WARNING

The signs along my street were all replaced last month in a single sweep. Grey background, white letters, the same typeface, the same height, even the same weight of border. From a distance it looks tidy. Up close you notice the problem: for a moment I could not find the shoe repair shop.

The shop used to hang a wooden board painted in red — Old Chen Mends Shoes. Half the paint had flaked off; the character for “shoes” was down to an outline. Beside it a line of small writing had been added with a marker: zippers replaced, keys cut. The board hung crooked, the nails were rusted through, and it looked ready to come down. Now there is a standard panel reading Convenience Service Point. I know the shop is still there. I simply have to count door numbers to reach it.

What is a sign actually for? Not decoration — speech. It has to shout down a street who it is: what I sell, what my name is, how many years I have been here. Letters that lean, paint that has flaked, an extra crooked line of small print — to a designer these are all defects. But it is precisely those defects that tell you the owner made this thing himself, and that this shop has an owner.

I understand the reasons for standardising. The first is safety: the steel frames of old signs rust through, and in typhoon season one coming down can genuinely kill someone. That is not alarmism. The second is the streetscape: dozens of panels on one street crowding each other, colours fighting, the sign larger than the goods — it is a mess. City administrators are facing those two problems, not aesthetics. So condemning standardisation wholesale as “aesthetic tyranny” is neither fair nor useful.

My view is that they are regulating the wrong thing. What a sign needs regulated is structure and fire safety: is the steel frame sound, is the wiring a hazard, does it block an escape window. Those are hard standards and not one of them should be relaxed. Typeface, colour, size, handwritten or printed — those are soft, and they belong to the owner. Regulate the hard things strictly and leave the soft ones alone, and a street keeps both safety and life. Do it the other way round and you get what we have now: perfectly even, perfectly clean, and nobody recognisable.

Go one layer deeper. Why do handwritten letters feel intimate? Because they are traces. A printed typeface has no author; handwriting does. Whether the letters on a sign were written by the owner himself or by someone he paid, the passer-by may not be able to say — but the eye can tell. People are sensitive to traces: a scratch on a table, a note in the margin of a book, a patch on a jacket. Each of them says someone used this. The cleaner the city, the fewer the traces, and so we slowly come to treat “new” as a synonym for “good”.

I am not arguing for a return to the era of neon jutting over the roadway, layer upon layer, hanging above pedestrians. That liveliness had its price, and a falling sign really does hit people; nostalgia is no basis for gambling with someone else’s life. What I want is simple: let a sign be something a person says again, rather than a box filled in on a form.

Last weekend I finally found Old Chen. He had moved to the mouth of the alley; the sign is still that wooden board, with another patch of paint gone. I asked about the new one. He said it had hung for two months, the letters were too small, customers could not find the door, so he had brought his own back out. He was a little embarrassed saying it, as though he had done something wrong. I think a street that can keep one disobedient sign is a street that is still alive.

卜世 撰