Liminal Pasts
September 2, 2023

I'm sitting at a table with an old lady at Saizeriya. The restaurant is packed. I was the only person in line willing to share with her.

I feel weird eating at Saizeriya all the time. I feel, as someone who came to China from far, far away, I'm supposed to just eat Chinese food. I like Chinese food more than pretend Italian food. But I also like having more than one choice to eat. Saizeriya is one of the only omnipresent chain restaurants that has a lot of vegetarian foods. It's also cheap, and its interior somehow feels like another world. So I got here just as the dinner rush was at its peak. I feel full of energy. I feel like I'm going to explode.

The problem with sleeping in until noon is that there's no way to properly appreciate the night. The significance of darkness comes from drifting through it in a dreamlike state, not fully able to interpret the sensations dripping into my body from the exterior world.

When I first came to Shanghai, I'd just gotten out a quarantine that lasted nearly a month. I had to do early morning temperature checks everyday, which enforced some kind of routine in me. I had to show my covid testing status every time I entered a building. There was a weightiness to eating bad pizza in a half-empty Saizeriya at 8pm that is lost on me now. Maybe some dim flicker of it is reignited on days like today when it's cold and rainy, the difference between indoors and outdoors taking on a greater significance than normal.

Somehow the imagination of my youth produced an idea that life in big cities takes place mostly indoors. In reality, you can't go into 90% of buildings. All the places you can go into have this transient feeling to them. You can only be there for a few moments, then you have to go.

I guess this is why I have all these irrepressible memories of Beijing. I didn't have anywhere to sleep or anywhere to go during the day. I spent a lot of time at Saizeriya, trying to force myself to read books like Fortress Besieged, taking an hour to read a single page. Places that were transitory gained a momentary permanentness to them. My life became about closely observing and learning about tiny interior worlds. When I stepped into them I imagined the building was floating in space -- that nothing existed except for whatever small room I was in. The spaces I was in entered my brain at a pace I could somehow observe. Observation became level design. Perhaps in spending so much time in these places I was taking something that wasn't mine, removing some ethereal essence it from our shared reality. Maybe that's why I continue to feel so guilty.

Today's the ghost festival, so I felt the need to wonder around in the rain until some ghost happens to latch onto my body and do whatever it is ghosts do. Somehow I ended up at Saizeriya, as all my wonderings eventually take me.

(Edit: The Ghost festival has now ended three days ago. This essay is a mixture of the past and present tense, without me explicitly revealing to you which is which.)

Is there something disgustingly American about me secretly wishing everything could be a chain store, disassociated from any one location, accessible from any point in the city, the same experience with different faces serving it to me? Why is this what I yearn for? I already have the same pop songs to listen to over and over in different settings — why do I need the settings themselves to be another constant-yet-changing element? Do I imagine freeing oneself from a physical address as a way to escape the ravages of time? To serve as a connection between those who came before me and those who will come after? To make me feel slightly less lonely?

Moments later, I found myself staning in Xujiahui. It’s like a tour of the history of Chinese malls.

You have the old-fashioned ones where there is no demarcation between separate stores, with employees hanging out at their designated locations, eyeing you to determine if your worth spending time on. When I go to the clothing malls no one says anything to me. At the electronics mall everyone is should “hello” at me.

You can enter a tunnel — through the ground or through the sky — and end up at the modern mall with luxury brand stores and glowing white marble floors.

I wonder what will happen when we replace building massive structures meant to sell you things with virtual reality worlds.

Already it feels like streaming in China is meant solely to sell you things. It’s the home shopping market with a live chat. You can buy Pokemon cards live on air and the host will open them for you, allowing everyone to share in the excitement of the reveal. It feels like a logical next step to me to let the viewers put on VR goggles and let them experience the tactile sensations of their pokemon cards in 3D before they’re shipped to you.

My favorite Roblox games are the liminal space ones, so I’m not necessarily opposed to using VR for selling me stuff, since I figure that will probably give me more of those sorts of worlds. My worry is that those worlds will feel more like the newer Shanghai malls, which are made with the knowledge that malls are already omnipresent — merely background spaces for hosting stores rather than a structure in and of itself that someone might take a trip to see. The older malls like Metro City were designed as spectacles. Every floor is different, and beneath the mall is a system of tunnels connecting to every other mall in the area.

I think one of my interests in video games comes from hearing about other countries where you have all sorts of phenomena you don’t see where I was growing up. The most typical example is reading people on the internet go on and on about Japanese vending machines or the Japanese rail system or Japanese love hotels. These are all semi-anonymous systems, so it makes sense that these are what I’d be hearing about. Anything that requires extensive interaction with a human being is less likely to show up on an English language blog due to the language barrier. Someone with lousy Japanese on the other hand can still become an expert on the Subway system and all the idiosyncrasies that make it different from the subway systems “back home.”

So it was these anonymous systems I heard about, and it’s also these anonymous systems that feel like they could be best simulated in a video game. And if you’re simulating systems from a foreign world, you might as well make up systems that don’t exist anywhere. For instance, before I saw a pizza delivery box at a subway station, it never occurred to me that such a thing could exist. If that were in a video game, I wouldn’t be able to tell if it were made up or a real object I just hadn’t seen before. So why not have a video game setting where I can make up a foreign country that has its own objects and systems and services and businesses? Another one I keep thinking about is the 24 hour study cafe I saw in Korea. I never went in — I can only imagine what kind of accommodations it must have had. Perhaps it was completely unlit except for little spotlights on occupied desks. I imagine you have a “Study Card” that you swipe to enter.

I should make it clear that my imaginations of all businesses I’ve never experienced myself come from the Bombchu bowling alley in Legend of Zelda, open only late at night with a very bored lady at the front desk who flirts with you.

The temptations is to say there would be more room for creativity, without the real life restrictions of physics, law, and economics — but in a virtual world there would still be other restrictions — most notably the restrictions of implementation, or perhaps the restrictions of imagination. Imagination is always a restriction, but in contexts where a greater degree of necessity exists, imagination can be subsidized. In virtual worlds without any real necessity, you’re left with your imagination as it truly is, which may not be enough to do anything interesting.

These liminal spaces are most interesting to me when they are ostensibly fragments of a past I never experienced. I want to enter the past simply because it’s inaccessible to me. Buildings are big and expensive, and the monuments of an age tend to get preserved. Commercial architecture like malls especially feel like an opportunity to feel some lingering essence of earlier decades — though what I want to be in communication with is people, not objects — and even the people who were here in 1989 are not the same now in the year 2023. I can speak about the past with them, but I can’t know their past, and most disappointingly we cannot experience the past together.

Real knowledge of the past never flows out like a fountain. At times it’s felt that way — for instance when I was first getting into 80s Japanese Idol Pop music, looking at Soulseek and having files from ten different people at once being wired to me like money by Western Union in the late 1800s. The past had already been curated and made into an artifact of the present day internet.

The true past — as something opposed to the present — seems to me to be the content that is utterly non-understandable — that can’t be comprehended in the current moment — that exists not in museum exhibitions or music collections — but only in the dark corners of nightmares of old men and women, who can’t even hope to verbalize those feelings to a young child such as me.

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