by Ed Lin
BOTH MY PARENTS AND the Huangs had loved to go flopping. Julia and I were dragged into temples and forced to inhale the fumes of burning incense, burning fake money and the cigars smoked by the odd folk-religion shaman between prophecies. But Julia’s mother was way worse than mine.
For years her mother prayed for a lighter color for Julia’s skin. She acted like her daughter was an obsidian idol when in reality Julia was the same beige shade as a generic PC. Mrs. Huang had some herb from a Buddhist monk that she scrubbed over Julia’s face to remove the sins from a past life. Her mother hired shamans—jitong in Mandarin, although I prefer the Taiwanese danki—to perform rituals to continue cleaning Julia’s soul and checked in with fortune-tellers at the temples to monitor progress.
I wondered what Mrs. Huang thought about souls and past lives now.
If I allowed myself to believe even for half a second in the superstitions surrounding Ghost Month, I would be terrified for Julia’s spirit. It was the worst possible time to die, because with the gates of hell opened and spirits pouring out, the recently departed might become confused and be doomed to wander the earth without rest forever.
But I didn’t believe in such things. I believed in facts, science and, every once in a while, human beings.
Ghost Month was also nicknamed National Pollution Month, because of the amount of ash generated by people burning fake money, paper-and-foil houses and cars in braziers and coffee cans to send to the dead. We appeased animal spirits, too. Buddhist monks presided over ceremonies at the pet columbaria for people to send Xiong Xiong the late Chow a nice house complete with dining-table set.
Buddhists believe in the cycle of life, death and reincarnation, so in what realm would these material goods be enjoyed by the loved one? Taiwanese like to cover all the bases. Maybe the cycle of life and death slowed at times, or didn’t exist at all. Maybe Xiong Xiong would want to catch a nap under that new dining table.
Religion was stupid and so was belief in a spirit world, I told myself. Julia wasn’t a ghost now. She was gone. That was what we believed. No. It was what we knew. I shouldn’t miss her but I did. I wished I didn’t have to feel anything.
I MANAGED TO STEEL myself and stuff down my emotions as I drove to work. It helped that my moped seat was worn and the ride almost always put my ass to sleep.
As the Shilin Night Market came into view, I thankfully felt myself shifting into work mode, Johnny mode. Fake mode. Uncaring mode. Just like I was to those Australian tourists. Put on a smile and a show.
The outdoor market turned the streets into blocks and blocks of everything and anything for sale. All the buildings had ground-floor establishments—sit-down restaurants, clothing stores with changing rooms. The streets themselves were crammed with stands that would soon be dishing out fried, frozen, grilled and raw foods.
The market was devoid of customers, and the continuous bare-metal frames of the unadorned stalls looked like a skeletal dragon splayed out across the length and breadth of the market. Vendors unpacked cardboard boxes and plastic crates. Apart from their usual goods, tonight many of them brought small folding tables to set up rickety altars for the first night of Ghost Month. Shilin Night Market was huge but too crowded to make burning large amounts of fake money feasible. I saw a few ashtray stands for accommodating petty cash offerings to the spirits.
I slowed my moped to a crawl to wriggle through a small flock of bumpkins blocking the road with their two vehicles. Both were half motorcycles welded to oxcarts. With riders in place, they looked like ugly mechanical centaurs fighting each other.
And they were fighting. You know the story. An extended family or group of close friends decides to invest together and start a night-market business. After a few weeks, the stand still doesn’t come close to breaking even, much less earning money. The distrust sets in. Each investor sends a representative to make sure nobody’s pocketing cash. The contempt for the struggling business turns into outright disdain for cheap customers who never buy enough. Before long everything falls apart and the other vendors buy up the used equipment for next to nothing, and the space itself is quickly rented to someone else.
The centaurs were yelling at each other and each other’s passengers to dismount and unpack first. I exchanged a few knowing looks with their amused neighbors. One of the drivers relented and drew his contraption back, giving me an opportunity to waddle through on my moped.
DON’T THINK OF MY food stall as a restaurant. I don’t. But it is bigger than most of my competition, and I like to think it serves better-quality food.
Shilin District is a residential area, and most of the people who live there stroll in for a snack or two at least once a week. A large population of foreigners lives here, too. A “red hair”—hong mao in Mandarin, or if you’re down with Taiwanese, ang mo—who resides in the neighborhood may not literally have red hair, but she or he can probably speak our language. Their kids can eat grosser things than any American-born Chinese who come through the Shilin Night Market.
Everybody comes here, not just the ABCs and tourists. This night market isn’t one of those five-block-long, locals-only rinky-dink operations. It’s the biggest one in Taiwan, and the best. All the tourist brochures tell people how to get here in general, but I’ll tell you how to get to my specific flavor emporium, Unknown Pleasures.
Here’s what you do. Take the red line of the Taipei Metro—the MRT—to Jiantan Station. The stench of stinky tofu should swaddle you even before you leave the elevated station. I suggest bearing east up Dadong Road, away from Bailing High School, unless you want to see mischievous boys trying to swat each other in the nuts and devious girls egging them on.
Yes, continue walking past the large indoor market—sure, there’s great food in there, but there’s amazing food throughout. Be adventurous! Marvel at the stand that makes sponge cakes in the shape of erect penises that the guy calls “gaykes.” Recoil at the thought of eating “frog eggs.” (Despite what the stand signs say in English, the dessert jelly aiyu is actually made from fig seeds.) Flip through the racks of cheap leather handbags. No brand knockoffs here—this isn’t China.
The crowds talk loudly, eat loudly and belch loudly, but they aren’t ever pushy. If you’re not Asian, people will probably stare openly at you. Take note of what they’re wearing and what they’re eating. Ask them where they got that cute shirt or those warm blocks of peanut candy and they’ll point out the stand. If they say they’re eating the best meat skewers ever, then you’re probably getting closer to my stall.
Don’t let the loud music deter you. That’s just a DJ a group of pot-sticker vendors hired to drum up more business. Make a left at the stand that sells underwear with superheroes from Japanese cartoons. If you hit the circle with the OK Mart, you’ve gone too far. Backtrack through Dadong Road and make a right on Dabei Road, also known as Jeremy Lin Lane because of the shirts, shorts and book bags adorning the merchandise racks there. One of the indoor stores proudly displays in its window a laminated printout of an email from the Jeremy Lin Foundation, thanking a donor for a $50 gift.
You’ll find Unknown Pleasures, my food joint, at the northwest intersection of Dabei and Daxi.
Maybe it’s a little corny, but I had the interior walls painted black and scraped out the white radio waves that appear on the cover of Joy Division’s first album, Unknown Pleasures. Some people mistake them for subsea mountain ranges. It looks so cool, and I can’t help but think less of people who ask me what the artwork is all about.
Look up at the only non-cluttered sign in the entire market: UNKNOWN PLEASURES is spelled out in English, horizontally, in all capital letters across a back-lit plastic panel, just like it is on the back of the album. A vertical sign in stained wood, lit by the light of the English sign, contains the two characters of the stand’s original name, given by my grandfather: Ke Kou, or “Tastes Good” in Mandarin.
Phonetically it also sounds like the two characters for “embezzle,” or “withholding money.”
My grandfather had felt that society had robbed him of opportunity, and to scrape by he had to resort to selling skewers made with scrap meat. It’s hard to imagine the business’s lowly beginnings now.
Incidentally, the first two syllables of Coca-Cola’s Chinese name are the same two characters as Ke Kou. The soda company has never contacted us, and my father told me we’ve had the name longer, in case the Americans want to sue us for trademark infringement.
Unlike most joints in the Shilin Night Market, Unknown Pleasures has five solid tables set up with sturdy chairs, all under a roof. The dining area in other places is usually unsteady stools at wobbly foldout tables under cheap umbrella stands that collapse in a sudden windy Taipei downpour.
Please come by and get some skewers to go, or step inside and order a spicy stew from Dwayne, the big guy who mans the counter. Point to the pictures of what you want and you’re good. Order more than you think you can eat. Come early during your stay in Taipei so you can come back and eventually try everything on the menu. I need the money.
I PARKED MY MOPED around the corner from Unknown Pleasures, but I couldn’t go directly to work. I had to see an old friend first, Dancing Jenny at Belle Amour. She caught me trying to rush by one day and slapped my arm hard. “I know you think I’m just an ugly old woman, but you still have to respect me!” she cried.
Belle Amour’s huge illuminated sign dominates our intersection of Dabei Road and Daxi Road and features a full-length curvy silhouette of a woman leaning against the words, one hand holding her ponytail erect. Located on the southeast corner, the store is stocked with upscale dresses and costumes made by up-and-coming Taiwanese and Japanese designers. Jenny Lung Ming-tai is the proprietor of the store and model of the sign. She is prone to wearing leotards from time to time, so everyone calls her Dancing Jenny even though she doesn’t dance.
The northeast corner of the intersection is Song Kuilan’s dumpling and soup joint, Big Shot Hot Pot. In Chinese characters, the sign says “Big Man Hot Pot.” It’s right across the street, but none of our offerings compete directly. Kuilan runs the place with her beaten-down husband. Recently she’s been able to rope in her petty-criminal son, Ah-tien.
In the span of my memory, our three stores are the lone originals left. Stores too many to count have come and gone. An available stall never lasts long. There’s always a cart business that wants to move to a fixed stall on the street next to a storefront, and there’s always a fixed stall that wants to move into a storefront. The storefront stores are angling on a corner location. Going back to the beginning, there’s always a new cart rolling in with a kid with a vision or a lonely retiree trying to feel useful.
The southeast corner of the intersection is where Julia’s family last had a store. Ever since they sold the location there more than a decade ago, there hasn’t been a business that has lasted more than two years on the corner. The current business is a sci-fi toy store called Beyond Human.
When we were still kids, I wrote our initials as small as I could in a wet concrete patch on the corner and enclosed them in a tiny lopsided heart. It was visible for less than a year before that part of the sidewalk was tiled over, chipped out and paved over again. Building materials don’t endure in Taipei’s heat, rain and humidity. Only human flesh does.
AT THE DOORSTEP OF Belle Amour, I took a deep breath and exhaled. I tried to forget everything. It was show time.
“Jenny!” I called out as I stepped into her store. “Where’s my favorite vendor in the whole market?” I have to be fully in my Johnny-night-market persona when I see her. When I act shy, she pinches my nipples.
A motion-activated alarm announced my arrival, playing the chorus to “Lady Marmalade.” The inside of her store was lit with a series of vintage-style filament light bulbs, which gave the place a filtered-lens, Instagram-inspired feel. Her offerings were divided into three aisles of double-decker racks. Most of the floor was bamboo wood, but the two dressing rooms in the back were carpeted—some customers wanted to make sure they were able to get down on their hands and knees comfortably while wearing certain outfits.
“Ah, Jing-nan!” Jenny cried as she came out of the middle and narrowest aisle. She set aside a bundle of dresses on the counter and kissed my cheek. For me, being extroverted is an act, but Dancing Jenny was genuinely flirty and flashy, her fingers and lips brushing your skin. Some said she was that way because she had been abroad. Some said she was into broads.
She was in her late thirties and stood a little shorter than me. Her arched eyebrows taken alone were severe, but her soft eyes and small smile gave her face an inviting look overall. Anybody who obsessed over the silhouette in her sign wouldn’t be disappointed upon seeing her.
Jenny opened up the place by herself when she was a teenager, and she was the first woman I ever saw wearing an exposed corset. My father slapped me upside my head because I wouldn’t stop staring. Her outfits are a lot less risqué these days, but a lot of boys and men still like to ogle her. Some women, too.
She pulled back and turned to her side, exposing the slit in a paisley skirt that seemed too short to have a slit.
“What do you think?” Jenny asked. Her hands came together at her waist and she instinctively picked at her cuticles.
“It seems way too short. I like it.”
Visibly relieved, she fixed her hair. “I’m glad you do, Jing-nan. This designer has been such a pain in the ass to work with. But she does such great stuff!” She retreated back down the aisle. I heard a zipping sound and her feet shuffling. “Do you think we’ll have a big crowd tonight?” Jenny yelled.
“How can we not? The holiday’s about to start, and foreigners are pouring in.”
“I hope they feel like buying stuff. This economic downturn has them acting all cocky. I swear, the white people never tried to bargain so hard until Wall Street bit it.”
“Let them! They’re celebrating Taiwanese night-market culture when they bargain.”
Jenny came from behind a rack of designer shirts and gave me a little push. “Whose side are you on?” She had changed into a pair of form-fitting denim shorts, a short, beaded shirt that exposed her midriff and a trucker hat with nonsensical graffiti in English sprayed across the front foam panel.
“Always on your side, Jenny! It’s the only safe side!” I held up my hand and we did a high five. “Have a great night,” I said.
“You, too,” she called out as I left.
MY NEXT STOP WAS Big Shot Hot Pot.
Kuilan’s son, Ah-tien, was at the front counter, seasoning a spicy soup base and a sour soup base. When he saw me, he gave the smallest nod and yelled out for his mother before assuming a sullen and resentful look. The son and I had never really hit it off. He was a bit of a delinquent and seemed to regard people who finished high school as sellouts. I shuffled my feet as the silence between us swirled and thickened like the soup.
Ah-tien was thirty, five years older than me, and still wore the buzz cut left over from conscription. He probably hated me because I’d been able to defer the mandatory military service, and then had been excluded from it because I was an orphan and running a business that employed others.
His black tank top showed off tattoos of tigers as well as a ba gua, the octagon-shaped Taoist symbol with a black-and-white yin-yang swirl in the middle. The collar was low enough to expose the face of a dragon with lobster-like eyestalks. He noticed me looking and puffed his chest out more.
I had never done anything to make him hate me, but I’m sure his mom had beaten him over the head with my good example of what a son should be. I had heard Kuilan talk about Ah-tien, always in a disparaging way, for years before I actually met him. I thought she was doing the overly modest thing parents do. Maybe this supposed “bad kid” was really the class salutatorian and not the valedictorian, merely an above-average pianist and not a virtuoso. Maybe the “trouble” Ah-tien was having with the cops was just an argument about a parking ticket.
Ah-tien’s slouchin
g form showed up at the night market about two years ago. The first time I saw him, with his tattoos, wild eyes and suspiciously crooked fingers, I had no idea who he was. This man I didn’t know was counting money and smoking in the men’s restroom in the indoor part of the night market. I looked at him, not accusingly, but with curiosity.
He straightened up and seemed pleased he was taller than I was. Thinking that I was focused on the cash, Ah-tien stuffed the wad partially in his front pocket. Try to take it, kid, his smirk seemed to say. Then he coolly rubbed out his cigarette on the plastic No Smoking sign and left without saying a word.
Less than an hour later, Kuilan brought him over to Unknown Pleasures and introduced him to me.
“Jing-nan is a good young man!” she emphasized, to my horror.
I got my hand to him as quickly as possible and we shook. I’d never met anyone with scars on their palm before.
“Hello,” he said in a quietly furious voice.
From now on, Kuilan said, Ah-tien was going to be working at her stall, and he and I were going to be best friends. I nodded and faked a smile. Ah-tien was better at it than me. We hadn’t had a substantial exchange of facial expressions since.
KUILAN GREETED ME WITH her hands on her hips and a nod. She had to be in her early sixties now, but she still looked the same as when I first saw her two decades ago. Kuilan often cited her Mongolian blood for her strength and slightly heavier-than-average build.
“Jing-nan, I forgot my hat today,” she said. “All this flour in the air is going to turn my hair even more grey!”
“That’s the only way I can tell the difference between you and Dancing Jenny,” I said.
She rubbed her ears. “You’re just a kidder! I know I look like her father. Say, have you heard about that new rumor going around? The district is going to pass a law that we’re all going to have to close by midnight!”