Reflected on a Face
Sep 1, 2024

I have a friend I met at a noise festival here in Shanghai last April — a physics teacher at an international school, originally hailing from Las Vegas. We stayed in touch since then, sometimes running into each other at other music events, or sometimes just meeting up to chat. For instance, yesterday I went to get coffee with her at a cafe she frequents on the top floor of high-rise in the French concession. When I arrived she was slurping some kind of reddish pasta dish with a milky looking sauce (which I assumed must use some milk substitute, as this place was vegan) and and bunch of vegetables, floating in the sauce. We talked about the things we usually talk about: guitar, noise, comparisons of math and physics, or learning Chinese vs learning Japanese. I experienced that recurring sensation of strangeness I get whenever I'm reminded of how different the Japan of the American imagination is from the Japan of the Chinese imagination. She also talked about going back to America over the summer and acquiring a boyfriend there — a friend of a friend.

The anxiety and excitement of having a boyfriend on the other (more familiar) side of the ocean — descriptions of a world back home involving all sorts of characters with American sounding names — friend groups persisting on, somehow persevered even after leaving the country, thanks to miraculous improvements we as a civilization have experienced in telecommunications over the course of the 20th century — even being able to watch movies together with her boyfriend — it somehow all seemed so novel and far away to me. Have I ever experienced any of that?

When I lived in America my life revolved around friends I had in China who I'd have to stay up long past midnight in order to engage in intense conversation with. So in some sense, I can understand all those long distance emotions she alluded to. Did I ever watch movies with them simultaneously, synchronized between evening and night across a continent and an ocean? I don't think so — but, at a certain time in my past, that's the sort of thing I might have dreamed of being able to do with someone.

Instead the only Chinese people I met were the sorts to point out that since I'm a completely useless and incompetent individual, I might as well learn to memorize some Tang dynasty poems and recite them, like a five year old. That was my initial introduction to Chinese poetry. The first poem I learned was Cui Hu's 题都城南庄 (On the theme of a settlement south of the city) , which is completely understandable even to someone who only knows a little bit of Chinese:

去年今日此门中，人面桃花相映红。
人面不知何处去，桃花依旧笑春风。

A year ago on this very day at this very gate,
Red peach blossoms reflected onto a certain human face.
Now that face is gone, I don’t know where,
But the peach blossoms smile like before in the spring wind.

I memorized a few others after that (e.g. Du Fu's Lüju about Taishan), though memorizing poems always felt too time consuming and didn't actually help me understand their meaning or appreciate their subtleties. The main reason I did it was to feel like I was part of something. All these weirdos I met on the internet had been forced to memorize poems as a kids. I too could force myself to memorize poems and be like them. Even more, being in America still I could imagine Taishan as an abstraction from over 1200 years ago, rather than the garbage covered Disneyland-like series of paved staircases blocked by seas of human bodies that is now in the first decades of the 21st century. Whenever I read short poems like Jueju and Lüju without memorizing them, I'd feel an intense amount of guilt. It seemed as though I was stubbornly clinging to my solitary road of incompetency, not learning the basic tricks everyone else can do. This I suppose characterized the friendships I had with Chinese people over the internet when I lived in America: they were all deeply disappointed in me.

Now on this other shore, I suppose I do have friends in America that I continue to talk to, but they're scattered across the country, and even in America I never really saw them in person. Also they don't appear in flocks — they're all weird loners who don't know each other. There was a time when I knew Americans in America with physical bodies, who weren't just abstractions trapped inside computers, but that day seems to have passed.

It's bit like how I don't have any music I can truly be nostalgic for in the way that, in the early 2000s, my uncle might have been for Nirvana or 90s Green Day. He’d albums he listened to as they were released while he was in middle and high school. Similarly, the internet has a kind of nostalgia for the 80s built into it, because that's what the first big wave of immigrants massively populating its webpages and forums in the late 90s and early 2000s were nostalgic for. I read about nostalgia long before I knew what it felt like. The form it took in the blogs and forum posts I read was derived from a very different world from the one I grew up in — a homogenized mass-media environment that made it somewhat difficult to find older stuff outside of a few landmarks that were declared classics. I on the other hand have no real memories of new movies or new bands massively opening up my horizons. The closest thing I have to that is Shinsei Kamattechan, whom I started listening to in 2016 because the cool perfectly-circular-glasses-wearing guy living in New York that the lady I was in an unstable sexual relationship with at the time actually liked posted about them on Facebook (!) and how they gave him so much nostalgia for six years earlier.

Having written that anecdote and stepped away from my computer for a few moments, I suddenly remembered I actually had a more timely pair of musical fascinations: in January 2014, Youtube's recommendation sidebar introduced me to Seiko Oomori's song Midnight Seijun Isei Kouyuu, less than a month after the songs original release. I remember cherishing the song as something from the present that I 100% liked, with lyrics that continued to fascinate me as I slowly decoded them, by a musician who was more and more interesting to me as I learned more about her. As the year went on, and the song faded farther and farther away from the now, I started to feel anxious that I hadn't managed to do anything meaningful with this new situation I found myself in of liking something current.

Early on Oomori’s existence in my Youtube search history had led me to BiS. I listened to two or three songs of theirs, but then more or less forgot about them. Later in the year, around September or October, I got curious about them again. I looked them up only to find they'd disbanded in July! I watched their farewell music video, and wondered what it meant to have wasted those few months I may have been granted to enjoy something new, strange and dark, while it still existed — a lost opportunity to explore the exact sort of things 17 year old me probably needed to explore. I’d instead have to explore them as a slightly older 17 year old, with the knowledge that the people who’d created this music had moved on with their lives — that they were doing something else now.

When I got to Shanghai and started going to Trigger, one of their first Very Big events was a tribute to BiS Kaidan — a collaboration I had never been aware of between BiS and long time noise band Hijo Kaidan. Here is BiS Kaidan playing Jun Togawa's song Suki Suki Daisuki. (Maybe someday Jun Togawa can be the subject of a different essay.) It didn't occur to me that this was the sort of event that there'd be a massive audience for, so I didn't buy tickets ahead of time, and it sold out. I had to make do with watching videos of the event afterwards on Youtube, just like I’d been doing my whole life. This summer I went to a different event that I thought would be similar, but there was only about 3 minutes of noise-idol synthesis — the rest was just normal idol music: young girls reaching out to middle aged men, standing close to them and smiling excessively.

Maybe as I sit here writing this, I'm already gathering material to someday be nostalgic towards, here in Shanghai, without realizing it. In fact, the hope that I'm doing so underlies a lot of my anxieties. I'm suspicious of any of my tendencies and habits that tear me out of the physical real world present and carry me back to a virtual "America". If I have nothing there to be nostalgic for, one has to ask why I keep thinking about American politics, American trends, American conversation topics and so on?

—

I left the cafe around 6:30, as the sun started to set. I felt the first moments of outdoors coolness I'd felt in a long time — an unsolicited yet not unappreciated sensation. Inside the cafe, the air-conditioning was up all the way — I’d convinced myself that that cool feeling, the first hints of seasons changing, was just an artificial illusion, modern technology manipulating my emotions. To step outside and discover there was something more substantial to that feeling — I found myself in a daze as I walked almost robotically to Metro City, where I was supposed to meet my girlfriend. We needed buy discounted snacks at HotMaxx, as well as some kind of small pastries that we could give to our newly moved in neighbors as a preemptive move to prevent them from hating us. At the pastry store, I'd end up hearing a song that shocked me to my core — though that's the subject of a different essay.

While still outside, beneath damp green foliage, walking down narrow sidewalks, I imagined what it would be like once the winter really does come -- to go to these fancy cafes drink expensive coffee whose warmth means something more when the world outside is so cold? Or to overhear Westernized Chinese converse with their European friends about their time in Spain, claiming that the Spaniards are ahead of the Chinese in understanding "how to live properly", so relaxed and happy compared to all the Chinese people they know?

I never drank coffee much in the United States, yet upon coming to China I find myself constantly engaging in this most Western of beverages. In America, I loved the sensation of drinking incredibly hot tea on the hottest day of summer in our house in Baltimore without any air conditioning. This was just another attempt to be Chinese, engaging in the notorious Chinese old person aversion to cold beverages. Now I am in the land of tea. My girlfriends dad sends us massive bags of all sorts of different teas on a regular basis. And yet I just drink coffee — iced coffee even! It was my girlfriend (reflexively rebelling against all that her parents love) that taught me how to drink coffee. I very rarely drink it at cafes though. Mostly we just brew it at home.

I must admit that cafes scare me — I don't know how to go to them, whether it be by myself or with others. When I read Leo Ou-fan Lee's book Shanghai Modern, in which he has a chapter devoted to the "flaneur and cafe" culture surrounding Fuzhou road (even today the location of most of Shanghai's bookstores), I contemplated becoming a flaneur myself, walking from cafe to cafe, arranging by telephone appointments with all my various intellectual acquaintances to get coffee and talk about life in the big city. That new life never materialized though. It seems the only suitable acquaintance I have is my friend from Las Vegas — which is probably a good thing. I don't think I'd be able to afford to go to a fancy cafe more than once a week.

—

The rain's faint coolness
was gone by morning —
Dripping leaves,
stained like acid
on paper.

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