❝Objects often outlive people, if you care for them. So if an owner lives long enough, they will eventually understand that they are merely keeping the object for its next owner. Owner? That might be the wrong word. Servant to the object is more fitting. In that sense, the object is the true master.❞

When we speak of “the most ornate writing of the last century,” we are referring to a once popular literary style. Through this technique, authors deliberately rendered a sensibility of Taiwan, a landscape of Taiwan that once existed within their consciousness. Beneath it lay a premonition of fear born from attachment to objects: a fear that those scenes, casually encountered at street corners, would one day disappear. They had to be preserved through a surrogate aesthetic of language, wrapped in intricate filters. Because the filter was, in fact, the eye of the era.

At the time, people believed that writing possessed a magical power to preserve what had never been seen. It was not about representation, but about recreation. The force of narrative driven by market demand had not yet emerged. Prose unfolded in a flowing, almost diaristic manner, like silkworms spinning threads across a flat surface. The reader, gathering those threads, relied entirely on intellectual appetite to move forward, to construct meaning. It was the era of flat composition in Taiwanese fiction. Every corner of the canvas competed for attention, striving to be seen. Yet what, ultimately, was the subject of the painting?

Because of this attachment to objects, works of science fiction did not derive their essence from science itself. Instead, they imagined futures where treasures were still salvaged from ruins. Because of this attachment, time in these stories did not alter one’s love for objects, but rather transformed the very form of the museum. Because of this attachment, yet not quite an attachment to people, these works ventured into experimental territory, envisioning a life designed for “those who have been cut off.”

There is always a period in life when, under a certain kind of anxiety, we begin to wonder whether we might spend it alone.

In the process of believing this may not be the case, while searching for a way out of seeming dead ends, we begin to ask what possibilities remain for those who, for various reasons, did not choose the path of family. It is a rare form of empathy. In such moments, we are able to imagine that the “homeless” might one day be ourselves. If that were true, would we be capable of living well?

Thus, the story omits the reasons why the protagonist chose to cryogenically freeze himself, and speaks only of the world he awakens to, and the life that follows.

At this point, he is entirely alone. He must attempt to understand this brave new world using the language of the previous century, and learn to live alongside strangers he encounters by chance. It is as if he has traveled to a distant land and must begin again. A body that has not aged, paired with a mind that no longer fits its time, finds its rightful place in literature. We live in the present, and yet we do not have to live within it.

Like all science fiction, which invites us into a parallel future, we come to realize this: we should preserve ourselves the way we preserve the things we love. Because just as we possess an object, we also temporarily possess ourselves. This world, this entire city, is becoming a museum in which I am placed. The author curates this exhibition, casting it in the tones of “scorching heat,” and poses a question: can the burning warmth of the sun withstand what seems like eternal sorrow?

❝These are fragments of the emotional ground tone of your love and resentment toward my city. In your lifetime, you will never again have the time to live this long in another city.❞