the smell of chinatown
There is a nostalgic smell from my past, a smell i always associated with Chinatown. I could never quite pin down what it was. It is a slightly acrid smell, not from food or incense, but something else. For the longest time i thought it must be some kind of exotic packing material that only existed in the warehouses of Hong Kong through which all the exports funneled, revealing its scent to discount stores across the world when the crates were cracked open.
But then i moved to China and realized it can't be that. The smell doesn't exist in China, you see. Or - to be more precise - it does exist, but it isn't especially common. It's not predictably clustered around discount stores or import/export companies or storefronts with a shady Hong Kong connect. It's just there, sometimes, like any other scent.
Every now and then i start to question myself. Is this a real smell? Did i imagine it all those years ago? I don't encounter it much at all any more.
Until a few weeks ago, when i started finding it here in Taipei, in one particular alley that i cycle through on the way to work, an alley crammed with mopeds and house plants, laundry and air conditioners dripping from overhead. And i think i finally know what the smell is. Or, at least, i think i know the category: it's a cleaning product.
I think it might be bleach.
The funny thing is that in my first job i worked as dishwasher in a restaurant and at the end of every service it was my job to clean the floors, with bleach, and it didn't have the same smell. (Although it certainly burned my nostrils.) And i've visited plenty of hospitals and tattoo parlors and other joints where you would expect disinfectant to be liberally applied, and they don't smell like Chinatown. So it's not the smell of any old bleach. It must be a very specific blend or brand, perhaps one that was popular in Hong Kong in the 1980s and has since fallen out of common usage. Or perhaps it's a reaction those chemicals make when it's 30+ degrees outside, humid, and you are in a tight alleyway?
I haven't solved the mystery, alas, but i feel closer than i have been in decades.
I've been thinking about this smell because a week or two back Cyberpunk 2077 went on sale, and now that i have an external GPU and the ability to play it, i bought it. And i have to say i am somewhat disappointed.
When i was young, i thought cyberpunk was the greatest sci-fi genre that there was. It was as if it was written just for me, a teenage boy dreaming of a future where i could be the hero, but also still a computer nerd. I could wear sunglasses at night and eat noodles from a stall on a neon-drenched curb, glittering skyscrapers towering above my head. I would be first in line to get the direct brain hookup installed. Jack me into the matrix, baby, here i come!
But as i got older i became disillusioned with the genre, mainly because it grew into a vehicle for telling action stories that glorified the lives of serial killers, terrorists and psychopaths. And fans of the genre might say "well you're just too much of a pussy to read literature this raw and confronting, you can't stomach the brutal truth of human nature, its violence, its depravity, its decadence..."
They're right, i can't stomach it. Not because it's an inconvenient truth, but because it's a tedious fantasy.
In the world of Cyberpunk 2077, there are gunfights breaking out every 5 minutes. Bullets are flying everywhere. Corpses litter the streets. It's a warzone, but a kind of absurd, grotesque Disneyland version of a warzone. Everything is bright and colorful, including the carnage. Civilians go about their lives unfazed and business is booming. It should be a parody except everyone plays it straight. Human lives are worth less than zero.
Right up until the story needs one particular human life to mean something, and then you get smacked in the face with ludonarrative dissonance.
This is a problem in many computer games, to be fair. At the core a lot of games are still essentially Space Invaders - kill the baddies, get the points. But with Cyberpunk 2077 it's particularly hard to swallow because i live in Night City.
Which is not to say i live in a city filled with murderers. But the cyberpunk aesthetic is based on East Asian cities of the 1980s, and - even though a lot has changed since then - there are still corners of town with advertisements flashing at you 24 hours a day, dark alleys that open up into street markets, smoke-filled video arcades, X-rated vending machines, mahjong parlors harboring illegal gambling operations, temples run by organized crime syndicates, and all the rest of it. The only thing that isn't there is a few hundred people getting murdered every day. Obviously. Because that kind of decimation would result in a city that looks very different.
And that takes me back to the Chinatown smell. My favorite computer game of all time is Deus Ex, a cyberpunk game that featured our stoic hero taking black helicopters across the world, chasing down a web of conspiracies linking a terrorist attack on NYC, the origins of a global pandemic, the development of a super-powerful AI and so on. Part of what i love about Deus Ex - and its sequel Human Revolution - is that it places you in a cyberpunk world that feels like the real thing. Walking through Hong Kong in Deus Ex (2000) or Heng Sha (Shanghai) in Human Revolution (2011) i could imagine the Chinatown smell wafting from a storefront. I felt like i was really there.
Deus Ex is still silly, of course. You creep through conveniently human-sized vents into top secret military installations and no matter how stealthy and forgiving you are, you still have to murder several people to complete the game. But your actions are clandestine. You only operate inside small corners of the city, usually under some kind of police lockdown. You have to take the subway to get across town. The rest of the world seems very big.
And that's the grandness that is missing in Cyberpunk 2077. Night City feels like a miniaturized caricature of a city, a technicolor playground for ultraviolent nihilists more interested in the viscera of slaughter than living a meaningful life. So i don't identify with the main character, or with any of the other characters in the game, and i don't smell the Chinatown smell.
Which is sad, because it never was a Chinatown smell. It was just a normal smell that you could find anywhere in the world, but my brain made a different association. It became the smell of adventure. The smell of somewhere i could turn a corner and not know what to expect - a new fruit, a bizarre tchotchke or a fresh steamed pork bun.
The irony is that when i bike to work in real life - to my regular, boring corporate job - i am getting to smell that adventure that i was hoping to find in this computer game. Meanwhile the computer game feels more like a job - collecting icons off the map, checking tasks off a list, going through the motions without any emotional connection.
I'll still complete it. The stealth infiltration mechanics are fun, and it creates the same kind of time sink that alcohol or drugs did for me in the past. A way to switch off my brain after the stress of my real job. But i fear it really is just mental junk food. When i finish the game some weeks will have passed, and my job will still be my job, and i won't really have any new memories to show for it.
Fortunuately, i am also watching the One Piece anime. Now that's a show with inspirational storylines. The characters act like petulant children and fight ridiculous, drawn-out battles, but the moral of the story is always to dream big, to be ambitious, to conquer your fears, to go out and explore the world. It seems to me that the overarching theme is about growing up and treating adulthood as the adventure it is. On the journey you will encounter adversity and witness injustice, but your job is to tough it out and try leave things a little better where you can. I think that's an evergreen story that should resonate just as much with adults as with the teenage audience for whom it was intended.
Meanwhile adult stories that boil down to "everyone is a vindictive asshole" seem more juvenile than ever.
Oh, you wanted an update on my life? Work sucks, but i'm hanging in. I have my gold card and 3 years of guaranteed residence in Taiwan. I went to a festival and it was okay. Mostly i enjoyed dancing in the sun. Someone came up to me and said "you're like a sunflower", which made me beam because i am tall and ugly but i always smile and reach for the sky.
But then i moved to China and realized it can't be that. The smell doesn't exist in China, you see. Or - to be more precise - it does exist, but it isn't especially common. It's not predictably clustered around discount stores or import/export companies or storefronts with a shady Hong Kong connect. It's just there, sometimes, like any other scent.
Every now and then i start to question myself. Is this a real smell? Did i imagine it all those years ago? I don't encounter it much at all any more.
Until a few weeks ago, when i started finding it here in Taipei, in one particular alley that i cycle through on the way to work, an alley crammed with mopeds and house plants, laundry and air conditioners dripping from overhead. And i think i finally know what the smell is. Or, at least, i think i know the category: it's a cleaning product.
I think it might be bleach.
The funny thing is that in my first job i worked as dishwasher in a restaurant and at the end of every service it was my job to clean the floors, with bleach, and it didn't have the same smell. (Although it certainly burned my nostrils.) And i've visited plenty of hospitals and tattoo parlors and other joints where you would expect disinfectant to be liberally applied, and they don't smell like Chinatown. So it's not the smell of any old bleach. It must be a very specific blend or brand, perhaps one that was popular in Hong Kong in the 1980s and has since fallen out of common usage. Or perhaps it's a reaction those chemicals make when it's 30+ degrees outside, humid, and you are in a tight alleyway?
I haven't solved the mystery, alas, but i feel closer than i have been in decades.
I've been thinking about this smell because a week or two back Cyberpunk 2077 went on sale, and now that i have an external GPU and the ability to play it, i bought it. And i have to say i am somewhat disappointed.
When i was young, i thought cyberpunk was the greatest sci-fi genre that there was. It was as if it was written just for me, a teenage boy dreaming of a future where i could be the hero, but also still a computer nerd. I could wear sunglasses at night and eat noodles from a stall on a neon-drenched curb, glittering skyscrapers towering above my head. I would be first in line to get the direct brain hookup installed. Jack me into the matrix, baby, here i come!
But as i got older i became disillusioned with the genre, mainly because it grew into a vehicle for telling action stories that glorified the lives of serial killers, terrorists and psychopaths. And fans of the genre might say "well you're just too much of a pussy to read literature this raw and confronting, you can't stomach the brutal truth of human nature, its violence, its depravity, its decadence..."
They're right, i can't stomach it. Not because it's an inconvenient truth, but because it's a tedious fantasy.
In the world of Cyberpunk 2077, there are gunfights breaking out every 5 minutes. Bullets are flying everywhere. Corpses litter the streets. It's a warzone, but a kind of absurd, grotesque Disneyland version of a warzone. Everything is bright and colorful, including the carnage. Civilians go about their lives unfazed and business is booming. It should be a parody except everyone plays it straight. Human lives are worth less than zero.
Right up until the story needs one particular human life to mean something, and then you get smacked in the face with ludonarrative dissonance.
This is a problem in many computer games, to be fair. At the core a lot of games are still essentially Space Invaders - kill the baddies, get the points. But with Cyberpunk 2077 it's particularly hard to swallow because i live in Night City.
Which is not to say i live in a city filled with murderers. But the cyberpunk aesthetic is based on East Asian cities of the 1980s, and - even though a lot has changed since then - there are still corners of town with advertisements flashing at you 24 hours a day, dark alleys that open up into street markets, smoke-filled video arcades, X-rated vending machines, mahjong parlors harboring illegal gambling operations, temples run by organized crime syndicates, and all the rest of it. The only thing that isn't there is a few hundred people getting murdered every day. Obviously. Because that kind of decimation would result in a city that looks very different.
And that takes me back to the Chinatown smell. My favorite computer game of all time is Deus Ex, a cyberpunk game that featured our stoic hero taking black helicopters across the world, chasing down a web of conspiracies linking a terrorist attack on NYC, the origins of a global pandemic, the development of a super-powerful AI and so on. Part of what i love about Deus Ex - and its sequel Human Revolution - is that it places you in a cyberpunk world that feels like the real thing. Walking through Hong Kong in Deus Ex (2000) or Heng Sha (Shanghai) in Human Revolution (2011) i could imagine the Chinatown smell wafting from a storefront. I felt like i was really there.
Deus Ex is still silly, of course. You creep through conveniently human-sized vents into top secret military installations and no matter how stealthy and forgiving you are, you still have to murder several people to complete the game. But your actions are clandestine. You only operate inside small corners of the city, usually under some kind of police lockdown. You have to take the subway to get across town. The rest of the world seems very big.
And that's the grandness that is missing in Cyberpunk 2077. Night City feels like a miniaturized caricature of a city, a technicolor playground for ultraviolent nihilists more interested in the viscera of slaughter than living a meaningful life. So i don't identify with the main character, or with any of the other characters in the game, and i don't smell the Chinatown smell.
Which is sad, because it never was a Chinatown smell. It was just a normal smell that you could find anywhere in the world, but my brain made a different association. It became the smell of adventure. The smell of somewhere i could turn a corner and not know what to expect - a new fruit, a bizarre tchotchke or a fresh steamed pork bun.
The irony is that when i bike to work in real life - to my regular, boring corporate job - i am getting to smell that adventure that i was hoping to find in this computer game. Meanwhile the computer game feels more like a job - collecting icons off the map, checking tasks off a list, going through the motions without any emotional connection.
I'll still complete it. The stealth infiltration mechanics are fun, and it creates the same kind of time sink that alcohol or drugs did for me in the past. A way to switch off my brain after the stress of my real job. But i fear it really is just mental junk food. When i finish the game some weeks will have passed, and my job will still be my job, and i won't really have any new memories to show for it.
Fortunuately, i am also watching the One Piece anime. Now that's a show with inspirational storylines. The characters act like petulant children and fight ridiculous, drawn-out battles, but the moral of the story is always to dream big, to be ambitious, to conquer your fears, to go out and explore the world. It seems to me that the overarching theme is about growing up and treating adulthood as the adventure it is. On the journey you will encounter adversity and witness injustice, but your job is to tough it out and try leave things a little better where you can. I think that's an evergreen story that should resonate just as much with adults as with the teenage audience for whom it was intended.
Meanwhile adult stories that boil down to "everyone is a vindictive asshole" seem more juvenile than ever.
Oh, you wanted an update on my life? Work sucks, but i'm hanging in. I have my gold card and 3 years of guaranteed residence in Taiwan. I went to a festival and it was okay. Mostly i enjoyed dancing in the sun. Someone came up to me and said "you're like a sunflower", which made me beam because i am tall and ugly but i always smile and reach for the sky.