LO$ER LOVER

visa struggles and concert garbage picking

I put on a baseball cap that SEVENTEEN released as their tour merch. The embroidery says “2015”, a commemoration of their debut year. It’s also the year that I moved away from home and started to build another life from nothing, except that nothing is clouds and endless rain and even more mists that fail to earn the title. For a country that loves whiteness, its clouds are actually grey. It’s a perfect token to wear on a morning like this.

I bring my coin purse with a photocard in it, just for good measure. That’s how superstition manifests for this generation, I think to myself. It’s miscellaneous idol-related items instead of charms and talismans and omamoris. I put on my late grandmother’s watch to “bring it home”—what an interesting phrase to use considering she’s not home anymore—the final step in this ritual of an atheist in desperate need of luck.

You’d think I’m going into some exams or interviews, occasions sophisticated and life-alteringly significant enough to warrant that kind of anxiety. You’d be wrong.

I’m applying for a Schengen visa at VFS Global.

I’d like to do this as a party trick at some point: ask all attendees at a social gathering whether they know what VFS does and watch that question divide the room. For now, I can only stand in the snaking queue that stretches far beyond the entrance and the barriers with those retractable belts, around the corner of the building, and down a side street. Bewildered and apprehensive faces hover. All kinds of questions are on the tips of our tongues and it boils down to one: Am I in the right place?

Behind me, a man wants to kindly know my scheduled time slot for entry. I was too early for my appointment, and him too late for his. Both of us are unsure if we should stay in the lane. I asked him to kindly keep my place in the queue while I go in front and check with a staff member. The answer is yes, we should wait to be summoned.

I silently remind myself to be grateful to even have a slot that I booked on my own laptop at its usual rates, without having to purchase an overpriced one from scalpers who snatch everything using bots. They would later resell them through group chats on Telegram or partner up with Chinese travel agencies that advertise “instant bookings” on Xiaohongshu. My friend and I didn’t want to aid and abet such behaviours, but she wasn’t as lucky. She still can’t find a slot.

Inside the waiting room, raw nerves tint the air with a slight hue and give it a density. Crisp, clean, snowy-white curtains shield each cubicle and ceremoniously grant some nonexistent dignity to all the voices that are desperately divulging details of our little human lives. The purpose and lengths of stays of our holidays, the age of our children, the well-being of our parents. We wait and wait with searching eyes and listen for the moment we are summoned again, not by our names but by a string of letters and numbers that dictate our place in the lane. We wait for the opportunity to prove that we are innocent, law-abiding, pure-hearted, obedient, exemplary citizens that won’t blasphemously overstay our welcome. It reminds me of the Ticketmaster waiting room where we have to prove that we’re authentic fans driven by the purest forms of love.

I sit down on an empty seat and the man next to me immediately apologises, for the tip of the strap of his bag is slightly astray from his place and touches my leg. He’s in an ill-fitted suit and mismatched leather shoes. It’s clear that he wasn’t dressing up for work, but for this. I recognise the tension in his shoulders and the caution between his brows, the constant fear of overstepping and inconveniencing others and making a scene in a place where the odds and the laws are most certainly not on your side. Practiced politeness and humility pulled taut. The need to impress and appear put together, to convince and persuade and ease any concerns.

People who look like me filter in and out, like we’re all in some firm’s diversity advertisement. From time to time you’d see people who don’t look like me, and they all have a similar look of reluctance and stiffness on their faces that said we don’t want to be here. We didn’t have to be here. Us being here is but a fluke, a misunderstanding, a rare occurrence like a full blood moon. I feel like the tide that keeps coming back.

Despite my meticulous double-triple checks, overprinting and overpreparing, I still fuck up the documentations. An Important Thing is missing. I am told that there’s a likelihood of refusal if I don’t submit them, but if I can get it within the next few hours, I can come back and they can still attach it to my file. I rush outside to call the all-inclusive trip organiser that I booked with, and ask for that missing paperwork to be provided. An amicable lady listens to my cough-riddled (still haven’t recovered from my flu) explanation of the situation, and tells me, in awe, that they had never dealt with a customer requesting such a thing. No one seemed to have needed a visa for this package? Yes, I said, but I’m Chinese. I’m not like them. She told me she’ll see what they can do.

While I wait for a call back, I find a “Xereox Prin & Potocopy” truck outside of the visa application centre. It’s like a food truck, but instead of deep fryers it has a cloudy-grey printer spewing out whatever people forgot to bring. It charges £1.5 per page if it’s under 10 pages. I forgot to check if they do a discount. Behind a counter, the owner stands on a slightly elevated platform, spreading out the pages of someone’s passport like he’s peeling us open. We watch wordlessly, waiting our turns to board this life raft. The man who was behind me in the queue just paid for his photocopies, and a loose page got blown away by the wind. He runs to catch it as it scrapes restlessly on the concrete pavement.

Last week, I was standing in the pit of TXT’s first concert in London, running and scavenging fallen confetti. It’s a tradition of theirs to blast a handful of fake dollar bills for their song, LO$ER LOVER, and fans collect them (and sell them) like real money. We had never been so close to the stage before, so we were determined to secure them this time round. Among us, hundreds of other General Admission fans kneel and crawl on the drinks-spilt floor to collect a new kind of star confetti that they recently introduced to their shows. It has each member’s printed autographs on it, and you obviously HAVE to get everyone’s. In the end, security guards had to link arms to form a barricade to prevent us from lingering and exploring the floor further.

“I wasn’t even looking at the stage, I was just bowing down and picking them up”

“Confetti is the only tangible thing you could touch in a dream”

It is an absolutely preposterous scene. Everyone dehydrated and faint from exhaustion, makeup running wild, turning on their phone flashlights and getting on their hands and knees to snatch pieces of flimsy paper. Me and Abby (yes, it’s her again) curse at the insanity of this primitive, raccoonish hunger for soggy garbage, but in those moments you think of little else and act on an impulse that’s strangely, and comfortingly, simple. I want, and I want, and I want. Confetti is the only tangible thing you could touch and hold onto in a dream. The company is well aware of that, so they make iterations to drive up the demand and the resale prices shoot up. I have a friend of a friend who messaged me on Instagram and wanted one of the stars I picked up. Other people are, once again, spending a fortune on paper.

I recall this video clip taken from NCT Dream’s group documentary that made me cry. The members watch a compilation of their fans cheering them on outside of their concert stadium. Girls and boys who look like me all shouting their wish for NCT to eat well and sleep well and be healthier and happier. They write their messages down on sticky notes. Then, the camera cuts to the members, and thousands and thousands of sticky notes fall from the ceiling and drown the boys in their bright, piercing and screaming love. The lyrics says “I really love you, and no one else’s love can measure up to that”. Incomparable love and want that gets abused.

It also sounds insane to draw a parallel between my trip to the VFS and fanning, but so much of fandom is about paying your way in and out of things, and therefore about exclusion, defeat and shame. Being spiteful about being at someone’s mercy, and succumbing to it. Wanting and being prevented from it. Wanting and being interrogated because of it. Humiliated.

I am too exhausted to wait by the printing truck, so I step into a cafe next door. The sign boasts authentic Puglian focaccia, wines, cheeses and avocado-on-toasts. I order a (very shitty) latte, and the cashier says they’re serving lunch, so they withhold the right to kick me out if someone else wants my table to eat from. Sure, I said.

A man and a woman munch on their sandwiches beside me. The man talks of designing “laser-focus strategies” and “holistic solutions” for the stakeholders, and investing in Deepseek, and the financials of Bytedance, and the Chinese government owning the coal mines and all the miners. That’s where the action is going to be next, he said. The woman nods along.

On my way home, I float through Moorgate in my rattled state and feel a dizzying anger. All the bankers are speedwalking, holding their boxes of takeaways to eat at their desks. Most of them don’t look like me, and the VFS workers hired by the consulate to labour on their behalf do look like me, and I feel an unnerving urge to wage a war on everyone who doesn’t look like me. It’s terrifying how quickly a law-abiding citizen can teeter on the very edge of it. I entertain that thought for a while, me the cowardly goody-two-shoes as an outlaw. I wonder if that man and woman would remember me in a few years when they see me on the news and I talk about my villain origin story.

I type this piece out from the scribbles in my Writer’s Notebook, where I sometimes keep track of potential newsletter materials. Rage protrudes through the words, and they dent the backside of the page like braille. I wonder if I sound whiny or bitter, or dangerous, and too dangerously honest. I wonder if it is an act of betrayal to write this piece in English, and to whom I’m the traitor. I wonder why I couldn’t express all of this in my mother tongue.