by Ed Lin
I shivered and rubbed my hands. I was creeped out. Not by the jiangshi story, but by the fact that there wasn’t one single syllable’s mention anywhere of the fire that had destroyed my house.
I was dazed by the revelation that I was up against what seemed like a gigantic conspiracy. All I could do for a while was eat more shrimp chips like a little kid having an after-school snack in front of the TV.
Why would anybody want to kill me? What had I done that was so bad?
I couldn’t say that I hadn’t been warned, though. If people were willing to track me and beat me up on occasion, my life was probably in danger.
What had Julia done to deserve being murdered? Apparently she was spying on customers of the betel-nut stand, based on how she helped nail Ah-ding.
The American had given me a final warning to back off and lay low. He claimed that he was going to smooth things out for me and convince his clients that even though I was still alive, I had at last gotten the message.
This is where the story should end. I keep my stall at the night market. Maybe I live happily ever after with Nancy. Maybe Nancy finds someone else. Maybe that someone else is Ah-ding when he gets out of jail. Does she still care about him? Why was I thinking about this now? I was the one who had told her I couldn’t fall in love.
After some more mindless munching, I lay down on one of the living-room couches and drew the throw blanket over myself. I didn’t want to crawl into bed and possibly disturb Nancy more tonight. The soft leather of the couch cradled me, and I rolled into its deep, dark pocket.
IT WAS A SUNNY day, not too humid, and I walked arm-in-arm with Julia, my wife of many years. Who knew where the kids were. We were laughing about something.
People were walking by. We didn’t know any of them. A woman ran out of a store and grabbed Julia by the arm, saying there was a beautiful dress inside that was perfect for her.
What can you do when that happens? If I objected, it would be tantamount to saying that my wife didn’t deserve a beautiful dress. I followed them into the store. I had to duck under some garments hanging from the ceiling as I followed them to the back.
Julia went into a dressing room and I was alone with the saleswoman, who began to lick the backs of her hands.
“Are you sure this is the dress for her?” I asked.
“Of course,” said the woman. “You’ll feel like you’ve never seen Julia before.” I saw that she had a tail, and I thought it would be rude to stare at it, so I turned and looked at myself in a full-length mirror. I was dressed in burlap head to toe—traditional mourning clothes.
I gasped.
“Don’t be alarmed,” said the woman.
“You tricked me!” I growled through my clenched teeth.
“It’s no trick. Look.” She led me into the dressing room. Julia was lying in a coffin wearing a flowing white dress. “Isn’t she beautiful?” asked the woman.
She pressed a button on a remote control and the coffin slid away on a conveyor belt as a furnace door at the other end flew open. Julia suddenly sat up.
“Remember to burn paper for me, Jing-nan,” she said.
“No!” I said, pressing all the buttons on the remote. The conveyor belt chugged on. Julia lay back down, and I saw her in the light of the furnace flames, shadows dancing on her chin.
“JING-NAN!” NANCY SAID AS she shook me. “You were shouting!”
I apologized and dropped the TV remote. I had slept on the couch specifically in order not to bother her, and now I’d woken her up a few hours before her alarm. I lifted the blanket and she crawled in with me. After a few minutes of fidgeting, we slunk off to the bedroom for a quickie.
NANCY HAD LEFT BY the time I woke up at 11:30. I had a vague memory of her kissing me and saying I could have something in the fridge, and to get that box the hell out of her apartment. Neatly wrapped in cellophane on the second rack, I found a to-go breakfast of youtiao, shaobing and danbing—deep-fried cruller, baked sesame flatbread and an egg crepe. I ate them with my fingers, and everything was so cold and soaked with grease, it was eerily reminiscent of raw meat. I swept the crumbs on the counter into the sink and ran the hot water over my hands.
That box. I had to get rid of that box. If somebody somehow discovered Julia’s CIA papers weren’t destroyed in the fire, there could be serious trouble. I didn’t need the American to tell me that. What was the fastest way to ditch it? The nearest dumpster, or maybe a river? Throwing the box into a river would be bad luck, though, especially this time of year.
Damn it, there was no such thing as bad luck.
I retrieved the box from Nancy’s closet, tucked in its flaps and slipped it into a shopping sack made from recycled bottles. I went down to the lobby, where I discovered that there was definitely such a thing as bad timing, if not bad luck.
“Hello, Peggy.” Surprisingly, she was wearing a skirt with her blazer. No pantsuit today. Dressed in navy blue with a white blouse, Peggy looked like a schoolgirl who could kick the principal’s ass.
“Jing-nan, how are you?”
I brushed my hair back in an attempt to cover up not having combed it. “I’m doing pretty good.”
She made a face at me like I was the ugly new kid on the first day of school. “You look like you slept in those clothes!” She broke into a smile and rocked forward on the balls of her feet in her flat shoes. “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter, considering where you work.”
I tapped my right foot, trying to come up with something. C’mon! “You’re very nicely dressed, yourself, Peggy. Aren’t you running late? Well, I guess it doesn’t matter when other people do the real work for you.”
She crinkled her nose and hid her briefcase behind her back without letting her smile down. “I started today with a conference call. A potentially big deal with Australian investors. I guess you were still in bed.”
“I was working early, too.” I made a move for the door, and Peggy walked alongside.
“So where’s Nancy?” she asked.
“She had to run.” I swapped my bag to the arm away from Peggy, but she picked up on its movement.
“What’s in the bag, Jing-nan?”
“It’s stuff for the stall. New decor.”
“Let me see it!” I was walking briskly, but Peggy had no problem keeping up. Man, this was one long lobby. The revolving doors didn’t seem to be getting any closer.
“It’s not quite ready yet, Peggy. I still need to go through a finalization process with some focus groups.”
“But I know all about Joy Division! ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart!’ You still think I don’t know?”
“That’s not the issue. It’s not good enough for you to see it. I know how demanding you are.”
“Did you make it? I promise I won’t laugh,” she said, contradicting her statement by letting out a nostril-snort chuckle.
I stepped into the building’s revolving door, followed closely by Peggy. I used the microseconds I had alone to try to plan my escape from her.
When she swished out into the open air I told her that I had to go.
“Let me give you a lift!” she insisted.
“I’m in a bit of a rush, though.”
“My car is right here. I can take you anywhere!”
“I’d rather not take up your time.”
“Nonsense!” A black Yukon with smoked windows pulled up next to us. The driver, a big guy in a dress shirt and black tie, jumped out and had a little fight with the building doorman to open the rear passenger door for us. I had no choice but to climb in, keeping the bag tight against my body. The doorman won the fight to close the passenger door, so the driver hopped back into his seat before Peggy had settled in next to me. He adjusted his rearview mirror and I noticed that he raised his eyebrows as he looked me over.
“Birdy, this is my old classmate, Jing-nan,” said Peggy. “We’ve known each other since we were little kids.”
“Hello, Birdy,” I said. He nodded. I knew what he was thinking. I wa
nted to say, “I was visiting someone else here last night, not Peggy!”
Peggy didn’t care what Birdy thought and didn’t attempt to clarify the situation at all. In fact, she further compromised my position by stroking my arm and saying, “Are you busy tonight?”
“You know I am. I work at the family business. Just like you.” We turned off into the street, and Peggy cleared her throat. “Birdy, we’re going to make a stop before we go to the office.”
“Where do you want to go, miss?” Birdy spoke an earthy brand of Mandarin, the kind you would pick up in northern China working jobs that built up your biceps. Like Birdy’s.
“The Shilin Night Market,” I said. “Any entrance is fine.”
“Too early to go, my man! Still so many hours before it opens!”
We swung out into the street behind a swarm of bikes. The motorcycles were the adult insects, and the mopeds were the grubs.
“Jing-nan runs one of the stalls there,” said Peggy with a mixture of admiration and admonishment.
“No kiddin’. I go there sometimes. It’s a great place.”
“I run a food stall,” I said, knowing that it would have been impolite for a mere driver to ask me outright.
“You look like a great chef!” he declared as we swung onto an elevated highway.
“He is, Birdy!”
“I wouldn’t go quite that far,” I said.
Peggy turned to me and said in a low voice, “Have you thought more about my proposal for your new indoor location?”
I looked at her. From my angle I could see sky and clouds the color of rancid, fatty meat go by behind her head.
“I’ve thought about it, but I can’t see how I can go along with it.”
“How can you not go along with it? Don’t you want your business to do well? Your parents put their whole lives into it.”
“Thanks for reminding me of my parents, because sometimes I forget. Of course I want Unknown Pleasures to do well, but it’s bad luck to arrange something during Ghost Month, as you well know.” I shifted in my seat and played with the seat belt.
“Bullshit, Jing-nan. You don’t believe in that crap any more than I do. Julia didn’t, either.”
I heard the driver cough into his fist.
“Please leave her out of this, Peggy.”
“Why won’t you let me help you?”
“I don’t need anybody’s help.”
“Then what are you doing with that girl Nancy?”
I thought I saw Birdy eying me in the rearview mirror. I felt self-conscious. Why didn’t her car have one of those privacy dividers? “It’s none of your business, Peggy.”
“Christ! If you wanted to keep me shut out of your life, then why did you get in touch with me in the first place?”
“I needed your help then, to find out more about Julia.”
“And now you don’t need me or my help.”
“Kinda.”
The Yukon slowed as we took an exit back to a ground-level street. I could see we were close to Xinyi Road, which would take us to Taipei 101.
“You don’t genuinely care about me at all, do you? All our years together in school add up to nothing, right?”
“Peggy, I do care.” I didn’t know how to phrase it in a neutral way, so I tried to be as honest as possible. “But I don’t care to the point where we have to associate with each other … closely.”
“Birdy!” she shrieked.
“Yes, Miss Lee?”
“Let me out at the next corner!”
“Are you sure?”
“Just shut up and do what I say!” She turned to the window but directed her words at me. “You probably don’t even want to ride in my car with me, so I’ll go! I’ll make it better for you! I’ll make everything better for you!”
I touched her arm lightly, and Peggy rammed her shoulder into the palm of my injured hand. It stung.
We came up to the curb, and before we reached a full stop, Peggy broke out and slammed the door.
Without missing a beat, Birdy pulled the car back into traffic.
“Next stop, Shilin Night Market,” he called out. We headed down Xinyi Road and then made a left to head north on Jianguo Road, one of my traditional routes to the market.
“Is Peggy going to be all right?” I asked.
“Oh, sure. She’ll get a cab for the rest of the way. Don’t worry about her. She’s good.”
“Does this happen often?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. All the time. The whole family’s the same way. Her aunt’s the worst. If they don’t fight during the ride, then they’re asleep or drunk.”
“Nobody’s drunk on the way to work, though, right?”
Birdy smiled and shook his head. “The horrors that I’ve seen, you wouldn’t believe. I’m scarred for life.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Her ex-husband, the Swiss guy, what a victim he was! She hammered him every day until he assumed the fetal position. That was his only defense!”
“Maybe it was best that the marriage ended.”
Birdy coughed hard and made a sucking sound in his nasal passage. “Us mainlanders, you know, we’re not all like that. Most of us are regular people. Anybody with money and power acts crazy. You’re benshengren, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I could tell. The way your ears and nose are.” He pointed at me in the rearview mirror. “When your ancestors came over, they were almost all men, and they interbred with the native mountain women.”
“It was a long time ago,” I said. Now was not the time to tell him that the term “mountain people” was offensive to aboriginal people, not least because not all the tribes were from up in the mountains.
“You know I’m from China,” said Birdy. He pointed at his mouth. “Way up north. You can tell just by the way I talk. Also, I’m big. You people never get to this size. It’s the Mongolian blood.”
I leaned back. This could be a revealing ride. I put my hand tentatively against the back of his seat. “Say, Birdy, how long have you been working for the Lees?”
“Couple years. I’m distantly related to them, so they brought me over, hooked me up with this job. I always have to be grateful for that. Decent pay for decent work. All in all, they are not the nuttiest people I’ve worked for. You want to see crazy, you go to China.”
“I think I already saw crazy today.”
“Ha!” shouted Birdy. We pulled up to the curb outside the Shilin Night Market. “So, right here, is this about where you want to go?”
“I’m fine here.”
Birdy unhooked his seat belt and reached back for my hand. “It was nice to meet you, Jing-nan.” He was like Dwayne in that he tried to intimidate with his grip.
“Thanks again, Birdy.” I left the car and shut the door with a solid slam. He had gotten the better of me with the handshake, so I had to show that I wasn’t completely weak, that I wasn’t less of a man.
I also had to show him that I wasn’t afraid. He knew his heidaoren tattoos were visible through the slits in his sleeves.
Tattoos aren’t as common here as they are in the US, where almost everybody who is cool or wants to be cool gets them. It was a rite of passage for incoming freshmen at UCLA to get some ink on their arms by spring break.
Not everyone in Taiwan who has tattoos is a criminal, but all heidaoren, “black-way people,” have them.
The black way is the extra-legal arena where so many political and business deals are forged. The deeds that black-way people do may not be technically legal, but they are socially acceptable. Heidaoren had built my home without worrying about getting a permit. Heidaoren operate temples, nightclubs and KTVs—all cash-heavy businesses where the accounting books offer only modest approximations. Older heidaoren are elected to serve in the Legislative Yuan, parliament, and wouldn’t hesitate to throw chairs and punches to get their way. Heidaoren and supposedly completely legitimate baidaoren, “white-way people,” help each other to keep their reputations consistent.
German Tsai was a heidaoren. So was Kuilan’s son, Ah-tien. But Kuilan and her husband were baidaoren. Peggy and her family were baidaoren with heidaoren connections.
I wondered what the Lees had tasked people like Birdy to do. If I didn’t do that deal with Peggy, maybe I would find out.
I WALKED THROUGH THE still-empty streets of the market. It was a little after noon, still a couple hours before the businesses would open.
I could feel the box buckling in the bag, so I perched it on a chained stool and turned the box ninety degrees to distribute the wear and tear on the cardboard. If it broke open, it might be harder to get rid of. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. In the absence of public trash cans, a big bottomless pit would be ideal.
I found a dark back alley that looked as good as any route to explore. I followed it to the sunlight at the far end, where I found myself standing at the edge of the construction site of the Taipei Performing Arts Center.
Several dumpsters squatted around me like giant cakes powdered with dry-wall dust. One of them would be a perfect place to ditch this box and walk away.
Yet I hesitated.
After all, I was about to throw away the last belongings of the girl I had loved almost my entire life.
I shifted the bag to my left arm. It didn’t feel very heavy at all, certainly not for something that was supposed to summarize all the most important work Julia had done in her brief adult life.
Yet I had to get rid of it. Nancy and I wouldn’t be safe as long as it was around. I set the bag on the ground, put my hands in my pockets and looked around as nonchalantly as possible. A group of workers were down in the pit area, about fifty feet away, while the others were sitting in the shade of a crane. No one seemed to be actively working. I didn’t understand what they were saying to each other. Most of them were probably Thai or Filipino and in all likelihood living in the country illegally. They had enough to be worried about already and wouldn’t mess around looking through a box full of papers in English. I lifted the lid to the nearest dumpster. It was nearly empty. I didn’t need two hands to lift the box out of the bag, but I used both, anyway. It seemed more respectful to do so. I released the box and watched it slide down and kick up some dust. I folded up the bag and stuffed it into my back pocket.