by Ed Lin
I laughed out loud, but too heartily for the beginning of Ghost Month, so I dialed it back a little. “There’s no way they could do that! Midnight is when Taiwanese first get hunger pangs.”
“It’s the tourists they’re thinking about. The image of Taipei is that we’re too morally loose, eating so many hours after the sun has gone down. Christians think it’s a sin! I know because my sister married a Christian. They call it ‘gluttony.’ ”
“The problem is that your soups taste too good!”
Kuilan’s son had had enough of our small talk. He wiped his hands on his apron, jammed a cigarette in his mouth and headed outside.
“Hey, Ah-tien!” his mother snapped at him. “You haven’t finished yet!”
He didn’t bother to remove the cigarette to talk back. “They have to simmer now. Do you expect me to make time go faster?”
“Why can’t you be like Jing-nan? Look how nice he is. Everybody likes him, and he’s never in trouble.” Luckily Ah-tien was out of earshot before she was even halfway done talking. She sighed and said to me, “I just hope the tourists and not the good brothers are hungry for our food. I’ll set another table outside for them.”
I didn’t want to, but I thought of Julia. I imagined her in pain and confused, wandering about with no relief, covered in blood.
“Do you want some water, Jing-nan?”
“No, thank you.”
“You’re swallowing a lot.”
“Your soup smells so good.”
“Such a kidder! So funny! How come you’re not married yet?”
I laughed soundlessly, feeling a cutting motion across my guts. “It’s not time yet.”
“Are you kidding me? When I was your age, I was already picking out baby names!” At that remark, Kuilan’s rarely seen husband, Bert, poked his head out from the kitchen in the back. He seemed to be sitting on a stool, and his hands were dutifully twisting dumpling skins over ground-pork fillings.
“Kuilan, looking at your husband reminds me that I should get my own show on the road. Don’t sell so many that you fill up my customers!”
“Bert!” Kuilan chastised him. “You didn’t say hi to Jing-nan the entire time he was standing here, and now he’s leaving!”
“Uh?” Bert looked up at her in awe before focusing on me. “Yes, hello, Jing-nan. You’re a good worker and a testament to what a good son is.”
I walked out just in time. Ah-tien was coming up Dabei Road, wearing a big pair of noise-canceling headphones.
I APPROACHED UNKNOWN PLEASURES with more than the usual dread. I was an actor who had lost his motivation. I wasn’t fully confident I could pull off the role tonight.
My two employees—colleagues, really—were prepping for the evening’s business.
Dwayne, the half aborigine who cooked and did pretty much everything else at the indoor counter, ran out and grabbed me around my arms. He didn’t use his customarily tight grip. It was soft. Caring, even. It brought me back to reality.
“I read all about Julia,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
Shit. Dancing Jenny and Song Kuilan didn’t pay attention to the news and Dwayne did?
I slumped a little. Dwayne led me inside to a metal prep table next to the sink in the corner. I sat down and lay my head sideways on top of my folded arms. Dwayne slid over a serving of spicy entrails stew in a ceramic bowl.
It looked and smelled exactly how my grandfather and father used to make it. The pig intestines and the pudding-like, coagulated lumps of duck blood were in the same proportion. We hadn’t slipped at all. If I didn’t hate my life completely at this moment, I’d say that I was rather pleased.
“Eat up, Jing-nan. Best thing you can do,” Dwayne said. He pulled out a chair and sat on it backward so he could perch his upper body on the backrest. He was close enough for me to see the red lightning-bolt veins radiating from his pupils. “This is terrible news, but we need you to be functional tonight, boss.”
He tilted his head down and regarded me over his cracking knuckles. You couldn’t tell he was part Amis. Dwayne looked like just another dark-skinned Taiwanese man in his late thirties, albeit on the heavier-built side. He fought back against his receding hairline by maintaining a crew cut.
I watched my hands turn the bowl of soup clockwise ninety degrees. “You remember Julia well, don’t you, Dwayne?”
“ ’Course I do. Me and the Cat both remember her. Wonderful little girl. Real nice and smart and pretty.”
From the other prep table on the other side of the sink, Frankie the Cat closed his eyes and nodded to us. Frankie was in his seventies, but he was ageless and silent in his appearance and movements. As always, he wore a clean, white long-sleeved kitchen uniform in spite of the humidity. With his big smile and oversized eyeglass lenses, he looked like the Cheshire Cat. Now, though, his mouth had sobered into two sad earthworms.
Dwayne and Frankie. Those were not their given names, but like a lot of people at the night market, such as Jenny, they were on their second or third chance at life. I was at a disadvantage here because I only knew certain episodes from their pasts, but Dwayne and Jenny had known me for most of my life, and Frankie, all of it. I couldn’t pretend to be someone different around them; that’s why they called me Jing-nan and not Johnny.
My right hand picked up a pair of chopsticks, and I watched red oblong shapes of hot oil stretch and slide into the hollow of the soup spoon my left hand was pushing into the soup. Steam lightly scorched my forehead as I bent down and ate mechanically.
“You and the Huangs haven’t been close in a few years, right?” Dwayne asked.
“I think the last time I saw Julia’s parents was at the funeral,” I said. “The funerals, I mean. Those were the last conversations I had with them. They sure sold their stall at the right time, when the economy was good.”
“What about Julia? You never … talked?”
The evening was getting a little too real for me. I had hoped to grieve inside and keep everything I felt in that soundproof darkroom with no doorknob. But Dwayne had kicked in that door and turned on the lights. I wasn’t used to talking to him in this way, either. We both had these playfully antagonistic, guy-guy personalities that we wore during work hours. When my parents died, he had mercifully said next to nothing. Now he wanted me to talk things out?
I scooped a few peppercorns from the stew into my mouth and crunched them one by one, feeling a burst of hurt every time.
“It was so stupid, Dwayne,” I said to a shaky reflection of myself in a shimmering oval of chili oil. I slurped up a stretch of chewy intestine. It broke easily in my mouth, with just the right amount of give. The ginger flavor had burst through the spicy firewall and became prominent in my mouth. “You knew about my plan, right?” I asked when my mouth was empty enough.
“Sure I did. You guys were going to ignore each other for a few years and then you were going to swoop in one day like a prince on a horse. Just like Sleeping Beauty.”
“Not quite Sleeping Beauty.” I stirred the stew and watched a cloud of pickled cabbage surface briefly. I picked out a dried chili that looked like a little devil’s tongue. I chewed it but didn’t swallow. “More like Snow White without the prince showing up. I couldn’t pull it off, Dwayne.”
“You tried. It was beyond your control.”
That set me off, because I wasn’t ready to stop blaming myself yet. “Beyond my control! Everything’s beyond my control! Look at me. Still doing the same shit my parents and grandfather—”
Dwayne stood up and kicked the chair across the tile floor. Frankie simply lifted his leg and clamped the chair down before it could fly into the street.
“Hey, you watch your mouth, Jing-nan!” said Dwayne. “This is a respectful business and one of the best restaurants in the market. Your grandfather, rest his spirit, and your parents, rest their spirits, put everything they had into this to make life better for you. For us, too.”
“I’m sorry, Dwayne. I didn’t mean to insult
you. You too, Frankie.”
“Don’t apologize to me and the Cat. We can take it. You apologize to your ancestors and set up an offering table for them. You have to. It’s bad enough that you took out the Guan Gong altar when you redesigned the place.” Like most Chinese gods, Guan Gong was based on an actual person, a famous general, in fact. He’s the red-faced guy holding a giant sword with a blade that looks like a lobster claw.
“No more fake gods here,” I said, my throat raw from the spices and anger.
“The previous management would be appalled!”
“It doesn’t matter, because I’m in charge now!”
“You lousy Han Chinese,” Dwayne said. “You destroyed my culture and you don’t even respect your own!”
Finally. We were both going back into work mode. Dwayne was the indignant native Taiwanese and I was the super-upbeat Johnny Taipei. Wrestling was definitely on the menu tonight. Frankie the Cat was going to go on being his silent self as he kept the stews fully stocked and fresh ingredients prepped throughout the night. The guy runs in the background like security software on a computer network.
I charged back into the stew with renewed vigor, never once letting go of my chopsticks or spoon. I wiped my forehead with the back of my right forearm and ate until there was nothing but pepper grit at the bottom of my bowl. I heard a scraping sound. Frankie was pushing out the front grill—Johnny Taipei’s pulpit—to the street. I stood up and put my bowl and utensils in the sink.
“Be happy,” I told Dwayne. “It’s the first day of you-know-what and we’re going to make a lot of money.”
“Oh, I know. Your restless undead are up and walking, trampling upon my people’s graves.”
“There’s no rest for us because we’re going to have customers in two seconds, my good Pangcah.”
“You don’t get to call me that! Only Amis get to call each other that. The way you say it, you murder my language.”
“Then how do you say it?”
Dwayne snickered and wiped his face. He went to the big back grill and tossed more wood chips and charcoal under it.
At some point Frankie had cleared out the sink, and now he was washing out pig and cow intestines, stomachs and chicken butts. The water washed down through a tube to a metal vent in the street curb. Who knew where that went to. The air smelled like wet feces and blood. It was comforting and felt like home.
I strode out to the front grill, feeling brand-new.
“That’s my boy, Johnny,” said Dwayne softly.
I set up the smaller skewers in a display behind my sneeze guard, to catch the eyes of people walking by. When they got hooked, people could move on to the larger skewers inside. Frankie brought over a tub of marinated, chopped-up meats and entrails. We each gathered a handful of wet bamboo skewers and began to spike them until they were full. As I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Frankie, he regained his full smile.
I remember making my first skewer, setting it on the grill and watching it burst into flames—I didn’t know the skewers had to be soaked in water first. It was good for a laugh for my grandfather and parents, but Frankie came over with tongs, tossed out the burned skewer and showed me how to do one properly. This was before Dwayne came on the scene and years before I’d be working there.
I looked at Frankie’s fast fingers. He had trained to be a soldier as a child, and that rigid discipline was still there.
Down the street, someone had set off fireworks. They were supposed to be banned in the night market. They always bend the rules a little around holidays.
Foot traffic was going to be heavy tonight. Some Taiwanese would be staying in for the night, but an influx of tourists would more than make up for the loss. There would also be ICLP and MTC students coming off the summer semesters, looking to blow off steam. Kids in the International Chinese Language Program and Missionary Training Center and other classes come from all over the world, and they’re into eating and buying night-market food.
A cloud of smoke and grease anointed my face. My worries and cares were sliding away. Jing-nan was the guy who had just lost his one and only love for good. Johnny was the hawker who always had a good time, was the life of the party and loved to show off his English to the foreigners. Johnny didn’t care about the dead. He lived life to the fullest.
Johnny made the most of the night market even before it was fully dark out.
He noticed a group of young white girls reading the stand’s sign and talking among themselves from a safe range.
“Hey, you,” I yelled out in English to the tallest one. “You’re an American, right?”
“What else could I be?” she said, laughing. She approached, and five of her friends followed in a tight formation. First time in Taiwan. Probably first time in Asia. The girls’ sunburned faces showed that they had already been here for a few days.
“You could be other things,” I said. “People come to Taipei from all over the world. But you and your friends talk like Yanks.”
“We thought the night market would be busier, but there’s, like, hardly anybody here.”
“You guys are early! The sun’s still out, people are just getting up right now!”
The women laughed. They say white people all look the same, but that’s not true at all. Their skin tones were all different, even with the sunburns, and their faces were all distinctive. They don’t all smile like Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts.
“Your English is really good,” the tallest woman said. “I knew there was something special about this stand because it was named Unknown Pleasures.”
“I love Joy Division, and that’s one of my favorite CDs.” I’d changed the English name from Tastes Good to Unknown Pleasures five years ago, when it was clear that I’d be stuck here for the foreseeable future. I’d meant it mostly as a tribute to Joy Division, but another meaning for me was that the word “unknown” indicated that I wasn’t sure what I was doing, and I certainly didn’t know if it would be “pleasurable.” I also figured a lot of cool people would be into it.
The American said, “I’ve never really listened to Joy Division. But we’re from Pittsburgh and there’s a store with the same name that sells sex toys.”
“The Pittsburgh Pirates!” I said, wielding an imaginary bat and swinging. “Well, we sell food, not toys. But if you want to try some sheep penis, I can help you!”
Her friends squealed in horror and fascination.
The American partially extended her index finger and tentatively pointed to some well-done mini pork and chicken sausages.
“What are those?”
“Sausages. Just pork and chicken. Nothing strange, I promise.”
“Are they good?”
“They’re the best in the whole world!” I plucked them from the grill with my tongs and released them into a crystalline bag. “Use this toothpick,” I told her. “Just eat it out of the bag.”
All the other women wanted the same exact things. I was only able to convince one of them to try a skewer of grilled pig intestines, and I think she planned to pose for pictures with it. I busied myself with bagging up sausages.
I was glad they didn’t want sit-down food. I could tell they were old friends who hadn’t seen each other in a while and they would linger for a long time.
“What’s your name?” the tall American asked. Her eyes gleamed with newfound interest, since the language barrier wasn’t an issue.
“Please call me Johnny,” I said, not pausing one second in my bagging motions. “What’s your name?”
I realized I was taking a huge risk by opening this door. Americans love to talk about problems they’re having and issues in their families with people they don’t even know. I was willing to take the extra step to make them feel more comfortable. After all, I had wanted to be an American, and a big part of being American was that you couldn’t be shy about physical contact with the people you met. Everybody wanted to hug.
“My name is Megan.” She extended a hand. I shook it briefly, pushed
a sausage-filled bag into her palm and patted her knuckles lightly with my fingers.
“Please pass this to your friend,” I said.
I had met several women named “Megan” at UCLA. Me-gan. It sounded like “not dry yet” in Mandarin.
“I’m here for the ghost celebrations,” Not Dry Yet said.
I glanced at the other people in her group. They stood nearby, anxious to get their food and pleased they could buy it from someone fluent in English. Otherwise, they wouldn’t trust that the food was safe for eating.
“Be careful!” I warned the woman. “You can’t say the word ‘ghost.’ It’s bad luck. Call them ‘good brothers.’ ”
“Oh, no! I’ve been saying it all day!”
“It’s all right,” I said. She was safe. No gluttonous spirits would try to possess an American body. Too many food allergies. “Also, don’t whistle, Megan. That attracts good brothers.” I handed the remaining bags out to Megan’s friends.
“But what do I do if I see a really cute guy?”
“Then just go up and talk to him,” I said, laughing uncomfortably. “I saw some cute guys go around the corner over there.”
She and her friends had paid and were already nibbling. Sure enough, one woman was posing for pictures with the intestine skewer poised over her extended, studded tongue. I wished they would all just keep walking.
“The whole thing is a Taoist holiday, right?” Megan asked. “Some other people were calling it Buddhist, and I was correcting them.”
“All of you are right. In the seventh lunar month both Buddhists and Taoists celebrate their ancestors, so it’s all mixed. Everybody celebrates—well, not ‘celebrates’—let’s say ‘participates in’ the holidays.”
“Are all Taiwanese people as nice as you?” she asked, playing with her right earring.
I looked directly at Megan. She seemed to be sincere. I think she liked me, too. I knew she did. But that wasn’t enough of a reason for us to open up and start talking about the island’s problems and what I hated about Taiwan.
After all, I was fully conscious that underneath this persona, I was crying my eyes out over Julia.