My Date With Holland

It was September 2nd, my last day in Europe.

By that time, someone had flown back to the States from Denmark, someone was probably sight-seeing with my mother, someone just moved to our new apartment while I still had tons of luggage left in my previous one, someone had moved back to the small town where almost all of us used to go to grad school- things have changed a lot during my temporary absence of this vast land, yet things haven't changed at all-to my great dismay.

It was a fairytale after all, and I decided to end it with a perfect romantic ending-I was going to visit the original shooting scenes of a surreal Korean/Hong Kong movie-Daisy.

"Daisy is an urban melodrama about a young struggling art painter, the Interpol police detective she loves and a professional hitman for whom there is no escape." Directed by Andrew Lau of the Infernal Affairs series, on which the Departed is largely based, the movie collided with my sense of serendipity spontaneously. The square that she used to draw portraits for people, the antique shop that she used to help out her grandpa and receive a pot of daisy from time to time...all of which brought me to Haarlem in Holland, where all the romance began.

Haarlem is only two stops away from Amsterdam on the train. It has the convenience of a big city yet still possesses the charm and cohesion of a small town. With a small hand-drawn map in my left pocket, I wandered down one of the small and bumpy gravel lanes to the center of the town-Grote Markt, which is the real name of the square.

“#$%%&*@” A man passed me by on his bicycle said something to me.
“Excuse me?” I stopped and turned.
“I love your jacket.” He repeated it in English.
“Thank you.” I smiled and continued ahead.

See, this is one of the small pieces that make up a whole picture of Europe, ambiguous weather, slow pace of walking, a coffee in one of the millions of open air bars and random romance from passers-by.

As soon as I turned right at a corner, here I was- the antique shop of the artist’s grandpa. Everything looked familiar, yet everything looked different in some way. All kinds of antique chairs almost blocked the front gate. That was where in the movie someone would shout out “Flowers for you!” and then fled from the scene immediately. He was so shy and so cute. I entered the shop with a fair amount of discretion, hoping to see an elderly man with grey hair and a pair of glasses. However, there were two tall and bulky men rigorously chatting in their language with arms dancing in the air. At this moment, I was unexpectedly too excited to utter a complete sentence:

“Um… Excuse me, is this the place…um…is this it?” Oh, hell would know what I was talking about. (Blush)

“Oh yes. This is it.” One of the men looked at me directly in the eye and grinned. I wondered whether my Asian look or my china red jacket helped finish my awkward sentence. “And we still keep pictures of Daisy over the window display- yes, near the gate.” He added.

Oh. They still kept the artist’s pictures in the frame display for sale, although her face was sort of blurred due to low pixels. I even suspected that it was just a casual product of a printer. A little disappointment crawled into my heart. Nevertheless, it all instantly brought me back to the scenes in the movie- her subtle smile, as tranquil as daisy flowers. Not as bright and aggressive as roses, daisy is enough for her.

With the kind and articulate instructions from the antique shop owner, I walked closer and closer to the center of the town. Actually my heart beat speeded up dramatically as I saw the tip of the church from far far away.

Pigeons flew above my head, breezes touched my cheeks and forks and knives and cups and plates and glasses tingled.

I sat down at the east corner of Grokt Markt, drowning myself in this moment before pulling out my sketch pad and charcoal sticks. Yes, I was going to draw something to commemorate this special moment of my date.

The clouds gathered above my head; no one seemed to notice.

Not far from me there was a happy middle-aged man playing the accordion. He walked around from table to table, content with a coin or two. A mother was passing over a basket of bread to her little son while he was wiggling in the chair… Oh, look at that street light… how delicate and how beautiful… I drew all kinds of weird stuff that cast shadows in my eyes exactly like what I used to do when I was little. Unexpectedly a young girl in her twenties walked towards my direction and sat down on the stair several steps lower. You couldn’t tell whether she was waiting for her friend, lover, or anyone- she wasn’t looking at her watch at all; she seemed to be local as people passed her by, they would exchange a few words and smiles; was she observing the crowd as I did? Or she was deep in her own thoughts? She was just sitting there, looking ahead. Her profile inspired me hundreds of thoughts as I couldn’t see her face. I started to draw her profile.

Her cheek, nose, long and curly eyelashes… For an unknown reason, people can feel being looking at by others even though they cannot see them. She definitely felt my constant attention on her yet she was not sure why I was so interested in her. :-P As a matter of fact, perhaps for a reason of avoiding awkward confrontation, she never turned back.

It was then time to say goodbye.

I jumped down the stairs. Turned and smiled at her. I handed my piece of paper to her:
“I’m a visitor to Holland and I’m leaving tomorrow. I just want to leave something here. Here you are-“
It was her profile with a sentence of “I [heart] Holland!”
“Thank you.” Her eyes sparkled when she saw the piece of drawing. I was glad that she liked it.
I disappeared in the crowd and never looked back.

I didn’t get the chance to visit Epen, where the daisy in Daisy thrived. My friend Melody said the blossom season had long gone. Nor some other shooting sites in Amsterdam, where the hitman killed his boss for retaliation and his boat house on the canal resides. I should have visited them when I was on the bicycle. But on that day I lost myself. Sometimes some places are too beautiful to revisit just as some memories are just too delicate to retouch- we don’t know whether this is the right reason for this person to stay or to let him/her go until some time later, if we ever find ourselves first, if we ever dare to look back.

Movie is movie; life is life. There was no artist group nor painters at all at the square; thanks to Andrew Lau, everything was a perfect set-up.

My date with Holland, with Europe, ended up being a blind one.