One of my goals for my brief winter homecoming is to stock up on existing literature on Taipei street culture. My thesis project will be a Winesburg Ohio/Dubliners/台北人-esque "novel" of urban short stories set in Taipei, so I thought it wise to read up on (and interact with) what other Taiwanese writers have already written about the city.
I'm reading 黃凡 now and he's absolutely amazing. One of the problems I saw in Chinese literature in general is that, up till the '80s,
it was almost an exclusively rural, political and/or diasporic genre. In other words, "serious" Chinese writers seem to distinguish themselves by rejecting urban modernity as bourgeois, petty. There are notable exceptions of course (圍城/Fortress Besieged and pre-communist Shanghai lit) but this was my damaging and slightly ignorant impression of Chinese lit in high school, that Chinese-language lit had nothing to say about the "petty bourgeois" daily realities of urban life in modern Asia. It did not help that my high school had a dated reading curriculum that included irrelevant texts like Pearl S. Buck's
The Good Earth.
Anyway, 黃凡 pretty much pioneered the urban/pomo novel in Taiwan. Instead of writing about 民族性 ("Chinese ethnic temperament"), the angst of East-meets-West hybridity, etc. (all those hallowed and laughably self-serious metanarratives of old school Chinese writers) he writes about Taipei's DIY craze in the '80s, architects with Napoleon complexes, the History of Sewage Pipes, etc. Petty shit, but written in
hilarious prose.
What the hell, I didn't set out to write some ode to 黃凡. Where was I?
---------------------(back on topic)
The picture you see above is the (in)famous Norwegian Woods cafe in the Gongguan/ NTUniversity district of South Taipei. I've read it mentioned in Pots Weekly and 舒國治's "Taipei Wanderer" essays (among many other places) as a sort of cornerstone in Taipei's arts scene, so I decided to pay it a visit yesterday afternoon. It was easily the most intimidating cafe I've ever been to.
The cafe owner's a renown town personality. He's a book/music critic and huge coffee nerd, and if he doesn't like you he'll pretty much tell you that they "don't serve the kind of coffee you're looking for" and he'll show you the door.
When I walked in, the clients stared and pretty much decided immediately that I was not a familiar customer. The barista took her time serving me coffee (though the coffee was
really good). The people in there were kind of absurd, cigarettes dangling between their fingers and piles of philosophy text/translated novels sitting next to their laptops. Most importantly, they were all typing furiously on their laptop computers. When I surveyed the room, everyone was writing on their blogs (!). I knew the blogging and online 散文/prose writing culture was huge in Taipei, but what the hell.
Also, this is what I deduced about the man who sat behind me:
Jokes aside, people there seem to be seriously working rather than trying to be hip/charming. So it was more a case of artists in hipster's clothes rather than vice versa?
I don't know. I'll have to check again next year to decide.
