A Third Culture Kid Travels Back to the/a Beginning
Life Update and Blog Reboot
CW: This post contains self-indulgent soppiness. Also, if you’re new to this blog, please bear with me—this is not this newsletter’s usual fare!
298 days ago, I sent out a missive indicating my desire to continue posting occasionally to this blog as I worked on my dissertation.
LOLOL.
Hysterical laughter aside, I’m relieved to announce that I defended my dissertation 12 days ago, and I deposited it 5 days ago. 468 pages of heartache, most of which were cranked out in the space of about eight months, are now fulfilling their cosmic purpose of gathering digital dust somewhere in the ether.
Also just over a week ago, I arrived back in Taiwan. Given the craziness leading up to my return, I came with virtually no plans, and without telling many people. (大家好——我回来了！😅) As I’ve slowly started adjusting to the idea that I don’t have a massive, unmovable deadline looming over my head, however, I’ve started to venture out of my apartment for no other reason than to wander the streets of Taipei and revisit my old haunts. Today, on a whim, I took a turn down the alley that was my very first haunt in Taipei. This alley was not the beginning, but it was a beginning. Let me explain.
Two years and 48 days ago, I landed in Taipei. Sometime before 6:00am, I and a few dozen other people disembarked from a mostly empty, slightly geriatric 747, and joined in the great social leveler of the COVID era: spitting determinedly into a cup until a public health official could bear the spectacle no longer. After the entire flight tested negative for COVID, we were welcomed into the country with a friendly round of applause, only slightly muffled by the gloves of the health workers’ HAZMAT suits.
From our communal salivation center, I was whisked through baggage claim and customs, and deposited in a quarantine taxi. The taxi delivered me to the Tango Taipei Linsen, a downtown hotel that had been converted to a reasonably comfortable quarantine site, despite some cosmetic deficiencies—it’s hard to make a lobby draped in sheets of sanitation plastic look welcoming. I was locked securely in my room, and my only contact with the outside world for the next two weeks came in the form of the incongruously soothing voice of my assigned police officer, who contacted me every few days to ask how I was feeling. (It remains unclear to this day if he was referring only to COVID symptoms, or asking on a more existential level.) I did not emerge until 13 days later, when a converted city bus performed a drive-by PCR test, the last quarantine verification before turning me loose on the city the following day.
To call the 779 days since my arrival in Taipei an intense period would be an understatement. Today, it seems almost implausible to think that, in the span of two years and 48 days, I went from wondering if overseas field research would be possible before graduation, to living in Taiwan for the better part of two years and writing a dissertation based largely on that experience. In that same time, I came to regard Taipei as home: the food, the music, the films, the scenery, the people, even the weather that has taught me the location of hitherto unsuspected sweat glands, have made me feel more welcome and more at ease than I can remember being anywhere for many years.
But coming back is also bittersweet. On a level, having grown up as a Third Culture Kid, I was prepared for this. Expat friends move away, local friends get new jobs, businesses close, old buildings get torn down, new buildings get put up, life moves on. My Taipei is the Taipei of the magical almost-two-years that I spent here. Everyone else’s Taipei is the ever-evolving Taipei that they continue to live in, day in and day out. This trip, for all its happinesses, reminds me in many ways of the first time I went back to Switzerland after my family moved to China, the first time I went back to China after moving to Singapore, the first time I went back to Singapore after the start of university. The excitement of return is tempered with the realization that you are no longer woven into the fabric of the city—and into the fabric of your friends’ lives—in the way you were just a few months ago.
The biggest difference this time around, however, is that I came to Taipei as an adult, not as a sullen tweenager. I came here under my own steam, with the support of universities, granting agencies, mentors, and colleagues. And I came in a world shrunk smaller by instant messaging, social media, and ultra long-haul flights. So I confess, it’s a surprise to once again feel the sensation of wandering a city that is full of joyful memories and simultaneously full of evidence that it has moved on in my absence.1
It seems fair to say that few things in life go as planned, and major writing projects do not compel the cosmos to align themselves in one’s favor. This past year contained any number of stressors above and beyond writing an arcane document of minimal interest to a general readership. Coming back to Taipei has given me an opportunity to start realigning my relationship with this city, and to give thanks for the people here who have defined my experience of Taiwan.
If the past few years have taught me anything, it’s that I can’t predict what the next few years will bring. At the end of this month, I will head back to the US to graduate. In the coming year, I hope that I will be able to resurrect this blog, at least as an occasional forum to post my thoughts about music, life, higher education, and the little joys elicited by the oddities of daily existence. Most of all, I hope to keep sharing periodic updates about the music, films, and people of this remarkable place that has defined my personal and scholarly trajectory. I have some ideas about how I might achieve this more successfully than over this past year, but I have learned enough to know that promises to this effect are unwise.
In closing, I hope that the occasional future mailing will not prove too onerous. To all of you who have read along during my time in Taiwan, thank you. To all of you who have cheered me on over the process of this final degree, thank you. And to all of you who have made my time in Taiwan the treasure that it has been, thank you. It is a source of unending joy to have friends, family, and supporters like all of you to root for me, to pick me up, and to carry me from one life chapter to the next. Wherever this next chapter leads me, and wherever it brings all of you, I look forward to sharing it.
I think it’s fair to say that this feeling of same-but-different accompanies any move. But there is something about an international move—maybe it has to do with the time changes, maybe it has to do with the different ways of organizing daily life, maybe it has to do with the fact that I have no legal right of return—that hits different.