Taipei, a City of Rain
Living in London now, the first reaction I get from most people when I say I moved from California is one of shock. California, to what seems like just about everyone, is a paradise in which the sun is ever unobscured and you drive your convertible, hood down, through radiant streets, and lie beside the sea on equally golden sands, day after day. Why would someone ever come here? There’s a rather pernicious belief underlying these reactions, held by both locals and anyone who knows anything about this city—that London is dreary, grey and rainy all the time. I wonder what it is that has made such a lie so pervasive; as someone who has spent a few years in Pittsburgh, I’m a bit offended when people think the weather here is unpleasant to the point of being the first thing someone thinks about when they hear the name of this city.
It’s worth noting, then, that ‘dreary’ is not the first thing that comes to mind when people talk about Taipei. Despite its penchant for both unleashing torrential downpours at unsuspecting hours and steadily drizzling for days on end, I suspect people don’t recall Taipei as cloudy and wet. It’s a city with a climate determined not by what the weather does from one day to the next, but by an unconsciousness yet visceral perception of its identity.
A brilliant day in London brings out colours once present, as though a haze removed from our eyes, an entity fundamentally unchanged, and hence we dwell upon, blame the grey that obscures the beauty of this city of centuries. Less of London when overcast and raining, more of it when the moments are bright, but, more or less, still the same. For Taipei, a city of a latitude that has but a passing notion of seasons, the changing of the months that evoke the romantic perception of the turning of time have been replaced by a day to day immediacy of the wrestling between a city and its heavens, the product of which is a place that has as many faces as names for its precipitation.
In this manner, the city of Taipei is reflected in its rain: it is patchwork, with a mind of its own; it heeds no calls, and resists the telling of its fortunes; it is to be immersed within, to be upon the earth. It is not a violent city, where the waters are unceasing and the inhabitants resigned in the rivers that course through the city, nor is it a wild one, one in which extremities are magnified and blessings and curses flow abundantly.
Taipei is not an idea, or an attitude, or a photograph; no sights are proclaimed, and no emotions are invoked by its name. Of its imperfections, many are seen at first glance: in worn streets, concrete free of refuse but dotted with permanent stains and blooming with sprawling cracks and fissures and wild flowers, and on the myriad buildings missing wall tiles and decorated with dark streaks flowing from windowsills and gutters, covered by half-torn election campaign posters and bright red numbers you can dial to hang an advertisement in its place. But it is a city of seven million, where travelers are invited to eat the same foods and walk the same roads as its inhabitants. In short, Taipei is human—just like its rain, not to be known, but to be lived alongside of.