Untitled
August 28, 2023
I've been thinking about how I should use this website. The one person who really wants to read it can't except via Google translate. There might be five or six other people who occasionally check in to see what I post. It's too public to write as if I'm the only one reading any of this, but it's not like I have an audience either.
I’ve always felt like blogging was a self indulgent thing to do, and I don’t particularly want to be the kind of person who comes home everyday and writes at length about my minuscule problems. Though maybe now that the times have changed and those sorts of long form blogs are no longer in style, there’s something more significant about writing thousands of words about myself on a dark corner of the internet few will travel to.
My essays are often written at a pretty abstract level. I can tell fictional stories, but when talking about my real life, I can only speak in short anecdotes, wedged between blocks of text philosophizing about one thing or another. I’m not sure if “understanding my own past, as it actually occurred” is an ideal that can be achieved, or even if its worth pursuing — but if it were, living and writing entirely in contextless anecdotes doesn’t seem like a particularly good way to seek understanding. In relating an anecdote, sometimes a sliver of greater meaning is revealed to me, but the amount of effort I’d have to put in to telling the full story is too much for me, so I stop at one anecdote.
I wrote the essay about Gong Gong Gong in part because I thought maybe I'd be able to send it to Tom Ng and that'd give us an excuse to have a conversation. I wanted to do an interview, or at least ask him a bunch of questions that had formed in my head. The piece ended up being too embarrassing to send to him. But then yesterday he suddenly showed up at Saizeriya with my girlfriend Xiaoxi’s friend Liuyi. We ended up going to an arcade together. There were dozens of opportunities where I could ask him any question I so desired, yet I asked him nothing. Whatever questions I had for him had left my brain and no matter how badly I felt I had a million things to say, I couldn't summon a single concrete word. Instead we played Street Fighter III together. I’d never played the game before, so the only characters I knew the moves for were Ryu and Ken. Tom already picked Ken, and I felt like it would be dumb to pick Ryu, so I picked Remy, since I’d never really heard anyone talk about him. He seemed like a throwaway character everyone’s forgotten about, so for that brief moment at the character select screen I felt it was my duty to play as him. I then discovered Tom actually knows how to play Street Fighter, at least as Ryu and Ken, and he promptly wiped the floor with me, then continued to play through Ken’s entire campaign on a single credit.
Existing next to a group of people I somewhat know always fills me with deep embarrassment. I think back to the times I was utterly alone, like in Beijing, Korea, or Guangzhou, and feel some sort of delusional nostalgia for that loneliness.
I want to go back to Guangzhou. I was only there for a single night and a single morning spent running from store to store looking for a place that I could get a phone plan. This was the tiny fragment of freedom I had between getting out of my initial on-arrival quarantine and the second ten days of quarantine I had to do once I got to Shanghai. I got out of my quarantine hotel at 8pm, shared a taxi into the city with someone else in the same quarantine batch as me, then checked into another hotel at 10pm. The guy at the front desk spoke in delicate mandarin, wore a clean white shirt and had very soft looking shiny skin. Maybe being separated from all human contact for ten days then immediately finding myself in China put me in a mood that made everyone feel beautiful to me. There were two drunk guys behind me in the line for the front desk. Some lady, I’m not sure if she was a friend or just some stranger trying to rid herself of a nuisance, was helping them get a room. While I was dealing with my luggage, trying to drag it to the elevator, I glanced back at the drunk guys and saw they were now happily wrestling on the floor, testing each others’ strength.
The guy I shared a taxi with was Korean, as were most of the people who took the bus with me from the airport to the quarantine hotel. My flight to Guangzhou had come from Incheon Airport after all. When we’d gotten to the hotel initially he’d helped me carry my guitar. On the last day of quarantine we were both asking in the hotel’s group chat about the Guangzhou bus system, so he asked me if I wanted to take the bus together, since it seemed like we were the only ones doing so. Later on we decided to just share a taxi together, since the bus would require too many transfers. He talked about how he’d studied Chemical Engineering, but kept switching his job around, and felt like all his knowledge of the world was superficial. He was in sales now and had to spend a few months in China going to meetings with clients for renewable energy company he now worked at. He gave me his business card and told me to call him if I was ever back in Korea. I’m not sure where his card is now. It’s one of maybe three or four business cards anyone has ever handed to me. The business card life that hear about — organizing one’s rolodex, keeping files on all of one’s contacts — that continues to be a fantasy to me — a fantasy that the advent of smartphones perhaps have made it impossible to live even if I pursue it wholeheartedly.
I’d gotten to Korea just as I had a bunch of big homeworks and book reports to do. I kept having to take the train back and forth from my hotel to the airport so I could get covid tests. I’d theoretically be able to get covid tests elsewhere, but entry to China had all sorts of very specific requirements for how the results were reported, so it seemed easier to just go to the airport, where there was a testing station set up specifically for travellers to China. On the train I pondered the questions about Sylow subgroups, then at night I’d sit at the laundromat, puzzling over convergence properties of Lebesgue integrals. Perhaps the reason these memories are so distinct is that group theory and real analysis don’t really figure much into algebraic geometry, the discipline I’m technically supposed to be specializing in. Leaving Korea more or less coincided with finishing these particular topics and never having to think about them again until taking the department exams this fall, which I haven’t studied for at all.
While in Korea I tried to going to old malls and old electronics wholesale markets — places one could glimpse “the old Korea” — i.e. the Korea of the 90s. I’d just gotten a handful of recommendations from the admin of the single forum I regularly post on, so it’s not like I did very much research. Most of my memories in Seoul occurred at night. I walked through a Chinatown looking for places that seemed like they’d have some vegetarian food. I walked through many other streets, also looking for vegetarian food. All the recommendations I’d seen on the typical apps one looks these things up on seemed too expensive to me. I’d walk past places at 11pm, seeing large groups of people eating and drinking happily together, wondering if I’d ever experience that in Korea. In the end I’d just eat some sort of meatless sandwich from 7-Eleven every day.
I’m not exactly sure what I was looking for in Korea. Maybe I thought I’d see the reality that the heavily Korean neighborhoods in Baltimore like Ellicott city I’d spent a lot of time in are “the mere shadows” of — though of course that wasn’t really the case. It felt more like I was playing a game like Shenmue, untranslated, without any real context for what I was seeing — just wondering the streets, wishing I could have a genuine connection with what I saw, but not even being able to have the tenuous connection I’m able to have with China via my limited Mandarin.
I spent a lot more time looking at the exteriors of buildings than the interiors. Because of my schedule, I could only get to the electronics markets in Yongsan as they were closing. I’ve since spent more time in Chinese electronics wholesale markets, so whatever holes I have in my memories about Yongsan might have been filled with Chinese memories.
In a similar way, Guangzhou was colored by Seoul. There might have been a ten day buffer, where I was stuck in a room facing a banana farm in some small hot springs town nearly a hundred kilometers outside of the city, but the moment I stepped outside that seemingly endless quarantine contracted into a single moment, so that the night I walked aimlessly through Guangzhou, drinking an iced coffee I’d bought at C-Store, bumping into strangers, feels continuously attached to the five days I spent in Seoul. They’re a single unit I can’t separate. This is of course unnatural and has nothing to do with the reality of Seoul and Guangzhou, so for that reason I want to go back to Guangzhou and populate the space in my brain reserved for it with real facts, real sensory data of Guangzhou as it is to others.
I want to accumulate stories about the world, or at least some fragment of the world, build some understanding about it and communicate what I’ve learned to others. Ultimately, that seems like the best use of a website like this. It’s a noble goal in theory — but I’ve found that when I actually try to enact it, when I try to act as a journalist or historian, the magnificence of my ignorance overwhelms me, and the more I write the more I feel like I’m distorting the truth — if there even is some kind of truth.
So I’m left with just thinking over my own memories — looking over the spotty images imbedded in my brain of places I can’t go back to — places I’m most certainly not the person best suited to describe. All I can do is talk about the feelings I had when I was there, which might very well be illusions of the present — feelings I’ve never really had. It’s a hard problem to deal with, because the past clearly does influence the present in someway. People go to therapy to uncover deep trauma from their childhood. Yet I’ve found it impossible to think about the past in any objective way. Every time I tell a story I feel like I’ve removed a layer of my memory of it and replaced it with the retelling. The more I analyze my memories the less raw substance remains. In a sense, it might be best to leave the past unexamined and undisturbed — at least that seems like it could be more honest.
I’d like to find a way to document that tidbits of information I gather about the world without tainting it. I’d like to create a collection of factoids that might serve some use to “real” journalists and historians. Maybe that’s what I can use this site for, rather than fill it purely with self-indulgence.