by Ed Lin
“No,” I lied. “There was a bug on your face.” I touched her forehead lightly. “There. It’s gone.”
Taiwanese are annoyingly shy in dating and relationships. We can’t walk around holding hands or giving any public displays of affection. At the airports you see long-time lovers waving goodbye without a final embrace. On the other hand, we have no problem sneaking into love hotels with our partners and/or other people as long as we’re sure Meilidao’s camera crews aren’t hiding in the bushes.
I saw Nancy blush. As much as I wished she would be less uptight in public, I knew that her learned behavior was a part of who she was, and I loved who she was.
I touched her arm and pointed to Dwayne. “Look at that guy! I’ve never seen him look so worried.”
“Has he been practicing?” asked Nancy.
“He’s been eating deep-fried stinky tofu, but I don’t think he’s ready for the wet kind. They changed the type at the last minute because the producer said it looked better on camera, all slimy and green.”
Dwayne looked a little green himself. The night-market association wanted one representative in the contest and in an act of bravado Dwayne had put in his name, never thinking that he would be the only volunteer.
A crew of four wheeled out a giant vat behind the contestants and dished out backup plates.
“Ugh, I can smell it from here!” said Nancy. We were about twenty feet away from Dwayne. They turned on the lighting and the stage was nearly as bright as day. Dwayne looked even more green, an apprehensive Shrek at the end of the table.
All the contestants were dealing differently with being in the heart of the stink. The Spanish woman was laughing heartily. The young Australian tightened his over-the-ear headphones and rocked in his chair, his face grim. The real-estate broker breathed through her open mouth and looked slightly embarrassed in a way Canadians seem good at. The Hong Konger cracked his knuckles and stretched his arms. Charlie rolled his jaw clockwise then counterclockwise. Only Sadao sat completely still. With his shaved head he resembled a lanky Buddha contemplating nothingness.
I heard some terse announcements crackle through the crew’s walkie-talkies.
A spotlight swung on to a Ryan Seacrest-wannabe at the corner of the stage, his voice booming through the PA system. “Welcome to a very special Realtime Sports presentation! Let me hear you, Chinese Taipei!” he declared.
The crowd mostly groaned at the use of Taiwan’s international moniker, forced upon us by China, which still claims the island as a province. “You’re in Taiwan!” yelled someone in the front.
Fake Seacrest smiled hard. Acknowledging the comment might mean no Realtime Sports broadcast deals in lucrative areas of China, including Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Macau. Instead, the man bounded downstage and began introducing the contestants, impressively pronouncing the Spanish name but blowing it on the Hong Konger’s Cantonese name. He declared that Dwayne was a “Formosan native,” which was less correct than “aborigine,” but Dwayne himself didn’t mind. After all, the guy constantly joked that someday his people were going to massacre all the “invaders” of Han Chinese descent. He didn’t look so tough now, though. He raised his arm weakly to acknowledge the crowd.
“Breathe through your mouth!” Nancy yelled.
“Jia you!” I shouted to him. “You can do it, Dwayne!” I didn’t define the “it” but winning was definitely not one of the options.
Fake Seacrest held out a plate of stinky tofu to the camera. “Let me show you the best way to eat this sucker,” he said as he dramatically produced a spring-type clothespin and clipped it to his nose. “P-U!” he cried to the television audience, who would be watching the contest in dramatically edited form.
“Of course our brave challengers aren’t allowed to cover up their noses,” the man continued. “They can’t even drink any iced beverages up here, since ice dulls the sense. This is one competitive eating contest in which winning stinks! The question is, who will win? The patient and inscrutable Sadao, or the lusty American, Chompin’ Charlie? Or maybe one of our nobodies? Are we all ready to go?”
“Yeah!” yelled the crowd, which was far more enthusiastic than any of the contestants.
“Let’s get this challenge going! Five, four, three, two . . .”
At the end of the countdown, Sadao transformed into a multi-armed bodhisattva, each hand delivering a lump of stinky tofu into his barely opened mouth. His bald head was the eye of calm in a furious hurricane of flailing limbs.
Chompin’ Charlie took a plunger approach, shoving down as much food as possible with his right hand.
The two of them were set to eat more in the first thirty seconds than the rest of the contestants would in the entire five minutes allotted for the event, although the real-estate broker was struggling to make third place look competitive. The projection screen switched from oddly serene Sadao to foam-mouthed Charlie. Suddenly, it featured Dwayne, who was a portrait of pain.
“Dwayne, let’s go!” I yelled. What I really meant was, “Please don’t come in last.”
I knew that face he was putting on. Shifty eyes, pursed lips, flared nose. I revised my thought to, “Please don’t puke. Our whole country’s honor is riding on you.”
He managed to keep down what he had eaten—half a piece of stinky tofu. Sadao won by wolfing down forty cakes. Chompin’ Charlie put away a manly thirty-two. The broker had managed to eat eleven. Everybody else ate fewer than five. Luckily, Dwayne finished second-to-last. The Spanish woman had taken one bite and spat it out. She spent the entire contest shaking her head and laughing at the others.
Sadao stood up. He stretched his arms and rubbed his biceps. He was immediately swamped by autograph seekers, so Fake Seacrest grabbed the closest contestant, the middle-aged Hong Konger, who looked as lost as a substitute teacher in a tough school.
“Where did things start to go wrong for you, fella?” Fake Seacrest asked him.
The man shook his head. “That was the worst taste I’ve ever had in my mouth,” he said. “I’ve eaten brains, balls, and anuses of all kinds of animals and none of that even comes close.”
Fake Seacrest chuckled and touched the man’s arm. “Well, better luck next time!” A handler wrangled Sadao away from the crowd and brought him to face the camera. “Sadao,” said Fake Seacrest as he bowed slightly, “yet another championship for you. What’s next?”
“I am going to travel in Taiwan with my good friend Charlie. We both love everything and everybody here,” said Sadao, adding, “Xie xie, da jia,” in perfect Mandarin. The crowd cheered appreciatively.
Chompin’ Charlie was signing autographs as well. Who knew competitive eaters were so popular? When they managed to get him next to Fake Seacrest, Charlie said, “Sadao beat me fair and square, but my mouth is always up for a rematch. Bring it on!”
I felt someone leaning heavily on me. I turned and stared into Dwayne’s bloodshot eyes.
“This was a big mistake,” he said.
“Are you all right?” asked Nancy. “I have some mints if you need them.”
“I could use a few,” he said. Nancy handed him the entire pack. He rattled out a handful and popped them. “I thought I could handle it but they used the foulest stinky tofu ever!”
“You looked like you were going to be sick,” I said.
“I haven’t ruled that out yet. Let’s get out of here. The losers have no right to hang around the field after a championship game.” I noticed several people looking at Dwayne with sad smiles.
“Are you sure you don’t want Sadao’s autograph?” I teased. He grunted and sucked down more of Nancy’s mints.
•••
We walked Nancy to the Jiantan MRT station. She was behind on a project, the orientation packet for first-year students of Taiwan National University’s College of Life Science. My girlfriend was in a doctoral biotechnology program. Nancy
and I did a one-arm embrace when we parted.
Dwayne slumped noticeably after Nancy was gone. Showing weakness in front of women is taboo in his culture, or in every chauvinistic culture, I guess. We pushed our way north on Dadong Road.
“Do you want to go home?” I asked Dwayne. He was a leaning tower of muscle with a top floor that reeked.
“I’m good to work the rest of the night,” huffed Dwayne. His breath smelled like a scoop of mint ice cream melting on a steaming pile of shit.
We passed a stand selling the deep-fried variety of stinky tofu.
“How about we get a couple plates of that?” I asked Dwayne.
He grimaced in pain but I could tell he was suppressing a laugh. “I’m not going to eat any more of your bullshit Han Chinese food.”
We turned west on Danan Road and passed Cicheng Temple. Supposedly this is where the night market originated a century ago as a series of snack stands outside the temple to feed hungry worshippers.
“Maybe it’s appropriate for you to make an offering for Mazu,” I suggested. “Our Heavenly Holy Mother might be able to help you out.”
Dwayne soldiered on. “If I don’t sit down soon, I’ll be making an offering in the street,” he said.
I gave him a wider berth as we continued down Danan until we reached the corner of Daxi Road. He ducked into the best skewer and stew joint in all of Shilin Night Market, Unknown Pleasures—that’s my food stand, the one I run with the help of Dwayne and Frankie the Cat, the one I inherited from my parents.
By the way, do you like the name? It’s the title of the first album of my favorite band, Joy Division. I used to be stupidly obsessed with the opaque lyrics, which drove me to learn English, and of course I was as fascinated as the rest of the world by the dramatic suicide of singer Ian Curtis just as the band was about to break big.
I’m older now. Death isn’t as cool as it used to be.
Unknown Pleasures used to be located one block north on Daxi, at the intersection with Dabei Road. But that area was recently declared an emergency route and all the merchants located there were evacuated. We moved to our present space, which is actually nicer and bigger, but I lost some friends, people I’d known since I was a kid, who took buyouts and decided to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
Dancing Jenny, who used to run a clothing boutique, left the country altogether. I’d heard that she was now modeling BDSM gear in Tokyo. Kuilan and her husband left their hot pot business to start a full-fledged restaurant in Beijing. My family, Dancing Jenny, and Kuilan all worked together for nearly two decades and then, boom, we were all gone from that block.
Yes, things have changed dramatically in the last two months since I became a minor national hero. That’s how it is in Taiwan, though. Nothing seems to change until it suddenly does.
Now how did I become famous? Well, it’s a little embarrassing, but a guy I knew from high school tried to shoot me one night while I was working. Luckily I happened to be holding Da Pang, or “Fatty,” a big cast iron pot that had been a favorite of my grandfather. The pot deflected the bullet, the gun jammed, and my erstwhile acquaintance fled.
It had made the news and all. I did a few interviews brandishing Little Fatty, retold the tale of how I could only see the gun and not the gunman, and of feeling the sting in my hands when the bullet ricocheted. Soon, keychain replicas of Little Fatty began to pop up all over the island. Unknown Pleasures’ traffic increased in a big way. People took selfies at our stand, more with Fatty, dent side out, than with me.
Everything turned out all right. Well, my classmate later killed himself, so that was a bummer, but you know what? Every time we open for business and I reach up and touch Fatty on his dedicated trophy shelf, I am glad to be alive and overworked.
I followed Dwayne as he teetered into Unknown Pleasures and disappeared into its tiny, staff-only restroom. That was one good thing about the new location. I sure don’t miss the communal restroom.
Frankie the Cat stood behind the main grill, chatting with another elderly mainlander man. Both were born in China and were probably in their late seventies, although Frankie could pass for a man in his fifties. His hair was still thick, combed back and impossibly black. He had to be dyeing it, right?
Frankie had joined the army when he was a gung-ho kid just entering his teens. He was an orphan who had washed up in Taiwan with the rest of the Nationalists, also known as the Kuomintang or KMT, after the Chinese civil war ended with their defeat in 1949. Later, he was a political prisoner of the KMT for more than a decade after his brother was mistakenly reported to be a Communist. Still, Frankie never showed any bitterness about his lot in life and took orders from a punk like me because my grandfather had hired him before I was even born.
I regarded Frankie’s friend, who was greyer and thinner. He shared the same sad smile of someone whose life had been derailed. If this was a prison pal, was he a fellow political inmate or a legitimately hardened criminal?
The two men also wore the same bandages on their forearms.
Frankie’s wrappings were a few days old. “I had some old tattoos removed,” he’d said casually when I asked him if he was all right. “They’re bad for your skin when you’re older.”
I’d just nodded but I knew that he had removed the KMT army slogans that ran down both his forearms: take back the mainland and kill mao and zhu. He had been wearing long sleeves to cover them up as long as I had known him.
Frankie glanced at me and nodded, indicating that now was a good time to introduce me.
“Hello, sir,” I said to Frankie’s friend.
“Jing-nan,” said Frankie as he held an open hand to the man. “This is my old service pal from the orphan brigade!”
The unit had been made up of boys whose fathers had been killed by Communists in China. They’d been among the KMT’s toughest soldiers even though they were as young as twelve. The brigade itself had been orphaned years ago, just another forgotten cockamamie Cold War relic.
I gave the man an informal salute that he returned immediately. “It’s an honor to meet you, uncle,” I said. It was best to be deferential, even though Frankie hadn’t told me his name. “Please have something to eat. Anything you want.”
“No, I should be going,” the man said before turning to Frankie. “It’s a miracle to see you again, my friend. A real blessing from Mazu. Take care for now.” The two men clasped both each other’s hands and smiled like boys. Frankie’s friend turned away and disappeared into the crowd on Danan Road. I saw Frankie’s smile fade. His face was neutral but his eyes were sad.
“Is everything okay, Frankie?” I asked.
“I’m fine.” I appreciated that he didn’t try to fake a smile.
“Did that guy say something to upset you?”
“No. It’s just upsetting to see him and remember those times. We were so innocent, you know? Sure, we had guns, but we were naïve. There aren’t many of us left.” Frankie shook his head. “I didn’t introduce you properly because he changed his name. He’d probably prefer you didn’t know either of them.”
We were rudely interrupted by Dwayne’s groans from the restroom.
“Did anything big happen while we were away, Frankie?”
“Naw, this place was dead while the contest was going on.” He turned on the faucet and ran his hands under the water. “Dwayne didn’t come in last, did he?”
“He almost did, but I don’t think anybody noticed. It was a two-man contest.”
Dwayne stepped out of the restroom, looking as fresh as a newly wilted flower.
“Well, that stinky tofu’s not going to be a problem anymore,” he declared.
Chapter Two
Near closing time some friends from other stalls walked by Unknown Pleasures to lightly sprinkle shit on Dwayne for performing so poorly in the eating contest.
“I was thinking about your fa
ce and I lost my appetite,” was his standard reply. Dwayne could have come up with something better under normal circumstances, but he wasn’t so sharp after his system cleanse. He wasn’t even up for horsing around during the lulls.
At around one in the morning I left the night market. I’d scrubbed down the side grill and mopped the tiles in the front. Dwayne would take care of the main grill and Frankie, who always left last, would finish everything else. I would be screwed without those guys because honestly they worked like they were family. No days off. I could tell when one of them was feeling sick only by their excessive tea drinking, and even then, neither would ever cop to it. They never seriously complained about anything.
Maybe they felt sorry for me.
I touched Little Fatty on the way out. I don’t believe in luck, superstitions, or gods, but that little pot had saved my life. I know it’s an inanimate object but I will feel a great deal of affection for it until I die.
I walked down the darkened streets that only a few hours ago were choked with people. Death. Why was I thinking about death again, much less my own death? I was alive, in love, and happy. Very happy.
I turned west on Jiantan Road, away from the night market. I continued along the boarded-up future site of the Taipei Performing Arts Center, which looked like a moon base in artist renderings. I was sure that it was going to have many important cultural events that I wouldn’t have the time, money, or desire to attend.
I crossed Chengde Road and stopped at the all-night fruit stand, which had way better deals than the cheats at the night market. I bought a pineapple that had already been shorn of its headpiece and skinned. It’s always good to have one in the fridge.
After I turned the corner, I saw a huge billboard and a wave of foreboding came over me. The giant ad was from a hospital. Like all hospital ads, none of the people in it seemed to require hospitalization. A three-generation family was sitting in their living room, smiling like dopes and pointing to a full moon that was perfectly centered in their apparently high-definition glass window.