Golden Week
Oct 12, 2025
The Suboptimalist came to Shanghai last week. He arrived on the first day of the golden week vacation and left on the last day. Perhaps in his mind, Shanghai will forever be a world trapped in holiday, filled with tourists from distant provinces, where little kids are dragged onto the subway by middle-aged women too old to have birthed them, needlessly and desperately pushing each body out of their way in a vein hope to wrestle for seats already taken — a Shanghai so different from the one I imagine.
On his first full day here, I took him to a 7th floor arcade in an office building down the street from where I live. I’d written about it long ago in a November Sentiment. The Suboptimalist’s website is filled with references to his love for Pump It Up, so I figured we could try looking for it so he could have a few moments of pleasure. Unfortunately, the arcade near my house only had e舞成名, a similar game with a few subtle differences — most notably the lack of a bar to grasp onto. He managed to do ok at it though. There was something magical, seeing him so frantically move his legs to Caramelldansen, playing co-op with a fellow from Xuzhou — a prodigy at the game. They hopped back and forth between the two pads, sweat dripping down their faces. The memory still brings me to the verge of tears. As Du Fu said of a dancer he'd seen as a child:
㸌如羿射九日落
Flashing like Yi, who shot down nine suns,
矯如羣帝驂龍翔
Mighty like deities, soaring on the backs of dragons.
來如雷霆收震怒
At first like thunder, gathering in a rage,
罷如江海凝青光
Finishing like waters, frozen in blue light.
The Suboptimalist had played only one round of e舞成名 before another American materialized — a bearded Detroit native engaged on a transcontinental roadtrip. He’d bought some kind of Citroën 80s hatchback looking vehicle in London and driven it across Europe, through the Middle East, into Central Asia and Mongolia, finally ending up in China where he was waylaid due to certain regulations I didn’t understand preventing him from taking his car by ferry to Korea. His final destination was Japan — a country he’d been to numerous times. The Suboptimalist on the other hand had just arrived from Japan. Soon enough they found themselves engaged in intense conversation about this island nation, just a few hundred miles away from Shanghai.
Listening to the Suboptimalist and this Detroiter automobile enthusiast talk until 2am on the smoking balcony outside the arcade, I realized how different and alien the culture of American Japan-likers is from whatever culture I find myself existing in — a culture that I sometimes suspect contains only of myself. I hadn't realized this before, perhaps because I’d only talked to people with such an intense fascination towards Japan one-on-one. I’d never had a chance to put two of them together and watch them talk, though I imagine there are whole circles for whom every conversation is similar to what I witnessed.
Or perhaps I’m simply misunderstanding the true nature of their conversation. Maybe they weren’t talking about Japan so much as the joy of collecting Japanese things. Both of these men were collectors by nature, and for them Japan was a country filled with interesting objects (or even non-material experiences) that could be catalogued and acquired. The Detroiter collected stolen license plates and Madoka Magica Nendoroids (I didn’t actually know what a Nendoroid was before this). You can peruse the Suboptimalist’s website to get an idea of the things he collects.
The first thing the Suboptimalist had shown me when I picked him up from the airport was a little paper sign that would have fit into Tokyo subway cars announcing what line it was (the Seibu Ikebukuro line? I don’t remember). He was boasting about how he’d been able to buy it for only 600 yen. Every time he mentioned something he bought in Japan he mentioned precisely how much cheaper it was due to the exchange rate.
I feel like my entire adult life the USD to JPY exchange rate has been at historic highs. The first time I remember people freaking out about this was in 2015, when a dollar was worth 120 yen, but now it’s gone up far beyond that.
Thinking about the Japanese exchange rate made me feel lonely. If only the Chinese exchange rate could experience bizarre oddities that excite the imagination of people around the globe. What would they cross the ocean to buy from here? Would anyone want decommissioned Shanghai metro train signs?
The conversations I overheard about Japan all seemed predicated on how much better it was than America, so I struggled talking with the Suboptimalist about China. I have no idea if China is better than America. I took him across the bridge on Wuning road, down the street from the building Trigger is in, and he pointed to all the tiny flaws that you apparently wouldn’t see in an American bridge. Yet when I thought back to American bridges I’d walked beside in Baltimore, I could only remember cracked concrete husks with rusted rebar exposed. At the same time, maybe I felt more at home among all that urban decay, where I had to take the bus every day along bumpy torn up roads to an ancient library building with ornate chessboard-like floors.
I don’t really know how to compare Shanghai with Baltimore. Maybe they are incomparable.
I suppose I continue to feel uncertain over whether or not I actually exist here. Yet I certainly don’t exist in America. I don’t have as many dreams about America as I used to. I’m starting to worry that I’ve forgotten what America was even like — that when I talk about America, I’m just repeating words from when I talked about America in the past rather than converting my actual memories of the place into language, fresh each time.
After the Suboptimalist left and I went back to the office, I found it difficult to adjust. I didn’t sleep at night the Wednesday night/Thursday morning before returning, and even though I did manage to sleep eight hours the next two nights (I had work on Saturday), it didn’t seem to make me feel any less tired. I hoped I could go to bed early last night, but I woke up at 3am and couldn’t fall back asleep.
Once again, I thought of Du Fu, who had written these lines during one of his own sleepless nights:
永夜角聲悲自語
I hear the lonely notes of a bugle sounding through the dark.
中天月色好誰看
The moon is in mid-heaven, but there's no one to share it with me.(Translation from here.)
After reading On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason until my tired mind could no longer make sense of it, I gave up at 5am, and decided to go for a run in the still-dark outer world. I ran along Panyu road, and then along Kaixuan road beneath the elevated metro line, where the bricks are dusty and humans would be sparse even in the middle of the day. Almost immediately I felt the need to use the toilet, but miraculously the first public toilet I came across was both open and had free toilet paper (usually toilet paper costs money). It had just been cleaned. When I entered that shining white capsule, it had still been night. When I stepped out of it, the world had become morning, covered in a faint orange glow.
I kept on running and found myself running by the Western Bus Station (西区汽车站), separated from it by a whitewashed concrete wall too high for me to see over. I’d like to compose an ode or essay or story or film or comic or song or perhaps simply an exhalation about the walls of Shanghai — somehow there seem to be so many more walls lining the streets here than I remember in Baltimore, all of a peculiar shapes that excite my imagination. When the seasons change, from Summer to Autumn or Winter to Spring, I find myself thinking of the vegetative matter just peaking out from the other sides of these walls.
This time last year, I started reading Junky’s old blog from 2004, when he was my age and had just started Torturing Nurse. I thought it would help me understand him. I imagined a website like mine, filled with long essays describing his feelings. Yet his blog was mostly just announcing performances or saying a sentence or two about musicians he liked (e.g. Boredoms). I’ve made him a kind of symbol of all that I can only glimpse at without ever truly knowing. Why does it pain my heart so much to be so far away from him in time? We are both existing in the year 2025. I can see him almost any weekend, and he often tells me to message him on WeChat if I ever need his help with anything. And yet it’s impossible for me to recognize our coexistence as real. Just as I’ve never read a novel with a character who knows who I am, I’m not sure it’s possible for this man, the origin of so many sounds stored inside my computer, to know my name. I can still remember him crawling on top of me after collapsing to the floor of the Ming Room, the first time I saw him perform — yet human touch is such a finicky thing. You can’t store it on a shelf next to all your other prized possessions. A touch lasts a moment, and though some trace of it seems to remain, I’m not sure of the nature of that trace. Is what I have a memory, or simply a reconstruction of what that touch, that grasping, must have been like, based on my knowledge of human anatomy and my composite experience formed by all the other times I’ve been touched?
It’s so dark now. All I want is to soak up the sun. I had the whole vacation last week to do so, and yet it never seemed to happen. I’m sitting at home at six o’clock on a Sunday evening, and I almost want to cry. The sun is gone already. For the man who spends his weekdays in an office building, even on weekends it’s as though the sun never existed. Other than my early morning run, which ended before the sun could really be considered to have fully risen, I was too tired today to go out — and besides, it was cloudy. So once again I missed it.