Ghost Month

by Ed Lin

  When I was cried out, I washed my face in Jenny’s bathroom and held a cold, wet towel to my closed eyes.

  After a few minutes, I met up with Kuilan. I wasn’t as close with her as I was with Jenny, so she had never known about my master plan to make it big and marry Julia. She thought I merely wanted to get back to the US and finish college.

  “I have to burn money for your parents,” said Kuilan. “All the masters say the spirits are having a hard time right now.” The Taoist and Buddhist masters on TV, anyway.

  Kuilan waved a sheaf of coarse bamboo paper. I think she wanted to show me she was using the higher-denominated notes with gold patches rather than silver patches.

  “It’s my gift to them, Jing-nan. I would like to do something nice for your father and mother.”

  How could I fight her on this?

  “Thank you, Kuilan.”

  “All of us are going to burn money, me, my husband and definitely Ah-tien. We want him to do as many good things as possible for his karma.”

  Ah-tien glanced at me with accusing eyes. Because of me and my parents, he was going to have to wait in line at some temple and flop around for a bit.

  “Ah-tien shouldn’t have to go,” I said. “He didn’t even know my parents.”

  “Nonsense!” said Kuilan. “Ah-tien insists on going! It’s so long since he’s been to a temple. He’s a stranger to the gods. No wonder so many bad things have been happening to him. So much unnecessary trouble.”

  Ah-tien was openly glaring at me now. I had embarrassed him by allowing his mother to complain about him in public.

  Kuilan’s husband approached the stand with a sack of flour on his back. “Good to see you, Jing-nan!” he called, grunting as he flipped the sack to the ground.

  “Sir, that’s much too heavy for you to be lifting on your own!”

  “It’s a good workout, don’t worry.”

  “Of course it’s too heavy,” Kuilan said. “My good-for-nothing son won’t even do the smallest tasks for his father.”

  “I said I would do it!” Ah-tien grunted. “He didn’t even give me a chance to!” Then he bared his teeth at me. “What’s so great about you, huh? You think you’re so smart and rich you can go to America? Look at you now. You’ve got the same job as me!”

  “You apologize, you little ingrate!” said Kuilan’s husband. Kuilan herself brandished a rolling pin in an obviously well-rehearsed gesture.

  “Jing-nan doesn’t have a police record!” she yelled. “He doesn’t have obscene tattoos all over his chest and back!”

  “It’s all right, Kuilan,” I said, moving away. “He was only kidding.” I nodded to Ah-tien, but the gesture wasn’t returned. If I shared an elevator ride with that guy, only one of us would make it to his floor.

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Dwayne asked as I untied the power cord to the boom box on the shelf.

  “I’m going to play some music and psych myself up.”

  “The CD function’s busted, boss.”

  “It worked fine the last time I tried it.”

  “Wait, let me see it first.” He reached out a hand slick with meat runoff.

  “No way!” Dwayne would rather smash the entire stereo system than listen to Joy Division again. I clicked open the lid and found another CD in it. Dwayne swooped in and quickly palmed it.

  “Just play anything but you-know-what,” he said, as he managed to stick the bare CD in a back pocket.

  “I’m the boss and we’re going to listen to my music.” I examined the playing surface of my CD for scratches out of habit and then popped it in and cued it to “In a Lonely Place.” The funereal synthesizer sounds washed over all of us.

  “For Christ’s sake,” moaned Dwayne, “do you really have to play this mopey-motherfucker music?”

  “It’s good,” I said.

  “This is a problem. Don’t you get it? The singer hanged himself! This music scares all the girls away. That’s why you don’t get laid! Ain’t that right, Frankie?”

  Frankie the Cat took a drag on his cigarette and wiped his mouth with the back of the same hand. “You can get used to it,” he offered.

  “No, this has to go,” said Dwayne. “We’ve listened to this lousy band five hundred times already. Let’s just switch it to the radio. Or turn it off.”

  MUSIC HAD CHANGED DWAYNE’S life.

  He had been a star baseball player as a kid. Outfielders backed up to the fence for him. My father told me if Dwayne had played on a stronger team, he would have been bound for Williamsport, Pennsylvania, for the Little League World Championship. Taiwanese teams have won the title there seventeen times over the years.

  He downplays it a lot, but Dwayne’s smart. He can do math faster than me. With his grades and athletic ability, Dwayne could have gone to almost any college he wanted to; apparently some college in Japan wanted to recruit him.

  In 1994, though, Taiwan’s native community suddenly found worldwide fame. The German electronic-music group Enigma had a global hit, “Return to Innocence,” that sampled a recording of an Amis folk song about drinking. Aboriginal culture became trendy.

  That summer Dwayne went to a week-long retreat at an Amis village in Taitung County in the boonies in Taiwan’s southeast. He met other high-school kids like him who were out of touch with their culture. Dwayne learned some Amis words, wore a headdress, stepped through some dances and made his own shoulder bag.

  When he came back to Taipei, he had changed completely. Dwayne told his urbanized parents he wouldn’t be going to college; he wanted to explore his lost heritage and understand who he was. Dwayne spent his days listening to indigenous reggae and hip-hop while studying the Amis language on CD.

  Dwayne moved out within a year. He was determined to join an active Amis community and reject modern Taiwanese society. Aboriginals shouldn’t have to be a part of the society foisted upon the island by the descendants of Chinese immigrants—whether they were mainlanders or yams. Even baseball, which used to be all Dwayne loved, was a game that had been brought in by the Japanese colonizers. There were other, authentic Amis activities he could be doing. There had to be.

  Dwayne made his way back to Taitung County and headed to the Amis village that was the site of his reawakening. He was in for a shock, though.

  The village’s main source of income was the busloads of tourists streaming in. Men and women danced in their native costumes for the cameras, and then backstage they would smoke cigarettes, drink beer and listen to American or Japanese heavy metal.

  After the shows the performers changed out of their Amis wear and into their street clothes, which meant jeans and T-shirts, before a night of Hollywood movies on VHS or hitting the bars in Taitung City.

  This was what life was really like in the village. “Being Amis” was just a job. The high school retreat Dwayne had participated in was something the management level of the village had come up with to show there was a socially redeeming value to the whole enterprise. It helped preserve the corporation’s nonprofit status with the government.

  But there was plenty of profit. The managers drove nice cars and lived in homes built in the mountains nearby. The performers, who ranged in age from the teens to the sixties, were housed in dorms on the site. They had come from all over the island. Some were runaways. Some were army veterans. Only a handful of them said they could speak the Amis language, and all of them declined to teach Dwayne.

  “Too much trouble,” an older man said, not specifying which party would be more troubled.

  The managers liked Dwayne’s physical build. They offered him a position in the chorus of the harvest dance. As he hopped around bare-chested in the steps being taught to him, he began to feel slightly ill, and then after a few days, angry. Dancing for tourists like a trained monkey wasn’t something a real Amis would do. And despite all the talk about how Amis culture is traditionally matrilineal, all the managers of “the village” were men.

  After spending a fitful night in the dorms, Dwayne
went to the older performer, the one who wouldn’t teach him the Amis language, and told him the performance was a sham.

  The old man nodded and like all the other actors—because that’s what they were—continued to eat his breakfast of fried dough, soupy rice, peanuts and eggs.

  When Dwayne suggested the performers unionize to earn better wages, the old man put down his bowl and chopsticks.

  “That is an idea,” he said.

  About an hour later, Dwayne was forced into a van and driven to the Taitung City station. He was put on the next train north and warned never to come back.

  After Dwayne got back to Taipei, he put on weight and lost his touch at baseball. Odd jobs led to working at the Shilin Night Market, and that led to working for my father.

  I TORTURED DWAYNE BY playing “In a Lonely Place” twice before turning off the boom box. “I’ll save this CD for more discerning ears,” I said. “You want to put your Amis language CD back in here?” He handed his CD to me without a word.

  “It was a good song,” Frankie offered as he sliced squid into rings.

  “You can’t be serious,” said Dwayne.

  “Most music is too happy.”

  “You want me to play it again?” I asked.

  “No,” both Frankie and Dwayne said.

  “I went to see Julia’s parents today,” I offered.

  “That was good of you to do,” said Dwayne. He patted my back. “How was it?”

  “It was sad, but it was fine.” I wheeled out the front grill to the street.

  “Her folks are pretty religious.”

  “Yeah.” I didn’t want to mention that I was going to do some digging into Julia’s past. It probably wasn’t going to amount to anything, anyway.

  “So, how are you doing, Jing-nan? Are you sure you’re up for working? You know me and Frankie can handle the stand ourselves.”

  I smiled as hard as I could. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be, Dwayne. I want to keep myself busy.”

  More customers came up, and I was busy right until close. It was the second night of Ghost Month, and people were a little less subdued. Of all the activities typically shunned, eating wasn’t one of them. I met some Jewish friends in college who told me they fasted during some holidays. I was surprised to hear of such a thing. Starving yourself on purpose would never happen in Taiwan.

  DURING A SMALL BREAK in the action, I looked around to the other three corners of the intersection and took it all in.

  Kuilan’s Big Shot Hot Pot was really packing it in. It looked like some students were having a dumpling-eating contest, while in another part of the dining room a bunch of tourists were taking pictures and yelling as one of them ate a bowl of pig-brain soup.

  “Man, it’s like a freaking brain!”

  “How can you put that in your mouth?”

  Then, without even a clap of thunder or flicker of lightning, rain plunged from the sky. A group of young women coming out of Belle Amour stood under its narrow awning and waited. I once went home with a girl that way, by walking over and offering her an umbrella. I hadn’t meant to pick her up. Just happened.

  Guilt began to gnaw at me. Well, Julia, I wasn’t betraying you because I never said I’d never sleep with anybody else. I certainly have never loved anybody else. That’s for sure. I tried to picture that last woman, but I kept seeing Nancy’s face.

  Rain fell as thick as metal chopsticks, and water sizzled on the pavement. The owner of Beyond Human stepped out, looked up and frowned. Business had never been too good, and the Ghost Month specials weren’t moving. His grotesque demon and dragon sculptures sat in his front display cases, as ugly and undatable as his target demographic.

  Dwayne stepped out into the rain, umbrella in hand, for a walk and a smoke. Frankie put out the octopus skewers, our most perishable ones, for prep grilling. If they didn’t get bought today, we could put them in a stew tomorrow.

  Frankie always kept himself busy.

  IN THE WANING DAYS of the civil war in 1949, when the Communists won land as quickly as they could march through the Chinese mainland, people who were aligned with the Nationalists escaped to Taiwan by plane, if they could afford it, or by boat. The island was one hundred miles away from China and looked like the last refuge available.

  Many families weren’t able to come over intact. Some children were sent over by themselves. Soldiers brought over their women.

  Frankie was only eight years old when his teacher led the class out of school and onto a navy vessel. Most of his classmates eventually reunited with their families in Taiwan. Frankie never saw his family again and grew up in a group home in a juancun village, singing songs that glorified the KMT and foretold the death of all the “land bandit” Communists on the mainland.

  Frankie was told Mao’s soldiers had killed his mother and father and jailed his older brother. When he was only twelve, he left school to train in a brigade set up by the KMT comprising orphaned kids—a group that trained as hard as adult men because they had a personal vendetta against the Reds.

  Frankie was the standout. He could run the fastest, shoot the most accurately and hold his breath even longer than his commanding officer. Before he met Chiang Kai-shek at a special inspection and dinner honoring the boys, he had his arms tattooed to match those of the KMT veterans: “Kill Zhu and Weed Out Mao” on the left arm and “Anti-Communist and Anti-Russia” on the right. Frankie broke protocol when he rolled up his sleeves to show Chiang. The Generalissimo was stunned, and then offered one of his tight-lipped smiles of unbreakable resolve and gave Frankie an arms-length hug on the shoulders.

  “This boy!” was all Chiang said.

  Frankie and the other top orphans joined the elite frogmen for suicidal propaganda missions. KMT boats brought them to within two miles of China’s coast. The frogmen swam the rest of the way into Fujian Province. They planted the KMT flag on the tops of difficult-to-climb cliffs and blew up power stations. They tried to avoid detection, but killed Communist guards when it was unavoidable. Most of the frogmen were killed by enemy fire and by drowning.

  In 1960 Frankie was allowed to march in the parade that welcomed Eisenhower.

  The next year, he turned twenty and it all fell apart.

  KMT intelligence discovered that Frankie’s brother had not only joined the Communists, but was an officer. How would it look for the KMT to use Frankie as one of its public faces when his very own brother was a high-ranking Red?

  They arrested Frankie in the early morning, before he had a chance to get dressed. He never even had a trial. Frankie was transferred from cell to cell, finally landing in Green Island, the infamous offshore prison that housed inmates judged to be the most dangerous. Frankie was there because of his tactical skills, but other prisoners were influential human-rights activists who had organized against the KMT regime.

  My father told me that for several months Frankie was kept in a cell that filled halfway with seawater at high tide.

  After more than a decade of imprisonment, Frankie was released. The KMT had discovered that his brother wasn’t a Communist officer at all. He was actually living in Burma with other Chinese refugees. The mix-up was that the wife the brother had abandoned had remarried a Communist officer.

  The military offered to take Frankie back, but he refused. He attended an official discharge ceremony in Taipei and then wandered through the city until it turned dark. He came upon the Shilin Night Market and saw crowds of people eating and laughing. Happy people. He stopped at a stand called Tastes Good run by a father and son and asked how to set up a food stall. It turned into a job interview, and my grandfather hired Frankie. It was the three of them for many years, until my father got married. We hired Dwayne when my grandfather got sick.

  My father told me Frankie had a Vietnamese wife he didn’t talk about and that I should never ask him about the woman.

  DWAYNE CAME BACK FROM his break and showed Frankie and me a video he’d just shot on his phone of an elderly man playing a no
se flute to a group of people taking shelter under a canopy.

  “Sounds like two flutes,” said Frankie.

  “That’s pretty neat,” I said.

  “It helped my ears recover from your crappy music,” said Dwayne. “That guy’s from the Paiwan tribe. They were bad as hell, man.”

  “Is there a Paiwan stall now?” I asked.

  “Naw,” said Dwayne as he chuckled a little. “When he was done playing he launched into this whole thing about how Ghost Month was offensive to the one true god and that we were all welcome to join the Presbyterian Church.”

  The rain began to taper off and we got back to work. I got a group of Canadians to come over. To my surprise, I found out that they grew up on farms and had no problem coming in and chowing down on stewed pig intestines.

  You meet all kinds of people at the night market.

  Everybody from everywhere is here. I’ve met people from Egypt and even North Korea. But no matter where you’re from, you learn immediately to walk slowly, try everything and take your time.

  It’s annoying to see anybody in a rush and getting pushy, more so when a young man does it with his face and neck smeared in blood. It was still fairly early in the night, around 10 P.M., when he showed up on my stretch of the night market. The rain had stopped by then and he was skidding on water, shoving aside anyone in his way. He was on Dabei and approaching my business.

  The man’s black T-shirt was covered in dark splotches. His baggy black slacks didn’t do him any favors. When a pocket in the crowd opened up, he ran through but tripped when the material got caught in the tines of a knee-level sales rack and a wall of iPhone accessories crashed onto his back. He went down but scrambled back to his feet, throwing off the rack like a cartoon turtle ditching its shell in order to run faster.

  When the man got to the intersection, he turned right on Dadong and squatted down. I kept him in view and tried to see whom he was running from. Dancing Jenny was making her way over to me.

  “That guy’s head is slashed!” she yelled.