Ghost Month

by Ed Lin

I could have been an extra in Monga. I was approached in the street by a production assistant who told me that I was a good-looking guy and asked if I minded taking a light kick in the neck. I shouldn’t have turned down the offer. I never say yes to the right things.

  In reality, jiaotous are older than the actors in the movie, and they look like a regular bunch of guys. They don’t run around shirtless, and you don’t want to see them that way. The film got one thing right, though. They were mainly dangerous to one another rather than to the general public.

  The only time a tourist would encounter a jiaotou is probably at one of the smaller temples. You might notice that the guys sweeping the floor and cleaning the joss-stick urns have scary tattoos on their necks and arms. They’ll show you where the gods are, how to worship them and where to leave your donation. You don’t have to worry about your safety. As long as you’re respectful, jiaotous will always be polite.

  For example, look at the jiaotous waving to me as I walk by. Why, they look downright friendly. I waved back but maintained my stride and kept the moped between us.

  One guy called out, breaking away from the car. He pushed up his sunglasses and pointed his Longlife cigarette at my throat as he approached.

  “Hey, you! You’re Ming-teng’s kid, right?”

  “That’s right,” I said, finally stopping. This is how every conversation with the jiaotous started.

  “How come you’re still riding this crappy old moped? How about we get you a new one? Maybe even a motorcycle?”

  “That’s okay. I still like this one.”

  “I gotta tell you, chicks like men on motorcycles.”

  “I can’t afford one right now.”

  He shook his head and smiled, showing teeth stained red from chewing betel nut. “Ming-teng was a good man. A great man. We all miss him a lot. We’re glad you’re keeping his business going.”

  “I don’t know if my father was a great man,” I said. “He was too busy to even be a dad, really.”

  “Hey, at least your father stuck around.” His smile faded a little.

  “Do you want money?” I asked, my hand going to my pocket. My father always told me to pay them whatever they asked, because they prevented other people from coming into the neighborhood and asking for even more.

  “Christ, no! Put that shit away! I was just thinking that maybe you and some of your friends who have food stalls might want to come sing karaoke at the Best Western KTV. We just opened. The mics are shaped like guns, and the girls dress up like Indian princesses. You should come. We’ll treat you right.”

  “You know I work at night.”

  “Take a night off. Relax already. First round is on the house. Okay?”

  “Okay. Thank you, ojisan.” I’d always heard my dad use the Japanese term for “uncle” when talking with German’s father.

  He laughed. “Don’t call me uncle! I’m your older brother! You’re my ah di!”

  “Some other time. It’s been a long night.”

  I kept going. This was how the scam worked. There wasn’t money handed over in the street. I had to blow a wad of cash at the KTV, making a legitimate transaction at a legitimate business.

  German and his boys weren’t merely leeches on the community. The guy really did take an interest in how people were doing. He wouldn’t take money from businesses that were struggling. Also, I deeply appreciated that he brought huge banners and flower arrangements to my parents’ funeral, along with more than a hundred people and a troupe of professional mourners who had wailed for hours with abandon.

  I walked along a stone-and-concrete wall almost as tall as I was. It was topped with shards of broken glass that stuck up like small stegosaurus plates. Older property walls from Taiwan’s martial-law era were all topped with glass or metal spikes. People must have been so paranoid back then.

  When I reached an off-center iron gate, I swung it open and pushed my moped through before me. I made my way down a short concrete walk to the house. The hinges were tilted for the gate to shut by itself, which it did with a click.

  I refused to look back. When I was a kid, I used to imagine there was a monster standing there, holding the gate open. Its teeth, dripping with saliva, made the click sound as they clamped on a human bone.

  I STILL LIVED IN the three-room, one-floor building I had grown up in. Considering that the place was constructed illegally, it was well built. It was painted white on the outside and was pushed up against a larger residential building, like a pop-up toaster against a kitchen wall. At one point four people had lived there, including my grandfather. How had we all fit?

  I went into the bedroom, disrobed and wedged my feet into a pair of sad plastic slippers. I clicked on my stereo amplifier, spun the balance all the way to the right and put the right speaker in the doorway, pointing out. On my PC I cued up a bootleg of Joy Division playing one of their last shows, in early 1980. I started it near the end of the regular set. It was the right soundtrack for two in the morning.

  My bathroom is set up in the traditional Taiwanese style. No sit-down toilet or bathtub. Just a ceramic oval on one side of the room and a recessed drain in the center of the tiled floor. I ignited the gas heater to warm up some water and listened to the lumbering, feedback-strewn “Atrocity Exhibition.”

  I stopped up the sink and poured hot water in, then ran the cold water for a few seconds to offset it. I soaked my one-foot-square towel, rubbed it all over my body and lathered up with a green-striped soap bar. I dunked a little bucket in the sink, stood over the drain and rinsed myself off.

  Ian Curtis wailed from my bedroom, powerless against a world where fate overruled everything and bred indifference among the living.

  Julia.

  I could see her face, her tough but graceful jawline. Maybe that was a strange thing to admire in a woman, but I knew it well because she loved for me to kiss her neck. When I held her, I was in awe of her physical and mental strength. She always thought her eyes were too small, but they could light up like a two-star constellation, particularly during the several times we escaped to love hotels. We felt like we were running away to another world. Even after the sex, which we usually did right away and one more time before leaving, we lay there and lied about how great our lives were going to be together.

  Love hotels are a hallowed institution that don’t exist in the US. They are the only places young couples can be intimate, because Taiwanese live with their parents in small apartments until marriage. Even after marriage, one might still need a love hotel for trysts to break up the average workaholic day.

  I should consider myself lucky to have the whole house to myself. I could have as many parties and women over as I wanted, only I didn’t really want to have parties, and the few women I had slept with since returning to Taipei I hadn’t wanted to bring home.

  The concert recording ended with drums crashing wildly. From what I’ve read online from people who were supposedly there, this was the show that ended with Ian having an epileptic seizure and tumbling over the cymbals and bass drum.

  I felt trapped in the sudden silence.

  I thought about my parents, Dwayne, Frankie the Cat and the jiaotous. As exhaustion took hold of my body, I felt my skepticism slip away from me. What if we were all fated to be what we were when we were born? I was meant to be operating the food stand, no matter how well I did in school or what I studied. I was also probably supposed to spend my life alone.

  Like Ian Curtis, I had control of little to nothing in my life. The singer had been married to a woman he no longer loved but was too stigmatized by the shame of divorce to leave her for his mistress. Complicating things, his fits were increasing in frequency and severity. His medication sent him on wild mood swings. Curtis found a way out, though—he hanged himself the night before the band was to embark on their first US tour.

  I shivered and wrung out my towel over the drain.

  I WOULD BE LYING if I said I had never contemplated suicide before tonight. The first year a
lone was probably the worst time ever in my life. For some reason I couldn’t shake off the jetlag, and I was struggling at the stall. People heard that both my parents had died and, while they were sympathetic, they avoided my “cursed” booth.

  In my weakness, I allowed Dwayne to set up a small shrine at work with photos of my grandfather and my parents. What really got me was how worried Dwayne looked. The big guy was shaking in his sandals. I’d never realized how much he needed this job. We kept joss sticks burning on one of the corner shelves, and he was always paranoid that they had gone out.

  I told myself there was absolutely nothing religious about the shrine. It was just a sign of respect, not ancestor worship, and there were no idols. I never bowed when lighting the incense. I merely watched the smoke waft around and remembered the three of them. None of them ever seemed very happy with the way I cooked, but maybe negative reinforcement was their way of training me.

  I knew I had hit rock bottom when I bought a bulk pack of joss sticks. I was buying into a system I despised. What a hypocrite.

  Desperately, I began to yell out to tourists in English to eat our food. I am an introvert by nature. I hate calling attention to myself, which is basically what I started doing. The “Johnny” persona was born. It worked better than I expected. I learned how valuable English fluency was as the skewers flew from our grill like greasy sparrows.

  The first profitable week we had, Dwayne was so relieved he tried to wrestle me to the ground. That was when the nightly matches started.

  The business wouldn’t have made it if I hadn’t made a concerted effort to pull in tourists who knew nothing about me, my family or my stand. Random strangers saved us, and I never forgot it. I tossed out the shrine and returned the photos to a desk drawer back home. Dwayne said I was courting disaster, but not even he could deny that our sales remained strong.

  MY FAMILY HADN’T BEEN cursed by angry spirits and gods. My parents were haunted and hobbled by the debt accumulated by my grandfather decades before I was even born.

  When my father first nervously sat me down to tell me the whole story, I was worried he was going to try to explain sex. It turned out to be something even more immediately intangible to a ten-year-old.

  Not long after my grandfather came to Taipei with my grandmother to set up Tastes Good with a single charcoal hibachi grill, he found he had some free time in the late mornings and early afternoons. The night market was a lot smaller back then and had far fewer tourists.

  The two of them were already living in this toaster building in the 1950s, when the Wanhua District was primarily a red-light district. It was probably a “pretty girl” (the term my father used instead of “prostitute”) who first brought my grandfather into a gambling parlor that was open at all hours of the day.

  The cops, many of them former soldiers, left the joint alone. Martial law was still the rule of the day over all of Taiwan, and the gambling operated under the guise of buying “patriotic bonds”—money that would go toward outfitting the army to “retake the mainland.”

  We don’t know what games my grandfather lost at, but he never seemed to win at anything. He considered fleeing to Japan, a typical refuge for those who had grown up in colonial Taiwan. But my grandmother told him she was pregnant. The news renewed his spirit. Unfortunately, he believed his luck had turned. My grandfather exchanged the deed of the toaster building for a bundle of patriotic bonds and proceeded to lose them as fast as if he had fed them into a fire. He returned to the gambling parlor with his set of knives and the singular hibachi, seeking to hock them for more bonds. The teller called out to the boss, German’s dad.

  “You can’t exchange these,” the elder jiaotou had said, “because I already own them. After all, I already own everything in your house.”

  Still, German’s father had a heart. He recognized that my grandfather was an honest guy who had gotten in over his head. At this point most men fled or killed themselves, but this country bumpkin from rural central Taiwan didn’t even know enough to do that.

  The jiaotou handed back my grandfather’s belongings and told him to go back to work and never gamble again. German’s dad brought the signed deed to a local bank and had papers drawn up to reflect a sale-leaseback deal on the house and a promissory note.

  I wasn’t familiar with the term “continuous compounding,” and neither was my grandfather, because he signed the papers, which allowed his expanding family to stay in their home. He had no choice, really. That was why we owed German a total amount that was probably four times what our house was worth.

  My grandfather’s big mistake was not going to a loan shark who would have bailed him out on more generous terms. It was a matter of preserving some pride. He wanted as few people as possible to hear about his situation.

  “Don’t ever let pride get in the way,” was how my father summed it all up. I nodded, though I didn’t understand. To the end of his days, my grandfather would fly into a rage if The Debt—or any debt—was mentioned. My father didn’t even have the balls to tell me how bad our situation truly was until after my mother was dead.

  I FLOSSED AND BRUSHED my teeth until my gums bled. In the heat and humidity of the night, my skin never dried off completely, and I was covered in a glistening sweat by the time I rinsed my mouth out. I finished with a cheek full of stinging mouthwash.

  In my bedroom, I replaced my speaker and clicked on Unknown Pleasures.

  When I was a kid I used to think it was so ghoulishly cool that Ian killed himself. I could read into his tortured lyrics and see that he had shamanistic insight into life and beyond. After I read some English-language books about Ian, the image faded. His wife’s account was particularly damning. They had married young—in their teens—and in only a few years he felt he was outgrowing her artistically and intellectually. When he noticed his wife, Ian treated her with contempt.

  Maybe Julia and I would have suffered a similar fate should we have married. I had no illusions whatsoever that I was as smart as she was.

  It was time for a reality check before bed. There weren’t any more updates on my phone, but maybe there was something on one of the twenty-four-hour news stations.

  I turned on my little Sanyo television, hoping they would have realized there’d been a misidentification. There wasn’t any more about Julia. The news cycle had moved on to celebrities leaving their spouses and animated reenactments of an armed standoff in the American Pacific Northwest that ended with five dead. One station used special effects to turn a television presenter into a transparent ghost as he hungrily ate up a bowl of steamed fish and rice in a segment that went on way too long.

  I shut off the TV and stereo, zapped the lights and slid across the mattress. A hot breeze from the street felt good across my slick, naked body.

  A light orange glow from the street prevented my bedroom from ever really being dark, even with the shades down. I looked over the contours of my useless hands and sighed.

  In my heart I knew the dead betel-nut girl was Julia. In the morning I should go to see her parents at their apartment. The trip would give me final confirmation. Maybe then I could cry.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I was still asleep when someone grabbed my left shoulder and tried to drag me out of bed.

  I woke up in a fright, but then I realized that it was my own right hand doing the pulling.

  It was about nine in the morning and the sun was fully up, but it was still an hour earlier than my alarm was set to go off. So annoying.

  I stretched out, experiencing a feeling I hadn’t expected.

  Relief.

  I didn’t have to keep saving money because I didn’t have to go back to UCLA because I didn’t have to keep my promise to Julia any longer.

  For a moment I felt a light giddiness, as if my entire body were hollow. But despair quickly seeped into the vacuum.

  What was I living for now?

  I reached for my phone and began to scroll through the news. A Japanese right-wing group ha
d erected a shrine on the largest island in the Tiaoyutai chain—the latest move in the ownership dispute between China, Taiwan and Japan. A group of undocumented Vietnamese women had been arrested as they arrived at a whorehouse. They said they thought they were coming to Taiwan for arranged marriages.

  Nothing about Julia.

  I was concerned she had been swept under the rug, but I wondered if it was better this way. I wanted the killer caught, but I didn’t want the entire island examining her corpse.

  My thoughts were interrupted by some people shouting in the street. I went to the window.

  Two compact cars, a Nissan and a Toyota, had swished to a halt just outside my gate. Both cars were pretty beat up, so if a fender bender had just happened it was tough to tell. Two middle-aged women standing at the side of the street were yelling insults at each other. Both were Taiwanese and both were screaming in Mandarin, but one had a heavy accent, giving herself away as someone who primarily spoke Taiwanese. It was a classic confrontation.

  YOU COULD SPEND ALL day talking about the history and culture of the people in Taiwan. We have twenty-three million people, the same population as Texas, packed on an island slightly bigger than Maryland. If familiarity breeds contempt, then the people of Taiwan are very familiar with each other. On top of that, our long and complicated relationships with larger and more powerful countries have created an interesting entrée.

  I wish I knew how to make zongzi, the glutinous rice dumpling packed with a bunch of different fillings and wrapped in dark green bamboo leaves in a tetrahedral shape (think of a soft, three-sided pyramid). I love them, and I also feel they sum up Taiwan as it is now. Zongzi are served fresh from the steamer or boiling pot, still tied with twine. Cut or untie the string and slowly unwrap the leaves. Contents will definitely be hot. Try to avoid getting your hands too sticky from the melted pork fat that has permeated everything and is now leaking through the leaves. Once the zongzi is fully peeled, spread out the leaves to keep the table surface clean. Admire how the rice and other fillings retain the tetrahedral shape.