Date someone from Tainan, China, with marriage in mind!
Editor's note: Migao, who loves Tainan, has published a wonderfully warm new book, writing in fine detail about her nostalgia for Tainan. Through her experiences growing up, she lets us see the beauty of the old city of Tainan, the coolness of Tainan people, and the truly flavorful food.... Migao, who deeply loves Tainan, also asks everyone to date Tainan with marriage in mind! Below is the preface to this book. Thanks to Migao and the publisher for letting Shangxiayou readers get an early look.
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If you are from Tainan - whether your family has lived in Tainan for more than three generations, or you were born and grew up in Tainan and later moved elsewhere, or you married into Tainan, work in Tainan, served in the military in Tainan, studied in Tainan, lived there briefly for a few years, or your boyfriend or girlfriend happens to be from Tainan, or after some year you rented or bought a home in Tainan and registered your household there - for these Tainan people in the broad sense, or the population around Tainan, at least several times a year you will be consulted about where to go and what to eat in Tainan.
As part of this backup force for people who want to cram all the delicious, fun and leisurely flavors of Tainan into one short sprint, sometimes you also worry that bad guidance will make friends hate Tainan forever. After all, it is a place you love, with deep affection and attachment, so it is hard not to feel an indescribable pressure inside. In fact, you could just fob them off with a travel guide or a magazine information issue, but such carelessness would simply be a betrayal of all the deities in all the temples of Tainan. To sell Tainan in just a few words or a two-day, one-night All You Can Eat mode still somehow feels insincere.
I worried about this repeatedly for a long time. Once, while preparing a thirty-minute talk for an online gathering (Punch Party), I simply sorted out in one go the secret guide in my heart for introducing Tainan to out-of-town friends. And in the process of organizing those words and images into slides, that Tainan character - one-third shy, one-third old-fashioned, plus four-tenths low-key yet still unable to shake off a certain pride - quietly took over. You could say it was the old soul of a Tainan person. A kind of high-concentration sense of mission, as if by possession, sat right at the center of my body, in the place closest to my heart, constantly reminding me. In an instant, I finally understood. The way to develop feelings with this city was not a rushed, brief one-night stand at all, but a long-term relationship with "marriage in mind"!
At that moment, the image of Ye Shitao, a literary elder born in Tainan, the prefectural city, immediately surfaced in my heart. For several years, as I read Elder Ye's books, the spacetime magnetic field of those alleys and lanes in the city turned backward at once. Elder Ye said, "Tainan is a place suitable for people to dream, work, fall in love, get married, and live leisurely." Every time I made a small sound and repeatedly recited this passage, my heart slowly opened, just like the flame trees blooming in Tainan's summer. There is no passage that better expresses this city's elegant face.
Migao, who loves Tainan, has a new book out.