Yu Su: A Café in Neukölln
© Ian Lanterman
A chaotic summer in Europe has left Yu Su bewildered, but a return to the langour of home is imminent.
Tuesday, August 23, 2022
I see Yu hurriedly walking down Weserstraße, her sunglasses strapped to her face. She paces past the array of bars and café on this busy Neukölln street, the sides of the buildings adorned with evergreen leaves, while I wait outside Ketori Coffee, the front of which is adorned with slim wooden panels. Panting and profusely apologising, she greets me with a hug.
“I'm never — I'm so on time usually,” she insists. “I can sometimes lose track.”
“I understand,” I say, insisting that she needn’t apologise.
We walk into this typically rustic Berlin café on this quiet Tuesday afternoon. Joy Division’s “Disorder” is emitted softly through speakers.
“Do you want a coffee?” Yu asks.
“No, I'm actually all good,” I reply.
“Really?”
“I don't drink coffee. I'm one of those —”
“Are you serious?”
“— One of those anomalies.”
“No coffee? That's crazy.”
Yu orders herself an iced latte and sparkling water for myself at the island counter, before we walk back outside to sit at the small arrangement of seating.
“This summer is just hectic generally,” Yu says as she settles herself at the table. “I've been having sleeping problems, so last night I took some Xanax to sleep, because I couldn't fucking sleep.”
“Have you just woken up?” I ask.
“I slept til one.”
“Well, I'm glad I caught you on a day where you're well slept.”
“There's too much going on.”
“And that's why you’re based in Berlin at the moment?”
“Yeah. I like it, but I also don't like it. It's too much for me. This is the last two weekends of my tour.”
“And then back to Vancouver?”
“Yeah, almost over. Almost,” Yu sighs.
“Are you looking forward to going back home?” I ask.
“Oh, definitely.”
“Really?”
“I'm so homesick.”
“Ok.”
“Because it's so different in Vancouver. Everything is slow. You don't see more than ten people on the street when you go out and I really miss that.”
“How was it making the move from China to Vancouver? Was it a vivid culture shock?”
“Of course,” Yu asserts, “because I also grew up in very small town in China where there wasn't so much exposure to Western culture.”
“And did you move alone —”
“Yeah.”
“— Or with family. Alone?”
“Yeah, just for university and then I stayed.”
“And you're very much settled in Vancouver now?”
“I think so.”
“Would you consider it somewhat your hometown?”
“Definitely, yeah, because my entire adulthood is in Vancouver.”
“And does it feel stagnant or does it still feel like a new thing to you that you're still discovering?”
“I think at this point it feels like a home, a base. So I'm just there to be cosy and work on music. That's it.”
“That's your retreat.”
“Yeah, exactly. Because coming here, that's work, work, work. Non stop. And then once I'm back there, I want to be still.”
Yu notices her chair is on uneven ground and corrects its precarious footing.
“I was talking to a friend recently,” I digress, “and he was saying that if you talk to anyone in the world, you'll always find common ground with someone. The ego wants you to believe that you're so different.”
Yu nods her head. “I know.”
“And that no one can understand you.”
Yu shakes her head. “No.”
“When moving to a new place, have you ever felt alone and that the people around you don’t understand your situation?”
“Never.”
“Never?”
“No, because I love food, so I'll get along with anyone who likes food. It doesn't matter what type of music they listen to, what books they read. I don't care.”
I laugh. “What's been the most interesting Asian-European culinary fusion you've seen?”
“It's in Northern Spain.”
“Yeah?”
“Northern Spain, on the coast, they do Japanese-Spanish fusion really well.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, I think I had the best Japanese food in Bilbao because they have such good fish.”
“Wow, hot tip. Bilbao for Japanese food.”
“They do it really well.”
“I don't know what it's like in Dublin now.”
“I had good Chinese food in Dublin, but you have to know the spots.”
“Yeah. We have this one thing — I don't know if you know it — but it's called a spice bag.”
Yu looks at me perplexed. “What is that?”
“It's basically just chicken balls, chips, and then onions and spices.”
“Seriously?” she says with palpable disgust.
“And it's literally the bestseller in every Chinese takeaway.”
“That's crazy.”
“Yeah, I don't know where it came from.”
“Definitely not China.”
I cackle.
“Definitely not China,” Yu reiterates softly, with an incredulous laugh.
“You're not claiming that one?”
Yu shakes her head. “No.”
© Marysia Swietlicka
The sun gets hidden behind a marauding cloud. Yu takes off her sunglasses and checks her phone.
“Do you want to get a new album completed soon?”
Yu looks up. “Working on it. This record will take longer because I'm recording a lot of stuff with my band, which is a totally new thing that I've never done before, so it's gonna take longer.”
“How are you at compromising on creative control?”
“It's just getting used to spending time working on stuff with other people, like, trying to develop more patience,” Yu says. “I'm someone who doesn't really have patience and when I write music I'll sit there, usually for five, six hours, and then I finish a song and it's done. If I sit there, work on a project for two hours and then I find myself trying to make something sound good, that usually means to me that it's not working, so I just drag it into the trash. I drag the project into the trash. I delete it.”
“Really?” I ask.
“Yeah, I don't even keep it.”
“Even if there was a stem that you liked?”
“No, I don't even care. I just say it's done. I'm that kind of person.”
“Yeah, ok.”
“So then working on music with other people, it's of course different, because most people like spending time.”
“Working it out.”
“So, I'm learning how to do that, which I think is a good skill to have.”
“Would you consider yourself quite stubborn and forthright? Like, that's it?”
“Yeah, that's it.”
“There's no negotiating?”
“No.”
“But that's something you're learning within the band?”
“Yeah, because you don't just delete everything. You can't. I don't want to keep unfinished projects around, but that's just me, because I have no patience to go back on something.”
“But what's the harm in just having it there?”
“I just don't want to bother even knowing there's something unfinished sitting there. I want to start fresh every time.”
“Ok.”
“But, of course, you can say that you could have made one of these things into a new beautiful stain.”
“That's what I was saying. What if you found a stem that you liked the sound of?”
“Yeah, but that only belonged to that moment.”
I crouch over, my head resting on my hand, which in turn is resting on my seated thigh, and release an epiphanic smile.
“But that's just me as a person,” Yu finishes.
“When you die,” I begin, “do you like the idea of people digging up things that were never released and releasing them posthumously?”
“I don't know. I've never thought about it.”
“Or would you be of sounder mind to know that everything you've done is released and no one can ever find anything hidden away.”
“Yeah, yeah. There's nothing. There's nothing else, for sure.”
We’re both distracted by an obnoxiously loud leafblower and look down the road to see the fallen leaves being removed from the path.
“That makes me feel like fall is coming,” Yu says. “Like, summer is over.”
“In Berlin it's quite sudden,” I say. “The change.”
“Yeah, all of a sudden it gets cold.”
“There's no easing into it.”
“For sure. It's interesting.”
“Do you get the same in Vancouver?”
“Yeah, it's all of a sudden. Snowfall, constant rain. It's fucked for like four months. No sun.”
“But you're living in the knowledge that summer is going to come again.”
Shortly after, Yu puts her sunglasses back on before telling me that she has to head off. An imminent deadline is playing on her mind. She leaves, her iced latte still half full, but not before giving me a Gelato recommendation nearby. “Get the pistachio,” she says, before strolling back down Weserstraße.