Early Vignette
This is a little vignette I wrote for the preface of my dissertation. Any comments?
Nestled in a quiet residential neighborhood on the slopes behind Kyoto’s famed Golden Temple lies the East Asia Center. From the front it appears to be just another small house on the block, but as you approach the doorway, a hand-painted turquoise sign reading Friends World College suggests a much different reality inside. Sliding open the front door reveals a dozen pairs of shoes scattered on the concrete below a wooden rack of mailboxes, each labeled with a different name in black felt tip. The faint smell of moldy tatami and old books arises as you enter. You take off your shoes and step up onto the creaky wooden floor, which gives slightly under your weight, leaving the immediate impression that this house is ‘used’. Indeed, a quick glance into the room on your left reveals a well-scratched coffee table next to a worn-out couch, upon which rests a laptop covered in duct tape, a coffee-stained copy of the Kansai Time Out, and the remains of someone’s snack from the night before. A mangy black cat sits drooling in the corner under a faded Buddhist tankha hanging neatly on the wall. Following the sound of muffled voices takes you past a brightly lit kitchen/office and up a steep flight of stairs, each step so narrow that it forces you to lift your heel and walk on the balls of your toes. At the top you are greeted by a large black and white print of an indigenous Lao woman on the wall and a traditional Japanese sliding door on the right, behind which come the sounds of laughter and awkwardly spoken Japanese. Quietly you turn to your left and navigate your way past several overflowing bookshelves to another set of partially open sliding doors guarding the computer room. Peering in, you see a whole row of boxy Power Macs from the mid-nineties perched atop a long rickety folding table whose front panel is peeling off. A young woman sits listening to an MP3 while peering intently into her newly purchased Power Book, for which she has created space by pushing back one of the heavy monitors and setting its grimy keyboard on top. Curiously, she has unplugged the blue LAN cable from the back of the old desktop and has inserted it into own shiny device, happily rendering the aging monstrosity temporarily out of service. Noticing your presence, she turns her head, gives you a warm smile, looks you in the eye, and gestures to the computers, “Hey, know any museums that might want these?”