8/28/24 | culture
i have a friend who is deeply, deeply into chinese culture, to the point where it’s almost his entire personality. it’s very unique. makes for a great college essay! we talk often about chinese culture and he teaches me historical figures. he wishes i spoke better chinese. he wants to teach me chinese. i know that i can try to learn as much as i can, but i’ll never match him in the way we both want. there’s a certain brotherhood, a certain ride or die that comes up again and again in warring states and such. i’ll take a million arrows for you! i’ll fight tooth and nail until my head comes off or his! we might never have that, because i’m not as attuned as him. i see it. there is a cultural gap.
i met another friend this summer. he’s japanese, was here on visa, visa expired 3 weeks ago. we stood on the beach, feet buried in the sand, facing the atlantic while the rest of the group played spikeball. we had some of the most meaningful conversations i’ve ever had. he told me he wishes we could converse in japanese. whenever he meets another japanese person in the us, despite speaking perfect english, he defaults to speaking japanese. he’s more comfortable in it. he asked me a question in the short month we had with each other.
when you speak in your dreams, what language do you speak in?
i think i speak in english. it makes sense, right? i speak two languages and i can’t read or write in one. i loved visiting family in taiwan last summer, but i was a foreigner and will always be one.
i’ve never spoken in my dreams before.
i only see temporal events, like a retelling of what happens read back to me. i can’t see an apple, only the word “apple”.
this writing isn’t about a conflicted heritage or anything like that. i don’t want to retouch with my taiwanese culture. when i was younger, i used to have a dumb mindset that culture wasn’t real - the internet had created the global network humanity needed! culture didn’t matter - a community didn’t matter, you made your community. you made your friends. i still hold on to that dream. i wait for the day we upload to the collective conscious or return to the sky or dissolve into lcl. why should we have differences? are tribes not the artifact of our animalistic needs to group up and survive? you can’t tell one ant from another. yet you can see they communicate, they wave and form circles that run themselves to death.
i’ve always been searching for some Truth. i can’t find it. i’ve always felt like so many people found their Truth. a culture that just hands you your worldview, your daily activities, your living beyond food water shelter, your maslow hierarchy.
why did i waste so much time? why did i fucking cut lines on myself, why did i lock myself away from development? academia didn’t change anything, sex didn’t change anything, the grind didn’t change anything.
the point of living is to put yourself in the best place possible so you can enact what you want to do when you figure out the point of living. but then, why can’t i stick to it? why can’t anyone stick to their worldview, their culture? you believe the point of life is to maximize happiness, but you’re not a hedonist? you’re a utilitarian, yet you can take leisure days solely for your self-interest? are we just all human? are we doomed to primal instinct, to tribes, to hormones and a shell of differentiation?
i just want to be able to truly understand another. i don’t speak japanese, i don’t breathe chinese, but i’ve had some of the best moments of my life with these people. i can’t imagine any way beyond raw human catharsis to truly connect with another. i guess that’s why denpa appeals so much to me. shuzo oshimi says you will find your Truth in another. i sort of believe that. i might never truly understand another. that scares me. i’ve met so many people since the last time i wrote, but i feel only a brief clarity. fundamentally, nothing has changed. i want to solve human connection. i want to solve the personal brand, i want to solve the human network, i want to build the ultimate information compression software.
the limits of my language are the limits of my world. think about talking to an elderly woman in flushing who speaks only broken chinglish - you can’t get your information 100% across. there’s a natural entropy. this entropy of the conscious, this physical barrier of flesh and skin and words and vocal vibrations and cultural difference between each person, is this not the worst fate of this world? is this not the root problem? i wish to consume the library of babel, to read the akashic records, for each agent to become a god. it might be too much to ask for.