Summer Vacation Day 1: Movies and Books

Hello, Tim!

Summer vacation has just started! This is the first school-less day.

Normally one would think that summers are for all the outdoor excitements and fun and joy, but I think it never is like that in Taiwan. In something more than two hundred days comes our college entrance exam, and if this holiday isn’t the right time to start preparing, I don’t know what is.

Still, even with all that, I plan to riddle my vacation with as many interesting events as possible.

6/29, Friday

It was the day for our obnoxious little end-of-the-semester ceremony. I had thought about going to the movies alone for a while now.

Some classmates think that it is weird to go to the movies alone. At the same day, Jay was going to the movies with his friend; Patrick was going with his own group of friends whereas some of us in the class were going together. I wanted to go watch a movie not because I was isolating myself; I like to have some alone time for myself since I was a kid.

There was a movie that I wanted to watch, The Cakemaker, which was supposedly a gay romance film about a cakemaker. Unfortunately, it was too late when I discovered it was no longer showing. I chose another movie named Tag instead.

It was raining

After the ceremony, I went all the way to the movie theater to catch the 12:25 movie I booked online.

Tag is a movie about a group of grownups who’s been playing the kid game tag for thirty years. I like the concept of the whole plot, about living your life however you want it to be, childish or not; about having friends that connect through their own game all through the years. It was very obviously a comedy, but a rather heartwarming one. The characters inside have illuminated and bright personalities, and there are some impressive lines as well: “You don’t play tag to just run away from someone. You get a reason to get nearer to each other.” After the movie, I heard some other moviegoers saying that the plot was ridiculous and that it doesn’t make sense. I believe she took this movie as just ‘another comedy’. I don’t think so, for it shouldn’t be abnormal to play a children’s game when you’re an adult. The friendship they have is genuine, and it is something that I would love to pursue and find in my life.

After the movie, I went to the grand bookstore nearby, sat down, and pulled out my book, Before the Coffee Goes Cold, to read.

The picture I took in the Fairy Cafe.

Four stories are in this book, and all of them probe deeply into the relationships between people. One about boyfriend/girlfriend, one about spouses, one about siblings, and one about daughter and mother. They all have their regrets, their pain, their inevitable, and even though they are well aware that traveling back in time would not change the reality, the result proves that the voyage they made back in time does change something, and that is their heart. There was a line in the book that is like this: ‘As long as you have the heart, you can overcome any kind of reality no matter how hard it is. As long as one’s heart can change, the café has a very concrete reason to exist.’

I fully understand the message conveyed, but somehow the book didn’t speak to me as much as I think it would. The usual wrenching at the heart was not there. I reckon it was because the book I read was translated into Chinese from Japanese, and some of the wording the translator chose was not powerful enough.

This is for today.