“Quarantine Hotel” by Zhou Hau Liew
I don’t listen to music anymore. Or, rather, I used to, religiously, until I developed a tingling sensation in my inner ear. The moment of transformation is relatively fresh in my mind. I was affixing earphones and they had gone in at a jutting angle. The sound of insects has bothered me ever since, swarms of imaginary locusts that had their origin and destination within the confines of my ear. The panic of having uninvited guests, staying in their room without an exit date, drove me to start counting sheep, even though I had never seen one before; in my dreams, the prospect of a land where willows bloomed was replaced by amorphous city light, dotting concrete that seemed to have been exposed for far too long to the sun.
I believe I entered a hotel of sorts, a jagged line of uneven surface, its texture highlighted only in the smoothness of photographs that have merged with screens. Yet something about the detail of this place still sticks with me, the way a particular jazz note seems to linger a bit too long, the sentence dissipating too slowly, leaving unwanted impressions.
One scene replays itself. It takes place where a Manhattan neighborhood would quickly be lost, a disappearance conveyed by a half-torn poster, pasted on the decaying walls of a funeral parlor. The words noted: “Temporary Relocation” – rendered in Chinese characters, a black-and-white state notice pasted on jade green walls. A jaunt through an uneasy development area, souls on hold while it was renovated, to complement the new candy-colored and themed cinema, a throwback to some lost Americana inside one’s hood. I had walked past it in real life, the intention to pay homage through a photograph ruined by my fear of rain, that accompaniment which sounded like the minor keys of a muffled piano. It was temporary. I snapped a photo that I kept; a phantom, disposable piece that would become a metaphor in a story – were it ever completed – and refigured through the words of another man.
There is nothing unwanted in this hotel – though there is nothing to want either when a traveler has entered past the checkpoints. But I had returned to the scaffolding, the unfinished machinery hinted by hard hats and uniforms, their everyday thudding merged into my daily walks then, the East Broadway that was filled to the brim with shop-houses, which from afar resembled the shops of my childhood in Kuala Lumpur. Rarely had I spoken with their denizens, and I mostly noticed the dramatic overpass that pointed to a haphazard development, the same strange half-bitten landscape that pointed toward something unfinished in its psyche. Oddly recognizable, across the Pacific Ocean to the island of Taiwan, to where I wanted to escape, to be without history, yet dragged back endlessly in memory to signs and patterns, places of the past.
Mostly I just miss walking, the steps that reset room time, and remind one of the possibilities of contact. What I remember is walking through checkpoints, which triggered the blare of alarms. And the large ghost in front of reception that took its time making laughter – accompanied by the soundtrack of a techno bar that only existed in virtual reality, enclosed within a concrete, almost nuclear shelter-like construction. The dark of the room was like the funeral parlor that had been emptied out, or the back of the dumpling shop that housed the white powder slapped together by aproned workers in the dawn. Again, the rain had interrupted my time in Chinatown, to have witnessed crowds moving in unison along the traffic of cars, cycles, pushcarts, which were all together in a stream of light, the neon lamps switching from red to yellow to green. And to think that I had only taken a photograph of the funeral parlor, the one transient move that did not involve space but rather time, time that was going away, that was always away, yet undoubtedly here.
*
“Mr. X, your dinner is here.”
“Mr. X, please record your temperature for us tonight.”
“Mr. X, please note that you are not allowed to leave the room under any circumstance. In case of an emergency, we will contact you first.”
The concrete buildings outside – brown boxes that must have been the remnants of a global architectural style – surround the river, rectangles carved with square windows where one could peek out, meant for the appreciation of those in tall buildings. The rooftops are colored red, ochre, purple, a pastel combination that subtly disappears in daytime, only to emerge after the sun sets west of the river. Neon glow of a pawnshop – the character 當 blinking at the two-second mark, a vivid transfiguration of characters into glowing animals and birds taking flight – which the motorbikes of helmeted occupants would enter bearing wads of cash.
The yellow-lit building in the distance had seemingly appeared before, in the dreams of those whose work was to conjure fantasy worlds, the virtual sets that allowed one to move around, traveling in a surrogate fashion. The L-line in its façade is a bitten cross, which may have had an actual history related to the American century. Taipei was not too long ago still a protectorate of sorts, the contours of a past reflected in the street names, Roosevelt being a prominent boulevard that wound through the western part of the city. Its traffic, the four-lane highways with onrushing streams of cars from both directions, was known to be reminiscent of the large thoroughfares at the height of Moses-esque modernism, the sublime realized in the thrum of cityscapes, that would testify to the vitality and buzz of machines careening across the asphalt. Its rail tracks, electric now, were straight lines that extended to the horizon, as if the city would never end, if one observed the distance.
I had been here before in a different time and place, walking through the cityscape, chasing the neon areas that corresponded with the feeling of movies imbibed. It was in the dark cinemas of New York, escaping the shadow of life falling short of its promise, where I first encountered this urban fantasy, the dreamscape that one could seemingly live in effortlessly, straddling worlds as a matter of fact, the one and the other colliding in a frenzy of moving images. The world in the dark was compacted into a series of two-hour vignettes, places that contained stories that could be excavated and absorbed, so long as one paid the requisite respect, the entrance fee that would be below even the price of a meal. Those stories were about men and women, cities and villages, action and history, fashioned into dress and costumes and settings where they interacted and took the position of sleeping, walking, fucking, moving from point A to point B, the camera winding its way from point C back to point A, leaving the characters behind to their lives as it pointed at an unchanging background of the city.
Its immaterial presence hinted at a larger truth, that it could not capture the teeming alleyways and the hidden corners where life would continue to move, beyond what was already in its sights. And there was the trade-off of the projection, the unreality of a screen that, no matter how wide or large or immersive, would remain a screen, separated from the time and place of recording, the contours of places absent except as an afterimage. The hotel window in Taipei provided the same promise, the concentration of a point of view that was the glass, the concrete, the wet roads, separated by a screen.
The emptiness of the cinemas provided another point of view; being part of a world of electric shadows, the ochre mood that contrasted with what was outside. The only film in the newly constructed East Broadway theater I had watched, ushered in by uniformed candy shop attendants, was a dismal three-hour art film that featured a haggard mainland Chinese detective chasing some memories in his past, interspersed with occasional, school-boyish poetry and lavish lighting; the kind of navel-gazing, internalizing art that seemed perfectly suited to our times, that of the intersection between screens, the mutually uninterrupted desire and unentangled subject, to paraphrase a French theorist who had been all the rage maybe 20 years ago.
None of that bitterness would matter once you entered the space; the magic of cinema was simply that you would be able to forget the world for a moment. What remained afterward was just the afterimage, the taste of what had passed, and its collision with the cityscape that contained surprising juxtapositions. For instance, a blurred figure that I had captured in front of a brown brick wall, a ghost of a person who was probably doing nothing out of the ordinary, save for the exact moment of walking past this wall. The film continued this thread of gloom and blur, the memory of East Broadway and its detection captured in the smell of congee. This was where I stopped after the film, the food that would sum up my feelings about the movie, a return from Europe past or indeed Asia present to the smoky pastures of cheap, steamed food. And where I had stopped at present, the occasional airplane still roaring past the window, fleeing the collapse. I am pacing around the room for the umpteenth time. The daytimes are shorter in Taipei, but the sun usually shines brightly, the blue skies accentuated by moving clouds that float above mountains, silhouettes which remind me that these are still northern climes, despite the latitude. They move around under no compulsion, the sun on its inevitable descent, tracing a circumference that will lead to its setting in the west. The changing of colors is as if a guard is sweeping through, the flurry of red chased out by a tonal blue and white, the seeping out of a river of light to be replaced by the underlying blue. Then a series of yellow lights begin to dot the cityscape, the sides of tall buildings turned into directional stars for wandering souls.
The window lets in a floor’s worth of light, a pleasant sheen to cover the wooden floors that I had stepped on. Far from everything, I thought of a flight through the window to become part of the sky; but empty, it appeared, as empty as the restaurants I imagined in the streets. Still far away in a distant tower, I heard of the unfolding emergencies in other cities, the roads that did not hold crowds. The wooden floors feel as if they had been scrubbed more than once, to be cleansed of any mark of a time where this was unclean; an austere beginning, to have only the taint of yourself, across the room’s Zen-like designs.
Writing remained the same in this room – to stare at a blank piece of paper, even if it was now a hazy white screen. The trick was to conjure up language that would, through a magical operation, transport the reader to another place. It seemed the easiest thing to do as a child, fantastic and frivolous fiction, low-stakes and nothing more than a boyish fantasy of stars and robots. Those notebooks had decayed in an era where worlds were available in all shapes and sizes in one’s palm. And yet. This need to be elsewhere, through a decrepit form called writing, the sun setting in the distance, black shadows on the page.
The day fades away. No wonder the ancients, when composing a poem, would borrow from the lights of the city to evoke their romances, their petty feelings for another jiaren, the ideal suitor, impressed into art by virtue of the urbanity of these lines. It was as if they could raise these stirrings within – no matter how juvenile into a status higher than they deserved, by being in the right urban milieu, though of course what was lost from those eras was impossible to tell, the ruins of words that had disappeared where once an edifice, perhaps destined to be so by the exhortations of the emperor.
Sometimes the television turns on, the blaring of 24-hour news a strange respite, the reminder that some semblance of the world goes on. It is ongoing, the obvious effects of the traffic outside, relatively normal with the cars streaming across lit highways like clockwork; the hypnotic blinking opposite in the mountains seemingly a message that could have been broadcasted decades ago, hidden away by those who could not have read the message, submerged in the pictorial characters that were of language but not of speech. Wafts of a Cantonese song, a jingle-like, bouncy anthem that somehow spoke of the East and the West, used within the scene of a Japanese animated movie – muitinkinyakin – every day we see each other, breezy but strange, as if piped through an old radio that was left in someone’s attic, a ghost.
A poem is being recited in my head, a song, sung and re-sung over time. It goes:
无言独上西楼 wuyan dushang xilou
月如钩 yue ru gou
寂寞梧桐深院锁清秋 jimo wutong shenyuan suo qingqiu
剪不断 jian buduan
理还乱 li hailuan
是离愁 shi lichou
别是一番滋味在心头 bieshi yifan ziwei zai xintou
She sings of the lack of language, ascending a tower in the west, spying the hanging of the moon like a curved sword. A tree stands lonely in the vacant lot, knitting the autumn air together. I have not seen trees, except next to the river, the yellow lights at the bank transfiguring them into shadows. But what is clear is the uneasiness of an uncut string, a disorder that persists, the anxiety of leaving. This emotion hovering above the heart. I resolved to make lists. Objects, places, things I had encountered in the intervening years. I found photographs, musical interludes, fragments that perhaps, with enough time and effort, would lay out a thread for one to follow, like a zither coloring the fog-filled mountains. time and effort, would lay out a thread for one to follow, like a zither coloring the fog-filled mountains. The blue and purple coalesced to form lines on top that was occasionally interrupted by the swoop of white birds, swallows that pass by the window and go. The birds, I imagined, would mark some cities, like Philadelphia and New York, interspersed with a few trips to Taipei, a humid stopover at Hong Kong, and further south, the roundabout return to Kuala Lumpur, even Sydney, the furthest south I had been.
I had moved to New York for something more than words. Images blinking in dark rooms, music beating in the neon background, a club that was eventually shut down. It was a time when everything seemed placeable, to be captured by a camera, moments snatched out of the stream of reality, if only one had the patience and time to do so. It felt real even if I had understood deep down that this was an artifice. It had been these encounters with the city, which had convinced me that there was something to document. A mundane moment – a football match in an alfresco bar – had convinced me to move. The fact that one could dine and drink in the brilliant sunlight, a city in rapture over the arrival of summer, was reason enough.
This sunlight was like that of elsewhere. A familiar melody from the tropics, a soothing woman’s voice from an old, disassembled speaker – equatorial echoes, their remains a tinny sound in my ear. And now in this hotel room, an entry point to Taipei, coexisting with an interior jumble of places still a blur to me, a life that preceded the present.
There were these photos. They captured acquaintances, family, friends; seafood restaurants, five-footway sidewalks, an aquarium. Sometimes the open sea and white sands. Often concrete and urban agglomerations, ramshackle stalls, and the night markets that were full of throngs, pacing the half-filled tar and bitumen roads. Gently entering the night that was a respite from the humidity of day, finding relief in the warmth of a heated café. Cities mingled and places collided; the country revealed itself in a flash of color, a muted blue in the distance, the stall I had found by accident, where a bowl of hot noodles cost less than a bus ride in the city.
So it was that I found a series, taken in trips to the only countryside I had really explored, in the small village settlements that still retained a warmth in the digital; anonymous towns by now, names that would not be recorded in the annals of history, despite their intersections with the global. They were filled with people who had been left behind but unaware of it being such, except for the steady stream of the young leaving. In another memory, one of my earliest, unrecorded journeys, repeated later by some vague attempt to document – a clumsy handling of a camera, which naively captured a feeling of camaraderie – a group of us were playing football at the side of the town house, unthinking of any future or difference.
Zhou Hau Liew is a Taipei-based writer and researcher. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. His fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop), Full Stop, Mekong Review, and Prata Journal. He is writing a novel about travel and transnational Asia set in Taiwan.