as queer as a clockwork orange

Yesterday during lunch, a woman sat across from me with a mango and a knife. After a quick inspection of the mango, she picked up the knife and started peeling it carefully from top to bottom. I watched as each slice of thin skin curled away from the hidden orange flesh underneath. She meticulously peeled off each piece of skin without a trace of flesh on them. I couldn’t help but be reminded of one of the stories a lieutenant told in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. It was the story of how he witnessed the skinning of his superior, Yamamoto, by the Mongols when they were discovered on enemy ground. Each Mongolian troop had a professional who possessed extremely high technical skill in shearing off every inch of skin on the bodies of their prisoners. “They can take a man’s skin off the way you’d peel a peach. Beautifully, without a single scratch.” The Mongolian officer started off with the left arm, skinning him carefully as Yamamoto burst in screams of agony. Soon, each piece of skin was sliced off and handed to the other officers, blood still dripping from it. What was left of Yamamoto was a bright red lump of flesh immersed in its own puddle of blood. Just like the bright orange mango dripping mango juice. My lunch didn’t look so appetizing anymore.

At first I found the early rush hour commute to work thrilling. Every day at eight in the morning I would squish into the overcrowded MRT (taipei metro) as the doors closed shut a few centimeters from my face. The distinct mixture of body odors and smells of freshly showered people would permeate the air. Everyone would be closer to each other than they wanted to be. Arms bumped into arms. Hair brushed faces. I wouldn’t need to cling onto anything for support. Human bodies were enough. If the MRT ever crashed, there would be enough people surrounding me to absorb the shock. It is interesting watching as people fill up the train. It is like water conforming to the volume of its container.

Though the train is  jampacked with people every weekday during rush hour, it is drenched with an artificial stale silence. No one talks. The train is merely a medium. It almost seems as if the MRT is just taking each person from one reality to the next. Home to work. Work to home. Home to school. School to home. Station to station. Everything else stops existing in the meantime. Life takes a pause in the safety of the enclosed carriage. A twenty minute escape from the stories of our lives. Everyone loses their personal identity for a moment and become insiginificant extensions of the train. Everyone stands still without flinching and is only barely breathing as the train travels at full speed. The silence is rudely filled with the overwhelming roar of the speeding rail.

There are all types of people on the MRT but the paranoid stand out. Masks cover their faces. Hands cover the masks, just in case H1N1 hops onto the train and attacks them. But they don’t realize there’s a more serious syndrome that eventually plagues all passengers. I’ll call it the MRT syndrome. When people enter the train, they take a quick glance of their surroundings, surveying the ever-changing crowd of people. Then, they slowly return their eyes to a blank forward stare, shrinking their perspective back into their own little world. Soon enough, the people around them become nothing but objects and they close their eyes as the monotony of the train lulls them to sleep. The weight of their bodies become unusually heavy and they sink into a shallow state of rest. Even though they may not feel tired, they feel a sudden sleepiness. It must be the unusual loss of order in thought and sense of time. At first, I thought it was just a way of coping with the urge to watch and stare at people. But after a week of using the train, I felt my eyelids becoming heavy. I felt myself sinking into the seat as a black background occupied my vacant mind. I contracted the disease without even knowing it. It must be airborne.

Attempting to rid myself of the syndrome and trying to stop myself from staring at people, I end up shoe-watching. Shoes make or break one’s outfit. Many people think shoes are minor and that the tops and bottoms are important, but shoes are the ones that hold the key to a complete outfit, a genuine style. I now respect people who take the effort to match their shoes with what they’re wearing. If the shoes don’t click with the rest of the clothes, it just feels like an awkward and forced date between two strangers. It never works out. The culprit is almost always a pair of clunky running shoes. Unless you’re out for a run or going for a workout, running shoes should be forbidden to be worn with casual clothing. The concepts already clash in the first place.  And then the fitted shape of the shoe in addition to its often colorful and metallic design makes it even worse when it is seen peeking out of a pair of jeans. A lot of the time, I see a very nicely paired and unique style of clothing on someone but when I reach the funky shoes I cringe a bit and then sigh in disappointment. What a shame.

Once when I was getting onto the metro, a sign on the inside displayed a set of cell phone etiquette guidelines and was followed by this statement at the bottom: “Good citizens create a happy atmosphere on the metro.” The metro is far from happy. Miles and miles away. I wouldn’t say it’s depressing either. It’s just kind of empty. It’s dangerously crowded, but every single person drains out their thoughts and succumbs their hollow minds to the MRT syndrome. It’s a kind of emotionless paradise where all we need to do is wait. It’s actually kind of nice traveling one hour to and from work. I have two hours of escape from life for shoe-watching. Who, I ask, would ever complain about something like that? It can’t get better than that.

The campus was still quiet. It was half an hour before people would start streaming in. The buildings were lifeless and cold but the heat of the sun shone down painfully on my exposed skin. Carrying my checkered Jansport backpack and wearing a white t-shirt, jeans, and black converse shoes, I felt utterly out of place. I wasn’t sure if I felt more like an American or like an over-priviliged spoiled brat as I blindly navigated the large campus trying to find the right building.

When the other researchers saw me, I could feel their judgment immediately. Arrogant ABC. She must be Taiwanese but she’ll claim she’s American. When my Chinese spilled clumsily out of my mouth, it didn’t help much. I knew it would take some time before I would get the opportunity to break their first impression and share my 10 minute intro to my life. I find it amazing that even though I have lived in Taiwan all my life, I still can’t speak Mandarin as fluently as I would like to. I find myself unable to embrace the nuances of the language, so much so that I find myself reluctant to speak. During one of the institute meetings where all the labs gather to watch a presentation by one of the researchers, I couldn’t believe what I saw. All the students are required to deliver their presentations in English. Naturally, their English was heavily accented but they were able to speak correctly for the most part. Plus they were presenting some esoteric scientific concept. If I were required to present in Mandarin I think I would die. What’s interesting though is that if I had to present in Spanish, it definitely wouldn’t be a problem. So I can listen to Mandarin very well but can’t explain without tripping what my experience in America is like. But I can write analytical essays and speak fluently in Spanish. I wish I didn’t have these deficiencies in the languages I have acquired so far because they inevitably create a barrier between the relationships I really want to form. Even though the friendships I’ve made in the lab have been awesome so far, it’s been so slow and extremely difficult to express myself behind a generalized Chinese American exterior.

To be honest, it was actually more of a culture shock to be thrown into a completely Taiwanese environment than moving to the US for college. All my life, I have been immersed in a rich American culture having studied at an American school, so it wasn’t “shocking” at all when I got to the US where everyone was American and privileged. It was more just adaptation to the different lifestyle that college brings. In my lab, all the researchers have never visited the US. Some have never even traveled outside of Taiwan. Some are married and have kids. I’ve never felt so physically and intellectually young…and spoiled. I was definitely not expecting so many clashes from all these different perspectives. Culture. Economic status. Age. Language. But I’m sure science will bring us all together. That is, if I ever catch up with all the esoteric scientific concepts they have been trying to explain to me in Mandarin.