This week, quite a few things moved forward in tandem. I used up the allowances on four Claude and OpenAI accounts altogether, then suddenly found myself a little lost.
Everything had been started, yet not one thing had truly reached an end. I seemed to be forever stranded halfway.
Today, at last, I also reviewed a little Japanese.
For reasons I cannot explain, I have always had conflicting feelings about Japanese, as though Gemini had given me two voices inside one mind.
At times, learning the language feels delightful and full of challenge. At others, it makes me restless, unable to summon the slightest enthusiasm.
I have always felt the same division in my response to Japan itself.
I love its surroundings, culture, and aesthetics. Yet the few times I have worked with Japanese colleagues have also left me less than eager to work with Japanese people.
That is why I am looking forward to these three months in Japan. I hope the experience will help me understand more clearly what distance I need to keep once I am truly living there, and where I will feel most at ease.
More than twenty years ago, before I had ever lived abroad, I too wondered and imagined what it would be like to make a life alone in another country. What would I do if a class was taught in a foreign language I barely knew and I understood nothing at all?
Back then, our messaging services were MSN and QQ. Later, when Skype appeared, I would use it to talk with older schoolmates studying overseas and ask them what being abroad really felt like. Did they truly miss home? Were they really lonely?
A “feeling” is an atmosphere that resists being made concrete in speech, one that language can rarely describe with any precision. At the time, their accounts gave me little in the way of substantial insight.
Only after I began living in Germany did I find an answer to the question of how life there differed from life in Taiwan. The first thought that comes to mind is this: Germany is quiet.
So quiet that there is an abundance of time and space that genuinely belongs to you.
That sense of emptiness is entirely different from the inner hollowness I felt inside the urban cage of Taiwan.
Germany’s spaciousness and silence seem to empty out even the physical world around you.
As my years in Germany accumulated, I gradually began to understand why hearing other people describe life abroad can only help so much. Or, to put it more precisely:
What helps are concrete, practical measures: what to pack, useful knowledge and small tricks of daily life, how to manage administrative procedures. Gathering the experience of those who came before can greatly reduce the number of traps one falls into.
Yet what life in another country actually “feels” like is something only the person drinking the water can know, whether it is warm or cold.
We each have a different temperament, different encounters, and different circumstances. Fate arranges a different path for every one of us. To know what that “feeling” will be, there is no substitute for living it yourself.
What each person later decides was good or bad about the experience is subjective as well. It cannot serve as an absolute measure.
If every account is only a sample for reference, there is no point thinking it to death. Just go.
When one lives abroad, “integration” is a subject that returns again and again.
Since the refugee crisis in particular, the question of whether newcomers can integrate into the values, daily life, and culture of the society around them has been argued with extraordinary intensity.
Over the past few days, I listened to several speeches by leaders and legislators of Germany’s AfD, discussing their ideas and proposals concerning “remigration” and cultural integration.
To be honest, I came away uncomfortable. I also understand that, at least in the rhetoric I heard, Muslim communities were repeatedly placed at the centre. Islam and Christianity spring from the same roots, yet their later development took them in radically different directions; both traditions also contain exclusionary extremes within them.
Between Elon Musk’s public support for the AfD and the party’s own positions, I kept hearing appeals to “save Germany”, preserve cultural integrity, and defend German and Western traditions profoundly shaped by Christianity. When those appeals are set beside the claim that people deemed unable to integrate should be repatriated, what I hear is an unsettling logic: any person or idea judged destructive to traditional Western values might be drawn into the circle of exclusion.
For someone like me, born of an Eastern civilisation, such language lands with unusual sharpness.
I do not personally share Christian belief. Yet I do not oppose the modern Western cultural values that developed, step by step, upon foundations shaped by Christianity. Many of those values, after all, emerged only through a long history of religious reform and intellectual challenge.
As someone without a clearly defined religion, I have always believed that faith is a matter between an individual and God, or whatever spirits they recognise. I will enter a church; I will also enter a temple or a shrine. But I do not believe in a single true God. Does someone like me count as successfully integrated into a society whose civilisation is rooted in Christianity?
I obey the laws of the country in which I live, even when certain provisions remain debatable from another culture’s point of view, and even when I do not necessarily agree with them. Still, I cannot help wondering: if German society were one day to exclude the Muslim communities most often treated as a thorn in its side, would another group then be the next to be judged “incompatible”?
Japanese society, too, is often described as closed and exclusionary. I wonder how it would regard a foreigner who follows the rules but has no intention of becoming part of it.
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