The first time I was in Taiwan, I took the time to visit the National Palace Museum in Taipei. It is a cultural crown jewel for Taiwan - with pieces collected throughout history by China’s emperors.

There, I quietly walked past a number of ancient artifacts that looked to me pretty silly and unremarkable. I still do not know what is the point of pottery and brasses and such. The jades was pretty cool (including the infamous jade cabbage, which has its own exhibition), but when you look at them you are looking at a rock. A rock is a rock.

It wasn’t until I got to the scrolls and the calligraphy that I really felt something. I came across a letter under glass from Su Shi. He was a famous calligrapher and poet from the 1000s. Apparently quite famous in Chinese history but not to the West - but what artist in Asia is other than Haruki Murakami?

So there I was all by myself in this exhibit and looking at this one letter, which the side plaque said was to his son. I kept staring at it and staring at it. I didn’t really get what it meant - didn’t really understand the symbols - but I noticed the texture of the papyrus and the blackness of the ink and the individual smears of the brush’s hairs. I kept staring and staring and then abruptly it felt like I fell through thick ice and into cold water. The realization suddenly struck me that I was staring at something left behind by a person from nearly 1,000 years ago. A thousand years ago, a human hand was on this papyrus writing. What sort of world was that man living in? How different was it from the one I live in now? Did he know that nearly a 1,000 years later a person like me would be staring at his letter?

I ended up staring at that letter for nearly 45 minutes - just feeling this explosive moment in my brain over and over again. Every new smear, every new texture of the paper triggered it again.

I grew up in a Western culture and adopted a lot of its norms, but one of the new pleasures of my current age is rediscovering my connection with my eastern roots in a way other than making jokes about how Asians like to wrap the tv remote in plastic. It is about leaving behind - even if it is just for a few minutes - my current identity as an American in Asia and assuming my (now-dusty) place in the Asian tribe.

(During my second trip to the museum in 2016, I was dismayed to find that the letter had been spirited away into the archives but pleased to see that in its stead was the stunning, amazing Along the River During the Qingming Festival scroll exhibition, China’s Mona Lisa and worthy of the increased attention it has been getting in Western media recently. I saw the Qing Court version - a national treasure - with my own eyes and was stunned. You can look at photographs but nothing compares to the vivid stunning colors of the actual object.)