I was still asleep when someone grabbed my left shoulder and tried to drag me out of bed.
I woke up in a fright, but then I realized that it was my own right hand doing the pulling.
It was about nine in the morning and the sun was fully up, but it was still an hour earlier than my alarm was set to go off. So annoying.
I stretched out, experiencing a feeling I hadn’t expected.
Relief.
I didn’t have to keep saving money because I didn’t have to go back to UCLA because I didn’t have to keep my promise to Julia any longer.
For a moment I felt a light giddiness, as if my entire body were hollow. But despair quickly seeped into the vacuum.
What was I living for now?
I reached for my phone and began to scroll through the news. A Japanese right-wing group had erected a shrine on the largest island in the Tiaoyutai chain—the latest move in the ownership dispute between China, Taiwan and Japan. A group of undocumented Vietnamese women had been arrested as they arrived at a whorehouse. They said they thought they were coming to Taiwan for arranged marriages.
I was concerned she had been swept under the rug, but I wondered if it was better this way. I wanted the killer caught, but I didn’t want the entire island examining her corpse.
My thoughts were interrupted by some people shouting in the street. I went to the window.
Two compact cars, a Nissan and a Toyota, had swished to a halt just outside my gate. Both cars were pretty beat up, so if a fender bender had just happened it was tough to tell. Two middle-aged women standing at the side of the street were yelling insults at each other. Both were Taiwanese and both were screaming in Mandarin, but one had a heavy accent, giving herself away as someone who primarily spoke Taiwanese. It was a classic confrontation.
YOU COULD SPEND ALL day talking about the history and culture of the people in Taiwan. We have twenty-three million people, the same population as Texas, packed on an island slightly bigger than Maryland. If familiarity breeds contempt, then the people of Taiwan are very familiar with each other. On top of that, our long and complicated relationships with larger and more powerful countries have created an interesting entrée.
I wish I knew how to make zongzi, the glutinous rice dumpling packed with a bunch of different fillings and wrapped in dark green bamboo leaves in a tetrahedral shape (think of a soft, three-sided pyramid). I love them, and I also feel they sum up Taiwan as it is now. Zongzi are served fresh from the steamer or boiling pot, still tied with twine. Cut or untie the string and slowly unwrap the leaves. Contents will definitely be hot. Try to avoid getting your hands too sticky from the melted pork fat that has permeated everything and is now leaking through the leaves. Once the zongzi is fully peeled, spread out the leaves to keep the table surface clean. Admire how the rice and other fillings retain the tetrahedral shape.
There’s no neat way to eat zongzi, but whatever you do, chew slowly and taste everything in there. You can sense all the separate and sometimes contradictory components, and how they come together as a whole.
Taiwan is like a compact zongzi, tied up together whether we like it or not. The rice is the land. The melted pork fat is the humidity and precipitation. The yams are the benshengren, the “home-province people,” descendants of people who came to Taiwan from China before the Japanese colonization in 1895. Benshengren actually refer to themselves as “yams,” because Taiwan is shaped like one.
The taros are the waishengren, or “outside-province people,” people who came to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949. They are also known as “mainlanders,” even later generations born in Taiwan. They say China looks like a spade-shaped taro leaf, the Bohai Gulf corresponding to the indent by the stem.
The fungus and salted eggs are the Hakka, probably the only distinct ethnic group of Han Chinese that hasn’t been assimilated into the larger population. They are known for their hearty food and hearty people. Traditionally farmers, Hakka never bound their women’s feet, as they needed everyone to be mobile and working. Although Hakka can be benshengren or waishengren, those identities are secondary.
The pork represents the native Taiwanese, as the various tribes who lived here centuries before any Chinese arrived hunted wild boar, among other animals. They weren’t all hunters, of course, and most of them are gone. They make up only about 2 percent of the country’s population now. Dwayne’s people, the Amis, are one of fourteen recognized tribal groups. The government says the rest are extinct or too integrated to matter.
All of these groups have historically fought and struggled against each other over the years, and new events make sure that the pot’s stirred frequently. Announcements of new major highways might bring condemnations from the Indigenous Peoples’ Action Coalition of Taiwan if any sacred lands are involved. They usually are. Hakka are roused to action whenever the Hakka language (and dialects) are excluded from public discussion, or when their culture is marginalized. Benshengren, the yams, take to the streets whenever the subject of closer ties to China is brought up, as they are mostly against the idea that Taiwan is really a province of the People’s Republic. Waishengren, the mainlanders, are indignant that none of the other groups thank them for the economic miracle that has unfolded over the last forty years. They also don’t understand why nobody seems to appreciate the transition to democracy that they presided over—after the era of harsh martial law they had imposed.
My family was benshengren. My grandfather and grandmother had left the farms of Taichung County near the middle of Taiwan’s west coast in 1954, headed north for Taipei and started the food stall.
“Damned mainlanders,” my grandfather would call the waishengren. He would call them worse names, too. I asked him why he sold them food if he hated them so much. He told me to be nice to anyone who put money in my hand. It was the best advice he ever gave me.
It was difficult to take his hatred of mainlanders seriously, though. Most of our neighbors in the Wanhua District were waishengren. Also, grandfather’s number-one employee wasn’t my father: it was a mainlander, Frankie the Cat.
Julia and her family were also yams. Dancing Jenny was a Hakka. Song Kuilan and her family were mainlanders. Dwayne was a native Taiwanese and had taken his English name from Dwayne Johnson, with whom he shared Pacific Islander heritage.
Of course I didn’t think of my friends in a categorical sense, but then again, we never really had serious political discussions.
The mainlanders are mostly associated with the Kuomintang, or KMT, the political party that lost the Chinese Civil War and still claims it is the legitimate ruler of not only Taiwan, but its definition of China, which includes Mongolia and Tibet. The KMT was in power in Taiwan from 1945 until 2000. That was when the DPP, or Democratic Progressive Party, which is mostly backed by yams, won the presidential election. The DPP is known for seeing Taiwan as an independent country from China, and the eight years the party held office were the most combative with the mainland. The KMT came back to power in 2008, and China was happy again. Even though the Communists had fought a bloody war with the KMT, they were united in the view that Taiwan was an inalienable part of China.
Political candidates from these two major parties, the KMT and the DPP, know they have to appeal to anyone and everyone for the presidential election, so they soften up their stances and appeal to the four major population groups through endless campaigning and giving away food and prizes. The candidates say that they won’t declare independence for Taiwan and will seek more trade agreements with China to keep the mainlanders happy. They tell the benshengren in the Taiwanese dialect that they are native sons and daughters of Taiwan. They proclaim haltingly in Hakka that they carry the mountain songs in their heart as they help dye fabrics in the traditional blue. After donning aboriginal clothing, the candidates conclude that modern Taiwan still has much to learn from its original communities. They all promise to do something about the undocumented workers from Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. Then after the election, we all go back to being our parochial selves.
But what are we, really? Do we have a broader identity that covers us all? Someone came up with “New Taiwanese” as an umbrella term to include everybody, but that phrase fell out of use, mainly because it just sounded stupid. We are people who work hard and disagree about a lot of things. Luckily for me, everybody loves to eat, and no one ever says the food in Taiwan sucks.
THE SHOUTING OUTSIDE REACHED a new pitch. I drew back my bedroom shades and saw that the women were now each restrained by a stoic, silent man.
German Tsai, accompanied by one of his boys, came between the women and spoke too softly for me to hear. Open hands slid out from the sleeves of his linen jacket and gestured at one woman and then the other. He took off his sunglasses so they could see that he was sincere.
His underling produced two plastic bags. I couldn’t believe what German pulled out of one of them. A wrapped zongzi. He held it up in the sunlight as if it were a prism. He smiled and gave each woman a bag of zongzi.
The situation was defused by two bags of zongzi German had picked up for his crew. I’m sure that he could get another two bags with no problem.
I TURNED AWAY FROM the window. Now that I was wide-awake, I felt the weight of what I had to do. I wet a towel and wiped my face. I dressed in my least-wrinkled buttoned shirt, black slacks and good shoes. I didn’t eat anything, but I had half a cup of soy milk to coat my stomach. It was something my mother told me to always do because it could prevent stomach cancer. It hadn’t helped my dad, though.
It was about ten in the morning now, and I was on schedule to see the Huangs. I rolled my moped out. In the daylight my ride looked old and dirty. There was a big tear in the seat that I hadn’t noticed before. Overall it wasn’t much better than what I had been riding in high school. I’d told Julia that when I came for her, I’d be driving a red sports car. What would she think if she saw me, a college dropout, riding this thing? What would I think if I had seen her wearing next to nothing, slinging binlang?
WHEN THE HUANGS SOLD their Shilin Night Market stall ten years ago, they also left their old ground-floor house to move to an apartment in a new building in the Zhongzheng District, the next one over, east of the Wanhua District. Zhongzheng houses the national government buildings and the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. The Huangs’ building had been banged out during one of the construction booms that come around every few years. It looked impressive from a block away, but a casual observer need only enter the building and walk across the loose porcelain tiles before a number of shortcomings revealed themselves.
The panel to the apartment buzzers was crooked because it was screwed into a frame that was a few millimeters too small. Hammer blows on the protruding edge indicated someone had attempted to cram it in anyway. Luckily visitors didn’t have to worry whether the buzzer system was functional or not, because the solid-steel front door was propped open by a plastic bucket with a chipped cinder block in it. The lock was probably out of order, and all the residents probably assumed somebody else had notified the repair service. What did it matter, anyway? Taipei didn’t have many thieves, they reasoned, and surely even those few bad men would be punished by the good brothers during the holiday.
I felt odd about simply walking into the building, so I switched my bag to my left hand and buzzed the Huangs’ apartment. I heard Mrs. Huang say hello, her voice fuzzy and faint, as if transmitted from Pluto.
“Hello, Mrs. Huang, I am sorry to bother you. This is Chen Jing-nan,” I said. The exposed lock made a clicking sound, and I stepped through the open doorway.
In the elevator I had a small anxiety attack and looked into the bag. My pack of joss sticks, some mixed CDs of music Julia liked and a few Snickers bars, her favorite candy. Everything was there.
Whatever I do next, I’m doing only for your parents, Julia. Don’t take it personally. Then again, why am I talking to you?
The elevator opened on the thirteenth floor, and I saw Mrs. Huang was holding the door open. She was dressed in burlap mourning clothes. Her hair was noticeably greyer since I had last seen her, at my parents’ funerals, an event where we’d held hands but said nothing.
It was tough seeing Julia’s mom, because only now did I notice how similar the lower parts of their faces were. Mrs. Huang was looking up to me, fusing her eyes to mine and pursing her lips off-center in the same way Julia used to when she was lost in a thought.
“Jing-nan,” Mrs. Huang said, with a trace of joy around her bleary and baggy eyes. “I knew you would come.”
There was no doubting that Julia was dead now.
“Mrs. Huang,” I said. “I was so sorry to hear. The news just destroyed me.” I embraced her lightly.
Mrs. Huang moved away and blew her nose. I stepped into their apartment and slipped off my shoes. Mr. Huang stood at a slouch in the kitchen, looking lost.
“I told you! Look!” Mrs. Huang said to him. I think he coughed.
I was dimly aware that Mrs. Huang was leading me toward the altar they had set up for Julia on a wall shelf by the dining table. A photograph of Julia looked indifferently over the smoking forest of half-burned incense sticks. I had never seen her face like that before, devoid of emotion except a hint of a smile. How mature you’ve become, I thought. I didn’t recognize the striped top she was wearing, either. This photo must have been taken at college.
I felt a tightness around my left arm. It was Mr. Huang’s hands.
“Jing-nan!” he said. “It’s really you!” Mr. Huang was about as tall as me at five feet eight inches, so among people his age he’s a giant. He was the source of Julia’s thick eyebrows and vaguely sad and beautiful eyes.
“I am so sorry,” I said, briefly embracing him and rubbing his back. “I’ve brought some things.”
“Of course, of course!”
I shook out several joss sticks from my box and lit them in my hands. I formed prayer hands and bowed three times to Julia’s picture.
You would have hated this, darling, but I know you would appreciate me doing this for your parents.
My hands shook as I planted the sticks in the holder and placed the CDs on the altar. I had a hard time reaching up to place the candy bars, because I had fallen to my knees and was sobbing. My whole face was raw, wet and salty, like a just-popped blister.
“No, no, no,” I babbled in English.
The Huangs helped me over to the couch and propped me up on some cushions. Mr. Huang pressed a damp and mildew-scented towel to my forehead. I had to cry it out before my sobs stuttered and slowed.
When I was able to talk again, I said, “Thank you.”
Mrs. Huang handed me a cup of hot barley tea, pumped from a hot dispenser. She sat down to my right and swung her knees away from me.
All three of us were quiet for a few minutes. For the first time, I could pick up the soft sound of the Amituofo chant from an electronic Buddhist chant box plugged in behind the altar.
Mrs. Huang touched my right arm. “The police brought us in to identify Julia’s body,” she said. “Still beautiful. Looked just like she was sleeping. Part of the back of her head was … gone.”
I sucked in my lips and nodded.
“I made sure it was her by feeling the calcium deposit near her right ankle. You know, it’s just like a little knob. Always had to get her low-cut shoes, or else they hurt.”
“She always carried corn cushions,” I said.
“When was the last time you saw Julia?” she asked.
“Right before we left for college.”
Mr. Huang took a seat to my left in an armchair covered in a pill-infested fabric.
“We know you told Julia not to talk to you,” said Mrs. Huang. “She said you didn’t want to get in touch again until you were going to ask her to marry you.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Sounds stupid now.”
“She thought it was so romantic. I did, too.”
Mr. Huang grunted. It wasn’t clear that he meant to indicate approval.
“Everything was doomed by the way you two left Taiwan,” said Mrs. Huang. “You didn’t ask for Buddha’s protection. You didn’t ask Mazu for a safe return to Taiwan. Now look what’s happened. You abandoned them, so they abandoned you and Julia!”
Now was not the time to argue about this. I took a sip of tea.
“This is the wrong way to talk,” said Mr. Huang. “We’re all in shock. We have to appreciate each other.”
“If it would have made a difference, I would have done it,” I said. “Believe me.”
“We’ll never know now,” she said.
Mr. Huang cleared his throat and moved to the candy bars on the ground. “I’ll put these up,” he said.
“Jing-nan,” said Mrs. Huang, “I know you and Julia meant a lot to each other.”
“Yes, we did.” I drank more tea. It had a pleasant, roasted-grain flavor.
“She told me about the times you went to love hotels.”
Barley tea nearly shot out of my nose, but I managed to swallow and say, “She told you?”
“We were very close. We had no secrets, mother and daughter, until a few years ago.”
I nodded. I didn’t want to say anything upsetting. She knew we were sleeping together the entire time! I caressed my puffy eyes and kept quiet.
“I think my relationship with my daughter started going a little wrong around the time your parents passed away, Jing-nan,” Mrs. Huang said. “I asked her if she wanted to come back for the services, but she insisted you wouldn’t want her here. She felt so terrible for you! She was crying like crazy. I told her that under the circumstances, the deal was off. You two had to talk to each other. But she insisted you would see it as a broken promise.”
I nodded.
“That was really something. It was the first time she wouldn’t do something I told her to. My little girl was slipping away. Pretty soon we were talking less on the phone. I could hear it in her voice, no more emotion. Then she told us about the expulsion from NYU, at the end of her junior year. Daddy went crazy.”
Mr. Huang spoke up. “I was very upset,” he said. “I left messages and cursed her. I told her she wasn’t good enough for you.”
“She never called Daddy back,” said Mrs. Huang.
I let a few moments of silence go by before asking a question. “Why was she thrown out of NYU?”
“She cheated,” said Mr. Huang. “She plagiarized from a book for a paper.”
I couldn’t imagine Julia cheating. She wouldn’t look at another student’s paper, not even in cram school, where everybody developed serious cases of giraffe neck. It must have been a huge misunderstanding at NYU. A missed attribution. A footnote gone astray.
“I don’t believe it,” I said.
“We didn’t want to believe it, either,” said Mrs. Huang. “But she told us she did. She was taking too many classes and tried to take a shortcut. She only copied a few paragraphs, but it was a serious enough violation.”
“When did she come back to Taiwan?” I asked.
“We don’t know!” said Mrs. Huang.
“I thought she would try to get back in to NYU,” said Mr. Huang.
“You had no idea she was here?”
“We had no idea she was in Hsinchu City!” said Mrs. Huang. “Less than an hour away all these years.”
“Maybe it was my fault,” said Mr. Huang. “I was too harsh. That’s why she didn’t call us again.”
“Who else’s fault could it be?” said Mrs. Huang. “If you really cared about her, you would have told her to just come back to Taiwan and finish her degree here!”
I knew Julia wouldn’t have wanted to do that.
Mrs. Huang launched another attack on her husband. “If you really loved your daughter, you wouldn’t let this go. You would make the police find out who did this! Make the murderer pay!”
Mr. Huang rubbed his hands. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.
“Call them every hour!”
“That’s not going to do anything.”
“See? You still don’t care!”
I spoke up. “Is there anything I could do to help?”
“Jing-nan!” Mrs. Huang looked me over like I was the last chocolate in a box. “Help us! The police don’t care about Julia. They haven’t done anything! Not one person brought in for questioning.”
“You have to give them a few days first,” said Mr. Huang.
“Not even one person! They should bring in everybody who works at that betel-nut stand! The police won’t even tell us which stand it was.”
“They probably don’t want us to interfere with their work.”
“They’re not working!” Mrs. Huang thumped her fist against her breastbone. She sounded empty. “They just want everyone to forget about Julia! The owner of the betel-nut stand must have bribed the police! The news stations don’t even talk about her anymore, just two days later!”
“That’s true,” I said.
“There’s nothing keeping the pressure on! Jing-nan, you have to do something!”
“Don’t put Jing-nan in this position,” Mr. Huang pleaded.
“What position? Her father won’t do anything, and Jing-nan is the closest thing to a husband Julia had!”
Mr. Huang shook off the sting and said matter-of-factly, “Jing-nan hasn’t even seen her in years.”
“Wake up! He never bought a ticket, but he got to ride the bus when they were still teenagers!”
I was spurred to speak up. “Please, I want to help,” I heard myself say. “I know two people who went to NYU with her. I can talk to them and see if they might know something.” I wasn’t really friends with either of them, then or now.
“Thank you so much, Jing-nan,” said Mrs. Huang. “We appreciate your help.”
“Anything you could find out would help us a lot,” said Mr. Huang. “We haven’t known our daughter in a long time, and as you can see we’re losing touch with each other every day.”
“When is the funeral?” I asked, feeling my mouth go dry.
“We aren’t having a funeral,” said Mrs. Huang.
“Is it because you couldn’t find anybody to handle it?” Undertakers are loath to handle funerals during Ghost Month because they are unlucky to stage—they’re unlucky to even attend. Many of the wandering ghosts never received proper rites and burials, so a funeral could incite their wrath and turn it upon everyone involved.
“We could have found someone,” Mrs. Huang snapped. “The problem is that she had her beliefs, just like you. We could have had a very proper Buddhist ceremony, but I knew what Julia’s final wish was. She wanted to be cremated and her ashes to be scattered at sea, so that’s what we did this morning.”
I took a deep breath and sank lower in my chair. So I wouldn’t get to see Julia one last time.
In the Huangs’ silent apartment, the light seemed to dim and time became lumpy.
Julia and I had made so many plans. They changed a little bit every time we discussed them, but we already had a basic narrative established.
We’d had a few ideas as to what sort of job I would have when it was time for me to come for her. Engineering was the traditional Taiwanese ticket to America. Americans hated studying math and science, so there was always a shortage of engineers. Best of all, the starting salaries among engineering majors were the highest you could get for an undergrad degree.
Yet I really enjoyed poetry, both English and Chinese.
I hadn’t declared a major yet when I left UCLA, but I had aced the freshman coursework for all engineering majors, and I also did well in a survey class of American poetry of the twentieth century.
Julia was certain she was going to study political science, and that she was going to see it through to a doctorate degree.
Since I was probably going to have less flexibility in landing a job than the brilliant and eminently admissible Julia, who would have her pick of grad schools, when I came for her we were going to get married in a civil ceremony and settle in to whatever town I was already working in. She was going to transfer to the nearest big university and continue studying until she had her master’s degree.
Somehow we were going to get permanent residency cards or US citizenship. We didn’t know what the climate for immigration would be, but we figured our English was good enough that we could blend in well with ABCs.
Then we were going to have two kids. Well, sometimes we thought just one. By that time, with a number of years of work experience under my belt, I would probably be in a position to kick back a little bit and help more with raising the kid or kids while Julia focused on her PhD. She would also probably have to teach a few undergraduate classes. Maybe Mandarin, too. At some point she would be done with her PhD. She would either hold on to a post in academia or open a consulting firm and do … whatever those consultants do.
We would be in a holding pattern for a few years until our kid or kids were old enough to attend college at Julia’s university, since the tuition would be heavily subsidized or entirely free. If they wanted to go to another school, they’d better have Julia’s smarts to get a mega-scholarship.
Once those kids were done with college, I could quit my job and open up a little music store. Not one that stocked racks and racks of major-label, deluxe-edition, reissued vinyl I personally didn’t care for but sold to make money. If I was going to have a business like that, why bother selling music when it could be power tools? My store would focus on Joy Division and associated acts. I also wanted to carry a select inventory of contemporary indie bands I liked, and I would probably like quite a few of them by that point since I would have more time to listen to music. I still wasn’t sure if it should be a physical store or an online one. Maybe an online one would be better, depending on how much storage space we had in our house after our kids left. That’s how it is in the US. They don’t wait to get married before they move out. I know we had a lot of pipe dreams and fuzzy definitions baked into our expectations, but we were crystal clear on one thing. Although we would maintain our fluency in Mandarin and Taiwanese, and even make the odd trip to the island to visit (we couldn’t cut off family entirely), we were never going to live in Taiwan again.
Yet here we were, reeled back in by our respective bad circumstances. Maybe Julia, like me, had been planning to save money and get back to the US. When I came for her, we could’ve laughed about how we had to go back to Taiwan for a little bit before resuming our American lives.
We had never planned out our deaths, though. I actually hadn’t known Julia wanted to be cremated, as in so many Taiwanese funerals. Most don’t choose to have their ashes scattered, though—the preservation of ashes has led to the construction of condo-sized columbaria up on the sides of mountains.
Julia and I had thought we were going to have long and happy lives together, but fate had other plans. When my parents died, what kept me going was the knowledge that I would see Julia again. What a foolish, false hope! How stupid and prideful it was for me to refuse to reach out to her for the sake of plans made by teenagers!
What would have happened if I had called her in New York, told her I would be stuck in Taiwan and that she had to go on without me? I don’t think she would have been able to abandon me. She loved me so much, she would have ditched everything and come back to Taiwan to be with me. It would have had to come down to me to set her free, and I would have had to act cruelly.
I’m sorry, Julia, but I’m calling to break up with you because I love you. You’ll have to go down that great path alone …
“JING-NAN,” SAID MRS. HUANG. I had been mumbling to myself out loud.
Mr. Huang was bringing in people I didn’t know. Mrs. Huang stood over me and touched my shoulder gently. Time for me to go.
“You loved each other so much,” she sobbed.
I could only nod as I rose to my feet.
“Go talk to them, your old classmates. Find out if they talked to Julia when she came back.”
“I’ll find out what I can,” I said.
I RODE THE ELEVATOR down and hit the ground floor with a thud. The door lurched open, and I had just managed to step out when it closed with a slam.
How could Julia have told her mother everything? She hadn’t promised not to, but I assumed she would be like me and only tell her parents the parts of our relationship appropriate for the general public. For example, our impending marriage.
“Still going to marry Julia, huh?” were among my father’s last words to me. It was as close as he could come to expressing approval.
I grabbed my helmet and leaned against my sun-baked moped seat. I hadn’t been in touch with my high-school classmates Peggy or Ming-kuo in years, and I wasn’t sure they were two people I wanted back in my life. Funny how I needed to get in touch now. Maybe it was time for me to start a Facebook account.
Peggy Lee was from a well-off mainlander family. Her great-grandfather had been a confidant of Chiang Kai-shek, and their family had privileged status when the Generalissimo established the capital of the Republic of China on Taiwan after bravely retreating in the face of inevitable failure.
Peggy’s family had a fancy house that Japanese officials had once lived in, the nicest one I knew of in Wanhua District. It had clay roof tiles that ended in slightly upturned corners. Every few feet there were fanged and horned demon faces making agonized expressions. I can only describe the roofs because I couldn’t see anything else over the exterior wall. Apparently Peggy’s family had a private garden with stone lanterns and a pond with kumquat-colored koi as long as your arm.
Mainlanders who didn’t come over with money or connections grew up in juancuns, military residential communities hastily built on public land for families of low-ranking officers and soldiers. People from every province were thrown together—something the normally clannish Chinese weren’t pleased by—as those juancuns were meant for temporary housing. Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang party and Republic of China Army were going to launch that counterattack any day, after all. That day never came. Several generations of families ended up living in juancuns, patching up crumbled cinder blocks in their walls to keep the rain out. Meanwhile, Peggy grew up leisurely feeding the same koi in the Lee family pond her father and grandfather had cared for years before.
Today, most of the juancuns are gone. It wasn’t the typical waishengren-benshengren politics that pushed them out—it was money politics. Condos had to go up.
And Peggy’s family had a lot to do with that. The Lees were big in real estate and helped the government “monetize” the land. Let’s face it. The juancuns were a major eyesore. Gangs like Black Sea were originally formed by disaffected mainlander youth living in those blocks, but a lot of those kids made it out and did something with their lives, including Ang Lee, the film director, and Teresa Teng, the immortal and yet dead singer. Supposedly Teng’s lifelong asthma was caused by childhood exposure to asbestos in a juancun.
After a public outcry to preserve juancuns as historical sites, the Lees recently turned their wrecking ball against their own antique Japanese house. A hotel stands there now.
THE LIGHTNESS I HAD been feeling earlier was gone. Thoughts of Julia weighed on me again. I had been tasked by her parents to find out more about her mysterious return to Taiwan.
I saw I had received a news text on my phone. The member of the Black Sea gang who had made allegations about the CIA and drugs was recanting his story, saying he was completely wrong. What an asshole.
I searched online for Lee Xiaopei—Peggy’s business name.
Surprise. She had decided to play it close to home. Peggy was a senior vice president of Lee & Associates, her family’s hedge fund. Of course it was headquartered in the most expensive office space in the country—the eightieth floor of the gigantic Taipei 101 building.
The phone number was right there, but I took a breath and hesitated.
I’ll admit Peggy had striking looks. Even if Peggy’s family wasn’t rich, she’d still have attracted a lot of attention. She had a sharp nose, a sharp chin and a sharp tongue. A lot of boys liked her. They left things on her school desk—candy, flowers and notes in fancy envelopes. But the only guy she was into back in high school was already in a committed relationship—me. You always want what you can’t have, and there was very little Peggy couldn’t have.
I looked at my phone again. I had to call her. Peggy might know something about Julia’s return to Taiwan. That information might provide some comfort to Julia’s parents. If not, I wouldn’t tell them.
I was reluctant as hell to open that door again, but still I’d rather call Peggy before trying to get in touch with Ming-kuo.
I hit the number and waited. An automated voice menu answered. I wasn’t a current client, so I guessed I was a prospective one. Why else would anyone call? I pressed 2.
Soothing light jazz began to play. Was I scheduling a dental appointment? Oh, I should probably schedule a dental appointment.
As if reading my thoughts, a man wearing cheap sunglasses and a grey linen sports jacket approached me slowly. He was a big man, almost two meters in height, and he had a crew cut. I thought he was Japanese, but he gave himself away when he smiled. Straight, white, American teeth. I looked at him, but he kept a respectful distance while I was on the phone. An operator took my call.
“Hello, thank you for calling Lee & Associates,” a man said. “You seem to be calling from a mobile phone.”
“Hello, I am calling from my cell. I’m actually trying to get in touch with Ms. Lee Xiaopei, please.”
“I’m sorry, if you’re not already a client, we don’t accept calls from mobile phones. You have to come in person or call from an office.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Have a good day, sir.” The son of a bitch hung up.
I crossed my arms as the man approached me. “Are you done with your call?” he asked. His Mandarin had an American accent.
“I’m done. What do you want?” I’m usually not this curt with strangers, but I was still annoyed by the phone call, and this guy wasn’t a customer of mine. He lifted his sunglasses and regarded me. The man seemed too young to have those bags under his eyes.
“I just want to see how you are. No big deal.”
“I’m doing fine,” I said.
The sunglasses dropped back down and he headed into the Huangs’ building. Man, some strange people lived there. “Take care, man,” he said in English over his shoulder.
Now, did he say “man” or “Jing-nan”?
I had about an hour before I had to be at Unknown Pleasures. That wasn’t enough time to go to Peggy’s office. That would have to wait until tomorrow.
I was frustrated and annoyed, and buying new music was my usual coping mechanism.
The music stores around National Taiwan University, known as Taida for short, were the best. No one bought mainstream, conventional CDs anymore, so the stores survived by stocking limited editions from indie labels, imports and bootlegs of live shows.
I rode east into the Da’an District. The big government buildings and wide sidewalks of the Zhongzheng District gave way to the residential buildings, churches and MRT stations of Da’an. The smell of incense grew heavier. A small hatchback drove by with a young boy and a girl crawling around in the rear cargo space. It made me think of Julia and me as small kids—until the girl gave me the finger. I had to smirk as I thought about what my father used to say: younger generations had no respect for their elders, and Taiwan was in danger of backsliding and becoming as uncouth and boorish as China.
Taida is the best university in Taiwan. Like a lot of Taiwan’s best institutions, it was originally established by the Japanese during the colonial era.
I parked near the Gongguan MRT station on Luosifu Road, which was the way they chose to render “Roosevelt Road” using Chinese characters. Bunk racks of parked bikes marked the edge of campus. It was summer, but Taida was buzzing with activity. The academic calendar was twelve months long. Classes were always in session. It sounds grueling, especially to my American college friends, but we never had such a thing as summer vacation all my years of school and cram school.
Taida students oversee the PTT, the Professional Technology Temple, an online bulletin-board system. It’s like America Online, only it remained cool and influential for marketing and networking. Older people thought it was only used for idle chatter and dirty jokes until Typhoon Morakot slammed into Taiwan in 2009, and the PTT organized hundreds of volunteers to haul supplies to disaster areas. Those kids were better than the government at responding to the deadly storm. They also set up blood drives and other public service opportunities that young people are into.
There are a lot of good things about the PTT, but I haven’t been on it in years, since I was chased out of a music discussion group when I said the former members of Joy Division shouldn’t have carried on as New Order after Ian Curtis killed himself. Sure are a lot of New Order fans in Taiwan. All of them came after me over the entire system, in every discussion I entered.
The first time I heard Joy Division and New Order (which I perceived to be the lesser band by far at the time) was at Bauhaus, a store on Luosifu Road that caters to Taida students with good taste in music. It’s the first CD store I go to when I’m up for a big shopping trip. I have a history with the place.
When I was still a kid, I went through a Black Sabbath phase. I think all teenage boys do. Bauhaus had been having a grand-opening sale, and I went in to check it out. I couldn’t find a single Black Sabbath or Ozzy CD. I went up to the guy working at the counter. He must have been a student at Taida, because he looked relaxed. Once you got into a school that good, you could finally ease off the pedal a bit. After graduation, you were set with a decent job. You could even sleep in on the weekends for the first time in your life.
“You don’t have any Sabbath?” I asked him.
He stroked both corners of his mouth with his thumb and index finger. “We don’t. We’re a music store,” he said, looking like he wanted to spit on my school uniform. “I’m going to do you the biggest favor of your life, kid.” He stood up and grabbed a CD from the rack above the cash register. “I’m going to allow you to buy this. It’s the in-store playing copy, but we can get another one.”
The CD cover art matched his shirt: a bunch of lines that looked like undersea mountains. It was Unknown Pleasures. He wasn’t kidding—it really was one of the biggest favors anyone ever did me. The music scared me in a way Sabbath never had. I studied English harder so I could understand the lyrics beyond surface-level literal meanings. There was a whole world hidden in those squat and loose-looking written words. Maybe Ian had encoded the secrets of life and death in the lyrics before committing suicide.
My English bookshelf expanded beyond two Shakespeare plays to include five costly paperbacks about Joy Division that had been printed in England.
I bought a black trench coat like the ones the band members wore in pictures. I soldiered on with it in the face of heat, humidity and open mockery from other students who didn’t get it. Julia was worried that I looked like a gravedigger, but she understood after I played her the music and explained the songs to her.
Early in senior year I sang “Love Will Tear Us Apart” for the karaoke competition and won. A picture of us was laid out right in the middle of the yearbook, me on stage during the instrumental break, reaching down to her outstretched hand. It was the most triumphant moment of my life. When I think about it, I see myself in the third person, looking down from the balloons on the ceiling at my perfectly poised body on that stage. I couldn’t have known then that it would all be downhill after that.
Time claimed the coat not long after. The sleeves and the lining were fraying, and mold spots popped up on the back before the fabric essentially disintegrated. I didn’t get another one, because by that time I didn’t have to flaunt my attachment to Joy Division’s music. It was already deep inside me.
IF I HADN’T GONE into Bauhaus that day and met that guy, I might have ended up as a pimply dude in his twenties who didn’t know much English. I would probably still be working at the night-market stall, but I certainly wouldn’t have as much style.
I never actually cared for Bauhaus, the band the store was named after. I didn’t like the theatricality of the guy’s voice and the lyrics were too “art school.”
Still, there was no denying Bauhaus the store was a great place. I stepped around an offering table on the sidewalk and admired a sticker by the door handle that read, “This is the way, step inside.” Those words were taken from the lyrics to “Atrocity Exhibition,” the first song on Joy Division’s second and final album, Closer. I did as the sticker instructed.
I noticed right away that there was a 10-percent-off sale on Japanese-import CDs. The Japanese editions of CDs often contain bonus tracks. I can understand how from the listener’s point of view that’s better—more songs. But it also destroys the artist’s intention; what was meant to be a cohesive piece is cheapened by tacked-on singles and B-sides.
I remember reading about how Matt Johnson, who recorded music under the moniker The The, had to campaign for years before the song “Perfect” was removed from the end of the album Soul Mining. I enjoyed the entire album for the longest time, having no idea of the distress he felt about the song being there. “Perfect” is a great song. It’s also unusual for a pop song in that it features an accordion, a vibraphone and a trumpet solo. On top of that, the music strangely remains the same through the verses and choruses.
I started humming “Perfect,” and then out of the corner of my eye I caught a movement. The woman behind the counter had been looking at me but tried to turn away before I noticed. A swish of her hair betrayed her. From the back of her head and smooth right arm I could tell she was young, maybe younger than me. Her ears stuck out perpendicularly to her head, like an elf’s. They looked cute. I wondered what her face looked like and, then I felt suddenly ashamed.
I had just come from meeting Julia’s parents. Had I forgotten all about her already?
I slinked to the Joy Division section, which was chock-full of CDs. I removed several of them to make it easier to flip through the bin. This is what the pros do.
It’s true that the band only recorded two studio albums, but their label went on to issue several compilations of singles and B-sides, not to mention reissuing the proper albums with bonus live CDs. There were bootlegs, too, of concerts and unreleased studio rehearsals.
It was possible to download it all, if you searched hard enough and had the necessary bandwidth, but it’s cool to have the tangible, physical object.
I came across a CD I had never seen before. It was a split release by Joy Division and New Order playing the same two Joy Division songs, the last two the band ever wrote—“Ceremony” and “In a Lonely Place.”
That was odd. No complete take of Joy Division recording “In a Lonely Place” was known to exist. Only a fragment of about half the song was uncovered and included in the 1997 box set Heart and Soul. The bassist Peter Hook had found it on a rehearsal cassette. Yet this CD purported to have the song in full.
I looked at the price again. In the past I have paid the full price for a CD in order to get a single song I didn’t already have. I began rationalizing. Containing only four songs, the CD was fully 25 percent new to me, so I probably had to buy it.
I brought the CD up to the counter.
“Is this for real?” I asked the woman. She looked up and in a synchronized motion both hands brushed her hair behind her ears.
She was indeed younger than me, maybe finishing her undergrad degree. She had a full, round face, bright as a caramel sunflower. I was glad she wasn’t one of those girls who huddled under an umbrella to keep her skin pale. Why pretend you don’t live on a Pacific island that lies on the Tropic of Cancer?
I noticed she had a scar the size and shape of a clipped pinky nail above her left eyebrow.
“It’s real,” she said. Her eyes were infinitely black. “It’s a bootleg, but it’s copied from a legitimate release that was only on vinyl. One of the Record Store Day releases, only in the UK.”
I tried to imagine what it sounded like, but it was useless. “Perfect” was embedded in my mind, just like the woman’s face.
“How is the sound quality?”
“Let me play it for you.” She gingerly took the CD, careful not to touch my hands. “You want to hear Joy Division playing ‘In a Lonely Place,’ right?”
“Yes. Is it really the entire song?”
“It really is! I feel shivers when I hear it!”
We smiled at each other, enjoying our shared enthusiasm.
I broke into a light sweat as the song played over the speakers. She caught my eyes, and I stopped breathing as the song went into the lost third verse, where Ian sings of a hangman and a cord, foreshadowing his own suicide.
When the song was over, I said, “I’ll take it.”
“We also have the official vinyl release,” said the woman. “If you’re interested.”
“I don’t have a turntable.”
A sly smile came over her face. “I thought a big music fan like you would have one.”
“How do you know I’m a big music fan?”
Her smile slid to the left side of her face. “You’ve forgotten me. My name is An-Mei, but you can call me Nancy. I know you’re Jing-nan.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t remember meeting you.”
“You were a senior when I was a freshman, but we both were in the karaoke contest.”
“What did you sing?”
“I sang a Pizzicato Five song in Japanese, but people didn’t seem to like me very much. You sang ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ really well and you won!”
I smiled. “I would have remembered you.”
“I didn’t look like this. I had braces and I was bony.” She cupped her elbows and her face flushed. I felt compelled to touch my fingers to my lips. I know from taking a psychology class at UCLA that most communication is nonverbal. Something was happening here. We might not even be fully aware that our actions were saying we liked each other.
I see a lot of people up close at the night market, but I only rarely see a woman as cute as Nancy. She had music savvy, as well. Did she have a boyfriend?
Wait. Not now. This was the worst time to be Meeting Someone New.
I looked at her and bit my lip. I tried to think of something complimentary that didn’t seem like I was hitting on her.
“You’re still really skinny,” I offered.
“I remember you always had headphones on. Even if you only had a minute free between classes, you spent it listening to music.” She spoke quickly, but she had a worried look on her face. Maybe she thought she was saying too much.
I pretended to look past her at the Killing Joke poster on the wall. Act like you’re busy. I took out my wallet. “I’d like to pay for that CD now.”
“Oh, sure, I’m sorry.”
I felt a pang of guilt handing over the cash. Bootlegged and pirated CDs and DVDs were mostly made and distributed by organized criminals, including Taiwanese gangs like Black Sea. By buying the CD, I was doing my small part to help fund what was essentially a corporation that pushed drugs and smuggled in Cambodian women and children for sex and cheap labor, not necessarily respectively.
I needed that song and CD, though. And it wasn’t like if I didn’t buy it those horrible things would grind to a halt, or even pause. I was just one guy. What could I do, anyway?
“I don’t need a bag,” I told Nancy.
“Okay.”
The CD in my hand, I found it difficult to walk away. “You’re new here, right?” I asked her.
“It’s my first week.”
“You know a lot about music.”
She nodded and shifted from foot to foot, probably wondering how long it was going to take for me to ask her out.
I was sorry to get her hopes up. My hopes, too. I really shouldn’t let my eyes linger on her face.
“Well,” I said, “I’ll see you around.”