why i made a toy store

there's an old chinese saying about how understanding arrives in three stages.

first you see the mountain as a mountain.
then you see that the mountain is not a mountain.
then you see the mountain as a mountain again.

i can put dates on all three.

the mountain was a mountain

for about twenty years my job was to build a beautiful frame around something you did not need, so that you would want it anyway.

mercedes-benz, bmw, audi. then a few years at apple's agency, where the first thing i produced was three minutes, their chinese new year film — shot entirely on an iphone x, directed by peter chan. then daughter, directed by theodore melfi. then nian, directed by lulu wang.

i finished the first one, went to ucla for a year to study directing, and came home in 2019 intending to do something enormous.

i was good at the work and i believed in the work. the mountain was a mountain.

then it wasn't

my savings ran out almost immediately, so i went back to shanghai and took the same jobs again. at the end of that year i bought an apartment, entirely on borrowed money.

then everyone went home and stayed there.

i had time for the first time in a decade and i spent it reading, and what i read rearranged me. i decided the problem was money itself. on may 13th, 2020, i wrote a letter to the leaders of china and the united states, explaining that the earth was running a fever, that her core is the perpetual motion machine every scientist has been looking for, and that what we ought to be building is an antigravity field so we could all fly like birds.

i signed it from one of seven billion +. then i sent it.

on may 27th a text message came back. my letter had been received. thank you for writing. wishing you good health and a happy life.

the identical message arrived again three hours later.

after that i spent two years in shenzhen at a job i disliked, because the mortgage did not care what i had read. and for a few years after that i ran a website while trying to want nothing. it sold wishes. it sold concepts. at one point it sold taoist paper talismans.

eventually it sold stone thumb rings, because ideals do not pay a mortgage.

that whole stretch was one long argument with myself, and i managed to lose it in both directions at once.

and then it was again

you don't get to quit a game you never learned to play.

so: play it. properly, on purpose, with both hands.

in june i opened a toy store.

why toys

because a dog with a toy is doing something most of us have lost.

kele is my dog. his name is the chinese word for cola.

kele takes a grass ball to the middle of the room and destroys it, methodically, for twenty minutes. no second screen. no plan for afterwards. no part of him is anywhere else.

almost all of my pressure now comes from a place with no physical dimension at all. a screen doesn't tire you out the way work does — it just never lets go. and the only thing i've found that reliably interrupts it is having something in my hands.

a spinning top only stays up while it's moving, and while you're watching it you are not anywhere else. that's the whole product. everything in this shop is a version of it: the ring you turn on your thumb, the ball he shreds, the small stupid object on your desk you pick up without deciding to.

go play means the summer you had before there was homework. it means the face you made as a kid when somebody handed you a toy — which is the same face kele makes, except he makes it every day and he isn't embarrassed about it.

the unglamorous half

ideals do not pay rent. this is a shop, i want you to buy things, and if nobody does, it stops. i spent several years pretending i was above that and it cost me most of my thirties.

so here is the whole standard, and it's three things.

• it has to look good. not styled for a photograph. good in your hand, on a shelf, in bad light.
• it has to be something i'd hand to kele, or leave on my own desk.
• and it has to be something you won't find in every other shop. if it's already everywhere, you don't need me for it.

that's all of it. and when i get one of the three wrong, i fix it on the page and leave the correction where you can see it. the fish i called solid pine is wood composite. the sandals i called silicone are soft pvc. those pages say so now.

---

the mountain is a mountain again.

somebody cuts me off in traffic and i swear out loud, and then i'm enjoying the drive again.

a game. play it. next. like water off a duck's back.

kele is ten. he has been sitting in the middle of the room taking things apart this entire time, through all three stages, without participating in any of them.

he was right.

go play.