Keelung Is Built Uphill, in the Wet

Keelung has almost no flat ground. The houses climb the hills; the road starts to rise the moment it leaves the water; the arcades run on, one after another, taking the pedestrians and the damp in under the eaves together. The shape of the city is whatever the port and the mountains have left over between them. What you notice first is not a festival or a night market but the air of the harbour itself, which is wet, close, and — this is the surprising part — perfectly steady, the air of a place that has decided not to mind.

The Ghost Festival is what the city is known for elsewhere. In the seventh month the water lanterns are lit and set out on the tide, and the crowds come to watch them go. I have stood in that crowd. What I remember is not the lanterns but the interval afterward, the harbour taking back its darkness lantern by lantern, and the sense the whole port gives of living permanently at this range from the sea, from its dead, from the dark. By day there are boats, and wind, and a certain grey. After dark the lights come up, the heat lifts off the temple forecourts, the hill roads and the black water reclaim the light at the same moment, and the city shows a depth it keeps hidden in daylight. Nothing here shines dry. The brightness comes with damp in it, and with the smoke of people going on with their evening.

The past keeps to the ground too. The harbour made the town a place of passage; the hills folded it into the tight shape it wears now; migration and faith and a life spent partly at sea have set into a temper you cannot easily take apart. This is not a city arranged to be looked at. It is a working port that happens to be looked at. Weather has not smoothed it. Weather has deepened its lines.

You see it most plainly at the temple gate, late, where the soup is hot and the fried things are heavy and worth their weight on a wet night — the kind of eating a climate insists on rather than offers.

And when the rain has only just stopped, and the lights are still running up the slope, and neither the salt air nor the temple fires have gone anywhere, you understand the one plain fact the place has been making all along: to walk into Keelung is to walk uphill.