(I feel like I am obligated to point out that what I'm wearing is just a red baseball cap, not a MAGA hat.)
Bikes
May 9
I bought a backpack for the first time in several years. For quite awhile I’d only used shoulder bags and tote bags. The blue Adidas bag everyone used to compliment me on started falling apart last year, which was quite depressing. I’d acquired it in 2018, and it had accompanied me on many adventures, and been covered in filth from all around the globe. Since the beginning of the year I’ve been using a bag my girlfriend gave me with a picture of some food on it. This was fine in the winter, but now that it’s less cold out and I’m biking more, I find it annoying to use shoulder bags. So I went to Muji and bought their tiniest backpack for about 200 RMB -- which was kind of expensive. Here’s a picture of me wearing it in the elevator:
I never really biked in America. I was always scared of being struck dead by cars. I had considered buying a bike when I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, which would have been a perfectly fine place to bike, but the year I lived there went by too fast and before I knew it I was already back in Baltimore, bikeless. In China you don’t need to buy a bike. There’s forests of rentable bikes (单车) that block the sidewalk everywhere you go.
They’re very cheap, usually 1.5-3.5 RMB (less than 50 cents) for a trip. Sometimes you see these generically referred to as ofos, since ofo was the first company that experimented with the idea. ofo was still a thing when I was in Beijing in 2018, but now competitors like Meituan and Hello have put both their hands on opposite ends of ofo’s marketshare and torn it to shreds. The entire time I’ve been in Shanghai I’d not seen a single ofo — that is until last Monday:
It felt like a sad metaphor, to see this lone rusty ofo without a seat, stuck between a forest of newer shinier bikes. I sometimes think of myself, or at least my possessions, and wonder about their future. What was once important to me, like my blue Adidas bag, becomes a tattered mess. At first I stubbornly keep using it, but eventually I submit to the temptation to buy something new. What will happen to my bag if I donate it? Will someone take it? Will it just be recycled? There is of course a whole sector of our economy devoted to processing people’s unwanted stuff — a sector which I have constant superficial contact with and still know nothing about.
The ideal is to buy things that last a lifetime, yet I am always too scared of big purchases to ever do that. Instead I’m in this greyzone of forming emotional bonds with the cheap trash I buy, watching it slowly degrade as I wish I could have it forever.