Two Floors Down: Chingshin, May 2026

The Voice Through Concrete

I was standing in the 6th floor open-space when I heard her.

Two floors down, through poured concrete and terrazzo worn smooth by six years of foot traffic, my middle school home-room teacher was doing what she has always done. The shout carried the way it carries every spring: sharp, rhythmic, the particular cadence of a teacher steering forty 9th graders through their final CAP preparations. I didn't need to look. I didn't need to think. Six years of hearing that voice through various thicknesses of building material, and my body just knew.

The 9th graders below sit where I sat three years ago. They're cramming the same material, stressing over the same stakes, occupying the same desks. And I'm up here, in a part of the building they barely visit, hearing her the way you hear a song playing in a shop you're about to walk out of. Still audible. Already fading.

I don't know when I started hearing the building instead of just being inside it. But sometime in the last few weeks, every sound became present in a way that used to be background.

Twenty-Five for a Chocolate Thick-Toast

The B1 school store sells a chocolate thick-toast for 25 NTD.

When I first bought one in 7th grade, it was 15. By 9th grade, 20. Now, 25. Ten NTD across six years. The toast itself hasn't changed. Same thickness, same uneven chocolate spread, same inconsistently-heated bread that you eat while walking up the stairs because there's never anywhere to sit.

The shelf next to the toast rack now stocks Italian brainrot products. I cannot explain this and I will not try. Somewhere between Tralalero Tralala and whatever the crocodile one is called, the school store decided that meme merchandise belonged next to breakfast items. The 7th grade version of me would have been confused. The 12th grade version of me is also confused, but has learned to stop expecting coherence from a school store that sells both thick-toast and plastic bombardiros.

The line in front of the 5th floor vending machines remains forever long. The prices remain overpriced. One machine is always broken. Yet always so crowded. Some systems are immune to time. They just adjust their prices and keep going.

5pm, West Side

There's a window in the late afternoon, shifting with the month, when the school field turns into something else. Earlier in winter. Past five in May.

The light comes in low from the west and catches everything at the angle photographers spend hours waiting for. Students crossing the field don't know they're walking through it. They're heading to cram school or the MRT or nowhere in particular, and behind them the pebble-wash bleachers glow the kind of amber that Hong Kong cinematographers built entire careers on. Fan Ho would have stood exactly where I'm standing and seen exactly what I'm seeing. He just would have done more with it.

I've watched this happen hundreds of times. Maybe more. Some afternoons I had a camera. Most afternoons I didn't. The light doesn't care either way. It arrives, it transforms the ordinary geometry of a school field into something briefly worth stopping for, and then it's gone. Tomorrow it comes back. The day after, same.

What changes is who's walking through it. Next year, a different set of 12th graders will cross the school field at 6pm. They won't notice the light. I didn't notice it either, for years. You have to be almost done with a place before you start seeing what it looks like.

I've spent six years framing other people's events. Photoshoots, ceremonies, performances. Hundreds of hours behind a viewfinder, composing shots of a school that was always just the background of my own routine. Now the routine is the subject, and I don't know how to frame it. Maybe you can't photograph a place you're still inside. Maybe you have to leave first, and by then the light has moved.

The Net

The 6th floor corridor is beautiful in the morning. One side of the building opens outward with no wall, and the light enters at an angle that makes the whole space feel taller than it is.

There's a net stretched across the opening. It's been there long enough that most people have stopped seeing it. Officially, it's for falling objects. Or birds. Everyone knows what it's actually for. Nobody talks about it. You walk past it on your way to class and your eyes skip over it the way they skip over fire extinguishers and exit signs. Infrastructure you hope never activates.

It's still there. The light still falls through it. Both things, at the same time.

The Arms Race

The elementary wing runs on different rules.

I pass through it every day, taking the southwest elevator to the 5th floor, walking the rest of the way to the 6th. The light there is warmer. Not the cool fluorescence of middle and high school but something closer to honey, the kind of glow that makes everything look slightly kinder.

The 1F front row facing the main entrance is always decorated. Giant spiders dangling from the ceiling during October. Air-filled santa guarding the school gates. Window stickers that change with the season. There's an arms race happening in those classrooms, each one trying to out-decorate the next, turning the hallway into something closer to a carnival than a school.

At recess, the elementary kids flood the first-floor courtyard. The middle section, surrounded by buildings, fills with sound. Not the tired shuffle of high schoolers between classes but actual noise, the kind children make when they haven't learned to perform tiredness yet.

The kids taping animals to glass right now were in kindergarten when I started 7th grade. They don't know my name. I don't know theirs. We've shared a building for six years and occupied entirely different versions of it.

The classroom is always half full, half empty. The school, the same. Yet no longer are we.

Next week someone will add more decorations. The jungle will expand. A small, very serious argument will break out over who taped what to whose window and resolve before lunch.

The building keeps doing what it does. The light keeps arriving at 5pm. The thick-toast will cost 30 by the time those 2nd graders reach high school. My middle school homeroom teacher will still be audible through concrete, steering a new set of students through a spring she's navigated more times than I've been alive.

Two floors down, someone is learning to hear it for the first time.

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Acknowledgments

• Title image: L'Atelier du peintre by Gustave Courbet, Public Domain, Link. Courbet painted himself at the center of the rooms and people that shaped him, and called it a real allegory of seven years. Some buildings do the summing up for you, two floors down, in a voice you've heard for six.