THOU SHALT SUFFER SWEETLY
We have traded retail wristcuts with lavish haircuts
All Hallows’ Eve
A stony complexion has replaced the usual grimacing. Gone are the days of toothy smiles and nihilistic boredom and teenage tantrums. In its place are blank sighs and half-muttered curses. No one to stop you in your tracks but your conscience. Depravity is now a mute dullard, mumbling away the days, wasted on the wayside. Musty costumes block my periphery. Hysterical roars ring in my eardrum. Stumbling in their gowns, it looks as if we’re still three kids stacked on top of each other. Yet only one of them has grown up, with none of the boyish bravado we used to rampage through life with. The blinding lights allow shadowy figures to rig in their favour. I eat candy until I crash. We are given photo ops, handshakes, stages, coloured irises. We face the enemy who swears he’s on your side. We keep getting shown interactive interfaces. We fondly eulogize. We pat ourselves on the back. We say, well done, massa, we done show em folks what be done….yassir me tink me gwan be allllllrite. God bless you, massa! God bless you! No more of that pain, we children ardent for some desperate glory… no more of that dread, we deaf falcons in the widening gyre… no more of that fear, we pitiful pilferers of the Indies. Only grifters remain in the Transformational Thouroughfare, in the luxury loft, in the digital replicas of dorms, where we’re gonna die till it doesn’t hurt. Rejoice! Celebrate! Good times be here. Cheers: 1, Jeers: 0. Send us to Myanmar! Fuck it. Fuck it all. No one goes up those steep hills in Las Vegas to look West anymore. It’s been fenced off and patrolled by bloodhounds and ICE agents and nuclear-powered searchlights. The road to their work is filled with potholes and runs through several Indian reservations. We’ve been utterly mowed down. The bullets graze the pavements we loitered on. I just needed one more drink. So I can have one more anecdote. So I can live one more song. So I can steal one last breath. So I can stretch my arms, lift up my skinny fists, like antennas to heaven. You can rally people into any flavour of insanity as long as the pillow-talk sounds feasible enough.
If it exists to be so, then let it be.
This is the zugzwang of our lives.
We wear the blood never shed to our graves.
Self-Flagellation For a Cop-Out Ending
Peril ensues in the madness of singled individuals. While I crave lucidity as much as the next glassy-eyed automaton fighting a civil war, substance sobriety-wise report cards have long since well-documented my poor grade. May I recall such happy turnarounds, later, perhaps already underway, slight curveball whizzing by, swayed by Doppler - utterly transparent for all - mortified. Under the pretense of a stolen HB pencil, happy scrawling!
Baptized in the voluptuous sun, a hum ringing from the depths of deathly children. “Buzzed”, ah. They make play in front. I soak it in: the seafoam, the hurried decisions, the apprehensive menu, the body, exalted, plateau of newly-weds, waiting for my bill…gunk on a bed. Dust bunnies, strands of hair, bodily debris. As if I was living furniture, molting in ruin time. My skin cells chip away like soap. Others shed light while I simply shed, my only legacy hand-vacuumed by some diligent hostel custodian-cum-proprietor. My eyes adjust, muscles twitch, bones crack, lips relax, joints fold, stomachs grumble, heads itch, knuckles ache, necks strain, mouths dry, throats contract, bladders scream. A rib or two, unknown, ignored.
At the utmost content, make a point on professional mannerisms. I.e. rotting in the enfeebled sun - craving something smooth and wouldn't struggle. Seldom do I lavish in such human f(l)ailings. Acceptable pain and gushing wind washing over me, permeating into reality. People sit beside me in situ, penning their own craft. May we all live long, prosperous, into the aimless nights, as far as we can wet ourselves. Don't let me keep you awake. Do the laundry, hang the towels.
Dangling a gaudy grin I carried those bare necessities (and a fistful of dead memories) in a large duffel bag. Objects spiritually charged, reset to default at the end of the week. I didn't really go anywhere. Realist historical narration/post-traumatic collision between realism discourse of omnipotent discourse of the impossibility of representation that these films continously haunt disrupt linear narrative - not the attempt to fully reproduce the event. Crowds crowding boiler rooms knobs twisted and fidgeted. Beware of moving parts… no worries about dead pixels, obfuscated rights, gray zones, choppy connection, low battery, haptic feedback, unresponsive plasma. You will struggle to defend me where I stand. I have to die living. I have to live having died. They will finally develop a pill to kill the fear of death. Some will call it love. Some will call it wrong. Some will call it Dylar. I will call it Quits. Ow!
…there I was, atop my freshly-fueled scooter, brimming with max potential as it disintegrates slowly from the moment its price tags were ripped, amidst hundreds of other, rumbling, vibrating beastial machines, a wall of frequencies, surely a numbing gel for the ear canal. The fumes, equal parts nostalgic as it is carcinogenic, is but another Acquiesced component to daily living. In essence, we are deaf and mute. As handymen of blind-deaf-mute machines, naturally we search for the missing pathology, blindness, troubling us so in this witching hour. As this amalgamation I was wonderfully apart of abides by a red traffic light (system of Illumination: concerning herd management), a tiny branch gently lodged on the jacket of a person beside me. I was instantly made aware of a) the existence of the person as unique, in direct conflict to the harmony of a fragile pack; and b) the existence of foliage outside my periphery, becoming too a lone sign of life as “elsewhere” and “discreet”; c) the existence of the forces binding a) and b), often invisible (we are blind), now brought into frontality for me to receive its (c) gaze. Since the person is unaware of the branch I am so aware of, and as far as I can assess from a quick glance, I am the sole witness who also cares enough about this solemn clash/reunion between previous (known) unknowns. As such, I am also the sole fiduciary in this event, and my gaze does not affirm the discreet life of my fellow rider insofar as I am the only perceiving party, and therefore my fascination and gaze is then applied inversely to d) the fact I am accident-prone. That is, if I were to allocate precious attention span to some plant matter on a random as opposed to safety on the road, I would not fare well. Ultimately then, it really was rather unsurprisingly d)eath, the inevitable mortality confrontation which is not only present in my ego but extending to the scooter assembly I briefly belonged to. One cannot simply divert their focus away from other stimuli present, which will surely cause an avalanche of crashing scooters, unable to break in time as I ride myself to Kingdom Come. In any case, the moment the branch disappears from the shoulder of the rider, they too cease to exist. The marker removes itself. The outline fades away. The contour blends in. The life gives way. I am to be blind again.
From the Evergreen Forests to the Olive Trees
It is 6, 7pm as I pen down these words. My body acutely aware of the humid summertime breeze, as I adjust slowly for the fact it is still 3, 4am where I once resided for the past four years. Now here, I have finally been granted scooter privileges, at long last graduating from a snotty peasant needing to bike/walk/transit to places into a proper Taiwanese bloke. The streets are blinding, deafening, welcoming. The amenities are endless. People are eternally warm and helpful. The convenience stores are actually convenient. Living is dirt-cheap. Living is easy. Living is simple. Living is delicious. Living is long. Living, is hell. I black-out in discomfort. In dismay.
This discomfort, as with any “world citizen” worth her welfare check can find its roots in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, and what it means to reside, hold citizenship, and be subjugated to a mandatory conscription under a government that is explicitly pro-Israel/Zionist. This did not come as a shock nor a surprise as Taiwan's buddy-buddy relationship with Israel (using the name for only convenience sake, otherwise a glorified make-believe McPlayPlace) is not only felt as I was growing up, but well-documented and can be traced all the way back in the 70s. In typical Israeli icebreaker fashion, an expanding aerospace-industrial complex bonds well with a budding, paranoid nation seeking for self-defense, espionage, and various sabotage products against an enemy combatant right next door. The Zionist arsenal always proves to be an effective bargaining chip. And so begun a wretched symbiosis. The most troubling consequence exemplified in the infamous 2024 Lebanese pager attacks, AKA Operation Grim Beeper where the explosive pagers which resulted in numerous deaths and thousands injured bore the mark of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. While investigations local and abroad concluded that “no Taiwanese” were involved in said attacks, the very notion of my home complicit in a shadow-proxy genocide deeply unsettled me, and pains me to no end.
Yet interestingly, also like every other country, Taiwan had bad blood with Israel at the very start, where post-Nakba in the 1950s Taiwan actually refused to grant entry visas to oncoming Israelis - the first and last act of true resistance. As the CCP has historically been the more sympathetic bunch with the plight of neighboring Arab countries (and to an extent Palestine itself), the same sadly cannot be said about Taiwan. This boggles the mind as Israel disliked and did not seek to make contact with the KMT regime in the 50s; publicly voted against Taiwan's UN membership during Resolution 2758; added Taiwan among the twenty-one Asian countries it won’t hold (official) diplomatic relations with, when all the others were either Muslim countries or outright communist (lol). The whole arms trade was obviously a clandestine arrangement and it wasn't until the 90s where an official “diplomacy” begun, letting this farce to go on ever since. Although some parts of me remained in denial, nothing is more soul-crushing and damning than to see an Instagram post by the Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs advertising what is essentially a paid “work-learn” vacation to an active war zone. What glib and blatantly ignorant attitude. Borderline evil.
Sometimes I believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I have no confusion as to the state of modern Taiwanese politics: neoliberal tokenistic identitariansim (as in identity politics, not the pan-nationalist white supremacist movement in Europe), incredibly sad and pathetic. The same tired rhetoric comes easy from the average “woke” Taiwanese doused in this sorry cesspool - you'll hear them, in horrifying parallel, mirror white liberal talking points in Bushwick. They'll fondly recall the time they thrifted a used yellow umbrella in solidarity with the Hong Kong protests; they'll recommend you a seedy Ukranian dive bar newly opened at the heart of Zhongshan District; they'll shed a genuine tear espousing the horrors recounted “first-hand” from a Uyghur TV personality/DPRK defector; they'll slip in mid-conversation how Taiwan was the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage. Yet with all the spotlights and glamour and the apparent given “authority” of Taiwan's progressivism, of it as a guiding lighthouse of global democracy, the strange and frustrating silence, if not outright support shown from Tsai's rule in 2023, lighting Taipei 101 with Zionist shades makes one wince in disgust. At best: internalized propaganda regurgitation as a US “puppet state” (which I vehemently disagree and won't elaborate other than the fact it fails the vibe check) coupled with general Islamophobia and distanced apathy spanning eight-thousand kilometers (5k in mi); at worst: a lucid accomplice of an unfathomable genocide of Indigenous Palestinians. Another common rhetoric? We love to promote how well we take care of our own “aborigines”. Stemming from increasingly nationalistic and alt-right sentiments amongst younger folks and especially Western/Trumpian influences, we are brewing the perfect conditions for a fascist uprising as we fill our rooms with air-conditioned complacency. A Mbembe-Fisherian hellscape at its most misconstrued, where the postcolony, driven by the stench of death in the wake of unimaginable trauma done unto the land and its denizens via martial law, has evaporated all lessons learnt at the expense of countless bodies and instead choosing to metastasize into the realm of capitalist realism, replete with terminal platitudes, a reflexive impotence rendering us incapable of critical engagement. The Strawberry-Santori generation on display - an enlightened Buddha who still bruises easily. What a maddeningly familiar narrative. What a spiritless endeavor. What a spineless reform. What a joke. Global reactions to Thunberg and the Madleen speaks to this with little to no words.
Taiwan has always been a (white) expat haven. In the struggle for sovereignty we've only managed to attract foreign presence, gawking onlookers, and smirking sergeants. Like so many others we've grown bored and fulfilled, forever defined by status quos and status quotas and status quotes. Our government is entirely predicated upon presupposed divine victimhood. Affirmed not by the autonomy to have an opinion on worldly matters, but through the rejection of an-Other (China). Always, provisionally speaking, that once “model colony” at the whims of larger conspiring forces, only held accountable by one's own conscience and expired glue sticks. We cannot, in good faith, be afraid. At the very least, we cannot be afraid.
We must resist.
We will persevere.
The world will not stand up for Taiwan if it will not stand up for Palestine.