From New York, About Taipei
I’m back from a two week trip to Taipei and have just wrapped up my first week working at The New York Times website. Between the new job, reassessing my living space, and an ongoing project for the Lubalin Fellowship, I’ve had no time to really sit down and recount my thoughts on the short stay in my family’s home. I’ll get to that right now.
My annual trips to Taipei are generally the same. I spend my time there feeling uncomfortably hot and humid. This is because Taiwan is a small tropical island sandwiched between China and southern Japan, both geographically and culturally. Political stress aside, this miniscule island is tormented by typhoons, floods, and the occasional drought or earthquake.
In spite of this, the city of Taipei teems with energy and an overwhelming flow of information. It is nestled in the basin of a valley surrounded by several large, lush mountains. The city is perpetually at odds with large volumes of water, mold, moss, and unwanted vegetation that springs up from the cracks in the concrete and sides of buildings. Consequently, Taipei and all its mountains are also home to a healthy population of mosquitos, flies, and cicadas.
Visitors generally take note of two very prominent characteristics in Taipei. The first is that the exteriors of all buildings, new or old, are always damp and always mildewed. Moisture and trace amounts of sulfur in the city’s air permeate concrete and iron. In newer buildings, like the impeccable malls modeled after Japanese or American architecture, cosmetic facades can only be sustained indoors. There, the floors can stay shiny and waxed in an air conditioned atmosphere. The interiors of new buildings in Taipei are dreams, or fleeting ideals, that would rapidly succumb to the harsh climate. They rot steadily from the outside in.
The second thing that foreigners notice is that all news sources in Taipei are highly sensational. News on television, the most popular form of news broadcasting in the country, generally descend upon inconsequential local events with the same gravity and embellishment as they would for grand, international affairs. The dozen news stations are aggressively competitive, but tend to always cover the exact same events. One can tell from the redundancy of the news reports just how small Taiwan really is.
The Taiwanese media has instilled in its audiences an appetite for the super sensational, and one that digests that chatter at an alarming rate. It sustains a communication system that channels and processes a lot of information but very little meaning.
I think the humidity and sulfur that so rapidly soaks and decomposes Taiwan’s buildings must find their way into Taiwan’s patience and attention span. The people, plants, and insects are always hungry for something more to devour, digest, or expand into. An island of that size festers in a restless desire for something outside itself.
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