City Poor
There he was, sitting hunched over on the broad sidewalk outside of the elementary school, scribbling something on a swollen ring bound notebook under the streetlamp. Maybe he’s the next king of Kowloon, that blue collar tradesman, shoe repairman, who came to Hong Kong at sixteen, barely literate, who wrote on every empty city surface he could find, proclaiming himself the hereditary heir of that most valuable island territory. This man’s handwriting is the same: those desperate, cramped, sharp, angular characters. He wears the ceremonial garb of the city poor: layered overcoats and scarves, emanating scent.
Individualism is for those who can afford it. We know we can’t, so we affect it. Self-sufficiency as a fashion.
We keep walking on the streets at night to find the next one. Maybe the man milling about under the walkway is Taipei’s next famous street poet, like that old man who sold his fine, hand-painted calligraphy chapbooks outside the Astoria cafe. There was a story that after years of selling his books out front, the head waiter finally invited him inside, asked him if he’d like to have a coffee.
“I’ve never had coffee before in my life,” he said. He looked like he could have been ninety years old, his face long and rectangular, his hair still wispy.
He got his coffee, black, tasted it, and pulled a face.
“What, is something wrong?” Nervous types like the waiter always think that old people are dying.
“I always heard people talking about coffee, like it was something wonderful, but this tastes just like the opium water they would give to prisoners back in my hometown before they executed them.”
***
It makes losers out of capable and good-hearted men and women, and it marked the crooks and the heartless cowards as its winners. We’ve all known the system of our city’s hierarchy to work like this, arranging its denizens in neat blocks so that all could be inundated with the same values: forget the cost of beauty, just lose yourself to it! Above all, you must always feel like you’re not good enough, not lovely, fun, youthful, sparkling, joyful, or smart enough.
***
Those old soldiers never seem to die off, and they never look a day over eighty. The one we met at the bus stop is one hundred and five. He had a floral printed polyester Korean fur blanket covering his legs, a check suit jacket, and a brown cap on his head. The news reporter says he sells steamed buns to pay for his sick son’s medicine, but we just feel that kind of sentimentality is flavorless, just like his buns. There’s something more hidden there.
The city poor feed off mass market values, they consume glossy advertising, they lap up luxury brands, they sop up elegance. But let’s not forget the myth of cultural diffusion, the shade cast by the silent majorities. They never believed in anything at all.
The last ones were us, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves woven into the urban fabric, as they say. Were we exploiting them by talking about them, writing about them? But what did we stand to gain from it? Since we loved literature, we didn’t plan on becoming rich. Taiwan’s first urban writer died homeless on the streets of Tokyo, where he lived most of his adult life after a failed love affair and forsaken teaching career. Well, they think he died, but no one ever recovered his body. Maybe he just plunged like a needle into the urban fabric and emerged on the other side.
Victoria Giang
Victoria Giang is a writer based in Taipei, Taiwan where she is studying for a Master’s degree in Asia Pacific Studies. Her work has appeared in both Chinese and English in Toxic Weeds, Diamond Drain Cover, and Literary Shanghai. She edits her own bilingual zine, Frisson, which features contributions by women writers, artists, farmers, folklorists, seamstresses, and filmmakers, among others. She once built a house out of straw.