaping – and their trembling voices, invariably evoke a feeling of defeat towards life. Perhaps it is not their job, but their age, that has sucked all the vital lymph out of their bean-curd-and-squid-porridge-eating bodies. One divorce with child, the end of a relationship that had lasted a lifetime, the ever-awaited encounter with the significant half destined to eventually never realise: truth be told, how can a person past their fifties feel but apathetic? As I speak with the hubris of my still unripe age, I fear for myself similar scenarios waiting ahead.

There is one manager that I am particularly conflicted about. He encapsulates maybe up to fifty percent of the reasons why I hate my job. The guy is a perfect example of the middleman: a mandarin standing between the Emperor and the people. In all effects a perfect tyrant, but only within his own tiny administrative district: subservient with those who are one tenth of a level above him, absolutely arrogant with all those who find themselves to be below. His speech is overstuffed with expressions that betray his presumptuousness, such as “As I mentioned”, or “Definitely not possible”. He will come to my desk and ask me, “Any progress?”, about ten times a day. People call him a “micro-manager”, but I am now convinced that this is just a very nice euphemism for the much lewder expression, “pain in the ass”. And yet, this man once composed poetry in Chinese verse. He could draw, sing, drink and enjoy his life. But when the government declares a day off because of a typhoon roaming off the coast of Taiwan (i.e., just when nobody really needs to show up at work), he will still work from home to “show face” to his boss, and expect that we do the same to him (lest he “lose his face”). Why? I wonder. The company is big: she is not going to be bankrupt when you do not work for just one day. Nor you are going to earn less at the end of the month, since typhoon holiday is, of course, a kind of paid holiday. The only logic answer must be the one that scares me the most: he enjoys working. But then, since it is literally impossible for our job to be in any way enjoyable, a most accurate explanation is due: he has nothing better to do with his life than to work remotely. This “failure” of a life, as a colleague of ours has portrayed, is hard to explain to me at this age. How could life have nothing else but work? When I hear his voice and I see his face, I am constantly reminded of this thought, and Italian swearwords naturally spring up from my mind.

Job-related concerns bothered me until a couple of weeks ago, when the feeling of suffocation that came from my daily life was paired with the anxiety of searching for my next job. I was completely secure in the idea that I would have not wanted to continue working in this company of half-humans-half-ghosts. And what’s more, I was pretty oriented onto leaving Asia altogether, at least for a while. Thankfully, the job search lasted as little as it could have. I sent my resume to my good friend A. around the first week of June. By the third week of July, I already had my second and last interview with the company for which I am going to work next. Preparing these interviews has occupied me with a rather stressful but entertaining exercise: brushing up my old university notes on metrics and competition law. It was a pretty fun pastime, because the sound of some silly words, which probably mean almost nothing to a lot of people – terms such as “principal component”, “F-test” and “tensor decomposition” – are instead ineluctably linked through my brain cells to some of the fondest memories of my life. Knowing that I am directed towards a more exciting job, which will pay me more, in a more exciting place and with more exciting people, makes my life in Taipei a matter of reverse counting. There is at this point really nothing that keeps me tied to this job and company: if anything, perhaps the little money that affords me this apartment, of which I am so fond.

Indeed, the memory of this house might be one of the sweetest that my life in this country has reserved for the future. I have personalized my place, made it really mine and in some parts a projection of myself. Like the piano, which I have placed in front of the bed, and that represents, at its core, my attempt to not give up completely on the pursuit of beautiful things in life. Its sound is perhaps the noblest one that my little bedroom shall ever meet: and when the vibrations of air travel through the space between the terrace and the tiny balcony… it really feels like some kind of protective god has invaded the space of my apartment, bringing warmth and hope where there were only the cold, blueish office lights that my landlord decided (for some reason) would have been an adequate form of illumination. Or like the cabinet in the living room, on top of which I have placed an old print of a woman, bought about two years ago, and a hand-fan with the drawing of peony flowers, bought the last time I was in Tokyo. When it’s an early afternoon of spring and the clear sunlight penetrates the glass on top of the living room ceiling, radiating into the space between the kitchen and the toilet, between the TV and the coffee machine… the peonies are dimly lit with a dark grey and light-blue shade, and the hand-fan casts a shadow on the delicate cheekbones of the portrayed woman. It makes me daydream of the natural light that must have penetrated paper walls in traditional Japanese houses, over a hundred years ago.

I am surprised to find myself speaking of leaving Asia. It is interesting to say the least that right when I finally moved to a country where Chinese – the language I have been now studying for over six years – is spoken, I also decided to suddenly take a step back. I will sadly remember this tiny island as the place that made me change my mind on Asia. Sometimes, as the place that made me hate Asia. It is unfair and wrong to direct one’s hatred – a deeply personal sentiment – towards such a broad concept as a country or an entire nation of people. And yet, the negative emotions that often arise from the bottom of my heart are always directed towards the outside, towards the Other. Towards the multitude of bystanders that I imagine as the amused audience of my daily petty misfortunes. By saying “hatred”, I might be using just too strong of a word: annoyance could convey the meaning in a better way. It is difficult for me to elaborate rationally and list out the reasons underlying this annoyance: what exactly I sometimes find so upsetting about living here. I could say that the feeling started from little things – mostly related to eating – not going exactly the way I wanted. For instance, not being able to buy regular bread anywhere, but instead, finding only those sort of buns stuffed with all kinds of fillings, whose flavour is invariably somewhat half-way between sweet and salty. Or also, discovering that most of the many restaurants located around my apartment all opened only until eight thirty in the evening – a time at which most sensible people have only started to think about what to have for dinner. Eating is such a basic function of everyday life: force someone to change even by a tiny bit their long-established habits, and you have set them up for catastrophe. That is, of course, when the will to adapt to a different culinary culture is lacking (which, towards my latter days in Taiwan, I found to be the case). China has, undeniably, her own culture of eating, and the misconception of bread as a snack is only one of the many features that a westerner may find weird about it. (One, by the way, of the most recent ones, and probably imported from either Hong Kong or Japan). An example that I like to pick when trying to explain just how difficult it is to adapt to eating here is the lack of water – or of any other drink, for that matter – on restaurant menus. Most local eateries in Taiwan just don’t offer anything to drink. This is something that might sound unbelievable to some foreigners, but the fact is: in Taiwan, the only liquid thing people drink during a regular meal is soup. If the meal is held for business or for a social occasion, alcohol and tea may be involved. But if you eat alone in a no-name noodle shop, consider yourself lucky to find a milk-tea carton forgotten between the bamboo sprouts and the frozen meat and leeks dumpling stuff, inside an old fridge left at the shop’s entrance. To be honest, I found myself more capable of adapting to these somewhat strict constraints of daily life than most of the friends that came here to visit me. For them, the lack of fresh water on the dining table was absolutely intolerable, and we were often forced to buy drinks before-hands and then carry them to the restaurant (a solution sometimes adopted by Taiwanese people too, especially when the drink is bubble tea).

Apart from culinary obstacles, which are jokes aside perfectly surmountable with a bit of tolerance and necessity, there are then the true differences. The ones that only a few people can really accept. This is not the right setting to start on an elaboration of the cultural differences between West Europe and Taiwan or the rest of East Asia. But in and outside the workplace, there have been many moments in which I lost hope in trying to understand just how some of the people I met here think. Many moments in which I was forced to cooperate with a style of thinking which I could not understand or with which I simply could not agree. One central aspect of Chinese culture, the influence of which has lasted until modernity, is undeniably the concept of “face”. Many social interactions that people entertain are explained exactly by this concept. For instance, we work not in order to produce tangible business results, but rather so as to “not lose face” in front of our clients and competitors. We accept to have lunch with our managers not because we wish to enjoy a moment of conviviality, but in order to “give face” to them. A couple of weeks ago, I invited my girlfriend out for dinner as a celebration for my new job: she confessed to me that, despite feeling full, she had to continue eating and appreciating the food we ordered, because she had to “give face” to me. To be honest, the concept of face is not completely foreign to other cultures: in Italy it is often the case that a family worries about their figura (appearance). Fare bella figura means to show off in one way or another in front of your social circle. By contrast, fare brutta figura is somewhat similar to losing one’s pride or honour because of a slip in commonly-accepted social rules. Similar concepts must be ingrained in many other societies too. Only in East Asia, however, the concept of face was uplifted to become a moral force that functions in almost every aspect of society. An ethical principle that provides guidance for business etiquette as well as family rites. Such are the fruits borne by the long tradition of the Confucian school of though.

Leaving long enough in such a culturally and geographically far-away place is not easy. Sometimes, one gets the feeling of living inside a glittering bowl of crystal, where only the few people coming from outside can fully appreciate everything that is weird (my fingers slip as I want to write, “wrong”) about what’s inside. People who live here actually have no idea, or so it seems some days, of the rest of the world abroad. People ask questions about the 国外, the overseas, starting with: “You guys overseas…?”, as if the rest of the world outside Taiwan could somehow think in only one way. I often joke with my friends that this must be a consequence of the fact that Taiwan is an island: an isolated drop of land in the middle of the ocean, just like Sardinia. And just like in Sardinia, here the island-dwellers are very much fond of their island. Their fondness occasionally transmuting into the thought that the island is self-contained: that, after all, “this is the best place in the world to live in”, and “nothing better can really exist”, outside the island. The foolishness of this though at times drove me insane. A simple accident in my daily routine could ruin my mood for an entire day: it made me hate the whole bunch, the entirety of people who decided to be born here. As I got past my first year in Taiwan I realised: I was transforming into some form of scooter-riding monster. I say scooter-riding because one of the few nice things I have learned in this country is how to ride a scooter. When riding, I got upset easily. I swore, and cursed like an old sick dog. It was actually the rage I had within that emerged to surface as I encountered the nth slow car driver, the nth way-cutting taxi or public bus, the nth red light. (Red lights in Taipei last like agony, some more than 100 seconds: you just don’t notice it because the countdown screen has only space for two digits, and does not show anything when the number is still over 99).

It has been a while since I could pronounce the word “love” confidently: since I felt that I knew what this word really means in the end. One aspect of life in East-Asia that I found hard to accept is how easily the word love is pronounced. Guys will say “I love you” after a few dates, in the hope of persuading a girl to become their girlfriend, and if they’re lucky, to sleep with them. But that word means very little: relationships here can last less than a monsoon (and still count as such). People get together and break up in the span of one month: and in that month, they had the time to do everything, including declaring their love to each other. For me, it took almost three years to be able to say this sentence again. Love has been the source and the antidote of my rage, at the same time. The antidote, because it gives me comfort just when I think I am about to lose my mind. The source, because I discovered myself a jealous little child once again. I found myself culpable of many of the misogynistic thoughts of which so often I fill my accusations against Asian men. Just when I found a person that I’m in love with once more, here I am questioning the meaning of this word – love – with my own behaviour. To my defence, this is all but an easy relationship, as the woman I am in love with comes from a divorce and carries two daughters with her. But as the saying goes, love is blind, and fool: the harder the challenge, the steepest the ascent, the more magnificent the promised landscape at the top. But I do wonder if the path I am taking really leads to the top of anything, or if there is even any way up at all. Loving a person that comes from a completely different background is hard, and not only because of the difficulty of translating one’s thought in Chinese: after all, my Chinese is by now good enough to represent the simple ideas that swarm through my mind. The problem is exquisitely cultural: putting yourself in the other person’s shoes, and letting her do the same. Once again, it is difficult to list out the reasons that justify exactly why this is difficult in a country like this one. But this is a place where a girl like Velma, a truly extraordinary person and good friend of mine, will find it harder if not impossible to find a (native) partner, simply because her thoughts and attitude are labelled by guys as “too free-spirit” [sic]. Why? Why are we so scared of women’s free spirit? Why are we so jealous and controlling that we forget what love is all about?