Ghost Month

by Ed Lin

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “There’s nothing keeping the pressure on! Jing-nan, you have to do something!”

  “Don’t put Jing-nan in this position,” Mr. Huang pleaded.

  “What position? Her father won’t do anything, and Jing-nan is the closest thing to a husband Julia had!”

  Mr. Huang shook off the sting and said matter-of-factly, “Jing-nan hasn’t even seen her in years.”

  “Wake up! He never bought a ticket, but he got to ride the bus when they were still teenagers!”

  I was spurred to speak up. “Please, I want to help,” I heard myself say. “I know two people who went to NYU with her. I can talk to them and see if they might know something.” I wasn’t really friends with either of them, then or now.

  “Thank you so much, Jing-nan,” said Mrs. Huang. “We appreciate your help.”

  “Anything you could find out would help us a lot,” said Mr. Huang. “We haven’t known our daughter in a long time, and as you can see we’re losing touch with each other every day.”

  “When is the funeral?” I asked, feeling my mouth go dry.

  “We aren’t having a funeral,” said Mrs. Huang.

  “Is it because you couldn’t find anybody to handle it?” Undertakers are loath to handle funerals during Ghost Month because they are unlucky to stage—they’re unlucky to even attend. Many of the wandering ghosts never received proper rites and burials, so a funeral could incite their wrath and turn it upon everyone involved.

  “We could have found someone,” Mrs. Huang snapped. “The problem is that she had her beliefs, just like you. We could have had a very proper Buddhist ceremony, but I knew what Julia’s final wish was. She wanted to be cremated and her ashes to be scattered at sea, so that’s what we did this morning.”

  I took a deep breath and sank lower in my chair. So I wouldn’t get to see Julia one last time.

  In the Huangs’ silent apartment, the light seemed to dim and time became lumpy.

  Julia and I had made so many plans. They changed a little bit every time we discussed them, but we already had a basic narrative established.

  We’d had a few ideas as to what sort of job I would have when it was time for me to come for her. Engineering was the traditional Taiwanese ticket to America. Americans hated studying math and science, so there was always a shortage of engineers. Best of all, the starting salaries among engineering majors were the highest you could get for an undergrad degree.

  Yet I really enjoyed poetry, both English and Chinese.

  I hadn’t declared a major yet when I left UCLA, but I had aced the freshman coursework for all engineering majors, and I also did well in a survey class of American poetry of the twentieth century.

  Julia was certain she was going to study political science, and that she was going to see it through to a doctorate degree.

  Since I was probably going to have less flexibility in landing a job than the brilliant and eminently admissible Julia, who would have her pick of grad schools, when I came for her we were going to get married in a civil ceremony and settle in to whatever town I was already working in. She was going to transfer to the nearest big university and continue studying until she had her master’s degree.

  Somehow we were going to get permanent residency cards or US citizenship. We didn’t know what the climate for immigration would be, but we figured our English was good enough that we could blend in well with ABCs.

  Then we were going to have two kids. Well, sometimes we thought just one. By that time, with a number of years of work experience under my belt, I would probably be in a position to kick back a little bit and help more with raising the kid or kids while Julia focused on her PhD. She would also probably have to teach a few undergraduate classes. Maybe Mandarin, too. At some point she would be done with her PhD. She would either hold on to a post in academia or open a consulting firm and do … whatever those consultants do.

  We would be in a holding pattern for a few years until our kid or kids were old enough to attend college at Julia’s university, since the tuition would be heavily subsidized or entirely free. If they wanted to go to another school, they’d better have Julia’s smarts to get a mega-scholarship.

  Once those kids were done with college, I could quit my job and open up a little music store. Not one that stocked racks and racks of major-label, deluxe-edition, reissued vinyl I personally didn’t care for but sold to make money. If I was going to have a business like that, why bother selling music when it could be power tools? My store would focus on Joy Division and associated acts. I also wanted to carry a select inventory of contemporary indie bands I liked, and I would probably like quite a few of them by that point since I would have more time to listen to music. I still wasn’t sure if it should be a physical store or an online one. Maybe an online one would be better, depending on how much storage space we had in our house after our kids left. That’s how it is in the US. They don’t wait to get married before they move out. I know we had a lot of pipe dreams and fuzzy definitions baked into our expectations, but we were crystal clear on one thing. Although we would maintain our fluency in Mandarin and Taiwanese, and even make the odd trip to the island to visit (we couldn’t cut off family entirely), we were never going to live in Taiwan again.

  Yet here we were, reeled back in by our respective bad circumstances. Maybe Julia, like me, had been planning to save money and get back to the US. When I came for her, we could’ve laughed about how we had to go back to Taiwan for a little bit before resuming our American lives.

  We had never planned out our deaths, though. I actually hadn’t known Julia wanted to be cremated, as in so many Taiwanese funerals. Most don’t choose to have their ashes scattered, though—the preservation of ashes has led to the construction of condo-sized columbaria up on the sides of mountains.

  Julia and I had thought we were going to have long and happy lives together, but fate had other plans. When my parents died, what kept me going was the knowledge that I would see Julia again. What a foolish, false hope! How stupid and prideful it was for me to refuse to reach out to her for the sake of plans made by teenagers!

  What would have happened if I had called her in New York, told her I would be stuck in Taiwan and that she had to go on without me? I don’t think she would have been able to abandon me. She loved me so much, she would have ditched everything and come back to Taiwan to be with me. It would have had to come down to me to set her free, and I would have had to act cruelly.

  I’m sorry, Julia, but I’m calling to break up with you because I love you. You’ll have to go down that great path alone …

  “JING-NAN,” SAID MRS. HUANG. I had been mumbling to myself out loud.

  Mr. Huang was bringing in people I didn’t know. Mrs. Huang stood over me and touched my shoulder gently. Time for me to go.

  “You loved each other so much,” she sobbed.

  I could only nod as I rose to my feet.

  “Go talk to them, your old classmates. Find out if they talked to Julia when she came back.”

  “I’ll find out what I can,” I said.

  I RODE THE ELEVATOR down and hit the ground floor with a thud. The door lurched open, and I had just managed to step out when it closed with a slam.

  How could Julia have told her mother everything? She hadn’t promised not to, but I assumed she would be like me and only tell her parents the parts of our relationship appropriate for the general public. For example, our impending marriage.

  “Still going to marry Julia, huh?” were among my father’s last words to me. It was as close as he could come to expressing approval.

  I grabbed my helmet and leaned against my sun-baked moped seat. I hadn’t been in touch with my high-school classmates Peggy or Ming-kuo in years, and I wasn’t sure they were two people I wanted back in my life. Funny how I needed to get in touch now. Maybe it was time for me to start a Facebook account.

  Peggy Lee was from a well-off mainlander family. Her great-grandfather
had been a confidant of Chiang Kai-shek, and their family had privileged status when the Generalissimo established the capital of the Republic of China on Taiwan after bravely retreating in the face of inevitable failure.

  Peggy’s family had a fancy house that Japanese officials had once lived in, the nicest one I knew of in Wanhua District. It had clay roof tiles that ended in slightly upturned corners. Every few feet there were fanged and horned demon faces making agonized expressions. I can only describe the roofs because I couldn’t see anything else over the exterior wall. Apparently Peggy’s family had a private garden with stone lanterns and a pond with kumquat-colored koi as long as your arm.

  Mainlanders who didn’t come over with money or connections grew up in juancuns, military residential communities hastily built on public land for families of low-ranking officers and soldiers. People from every province were thrown together—something the normally clannish Chinese weren’t pleased by—as those juancuns were meant for temporary housing. Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang party and Republic of China Army were going to launch that counterattack any day, after all. That day never came. Several generations of families ended up living in juancuns, patching up crumbled cinder blocks in their walls to keep the rain out. Meanwhile, Peggy grew up leisurely feeding the same koi in the Lee family pond her father and grandfather had cared for years before.

  Today, most of the juancuns are gone. It wasn’t the typical waishengren-benshengren politics that pushed them out—it was money politics. Condos had to go up.

  And Peggy’s family had a lot to do with that. The Lees were big in real estate and helped the government “monetize” the land. Let’s face it. The juancuns were a major eyesore. Gangs like Black Sea were originally formed by disaffected mainlander youth living in those blocks, but a lot of those kids made it out and did something with their lives, including Ang Lee, the film director, and Teresa Teng, the immortal and yet dead singer. Supposedly Teng’s lifelong asthma was caused by childhood exposure to asbestos in a juancun.

  After a public outcry to preserve juancuns as historical sites, the Lees recently turned their wrecking ball against their own antique Japanese house. A hotel stands there now.

  THE LIGHTNESS I HAD been feeling earlier was gone. Thoughts of Julia weighed on me again. I had been tasked by her parents to find out more about her mysterious return to Taiwan.

  I saw I had received a news text on my phone. The member of the Black Sea gang who had made allegations about the CIA and drugs was recanting his story, saying he was completely wrong. What an asshole.

  I searched online for Lee Xiaopei—Peggy’s business name.

  Surprise. She had decided to play it close to home. Peggy was a senior vice president of Lee & Associates, her family’s hedge fund. Of course it was headquartered in the most expensive office space in the country—the eightieth floor of the gigantic Taipei 101 building.

  The phone number was right there, but I took a breath and hesitated.

  I’ll admit Peggy had striking looks. Even if Peggy’s family wasn’t rich, she’d still have attracted a lot of attention. She had a sharp nose, a sharp chin and a sharp tongue. A lot of boys liked her. They left things on her school desk—candy, flowers and notes in fancy envelopes. But the only guy she was into back in high school was already in a committed relationship—me. You always want what you can’t have, and there was very little Peggy couldn’t have.

  I looked at my phone again. I had to call her. Peggy might know something about Julia’s return to Taiwan. That information might provide some comfort to Julia’s parents. If not, I wouldn’t tell them.

  I was reluctant as hell to open that door again, but still I’d rather call Peggy before trying to get in touch with Ming-kuo.

  I hit the number and waited. An automated voice menu answered. I wasn’t a current client, so I guessed I was a prospective one. Why else would anyone call? I pressed 2.

  Soothing light jazz began to play. Was I scheduling a dental appointment? Oh, I should probably schedule a dental appointment.

  As if reading my thoughts, a man wearing cheap sunglasses and a grey linen sports jacket approached me slowly. He was a big man, almost two meters in height, and he had a crew cut. I thought he was Japanese, but he gave himself away when he smiled. Straight, white, American teeth. I looked at him, but he kept a respectful distance while I was on the phone. An operator took my call.

  “Hello, thank you for calling Lee & Associates,” a man said. “You seem to be calling from a mobile phone.”

  “Hello, I am calling from my cell. I’m actually trying to get in touch with Ms. Lee Xiaopei, please.”

  “I’m sorry, if you’re not already a client, we don’t accept calls from mobile phones. You have to come in person or call from an office.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Have a good day, sir.” The son of a bitch hung up.

  I crossed my arms as the man approached me. “Are you done with your call?” he asked. His Mandarin had an American accent.

  “I’m done. What do you want?” I’m usually not this curt with strangers, but I was still annoyed by the phone call, and this guy wasn’t a customer of mine. He lifted his sunglasses and regarded me. The man seemed too young to have those bags under his eyes.

  “I just want to see how you are. No big deal.”

  “I’m doing fine,” I said.

  The sunglasses dropped back down and he headed into the Huangs’ building. Man, some strange people lived there. “Take care, man,” he said in English over his shoulder.

  Now, did he say “man” or “Jing-nan”?

  I had about an hour before I had to be at Unknown Pleasures. That wasn’t enough time to go to Peggy’s office. That would have to wait until tomorrow.

  I was frustrated and annoyed, and buying new music was my usual coping mechanism.

  The music stores around National Taiwan University, known as Taida for short, were the best. No one bought mainstream, conventional CDs anymore, so the stores survived by stocking limited editions from indie labels, imports and bootlegs of live shows.

  I rode east into the Da’an District. The big government buildings and wide sidewalks of the Zhongzheng District gave way to the residential buildings, churches and MRT stations of Da’an. The smell of incense grew heavier. A small hatchback drove by with a young boy and a girl crawling around in the rear cargo space. It made me think of Julia and me as small kids—until the girl gave me the finger. I had to smirk as I thought about what my father used to say: younger generations had no respect for their elders, and Taiwan was in danger of backsliding and becoming as uncouth and boorish as China.

  Taida is the best university in Taiwan. Like a lot of Taiwan’s best institutions, it was originally established by the Japanese during the colonial era.

  I parked near the Gongguan MRT station on Luosifu Road, which was the way they chose to render “Roosevelt Road” using Chinese characters. Bunk racks of parked bikes marked the edge of campus. It was summer, but Taida was buzzing with activity. The academic calendar was twelve months long. Classes were always in session. It sounds grueling, especially to my American college friends, but we never had such a thing as summer vacation all my years of school and cram school.

  Taida students oversee the PTT, the Professional Technology Temple, an online bulletin-board system. It’s like America Online, only it remained cool and influential for marketing and networking. Older people thought it was only used for idle chatter and dirty jokes until Typhoon Morakot slammed into Taiwan in 2009, and the PTT organized hundreds of volunteers to haul supplies to disaster areas. Those kids were better than the government at responding to the deadly storm. They also set up blood drives and other public service opportunities that young people are into.

  There are a lot of good things about the PTT, but I haven’t been on it in years, since I was chased out of a music discussion group when I said the former members of Joy Division shouldn’t have carried on as New Order after Ian Curtis kil
led himself. Sure are a lot of New Order fans in Taiwan. All of them came after me over the entire system, in every discussion I entered.

  The first time I heard Joy Division and New Order (which I perceived to be the lesser band by far at the time) was at Bauhaus, a store on Luosifu Road that caters to Taida students with good taste in music. It’s the first CD store I go to when I’m up for a big shopping trip. I have a history with the place.

  When I was still a kid, I went through a Black Sabbath phase. I think all teenage boys do. Bauhaus had been having a grand-opening sale, and I went in to check it out. I couldn’t find a single Black Sabbath or Ozzy CD. I went up to the guy working at the counter. He must have been a student at Taida, because he looked relaxed. Once you got into a school that good, you could finally ease off the pedal a bit. After graduation, you were set with a decent job. You could even sleep in on the weekends for the first time in your life.

  “You don’t have any Sabbath?” I asked him.

  He stroked both corners of his mouth with his thumb and index finger. “We don’t. We’re a music store,” he said, looking like he wanted to spit on my school uniform. “I’m going to do you the biggest favor of your life, kid.” He stood up and grabbed a CD from the rack above the cash register. “I’m going to allow you to buy this. It’s the in-store playing copy, but we can get another one.”

  The CD cover art matched his shirt: a bunch of lines that looked like undersea mountains. It was Unknown Pleasures. He wasn’t kidding—it really was one of the biggest favors anyone ever did me. The music scared me in a way Sabbath never had. I studied English harder so I could understand the lyrics beyond surface-level literal meanings. There was a whole world hidden in those squat and loose-looking written words. Maybe Ian had encoded the secrets of life and death in the lyrics before committing suicide.

  My English bookshelf expanded beyond two Shakespeare plays to include five costly paperbacks about Joy Division that had been printed in England.