Chapter 1 #8
We decided on a film called Lost (迷), the debut of the Hong Kong director Fan Ho.
The program informed us that Lost had in fact been lost: After it premiered at Cannes in 1970, all screening reels were destroyed or went missing for half a century.
The program did not explain why. The sole remaining copy—a 35 mm print with German subtitles—had been located by the Reel to Reel Institute.
We all felt a sense of awe learning this.
But for fate, we never would have seen this film.
We might never see it again—it didn’t seem like the kind of thing you could stream at home.
Lost was about a young man’s identity crisis in Hong Kong in the 1950s—after the Chinese Civil War, after the mainland and Hong Kong and Taiwan functionally became different countries.
The young man was trapped between two poles: China and tradition versus the West and modernity.
These poles were represented by two women.
At the beginning of the film, the man meets a young woman with long, uncombed black hair who lives in an abandoned castle.
She is clearly not doing well, mentally speaking, but she is very beautiful and mysterious, so they fall in love.
They do all sorts of traditional Chinese activities together: reading the classics, playing the zither, admiring the calligraphy on their fans.
But tragedy looms. The young woman is afraid of forces she cannot name.
She tells the man that someone is coming for her, that they’ll take her away and he’ll never see her again.
He vows to help her escape from the castle before this happens, but when he comes back the next day, she isn’t there.
He runs through the empty halls, shouting her name.
The castle is abandoned. He realizes he’s all alone, in a ruin of forgotten relics. Perhaps he’s been alone all this time.
Despondent, the man then goes to a party, where he meets another woman, with thick eyeliner, big mussed-up hair, and Western clothes.
She is dancing on a table. Her name is Beibei.
He and Beibei go to an attic room somewhere and have sex.
Afterward, he is repulsed by her: He sits against the wall and starts to cry.
She asks him how he’s feeling, and he pouts and refuses to speak with her.
The next day, he walks out in a field. Beibei appears wearing hunting gear.
She misfires and shoots him in the head, and he winds up in a coma.
That’s the end of the movie. We all sat a moment in silence, unsure of whether we were supposed to laugh.
We didn’t know how to interpret the coma.
WE EMERGED WINCING INTO THE AFTERNOON—THE SUN AND HEAT were shocking after hours in the cool dark.
Devin loved the film. He felt it was a brilliant exploration of cultural alienation, of the half-life of assimilation, the violence of British colonialism.
I felt that the young man was being a bit of a baby, and Anna agreed.
Anna felt that the director clearly hated women, and that if Beibei wanted to dance on tables and wear Western clothes and shoot guns, then that was her right.
Why would the young man choose to sleep with her and then sulk about it?
Why was Westernization so bad? We’d all grown up in America; did that make us so evil?
As we walked down the steps outside, I felt a sudden pressure against my hip.
I turned. A boy my age was slumped against me.
I tensed, fearing—what? I didn’t know. He collapsed to the ground: a soft, fluid motion, more a slide than a fall.
For a moment nobody noticed. Anna and Devin walked on past me, and I shouted, “Guys—” They turned, looked at me, and it seemed an eternity passed before they saw the boy.
By then several people were clustered around him—patting his head, feeling for his pulse.
“Should we call an ambulance?” Anna asked.
We all took out our phones, but no one made a call.
We didn’t know the emergency services number in Taiwan.
They had told us in orientation—something with nines, ones, and zeroes—but in that moment I could not remember, and I couldn’t look it up; my fingers were shaking too badly to type.
Someone shouted for water. Someone unzipped the boy’s jacket. Someone cradled his head, murmuring things in Chinese. His friends? Bystanders? I couldn’t tell. The girl cradling his head looked up. “Stop staring!” she snapped. “Don’t crowd him.” We backed away.
WE CROSSED THE SQUARE, AWAY FROM THE CROWD.
I FELT VAGUELY criminal, though we hadn’t done anything wrong.
I glanced back over my shoulder. The young man was sitting up now, eyes open, sipping from a bottle of water.
“Probably heat exhaustion,” said JC. “He looks okay.” But I kept replaying how, when I first felt the boy’s presence, my instinct was to jerk away.
The boy had fainted against me, he had needed help, and I had just let him fall.
The only excuse I could come up with was that I had felt like I couldn’t interfere. Like whatever happened in this city happened through a glass wall, and if we weren’t paying for it, we weren’t allowed to interact with it. All we could do was look.
“Holy shit.” Devin pulled out his phone. I turned to look. Across the square, an old man was carrying a boom box while walking beside his dog, who was riding a skateboard.
WAS I AN UGLY HUMAN BEING?
I had just read Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place in a writing seminar that spring.
It had made a great impression on me then, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it now.
A tourist is an ugly human being, wrote Kincaid.
An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you.
But Kincaid was writing about British visitors to Antigua.
By you, she meant the white European tourist descended from the enslaver.
Our situation was different, surely. We did not have a colonial relationship with this place, did we?
We had not come to gawk at natives, or dine at country clubs, or solicit the island girls, or enjoy private beaches inaccessible to the locals.
We had come here to learn—to form a deeper relationship with this place. Surely Kincaid did not mean us.
But none of us were Taiwanese. None of us had family here.
Most of us were here only because Taiwan right then was friendlier to American travelers than mainland China was, or we would have gone to Beijing, and in fact this was a source of great contention with my parents—that I had chosen the program farther from my extended family because I wanted to go where all my friends were going and I didn’t want to bother with downloading a VPN.
I could go see my grandparents any other summer.
I wanted to become Chinese here, on my own terms. The anonymity was the point—but that meant this place had nothing to do with me, that no cradle of belonging justified my missteps.
All this passed through my head every time we did something wrong, even by accident: when we failed to queue along the lines marked on the subway platforms; when we spilled bubble tea in the subway cars, which clearly prohibited eating or drinking; when we stood on the wrong sides of the escalators, blocking commuters racing for their trains; when we dropped plastic spoons, straw wrappers, and receipts on the ground and did not pick them up; when we took too long to order because we couldn’t read the menus; when we held up the line at the tofu pudding counter because we didn’t understand that the word for “spoon” here was 湯匙, not 勺子; when we stepped out in front of bicycles and mopeds without looking, and drivers swerved cursing around us.
Did the locals tolerate us? Did they despise us? Did they think about us at all?
ANNA AND I HAD GRAND PLANS FOR MONDAY. WE WOULD GO FOR soy milk and fried dough sticks at the famous breakfast stand across the street.
We would eat in the nearby Da’an Forest Park.
We would sit at a cat café and make friends with an Instagram-famous fat tabby and get started on our readings for the week.
Then we would go to the shopping plaza in Ximen, browse the pop-up accessory shops, and watch the street buskers until dinner.
Instead we slept. We were supposed to wake up at eight.
Every time an alarm went off we fumbled around and did whatever it took to silence our phones.
This cycle went on for hours. At one point I nudged the curtains aside, because daylight was supposed to help with resetting our circadian rhythms, but Anna moaned theatrically until I yanked them shut.
I couldn’t remember the last time I felt fatigue like this.
It was so hard just to lift my arm. I could have stood up if I’d tried, but the amount of willpower that would have taken was immense.
The distance between thought and action was Herculean.
I imagined getting up and going outside—into the heat, the sun, the sticky mechanics of sunscreen and bug spray—and the thought made me wilt.