Today's sentiment: Shame.
I got up early today, so by two in the afternoon I was finished with all the nonsense that represents my obligations to the world. I took the subway home, but once I got to Jiaotong University Station, instead of biking directly home, I was filled with the sudden urge to go the opposite direction and check out Bainaohui (百脑汇) today, an electronics mall hidden behind the massive center of commerce that is Xujiahui. It’s name is a pun: in Chinese it means “One Hundred Brains”, though “brain” here is referring to computers, as the Chinese word for computer (in the sense of PCs) is 电脑: Electronic Brain. If you pronounce Bainao aloud, it sounds like the English words “Buy Now”, which give the mall its English name.
There’s a smaller electronics mall closer to other malls at Xujiahui called Taiping Digital (太平数码). When I’d heard people talking about a mall with a bunch of game stores, I always assumed that’s the one they were talking about. It has some PC stores on the first floor and two or three game stores on the second floor, but it’s not all that exciting. At some point I looked more closely at a map and realized there was a much larger electronics mall further along the massive tunnel that extends southwards from the center of Xujiahui. I kept planning on taking a visit, but didn’t actually get there until today.
The first two floors are mostly dealers for name brand PCs, the kind of stores you could find in any mall. The third floor has gaming PCs, well the fourth floor is devoted to console games, board games and TCGs. What this amounts to is a dozen different places to buy Switch, Playstation and Xbox games. There’s also places you can sit down and pay to play consoles for a set amount of time. In terms of scale, there’s so much more stuff than in that other smaller electronics mall. Yet that’s precisely what made me realize how unideal of a correspondent I am when it comes to these video game places. I fantasize of going to them, but once I’m there, I don’t know what to do. Do I look at every game box. Do I sit down next to strangers playing Mario Wonder and try to play with them? Do I ask the clerks to teach me how to play the Pokemon trading card game so I can join the guys wearing black t-shirts and glasses, sitting at low wooden tables, their cards placed symmetrically on either side?
A question: why is it that I feel it’s only through video games that I can interface with the world at large? I don’t even play games. Yet when I want to make friends, my first thought is to go to the places where there are lots of games, and just wait for something to happen. When I get to those places, I walk around as fast as I can, scared that if I stop one of the salespeople will start talking to me. Didn’t I come here so people will talk to me, even if they’re just salespeople? I now live in a city with massive arcades. There’s one down the street from Bainao, even closer to where I live. As a kid I tried to learn how to play King of Fighters on my own, but there was no one to play it with me. It just felt like some sad pathetic past time, to play multiplayer games alone in the dark. Now there are rows and rows of King of Fighters cabinets a fifteen minute bike ride from where I wake and where I sleep — what’s more, the arcade in question is open 24 hours a day. My chance has arrived, my childhood dreams can be fulfilled. I can play King of Fighters ’98 with strangers beneath photos of the winners of some King of Fighters tournament held in this arcade back in 2003.
The problem is I never actually learned to play King of Fighters. I had so much trouble finding people to play video games in middle school and high school, and either rejected or was rejected by all the game players I met in college (this is something we can go into another time), that by the time I find myself in a place where games — old games — are plentiful, I don’t even know how to play games anymore. Not just in a technical sense of not knowing the controls or combos — there’s some deeper mental blockage going on. I don’t know if I have the guts to even stand in front of other people who play games and actually talk about games with them. Usually when games come up in conversation I pretend I don’t know anything about them. I sometimes do this music and movies too, but not with the frequency I deny any acquaintance with the video game life. I act like it’s alien to me — in part because it is. I played a lot of games as a kid, I continued reading about games as an adult, yet there’s been so few times in my life I’ve actually played games with other people.
I wish I could understand society, or at least some subculture. I wish society understood me! I wish malls were filled with stores for people like me. This is what I think late at night, or in the middle of the day when I find myself in another street filled with strangers, all busy doing things I never would. I have the self awareness to know that, even supposing it were true that there’s nowhere made for me, if there were such a place, I’d definitely be too scared to enter. It’s of course silly to expect that this foreign country would have places made for me, someone who’s a freak even in his own country. Didn’t I come here to be surrounded by things not made for me? To be the stranger in every situation? Isn’t the goal to pull out some familiarity, some small attempt at connection, in any place I find myself? Yet I’m always so scared.
My friend Mippy has probably influenced me more than anyone else, yet I hardly ever write about her. She told me that every time she'd go to Lolita meetups in Portland she'd always come home and have to cry the rest of the day. In this respect, I guess we're pretty much the same. It's so mysterious, how we ended up this way.