by Ed Lin
“Because we’re not at McDonald’s.” I dumped a healthy portion of pea shoots on her plate.
“If I eat all these vegetables, I get to go with you to the night market.”
I wiped the handles of my chopsticks against my napkin. “I’m responsible for you, so you have to promise me that you won’t go off with some boys or drink or take drugs. You understand?”
She frowned and kicked me lightly under the table. “You sound like my dad! Do you think I shouldn’t get pregnant tonight, too?”
“No, I’m all right with you getting pregnant. Nancy will help you raise the child.”
“Crazy talk,” said Nancy with her mouth full.
“I have to be at the night market until almost one in the morning. You’re probably going to run out of things to do there way before then. How are you going to get back to your apartment?”
“I’ll just take the train back.”
“You know how to ride the train by yourself?”
She crossed her eyes and stuck out her teeth. “Duh, I no know how to do anything, duh!”
When my cousin excused herself “to go piss,” I told Nancy about my gangster uncle, the gambling den in the sugarcane field, the shootout, and the crazy temple. She told me that she had joined a protest group that was going to storm a government building and occupy the space.
We were each surprised the other wasn’t.
When we hit the street the full weight of my exhaustion fell upon me. I staggered to the MRT subway system while Nancy escorted Mei-ling back to her apartment. From there Nancy would walk south through Da’an Park to the university and go on plotting revolution.
I met Mei-ling at 3:30 in the afternoon just outside the northern exit of the MRT at Jiantan Station.
“You’re on time!” I exclaimed.
“Why wouldn’t I be? Did you get enough sleep?”
“A few hours are all I need. Did you sleep, too?”
“I stayed up and read about the student movement. I appreciate Nancy’s activism.”
“I appreciate that you changed into something less flammable. Anyway, you can never go wrong with jeans and a T-shirt.”
She did that Big Eye hand dismissal. “I changed for me, not you.”
Mei-ling and I walked briskly through the early hours of the night market as vendors were unloading their goods and setting up signage.
“This is like watching a circus set up,” she said. “Only there aren’t any animals.”
“Just wait for the people to show up. They’re all beasts. I have to tame them a little and take their money.”
We entered Cixian Temple, where the vendors prayed each night before the market opened.
“You know who that is?” I asked, pointing to the goddess seated behind a table overlain with offerings of lit joss sticks, flowers, and baskets of fruit.
“Of course I do,” said Mei-ling. “It’s Mazu.”
The indifferent eyes of the idol of the Empress of Heaven stared at us through her beaded veil.
I bought a pack of incense sticks from a shady-looking guy at a booth in the temple. The tattoos went above his inner elbow and under his rolled-up sleeve. Half these guys who work at the temple look like criminals, or heidaoren, because they are. They’re not at the temple to cultivate their karma. They’re here to handle the menial work of collecting tax-free money for their outfit. After all, almost every neighborhood temple is owned by criminals.
Don’t think they don’t take the gods and goddesses seriously, however. This is Taiwan. Everybody’s superstitious. Nobody blindly believes in any deity yet nobody wants to incur their wrath. Even the most cold-hearted, willing-to-sell-his-own-mother-for-money thug wouldn’t release intestinal gas until leaving the temple, or at least getting a respectable distance away from the offering table.
Personally, I wouldn’t give a dime to this enterprise. But my hands were tied. The temple had been complaining that the night-market merchants weren’t being supportive enough and suggested that everybody at least burn some incense every night. As a strictly pragmatic matter, I agreed that it made the temple and by extension the entire night market look more legit to the tourists. Cixian Temple is cited in all the guidebooks as the origin of the night market, so people like to start there.
Sometimes it’s a pain in the ass to maintain history for the sake of tourism. I’ll go along with it, though, because I like having money.
I handed several lit joss sticks to Mei-ling.
“Bow three times to Mazu,” I told her.
“I know what to do,” she said as she proved it. As I paid my respects to the Mother Ancestor, another one of Mazu’s many aspects, I heard Mei-ling mutter, “This whole thing is stupid, anyway.”
My hands shook as I planted my sticks in the ash-strewn urn.
“Don’t ever call it stupid,” I warned her. “If people find comfort in something without hurting anyone, it’s not stupid. How would you like it if I told you your singing’s stupid?”
“You’ve already told me my singing’s stupid.”
“And it was a hurtful and wrong thing to say, right?”
She slapped my arm. “You’re so annoying!” she said, her mouth curling into a playful frown. “I can’t believe I came to the night market with you.”
“If you think I’m bad, you should meet the guys I work with.”
Dwayne’s blood-splattered arms worked like hairy pistons as he cut up organs destined for skewers. As Mei-ling and I approached Unknown Pleasures he glanced up and immediately adjusted his body language to bulk up his arms.
“Dwayne, this is my cousin, Mei-ling,” I said and made a point to emphasize every word of, “She is sixteen years old.” It was a warning for him to watch his language, but Mei-ling was the one I should have warned.
“Hello, Dwayne,” she said. “Are you a mountain person?”
I tensed up at the use of the phrase as Dwayne put down his knives and crossed his arms. At best, “mountain person” was outdated. At worst, it was plain racist.
But I knew Dwayne. A pretty girl who was related to his employer could never offend him. “Please call me an ‘original inhabitant,’” he said with gleaming eyes. “Many people prefer that term. We didn’t all live in the mountains.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Dwayne made sounds like he was cooing to a baby. “Don’t worry. It’s all just words, anyway.” He rubbed his nose roughly with the back of his right hand.
Frankie the Cat, subtle as ever, appeared out of nowhere and presented himself to Mei-ling before I had a chance to. “I’m Frankie,” he said. “You must be Big Eye’s kid.”
“Yes, he’s my dad.”
Frankie face softened. He gazed across the years. “The last time I saw you, you must have been about a year old.”
“But this is my first time in Taipei.”
Frankie nodded. “Yes, I believe it is.”
I was dumbstruck. “Hey, Frankie.”
“Yeah?”
“You’ve met my cousin before?”
“Yeah.”
“When did you meet her?”
“I was down in Taichung briefly with some old acquaintances.”
“Why didn’t you tell me I had a cousin?”
“It wasn’t my business to tell you. It wasn’t my business to know, either, but I couldn’t help that. Now you know, so I guess Big Eye’s back in touch with you.”
He turned and went back to his station. Sometimes I forget how attuned Frankie is to the heidaoren and all their misdeeds. As a political prisoner on Green Island, he was treated the same as the flat-out criminals—like shit. By the time Frankie was released, he had brothers for life who would kill for him.
“He knows my dad,” Mei-ling said slowly.
“Frankie knows a lot of things.” I
wondered what else he was holding close to his vest.
“Well, what are we gonna do now?”
“Mei-ling,” I said. “I have to help set up. If you walk around, you won’t get lost, will you?”
“She’s a big girl,” said Dwayne. “She’ll be fine.”
“There’s not too much going on right now,” Frankie called out. “Be another hour before things start swinging.”
Mei-ling shifted her weight to her right leg. “Do you want me to help with anything?” she asked.
“I’m just going to make about a thousand skewers,” I said. “It’s pretty boring work.”
“I want to try it! I’ve never really cooked anything.”
“I don’t know about this. You could cut yourself.”
“Let her give it a shot, Jing-nan,” said Dwayne. “Are you afraid she’ll be better at it than you?”
“I’m afraid she’ll stab her finger, get an infection and then lose her entire arm after gangrene sets in,” I said. Everybody laughed. “All right, young lady, if you want to try this, wash your hands first at the sink. Use lots of soap.”
When she was done, I gave her a stack of bamboo skewers and a bowl of pig intestines.
“Frankie’s already done the hard part,” I said. “He’s cut them down and washed them out thoroughly. Dwayne’s sliced and marinated them.” I reached in and grabbed a strip dripping with sauce. “You want to take these, squeeze them off but not all the way. Roll ’em up like a sock and then stick it through with this.”
I was distracted by narrating what I was doing, as the process was intuitive to me after all this time. Talking about it was making me consciously think about what I was doing. A skier wouldn’t say out loud what muscles were doing what while slaloming. When I scratched myself by accident, I played off the pain with a flourish of my fingers. “Yep, the skewers are nice and sharp!”
Mei-ling cringed. “Your fingers must be tough from this job. I would be bleeding if I did that.”
“Then don’t. So, put four on a skewer and you’re done,” I concluded. “Pretty basic stuff.”
“Why four? There’s room for more.”
“It’s a dirty trick,” said Dwayne. “He always wants the skewers to have four chunks each because he wants people to buy two in order to get that lucky number.” The word for “eight” in Mandarin sounds like “wealth,” so the superstitious Taiwanese buy things in eights, and get phone numbers and license plates that include as many eights as possible. It also helps me that four is considered an unlucky number.
“You should put five on a skewer,” said Mei-ling. “They’ll fit and that’s a lucky number, too.”
Frankie called out over his plastic tub of organs, “Why sell five when you can sell eight?”
Mei-ling nodded as she stabbed another rolled-up intestine. “I think I’m starting to understand the night-market culture,” she said. “You’re all a bunch of scammers!”
It was fun showing Mei-ling what to do. Her presence added a soft note to the usual roughhouse idiocy that Dwayne and I could degenerate into.
Foot traffic picked up around 5:30 and I stood at the front of Unknown Pleasures, surveying the crowd and listening carefully. I heard a group of men speaking English, of the English-accent variety. I stepped out into the crowd and spied a group of four middle-aged white guys, a little out of shape but cheerful.
They had no idea what to do with their money, so naturally they needed my help.
“You lot!” I called to them, using the expression for the plural third person that I learned from the chorus of The Clash song “Magnificent Seven.” “Come over here!”
The men burst out laughing—a common reaction to hearing fluent English spoken—and ambled over. A guy with wispy dried-garlic-root hair wearing a Hawaiian shirt was the first to reach me.
“Haw haw,” he laughed in a decidedly American way. “You fell for Bob’s fake accent. Thought we were British, right?”
“I did,” I said. “You got me.”
“We don’t want the wrong people to know we’re Americans!”
Bob came up and rubbed his pink sea-anemone mouth. “We can tell you’re not the wrong sort of people. Did I really fool you?”
I nodded and smiled. If I played along, they’d buy more. “Yes, I fell for it completely. It was perfect.”
The other two guys gathered around. They looked like retired cops—walking around with guarded casualness. A surprisingly high number of American tourists are ex-police. I guess the word was out among them that Taipei was a great vacation place that was seemingly crime-free. What they don’t know won’t hurt them.
“Wait a second, hold on now,” said Bob. “Are you an American? Your English is just a little too good.”
I crossed my arms and smiled. “I went to college in the States,” I said, not mentioning that I never finished. “You’re Bob, right? Please call me Johnny.” I shook hands with him. He had to buy something from me now. You can’t not buy something from someone whose name you know. I made sure to introduce myself to each of them.
“What have we got here?” the ex-cop named Jeff said to himself as he cast a critical eye upon my award-winning skewers. “How about that one? What the heck is it?”
“You don’t want that one,” I said. “I think you better go with something safer. It’s too Taiwanese for you.” That would challenge their manhoods.
“Jeff is tougher than he looks,” said Bob. “This man’s seen murder victims.”
I raised an eyebrow and threw out a challenge. “Well, Jeff, do you think you can handle pig uterus? If that’s too much for you, the chicken uterus is just to the left.”
Jeff sucked in his lips and opened his eyes wide. “I’m not even sure what the uterus does,” he said with a nervous smile. “How about, you know, a straight-up beef or chicken thing?”
I reached over the counter and touched his shoulder. “I’ve got you covered, Jeff. We’ve got satay-style chicken and beef.” I called out in Taiwanese for Mei-ling to bring over the goods from the main grill in the back that was manned by Dwayne.
All four men immediately evaluated Mei-ling’s teenage cleavage as she transferred a tray of skewers to the front grill.
“I didn’t know,” said Bob, “that Taiwanese women were so alluring.”
I shrugged. “I don’t think of her like that,” I said. “For one thing, she’s my cousin, and she’s sixteen.” Three of the men shoved their hands in their shorts pockets while Jeff let out a low whistle. I didn’t know what the age of consent was in the US but it sure wasn’t sixteen, which was Taiwan’s. “Say hello to the customers, Mei-ling,” I said in English.
“Hello,” she said. Like most Taiwanese, she sounded nice and innocent when she spoke English. I pointed out the intestine skewers to the men.
“Mei-ling made these herself. It’s only her first day but I think she did a pretty good job. Should I add these to your order?”
“Oh, yeah, we want to support Mei-ling,” said Bob.
“Sure thing,” said Jeff. I loaded them up with skewers and even threw in a small bag of sausages. Mei-ling thanked each of the men. They looked at her wistfully as they left.
“I should have told them I was a singer,” Mei-ling said. “They would have bought my songs!”
“They wouldn’t get your kind of music,” I said.
She pouted. “They would’ve bought it just because I’m cute. I could tell.”
I couldn’t argue with her. They had gone for her hideously asymmetrical (by my standards) skewers, which I’m sure they wouldn’t have the guts to eat. They would eat the sausages, at least—they had a familiar form factor.
Some Australian women came by and were also charmed with Mei-ling. “Cute as a button,” they called her, which I thought was odd since all the buttons I had ever seen were rather utilitarian and plain.
I should have hired a girl sooner. Maybe Dwayne and Frankie and I hadn’t been able to squeeze all the New Taiwan dollars that Unknown Pleasures was capable of yielding. I could crunch the numbers and see if it was cost-effective to keep her for a month or so. I’d have to pay her, after all.
Maybe I could even get a karaoke system and let her sing her songs a little bit.
No, scratch that. She would drive people away.
As the hours went by I could tell we were picking up substantially more cash than the typical night. Mei-ling seemed to enjoy learning the ropes, how to read people and draw them in. Too bad her English wasn’t so great. I think part of the problem is that the English language is overt and specific in a way that Taiwanese find offensive. The Taiwanese language, like Mandarin, is by comparison vague and indirect. Speaking it in a familiar way with a stranger gives you an assholic quality.
“Ma de, this is the place!”
The foul mouth belonged to a short and enthusiastic high school student, his shirt untucked. He had brought a dozen boys and girls to Unknown Pleasures. I smiled. It was always a short kid who led the packs. Why?
“Hey guys, welcome to my venerable stand!” I called out.
The little leader nearly fell over. “You! You’re the guy who got shot!”
“If you all buy something, I’ll show you the bullet wound.”
“You didn’t actually get shot, Jing-nan!” yelled Mei-ling.
“Who said I did?” I lifted Fatty from its shelf and hefted the pot over my head. “This is the brave little soldier who took a bullet for me! When you’re all done eating, take a picture with Fatty!”
The kids lit up and lined up. I caught Mei-ling’s exaggerated look of disgust at my sales technique. Maybe she didn’t have it in her to do this.
Chapter Six
An opportune time came for my bathroom break. I posted Mei-ling in the front; Dwayne and Frankie said they’d keep a lookout.
A few young women were waiting to get into our restroom. It’s our private restroom, yes, but a group of attractive women attracts both men and women. For such an attraction I was willing to self-sacrifice and trudge all the way to the common restroom halfway across the night market.