Zhu Tian Wen is My Twin

A picture of a woman came up when I searched for Millennium Mambo, a movie I liked. I don't know why google decided to show this image. She is not the lead actress, instead, she is the writer. She looks nice and has a cute scarf. She is older than me, but I still thought we bore a little bit of a resemblance. This will be me in the future. I'd thought. And then another thought occurred: what did she look like before, in the past? This is where I made a fatal mistake. I went and found pictures of her in her 20s and 30s, and they look exactly like pictures of me in my 20s and 30s. It's like looking into a mirror. I look more like her than I do my own mother or grandmother at the same age. My mom even agreed. If you know me in real life (hi! I'm so happy to have you here! Please make yourself at home), I invite you to search up 朱天文 circa 1980 and, wonder how the heck did Moo time-travel to the 80s.

At first, I was happy. This is magical! It's like I have a twin sister that time-traveled! Or maybe I time-traveled? Zhu Tian Wen is a super talented writer! And I like to write, too! Maybe that means I can be talented, too! But then, I started to feel bad. I thought: How dare you compare yourself to Zhu Tian Wen? She's a legend in the writing world of Taiwan, and you're just Moo Meng struggling to barely put her life together in her apartment. Zhu and her sister are described as the Bronte sisters of Taiwan. And I'm... described as, according to more than one friend, “how are you still alive?”

me, or my career, crawling along the concrete floor

Aside from all of that, Zhu Tian Wen's career is a beautiful bird soaring in the sky along with Taiwan's economic growth in the 1980s and 90s and, my career is a snail crawling on the cement floor along with North America's never ending recession. I am many times less lucky, on that front. I don't know her deepest darkest secrets, but I sure do know mine. Oh heck, I'd made a pillow fort down in there and settled. Of course I'm going to lose in this crazy game of comparison, I'm just sending myself down a hole. “That's obsessive, you're being too obsessive.” Said Ian, who witnessed all this insanity go down. He's right. Why am I bullying myself like this? Geez, isn't there enough things in life to feel bad about already? Why am I doing this just because she looks like me? Why not just leave it as a positive thing? But I can't help it! You don't understand. This is what happens when you are a little neurotic, and you run into someone who looks just like you. Now imagine that person has roots from the place where you're from, and is a genius at the language you once started getting good at too, but then had to abandon because you left. Meanwhile, you're still struggling to cobble together a thing you call career.

my twin/her career, soaring in the sky

I also happen to just really like her work. At least, I think I do. Because I liked Ho Xiao Xien's Millennium Mambo and Café Lumière, which she wrote the screen play for. I found this out because I looked up her bio. And then I looked at it some more. I went and watched A Summer at Grandpa's, another movie they worked on, and loved that, too! There's a whole bunch of other movies done under the same collaboration and now I want to watch them all. This is creepy, you say? Well yes, my friend, I'd realized that. I feel like an absolute utter creep, thank you very much. I know far too much about Zhu Tian Wen. Too much, for someone who also looks exactly like her. It was cute for a bit and, now I'm veering off into evil twin territory. But it's too late. I'm too curious. She's too fascinating. I might as well dive into some of her written work, which is what she's known for in Taiwan. But they're all in mandarin and I can't read mandarin well enough to understand it. Which sends me down another shame spiral. Isn't this fun?

I would like to just, somehow deal with this better. I didn't know finding a twin from another time period would be this disorienting. I mean, why? How? Why do we look like each-other and why do we both like writing? I did more deep dives and listened to even more of her interviews. I find her incredibly fascinating and inspiring. It makes me want to look like her. And it cannot be a mere coincidence that her dad's family is from a place close to Shan Dong, my adopted grandpa's birth place, allegedly. Could we be literally related? Is my tendency toward writing related to hers? If we're not related... then, that's just, like, even more weird! Maybe there are hundreds and thousands of women out there, who all look like us. Do they all like writing, too? What if this lady just happens to be famous so I found her. What if my looks is actually super common, like one of those clay figurines someone had carved out of a mold, and there's a million other ones that are just the same?

Or worse. What if the universe went and screwed up and I'm a result of a parallel world that somehow made it into this world, where she already exists. What if, the Universe was drawing a picture and they did a stroke way too hard, and oops, now there's two of the same thing, except the first one was good enough already. And my existence is just some sort of echo of her life and, I have no real purpose at all?

Ugh. The past couple of days had been a bit of a spiral.

I have to remind myself that. Even if I were just a copy. These experiences I had in life were uniquely different. Even if Zhu Tian Wen is infinitely better than me at writing, the experiences that I have are still mine to write about. Heck, Zhu Tian Wen didn't discover a picture of me on the internet and start obsessing about that! I know that because I also creepily know that she doesn't use computers. She said so in multiple interviews.

I need to remind myself. My friends are still my friends, my family is still my family. My cats are still my cats. Even if I am the result of some kind of Universe's blip, my blip life is still worth living out, because at the very least, I matter to these people. If I'm a blip, are all those other people I know also blips? That's highly unlikely. And even if we are all blips, let us be happy blips! And geez, why be so mean to myself even in my own imagination? Why couldn't it have been something positive, the Universe made a person similar to Zhu Tian Wen, with a similar interest in writing, so she can be in the world 30 years later, telling her stories? The Universe could equally had been totally intelligent, instead of having gone and screwed up. I don't know. Zhu Tian Wen says, she believes the written word is her destiny, her calling, her duty for being here. Then, maybe in some way, it's also my duty to follow my creative impulses?

I might be one of a whole bunch

I still can't make out a convincing enough meaning out of all this. It's too big. There are too many possibilities. I think I see Zhu Tian Wen as a guide, I just want her to tell me what to do. But I know that's insane... Our resemblance is in all likelihood, just a mere coincidence. I don't know. But to think that there's someone out there, who looks like you and likes the same things you do but it means nothing, is insane, too! So, for the sake of my sanity, I will try to grab onto the positive things. At the very least, this all makes me feel a bit closer to the magic in the universe.