❝What are you looking for?❞

Perhaps, compared to asking “How did we arrive in an unfamiliar place?”, the question “How do we know where we are?” is even harder to answer. Familiarity can produce a kind of linguistic estrangement—when something is too familiar, we find ourselves with nothing left to say. And yet, there are always clues that reveal our imagination of a place more honestly than language ever could. For instance, in their conversation, they mention Revolico, a popular online marketplace in Cuba. Through this platform—where users freely list and sell items—Cubans project a certain exotic imagination of China. When collective fantasies are naturally inscribed onto a marketplace, it becomes more than a site of exchange. From one perspective, it can be seen as a fictional territory where images of the “other” are unconsciously constructed in everyday life. In this way, it reflects the outline of an imagined virtual nation. Isn’t this precisely what Tongdi seeks to achieve?

❝The way we perceive plants is closely tied to human society, because for a long time, our ways of understanding and classifying other living beings have been fundamentally human-centered. Yet literature and art have never ceased to challenge these systems of division in different ways.❞

In contrast to the listed items on a shopping platform, objects transformed into elements of a language constructed from material existence, literature confronts its own limits. Writing turns back upon itself in reflection. Can we truly describe a place using only words, suspended between two points of return? Attempting to construct a landscape no one has yet reached resembles a kind of revolutionary ambition, one that seeks to overturn established cultural relations and redefine a new paradigm. Much like when Jorge Luis Borges wrote, hoping that his works might shift the way people perceive literature itself. The artist-in-residence, Yornel J. Martínez Elías, expresses a similar awareness in the book’s dialogue: How do I understand residency? If I can adopt a perspective that sees residency as a mobile, aggregating artistic community, then when we speak of community and collaboration, yet fail within artistic practice to reflect on and propose ways to expand a broader artistic ecosystem, such creation becomes hollow. At best, it remains an interpretation; it does not generate the force needed to provoke challenge or resistance.

This kind of intellectual flexibility does not necessarily depend on shifting perspectives or crossing disciplinary boundaries. It can also emerge from recognizing the distinctiveness of a place itself. What determines whether a place is or is not, whether it exists or does not exist? When we identify elements of a place, extract them, and rearrange them, we begin to see what relationships are truly fixed, and what can be moved. Contexts are rewritten. All living beings alter their destinations, and with them, every path is transformed.

How do we realize that this is not Taiwan? This reveals how we translate and interpret other cultures. In the book, Li Xinjie quotes Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island, describing the Caribbean as a state of “disorder”: fragmented lands, diverse colonial histories, and differences in race, language, tradition, and politics. These conditions produce an internally contradictory, endlessly self-replicating “island” image, ultimately giving rise to a complex and divergent cultural archipelago.

Do we see ourselves in this description? To understand the spirit of the Caribbean is not to seek definitive answers, but to recognize ourselves as marginal, discontinuous, and heterogeneous beings—and to perceive the unpredictable processes, forces, and rhythms that coexist with us in everyday life.

In the appendix of Archipelagic Empathy, Huang Chong-kai contributes a short story, “What Are You Looking For?”, set within the same universe as The New Formosa. To some extent, it draws upon a specific, temporary experience of diaspora to shape how the protagonist approaches the act of searching. Within the story, he becomes a tunnel within a tunnel, moving through the future. In that moment, we no longer ask, “What are you looking for?” unlike in our real lives as islanders, where we seem destined to search endlessly. Why is it that once the people around us change, even disorientation is no longer escape, nor something that needs to be justified as temporary? Why does an imposed reality give rise to a form of freedom?

This leads us to wonder: before arriving somewhere, what do you already know? How does your own shape determine what you are able to see? In real life, if we do not wish to remain where we are, we must leave alone, heading toward some distant place. But how often do we encounter the opposite situation, where everyone else must leave, and only you are allowed to stay? When there is nothing left to search for, yet you feel that you are truly somewhere, somewhere that belongs to you.

The question Huang Chong-kai poses is not answered in his dialogue with the artists. Instead, the short story asks us once more:

❝Is there anything you would like to say to someone who has not yet arrived at this place?❞