In high school we read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. In the book, Jerry Cruncher derisively refers to his wife’s praying for his salvation as “flopping.” I thought that was a perfect way to describe the act of baibai, bowing to an altar while brandishing a lit joss stick.
Students, who should be the least traditional segment of society, were out in force, baibai-ing at the temples like it was a contest. I felt bad for them. Most of them were taking their summer classes, studying their brains out for that senior high school test at the end of ninth grade. I know how hellish it is. Maybe they didn’t want to jinx themselves by pissing off the undead.
BOTH MY PARENTS AND the Huangs had loved to go flopping. Julia and I were dragged into temples and forced to inhale the fumes of burning incense, burning fake money and the cigars smoked by the odd folk-religion shaman between prophecies. But Julia’s mother was way worse than mine.
For years her mother prayed for a lighter color for Julia’s skin. She acted like her daughter was an obsidian idol when in reality Julia was the same beige shade as a generic PC. Mrs. Huang had some herb from a Buddhist monk that she scrubbed over Julia’s face to remove the sins from a past life. Her mother hired shamans—jitong in Mandarin, although I prefer the Taiwanese danki—to perform rituals to continue cleaning Julia’s soul and checked in with fortune-tellers at the temples to monitor progress.
I wondered what Mrs. Huang thought about souls and past lives now.
If I allowed myself to believe even for half a second in the superstitions surrounding Ghost Month, I would be terrified for Julia’s spirit. It was the worst possible time to die, because with the gates of hell opened and spirits pouring out, the recently departed might become confused and be doomed to wander the earth without rest forever.
But I didn’t believe in such things. I believed in facts, science and, every once in a while, human beings.
Ghost Month was also nicknamed National Pollution Month, because of the amount of ash generated by people burning fake money, paper-and-foil houses and cars in braziers and coffee cans to send to the dead. We appeased animal spirits, too. Buddhist monks presided over ceremonies at the pet columbaria for people to send Xiong Xiong the late Chow a nice house complete with dining-table set.
Buddhists believe in the cycle of life, death and reincarnation, so in what realm would these material goods be enjoyed by the loved one? Taiwanese like to cover all the bases. Maybe the cycle of life and death slowed at times, or didn’t exist at all. Maybe Xiong Xiong would want to catch a nap under that new dining table.
Religion was stupid and so was belief in a spirit world, I told myself. Julia wasn’t a ghost now. She was gone. That was what we believed. No. It was what we knew. I shouldn’t miss her but I did. I wished I didn’t have to feel anything.
I MANAGED TO STEEL myself and stuff down my emotions as I drove to work. It helped that my moped seat was worn and the ride almost always put my ass to sleep.
As the Shilin Night Market came into view, I thankfully felt myself shifting into work mode, Johnny mode. Fake mode. Uncaring mode. Just like I was to those Australian tourists. Put on a smile and a show.
The outdoor market turned the streets into blocks and blocks of everything and anything for sale. All the buildings had ground-floor establishments—sit-down restaurants, clothing stores with changing rooms. The streets themselves were crammed with stands that would soon be dishing out fried, frozen, grilled and raw foods.
The market was devoid of customers, and the continuous bare-metal frames of the unadorned stalls looked like a skeletal dragon splayed out across the length and breadth of the market. Vendors unpacked cardboard boxes and plastic crates. Apart from their usual goods, tonight many of them brought small folding tables to set up rickety altars for the first night of Ghost Month. Shilin Night Market was huge but too crowded to make burning large amounts of fake money feasible. I saw a few ashtray stands for accommodating petty cash offerings to the spirits.
I slowed my moped to a crawl to wriggle through a small flock of bumpkins blocking the road with their two vehicles. Both were half motorcycles welded to oxcarts. With riders in place, they looked like ugly mechanical centaurs fighting each other.
And they were fighting. You know the story. An extended family or group of close friends decides to invest together and start a night-market business. After a few weeks, the stand still doesn’t come close to breaking even, much less earning money. The distrust sets in. Each investor sends a representative to make sure nobody’s pocketing cash. The contempt for the struggling business turns into outright disdain for cheap customers who never buy enough. Before long everything falls apart and the other vendors buy up the used equipment for next to nothing, and the space itself is quickly rented to someone else.
The centaurs were yelling at each other and each other’s passengers to dismount and unpack first. I exchanged a few knowing looks with their amused neighbors. One of the drivers relented and drew his contraption back, giving me an opportunity to waddle through on my moped.
DON’T THINK OF MY food stall as a restaurant. I don’t. But it is bigger than most of my competition, and I like to think it serves better-quality food.
Shilin District is a residential area, and most of the people who live there stroll in for a snack or two at least once a week. A large population of foreigners lives here, too. A “red hair”—hong mao in Mandarin, or if you’re down with Taiwanese, ang mo—who resides in the neighborhood may not literally have red hair, but she or he can probably speak our language. Their kids can eat grosser things than any American-born Chinese who come through the Shilin Night Market.
Everybody comes here, not just the ABCs and tourists. This night market isn’t one of those five-block-long, locals-only rinky-dink operations. It’s the biggest one in Taiwan, and the best. All the tourist brochures tell people how to get here in general, but I’ll tell you how to get to my specific flavor emporium, Unknown Pleasures.
Here’s what you do. Take the red line of the Taipei Metro—the MRT—to Jiantan Station. The stench of stinky tofu should swaddle you even before you leave the elevated station. I suggest bearing east up Dadong Road, away from Bailing High School, unless you want to see mischievous boys trying to swat each other in the nuts and devious girls egging them on.
Yes, continue walking past the large indoor market—sure, there’s great food in there, but there’s amazing food throughout. Be adventurous! Marvel at the stand that makes sponge cakes in the shape of erect penises that the guy calls “gaykes.” Recoil at the thought of eating “frog eggs.” (Despite what the stand signs say in English, the dessert jelly aiyu is actually made from fig seeds.) Flip through the racks of cheap leather handbags. No brand knockoffs here—this isn’t China.
The crowds talk loudly, eat loudly and belch loudly, but they aren’t ever pushy. If you’re not Asian, people will probably stare openly at you. Take note of what they’re wearing and what they’re eating. Ask them where they got that cute shirt or those warm blocks of peanut candy and they’ll point out the stand. If they say they’re eating the best meat skewers ever, then you’re probably getting closer to my stall.
Don’t let the loud music deter you. That’s just a DJ a group of pot-sticker vendors hired to drum up more business. Make a left at the stand that sells underwear with superheroes from Japanese cartoons. If you hit the circle with the OK Mart, you’ve gone too far. Backtrack through Dadong Road and make a right on Dabei Road, also known as Jeremy Lin Lane because of the shirts, shorts and book bags adorning the merchandise racks there. One of the indoor stores proudly displays in its window a laminated printout of an email from the Jeremy Lin Foundation, thanking a donor for a $50 gift.
You’ll find Unknown Pleasures, my food joint, at the northwest intersection of Dabei and Daxi.
Maybe it’s a little corny, but I had the interior walls painted black and scraped out the white radio waves that appear on the cover of Joy Division’s first album, Unknown Pleasures. Some people mistake them for subsea mountain ranges. It looks so cool, and I can’t help but think less of people who ask me what the artwork is all about.
Look up at the only non-cluttered sign in the entire market: UNKNOWN PLEASURES is spelled out in English, horizontally, in all capital letters across a back-lit plastic panel, just like it is on the back of the album. A vertical sign in stained wood, lit by the light of the English sign, contains the two characters of the stand’s original name, given by my grandfather: Ke Kou, or “Tastes Good” in Mandarin.
Phonetically it also sounds like the two characters for “embezzle,” or “withholding money.” My grandfather had felt that society had robbed him of opportunity, and to scrape by he had to resort to selling skewers made with scrap meat. It’s hard to imagine the business’s lowly beginnings now.
Incidentally, the first two syllables of Coca-Cola’s Chinese name are the same two characters as Ke Kou. The soda company has never contacted us, and my father told me we’ve had the name longer, in case the Americans want to sue us for trademark infringement.
Unlike most joints in the Shilin Night Market, Unknown Pleasures has five solid tables set up with sturdy chairs, all under a roof. The dining area in other places is usually unsteady stools at wobbly foldout tables under cheap umbrella stands that collapse in a sudden windy Taipei downpour.
Please come by and get some skewers to go, or step inside and order a spicy stew from Dwayne, the big guy who mans the counter. Point to the pictures of what you want and you’re good. Order more than you think you can eat. Come early during your stay in Taipei so you can come back and eventually try everything on the menu. I need the money.
I PARKED MY MOPED around the corner from Unknown Pleasures, but I couldn’t go directly to work. I had to see an old friend first, Dancing Jenny at Belle Amour. She caught me trying to rush by one day and slapped my arm hard. “I know you think I’m just an ugly old woman, but you still have to respect me!” she cried.
Belle Amour’s huge illuminated sign dominates our intersection of Dabei Road and Daxi Road and features a full-length curvy silhouette of a woman leaning against the words, one hand holding her ponytail erect. Located on the southeast corner, the store is stocked with upscale dresses and costumes made by up-and-coming Taiwanese and Japanese designers. Jenny Lung Ming-tai is the proprietor of the store and model of the sign. She is prone to wearing leotards from time to time, so everyone calls her Dancing Jenny even though she doesn’t dance.
The northeast corner of the intersection is Song Kuilan’s dumpling and soup joint, Big Shot Hot Pot. In Chinese characters, the sign says “Big Man Hot Pot.” It’s right across the street, but none of our offerings compete directly. Kuilan runs the place with her beaten-down husband. Recently she’s been able to rope in her petty-criminal son, Ah-tien.
In the span of my memory, our three stores are the lone originals left. Stores too many to count have come and gone. An available stall never lasts long. There’s always a cart business that wants to move to a fixed stall on the street next to a storefront, and there’s always a fixed stall that wants to move into a storefront. The storefront stores are angling on a corner location. Going back to the beginning, there’s always a new cart rolling in with a kid with a vision or a lonely retiree trying to feel useful.
The southeast corner of the intersection is where Julia’s family last had a store. Ever since they sold the location there more than a decade ago, there hasn’t been a business that has lasted more than two years on the corner. The current business is a sci-fi toy store called Beyond Human.
When we were still kids, I wrote our initials as small as I could in a wet concrete patch on the corner and enclosed them in a tiny lopsided heart. It was visible for less than a year before that part of the sidewalk was tiled over, chipped out and paved over again. Building materials don’t endure in Taipei’s heat, rain and humidity. Only human flesh does.
AT THE DOORSTEP OF Belle Amour, I took a deep breath and exhaled. I tried to forget everything. It was show time.
“Jenny!” I called out as I stepped into her store. “Where’s my favorite vendor in the whole market?” I have to be fully in my Johnny-night-market persona when I see her. When I act shy, she pinches my nipples.
A motion-activated alarm announced my arrival, playing the chorus to “Lady Marmalade.” The inside of her store was lit with a series of vintage-style filament light bulbs, which gave the place a filtered-lens, Instagram-inspired feel. Her offerings were divided into three aisles of double-decker racks. Most of the floor was bamboo wood, but the two dressing rooms in the back were carpeted—some customers wanted to make sure they were able to get down on their hands and knees comfortably while wearing certain outfits.
“Ah, Jing-nan!” Jenny cried as she came out of the middle and narrowest aisle. She set aside a bundle of dresses on the counter and kissed my cheek. For me, being extroverted is an act, but Dancing Jenny was genuinely flirty and flashy, her fingers and lips brushing your skin. Some said she was that way because she had been abroad. Some said she was into broads.
She was in her late thirties and stood a little shorter than me. Her arched eyebrows taken alone were severe, but her soft eyes and small smile gave her face an inviting look overall. Anybody who obsessed over the silhouette in her sign wouldn’t be disappointed upon seeing her.
Jenny opened up the place by herself when she was a teenager, and she was the first woman I ever saw wearing an exposed corset. My father slapped me upside my head because I wouldn’t stop staring. Her outfits are a lot less risqué these days, but a lot of boys and men still like to ogle her. Some women, too.
She pulled back and turned to her side, exposing the slit in a paisley skirt that seemed too short to have a slit.
“What do you think?” Jenny asked. Her hands came together at her waist and she instinctively picked at her cuticles.
“It seems way too short. I like it.”
Visibly relieved, she fixed her hair. “I’m glad you do, Jing-nan. This designer has been such a pain in the ass to work with. But she does such great stuff!” She retreated back down the aisle. I heard a zipping sound and her feet shuffling. “Do you think we’ll have a big crowd tonight?” Jenny yelled.
“How can we not? The holiday’s about to start, and foreigners are pouring in.”
“I hope they feel like buying stuff. This economic downturn has them acting all cocky. I swear, the white people never tried to bargain so hard until Wall Street bit it.”
“Let them! They’re celebrating Taiwanese night-market culture when they bargain.”
Jenny came from behind a rack of designer shirts and gave me a little push. “Whose side are you on?” She had changed into a pair of form-fitting denim shorts, a short, beaded shirt that exposed her midriff and a trucker hat with nonsensical graffiti in English sprayed across the front foam panel.
“Always on your side, Jenny! It’s the only safe side!” I held up my hand and we did a high five. “Have a great night,” I said.
“You, too,” she called out as I left.
MY NEXT STOP WAS Big Shot Hot Pot.
Kuilan’s son, Ah-tien, was at the front counter, seasoning a spicy soup base and a sour soup base. When he saw me, he gave the smallest nod and yelled out for his mother before assuming a sullen and resentful look. The son and I had never really hit it off. He was a bit of a delinquent and seemed to regard people who finished high school as sellouts. I shuffled my feet as the silence between us swirled and thickened like the soup.
Ah-tien was thirty, five years older than me, and still wore the buzz cut left over from conscription. He probably hated me because I’d been able to defer the mandatory military service, and then had been excluded from it because I was an orphan and running a business that employed others.
His black tank top showed off tattoos of tigers as well as a ba gua, the octagon-shaped Taoist symbol with a black-and-white yin-yang swirl in the middle. The collar was low enough to expose the face of a dragon with lobster-like eyestalks. He noticed me looking and puffed his chest out more.
I had never done anything to make him hate me, but I’m sure his mom had beaten him over the head with my good example of what a son should be. I had heard Kuilan talk about Ah-tien, always in a disparaging way, for years before I actually met him. I thought she was doing the overly modest thing parents do. Maybe this supposed “bad kid” was really the class salutatorian and not the valedictorian, merely an above-average pianist and not a virtuoso. Maybe the “trouble” Ah-tien was having with the cops was just an argument about a parking ticket.
Ah-tien’s slouching form showed up at the night market about two years ago. The first time I saw him, with his tattoos, wild eyes and suspiciously crooked fingers, I had no idea who he was. This man I didn’t know was counting money and smoking in the men’s restroom in the indoor part of the night market. I looked at him, not accusingly, but with curiosity.
He straightened up and seemed pleased he was taller than I was. Thinking that I was focused on the cash, Ah-tien stuffed the wad partially in his front pocket. Try to take it, kid, his smirk seemed to say. Then he coolly rubbed out his cigarette on the plastic No Smoking sign and left without saying a word.
Less than an hour later, Kuilan brought him over to Unknown Pleasures and introduced him to me.
“Jing-nan is a good young man!” she emphasized, to my horror.
I got my hand to him as quickly as possible and we shook. I’d never met anyone with scars on their palm before.
“Hello,” he said in a quietly furious voice.
From now on, Kuilan said, Ah-tien was going to be working at her stall, and he and I were going to be best friends. I nodded and faked a smile. Ah-tien was better at it than me. We hadn’t had a substantial exchange of facial expressions since.
KUILAN GREETED ME WITH her hands on her hips and a nod. She had to be in her early sixties now, but she still looked the same as when I first saw her two decades ago. Kuilan often cited her Mongolian blood for her strength and slightly heavier-than-average build.
“Jing-nan, I forgot my hat today,” she said. “All this flour in the air is going to turn my hair even more grey!”
“That’s the only way I can tell the difference between you and Dancing Jenny,” I said.
She rubbed her ears. “You’re just a kidder! I know I look like her father. Say, have you heard about that new rumor going around? The district is going to pass a law that we’re all going to have to close by midnight!”
I laughed out loud, but too heartily for the beginning of Ghost Month, so I dialed it back a little. “There’s no way they could do that! Midnight is when Taiwanese first get hunger pangs.”
“It’s the tourists they’re thinking about. The image of Taipei is that we’re too morally loose, eating so many hours after the sun has gone down. Christians think it’s a sin! I know because my sister married a Christian. They call it ‘gluttony.’ ”
“The problem is that your soups taste too good!”
Kuilan’s son had had enough of our small talk. He wiped his hands on his apron, jammed a cigarette in his mouth and headed outside.
“Hey, Ah-tien!” his mother snapped at him. “You haven’t finished yet!”
He didn’t bother to remove the cigarette to talk back. “They have to simmer now. Do you expect me to make time go faster?”
“Why can’t you be like Jing-nan? Look how nice he is. Everybody likes him, and he’s never in trouble.” Luckily Ah-tien was out of earshot before she was even halfway done talking. She sighed and said to me, “I just hope the tourists and not the good brothers are hungry for our food. I’ll set another table outside for them.”
I didn’t want to, but I thought of Julia. I imagined her in pain and confused, wandering about with no relief, covered in blood.
“Do you want some water, Jing-nan?”
“No, thank you.”
“You’re swallowing a lot.”
“Your soup smells so good.”
“Such a kidder! So funny! How come you’re not married yet?”
I laughed soundlessly, feeling a cutting motion across my guts. “It’s not time yet.”
“Are you kidding me? When I was your age, I was already picking out baby names!” At that remark, Kuilan’s rarely seen husband, Bert, poked his head out from the kitchen in the back. He seemed to be sitting on a stool, and his hands were dutifully twisting dumpling skins over ground-pork fillings.
“Kuilan, looking at your husband reminds me that I should get my own show on the road. Don’t sell so many that you fill up my customers!”
“Bert!” Kuilan chastised him. “You didn’t say hi to Jing-nan the entire time he was standing here, and now he’s leaving!”
“Uh?” Bert looked up at her in awe before focusing on me. “Yes, hello, Jing-nan. You’re a good worker and a testament to what a good son is.”
I walked out just in time. Ah-tien was coming up Dabei Road, wearing a big pair of noise-canceling headphones.
I APPROACHED UNKNOWN PLEASURES with more than the usual dread. I was an actor who had lost his motivation. I wasn’t fully confident I could pull off the role tonight.
My two employees—colleagues, really—were prepping for the evening’s business.
Dwayne, the half aborigine who cooked and did pretty much everything else at the indoor counter, ran out and grabbed me around my arms. He didn’t use his customarily tight grip. It was soft. Caring, even. It brought me back to reality.
“I read all about Julia,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
Shit. Dancing Jenny and Song Kuilan didn’t pay attention to the news and Dwayne did?
I slumped a little. Dwayne led me inside to a metal prep table next to the sink in the corner. I sat down and lay my head sideways on top of my folded arms. Dwayne slid over a serving of spicy entrails stew in a ceramic bowl.
It looked and smelled exactly how my grandfather and father used to make it. The pig intestines and the pudding-like, coagulated lumps of duck blood were in the same proportion. We hadn’t slipped at all. If I didn’t hate my life completely at this moment, I’d say that I was rather pleased.
“Eat up, Jing-nan. Best thing you can do,” Dwayne said. He pulled out a chair and sat on it backward so he could perch his upper body on the backrest. He was close enough for me to see the red lightning-bolt veins radiating from his pupils. “This is terrible news, but we need you to be functional tonight, boss.”
He tilted his head down and regarded me over his cracking knuckles. You couldn’t tell he was part Amis. Dwayne looked like just another dark-skinned Taiwanese man in his late thirties, albeit on the heavier-built side. He fought back against his receding hairline by maintaining a crew cut.
I watched my hands turn the bowl of soup clockwise ninety degrees. “You remember Julia well, don’t you, Dwayne?”
“ ’Course I do. Me and the Cat both remember her. Wonderful little girl. Real nice and smart and pretty.”
From the other prep table on the other side of the sink, Frankie the Cat closed his eyes and nodded to us. Frankie was in his seventies, but he was ageless and silent in his appearance and movements. As always, he wore a clean, white long-sleeved kitchen uniform in spite of the humidity. With his big smile and oversized eyeglass lenses, he looked like the Cheshire Cat. Now, though, his mouth had sobered into two sad earthworms.
Dwayne and Frankie. Those were not their given names, but like a lot of people at the night market, such as Jenny, they were on their second or third chance at life. I was at a disadvantage here because I only knew certain episodes from their pasts, but Dwayne and Jenny had known me for most of my life, and Frankie, all of it. I couldn’t pretend to be someone different around them; that’s why they called me Jing-nan and not Johnny.
My right hand picked up a pair of chopsticks, and I watched red oblong shapes of hot oil stretch and slide into the hollow of the soup spoon my left hand was pushing into the soup. Steam lightly scorched my forehead as I bent down and ate mechanically.
“You and the Huangs haven’t been close in a few years, right?” Dwayne asked.
“I think the last time I saw Julia’s parents was at the funeral,” I said. “The funerals, I mean. Those were the last conversations I had with them. They sure sold their stall at the right time, when the economy was good.”
“What about Julia? You never … talked?”
The evening was getting a little too real for me. I had hoped to grieve inside and keep everything I felt in that soundproof darkroom with no doorknob. But Dwayne had kicked in that door and turned on the lights. I wasn’t used to talking to him in this way, either. We both had these playfully antagonistic, guy-guy personalities that we wore during work hours. When my parents died, he had mercifully said next to nothing. Now he wanted me to talk things out?
I scooped a few peppercorns from the stew into my mouth and crunched them one by one, feeling a burst of hurt every time.
“It was so stupid, Dwayne,” I said to a shaky reflection of myself in a shimmering oval of chili oil. I slurped up a stretch of chewy intestine. It broke easily in my mouth, with just the right amount of give. The ginger flavor had burst through the spicy firewall and became prominent in my mouth. “You knew about my plan, right?” I asked when my mouth was empty enough.
“Sure I did. You guys were going to ignore each other for a few years and then you were going to swoop in one day like a prince on a horse. Just like Sleeping Beauty.”
“Not quite Sleeping Beauty.” I stirred the stew and watched a cloud of pickled cabbage surface briefly. I picked out a dried chili that looked like a little devil’s tongue. I chewed it but didn’t swallow. “More like Snow White without the prince showing up. I couldn’t pull it off, Dwayne.”
“You tried. It was beyond your control.”
That set me off, because I wasn’t ready to stop blaming myself yet. “Beyond my control! Everything’s beyond my control! Look at me. Still doing the same shit my parents and grandfather—”
Dwayne stood up and kicked the chair across the tile floor. Frankie simply lifted his leg and clamped the chair down before it could fly into the street.
“Hey, you watch your mouth, Jing-nan!” said Dwayne. “This is a respectful business and one of the best restaurants in the market. Your grandfather, rest his spirit, and your parents, rest their spirits, put everything they had into this to make life better for you. For us, too.”
“I’m sorry, Dwayne. I didn’t mean to insult you. You too, Frankie.”
“Don’t apologize to me and the Cat. We can take it. You apologize to your ancestors and set up an offering table for them. You have to. It’s bad enough that you took out the Guan Gong altar when you redesigned the place.” Like most Chinese gods, Guan Gong was based on an actual person, a famous general, in fact. He’s the red-faced guy holding a giant sword with a blade that looks like a lobster claw.
“No more fake gods here,” I said, my throat raw from the spices and anger.
“The previous management would be appalled!”
“It doesn’t matter, because I’m in charge now!”
“You lousy Han Chinese,” Dwayne said. “You destroyed my culture and you don’t even respect your own!”
Finally. We were both going back into work mode. Dwayne was the indignant native Taiwanese and I was the super-upbeat Johnny Taipei. Wrestling was definitely on the menu tonight. Frankie the Cat was going to go on being his silent self as he kept the stews fully stocked and fresh ingredients prepped throughout the night. The guy runs in the background like security software on a computer network.
I charged back into the stew with renewed vigor, never once letting go of my chopsticks or spoon. I wiped my forehead with the back of my right forearm and ate until there was nothing but pepper grit at the bottom of my bowl. I heard a scraping sound. Frankie was pushing out the front grill—Johnny Taipei’s pulpit—to the street. I stood up and put my bowl and utensils in the sink.
“Be happy,” I told Dwayne. “It’s the first day of you-know-what and we’re going to make a lot of money.”
“Oh, I know. Your restless undead are up and walking, trampling upon my people’s graves.”
“There’s no rest for us because we’re going to have customers in two seconds, my good Pangcah.”
“You don’t get to call me that! Only Amis get to call each other that. The way you say it, you murder my language.”
“Then how do you say it?”
Dwayne snickered and wiped his face. He went to the big back grill and tossed more wood chips and charcoal under it.
At some point Frankie had cleared out the sink, and now he was washing out pig and cow intestines, stomachs and chicken butts. The water washed down through a tube to a metal vent in the street curb. Who knew where that went to. The air smelled like wet feces and blood. It was comforting and felt like home.
I strode out to the front grill, feeling brand-new.
“That’s my boy, Johnny,” said Dwayne softly.
I set up the smaller skewers in a display behind my sneeze guard, to catch the eyes of people walking by. When they got hooked, people could move on to the larger skewers inside. Frankie brought over a tub of marinated, chopped-up meats and entrails. We each gathered a handful of wet bamboo skewers and began to spike them until they were full. As I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Frankie, he regained his full smile.
I remember making my first skewer, setting it on the grill and watching it burst into flames—I didn’t know the skewers had to be soaked in water first. It was good for a laugh for my grandfather and parents, but Frankie came over with tongs, tossed out the burned skewer and showed me how to do one properly. This was before Dwayne came on the scene and years before I’d be working there.
I looked at Frankie’s fast fingers. He had trained to be a soldier as a child, and that rigid discipline was still there.
Down the street, someone had set off fireworks. They were supposed to be banned in the night market. They always bend the rules a little around holidays.
Foot traffic was going to be heavy tonight. Some Taiwanese would be staying in for the night, but an influx of tourists would more than make up for the loss. There would also be ICLP and MTC students coming off the summer semesters, looking to blow off steam. Kids in the International Chinese Language Program and Missionary Training Center and other classes come from all over the world, and they’re into eating and buying night-market food.
A cloud of smoke and grease anointed my face. My worries and cares were sliding away. Jing-nan was the guy who had just lost his one and only love for good. Johnny was the hawker who always had a good time, was the life of the party and loved to show off his English to the foreigners. Johnny didn’t care about the dead. He lived life to the fullest.
Johnny made the most of the night market even before it was fully dark out.
He noticed a group of young white girls reading the stand’s sign and talking among themselves from a safe range.
“Hey, you,” I yelled out in English to the tallest one. “You’re an American, right?”
“What else could I be?” she said, laughing. She approached, and five of her friends followed in a tight formation. First time in Taiwan. Probably first time in Asia. The girls’ sunburned faces showed that they had already been here for a few days.
“You could be other things,” I said. “People come to Taipei from all over the world. But you and your friends talk like Yanks.”
“We thought the night market would be busier, but there’s, like, hardly anybody here.”
“You guys are early! The sun’s still out, people are just getting up right now!”
The women laughed. They say white people all look the same, but that’s not true at all. Their skin tones were all different, even with the sunburns, and their faces were all distinctive. They don’t all smile like Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts.
“Your English is really good,” the tallest woman said. “I knew there was something special about this stand because it was named Unknown Pleasures.”
“I love Joy Division, and that’s one of my favorite CDs.” I’d changed the English name from Tastes Good to Unknown Pleasures five years ago, when it was clear that I’d be stuck here for the foreseeable future. I’d meant it mostly as a tribute to Joy Division, but another meaning for me was that the word “unknown” indicated that I wasn’t sure what I was doing, and I certainly didn’t know if it would be “pleasurable.” I also figured a lot of cool people would be into it.
The American said, “I’ve never really listened to Joy Division. But we’re from Pittsburgh and there’s a store with the same name that sells sex toys.”
“The Pittsburgh Pirates!” I said, wielding an imaginary bat and swinging. “Well, we sell food, not toys. But if you want to try some sheep penis, I can help you!”
Her friends squealed in horror and fascination.
The American partially extended her index finger and tentatively pointed to some well-done mini pork and chicken sausages.
“What are those?”
“Sausages. Just pork and chicken. Nothing strange, I promise.”
“Are they good?”
“They’re the best in the whole world!” I plucked them from the grill with my tongs and released them into a crystalline bag. “Use this toothpick,” I told her. “Just eat it out of the bag.”
All the other women wanted the same exact things. I was only able to convince one of them to try a skewer of grilled pig intestines, and I think she planned to pose for pictures with it. I busied myself with bagging up sausages.
I was glad they didn’t want sit-down food. I could tell they were old friends who hadn’t seen each other in a while and they would linger for a long time.
“What’s your name?” the tall American asked. Her eyes gleamed with newfound interest, since the language barrier wasn’t an issue.
“Please call me Johnny,” I said, not pausing one second in my bagging motions. “What’s your name?”
I realized I was taking a huge risk by opening this door. Americans love to talk about problems they’re having and issues in their families with people they don’t even know. I was willing to take the extra step to make them feel more comfortable. After all, I had wanted to be an American, and a big part of being American was that you couldn’t be shy about physical contact with the people you met. Everybody wanted to hug.
“My name is Megan.” She extended a hand. I shook it briefly, pushed a sausage-filled bag into her palm and patted her knuckles lightly with my fingers.
“Please pass this to your friend,” I said.
I had met several women named “Megan” at UCLA. Me-gan. It sounded like “not dry yet” in Mandarin.
“I’m here for the ghost celebrations,” Not Dry Yet said.
I glanced at the other people in her group. They stood nearby, anxious to get their food and pleased they could buy it from someone fluent in English. Otherwise, they wouldn’t trust that the food was safe for eating.
“Be careful!” I warned the woman. “You can’t say the word ‘ghost.’ It’s bad luck. Call them ‘good brothers.’ ”
“Oh, no! I’ve been saying it all day!”
“It’s all right,” I said. She was safe. No gluttonous spirits would try to possess an American body. Too many food allergies. “Also, don’t whistle, Megan. That attracts good brothers.” I handed the remaining bags out to Megan’s friends.
“But what do I do if I see a really cute guy?”
“Then just go up and talk to him,” I said, laughing uncomfortably. “I saw some cute guys go around the corner over there.”
She and her friends had paid and were already nibbling. Sure enough, one woman was posing for pictures with the intestine skewer poised over her extended, studded tongue. I wished they would all just keep walking.
“The whole thing is a Taoist holiday, right?” Megan asked. “Some other people were calling it Buddhist, and I was correcting them.”
“All of you are right. In the seventh lunar month both Buddhists and Taoists celebrate their ancestors, so it’s all mixed. Everybody celebrates—well, not ‘celebrates’—let’s say ‘participates in’ the holidays.”
“Are all Taiwanese people as nice as you?” she asked, playing with her right earring.
I looked directly at Megan. She seemed to be sincere. I think she liked me, too. I knew she did. But that wasn’t enough of a reason for us to open up and start talking about the island’s problems and what I hated about Taiwan.
After all, I was fully conscious that underneath this persona, I was crying my eyes out over Julia.
I nodded at Megan and gave a big, platonic smile. “Oh, yes,” I said. “Everybody in Taiwan is very nice.”
“I’m going to be here for a few days,” she said. “Maybe you can show me around a little.”
“I think you would find a taxi tour very interesting.”
Dwayne didn’t understand much English, but he read the woman’s big smile and the tilt of her head.
“Tell her you’re married!” he yelled out in Taiwanese. “Say your wife keeps a padlock around your cock and you don’t know where she hides the key!”
Frankie the Cat’s smile curled up tighter at the ends.
Fearfully, I looked at Megan, but she hadn’t understood. Most tourists, if they spoke anything other than English, only knew the official and formal Mandarin dialect.
I looked directly at Megan’s chin and said, “My boss says my wife will be really jealous if she sees us talking.”
“You’re married? I thought you were like twenty!”
“No,” I said, not smiling. “I’m a very old man.” I glanced over at potential customers buzzing near the stall, hoping she would get the hint to leave. Her friends had already moved on to Dancing Jenny’s Belle Amour.
Megan brushed her hair back over her ears and said, “Anyway, happy holiday, Johnny!”
“Thank you, Megan,” I said, sounding as sincere as possible and nodding perfunctorily.
Three Asian men in their thirties stood a few footsteps away. They looked like guys who had stepped out of the office early. I could tell they were on the fence.
In Taiwanese, I said, “Better get your food now and go home early before the brothers come out and get you!”
They chuckled and came over. They ended up getting some appetizers up front and stews inside. People say it takes money to make money. It also takes customers to make customers. A small line had formed to sit inside, and that generated more interest. I was running out of skewers on the front display grill, so Dwayne transferred over a few tubs of partially cooked skewers.
“Thank you, Megan,” he said in a high-pitched whine. I kicked him lightly with my right heel.
DURING A SMALL SLOW period around 11:30 P.M., Dwayne caught me offguard. I should have been ready. When there are no customers, it’s high school guy-guy time, and my ass was pretty much up for grabs, along with my private parts. In school, when the teacher’s back was turned, you had to practically cover your crotch with one hand. Taiwanese boys punch and kick each other in the balls just for laughs.
Dwayne snuck up behind me and pinned my arms back. The smell of his sweaty arms and neck, smeared with burned fat and grease and blood and shit from dirty intestines, would have made me gag if I didn’t smell so strongly of all those things myself.
“That’s it, you lousy Han Chinese people,” Dwayne grunted with pleasure. “We’re taking revenge for all the years that you people have mistreated our tribes.”
“We gave you the Great Warmth a few years ago,” I said, referring to the stimulus bill that targeted disadvantaged populations, including those of aboriginal descent. I struggled to find the weak spot in Dwayne’s grip.
“You gave us the Great Warmth of your farts,” spat Dwayne.
Frankie the Cat sat on a plastic stool, put his back against a wall and lit up a cigarette.
“The English, Dutch and Japanese murdered you off, too,” I said dryly.
“We’ll get to them soon enough, you dirty Han! It’s only because your parents were kind to me that I will spare your life and also the life of one potential mate. Now pick one!”
“So we’re going to play this game again, huh?”
“Hey, how about Dancing Jenny? I know you think of her when you beat off!”
“Yeah, but I haven’t since last week.”
“What about her?” Dwayne still had me swaddled in his grip. He turned my entire body and pointed my face at a woman in a low-cut dress sucking on a frozen melon pop.
“She’s not quite my type.”
“Don’t tell me her tits aren’t your type!”
“I look for many things in a woman, not just her body parts.”
“I think you like her,” growled Dwayne. While trying to keep a firm hold of my waist, he worked his hands down my stomach to my crotch. “I’m going to check if your dick’s hard.”
He was trying to do too much at once. This was my chance.
I turned to my side and dug into his chest with my right elbow until he had to let go.
“I’m going to put a skewer in my boxers so the next time you reach in for my cock you’ll shish kabob your fingers!” I told Dwayne.
“Your thing’s so small, it’s already a skewer!” We clasped right hands and Dwayne cradled my head with his left hand. “I’ll make you a warrior yet!” he told me.
Frankie dropped his cigarette and clapped his hands. “C’mon, boys!” he yelled. “Customers!”
CROWDS BEGAN TO TAIL off shortly after one in the morning, and market stalls began to close around one thirty. Sometimes it’s later, sometimes it’s earlier. A few savvy people rushed around to get great last-second deals at stands. To the south, on the other side of the night market, the secondary stalls opened up in the little lanes between Dadong Road and Wenlin Road. This is where the people who work at the Shilin Night Market come to relax after a long night, eat soup noodles and omelets, chew betel nut and play mahjongg. If you are a tourist, do not go to the aftermarket. Non-vendors are not welcome. After all, this is their safe space, where they can stretch and complain about people like you, in addition to life in general. I didn’t go there, either. For one thing, I didn’t want to hang out any longer than I had to at the market.
I was cleaning the counters when Dancing Jenny stopped by. All she had to do to close was roll down her metal gates and padlock them. She was now wearing a blue linen blouse and matching skirt that went past her knees.
“Jing-nan,” she said, “I’m going to Cixian Temple. Do you want to come?”
The temple was less than two blocks away. Supposedly the night market grew out of stands that sold snacks to worshippers more than a century ago.
“I’m not going, Jenny. You know I don’t believe in that stuff.”
“I don’t really believe, either, but why take a chance?”
“He’s taking a chance going the other way,” said Dwayne. “I’ll see you there, Jenny.”
“Don’t take too long,” she told him before turning back to me. “It will just take a minute, Jing-nan. Just light some incense. That’s all.”
“I’m not going.”
“Even if you don’t believe, your ancestors did, so do it for them.”
“I’m already running this stand for them. Jenny, please. Don’t ask again.”
“Frankie, are you going to talk some sense into him?”
Frankie briefly looked up from scrubbing the grill surfaces and shrugged. “He’s my boss. I can’t tell him what to do.”
Jenny sighed. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Jing-nan.”
“I have some leftover skewers, if you’re hungry, Jenny,” I said. “Not for me, I’m vegetarian for the month.”
After she left, Dwayne poured a watered-down detergent on the floor and scrubbed a stiff brush over the tiles. As he worked, a light foam built up on the floor. It looked like a toothpaste commercial with a close-up of the toothbrush cleaning the teeth.
I sorted and counted up the cash.
“It was a good night again, gentlemen,” I said.
“Of course it was,” said Dwayne. “You got the two best workers in the world here. Frankie, how about we unionize? That way the little bastard will pay us a fair salary.”
Frankie’s face twitched, looking like he checked a sneeze.
The work night ended with me paying out Dwayne and Frankie, and giving Frankie some more to shop for tomorrow’s ingredients.
Dwayne got up close to me and warned, “I’m going to say prayers for Julia. I don’t care what you think.”
I’d had my phone charging the whole night and hadn’t had a chance to check it. There was no more news about Julia, but I had an update on the supposedly related story. The incarcerated Black Sea member had made a new allegation: the American CIA was operating fronts owned by the gang. An anonymous senior member of the Legislative Yuan, our parliament, said the allegation was ridiculous and that the CIA hadn’t been in Taiwan “since the Cold War ended.”
Doesn’t matter, I thought as I slid on my helmet.