"Taipei" in this instance meaning Taipei City, not New Taipei City, which is where most people actually live but where few people seem to be from.
Person A worries about money a lot. Person A eats out often, but the food they eat isn't that good because the "really good food" is too expensive and they're trying to save money. There are a lot of fun things to do in Taipei, but Person A only takes part in a fraction of those things because a) they're expensive and b) they're too crowded for Person A's liking.
Person A would like to buy a house or apartment at some point in the future, but it's a daunting prospect. When Person A thinks about how long they'll be paying for a mortgage on that house or apartment, Person A becomes very, very depressed. The price of a house or apartment goes up all the time, and Person A isn't able to save much money. A loan? Sure, but an even greater burden later on.
Person A, provided they're of Chinese extraction, would like to get married "when the time is right." But sometimes it seems like the time is never going to be right, because the cost of living keeps going up and up, and there's more competition every day for the same jobs, in the same place, with the same responsibilities. Feathering a nest with someone means finding a secure tree, and secure trees are hard to find in Taipei.
Person A, if they live near their work, lives in a tiny apartment within reach of an MRT stop. Everywhere they go the hum of the MRT haunts their thoughts, and if you were to name any location in Taipei or New Taipei City they could tell you the distance from that place to the nearest MRT stop. They might have a scooter, but they often wonder if keeping this scooter is worth the time, money and effort involved. Every day, on the roads near their apartment building, the scooters seem to multiply, and finding a space between these scooters for one's own personal conveyance is becoming increasingly difficult.
Person A, if they live far from their work, lives in a larger but equally antiquated place in a part of New Taipei or Taoyuan that nobody's ever heard of. They might have space for a car, or there might be ample parking on a road near their house. Their drive to work entails endless mergers into terrifying traffic, and of course once they arrive at their job there looms (yet again) The Problem of Parking, present in any place that doesn't have its own lot for employees.
But sometimes, as Person A well knows, living in Taipei can feel like being in the center of a vast, interesting web of trains, taxis, scooters, pedestrians, prostitutes, shipping containers, tourists, children on their way to school, poorly organized gangsters, temple festivals, international events and grimly contested politics. Person A turns on the news and sees his or her city all over the television. Person A opens a newspaper and never has to look for local coverage. Person A can stand in the Taipei Main Station and feel the whole city pulsing with life and industry, endlessly intent on itself and needing no one's approval.
Those are good times for Person A. And there's also the warmth of being tucked into some tiny restaurant on a winter's day, or being in a car full of friends, with the city lights scrolling over the glossy surfaces of cars. For all the fearful anonymity of the city comes a freedom, and a knowledge that for every failed friendship and love affair there will be another, and another, and another after that.
Planes soar over the city blocks in the summer, and all of those planes are bound for Taipei, where everything worth doing is done.
Let's say that Person B lives far from Taipei. Perhaps they live in a bigger city like Taichung, Tainan or Kaohsiung. Perhaps they live in a still smaller city, or even a place that's not a city, but instead a municipality, township or village. They work a job very similar to what Person A does in Taipei, but their job is slightly less impressive, less tinged with the prestige that Taipei imparts to its places of employment. They make less money that Person A, but they also pay slightly less for everything.
Person B, if they live in one of the bigger cities mentioned above, also worries about money. They want to invest in property, but the challenge represented by down payments causes them no small amount of worry. They haven't saved much money because they've disposed of most of their disposable income. They spend most weekends in almost vacant bars and in the newest, most fashionable restaurants. They don't bother with the fact that many of these newer, more fashionable restaurants are almost identical to the older, less fashionable restaurants they visited six months to a year before. In Person B's thinking six months to a year might as well be a hundred years ago, so intent are they on novelty.
Person B, if they are Taiwanese, goes home to visit family in some still more rural place every weekend. Their family, who for the most part live in dusty brick and concrete houses squirreled away between pesticide-saturated fields and semi-industrial zones, have great plans for their son or daughter's marriage, and these plans will be carried out regardless of Person B's opinions on the matter.
If Person B is a foreigner, an expat, or more specifically a laowai, they will spend a lot of time fretting over whether the place they live in is "real enough," and whether they are living up to their full potential by living there. Between working hours they'll cruise the internet and think of all the possibilities life in another, still more exotic place might hold. They'll remember their initial enthusiasm for the place they live in now, and wonder why, over time, every place becomes equivalently gray and uninspiring.
Person B has an easy commute to work. Unless perhaps they rage against the machine, and are thus too good for more densely populated areas. Person B will have a scooter and maybe even a car, and Person B will never have too much trouble finding a place to park their vehicles. There will be traffic, yes, but over time Person B will find ways around it.
Trains pass through the city/town/village where Person B lives every few minutes without fail. All of these trains are bound for other, seemingly more interesting locations. Every Saturday these trains will embark with a sense of anticipation, every Sunday they'll arrive bearing weary travelers, locals beaten down by competing senses of satisfaction and discontent. Some of the trains that pass through some of those places are returning from Taipei even now.
In the end maybe it doesn't matter where you live, but rather the person that you are.
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