Eye of the beholder

It was the day of the fashion show and anyone with a sense of the absurd would have been forgiven for thinking that aliens had invaded. But these were not people with any sense of the absurd. They were fashion enthusiasts.

In the lobby of the hotel, scores of women waltzed around proudly crowned with what looked to me to be 8th grade science projects-- a DNA double helix, butterfly wings, Papier mâché flower petals and Adam's Family inspired coifs. I arrived on the scene a bit late owing to the fact that I had a desire to sleep in. I expressed over a text to a friend back in the real world who inquired as to my whereabouts that since I was unimportant to the proceedings, that I got to sleep in. He replied that I was not unimportant, but that I needed to regain control over what he called "the sense of narrative."

But there is no place more appropriate than a fashion show to understand that all sense of narrative is a fleeting illusion. This truth is easily understood when the smell of nail polish so strongly permeates the open air as to seem like a weather system, a heavy fog that obscures all sense of meaning.

The hotel was called the "Shangri-la" but as a name which would reveal the sense of theme intended by the proprietors, it was ineffective at best. The inside of the place looked like something off the set of "water world" with fountains and pools of carp which the non fashion inclined chose to fish out of. I had some inkling that the design of the hotel was intended to convey a sense of fairy tale fantasy though, with it's scarecrows near the facade, and a giant windmill that wound round a path next to plastic sculptures of mushrooms like the ones from "Super Mario Brothers."

Nearby a cafe along the banks of the river which stretched from the mountains of Yilan to the nearby ocean, there stood a group of young women posing for a photo indicating the rudimentary "peace sign" which seems to be the signature of so many poses in Taiwan. They all smiled at the same time and looked right at the camera, the implication of their attempt at narrative (we all became suddenly happy at the same time) seeming anachronistic against the backdrop of the rainy river and the cafe which later proved to be locked and empty, cobwebs in the corners.

I laid down on a few chairs which I had pushed together, and enshrouded in the fog of nail polish, I wafted into sleep. From some very strange dreams, I awoke abruptly. Momentarily, I was not cognizant of where I was. From "where I am I?" my mind wandered to "what am I doing here?" and this question, sadly, was not a query which wakefulness could answer. "I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow" [...]

If you were to ask Melissa though, she would spin a yarn of the youngest nail-work artist ever to win the "most original" prize, of youthful energy stymied by the established order, subversion of the dominant paradigm the sort of which Melissa, the tattoo artist, exhibitionist, perpetually scornful of established social norms would be in support of... err, well, apparently she's no good at doing nails.

The story, told in frustrated tones, went something like this:

Two years ago, Melissa was asked to be a model for the up-and-coming child prodigy nail artist in Tai-Chung, whose mother, like so many scary stage moms, had groomed her to be Taiwan's youngest nail art champion. Melissa was the only "foreigner" model at the competition, which included hundreds of competitors from far away China, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and other south Asian countries where they take their fingernails, very very seriously. To include a foreigner model, and to bill oneself as the youngest ever nail artist in the history of Taiwan was, by Melissa's perception, merely a publicity stunt, albeit one that worked smoothly enough to win the then 10 year old nail artist the prize of most original. But regrettably (again, according to Melissa) this was at the expense of the dignity of her (Melissa's) fingernails which suffered an onslaught of chemicals and ended up looking "awful, just awful" to connoisseurs of such things, who obviously overlooked certain elements of sloppiness and awarded most original to the young girl anyway, much to the outrage of those older and more wizened veterans of the craft.

Those same wizened veterans were busy creating the most elaborate and dare I say "gaudy and pretentious" nails which had ever been glued to human hands. Some of the danglies, bobblies and various accoutrements, were longer and larger than the fingers themselves, and in sum, larger and more clumsy than the hands themselves. Just for fun, I walked up and offered one nail model a beverage in a teacup, just to watch her try to pick it up which she couldn't. She probably would have died of thirst if the contest had lasted longer. One woman had little bowties glued to her fingers. "Cute" would be the word, provided that you would also apply that word to some sort of bird species whose overly elaborate plumage caused other birds to avoid mating with it, suspecting it to be crazy.

I am asked to pose for an array of photos, Melissa standing nearby. I think "of those so close beside me, which are you?" and I smile. Another photo, and another and another, until I have slipped into another time and place, somewhere else entirely. A handshake, another smile. "Wo ting bu dong." Smile. Exchange business cards. Smile. Nod.

Later, in the night-market, we saw a sweatshirt on which the phrase "what the fuck?" was indecorously printed. Now that's my kind of fashion.