by Ligo Su
Transitional lenses framed by tortoiseshell. Softened Aegean blaze. Crimson Victorinox multi-tool. Travel mate since boyhood. Squared ochre umbrella named Kafka. A touch of metamorphosis. Numerous pens and various ID cards. My tears, my losses, and my memories. This is not Marcel Proust on his death bed conjuring. Nor some cheesy poetry. This is the list of items I lost on the campus of National Taiwan University with my mental entries interwoven. And I doubt there is an end to this list. Perhaps you would like to accuse me of something you are not: carelessness, forgetfulness, absentmindedness. Come on, save some syllables for yourself. We all leave things behind. We never get to mourn for the end of our eraser. We run out of paper clips pretty quickly. Umbrellas? Don’t tell me you only buy new ones at the kiosk for unexpected showers. Old umbrellas piled on the stand when the skies are sunny explain the universal truth you don’t want to admit: in life we all lose things. Only that some people lose bigger things too often and they sigh when reminiscing. Like me. However, we always want to retrieve what belongs to us. As a “superannuated” student with five years’ experience, I am more than able to tell you how challenging it is to find your lost things at NTU. You leave your MP3 at the computer center, for example. The next student at your PC might be benevolent enough to hand it in to the counter. In a less lucky case, it could be flung into the box at the end of the corridor for “open” retrieval. You may just be the finder, who knows. However, chances might be you end up questioning the staff for a record of what had happened around your PC after you left. After filing your case at the police station you might be told that the video tapes were “lost” or the picture resolution is “too unsatisfactory” for identifying the “taker.” In the following months your eyes bulge out every time you see someone holding a similar MP3 on campus. To make life easier, you convince yourself that it’s lost and no one is listening to the newest singles you downloaded from iTunes. Then you grudge having to pay for a new one, hoping it won’t remind you of the old. That’s exactly what happened to my sunglasses. Things look even gloomier if your story happens in a classroom building. According to our cleaning staff, emptied wallets are often found at the back of classrooms. Electronic dictionaries, cell-phones, and even laptops might disappear right after you forget their desirability and leave for the toilet, a cigarette, or your next class without them. As the line between stealing and finding blurs, it seems that on campus we have too many “finders” who see themselves as keepers and leave us to be weepers. They are the real losers, I assure you. But can we blame them for our misery? What do we do when we see an exquisite pen left in the drawer or when we spot a valuable watch under a chair? Could you imagine that the loose leaves to be recycled by the janitor could weigh more than your Norton Anthology to someone else? What are we supposed to do around campus as “finders”? At a university which claims to be one of the world’s best, we are embarrassed to admit that we lack a centralized system for lost and found. The only related unit is supervised by Mr. Chang Yifang at the office of student affairs. Mr. Chang has a desk of regular size but he has to keep all the items found across campus: keys, textbooks, ID cards, even sneakers. People come in to leave contact information and item descriptions if they lose something. Ideally Mr. Chang will match the found items with the report entry every day. However, not all finders know his unit and the lost list is three times longer than the found one. Mr. Chang said last year he suggested that the university establish another unit for lost and found since most lost items don’t belong to students or even NTU members. However, the office of general affairs dodged this quest. They quoted a law professor who asserted we had “no legal right to keep such items.” They claimed that only police offices can legally manage them. So Mr. Chang and his unit continue to operate underground. So goes the sad story of our lost things. We never know whether they will be found. When I glanced through Mr. Chang’s “losers’ book,” I saw two of my entries. A pair of miu miu sunglasses, tortoiseshell, with transitional lenses of army green from Zeiss, lost in the computer center, PC 28 room 107; a crimson Victorinox multi-tool with its toothpick refitted as a pen, lost in the Gongtong Building Room 401. Those two items remind me of all the days and places I traveled with them and how I lost so many other meaningful things on campus. No tears now, I told myself. Enough time has already been lost with “old woes” and “new wail” as our Bard chanted. I readjusted the nearly identical pair of glasses on my nose, thanking Mr. Chang for his time, both the time he spent on my whining interview and on our lost belongings. Now I could only wish we who “summon up the remembrance of things past” after reading this sad story will always find “all losses are restored” and “sorrows end.” At least you can never lose Shakespeare’s sonnets on campus or anywhere else. And that is real poetry. a
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The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
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