Untitled
Oct 16, 2023
I thought that by coming to Shanghai, to a big city, I’d be able to have more experiences, and to write about all of them. Instead, having all this accessibility to new experience, I feel nervous writing about any of it. 17 year old me would have been able to write about our local movie theatre in intense fervor, because going there felt unusual to me — I could only go there if my parents brought me. And when I was 17 our little part of the city was changing rapidly. It was becoming more “suburban”. the mall was closing down. They were knocking down a bunch of factories. The first fruits of this new development had just opened, and now there was a new library next to the metro station, which was on the other side of the movie theatre. The theatre was cleaner now, and had reserved seating and chairs that reclined. The only problem is that I can’t actually remember any of the movies I went to see with my mom — the only person who would go to a movie with me. For many years of my life there was one place I would see movies, one place I would go bowling, one place I would get groceries, and all of them seemed mysterious to me because I couldn’t go to them on my own whenever I wanted. I could only catch glimpses, collected over the course of ten years. Maybe people who grew up in walkable cities don’t have this experience. Kids in Shanghai can go to a dozen different malls as soon as they’re old enough to walk by themselves. They can go to arcades. When internet cafes were still a thing that teenagers would go to, they could try to go to those and maybe be kicked out for not being 18. Maybe they still wouldn’t end up having the problem I have now. Maybe they’re not in search of experiences. Maybe they just keep going to the same internet cafe everyday because they want to play the same games without having to go on a journey to find another internet cafe.
Doing interesting doesn’t automatically make you interesting. Going somewhere new doesn’t automatically let you do interesting things. Especially when the place you went is just a big city millions of people live in. It’s not particularly interesting to those people. It’s not particularly interesting to you even once understand it’s general layout and have gotten used to one of its streets.
One christmas eve my dad and I were alone at the house. i have no idea where my mom and sister were. Maybe they were at my grandparents’ house. My dad asked me if there was anything I wanted to do. I don’t think I said anything in particular. He said “In that case, let’s go to the mall. There’s a special feeling about going to the mall on Christmas Eve.” Maybe he had some gift he still needed to buy. I at the time had just gotten interested in Puyo Puyo, so I wanted to see if they had Puyo Puyo Fever for the DS at the mall Gamestop. I must have been 15 at the time. We went to the Columbia mall, which was far away, but felt like the nice mall — not that I’d actually been to a mall anytime recently. At the time malls weren’t something I thought about. I’d written them off, the way I’d written of movies. I’d only seen super commercial movies, so assumed books were better than movies. Malls are by their nature commercial. I didn’t have some better thing to compare them with the way I had books to tout over movies — I just figured I didn’t need malls. This was the first time I was really truly aware that the mall I was going to was the Columbia mall. I must have been there before when I was younger, without anyone remarking about it. This was before I’d formed any kind of mental map of the place, so it seemed far more massive than it was. As my dad has predicted, there was a special feeling. It was crowded. Just moving around the mall was difficult with how many people there were. My dad took me to every store that seemed remotely interesting. He spent an hour at Sear’s looking at the appliances (his line of work). Maybe this was the beginning of something. I remember later on quite frequent trips with my dad to other appliance retailers, so that he could see all the refrigerators they stocked, open and close them, then talk to random old people who were in the mood to talk with some stranger about appliances.
What I’m trying to get at here is the question of “Why do I keep going to malls, when every mall ends up feeling the same to me?” and “Why do I keep thinking and writing about video games, even fantasizing of making video games, when I no longer play them?”
The teenagerly ambitions of my past were never accomplished. There were all sorts of things I thought I would do and thought I would feel, and I never did or felt any of these things. These weren’t accomplishments like getting into Harvard, making a million dollars or whatever else. I just wanted to truly feel whatever it is I imagined lying deep inside Final Fantasy or Chrono Cross, or later on games like Chulip. Even just playing a bunch of video games is something I never really managed to do. I’m getting older and older, and I can’t help but wonder why I felt like there was anything important inside of video games. What is the relationship between what I imagined in games, and what actually is in there?
Maybe I’d feel better if I actually played video games. Or I could read enough to actually feel like not-a-liar to say I like reading. I mean, I read way more novels than I play video games, yet I go weeks sometimes without having any particular book I'm reading. Sometimes I start 5 different books in a row, reading only the first 50 pages. Sometimes I go several months this way not really feeling like I've "truly" read anything. Video games are like this in slow motion. It's been years since I've finished a video game. I wonder if I'll ever finish a game again.
Yesterday I took the subway to Jiading, which is very far away, far past where Shanghai stops feeling like Shanghai. I got out of the station, which was connected to a big bridge over a river. I took the stairs down from the bridge and there were a bunch of bikeshare bikes. I got on one. I started pedaling in one of the two directions available to me. I biked past fields and trees, powerlines and roads that are bordered by grass instead of sidewalks. I biked up and down hills, and saw seas of forest with brown highrises ascending out of them in the distance. Maybe they contained big fancy apartments like the one Maque (麻雀) has. She's a girl who is named after Mahjong (aka 麻雀 aka Sparrow), and lives in her ex-boyfriend's apartment somewhere in the suburbs. I was only there once. It didn't feel as rural there as where I ended up in Jiading. If I kept going a little farther of Line 11 of the subway instead of getting off where I got off, I'd end up on the Suzhou subway, which is a whole other world of mysteries for me.
The thing about suburbs is they can seem so remote to people from the city, yet they're still a fifteen minutes bike ride from concentrated urbanization. Judging from the amount of construction I biked past (far more than I see in Shanghai's urban core, which I already though was a lot) there will be new highrises and new malls at even farther edges of Shanghai before long. People spend all day in the suburbs. Some people go years without visiting the city. There are industries that thrive there. I drove past a multi-kilometer complex of hardware/powertools wholesalers. I wished I were a person in the market for whatever it is they were selling. Instead I kept biking on, thinking about the suburbs I'd lived in once, long ago -- the suburbs that to me felt so far away from everything, that I now realized were far more urban than what most people imagine as suburbs. I wonder what life in Chinese suburbs is like? I've only known the cities, just as many Chinese people who go to America only know the cities. Maybe I need to be on the lookout for more suburban friends so I have an excuse to go to their houses and explore their neighborhoods.