[Short Story] Taipei

There are too many shadows in this city. The skyscrapers stand tall at every corner. It's not only the corporation buildings, either. Even the residential buildings shoots to the sky, like a forest in the temperate zone, fighting for a little bit more of sunlight. She therefore cultivated a habit on buses, that she always presses her cheek to the cold glass windows, and looks up. On the bus she could be slightly taller than the pedestrians on the street, the cars trapped in traffic, and the river-like scooters streaming through the city. She is also slightly closer to the sky at the same time.

People always say this city is ugly and has no style of its own. The gloomy weather also brings too much rain in its residents. The vendor by the street pulled out his canopy, and returned back to the pan to produce more scallion cakes, steaming and crispy. She peeked at other customers and found there are no facial expressions, just a blank. They took the food, paid their fee, and strode on into the rain. She likes her scallion cakes with cheese. The cheese melted to the heat, stickily pulling the cake and formed silk-like stripes that stick everywhere, reminding her of the lanes that she passes everyday.

This is a fast-growing city, yet at the same time a slow-paced one. Just a few blocks from the MRT station and the scenery changes. This district where she grew up in is one of the few greenery spots left in Taipei. Sitting besides the mountain and shouldering the river, she learn that description from her primary school. Across the river banks the mountain ridge rests. When the classes seemed difficult to focus on, she'd follow her mom's suggestion and let her eyes rest upon the green sights to relax them. It is said to prevent near-sightedness, but she ended up still has near-sighted eyes. It is a light one though, so she doesn't always wear the glasses. She often walks in a world that looks blurry. The unchanged part is that she still tries to look far, searching for the mirage-like green spots in the distance. 

She has not turn on the television at home for a while. The politicians and celebrities and their rambling stories give her headache. It is said that in the centre of the city, a group of students has occupied the congress. She admires their courage. She has always been a good girl, a good student. She was the type that always wins the first prize in the exams, elected the class leader each semester, and always keep a handkerchief in her bookbag even when the teachers did not ask them to. She admired that girl who stood out against the boys, chasing after them until they apologized for the misdeeds they'd done to other girls. She didn't even remember her name though. She wondered whether that girl is in the current protest as well.

For her, life goes on like the normal days. Go to work, get off work, follow the boss' orders, these are more important. Life is all about earning some money to sustain oneself after all. Her job is not bad, she goes to work early in the morning and back home when it's deep into night like everybody else. Sometimes she meets up with oldtime schoolmates for a meal, sometimes she visits the restaurnats recommended by famous bloggers online. She does not lack of expectations in life. She had known long ago not to expect too much, therefore there won't be too much disappointment. This is the only balance in life she could grasp. She stood up and gave her seat to the old lady who just got on. The lady spoke Mandarin with a heavy Taiwanese accent, volume loud enough for everone on the boss to hear her appreciation. She felt slightly embarrased, so she only nodded and smiled, then looked out of window again holding on to the poles.

The lights were shining bright outside, the bus drove past windows after wondows. She wondered whether she could see her own reflections on those windows.

[Short Story] London

It is like those depictions in the movies: ancient buildings, wet pavement, pedestrians dressing all in black walking by in haste, clouds are grey or dark, hovering on the brim of the sky. The rain in this city seems never ending, their song dropping on the stone walks that have hundreds of years of history, singing tik-tak tik-tak in a deep voice, fogging the whole city with a sense of melancholy.

Before she arrives back on the campus, she reflects on when she just moved from her hometown to this overwhelming city. It is no longer news when the never ending march of urbanization has devoured one more young soul. She found a job in an office, was asked to sit at the counter desk and be pretty. She would point out the direction for the visitor sometimes with her finger and sometimes with impatient eye gesture. London by the time seemed less rainy than now. Once in a while, when she raised her head up from the piled documents, she would see a few visitors entering the door. They took off their hats and flipped out the weight of raindrops. She would frown, pick up phone and ask the cleaning lady to mop the floor dry. But most of the time, she did not even notice whether the sky outside was rainy or sunny.

The job at the counter bored her, so one day, when a window popped out on her computer shouting an admission advertisement to her, she clicked on it. The college is not very remarkable in size nor in reputation, but it offered her one year’s time, and if she was lucky enough, a degree that will name her a “master.”  She still remembered the day when the semester began. She took off her high heels before going out, but the flats she changed into kept sinking into the puddles of the street. When she paddled into the school building, her shoes were half soaked already. From that day on, the rain seems never ending.

It was raining when she looked out a window of a classroom; it was raining when she finished studying and stepped out from the college library. Before going out to the discussion for a group report, she grabbed a water-proofed coat with a hood attached because it was raining outside. She bought herself a pair of long boots from Doc. Martin. She likes the movement when she pulls the boots up to her knees in one breath and she also likes the sound the heels make walking down the pavement. Even so, there are times when she cannot hear the crisp sounds, because it is raining.

When she left her hometown, she had known that the next return would be a long time after. She is not often homesick, but on one rainy day, she started to miss the warm fire in their fireplace that one Christmas, as well as the cracking sound the wood made. She also missed how her mother always does housework on Saturdays, and how she flaps the freshly-washed white sheets and lets them float in the air. The room she rents here is not too small, once one steps in from the door, everything is exposed to the inspecting eyes, everything from the small kitchen, to her bathroom, to her single bed by the window. She always feels like she brings in all the raindrops she absorbed on the streets, letting them fall all over her room. No sunlight reached here, so the room is always humid, layered with an invisible wet fog, all year long.

Among her belongings, the driest things are those boring textbooks. They are thick and heavy, like bricks, listing one business theory after another. In fact, she fails to see the relation between these theories and the practice of real life, and she doesn’t see the relation between them and how she can find a job and feed herself. She studies on, despite the odds. She emerges herself in books, because beside this, she does not have any clue of what other things she might do. Sometimes she tries to memorize the faces she passed by on the streets that day. Did they know nothing about their lives like her? Or had anyone ever given her a brief smile? She could not remember.

All she can remember is the grey and dark curtain of rain. She looked at the window, the cactus on the flat space besides the window stood straight, looking at the raindrops outside.