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One bright January morning, Nientzu slips into her climbing shoes and stares at the skyscraper before her.
It’s tall.
Obviously.
Pin the blame on her exceptional way with words, but it has to be said. Hell, it was even the tallest in the world at one point, until the Burj Khalifa came along, and now these days it isn’t even in the top ten.
Those are moot points. As the wisdom goes, size isn’t everything. Nientzu tells herself this joke and its variations while she adjusts the chalk bag tied around her waist. The real point is in the knowing, after all, and she knows this skyscraper well — its blue-gray sheen, its boxy and serrated silhouette. It was a constant presence on the skyline she once called home, and only slightly less so on the postcards she’d get when she’d been away a little too long.
It should be a friendly sight, even a reassuring one. Today, all Nientzu sees is an ultimatum. This skyscraper stands to remind her of everything she is and has to prove.
Just her and the challenge, now. Her, and the climb.
But she’s not alone, not really. There are reporters on the ground and a crowd filling out the streets. There’s a team of forecasters checking the weather — no strong winds, they assure her. No storms, no rain. And most importantly, no earthquakes.
All that, because it’s hard enough to scale over five hundred vertical meters with nothing but the strength of her own limbs. Nientzu doesn’t need the wrong gust or tremor to make it any harder. And, though she’s not one to get ahead of herself, she’s got a hunch that everyone watching, from the pavement, from over the air, might agree.
There’s a ten-second delay built into the livestream, anyway. If she falls, the cameras will be cut long before she hits the ground.
She approaches and rests her palms against the first beam. Metal, warm under the sun. Dry, too, after yesterday’s rain. With every hand she places, she is doing so out of equal parts reverence and defiance.
A cheer comes up from the crowd, but she doesn’t let herself hear it.
Nientzu braces her foot on the corner of the building, and begins to climb.
FLOORS 1-8. ELAPSED TIME, 00:00:00-00:04:59.
The Taipei 101 is, as the name suggests, a hundred and one stories of offices, malls, observation decks, glass and steel. Nientzu’s been inside more than once and then some. The first time as a kid, with her family to celebrate her dad’s promotion. The few after that, for the shopping, or just for shits and giggles. At one point she got really into collecting merchandise of the tower’s Damper Baby mascots, and then years back she sold the entire lot for just shy of eight thousand NTD, only keeping a set of rubber magnets because, so sue her, she gets sentimental, too.
She remembers pulling those magnets off the fridge, one by one, the day she packed up and moved out of that Tokyo apartment. It was only seven months ago. Not much to be done, yet, in the way of forgetting.
The first part of the climb itself is simple enough. Window ledges of identical distance, up and up and up. It’s one big angled-in slab as well, which is nice. When she gets to the affectionately-known “bamboo boxes”, she won’t be able to say the same.
It’s always easy, at first. It’s the rest of it that does the wearing down, the stamina that makes the difference between letting go and working hard enough to make it click.
Though, if Nientzu is being honest, the hardest part is already over. She might have only started her climb a few minutes ago, but in reality, the process of scaling the Taipei 101 began a long, long time ago.
It was pitching and paperwork and never-ending formality. It was training, wringing herself out alone for years on end, then landing on the runway to the flash of a hundred camera bulbs. Interviews, articles, scripted TV segments. And before she could even get within sneezing distance of the building, the last hoop to jump through was a blessing. She stood outside the 101 with its chairwoman, then pressed a stick of incense between her hands and prayed.
Nientzu doesn’t believe in that sort of thing, honestly, but it’s the thought that counts.
She’s climbed far enough to get to the bottom of the first jú’ì — a symbol of good fortune and wishes come true, modernized and made large on every corner of Taipei 101’s base. People get nervous, because it’s an obstacle. Because it could mean the difference between triumph and oops, oh no, splat.
Not to worry. Nientzu hauls herself around and over. She pauses to wave at the crowd, maybe spark a few passionate heart attacks, and then continues on her way.
FLOORS 9-18. ELAPSED TIME, 00:05:00-00:10:48.
The whole world is watching, Nientzu knows.
Well, not literally. Her head isn’t quite that big. In that sense, it’s just the folks packed into a neat square across the street and anyone else tuned in online. That’s still no small feat — nothing is, where Netflix is involved — but what drives her to scramble up the side of skyscraper without so much as a rope goes far beyond a viewcount.
It’s on a completely different scale, beyond numbers, beyond fame. It exists as the line between threat and reminder, made behind handshakes and pearly smiles: The whole world is watching.
Today, someone in Serang, Indonesia thought about the Taipei 101 for the first time. Tomorrow, someone on the coast of Labrador will learn about the island nation of Taiwan. Weeks later, months, years, whatever, people will search up Nientzu’s name and any number of her idiotic stunts and discover something new, taking a population of twenty-four million one step closer to solidifying a place in a consciousness and a name on a map.
She’s sponsored by the Tourism Administration, by the way. She’s out here acting on her best behavior.
The thing is that she really does want this, even when she knows it’s unfair-slash-upsetting to have such greatness demanded of her. She does want to be part of the exceptional, and the lauded. She does want to be pride of the people — even if just for a little bit.
And, if she really does pull it off, then maybe this will earn some breathing room for all the not-so-exceptional ones who have the heat turned on them nonetheless.
There’s no guarantee, that said. In Nientzu’s experience, expectations beget expectations. They stack and multiply until fulfillment is an impossible dream, and that’s when it all comes toppling down.
The second jú’ì. Trickier than the first, but only just. Nientzu scales this one, too, and keeps going up.
FLOORS 19-26. ELAPSED TIME, 00:10:49-00:16:21.
What Nientzu likes about climbing is the puzzle. She’s got two arms, two legs, one strong core — and between them, infinite combinations of movements to help make the imagined real, and forge her way to the top.
What Nientzu hates about relationships is the puzzle. She’s one person. So’s the other. How much possibility is there in that?
For three, going on four years, Nientzu dated Kotone — not a climber, and not much for puzzles, either. Nientzu would have done anything for her, and did. She smiled for her, stopped being so intense for her. Moved to Japan for her. Cleaned up her act for her.
It wasn’t enough, in the end, because the one thing Nientzu wouldn’t do was stop climbing without a rope.
“Why don’t you get it?” went Kotone, in one conversation of many. She was close to tears, trembling and pretending not to be. “Don’t you realize how selfish this is?”
“I’m good,” Nientzu would say. And she meant at climbing, but it only came out like a refusal. “Don’t you trust me?”
“It’s not about trust, and it’s not about skill. Because — it’s not a question of if, but when.” Kotone turned for the door. “You’re putting yourself in danger when there are people who love you. And that’s not okay with me.”
Nientzu still remembers the smell of Kotone’s shampoo. Some kind of citrus grove, sharp and fragrant with a hint of rain, and to this day she has yet to get it out of her pillowcase.
Up here, the wind doesn’t smell like anything at all.
FLOORS 27-34. ELAPSED TIME, 00:16:22-00:21:57.
After the base of the Taipei 101 comes its series of bamboo boxes. Eight sections of eight floors each, meant to resemble pagoda tiers, stacks of ingots, and yes, the segments on a stalk of bamboo.
To Nientzu, they more or less resemble a pain in the ass.
For a while now, the pattern has been two short windows, followed by one long. To traverse the longer distance, Nientzu has to use one foot and then the other to smear herself upwards, trusting that her grip will find purchase on the waiting ledge. There’s always a brief feeling of weightlessness in the space between the push and the grab. Unnerving, perhaps, but the physics come down to a no-nonsense equation.
Rubber sole versus slick glass equals the outcome of the day. It’s a game of friction, pressure, and how much dissatisfaction something can or can’t take.
When it comes to those, sure enough — Nientzu knows a thing or two.
She’s always liked to test her luck, even in the face of an unquestionably good thing, and it’d take less time to count the relationships she’s managed to keep than all the ones she’s left splintered in her wake. Sometimes it was as small as a text, unread for the better part of a day. Sometimes is was big as refusing to make a promise on life, hers or anyone else’s.
It’s just that anyone could die at any time. Uncomfortable, for some, but true, and it is that same truth which Nientzu has always subscribed to. So if it’s between plummeting from a heroic climb and getting hit-and-run at the intersection of Tonghua and Linjiang, then why not, she’ll take the one that’ll make a better movie.
She wonders who would play her in a movie. She hopes it’s Vivian Sung.
Nientzu is almost past this bamboo box, full steam ahead. But guarding each top corner of the boxes is a “dragon”, or a metal abstraction of one, and the fact that they invoke temple carvings, oh-so-elegantly fusing innovation with storied history, doesn’t make them any easier to climb.
It’s alright. She’s planned for this. Despite appearances, Nientzu is capable of handling the approach with caution, and so she shuffles along the wall until she hits the lower part of the dragon. The crowd draws collective breath as she walks herself along the semicircle formation and swings one leg up to where her foot finds its hold. From there it’s another boost, toe against flat steel sheet, and finally she gets one box down, with seven more to go.
The audience bursts into premature celebration. Nientzu bows and waves and grins. And to them, she almost wants to ask the rhetorical — come on, what did she say before?
That’s right, friction. Nothing more complicated than that.
FLOORS 35-42. ELAPSED TIME, 00:21:58-00:28:09.
In any case, it’s good to be home, Nientzu figures, though she gets the feeling that this isn’t anyone else’s first choice in how to do it.
She’s spent the last good chunk of her life being a globe-trotting weirdo with a larger-than-life personality. She’s slept in vans and on couches and very rarely hotels, though only when she could get sponsors to cover the cost. If she wasn’t on the road, she was in the gym. And if it could be climbed, there she was, with little more than the clothes on her back and a camera in her face — Look Ma, no hands! Then when those stints of adventure were all said and done, right onto a plane and back to Tokyo she went.
Nientzu really did like Japan, honest. The bustle was killer but it wasn’t hard to understand. Better yet, the apartment she shared with Kotone was a six-minute walk from the station, and the station could take her nearly anywhere she wanted to go. Even on her off days she was always in motion. She couldn’t be stopped, and it was fun right up until it was the thing that did her in.
Metaphorically, of course. Whether or not Kotone will be proven right, and whether or not this same thing will also do her in physically, materially, corporeally, remains to be seen.
Nientzu hooks her heel around one of the beams and pauses to grab a fistful of chalk from her bag. Down below, Taipei waits.
They’ve wanted her back for a very long time, Nientzu thinks. Her parents, certainly, but everyone else, too. The buddies at her old climbing gym. The retirees at the public park. The bus drivers, the scooter-commuters. The auntie and her kids working the grass jelly stall.
There’s a hope there that would persist even if she weren’t around, but it’s easier to keep fighting when there’s someone to look up to — metaphorically, of course, and physically. Materially, and corporeally.
She’s the girl on top of the world. They’re the ones who need that to stay true. Why bother with a rope when climbing, then, when she carries more than enough wherever she goes?
Nientzu crests another box and doesn’t look back because, when it comes to fears, dragons aren’t one of them.
FLOORS 43-50. ELAPSED TIME, 00:28:10-00:35:01.
There are people in the windows.
Well, put another drop in the bucket of obvious thoughts. There always would have been, because they live in the kind of economy that asks people to clock in on beautiful gorgeous Sundays of all things, but Nientzu means people, up from their office chairs and on their feet, pressed up against the glass, waving phones, waving hands, waving flags.
Nientzu waves back, poses for a few snaps. She’s a natural like that. She keeps climbing.
Admittedly, it would be pretty bad if she fell to her death moments after hamming it up for a fan, but she’ll just have to make sure that never happens.
She’s always liked the attention. It’s not the only thing that gets her out of bed in the morning, but she can’t lie. It’s great — and, unfortunately, just another thing Kotone couldn’t stand.
“Aw,” Nientzu liked to say, still half-waving to a group of onlookers, “you know I don’t mean anything by it. Don’t be jealous.”
“I’m not jealous.” Kotone hated that word, too. “Can’t you take anything seriously? That’s not the reason I’m mad, and you know it.”
Yes, because Kotone wanted Nientzu to “stay focused”. To “minimize distractions”, and “not die”.
“Come on.” That kind of sentiment made Nientzu chafe and she had no desire to figure out why. “It’s part of the job, that’s all.”
On floor 49, a serendipitous breeze catches the edge of Nientzu’s shirt. It lifts the fabric away from her stomach and throws it in her face. An inconvenience, at least on her end, but through the window the entire office screams in delight.
Yeah, yeah, the abs. They’re rock-hard and they glisten. Nientzu makes good on her promise, and pulls herself over the ledge.
FLOORS 51-58. ELAPSED TIME, 00:35:02-00:42:59.
It’s always partway through the climb that Nientzu starts getting the funniest thoughts. She’s heard other climbers laugh about the same thing — must be the thinner air, or so it goes. It doesn’t sound very scientific, but she’s one to talk.
So Nientzu’s already gone up half the tower when she realizes that she would have liked to show Kotone around Taipei, just once. The rest of the country, too, if they’d had time, but in Nientzu’s heart there will never be a more beautiful city than the one where she grew up.
It’s strange, the particulars of having a hometown, and stranger still to come back to it a hero. Kotone never would have understood. They lived in her stomping grounds and, until it went awry, had no plans to leave.
Part of it was that there was more than plenty of Tokyo for them to see together. The utter sprawl, the minutiae of each and every ward. One of Nientzu’s favorites was Ginza, to which Kotone rolled her eyes and said she was only able to think as much because they weren’t living there, paying the rent. Nientzu would stick out her tongue and cite the seven-story Muji flagship instead.
The other part of it was that Nientzu was already used to being away from home. Kotone, on the contrary, just wasn’t.
But say, for the sake of the argument, that Nientzu actually had been able to convince Kotone to visit, and that they’d gotten that perfect chance. Say Kotone really did learn about exactly who Nientzu is and what made her.
Maybe there would have been a future in which it worked out, is all Nientzu hazards to think. Not like this, where Kotone will never feel this sun, see these streets. Where she’ll never know the victorious pop of a night-market balloon, or the muggy sleeplessness of being woken by a spotted dove’s calls and coos.
No, Kotone will only know Nientzu through the imperfection she’s been shown. Egotism and recklessness — some paragon she is.
There’s really so much more than that, Nientzu wants to tell her, but it’s too little, too late.
Nientzu will never have that forgiveness, and Kotone will never know the snap of a Black Bridge pork sausage between her teeth, a slice of raw garlic layered to cut the sting.
FLOORS 59-66. ELAPSED TIME, 00:43:00-00:50:10.
Speaking of funny thoughts — Nientzu starts to get the feeling that she might be, in the most straightforward way of putting it, tired.
Not exhausted-tired. Just tired-tired.
She might be a strong climber, but she’s only human, after all.
Nothing to be gained from showing it. She presses on.
FLOORS 67-74. ELAPSED TIME, 00:50:11-00:56:33.
The crowd is still excited, still spellbound by novelty and encouragement and hope. It can’t be that interesting to watch someone climb a building, or so Nientzu used to think, but the past hour has really proved her wrong.
She mostly gets it, she does. She’s been there, too — that’s me, that’s ours, that’s us! It’s the pride of a people who don’t get a lot of opportunities to be so, and it’s all the better to enjoy it while it lasts.
But, to this day, Nientzu can’t help but wonder how the gay, half-Vietnamese university dropout that she is managed to become a national treasure. She doesn’t exactly come without complication. She can prove herself as much as she wants, and she’ll still always be a little on the outside. Sure, evidently, they’re all somewhat slapdash and peculiar, but herself the most of all.
Well, there are worse places to be gay and half-Vietnamese. If anything, the university one is what they’ll really end up getting her for.
She’s having to stop and rest more often now, shaking the tension from her hands whenever she gets the chance. Heel hook, then flick, then business as usual. That’s manageable enough, though she’ll also have to clean her shoes once she gets to the top of this box. Window washers do what they can, but in a few more words, the Taipei 101 is still an outdoor structure buffeted by rain and flocks of pigeons. The soles of her climbing shoes are starting to turn black with grime.
It’s to be expected, of course. Wear and tear, the natural entropy of the universe. Some of the residue even smells faintly of gunpowder — remnants of the annual firework display.
Maybe Nientzu should have watched it this year. It was only a couple weeks ago, a city hall celebration to ring in another trip around the sun. It could have been fun. It sure sounded fun. The organizers managed to book KARA as the headliners, and of course no one would do a party like them.
In reality, she couldn’t be bothered. She just stayed in, eating leftovers, watching the clock tick to midnight alone.
FLOORS 75-82. ELAPSED TIME, 00:56:34-01:04:03.
It’s not pretty, but Nientzu cleans her shoes by licking her palms and scrubbing them across the surface. Yes, it’s gross. Yes, she can taste it. And yes, all her behavior is potentially being broadcast to almost two hundred different countries, but what, does it look like she’s carrying a sink on her back? She has to do what she has to do. If someone’s watching and thinks they’d have such an easy time doing otherwise, then by all means, she welcomes them to try.
That frayed edge of Nientzu’s thoughts catches up with her, and she sighs. She’s able to recognize the feeling from years of practice, and it’s not rocket science.
Put simply: She’s been at it for a while. Also, she’s getting hungry. Far be it from her to deny that she’s getting a little snippy.
Luckily this is a solitary sport. Ergo, there’s no one around to take the crossfire of her mood. It isn’t even that she’s temperamental, per se, but she didn’t get this good by being easygoing.
Still, she can never let herself forget that impatience is her enemy. She needs a cool head and sound mind — hence the practice, and in the form of everything from deep breaths to pushing any and all unhappiness to the side.
It’s done its work; it’s served her well. There’s no such thing as making it too much of a habit, at least when she’s in the middle of a climb. Throw in the benefits of a good public image, and the way it only helps her keep playing to the camera, and she’s got herself a deal.
She is still cleaning her shoes with spit, though. Again, nothing to be done about that.
Nientzu wipes off the last spot and stands and brushes herself off. Chin up, eyes bright. Smile! And onwards.
FLOORS 83-90. ELAPSED TIME, 01:04:04-01:10:27.
The final bamboo box, lucky number eight. They’ve been tough, demanding a combo of concentration and monotony that clashes with her thrill-seeking brain, but in some ways Nientzu will be sad to see them go.
She’s almost done, at this point. A lifetime of skill condensed into less than two hours. All this preparation to climb the Taipei 101, all this training and sweat but never tears, so once she’s reached the top — what then?
Nientzu scheduled the climb for morning because any later meant more sun and heated metal. It also means that once she’s finished, and once the media has had its fill, she has no plans for the rest of the day.
Her family will want to spend time with her, of course. They’re all watching from the screen at home — too frightening, and too much of a circus, to try it in person. But at the end of the day she’s got her own life. What else to do with it, she doesn’t quite know.
When she isn’t busy, she climbs. When she isn’t climbing, she’s restless. There must have been something before it swallowed up the rest of her life, but she can’t remember much of what it was. No matter. She figures she can always do laps around Shin Kong Mitsukoshi, in the absence of anything else.
They’re strange, absences. How they can call so much attention to something that isn’t even there.
When Nientzu passes the last of the dragons, she kisses her chalk-stained hand and slaps its side, for bragging rights, and for good luck.
FLOORS 91-101. ELAPSED TIME, 01:10:28-01:23:42.
Nientzu still has plenty left in the tank. That’s a good thing, because she’ll need it.
The exteriors of the last remaining floors are covered by jutting steel overhangs, and to pass them, she’ll have to put a lot of trust in her arms — just like pull-ups with the dial turned all the way to eleven, she reminds herself.
She’s pretty good at pull-ups. Basically eats them for breakfast, with how much training she does.
No, the arms aren’t the hard part, and that irony is nothing if not very clear to Nientzu. Instead she’s more worried about the legs, because while she hauls herself up with her good ol’ lats and traps, her feet will be left to dangle in the open air until she can get them onto the ledge below. It’s about core strength and control, and that precision is all the more important now that the wind is starting to pick up speed.
It isn’t that Nientzu is afraid of not having her feet on the ground. She wouldn’t be much of a climber if she was. To have nothing, though, no foundation or hold in the slightest, is a different matter entirely.
Nientzu’s been around. She knows a lot of climbers and, by extension, their partners. And when they’re asked about what they mean to each other, it’s always said: She’s my rock.
Kotone wasn’t exactly Nientzu’s rock. Nientzu didn’t need Kotone to be anything other than what she was — sensible, driven, easy to love and easier to tease. And, though Nientzu could never find it in herself to say, to her Kotone was more than just an oft-ignored voice of reason. Not a rock, maybe, but a source of constancy nonetheless.
When it ended between them, Nientzu had the rude realization of just how much she needed that constancy. She doesn’t have anywhere to land and hasn’t for the better part of a year. She’s been left dangling, and off-balance, and without so much as a ledge in sight.
In fairness, Nientzu didn’t feel like much of a rock, either. She was closer to loose sand in the wind or a pebble in a shoe or a boulder, tumbling down a grassy hill, laughing and waiting for someone to dare try rolling her back to the top again. She was at best fickle, if not unequivocally annoying and adversarial.
She was far from perfect, and she knows it. It was a miracle Kotone stuck around as long as she did.
Nientzu makes it over the last sill, and she stands and draws in a breath.
The view from the 101st floor is beautiful, a true panorama of Taipei in all its glory. It’s stunning and it’s new to her, too — she could never spare the money to pay for observatory tickets on her own.
She’s almost there.
If it’s the last thing she does, she’s going to make it.
THE SPIRE. ELAPSED TIME, 01:23:43-01:31:36.
By now, the Taipei 101 is out of floors. Just sixty-odd meters up the spire, and then that’s all there is to it. Happily ever after, the end.
In theory, it’s easy. In practice, it’s awkward. For one, the lower portion of the spire is completely smooth, so they’ve made the concession of giving Nientzu a… ladder, of sorts. If they’d asked, maybe she would have preferred the sturdy construction-grade type of deal, but this spindly little wire one that twists and spins in the wind is fine, too.
She painstakingly pulls herself along, rung by rung. It’s humiliating and slow, but that’s nothing new.
She wants to go home and sit on the couch. She wants to see her mom and eat guava without removing the seeds.
The end of the ladder throws Nientzu for one more embarrassing loop, and she’s done. After that, it’s up some lighting fixtures, slow and steady, but at least plain sailing and no longer a blow to her pride.
She wants to crack open a Hey Song on the beach. She wants to take a nap for the next thousand years.
One hand, then another. One foot, then the other.
Nientzu steps and wraps her fingers over the top of the lightning rod. She presses her thumb against the tip, and straightens, and—
She’s done it. She is the first, the fastest, the best, the only. She stands here over all of Taiwan and says, thank you. She says, careful to never forget, you’re welcome.
Off in the distance, she can see the flat expanse of Songshan Airport’s runways. Further still, a hearty green, of the mountains and their wild trees. And all around, both forming the heart of the city and bubbling up through its many cracks, the patchwork roofs of apartments and schools and tailor shops and office buildings, shining salmon and gray and white in the color of every kaleidoscopic, unknowable life.
It’s hers and she is everyone else’s. How does it feel, she imagines they’ll ask, and she already knows there’s no words she could use to explain. She’s the sole person to do it; the view from the spire is a sight for her alone.
Nientzu thinks, if she tries hard enough, that she might be able to see her house from here.
And Nientzu thinks, if she tries hard enough, and if she wakes up tomorrow changed, then she’ll find the guts to pick up the phone and give Kotone a call when this is all over.