The narrow one-way street stood the residence of my childhood, a small ground floor unit that belongs to a grayish concrete building that stretches six stories high. The building itself is of common pedigree in the streets of Taipei, but the ground unit is especially pronounced by its facade -- a red wooden door that is twenty years behind the rest of the neighborhood, with its frail-looking, bright red paint been chipped away as time progress, leaving behind a look of withered spinster. Upon entering through the wooden door is a small garden, no bigger than perhaps a walk-in closet in many homes in the US. To call it garden is misleading, for the only foliage visible to the eyes are the uncultivated weed and dandelion that persevered in wherever crevices in the stone ground are found. But since the tiny square is well exposed to all earthy elements, I am inclined to calling it garden. I recall there once existed a small koi pond, in which during the sultry summer days I would dip my tiny feet in the cool water. There are, however, no evidence of any pond, and now everything is flatten and ugly and exposed.

I will like to take a few steps back and describe the street scene. I often think the street as a quiet fissure in the midst of noise and hustle and bustle of central Taipei. It takes two minutes of walk to reach from my house to the nearest MRT station. But I have never thought the place as noisy; in fact, it was almost too quite for my then restless young mind. On both side of the block are concrete buildings that are typical of ugly modern Taiwan architecture, the outer walls darkened by air pollution and steel bars in symbiotic relationship with glass windows. I didn't know what shielded the block from the busy movement of Taipei, but time there didn't seem to be in conjunction with the time outside. Tall apartment units stood row in row on both sides of the street. As a result I never knew what other people were talking about when they referred to a big expanse of blue sky; my notion of sky was always the long stretch of open air that hung above the block.

Tags: Childhood, Taipei, Taiwan, Home,