by Ed Lin
Broccoli? Blah. Cauliflower? Double blah. Could I do something with spinach? Nah. It cooks down to soggy clumps. Useless and ugly.
I picked up a bundle of asparagus and tapped my fingers on the tips. Still fresh. Asparagus doesn’t last long once harvested. I liked the shape of the vegetable. They are the noble columns of the palaces of the plant kingdom.
The vendor, a man in his mid-forties, ambled over to me and pushed back his Yankees baseball cap. “I just cut them this morning. My best crop ever. These asparaguses are good enough to offer to the gods!” Whoa, guy, let’s not overdo it. Don’t make me rethink this purchase before we even begin to bargain.
I saw a boy, no older than ten, sitting on a crate, bundling asparagus and snapping rubber bands around them. He was already in his school uniform and probably did this every day before classes. I was like that kid, only I had had to help in the night market after school, and I hadn’t been able to keep my uniform as clean.
The boy was eating something with relish. It wasn’t candy. Every few seconds, he’d pick up a piece of fruit that looked like a light-brown apple and take a huge bite. What was it? I gingerly put down the asparagus bundle.
“What’s that your son is eating?” I asked. “It looks like something really good and special.”
The vendor smiled but his eyes narrowed. “Everything I have is special, what are you talking about?”
“I rarely see kids eat anything but junk food. While I’m sure you’re forcing him to work with you, he appears to be happily eating something voluntarily. Tell me what it is.” The boy smiled mischievously behind his father’s back.
The vendor ran his tongue over his teeth and sighed through his nostrils. “I have some really good spinach you might want to look at. It’s great in soups and so nutritious.”
“Ah, spinach isn’t going to work for me.” I glanced down at the asparagus bundle again. Now that I had lost interest in them, they resembled a bundle of crooked green crayons.
The boy spoke up.
“Dad, why don’t you sell him the jujubes? They’re better than you think.”
The man turned to his son. “I don’t think this guy cares about that.”
The jujube is a fruit that comes in many shapes and sizes. Some are grown to be dried for tea. Some are eaten fresh.
The sort of jujube that I was most familiar with was the green jujube that resembled a Granny Smith apple only it was sweet and had an olive-like pit. Also, it was way too early in the year for them to be harvested. They usually don’t show up until December.
“What kind of jujubes are these?” I asked.
“They are a new variety they experimented with down in Kaohsiung. They’re ripe, but they’re too sweet for me, even though the kid likes them.” He pulled his cap back down to cover part of his face. “I made a bad trade.”
“Can I try one?” I asked.
The man peered at me to see if I was serious before handing me one from under the counter. “If you want to spit it out, use a garbage can, not the street,” he warned. “There’s no spitting allowed at the market.”
It was the same size and shape as a green jujube but the skin was a purpled chocolate color.
I took a bite. The smooth skin snapped and a syrupy film coated my lips and tongue. It really was way too sweet, but I chewed through the entire fruit. It was still fibrous enough to be grilled. Then the sugary glaze that it yielded would be even better with something to enhance the taste and texture. I had to figure out what I would add, but first I had to have those jujubes.
“How many of these have you got?” I asked.
The vendor was knocked back. He couldn’t believe his fortune and/or my stupidity. “Xiao Ping,” he respectfully addressed his son, since he was the one who had spurred the sale. “Bring those jujubes over here.”
The boy swung to his feet and lugged over two tied-up burlap sacks one by one. Xiao Ping stood them up against a box of untrimmed asparagus.
Seeing the sacks leaning against each other, I thought about Tong-tong and the other guy who had been kidnapped. I wondered if the cops were as attentive to the other man’s family as they were to Peggy. Or was he expendable?
I untied the two sacks and pulled out two from as deep as I could reach. I sniffed them for good measure. The jujubes were comparable with the one I had.
“How many have you eaten?” I asked Xiao Ping.
The boy cautiously glanced at his father and then looked me right in the eye. “Five,” he said.
“Were they all good?” He nodded. “I’ll bet you can eat some more.” He looked worried as I handed him two more. “Don’t worry,” I told his father. “These two are on me.”
I lugged the sacks through the market, thinking that maybe I had overpaid for the jujubes, and I certainly didn’t have to buy all of them. Once again, I had been too impulsive. Maybe I saw the boy and had projected my life broadly upon his. Maybe that had been the plan and I had been played like a sucker.
Now I had enough fruit for a few nights of vegan skewers and then some. If the jujube specials crashed and burned, then there’d be plenty left for Nancy and me to snack on.
I trudged on through the market. I noticed some people reading newspapers with Peggy’s dad on the cover. “Where Is Tong-tong?” the World News plaintively asked. It was paired with a photo of the man laughing.
I pressed on, picking up scallions, parsley, onions, garlic and some secret ingredients. I worried about Tong-tong and felt worse and worse about the jujubes. Maybe I shouldn’t have bought any at all.
Shit. Second-guessing myself again. I should think positive thoughts.
Surely there were nutritional properties of the jujube that I could freely expound upon and exaggerate. People love to eat things with health benefits.
I walked by a woman casually flaying pineapples with a machete as long as her forearm. She ended each motion with a flick that gave each spiny rind flap just enough power to wing into a mesh bag strung open at the end of the table like a net.
My thoughts again turned to Tong-tong. How much danger was he in? Would his kidnappers really execute him as they’d threatened to if it came down to it?
If I could do something to help Peggy’s father, I would. She hasn’t always been the greatest person in the world to me, but she had never really hurt me.
Peggy might even be a real friend. We were certainly close enough to yell and scream at each other.
We were also probably close enough relationship-wise for her to sic one of the cops on me. I was blithely unaware, as I breathed my jujube breath, that I was about to be accosted on my way to the train station from the day market.
Detective Huang came up from behind and grabbed at the bag handles I had in my right hand. I fought him for a few seconds until I recognized him. He looked happier than I had remembered.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked as I let go. The cop staggered back as he tried to balance the five bags. The jujube sacks had to be 10 kilograms each.
“Ma de, is this how you keep in shape? You should thank me, Mr. Chen, for helping you carry these. Well, you should thank Peggy. We’re going to give you a ride back to your apartment. C’mon.” He stalked off.
As I followed him, I looked to the curb and saw a black stretch sedan. That was Peggy’s chauffeured company car.
I considered making a run for the MRT, but I needed that produce that Huang had walked off with. Besides, if I could help Peggy, I wanted to.
I followed Huang to Peggy’s car. As we drew closer, the trunk door majestically lifted like a giant clam yielding its pearl to a sea god in dragon form. Huang stowed away all my bags quickly but with care, a skill likely derived from handling live weaponry. “This looks and smells great, Mr. Chen. You have a real talent at picking the best ingredients. I can see why your food is so good and I appreciate the trouble you go thr
ough.”
That was the nicest thing a cop had ever said to me. I reached in and loosened one of the burlap sacks.
“Please call me Jing-nan,” I told Huang. “You’ve already helped me carry my stuff, so you’re a friend now. Go ahead and grab a bunch of jujubes. Take as many as you want.”
“Isn’t it a little early in the year for them?” said Huang as he scooped one up and cautiously held it at arms length. “Or maybe it’s too late in the year. What’s up with the color? Why are they brown? Are these diseased or something?”
“It’s a new variety that’s been bred to be especially sweet,” I said. Man, I was fast when I was trying to sell food. “Take a bite.”
“I trust you,” he said. “I’ll eat ’em in the car.”
Like Buddha, the man could hold an infinite number of items in his hands, and he made full use of the crooks of his arms. How had he managed to snag a dozen of them? I heaved the trunk shut for him.
“Thank you,” said Huang.
I caught a jujube as it slipped out of his embrace. “I can hold more for you,” I said.
“I’m good,” he said.
A door next to the curb popped open. Huang gestured for me to enter first. I pulled out the door, all the way, ducked down and stepped in. Peggy and Kung were sitting in the back seat. “Good morning, ladies,” I said as I shimmied like a crab and dropped on the shorter side seat. “This is for you,” I said to Kung. I showed her the jujube before tossing it to her.
“What the hell is this?” she asked as she handed it to Peggy.
“It’s a new kind of jujube,” I said.
Kung frowned. “What’s wrong with the color?” Peggy displayed no curiosity in the fruit at all and handed it back to Kung.
“It’s a new variety,” Huang gurgled with his mouth already full of mashed jujube. He dumped the jujubes into an empty magazine holder and sat next to me with a satisfied grunt.
Kung turned the jujube carefully over in her hands as if she was searching for a port to plug in a USB cable. I turned to Peggy, who crossed her arms and craned her neck at an odd angle to emphasize how disappointed she was with me.
“It would be so easy to kidnap you, Jing-nan,” Peggy sighed. “You live your life on such a predictable schedule!”
I shrugged and lay back as the car eased out. “How did you know I’d be here?” I asked. “You’ve never been out shopping with me.”
“You put up pictures of what you picked up from the day market on the Unknown Pleasures page on Facebook. I know you go to Gongguan because you told me it was your favorite. Based on the timing of the pictures, I figured you leave the market around nine in the morning and head back to your apartment to take pictures and post them.”
Satisfied, Peggy took the jujube from Kung and bit into it. Her expression registered only that Peggy was pleased with herself, and didn’t reflect how the fruit tasted.
I was still blocking Peggy on Facebook from my personal account, but I couldn’t stop her from viewing my business page.
“Listen,” I told her. “I don’t go to that market every day. Anyway, if someone wanted to kidnap me, they could just show up at work or come in the middle of the night to my apartment.”
Kung put her elbows back. “We stopped by your place this morning, but you weren’t there. You wouldn’t open up your stand until nighttime, but Peggy knew where you probably were.”
Huang covered his mouth with a tissue and spat a pit into it. Kung pointed at the pile of jujubes and he tossed over two of them to her in rapid succession.
“Don’t get any juice on my goddamned car,” snapped Peggy, even though some jujube juice was leaking down her wrists.
“We’re professionals, Peggy,” Huang said. Was that some spittle I felt? I edged slightly away from the detective.
“If you guys wanted to find me,” I said, “you could’ve called. We could’ve just talked on the phone.”
“We didn’t want to make you worry,” said Kung. “We figured we’d let you go about your routine and then interrupt you after you shopped.” She rubbed a jujube across her left sleeve to clean it and took a healthy bite before her face took on a mildly grim expression. All three of them looked that way.
What did they want from me? Was I possibly a suspect or something? Maybe I had said something that wasn’t positive about Tong-tong a while ago to Peggy, and she had turned it over and over in her mind, making something out of nothing.
I had mentioned that her father was greedy for raising the rent. In the past I had said mainlanders should all go back to China. When we were in elementary school, she had given me a jade pendant as a token of her affection, but I handed it back almost immediately. I didn’t think it was wrong for me to take it, but I didn’t want it. It was ugly, one of those hybrid fish-turning-into-a-dragon things. She hadn’t said a word and only glared at me, but maybe a part of her still resented me for that.
The car slowed and stopped at a red light. Kung and Huang leaned over to each other for a private conference. An inquisitive look came over Peggy’s face as she mimed holding a cup and tilting it back. I shook my head but raised my empty hands in a gesture that asked, “What am I doing here?” She held up an open palm to me, signaling that I needed to wait.
The light changed and the car went ahead. We seemed to be heading toward my apartment so I played it cool and bided my time. I wasn’t under arrest or wanted for questioning, was I?
The cops had ended their tête-à-tête and Huang was now writing something down in his notebook. An inventory of everything I had in my bags? Questions for an upcoming session with a lie detector? Kung stared hard into my eyes as she chewed.
Despite her earlier warning to her fellow passengers to keep the car clean, Peggy dropped her jujube pit on the floor and recklessly tore off the paper wrap of a package of haw flakes, a snack made from dehydrated and processed hawthorn berries. They are sort of like the Pringles of Asia.
Peggy ripped out one of the thin disks from the package and held it out to me. Purple haw crumbs scattered everywhere.
“No thanks, Peggy,” I said.
She flipped it into her mouth. “Suit yourself.”
I turned to Huang and Kung. “Can one or both of you tell me why you’ve picked me up?” I asked.
Peggy licked her fingers and worked out another haw flake. “Should I play him the message?” she asked.
Kung held up a hand. “There’s no need, we’ll just tell him what it said. Tong-tong managed to leave a short message on Peggy’s phone earlier this morning. We weren’t able to take the actual call because the ringer was off despite several reminders to keep it on.”
Peggy grunted with contempt. “Turning it off before going to sleep is a routine action for everybody. You can’t blame me when you should’ve double-checked.”
Kung, without looking at Peggy, resumed. “Tong-tong said that a certain man had the chip design the kidnappers were looking for.”
Huang picked up a jujube and held it to his crotch before speaking up. “We’ve sent our hacking unit after the man’s email and phone records. They came up with nothing. Well, nothing directly related to the case.” The tentative tones in their voices and their distracted glances at the floor made me uncomfortable.
“If you know the man, why don’t you bring him in for questioning?” I asked. “He’s not dead, is he?”
Kung let out a small laugh. “No, he’s not dead. He’s incarcerated at Taipei Prison at the moment.” People doing hard time for murder and high-profile financial shenanigans were locked up there. It had originally been built by our Japanese rulers during Taiwan’s colonial years in the first half of the 20th century, so you knew it had to be a serious place to serve out a sentence.
“We won’t be able to reach him in a timely manner,” said Huang. “The corrections department gets bureaucratic with the police when white-
collar criminals are involved. They want everything by the book. Warrants, court orders and all.”
Kung rolled two jujubes in her left hand in a meditative action that I found impressive. “We were thinking that maybe you, Mr. Chen . . .”
“Again, please, call me Jing-nan,” I said. “We’re already close enough to share car rides and fruit.”
“Okay, Jing-nan, we were thinking that maybe you would want to go visit this man and ask him where the chip design is. It would help us so much.”
“This is a pretty high-profile case,” I said. “The prison wouldn’t want to help out the cops?” I asked.
“Lemme put this way,” said Huang. “A lot of people in the corrections department are people who wanted to be cops but didn’t make it, so they resent us. Yeah, it is a big case, but it also means they would want to assist us even less. They want us to look badly in the public’s eye.” He cleared his throat. “We need a civilian, like you.”
I pressed my shoulders into the back of my seat. So they needed my help. I wasn’t so sure I was ready to be generous.
“You mean you want me to pose as a visitor and get him to tell me where the plans are? Sure, I could do that. I’d do anything to help Peggy. But tell me, why do you want me in particular to go see this guy? Because you trust me so much with this information?”
“We do trust you Jing-nan,” said Huang. “We know you’ll go the extra distance to help Peggy.”
“We wouldn’t want to send just anybody into this jail,” said Kung.
“The guy in jail is Nancy’s former sugar daddy, Ah-tien!” blurted Peggy.
I felt my scalp tingle. Nancy had been a mistress to Ah-tien when she was an undergraduate. She was poor and he was an executive at a tech company. He had rained money on her before going to jail for bribing government officials to buy his company’s laptops for Taipei’s public schools. Nancy had described him as “a nice guy.”