Old friend Simon from SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) days went travelling in the East after he graduated. Those were the days when people would take off and travel around the world, then come back and start looking for a job.
I’d asked him to look up my old friend Daniel when he got to Taipei. Simon got on the bus to Daniel’s place — very brave for an Englishman with no Chinese.
The bus in question is visually presented on the front as 0 南 and 0 北, said aloud as líng nán (“zero south”) and líng běi (“zero north”). The 0 is not zero but represents a circular route, rather like the Circle line on London’s Tube, with the “north” and “south” indicating the direction: clockwise or anti-clockwise.
When he got back and told me about it, Simon said he thought it was “the bus that goes nowhere”.
I had visions of this non-Chinese-speaking foreigner getting on, happily letting the bus that was going nowhere take him to nowhere. Haha.
Can this count as sort of Kafkaesque?
Googling produces this:
Quote
…the word Kafkaesque is often applied to bizarre and impersonal administrative situations where the individual feels powerless to understand or control what is happening.
Unquote
(Taipei, 1980/1)
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