Ghost Month

by Ed Lin

  I checked my email as I walked down Daxi Road to Unknown Pleasures. Nothing in the inbox. Just that one that had popped up in the junk folder last night. The subject line simply read, WARNING. It didn’t offer a Nigerian lottery prize or Viagra, so I opened it.

  I will call you soon, read the email.

  Creepy. I shrugged it off and opened up the metal gates to my stand.

  I took a deep breath and scratched the end of my nose. Suddenly, my nostrils were tickly. It could only mean one thing. I cranked out the three canopies all the way.

  Seconds after I finished, raindrops fell in moving sheets. I stood and watched the animated dot-matrix impacts make a story in the empty street. In fifteen minutes, the sun was out again and the air smelled of hot garbage. Or maybe it was stinky tofu.

  Frankie the Cat came strolling down Daxi Road and nodded to me. Silently, he unloaded boxes of animal parts from the hand truck he was pushing. Despite the fact that I was never at the stand this early and that I was wearing yesterday’s clothes, he didn’t ask me a thing. Hell, he had probably put all the clues together already, so there was nothing for him to ask.

  I helped him wash out grisly intestines and stomachs. Dwayne came in about half an hour later.

  “Whoa, Jing-nan, what are you doing here so early?”

  “I’m the owner,” I said. “I have a responsibility.”

  “If you’re so responsible, then how come you haven’t changed clothes? Look at him, Frankie. What a dissolute man! Carrying on with women during Ghost Month! What nerve! Jing-nan would make the Eight Immortals keel over and die with his insolence!”

  Frankie walked to the street and lit up a cigarette before speaking. “The kid’s getting laid and you’re not. Deal with it.”

  The rain never came back, and throngs of tourists choked the streets. I called out to a middle-aged male tourist wearing a Clash shirt from the Give ’em Enough Rope era and told him that Joe Strummer should have begged Mick Jones to come back.

  “I saw that last tour without Mick, and it sucked!” he roared.

  “Mick went on to do great stuff, though,” I said. “Big Audio Dynamite’s first album was awesome.”

  He smiled and waved his whole group of six over. Three couples of old punk rockers. The Clash guy came around the grill and hugged me like an old friend.

  Over his shoulder I saw Peggy Lee in a black linen pantsuit enter and sit at one of our tables. I had a pet peeve about people putting their bags on empty chairs, and she indulged my annoyance when she plopped her Louis Vuitton down next to her. When I glanced at her again, she was holding her lipstick in a fist and smearing it on.

  The group bought up a lot of stuff I wouldn’t normally be able to trick white people into trying: chicken hearts, gizzards, whole cuttlefish. They settled in at a table near the back.

  I sat down next to Peggy as soon as I could.

  “Did you just get out of work, Peggy?” I asked.

  “I did. It’s quite a quick car ride here,” she said. “Could I get a napkin, Jing-nan?”

  I swiped some from under the front grill and handed them to her. I thought she was going to kiss off the excess of her lipstick but instead she lifted her bag, wiped the seat under it and then put it back down.

  “Are you hungry, Peggy?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Do you want to go somewhere?”

  “You can have anything you see here.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’ll get something at home.”

  I drummed my fingers on the table. “Speaking of which, funny seeing you this morning,” I said.

  “Yes, funny seeing you in my building.”

  “It was almost five in the morning. Pretty late for you to be going out.”

  “I was going in to work. The market closes in New York at four A.M. our time, and the most relevant financial news comes out shortly after.” She folded her legs under the table and kicked me, maybe by accident. “I need to be up on the latest news before the Asian markets open.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to say hi or introduce you to Nancy.”

  “You two seemed to be in a rush.” Her eyes narrowed as my silence fed her imagination. “Are you having something serious with her?”

  “Peggy, I don’t see how she’s any of your business.”

  “I’m here to save you.” She lowered her head and whispered, “You know about her, don’t you?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “She’s not a good girl.”

  “I think she is.”

  “You don’t have money, but you do have morals. You would never have cheated on Julia.”

  “That’s right.”

  “A girl like that has no standards,” said Peggy as she folded her hands in her lap. “How do you think she lives in a place like that even though she doesn’t have a real job?”

  “Peggy, Nancy is a graduate student, and I know about her past.” I put my hands together and built a small wall of fingers on the table to shield myself.

  “Look! I don’t want my old classmate to be seen associating with a call girl. Wang Ding-yu would come to stay with her. You know who he was, right? That tech executive who went to jail two years ago?” She slapped my finger fortress hard. “He’s married, and his kids are almost as old as us!”

  “Ow! Gan! Well, so what, Peggy? Nobody’s perfect. Look at you! You’re divorced. There’s a stigma to that. Look at me! I’ve been living with a ghost, and this was years before Julia actually died.” I planted my elbows on the table as reinforcements. Even though I was talking to her, I was really speaking to myself. “You can plan on living a great life with someone you love, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to work out that way.”

  Peggy’s hands shot to her bag and tore open a pocket. Why was she opening an eyeglass case? Oh, it was a flask disguised as an eyeglass case. Peggy took two quick pulls and grunted. She shoved it at me.

  “Do it,” she commanded.

  I took a small sip. “Damn, that’s not whiskey,” I gasped.

  “It’s soju.”

  Korean rice liquor. I wasn’t sure how much alcohol was in it, but it tasted like a hundred percent. She took another mouthful and stuck the flask back in her bag before continuing.

  “You know, Jing-nan, that dirty Mr. Wang tried to pick me up at an investing conference in Beijing a few years ago. We were having drinks and he thought he could bring it to that next level.” A dreamy, happy look came over her eyes. “I was married at the time, too. He didn’t care.”

  “I’m glad nothing happened,” I said. “You’re not the cheating kind.”

  “I hate people who cheat. Boy, Mr. Wang got the shock of his life when I ran into him in the apartment building.”

  “He probably wondered who had set you up there.”

  Her face reddened and she grabbed my wrist. “Hah! The joke’s on him! My family helped to construct that place! Go read that plaque in the lobby!” She shifted in her seat before triumphantly adding, “We still own the penthouse apartment.”

  I glanced back at the counter and wished hard for some customers to walk up. “Peggy, it’s nice that you stopped by, but I’m working right now. Maybe we can do lunch sometime.” I meant it, too. Even though we were completely different people and had a contentious past that sometimes bled into the present, I still liked her.

  Her eyes flashed at my attempt to bring our talk to an end, and some programmed business instinct seemed to kick back in. “I came here to offer you something special, Jing-nan. Something no one else here is going to have.” She fished through her bag again and handed me a stuffed legal-sized Tyvek envelope.

  “What is this?”

  She dropped her voice and cupped her mouth. “It’s a lifeboat for when this night market gets blown out of the water,” she whispered. “This whole area is going to be redeveloped into condos and upscale retail.”

  I regarded the envelope. It was unmarked and seemed to hold about twenty pages of paper clamped with a binder cli
p.

  “They’ve been talking about that for years, even decades,” I said. “It’s never going to happen.”

  “Oh, it’s going to happen, big boy. In about a year, give or take a few months of protests.” She looked happy enough to burst into song.

  “How do you know?”

  “We’re doing it. My family’s company. I’m taking the lead on this project.”

  I grabbed my kneecaps. The removal of the night market was an on-again-off-again fight that pitted developers like Peggy Lee’s family against vendor families like mine that have built up their business over generations.

  In the larger scheme, the well-off mainlanders wanted to bulldoze the night markets in the trendy parts of Taipei, even though the night markets were what made the areas so desirable in the first place. The scrappy benshengren—yams from the country, like my grandfather—had built the night markets with their bare hands and delighted in the simple pleasures of cooking and eating good food late at night.

  Everything my grandfather and my parents did with their lives was sunk into my night-market stall. No business cards, letterheads or office doors carry their names—or mine. Threads of meat from that crappy chicken leg were still stuck in my teeth, reminding me how great a place Unknown Pleasures was. I would have picked up a bullhorn to fight for it.

  When I was in eleventh grade, in fact, I remember the night-market merchants staged a huge protest when they got word that the city council was about to approve a rezoning of the area. In front of the night market’s Cixian Temple, a man doused himself with cooking oil and threatened to light himself for the news cameras on standby. The developers quickly backed off.

  That protester was Julia Huang’s father. The grateful denizens of the night market tacked up posters that featured Mr. Huang standing in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square, with his pasted-on head turned to the viewer, Exorcist-like. Nonetheless, the Huangs sold their stand fairly soon after that incredible display.

  I let out a small sigh. “Don’t do this, Peggy.”

  “Don’t worry, Jing-nan. We’ll keep an indoor area for many of the vendors. It’s another step forward to help internationalize Taipei.”

  I shuddered. Whenever I heard the phrase “internationalize Taipei,” I took it to mean they wanted to do away with lower-class neighborhoods and replace them with Taipei 101 clones. I looked over at Dwayne and Frankie. What place did they have in an exclusive Taipei built for wealthy tourists and rich mainlanders?

  I patted the still-sealed envelope. “Now, what’s this about, Peggy?”

  She kept her voice down and splayed her hand out palm-down on the table, practicing her grip for grabbing the entire globe. “We’re going to hold a lottery for spaces in the new retail location.” She narrowed her mouth and added, “We could assign you one majorly prime location by default.”

  “Is this illegal?”

  “It’s not. We’re allowed to designate spaces for the most culturally significant merchants as determined by a nonpartisan committee of which I am the chairwoman.” She gave a closed-mouthed smile and picked at the wax crumbs of lipstick in the corners. I crossed my legs under the table.

  “Is the entire committee made up of mainlanders?”

  “No! It’s about fifty-fifty. We were going to vote on potential candidates, but we’re finding that it’s easier for each member to simply pick one they want. I pick you.”

  “I’m flattered, but I’m also somewhat disgusted.”

  Peggy blinked. Her face remained in its neutral position of vague amusement.

  “What makes you think you can pull this one off?”

  Sure, there would be another ugly public hearing, complete with shouted threats, fistfights, crotch-level kicks and thrown chairs. Status quo won more often than not. But this time Peggy’s family was involved, and they were undefeated against little guys.

  “History’s on our side, Jing-nan. They’ve already broken ground on the Taipei Performing Arts Center next to the Jiantan MRT Station. That’s gonna be done in 2015 or so, but before that you have to ask yourself, are well-dressed and well-heeled people going to want to fight their way through a grubby night market?” She opened her eyes wide for emphasis. “Of course not! Now, before or after a night at the theater, they might consider an indoor dining area that’s well-ventilated and clean, not like this.” She waved her right hand around.

  It was true that the arts center was going to be completed roughly on time. What else was she right about? “Even if I agreed to this, and I’m not going to unless you put a gun to my head, everybody else here is going to hate me for life.”

  “They won’t find out. I promise. I can make it look like you were lucky in the lottery.”

  “How do I know you’ll keep your word?”

  “We bought out Julia’s father years ago, in anticipation of developing these blocks someday. That troublemaker didn’t have too high a price. So, Jing-nan, you can trust me because I’ve never told anybody that except you just now.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I had only taken my first shoe off before I unloaded what was on my mind.

  “Everybody thought Mr. Huang was such a big hero,” I told Nancy. “My parents and all their friends, too. They thought he sold his stand because he was exhausted from the fight. What a fake! What a goddamn sellout!”

  “I’m sorry, Jing-nan,” said Nancy. “You never know anybody’s real motivation for anything.”

  Wangba! You bastard, Mr. Huang! I couldn’t go much further than that. He would have been my father-in-law, after all.

  WHEN I WAS A kid, I thought he was so great. He was nicer to me than my dad was, and his fun side came out when his wife wasn’t around to rein him in. Mr. Huang would take pomelos and make big citrus-smelling helmets for Julia and me with the rinds. He showed us kids how to write in lemon juice with toothpicks to create messages in invisible ink.

  Most enchanting of all, he stuffed his mouth with wintergreen mints and cupped his hands around his mouth, letting us see sparks flying around his open mouth as he chewed.

  “Don’t do this after you eat something oily, otherwise your mouth could catch on fire,” he had warned. Of course we believed it.

  He was the first guy, in direct opposition to my parents, to tell me not to take the gods and goddesses too seriously.

  “The priests and monks at the temples pray that people keep coming to give them money,” he muttered to me once when his pious wife was in the bathroom. She gave generously to temples of all faiths. “She helps keep Buddha fat,” he joked another time.

  I must have been in third grade when I asked him why people worshipped so many gods. He had brought Julia and me to eat dessert burritos filled with peanut ice cream.

  “I’ll tell you why,” Mr. Huang said. “People in Taiwan have always been vulnerable to many random natural events. Monsoons, earthquakes. Stormy seas drowned fishermen, and farmers were ruined by too much rain, or not enough. Disaster was historically right around the corner.”

  He paused to take a bite of his burrito to suck the ice cream through. Julia and I did exactly the same.

  “If you feel like you have no control over your life, then you need gods, goddesses and good-luck charms,” he said. “But a truly educated people can prepare for the monsoons and earthquakes and predict storms and weather. We are a capable people, but we Taiwanese are too scared to trust ourselves.”

  Julia and I didn’t say anything, but we both thought about what he had said and knew that he was right. He mopped up the melted ice cream on his plate with his tortilla and we imitated him.

  “Julia,” he said, his voice unsteady, “don’t tell your mother what I told you. Jing-nan, don’t tell your parents.”

  Julia and I vowed soon after to wean ourselves from religion altogether. We never blamed Mr. Huang.

  “SO THAT’S HOW YOU got turned on to atheism,” said Nancy. She was sitting at the end of the couch closer to the floor lamp, her arms folded across a closed lapt
op.

  “Yeah,” I said, bitterly. “I guess I should have known there was something wrong with him because he kept going to the temples as often as his wife. He never had the balls to do and say what he believed as long as she was around.”

  “Do you think he wasn’t a good father?”

  “Maybe he was, but he wasn’t a real man.”

  Nancy sighed and lifted her closed laptop to her chest. “It’s not right to sit around and rip on Mr. Huang. Jing-nan, I have a long essay due in two days and I haven’t really started. It’s important. All the freshman science majors are going to read it in the fall. If you want, you can watch TV. I have wireless headphones you can wear.”

  I dropped to the rug and grabbed her knees.

  “Wait, Nancy. I just thought of something. The last time I went to see the Huangs, Mr. Huang was bothered that Mrs. Huang wouldn’t even let me in. Maybe he wanted to talk to me. If I can get him alone, he might tell me what happened to change their minds about looking into Julia’s death.”

  “That’s a good idea, Jing-nan!”

  I licked my lips. “If he’s reluctant, I could tell him I know the circumstances of the sale of his stand. If I tell the other merchants about it, when the removal of the night market is announced, they’ll march down to his apartment and tear him apart. Man, Kuilan would rip his head off.”

  “How are you going to get Mr. Huang alone?” Nancy asked clinically. Her anxious fingers remained clasped to her laptop. She really wanted to work on her essay, but I wasn’t done thinking aloud yet.

  “Mrs. Huang is into temples, priests and shamans.” I looked in her eyes. “Will you help me, Nancy?”

  “If I say yes, will you let me work on this essay?”

  “Sure.”

  Nancy tore open her laptop and made some tentative keystrokes. “Good,” she said.

  “After I tell you about this plan.”

  Not bothering to close the lid, she set her computer aside. “What, already, Jing-nan?”

  DANCING JENNY LOOKED NANCY over, her eyes taking in each breast, and nodded slowly.