The Walk Is Mine — Photographer Jung Sooim's Walking Journey Through Taiwan

The Walk Is Mine — Photographer Jung Sooim’s Walking Journey Through Taiwan

When she needs to clear a cluttered mind or soothe an anxious heart, photographer Jung Sooim says nothing beats a walk. Here is her account of walking through Taiwan.

Words & Photos *Jung Sooim
* She began roaming the world while working as a photo director at a travel magazine. Though she believes there is nothing new under the sun, she keeps repeating a contradictory life in which travel fuels her energy. Lately she has focused on traveling by living in a place. Last spring she stayed a long while in Taiwan, and this summer in Tokyo.

An editor I have worked with for many years got in touch after a long silence and asked me for a few brief reflections on the trip I took to Taiwan last year. Sure, why not. I’m currently near Mitaka Station (三鷹駅) in Tokyo, tearing my hair out over whether a single usable image exists among today’s shots, so the timing is perfect. Maybe I’ll slip off to Taiwan for a breath of fresh air. But thinking back, this isn’t really about Taiwan at all. It’s more a short reflection on walking, my lifelong cure.
Steven Patrick Morrissey is a singer and writer from England. I had known him only as one of the country’s best-known singers, but when I watched him talk about walking around his neighborhood on YouTube, I found myself relating to him quite a bit. A little more digging showed that he is something like an icon of British Britpop, and his youth was even made into a film titled “England Is Mine.” I have no particular interest in British pop and don’t plan to seek out the film, but from the synopsis, it covers a childhood spent like a recluse in Manchester.
After school, he reportedly wrote at home and watched TV, and when he couldn’t shake his anxiety about the future, he found peace of mind by walking around his neighborhood. “To other people, the sight of me walking may have looked rather gloomy and pathetic, but walking the streets was, for me, the perfect fuel for writing.”

You may wonder why I’m bringing up an English singer out of the blue in a piece about Taiwan, but for me, walking goes beyond any particular place or region. As Morrissey describes, walking has been my only remedy for quite a long time. That doesn’t mean I have some illness. It means that walking helps me escape the basic gloom, emptiness, occasional mood swings, and aimlessness that come with being born human into a society that rarely looks happy, so that I can live a normal life. Doesn’t every person need at least one cure of their own? For some it’s a walk, for others it might be knitting, a modest remedy of that kind.

When I left for Taiwan, I hated Korea intensely. I simply wanted to go somewhere other than here, but I didn’t want to head unprepared to some faraway place and suffer for it. So I chose Taiwan, the destination of my very first trip abroad and a place I had visited so many times that it felt familiar.
I walked a lot in Taiwan. It wasn’t the kind of trip that gets you to a destination in the shortest possible time, but one where inefficient decisions fill the stretches in between. I went out of my way to make things hard, so I walked even more. If you cut the time of a walk in half, one half is spent following the scenery with your eyes, and the other half is spent endlessly letting your inner thoughts surface. As my feet, a mere part of the body, worked hard, they became the perfect fuel for my body and sent a signal to my brain, making me think as I walked and walked.

The scenery before your eyes looks very different depending on what fills your mind at the time. Or perhaps the scenery you follow with your eyes changes according to your heart. In Taipei, where I started, I saw only fragmentary glimpses of a concrete city, but the farther south I went, the more I was drawn to people’s calm and cheerful faces. I suspect that the more I traveled and the more I walked, the gentler I became emotionally. There were moments, among people enjoying night strolls and the food at the night markets, when I thought, ‘Life is too short to live it so complicated, after all.’ Now I’m back in a complicated metropolis, agonizing over whether there’s any scrap of a usable image to be found… Oh, never mind, never mind, let’s stop worrying. No more hair-pulling!