Asian style materialism

Thoughts from a rainy Taipei, and a Chinese Pigeon Guy!

I’m writing this on Korean Air, headed home after a month that took me to South China (Kunming), then kind-of-China-kind-of-not (Hong Kong), then China Classic (Taipei), and then Northern China (Zhengzhou), a journey with a wealth of comparisons and contrasts, mostly about the Chinese world¹.

I’d hoped to write a piece exclusively about Taiwan, where I’d not been in two years², but for the entirety of my time there, it rained. Not a light drizzle, but a constant drenching that flooded streets, caused mudslides, and generally made getting around miserable. So for four days I shuffled precariously to a Mr Brown Coffee, a McDonald’s, and did circuits of the underground Taipei mall.

I was only able to do that because most sidewalks are protected by the buildings above, which means you can walk the mile to your destination without getting drenched, with the occasional cat-like scamper across unprotected parts.

All of that is annoyingly hard and dangerous though, because much of Taipei is surfaced with absurdly smooth tiles. Which brings me to my first trivial but important (for a walking newsletter) observation, which is that the Chinese world is unified in believing that smooth tiles look so great, so magnificent, that it doesn’t matter how hard or dangerous they are to walk on, especially when slightly wet, as after a light rain, or when coated with morning dew.

The majority of Taipei has this covered walkway design

Below is a picture of the exact spot in Kunming where I almost died. For the first two days while I was there, it also poured, and while walking back to my hotel that first morning, on the top step my sandal landed on a wet spot with the viscosity of slick ice, and before my mind could register what was happening, I was going down, hard. Somehow the staying-alive part of my brain was engaged enough that I instinctively grabbed the food cart, which started to roll down the stairs, pulled by my momentum and destined by physics to tumble and crash on top of me, a disaster of broken bones, shattered dishes, and upturned propane stopped only by the man in the white hat who lunged, grabbed, then pulled at his cart with the strength of someone determined not to lose his day’s investment, which kept me from slamming my head on the hard-as-marble ground, and only crumpling awkwardly to the ground³.

Walking continual loops of the Taipei mall however was safer, and proved to be a fascinating diversion that was also revealing. It is a two-mile L-shaped walkway connected to the main train station, and acts as a hangout for four different groups: the elderly looking to get out in the world, their immigrant caregivers (mostly Indonesian) accompanying them (or on their day off), dance groups, and the largest, a youngish crowd of nebbish collectors. There are specialty shops designed for all of them, including mini studios where the dancers, hoping to go viral, record and refine videos for social media, yet the biggest draw by far is the roughly hundred stores brimming with curated collectibles, mostly figurines from gaming and anime.

Collectibles is now a big business in NE Asia (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now China), a well establish industrial complex⁴ that churns out endless statuary of Gundams, Transformers, Pokémon, anime waifus, chibi versions of historical figures, anthropomorphized foods, lucky cats, and gaming mascots, but primarily it’s about selling the cute.

I’ve written before about collectibles’ similarities to crypto, but what has always struck me is how symptomatic it is of a broader NE Asian cultural phenomenon — an insatiable demand for the cute that is an offshoot of a larger aesthetic sensibility that animates and anthropomorphizes anything and everything.

That aesthetic, a mixture ranging from the jarring chaotic hard lines of Japanese manga to the simple soft lines of Hello Kitty, dominates the physical culture of the region so thoroughly that it can, especially if giddy from jet lag, make you feel like a human character trapped in a cartoon world — transported into a Toontown with residents (thanks to makeup, thousands spent on wardrobes, and even plastic surgery) that look more animated than human, with thickets of plushies dangling from their backpacks, eating fried octopus in restaurants advertised by smiling octopuses bragging how good they (or their children) taste, all beneath an animated nuclear mushroom cloud scolding them for not being prepared for the death they (the nuclear cloud, not the human responsible for launching it) will bring.