An anonymous asian girl in the town goes to the cafe and drinks coffee everyday.

The coffee the girl drinks is never the same from day to day. There are countless scenarios; it could be that she literally orders a different kind of coffee. Even if she only drinks one kind of coffee, a cup of coffee tastes different depending on who made it, the state of the coffee bean, brewing methods, and so on. Moreover, it makes the experience of coffee diverse whether she drinks it by herself or with company, what conversation is going on around her, how the weather is, how she has been doing during the day, et cetera. Maybe these personal and environmental factors are what constitutes the phenomenology of a cup of coffee rather than the physical ingredient of the coffee.

The cigarette the man smokes on the street is the metaphor of opaque things of which we are indifferent and unconscious, for example, an anonymous asian girl in the cafe, the garbage patch, crimes towards minorities. We don’t pay attention to what kind of cigarettes random people smoke on the street. The smoke only bothers for seconds. As soon as we pass by them, the smoke disappears into the air and we forget. Before I spent time at the cafe and got to know people, my existence was no more than a smoke, an unknown being, an object of ignorant racist questions like “where are you from, China or Japan?”. However, I am the one and only being as every being in the world Is.

Going to the cafe next to my house everyday for three months, which is too ordinary, was the foundational performance for the production of this book. I hope this small truth I learned from a cup of coffee and smoking man could inspire readers to believe in the power of caring and sharing.