GRAIN

Taipei announces its contradictions before you can name them. A café playlist slides from Mandopop ballads to Japanese city pop to a track that could’ve been mixed in a Brooklyn basement last week. A poster advertises a Scandinavian design exhibition. Outside, a Tang Dynasty temple, a 7-Eleven, a French bakery, and a glass tower that could belong to Singapore, Seoul, or any city where capital moves efficiently.

It’s the kind of landscape that shouldn’t cohere, but somehow does.

Ask people here whether they feel Chinese or Taiwanese and you’ll get answers that refuse to stay still. “It depends who’s asking.” “Sometimes both.” “Sometimes neither.” Taipei lives in a permanent state of suspended definition. For seventy-five years, it has existed in a diplomatic grey zone: democratic institutions, its own currency, a military, universal healthcare, one of Asia’s most sophisticated tech economies, and yet, most of the world avoids acknowledging its sovereignty. It is a nation both affirmed and denied. Schrödinger’s statehood: alive and dead, Chinese and not-Chinese, real and theoretical.

I first came here twenty years ago to perform at the National Theater. I was too young, then, for the city’s contradictions to register. Returning now, I found myself preoccupied with a question I hadn’t known to ask: How does a place function, thrive even, when its very existence remains unresolved?

What emerged wasn’t chaos, but something more deliberate: a city that has turned suspension into a working method.

The Absurdity of It

Every Taiwanese passport holder knows the ritual at foreign immigration counters. “Taiwan? You mean Chinese Taipei? Or the Republic of China?” The correct answer depends on the agency, the sport, the treaty, or the geopolitical mood of the week. Identity as administrative improvisation.

Even the street names are artifacts of longing. I’m staying in Zhongzheng District. Nearby are Nanjing Road, Chengdu Street, Guilin Road, all cities on the Chinese mainland, memorialized by the Kuomintang government that fled here in 1949, expecting a brief exile before reclaiming the mainland. Three generations later, most Taipei residents have never visited the places their streets commemorate. Nostalgia as municipal ordinance.

And beneath it all, an unspoken question: When will China invade? Not if, when.

The threat is ever-present and rarely remarked upon. Suspension here does not mean paralysis. It means proceeding without resolution.

The urban form mirrors psychology. Walk a single block and you’ll see five different Taipeis: Japanese-era wooden houses beside concrete mid-rise apartments beside mirrored tech towers beside temples trailing incense smoke. It shouldn’t work, yet the city absorbs contradiction without flinching. Coherence emerges not from uniformity, but from a collective ability to hold tension.

What Holds It Together

I kept circling a psychological analogy. Jung wrote about the difference between the Persona, the mask we show the world, and the Self, the full, contradictory totality beneath it.

The Persona is the professional face, the socially legible version that moves through airports, meetings, and small talk. Necessary, functional, incomplete.

The Self is everything else: the parts that contradict, the ambitions that don’t fit the narrative, the insecurities we’d prefer to disown.

Many of us spend our lives trying to collapse these into a single identity. We call it authenticity. We imagine that integration is the goal.

But Taipei suggests another possibility: coherence doesn’t require collapse. It requires architecture.

I thought about my own earlier life in the studio. There was the performer who could walk onstage, delivering under scrutiny. And there was the quieter version, shy, self-conscious, occasionally overwhelmed by being seen. For years, I believed the confident version had to win. I thought wholeness meant eliminating the parts that didn’t match the story.

What if it doesn’t? What if you simply need distinct structures for distinct selves? Taipei has been living with that question for seven decades.

What Taipei Showed Me

1. You can operate without resolving the question

I once assumed clarity had to precede action, that you figure yourself out first, then build your life. But Taipei disproves this. It has no settled identity: Chinese province? Independent nation? Something in between? The ambiguity is structural, yet the systems function.

Identity isn’t something you have and then express; it is created through repeated acts. Taiwan performs statehood through elections, passports, treaties, civic rituals. Through repetition, an identity emerges, because the acts constitute it.

Clarity is not the prerequisite. Practice is.

2. Stop collapsing into a single story

The pressure to be consistent across all contexts is exhausting. Taipei refuses that demand. It holds Chinese heritage without being Chinese, Japanese influence without being Japanese, Western aesthetics without being Western. Coexistence is the point.

The people who seem most at ease aren’t the ones who’ve chosen a single identity, but those who’ve expanded their capacity to hold several.

I began to see my own life differently: the performer, the consultant, the person who watches bad TV, the one who overthinks in the early hours. I kept searching for the narrative thread that would unify them. But maybe the coherence isn’t narrative at all, maybe it’s structural.

Not performing consistency. Building the container that allows multiplicity.

3. Build the container, not the answer

Often in our culture there is a push to resolve who we are before building the structures to support that identity. Taipei suggests the opposite: build the architecture first; let the identity emerge inside it.

What that requires:

• Decision frameworks that hold regardless of mood

• Operating principles that transcend self-doubt

• Boundaries that maintain coherence

• Rhythms that support transitions

• Systems strong enough to hold contradiction

No answers. Architecture.

The question of identity can remain open. The container must be the thing that is strong.

What’s Hard About This

Holding multiple truths without resolution is uncomfortable. Ambiguity is tiring. There are days when the uncertainty feels like too much, when I want the questions answered simply so life can proceed cleanly. But then I walk outside and the city reminds me: life proceeds anyway.

The risk is collapse, into avoidance, performance, or premature certainty. The alternative is what Taipei models: keep building, keep moving, keep creating systems that work even when the narrative doesn’t.

The tension won’t disappear.

The question is whether something beautiful can be constructed while holding it.