Faraway by Jeremy Tiang

Author:Jeremy Tiang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

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In my country, or I should say in my city, people have a sort of “nostalgia for rough materials and coarse objects.” Hotel walls are decorated with bedraggled objects from our years of poverty, such as the metal tobacco and liquor sales licenses that used to hang outside grocery stores (known as “booze shops”) in old housing compounds or by the side of the road just twenty or thirty years ago, or metal discs meant to look like bottle caps painted with the names of old brands of soda, or even the “Everyone has a duty to keep secrets and guard against spies” wooden boards from the White Terror, now turned into fashionable playthings. In the expensive kiosks of five-star hotels, they put up the “Fifty Cent Lucky Dip” cardboard signs from our childhoods, with cheap prizes meant to evoke nostalgia: green bean cakes, Brother Liu and Brother Wang on the Road in Taiwan, candied sweet potatoes, chocolate toothpaste, tangerine powdered soda, fake meat in red sauce, tartrazine-yellow dried mango … though these days it’s ten dollars per draw. They also offer low-quality toys: wooden spinning tops, feathered balloon horns, paper dolls, bubble solution with the consistency of superglue, glow-in-the-dark bouncing balls, Styrofoam airplanes propelled by rubber bands … none of them cheap, yet they sell pretty well. I know some nouveau riche folk with deep pockets whose living rooms are full of kitschy, gaudy human-sized plastic figures: Mazinger Z, Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, Candy Candy, Ultraman, Little Fairy. I’ve heard that these sell for twenty or thirty thousand each, and my acquaintances bring them home without blinking (because they’re limited editions).

These tattered objects and old cartoon figures have long been removed from their original context. They’re like old bank notes no longer in circulation, with no practical function in the real world. And yet, the nostalgia fiends around me insist on dragging them from the garbage heap and assembling them into a tableau that makes it feel as if time has stood still: an old street with a booze shop at the corner (with its liquor license hanging outside, or else the circular emblem of White Plum Blossom soda). Inside the store: a fifty-cent lucky dip and large candy jars made of coarse green glass, with New Paradise cigarettes and Ramune lemonade. Through the entrance of the arcade, you see a Singer sewing machine in black and gleaming metal (a friend of mine opened a pub, using a dozen or so sewing machines with wooden boards atop them as tables, cramming customers into this chaotic yet atmospheric space to enjoy martinis and tequila bombs), and a carefully curated selection of objects including a black-and-white TV set, the sort with legs and sliding doors across the screen, on top of which will be a couple of Tatung Baby collectibles, the rare number 51 or 52, or the single crystal radio set they paid an astronomical sum for, with a clear plastic bubble over a needle pointing to handwritten

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