Incensed

by Ed Lin

  I feel the same way. Each Chinese customer at Unknown Pleasures who buys more than NT$1,000 in food gets to scratch her initials into the chairs.

  I spied a small group of grungy young men rummaging through their shoulder bags and comparing trinkets. They could have been Taiwanese. Everything they wore was Uniqlo. As they made their way to the entrance I slipped in a pair of earbuds, kept my head down and trailed them. We all jumped back as bellhops leading three brass-pole luggage carts charged out the door. The Uniqlo brigade bitched about the interruption and the spell was broken. They spoke clinically proper Mandarin; they were probably young recruits of the Communist Party touring the island for the first time. The liberal use of “taibazi” tipped me off that they hadn’t been impressed by what they’d seen so far on this trip. When the way was clear the line began to move again. The first young man in the group held up a card key but the doorman waved it away. No need to show it. His comrades and I followed him in.

  They didn’t notice that I had infiltrated their group and neither did the middle-aged couple behind me.

  “Everything is so pricey here,” said the woman. “I can’t find any bargains. No wonder the travel company had a Mid-Autumn Festival special. Everything else is a rip-off.”

  “We could go to Hong Kong again,” the man offered.

  She scoffed at him. “I don’t like Cantonese people,” said the woman. “They only want to eat animal feet.”

  I lost track of their conversation as the cavernous lobby revealed itself. It was brightly lit and the air smelled so sugary it was probably full of carbs. The ceilings were at least thirty feet high and from them two dozen crystal chandeliers pointed down like the sparkled tips of wizard staffs. The lobby furniture resembled swollen hawthorn fruit, blazingly red and rounded. People shuffled over and collapsed into chairs and chaise lounges. Available space was going fast. I glanced around and slid into an ottoman near the front desk. I was blending in beautifully.

  I could really use a piss break. I was on a mission, however. A rescue mission. Craning my neck to try to get within earshot of the front desk, I edged down the ottoman and my butt scraped something that had been left in the folds of the cushion. It was a key card. I pocketed it. Could come in handy.

  I continued to survey the room to see if my presence had attracted attention. I spied two of the men I had snuck in with. They were lingering over a rack of tourist-attractions pamphlets with strategically incomplete maps. One of the guys unbuttoned his linen shirt, revealing a T-shirt with the tomb image of Joy Division’s Closer album. I had just worn my Closer shirt the other day!

  I couldn’t help but stare. Was this more than a coincidence? It had to be! This man and I were connected!

  Did this mean that underneath China’s calloused and colorless skin there was a heart, a facility to feel pain, an appreciation of beauty, and the need to be in love right now this second?

  I was almost breathless. This Chinese guy loved Joy Division and he even had a bootleg shirt to prove it!

  Of course it was a bootleg shirt. The version that Joy Division and New Order bassist Peter Hook sold at his shows featured “Manchester” underneath the album cover. The other official design sold by the continuing version of New Order featured Joy Division’s name and the album title. The Chinese guy’s shirt was the exact album cover, as originally issued. No words. Just the picture. Exactly as it should be.

  Another Chinese guy joined them. He was now wearing a Flipper T-shirt. That was a punk band from San Francisco that I could never get into. Flipper had two bassists and the songs just never ended.

  The dudes left the lobby and waited out front for a cab. Now that they had done the family-friendly tour, it was time for their night out at a club. Good for them and back to work for me.

  Two concierges were behind the front desk, a woman and a man, both of medium height. They were wearing similar black jackets and bowties. Each was handling a line of three people. The woman was in her late thirties and had the insular-yet-friendly look down pat. I’ll bet she didn’t take any shit. The man was in his mid-fifties and had the beaten-down body language of the coach of a last-place high-school volleyball team. He nodded a lot. There was a deep-seated sorrow in his pudgy face but his eyes were dead and, even from where I was sitting, terrifying.

  They looked like gangsters. Could that woman have been the one who escorted Mei-ling to The Perch? Maybe she was the one who’d driven the motorcycle.

  I shot two close-ups of both employees and sent them to Big Eye. The doorman was the only other employee currently in view. I shot his face from the side.

  Big Eye texted back, who else is there?

  I wrote back, there are at least three bellhops but they are busy now.

  send their pictures. whatever happens, don’t leave the lobby. stay there until i tell you to go.

  all right.

  I pulled out my earbuds. I needed to be fully alert so I could hear them the second they came back down the elevators.

  I became aware of a burbling sound behind and beneath me. A koi pond. The sound came from a larger-than-life statue of a vaguely divine-looking woman. Water was pouring out of a magical vase she cradled. Her face was serene and too young for her exaggerated height.

  It was also oddly familiar.

  She bore a striking resemblance to Mei-ling, especially in the nose and ears. I looked over the figure’s flowing multi-layered robe and felt a chill.

  A bell sounded and an elevator opened. Two of the bellhops emerged, strutting jauntily. I took each of their pictures, although honestly up close they looked nearly identical. Rounded jaws, jutting ears, freckles and light brown eyes. Must be brothers. As they crossed the lobby to the front desk, one of them slapped the other’s ass. The woman at the desk reacted immediately.

  “Act professionally!” she spat. The two shimmied to the side and stood with their backs against the wall. Where was that third guy? Maybe he was helping someone unpack.

  I sent the two pictures to Big Eye.

  one more left, I typed.

  hurry up. remember, don’t go up into the hotel. stay in the lobby.

  of course.

  The lobby was never completely empty nor was it ever really quiet. When the human activity level seemed in danger of tapering down to an off-peak MRT platform, another busload of tourists would arrive. As people poured in, I understood how I’d missed the splashing fountain in the koi pool earlier. A group of five Chinese, yelling as if testing the lobby for echoes, easily blocked the statue and masked the sound.

  A bell cut through the din and another elevator opened.

  “Oh, shit!” I thought. I dove into a high-backed couch, hoping I had been quick enough.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I opened my hands wide, held them in front of my face and examined my palms as if I were holding the most interesting book in the world.

  When I felt somebody drop next to me on the couch I knew my efforts were in vain.

  “Jing-nan?” asked Peggy. “What in the world are you doing? And why are you here?”

  No sense in trying to ignore her. I had to try to get her to understand the situation and leave, or at least leave me alone.

  “Listen, Peggy, I’m here because I’m trying to find my cousin.”

  “Your cousin!” she said. “Mei-ling! She’s here?” If I hadn’t already known that Peggy was from a mainlander family, I would have guessed it from the explosive way she was now yelling, surrounded by her ancestral brethren.

  “Peggy,” I said through my teeth, “please keep it down.”

  “I thought you had to be a tourist from China to stay here.”

  “I’m not staying here,” I said, regretting it immediately.

  “You’re not staying here!” Peggy yelled. Aw, screw it.

  “Yes! I’m just waiting in the lobby!” I yelled back.

>   “How are you going to find Mei-ling by sitting in the lobby?”

  I lowered my head into my elbows, maintaining eye contact with her. “I’ve heard that she works here,” I whispered.

  Peggy seemed to get it. “She works here?” she whispered. “It’s impossible to get a job here. You have to go through so many screenings. Supposedly, you have to be in good with Black Sea because they control where the tourists visit and all.”

  Of course Peggy would be aware of the criminal organizations and their territories, especially as many of them operated legitimate businesses. I was anxious to change the subject, as nothing would attract more attention from gangsters than discussing gangs. I clasped my hands and said, “Tell me something, Peggy. What are you doing here?”

  “I was a keynote speaker at ‘Modern Chinese Culture’ in the main conference room. I made a lot of business connections. Looks like my family is going to be reconnecting with our now-less-distant relatives back on the mainland.” She dropped her voice even lower. “I’m going to have to conduct some due diligence, though. Chinese people cook the books like they’re raw meat.”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t trust your own people, Peggy.”

  “They’re your people, too, Jing-nan.” Here we go again. The starkest difference between mainlander people like Peggy’s family and long-established Taiwanese families like mine is that the former still generally feel a close kinship with China and the latter, not really.

  “My people left China centuries ago,” I said.

  “There are still lots of Chens in China!”

  “Lots of Chens in America, and a bunch of them don’t speak a word of Chinese.”

  Peggy put her head back and gave a Wookiee cry of exasperation. “It’s utterly useless talking to you. How about a drink? The bar’s still open upstairs.”

  “I have to wait here, Peggy.”

  “For what?”

  “Too much to explain right now. You go ahead, all right?”

  She swung herself to her feet. “At some point in the future,” she warned me, “you’re going to tell me everything.”

  I held up a noncommittal hand and she high-fived it hard. “Ouch!” I said. “You just knocked a few years from my life line!”

  “Thought you didn’t believe in that sort of thing, Jing-nan!”

  As she walked away, I spied the third bellhop. I swung up my phone, changing the focal point between shots. When I had about a dozen pictures I paged through them, trying to find the clearest shot. The last one was a little hard to make out because the bellhop was standing over me and his shadow was messing with the auto-brightness setting of my phone’s display.

  “Why the fuck are you taking my picture, asshole?” he asked.

  The bellhop wasn’t a small man but he was smaller than me. He certainly shouldn’t be talking to me in that way.

  I ignored him and sent the last two pictures to Big Eye.

  “Hey, jerk! I’m talking to you!”

  I crossed a leg and turned away. My phone buzzed once. good, sit tight.

  Now he stuck a finger under my chin.

  “You’re not a guest here, are you?”

  I looked up and met his narrowed eyes. “Is it any of your business?” I asked. “If you must know, I’m waiting for somebody.”

  “Who?” The lobby was in a state of emptying again. I saw the two other bellhops, arms crossed and looking at us with interest.

  “Look, man, it doesn’t matter,” I said. “I just happened to take your picture by accident. I’m doing a blog entry about this hotel.”

  His eyes flickered. “You’re not supposed to be here if you’re not a guest. If I report you, they’ll escort you out.”

  I sighed. “How much do you want?”

  He considered for a second and then flashed two fingers like a baseball catcher. NT$200. Annoying but cheap enough. I handed him the bills. He went away with a big smile.

  Uh oh. He walked over to the other two bellhops and pointed me out. They came at me like I was a birthday cake and the candles were just blown out.

  “You guys want money, too, huh?” I asked them. They nodded eagerly. This was all going to be worth it, in the end, after we had Mei-ling.

  While I was paying them off, the woman at the front desk cocked her head and stared at us. She tapped the man and they both looked at me hard. The woman came around the desk and sailed right for me. The two bellhops saw her and beat it in the opposite direction.

  “Why are you tipping the bellhops?” she asked point-blank. Mandarin, when spoken properly, makes everything sound like a reprimand. “You only have to tip them for bringing your luggage up or down.”

  As soon as I spoke she would be able to tell that I wasn’t Chinese. “I was asking them where the bar was.”

  Her face soured immediately. “Who are you?”

  “I’m here for the ‘Modern Chinese Culture’ event.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I’m the plus-one of Peggy Lee, the keynote speaker.”

  She inhaled sharply. “Oh, Ms. Lee. Yes, we’re very honored to have the Lee family attend a function here.”

  I rose. “Could you please tell me exactly how to get to the bar? She’s been expecting me for quite a while now.”

  “Eighth floor R,” said the woman. “It’s right across from where the elevator doors open.”

  “Thank you.” I walked slowly to the elevator. I figured I had a minute or two before the woman checked up on the guest list. I didn’t know where I was going but I sure as hell wasn’t going to go to the bar. Peggy and her loose lips could blow my cover.

  I hit the up button and kept my back to the front desk.

  “Excuse me!” I heard the woman yell out from across the room. The light on the button went out and the bell sounded. “Sir! Excuse me!”

  The door slid open and I dodged a couple exiting. I jumped into the car and headed for the controls on the far side. I selected 33, the top floor, and tapped the “close door” button until it worked. Before the doors closed, a man squeezed through and completely disrespected my personal space by grabbing my wrists. He was the guy from the front desk. We swayed in sync as the car rose.

  This guy was stronger than Dwayne. I wondered how he was with a butcher’s knife. He twisted his hands, trying to make his grip more painful, but I compensated by jutting out my elbows. I saw crude bird tattoos just inside the cuffs of his long sleeves. It was the sort of tattoo you gave yourself in prison as you whiled the days away before your release.

  “You’re with that student protest group, aren’t you?” he growled.

  “What protest group?”

  “You thought you could disrupt the ‘Modern Chinese Culture’ meeting, huh? Idiot. We moved it to an earlier time!”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Nancy says I look like I’m lying when I am being honest. My widened eyes and open mouth look exaggerated. When I tell her that I didn’t eat the last package of Pocky, she smirks. I don’t even like Pocky that much. But the stakes right now were higher than chocolate-covered pretzel sticks. It was about exploring my pain threshold.

  The man didn’t believe I was telling the truth, either. As he looked at me, I could see that to him I represented every non-tipping hotel guest. “You stupid college students. Why don’t you get real jobs and pay taxes? Then you can tell me you don’t care about trade with China.”

  Correcting this guy wasn’t going to help the situation. Instead, I thought about what I would do as soon as the doors opened. I moved my wrists and arms slightly to test his grip for weak points.

  The elevator slowed prematurely and stopped at the twenty-fifth floor. The doors opened. A middle-aged couple stared at us, two men in the elevator in a tight embrace. The man was about to get in but the woman pulled him back.

  “Sinful!
” she chided.

  The front-desk clerk, aware that he was in uniform, said, “Everything is under control.” He nodded a few times but disgust remained on their faces. The doors closed without us or them saying another word. As the car began to lift I formulated a plan.

  At the thirty-third floor, the doors opened and I threw my weight at the clerk. People usually pull away to try to break holds. In my years of grappling with Dwayne I’d learned a thing or two. Sometimes the best thing to do is bring your opponent even closer. As long as they hold on to you, their arms are effectively pinned.

  The clerk’s eyes blew up like airbags as he stumbled backwards. In quick succession, I headbanged his nose and brought my right knee into his balls. He fell away and hit the floor, twitching and bleeding. For a second I admired my victory, then I leapt out of the elevator car. I stood square in the hallway, feet directly under my shoulders, just in case he recovered and counterattacked.

  “Gan!” the man on the floor cried long and loud. The doors closed and headed back down. I wondered if it would stop on twenty-five again, giving the same couple their second shock of the night.

  I looked down the hallway. Ceiling cameras in both directions. I bolted for the stairs. A sign warned that opening the door would sound an alarm. I took a chance and rammed the push bar. The door swung open without a sound. Thank you, hasty construction practices and irregular safety inspections.

  I jogged down two flights to the next floor. I should get out of the hotel. As long as I was in the building I was visible and vulnerable. As soon as that clerk recovered, he’d come after me hard.

  I continued going down, pacing myself. I didn’t see any cameras in the stairwell. They’d start looking for me on the thirty-third floor. They were probably on their way right now.