a place of their own

While I was riding around with Sunset, her studio-mate, his boyfriend, and his teacher, talking about Taiwanese politics (as usual, I was the only person in the car who could name a date for the end of martial law—“Wa, you’re really something, how do you know that? We all lived through it and we don’t even know when it happened”—which tells you a lot about the status of the end of martial law), changing names in order to rebalance the yin and the yang, and, of course food, food, and food, someone mentioned that they’d taken the boyfriend to the enormous Raohe Street night market (“I can’t remember the name of the street. I just know it had neon palm trees.”).

The Taiwanese people in the car started naming the big night markets in Taipei: Shilin, Raohe Street, Tonghua Street, Huaxi Street in the old brothel area around where I used live. I guess that’s about it for the big ones, someone said as we passed what looked suspiciously like a night market without the hype on our right, that is, an alley full of food stands operating in the evening. But, I commented, really you can’t go a block in Taipei without there being a night market of some kind. That’s right, someone agreed, night markets are a completely common, universal thing, and we never really bothered to think about them until the city government cleaned a few of them up and reorganized them and made them official leisure areas. Then they got bigger, and brighter, and better paved (“And they got neon palm trees!”), and now they kind of look like, well, we kind of feel like those big ones have kind of been remodeled and replanned to appeal to tourists. They don’t really look like the night markets that we went to when we were young looked. They look kind of like… America. “Yeah, now Taipei is modern enough that it gets to have its very own Chinatown.”