Traffic on the way home was light as people were still avoiding routes along the water. There didn’t seem to be any more ghosts than at any other time of year, but I did notice a modified black pickup truck keeping pace with me. I slowed down a bit, and so did the car. I sped up, and its red lights zoomed past me. It pulled over and stopped on the shoulder. I nearly flipped my moped trying to brake in time.
A man got out of the passenger side. It was the American who had confronted me earlier in front of the Huangs’ building. Now he was wearing a dark suit that rendered him nearly invisible in the night.
“Jing-nan,” he said. “You’re poking your nose where it shouldn’t be.”
“Is this about the liumang?” I asked.
“Don’t get smart with me, bitch!” Typical conceited Taiwanese-American asshole. “You stay away from Julia’s family and the investigation!”
“What are you talking about?”
“I know for sure you saw the Huangs this morning. Let’s make it your last visit there.”
“They’re family friends. Julia was my girlfriend.”
“I’m giving you one warning. Do you know how easily I could have knocked your sorry ass over into the river? Might happen next time.”
I crossed my arms and felt my skinny biceps. “Who are you?” I asked.
He shifted stance so his feet were even with his shoulders. “I’m a guy with a gun. That’s who I am.”
“What happened to Julia?”
“She’s dead. Unless you want to join her, stay far away from the Huangs.”
“I get it,” I said. It lacked conviction, but it was good enough for him. The American got back in the car, which eased away from the shoulder before peeling out. I got back on my moped like a little fucking boy.
It wasn’t until I was taking the highway exit home to the Wanhua District that I started shaking. I’d never had my life threatened before by someone who could possibly back it up.
Looking into Julia’s story was dangerous. Who the hell ran the betel-nut stand she’d worked at? Gangs? Cops? Americans?
Who was the Taiwanese-American, and why was he watching the Huangs’ apartment? He knew who I was. If he really wanted me dead, he’d already had a few opportunities to pop me. But why would he? He had already written me off as a shadow from Julia’s past. A love-sick schoolboy chasing a ghost. I was something to brush aside, not a threat.
MY HOME DISTRICT, WANHUA, is the old part of Taipei, settled by Chinese from Fujian Province after the Ming Dynasty fell in 1644. I say “settled” in the American sense: the Chinese immigrants drove the natives from the land. The Mandarin name “Wanhua” is derived from the name the indigenous aborigines had given it, which was closer to “Banka,” the Taiwanese pronunciation. Taiwanese also called it “Monga,” and that was the source of the title of that blockbuster gangster film that has made Wanhua a tourist destination.
Many areas of Taipei still have the names given to them by people who were subsequently forced off. Two of Taipei’s biggest districts by population—Shilin, which has my night market, and Beitou, famous for its hot springs—still carry names derived from the extinct Ketagalan language. The Ketagalan homeland was unfortunately in the same footprint as the future Taipei, and they were pushed out as Han Chinese arrived and built out the city. The Japanese after them claimed even more land when they renamed the city “Taihoku.” When the city reverted back to “Taipei” at the end of World War II, there weren’t any Ketagalans left to push out. We killed them off and took their land, but at least we kept their place names. That was an American thing to do.
I felt bad about the way aborigines had been treated over the years. I wasn’t alone. The government had made small but symbolic concessions to Taiwan’s first people. Long Live Chiang Kai-shek Road—seriously, that was the name—in front of the Presidential Building was renamed “Ketagalan Boulevard” in the 1990s. The Generalissimo’s reputation had slipped by then from Savior of the People to The Wedge That Continues to Divide Us.
The Ketagalan aren’t even one of the fourteen tribes recognized by the government. Taiwan doesn’t acknowledge their existence, but they are still here, somewhere. The early Chinese immigrants to Taiwan were almost all men, and they hooked up with native women. Around the Taipei settlement, that would mean the Ketagalan.
The Japanese administration recognized the tenacity of Taiwanese aborigines after fighting many deadly skirmishes against them. In World War II, Japan organized native peoples as the dogged Takasago Volunteers. How dogged? The last holdout of the Imperial Japanese Army to surrender—in December 1974—was Amis, like Dwayne. When Private Teruo Nakamura, whose Amis name was Attun Palalin, was brought out from the Indonesian jungle he had been hiding in, his years of resigned solitude came to an abrupt end. Palalin said he had kept his mind off his wife (who had remarried) and son (who was born after he left Taiwan in 1942) by focusing on gardening.
My story wasn’t too different from Palalin’s. I was living and working among other people, but it was a solitary existence. Julia’s death had dragged me out of my crude hut to reality. I was stunned, naked and blinking back at the world.
I DROVE BY LONGSHAN Temple, a gigantic open-air complex built in 1738, probably the top foreign-tourist destination in Wanhua. Taiwanese people come here in droves, too, to flop in front of Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, Mazu, the goddess of the sea, and other idols.
The temple stood here when the British invaded Taiwan in 1840 during the Opium War. It was here when the French invaded in 1844 during the Sino-French War. Longshan Temple was already one of Taipei’s oldest temples in 1885, when Qing Dynasty China finally decided that Taiwan was indeed a Chinese province and not merely a “ball of mud.” When the Japanese took over Taiwan in 1895, they wisely decided to leave Longshan be, although they destroyed other temples that featured Chinese folk deities in a quest to desinicize the island. The temple survived World War II, when the US bombed the shit out of it, convinced that Japan was hiding armaments among the idols of the immortals. There were stories of miracles the goddesses performed during that war. In 1945 believers witnessed Mazu materializing in the sky, spreading her skirts to deflect most of the bombs from US planes away from the temple. Despite her efforts, the main hall was completely destroyed. But underneath the rubble, the Guanyin idol, eyes still closed in meditative serenity, was completely intact. People see these incidents as proof of divine intervention. I see it as proof that the people operating the temples will spread such stories in the name of preserving their livelihoods.
Lit up by the moon, lanterns and streetlights, Longshan, literally “Dragon Mountain,” looks just like a temple should. Even a nonbeliever could agree to that. Dragon sculptures in full color prowl around the tiled roofs and columns while phoenixes and other supernatural-creature pals do their best to keep up. The walls and ceilings are covered with painted, carved wood and stone. Angry guardians painted on open doors warn evil spirits not to enter. For Ghost Month, the temple hangs lanterns and bamboo hats to guide lost spirits to Longshan.
The temple was the last place I wanted to go when I was a kid. We had a smaller one on our block that my parents bypassed because it only had Taoist idols. They brought me to Longshan for their weekly stop to ask the blessings of the gods and goddesses, every single last one of them. “The most forgotten ones are the most grateful,” my mother often said. I think my parents expected me to bow and pray with them to each idol as we made our way through the inner courtyard, where there was a new god or goddess every few meters, but I just stood by them and waited. So many old people came to the temple, there was never a seat available. One time, out of frustration and out of view of my parents, I discreetly gave the finger to Mazu, the sea goddess, the mother of heaven and essentially the patron deity of Taiwan. Nothing bad happened to me. Well, not immediately.
The Longshan visits were more than a waste of time. I found the energy of the miserable people at the temple to be completely draining. Most people weren’t regular visitors like my parents. Most people only came to beg the gods for help because they were suffering from health or money problems, or their loved ones were. Maybe some people had come to give thanks for their good fortune, but they were drowned out by whimpering elderly people begging for forgiveness before death and muttering young people who had just been laid off.
Most galling of all—and even my parents found them offensive—were the slick characters rolling dice before the altars, thinking one of the iterations of Buddha or a Taoist demon would give them winning lottery numbers.
On certain days my parents left wrapped pieces of candy at the pedestals and altar sills. Those were good days for me, because I would swipe most of them and hide them in my pockets for a sugar boost later. I was scared the first time that I would be punished for stealing a treat left for the divinities.
I asked the oldest kid I knew at the time.
“Dwayne, is it true the gods can punish people?”
“Not for taking candy, Jing-nan. The gods exist, but they don’t really interfere down here for minor infractions. My ancestors prayed to our gods to make the Han Chinese go away, and look what happened. You guys took over. Maybe we weren’t good enough to our gods.” Then he laughed. “Hell, maybe you people are our punishment for not being pious enough!”
THE FAMILIAR STREETS WERE dark and empty from the temple to my house. Not my house. My home. This was my home. I stopped at a red light for nobody and got mad.
Who the hell did that Taiwanese-American asshole think he was to threaten me? Now that I was back on familiar turf and my antagonist was long gone, I was feeling brave, even cocky.
I wasn’t going to back off one bit, you motherfucker. I was going to find out why Julia came back and tell her parents everything.
He made me think about all the mean American-born Chinese and Taiwanese, the ABCs and ABTs, back at UCLA, who used to talk around me as if I didn’t understand English just because I had the slightest accent. I ended up being best friends with pretty much every other kind of people, because they didn’t shun me for the way I spoke.
Let any of those fake Asians try to speak the same languages their parents did. They’d choke big-time.
That American asshole should be ashamed of his Mandarin, instead of thinking he was superior and had authority over me. I was going to show him. I was going to keep one eye on my rearview mirror, but I was going to keep going forward.
I bathed and instead of drying off completely, I put on a shirt and boxers to absorb the water and walked around in the damp clothes. It was one way to beat the heat. They helped cool my body as the moisture evaporated.
It was a hot night, but that was hardly breaking news. Every night was going to be hot until November. Only then would the temperature dip back down below twenty-one degrees Celsius.
To do this right, I had to put myself in the right frame of mind. I was going back to high school, after all.
I pulled out a bottle of Kirin from my squat refrigerator and drank it as quickly as I could. I didn’t drink that often and a single beer would hit me harder than a lot of people. I only wanted to numb myself a little. Two beers would send me straight to sleep.
I fished out my cloth high school yearbook from a storage box under the dining-room table and brought it into my bedroom, which had the best lamp. I switched on the Teco fan that had been my grandfather’s prized possession and one luxury. I sat on the edge of the mattress to read.
After a few pages of the wallet-sized individual pictures of students came several dozen pages of stats. Class rankings, grade point averages and finals scores for each semester. ESPN would have been proud to have such detailed figures. I cringed every time I saw my name because of how far down the page I had to go to find it. I was in the top three for only one class, English. I was in second place. Julia, of course, was in first.
Hmm. Look at that. There was Cookie Monster, Wang Ming-kuo, in third place. I didn’t know he had done so well at English. Rich little Peggy Lee Xiaopei was in fourth. I guess it makes sense that we all went on to American universities—and the three of them on to NYU.
The fan, groaning, shook its head sadly from side to side and sent over a breeze to turn the page on my accomplishment and expose my next shortcoming.
Each successive class ranking saw my name bobble to the lower half of the top ten. That’s actually pretty good, but at the time I remember thinking I was so dumb. After all, the name at the top of the page was always valedictorian Julia Huang, except for in Military Education and Robotics. She couldn’t handle the rifle training with live fire and slipped to sixth place. I was in fifth, thanks to the written test and tire run, which I was oddly good at. The guy who came in first, Tseng Wen-chen, was a small, meek sort of guy, so it was surprising he’d taken to guns so well. He even outshot the teacher, who had served in the army. Tseng went on to win a national shooting competition, and now he’s some sort of advisor to the Australian film industry.
Look at Ming-kuo, taking second in Physics. You go, Cookie Monster!
Lin Cheng-sheng. There’s always some Lin in the way. I was always so jealous of him, and now I can’t remember why. He was taller than me, but he wasn’t better looking. That’s for sure. He took the top grade in Circuits, and I’m sure he’s some engineering whiz at a chip company in China. I’ll bet he never thinks about me.
The less important parts of the yearbook, including the social activities, were near the end, but they weren’t detailed with the same precision as the students’ grades. There, on the karaoke-contest spread, was the record of my one moment of triumph in years of academic struggle. The picture made me look even more heroic than I remembered. There I was, kneeling down and touching Julia’s hand.
And there, right behind Julia, was the girl I met today at Bauhaus, also reaching for me. The young Nancy, a waif wearing a too-big dress, was still in her larval stage. I could see the potential in the photo, though.
Why was I looking at Nancy more than Julia?
I tore through a few pages to get to a poem I wrote, based on a dream in which I was floating over Taiwan, a premonition that I was going abroad. The editors titled it “New Pledge of Allegiance.”
Taiwan, you monsoon-pissed-on yam of the Pacific Rim! How many nations have sought and fought to possess you in a game of hot sweet potato! The Republic of China, the diplomatically shunned nation of my birth! You seismically challenged tiny leaf trembling at the real China’s doorstep! Formosa, you humid-as-a-bamboo-steamer island nation of workaholics! Takasago Koku, don’t forget to clean off the Shinto shrines for Qingming, because your Jap gods need love, too! You land of the brown robbers, I hate you for what you’ve made me—a man with no country, no identity and no future!
I shouldn’t have put the Japanese slur in there. Hell, I shouldn’t have written the damned thing at all, much less had it published in the yearbook. It was prescient, though. I was a man with no future.
I’d written it down to sort of get the words from the dream out of my head and stuffed it into the yearbook committee’s mailbox anonymously. Some people were pretty outraged by it. The faculty advisor, Mr. Shen, stood by its inclusion, saying the poem was written by one student but spoke for many. Good old Mr. Shen. I heard he opened a bicycling-tour company down at Sun Moon Lake.
The back section of the yearbook detailed our college destinations. Those going abroad were listed after even the lowliest Taiwanese schools.
Julia had gotten into Columbia and Yale, but NYU had offered her a scholarship to cover everything, and she took it. I knew Peggy Lee Xiaopei and Wang Ming-kuo had also gone to NYU, but I wanted to double-check to see if anyone else had gone. Anyone would have been nicer than Peggy or more normal than Cookie Monster, but there was nobody.
WHEN I WAS REALLY young, that mainlander Peggy told me I was a Jap because my grandfather was a Jap. I made the mistake of asking him if he was.
“What!” he yelled, spraying me with betel-nut juice. “Who dares to call me a Jap?”
“A girl at school said you were. You read Japanese newspapers.”
“Just because I can read and speak Japanese, that makes me a Jap? You’re learning English in school. Does that make you English?”
I wiped my face, which was now slick with his spit and my tears.
He slid over a bucket of organs to me. “This is your punishment. Wash all the shit out of those intestines!” he growled before stomping away from the stall.
I burst into open sobs until I felt someone grab my shoulder. It was Frankie the Cat. He winked at me, then took the bucket and began cleaning.
Peggy played pranks on me as we got older, everything from tripping me to spraying me with perfume. In high school her antagonism morphed into a mildly obsessive crush that I found unnerving in its consistency. When there was a seat free next to me, she’d be in it. When I stepped away from my parents’ food stall to walk around the night market, no matter how late it was, there was Peggy walking next to me, her shoulder pressed against my arm.
It didn’t stop until Julia slapped her in the girls’ locker room. We could hear the commotion from the boys’ locker room.
Funny how Peggy also chose to go to NYU. Her family had the money to send her to any school she wanted to go to and, after graduation, set her up anywhere in the world.
I couldn’t believe her stupid company wouldn’t take my phone call. Now I had to see her in person. Maybe she was better now, mellower and married.
Ming-kuo was a different case. I had no idea where he was or what he was doing. We used to call him Cookie Monster because he was obese and had googly eyes. Both his parents worked long hours, and his grandmother let him eat junk food all the time. He didn’t look anything like the scholar he was. Even the teachers called him Cookie Monster when they cited him for doing exceptionally well on a test. He would just take it with a stupid smile, thinking the people laughing the hardest were his friends.
I searched for him online but found nothing. He had to be up to something. Nerds who were teased in school always became successful in the end, right? Look at Bill Gates. Maybe he was a reasonably well-adjusted head of a start-up in Silicon Valley who worked out regularly, the ugly duckling far in the past.
I wrote an email to NYU’s alumni coordinator, asking for Ming-kuo’s whereabouts. I figured at the very least he and I could exchange some emails and I could find out about Julia in addition to the radical transformation he’d hopefully gone through.
I WOKE MYSELF UP in the middle of the night, unsure if I’d swung an arm or a leg out to defend myself from some dream-world menace. I fell asleep again in an instant. In the morning all but the vaguest details of my imagined struggle were left in my head, and after I yawned even those were gone.
My phone had a news alert on the body of a young man found floating in the Shuangxi Creek, which was just to the north of the Shilin Night Market. Victim unidentified.
I got on my computer to look up a corresponding story. The only other significant detail was that he was wearing a black T-shirt, like that guy who had been running through the night market. I searched for more about Julia. Nothing.
I searched for our old classmate Peggy Lee. She was still a secondary player within her family, only mentioned as a daughter of her mogul father.
I ate two bowls of unsweetened instant oatmeal while sitting at my PC in my bedroom. Having spent my whole life around food—I’d learned how to walk by balancing myself between dividing walls of food stands—I found my own tastes tended toward the bland side.
What I really devoured was music. I was somewhat aware that I was chewing and swallowing as the sound of a Cocteau Twins bootleg played over my stereo speakers. It wasn’t actually their best stuff. It was from late in the Cocteau Twins’ career, the early 1990s when they were already on a major multinational label. Some fans called it a sellout move when they left their little indie label, but the music was still good.
Joy Division was the only band I listened to for years. For the longest time, I even refused to voluntarily listen to a single note of successor band New Order, on principle alone. That was the same stubborn kid who made the crazy promise to Julia.
I don’t remember how I changed, but it came slowly. Hearing New Order’s song “Regret” at random was a major turning point. It really stuck in my head. I loved everything about it—the snappy drumming, the trebly bass and the catchy guitar riff. After that I had to have everything New Order did. Now I do have some “regrets” about dissing the band online on the PTT.
I listened to a lot of bands now. I even liked what I heard from the burgeoning Taipei indie scene. If I didn’t have to work nights, I would be at those concerts.
I didn’t get out much, or rather, at all. I’m sure it was the same for many of my old classmates, and one in particular.
Out of respect for the professional nature of Peggy Lee’s office building, I dressed in a buttoned, collared shirt and slacks. My best shoes hurt like hell, but I carried a pair of Converse in my moped pack to change into after.
I drove to the Xinyi District in the southern part of Taipei, the capital of shopping malls and American chain restaurants. I continued east on Xinyi Road, embracing the “integrity” and “righteousness” of its name and my mission to find out what had happened to Julia. The looming Taipei 101 skyscraper observed my approach as shorter, older buildings between us seemed to scurry away. I’d disliked Taipei 101 the first time I saw it; it looked like a stack of green soup containers. It grew on me, though. Now I appreciate the segmented-bamboo aesthetic.
I entered the building and had to push past the shoppers swarming the upscale retailers and teeming to get to the escalators to the food court. I found my way to the office elevators and shot up to the eightieth floor. It was almost noon, and the elevator cars going up were less crowded than the ones going down stuffed with hungry office workers.
Lee & Associates’ double doors of chemically antiqued wood were weighed down by two oversized, gold-colored metal plaques. Replica ancient Chinese-lion knockers were set on each door near the center. I brought my hand near the right knocker, tripping an invisible sensor that caused both doors to swing open.
A young man wearing a headset over his windswept hairstyle looked directly into my eyes. “Welcome to Lee & Associates. How can I help you?” He leaned slightly to one side, showing off a sunken cheek and enhancing his famished look.
“Hello there. I’m here to see Peggy Lee.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Do you have an appointment?”
“No, but could you tell her Chen Jing-nan is here?”
“Chen Jing-nan? Do you have a more familiar English name, Mr. Chen? A business name?”
“No, I don’t.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Chen, Ms. Lee is booked today through the …” Suddenly he sat upright, held on to the headset with both hands and stared straight ahead. “Oh, all right,” the man said into his microphone. “I will tell him.” He looked at me with a newfound sense of respect and fear. “Ms. Lee will be right out to see you.”
He had barely spoken the words when Peggy strode out from the far right hallway. She hadn’t changed much. She still wore that hurt, indignant expression of a soap-opera heroine. Still wore a pantsuit. The top button of her blouse looked like it might have just been unbuttoned.
“I knew,” she said triumphantly, “that you would come crawling back to me someday, Jing-nan!”
Peggy shook my right hand and clapped me on the shoulder. I wondered if she could feel my reluctance.
“Peggy, it’s not like that at all,” I said.
“C’mon, Jing-nan! I’m just joking! We’re old classmates, we should hug!” She pulled me in tight and I could only smile to the greeter, who was staring at us. “Loosen up a little,” Peggy chided.
She hooked my arm and dragged me through a maze of potted bonsai and antique landscape scrolls to her office overlooking the city. We walked by a pool filled with kumquat-colored koi and surrounded by a guardrail.
“I was just thinking about you,” she said, kicking her office door shut with her heel. “Our horoscopes probably line up better now.”
I gave a nice fake laugh. Taiwanese liked to consult with advisors to find auspicious days for weddings, business relationships and investing. Peggy would have to be well versed in astrology and mythology for her family’s hedge fund to be successful. It would be lousy to call on a client on a Bad Day. Then again, if you were a good talker, and had the proper Taoist charms and mirrors, you could transform that Bad Day into a Good Day by reversing its evil.
“I don’t know much about the stars,” I said. “I’ve been too preoccupied by the news, anyway.”
“You mean Ah-bian?” she asked. She used the nickname of Chen Shui-bian, the former Taiwanese president who was now in prison for embezzlement. It seemed that every week he was pulling another stunt—hunger strikes and alleged medical conditions that required hospitalization. He had recently tried to hang himself with a towel.
I looked at Peggy’s face. As always, her eyes seemed guileless. It was impossible to tell whether she was pretending not to know about the murder. All I could do was sigh and prepare myself to ask her about Julia. But she interrupted my thoughts.
“Sit down, sit down!” she cried. “Do you want tea? Hey, maybe you want whiskey instead?”
“I’m not ready for a drink,” I said, settling into an ergonomic chair that felt like a big piece of boneless meat. Peggy swung into her Aeron and leaned across the table, splaying out her cat claws.
“You know what, Jing-nan? You look like you’ve never been to America.” Peggy cut off my objection. “I mean that as a compliment. You look like a contemporary Taiwanese right there.
“This building, Taipei 101, they didn’t finish it until we were away at college, but I was here for the opening over winter break freshman year. It was the tallest one in the world for six years! That’s something to be pretty goddamned proud of, right? Our politically marginalized, pissant island showed the rest of the world up for a little while. When my father moved the Lee family headquarters into the building, I was like, ‘Fuck, yeah!’ ”
She got up and stretched her arms over her head, pulling the material of her suit taut. Had she gotten new boobs?
Peggy smiled, approving my glance at her chest. Then she stepped away from the window and tapped the glass.
“That’s Taiwan out there, Jing-nan. Come over here! I want you to take a good, hard look at it!”
I pulled myself out of the chair a little awkwardly and nearly fell to my knees. I stumbled over to the full-length window. She put her hand on my shoulder and rubbed.
“What do you notice about the buildings out there? The best ones were constructed by the Japanese while they colonized us. That was seventy years ago! Honestly, it is embarrassing as hell that our Presidential Office Building was originally built for the Japanese governor-general. You think the American president would live in a house built for the king of England? No way!
“Look over there, up in the hills. You see all of those crappy houses? Those are illegal houses, Jing-nan. They’re eyesores. Tourists from all over the world are looking down at them from the Taipei 101 observation deck, and they’re like, ‘What the hell are those?’ People who live in illegal houses should all be sent to jail.”
“Peggy,” I said, “I never really cared much for architecture.”
“You have to admire this building. It’s a remarkable human achievement.”
“I like Taipei 101, but sometimes I think it lacks some heart.”
Peggy slapped her forehead with the back of her hand and fell back into her chair in an exaggerated motion. “Oh, I forgot I was talking to you! Mr. Joy Division! Of course you have an eye for the negative aspects of everything! Hey, you could leverage that pessimism—start a bearish fund. Maybe clean up a little bit.”
I returned to the boneless chair and put my hands tentatively on the edge of my side of the desk. “Actually, Peggy, I am here on rather depressing business.”
“Julia,” she said, looking down at her open palms.
“You know.”
“Of course I do. It was all over our school Facebook page. This was like two days ago.”
“I’m not on Facebook.”
“You’re not, eh?” she said, crossing her arms. “I thought you were just blocking me.”
“I wouldn’t know how to do that.”
Peggy turned her chair, leaned under the table and shrugged. She came up with a bottle of Yamazaki Single Malt and two glasses. “So, you wanted to come here to talk about your old girlfriend? You didn’t really want to see me, after all.” She poured and made two amber slits dance in the glasses.
“I still don’t feel up for a drink,” I said.
“They’re both for me,” she snapped.
I spoke as she took a long sip. “Peggy, you went to NYU with Julia. What can you tell me about her time in school?”
“Well, what do you think?” Peggy eased her chair back and banged a drawer shut. “With a face and a body like that, what do you think? She was popular. Everybody liked her. Guys wanted to take her out—even the Americans. Girls wanted to be her friend. But you know her nature. Study study study all the time.” Peggy emptied the first glass and shoved her chair forward until the edge of the desk bit into her waist. “Julia made things as hard as she possibly could for herself. She was a double major.”
“What did she study?”
“Political science and something else.”
“What else?”
“I don’t remember.”
I saw her teeth for a second.
“I didn’t see her that often. You know we were not friends, Jing-nan. The only time I ran into her was at the Japanese market or at the library, one of the few times I went.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
Peggy shook her head and picked up the second glass. “Back in the US,” she said, sipping her drink.
“You didn’t know Julia was here?”
She gave me a long look, her eyes half-closed. “I. Had. No. Idea. What?! Do you think I killed her?”
“No, I don’t think that.” But you probably don’t mind that she’s dead. “Please, just tell me about when you saw her last.”
“The day she was kicked out of NYU, the end of junior year. Six years ago.” Peggy sipped some whiskey and snorted. “She cheated. You knew that, right?” She arched an eyebrow that seemed to question Julia’s lifetime academic record.
“That’s what I heard, but I have a hard time believing it.”
“You’d better believe it. She was dumping most of her stuff right in the street. All she was going to take back to Taiwan were two tiny, tiny suitcases. I asked her what had happened, and she told me they had caught her cheating. The double major was too much work, and she had taken one little shortcut. All she did was copy one paragraph and they were throwing her out. It was a bad scene. She had me crying, too!”
I folded my arms. Crying with laughter, I’ll bet.
“You knew, Peggy, that I had a serious agreement with Julia.”
“The two of you were going to stop seeing each other and one day you would come for her like a knight riding out of the mist. Blah blah. Who didn’t know about it?” She finished the second glass and her face twitched.
“We never imagined things would turn out this way.”
“No one knows the future, right?”
I felt something at my ankle. It was Peggy’s foot. With some effort I shifted in my seat and pulled my feet underneath my chair. “You know what happened to me, right?”
“I heard, Jing-nan. There was a big chain email going around our old classmates. I was a part of the group that sent a banner and flowers to the funerals.”
“I’m sure you were the one who spearheaded the gesture, so thank you.” She nodded and folded her hands in front of her. “Listen, Peggy. Julia’s parents have asked me to help find some more information about her murder. They say the cops aren’t helping at all.”
“Nobody wants to take the blame for an unsolved crime, so nobody will take it up. Cops won’t do anything unless the victim was someone important, someone rich or famous.”
“Julia was murdered.”
For the first time, I saw a sympathetic look in Peggy’s eyes. “I know. It’s just unbelievable.”
“It would have to be a gangster or a cop—someone who had access to a gun.”
“It could be an aborigine,” she offered. “They’re allowed to carry firearms for hunting and maintaining their culture.”
“I didn’t think about that.”
Peggy looked thoughtful. “A betel-nut girl is essentially a prostitute,” she said. “I don’t mean to speak ill of Julia, but she probably did turn a few tricks, right? Just to get by.”
My hands curled into two fists on my thighs. I had to admit that it was a possibility. If only I had backed down from my big plan and swallowed my pride, she could have stayed with me in the toaster house. She wouldn’t have had to do any of it. I’m sure her parents wouldn’t have been happy about the living arrangements, but we’d be happy, and Julia would be alive.
We could have just gotten married, anyway. Did it matter that the two of us would be back at the night market, living the same lives as our parents?
Doesn’t matter.
Thinking of my father’s favorite phrase rubbed the wistfulness away.
“You want me to tell her parents that their daughter was a hooker?” I said evenly to Peggy.
“Hey, they probably half think it themselves but don’t want to believe it. Maybe you, too.”
“Jing-nan! We really need to consider everything possible.”
“Maybe it was a waste of time for me to come here.”
“You have an issue with me, don’t you, Jing-nan? You always did. Don’t think I can’t tell.”
“This is the issue: you never respected my relationship with Julia.”
Peggy sprung from her chair and pointed at my nose with the white-star end of her Montblanc pen. “You hate mainlanders! You hate me and my family, right?” She put on a smug smile.
“I came here to see if you knew more about Julia, about her life when she came back to Taiwan. I’m an optimist. I thought maybe you might have set aside your animosity and become friends with Julia. I thought you two might have been in touch by email or through Facebook.”
“If it were up to me, we would have been friends,” said Peggy. “When my parents made me a VP I wrote to Julia to offer her a job—an important job—and I told her I didn’t care if she didn’t have a college degree. She completely ignored me. Can you believe that?”
“When was this?”
Peggy visibly stiffened. “Two years ago. I guess you missed the press coverage. I was the youngest female vice president ever in the securities industry.”
“How did you reach out to her?”
“I wrote to her NYU email. It was still good, and I know she read it because I had a read receipt on it.” She splashed more whiskey in her first glass. “Am I really such a horrible person that I don’t deserve a reply?”
“What sort of job did you offer her?”
“I was going to make her my top researcher—reporting directly to me.”
“I can’t see why she didn’t respond,” I said, leaking sarcasm.
“Wait, Jing-nan, why can’t we simply be decent with each other? It’s been so long, after all.”
“It has been a while.”
She slapped the desk and grunted like an old man. “Do you know what’s been going on with me? Do you care? It hasn’t been all good for me, either, you know.”
“I’m sorry, I never even asked about you,” I said as sincerely as possible. “I just assumed you were doing well because … you seem to be. How have you been?”
“I married a guy from Switzerland after graduation. A banker.”
“You have my congratulations.”
“We got divorced six months ago.” She fixed the shoulders on her pantsuit. “It was over before then, but you know how it is.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“My parents won’t get off my case. They say I should have found a good mainlander boy. Guess I’m cursed, huh?”
She looked sad. The world doesn’t need another sad person.
“Peggy, I’ve changed my mind. I will have a whiskey. A small one.”
“I’ll get you a clean glass.”
“I’ll just use this one. Alcohol kills germs. And anyway, we’re old friends.”
It was nice to see her smile for real.
“You wouldn’t happen to know,” I asked halfway through my shallow drink, “where Cookie Monster is, would you?”
She spit on me when she laughed. “Oh my God, I’m sorry, Jing-nan!”
“It’s all right.” I wiped myself with my hand.
“Wow, I have no idea where he is now!”
“He might be better. You never know.”
She shook her head. “Say, Jing-nan, have you been seeing anybody?”
“Oh, no.” I felt a lump in my throat spiral upward. “I was still going to, you know, marry Julia. Are you seeing anybody now?”
“No. My life is all about work.”
“Your family has all these business connections and you know all these people—a lot of guys, I’m sure.”
She smiled bitterly. “Do you think any of us are free to see each other? We all work eighty-hour weeks!”
EVERY ELEVATOR HAD SEEMED to be going down when I arrived at Taipei 101, but when I stepped out of Peggy’s office they all seemed to be coming up.
I had forgotten how straight whiskey could burn. I felt like my throat and nose had been cauterized. I rubbed my tongue against the roof of my mouth. I needed some water.
Finally the elevator arrived. It was empty, save for the smell of burning cigars. Or was it incense?
I rode down, thinking of Peggy’s words: “If it were up to me, we would have been friends.”
Julia was just like me, I thought. After my exit from UCLA, I completely avoided messages from all my former roommates and classmates. I didn’t want to field their sympathetic emails or explain exactly what had happened. It had been too much for a newly minted orphan to deal with. After a while, people stopped asking, stopped emailing. I’m sure I was no longer even in their address books.
I rode the elevator alone. The car slowed as it approached ground level, and I could hear a disturbance outside. As the doors opened, two big men in overcoats, one wearing shades and one wearing a floppy rain hat, shoved their way in and blocked the doors before I could exit.
I quickly recognized the guy on the left as the American who had accosted me at the Huangs’ parking lot and on the highway. I looked into his shades and he greeted me by throwing the back of his hand against my face. Before I could react, the man in the hat jabbed me hard in the gut with an umbrella handle. My body involuntarily folded in on itself, as if I were a startled armadillo. I staggered to a corner of the elevator and propped myself up. That bastard had gotten me good in the middle and I couldn’t inhale. Behind my assailants, an old woman tried to enter the elevator.
“I’m sorry, auntie,” the man in the hat said. “This car is going out of service.” Unlike the American, he was a yam and spoke Taiwanese. She nodded and stepped back.
The men opened up their umbrellas, I observed, to block the security cameras. There were a few awkward seconds before the doors closed. There was little I could do apart from trying to get my halting breaths under control as the elevator shot up.
The American turned to the side and activated a switch on the elevator panel, possibly with a key. It was hard to see his actions clearly from the floor. I still couldn’t raise the upper part of my body. The car slowed and then stopped. An emergency light on the panel began to blink, and a prerecorded message began to play loudly.
“We apologize for the delay. The car should be moving shortly,” a woman’s voice said in English, Mandarin and Taiwanese, then what must’ve been the same thing in Hakka and Japanese. Her message kept looping through the languages.
The Taiwanese was clean-shaven but had bad skin. Pockmarks on his face glistened with sweat, looking like the crust bubbles on a pizza slice after the cheese has slid off. He seemed to take his cues from the American. Maybe he’d been the one driving last night; he would know the roads, being a native of the island. The fucking Green Hornet’s Kato.
The American spoke, showcasing his bad Mandarin. “Jing-nan, I told you to stop asking about Julia. How come you didn’t listen?”
I gasped for breath and whined a little, unable to speak.
The Taiwanese cradled my chin roughly. “Little Jing-nan, a friendly poke couldn’t hurt you this badly.” He spoke bad Mandarin, too, but I was more interested in the piece of rope he took out from a back pocket. I quickly assessed that it could wrap around my throat twice and have enough left over for two fat fists to grab.
“Hey, come on! No need for that,” said the American. “He gets it now. He’s a smart boy. Aren’t you, Jing-nan?”
The pockmarked man let the rope dangle from one hand. “We should kill him right now,” he shouted over the sound of the prerecorded woman’s voice. “That way we know for sure he won’t keep talking.”
“We don’t have to kill him,” said the American, laughing a little bit. “He just didn’t know how serious the matter was. Now he knows. Isn’t that right, Jing-nan?”
“I’ll be good,” I said breathlessly. “I didn’t know.” I felt stupid and weak for wishing Dwayne were there to stick up for me.
“See? We don’t have to do anything to him. He’ll stop right now. He knows he can’t fool us anymore.”
“Let me have just one punch,” said the Taiwanese as he wrapped the rope around his right fist menacingly. “One in the gut. It won’t leave a mark, I promise.”
The American looked up and petted his own neck thoughtfully. “Jing-nan, my friend is upset because we had to buy these umbrellas for six hundred NT. Each. I think if you agreed to pay for them, he would calm down considerably.”
My right hand shot to my wallet. I managed to stand upright and paid the exact amount. Twelve rose-colored hundred-NT bills, all featuring a portrait of Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Chinese revolution and the one man unreservedly loved on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Sun’s engraved likeness somberly reprimanding me for all my wrong actions leading up to this moment.
Shit. Twelve hundred NT. I probably grossed ten times that on an average night, but a thousand NT was my allotted weekly disposable income, after I paid off the debt and interest.
“You still have enough to eat?” the American asked me as he held up the folded bills. He looked contrite and seemed ready to peel off a Sun or two and hand them back.
“He’s got that fucking food stand!” objected the Taiwanese. “He could still eat if we took his whole goddamned wallet. If you still don’t get it, boy, guess where we’re going to show up next!”
“Stop,” growled the American. “You don’t know when you’ve gone too far.” He released the emergency tab. The elevator rose for a few seconds and then slowed. The Taiwanese looked meaningfully at me and tapped his temple. Don’t forget this warning.
The doors opened and the men filed out, snapping their umbrellas shut. I lunged at the panel to close the doors and then pressed the button for the ground floor. The smells rising up from the food court—so different from a night market and so appetizing not even an hour ago—now made me nauseated.
The worst thing about the encounter, I decided later, was that despite the fact that the emergency stop had been on for a few minutes, no one had broken in over the intercom. Typical blasé Taipei thinking: alarms only go off by accident.
I WASN’T GOOD AT hiding things from Dancing Jenny. She freaked out when I finally gave her the brief version of events, from Julia’s parents to the guys who had warned me off and roughed me up.
She raised her hands and called up to the sky. “Oh, Mazu, Mother of Heaven,” she said. I could see Jenny’s nipples darken and push against her nearly transparent bra and cheesecloth shirt. “Are you badly hurt?”
“Naw, I’ll be all right.”
“Lift up your shirt,” said Jenny.
“Why?”
“I want to see something.” I complied and she gasped. “It’s as bad as I feared. I can see auras, you know!”
I bent over and saw a baseball-sized splatter of purple.
“Gan,” I whispered.
“I know you don’t want me to, but I’m going to be praying for you, Jing-nan. I’m going to ask for all the protection you can get!”
“I don’t need help from gods. I just need a gun.”
Anger flashed in her eyes.
“Hey, I’m kidding, Jenny!”
“I’ve had enough guns in my life. Don’t even joke about it, Jing-nan.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Make sure you drink a lot of liquids. Your body needs to wash out the damaged tissue.”
“You know best.”
I left and went to Big Shot Hot Pot. Kuilan was away, so I said hi to her husband. Her son was chopping chives in the back, and he didn’t break from his hacking motion even when I waved to him. I’m glad my grandfather had the sense not to have a dumpling-and-soup business. The fillings are cheap because they’re mostly vegetables, but you have to spend a lot of time chopping.
“YOUR COLOR DOESN’T LOOK good,” Dwayne informed me. “You never liked my color,” I said.
“I’m not joking, kid. You look sickly. You feeling okay?”
“Two guys threatened my life today, Dwayne.” Fuck it. I told Jenny, how could I not tell Dwayne, the guy I talked to more than anybody?
“What!” he thundered.
“But everything’s all right now, I’m pretty sure.”
He stared at me, a knife erect in his right hand. I could tell from his eyes that his mind was set to “kill.” “Who threatened your life?” Honestly, I was touched he was sticking up for me.
“Two guys. Not jiaotous. Probably affiliated with big gangs.”
“You think they were Black Sea?”
“I’m not sure. But one of them was a taiyi asshole.”
“You got pushed around by a Taiwanese-American! On your own turf!”
I lifted my shirt and exposed my bruise.
“Gan!” Dwayne and Frankie shouted.
“It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“I’ll make that guy’s face look worse!” Dwayne vowed. He threw the knife into the sink for emphasis.
“Let’s forget it for now,” I said. “C’mon, let’s focus on work.”
“Not yet!” Dwayne pointed at Frankie. “You! Have you been doing your duty?”
Frankie’s face tightened just the slightest. “You’re questioning me?”
“I can’t think of a reason why else our young boss here was accosted by gangsters, Mr. Cat.”
Frankie said, “I’ve been keeping him out of trouble.”
Dwayne sighed and said to me, “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t blame Frankie,” I said. “This didn’t happen around here. They got me at Taipei 101.”
“God, I hate that place. The Han Chinese built that thing to give the finger to my people. So they roughed you up, huh? Shit.”
“I also had to pay them twelve hundred NT.”
Dwayne whistled. “Next time you get ripped off like that, you goddamn call me and I’ll show up and kick some ass!”
“I would’ve called you, but I was too busy trying to breathe.”
“What did they say to you?”
“They want me to stop looking into Julia’s death. I was asking an old classmate for information. Somehow they knew.”
Dwayne rubbed his stubbly chin. “What are you going to do?”
“I have no choice.” By that, I meant I had to keep on going. Dwayne nodded. “I think we should report this to the Black Sea people, Jing-nan. Frankie has connections with those guys.”
“Shouldn’t we report it to the police?”
“Naw, it’s faster and more effective if we go straight to Black Sea.”
“I’ll handle it,” said Frankie as he patted my right shoulder. “Don’t worry.” He walked off.
“Hey, I didn’t tell you the details, the circumstances!” I called after him.
“I heard enough.”
“It can wait, Frankie!”
“No, it can’t. Right now I’m just going to take a leak, Jing-nan! I’ll talk to Black Sea later.”
IT WAS A BUSY night, and I didn’t notice Ming-kuo’s email on my phone until we were closing. The alumni office had forwarded my email and he was excited that I was getting in touch. I felt a little bad reading his note, because he thought we were going to resume an active friendship when there hadn’t really been one to begin with. Ming-kuo seemed to think we’d had a lot of good times together. I couldn’t remember even talking to him for more than thirty seconds at a time.
Shit. Cookie Monster was still in Taipei, and he sounded needy, if not flat-out desperate. I wondered how he would react when he found out I just wanted to pick his brain for info on Julia. I wished we could have done so via email. There was no way to avoid an in-person meeting now.
Wait. I wasn’t even giving the guy a fair chance. High school was a long time ago. It might be fun to hang out with an old classmate and laugh a little about the old days, back when I was the king of the world and he was Cookie Monster. Hadn’t things ended nicely with Peggy? My conversation with her, anyway, not the aftermath.
WHEN I WAS DONE with work, I drove home keeping one eye on the rearview mirror.
I sent Ming-kuo a short reply with my phone number, saying it was great to hear from him. I was tired now from work, I wrote, but I would love to talk late in the morning or early in the afternoon, whichever was better.
I took off my shirt and noticed that the bruise had expanded into an ugly nebula of blue, purple and red jam. I didn’t know injuries could be so colorful. I went to the bathroom mirror to admire my bruise in full.
My phone rang.
I didn’t recognize the number, but it had to be Ming-kuo. Did he just skim my email? It was like three in the freaking morning. Didn’t he know how late it was now? Shit. If I didn’t answer now, I’d have to call him back at some point, and it would never be enjoyable. Why draw it out?
“Hello, is that you, Ming-kuo?”
“Jing-nan! It’s good to hear from you again! I wasn’t sure if you were still here in Taipei!”
“I’ve been here a long time, Ming-kuo.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, clearing his throat. “I was sorry to hear about your parents. I didn’t know you stayed. I thought you would have gone back to UCLA.” His voice was the same. Squeaky and fast, like a gerbil on a sugar high.
“Yeah,” I said. “There was a lot for me to take care of here.”
“I heard about Julia,” he said.
“You did?”
“Jing-nan, it was all over the TV!”
“Ming-kuo, where are you? It sounds like there’s a big commotion over there.”
“I’m at work.” He chuckled to himself. “I have a late shift at the front desk of a love hotel.”
Damn, and I thought I had it bad. Think of the scumbags and lowlifes he had to deal with.
“Is something really funny there? I hear people laughing.”
“A guy is checking in with three girls. They’re all pretty drunk.”
“That explains the terrible singing.”
“Do you want me to send you a picture?”
“No, I don’t need that.”
“They’re leaving the lobby now. Boy, this job is crazy sometimes.”
“Ming-kuo, are you working two jobs?”
“No, this is my only job.” I heard facial stubble brush the phone as he switched to the other shoulder. “Who would have thought I’d end up here? This economy sucks. What do you do, Jing-nan?”
“I work the night shift at a restaurant. It’s sort of a menial job.”
“Oh,” he said, unable to disguise his disappointed tone. “Look at us. The smart guys in high school stuck with these dumbass jobs.”
“Maybe we should talk later, Ming-kuo. I don’t want to bother you at work.”
“No, don’t worry! They don’t care if I’m on the phone. It helps keep me alert.”
This could be my break. If he could help me over the phone, I wouldn’t have to see him in person.
“Let me ask you something. Were you in touch with Julia through college?”
“You know, Julia was really busy at NYU. Every time I ran into her, she was in a rush to go somewhere, whether it was the library or to an afternoon nap.”
“She liked to keep herself busy.” And away from Cookie Monster.
“I saw her when she was working at the betel-nut stand, only a few months ago.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“I saw her from the car a few times. It was by an exit, so I drove slower. I got a good look, but I wasn’t absolutely positive it was her. Until, you know, after the news.”
“Where exactly was the stand? The news didn’t say.” I looked out my window into the haze where ghosts were supposedly slipping by, looking for bodies to possess.
“It was out in Hsinchu City, the second exit on National Highway One.” Less than an hour away by car to the southwest of Taipei, right on the coast. “If you get to the intersection with National Highway Three, you’ve gone too far. When you get out of the exit, there are about seven betel-nut stands. She was at the one that had sort of a little parking area. None of the other ones had one. It might have changed.”
“What sort of binlang stand was it? Did it seem sort of rinky-dink?”
“Not at all. It was a classy place. That whole area is, actually. You try to offer money for sex and no one will take it.”
How desperate were you, Cookie Monster? There are plenty of red-light districts right in Taipei, unless you got yourself banned from all of them. I fumbled around with a piece of paper on my desk and wrote down the directions. Second exit to Hsinchu, place with parking lot.
“Were you working in Hsinchu City, Coo—er, Ming-kuo?”
“No, no. I wasn’t working at the time. I was driving around, trying to figure out what happened to my life. This job fell into my lap not too long after. Life wasn’t fair to any of us, Jing-nan. We were the smart ones! You, me and Julia.”
“Peggy seems to have done all right.”
“Her family’s rich! Fucking mainlanders stole all the money from China and made out here like bandits!” It was the first time I had heard him angry. “You know how stuck-up she is! Whenever I saw her in college, I turned the other way. I wouldn’t give her the time of day.”
“Speaking of which, it’s late for me, Ming-kuo.”
“Yeah? Wow, it’s three thirty in the morning.”
“I have to sleep.”
“Hey, let’s hang out real soon!”
“Sure we will.”
I chucked my phone into my pillow. I hated how he lumped Julia and me into the same sad sack he put himself in. It might have been an appropriate comparison, but he shouldn’t have assumed he and I would have this sudden camaraderie. I was so glad I hadn’t told him I worked at a food stall in a night market.
I picked up my phone and threw it back into the pillow again. Damn it! This was the worst thing possible. My life was in danger and Cookie Monster and I were reunited! I slapped my forehead.
Well, he was at least good for something. I sort of knew where Julia’s betel-nut stand was.
I was riled up and afraid I would be up all night. After I washed I turned the volume low on the stereo and played Joy Division’s cover of “Sister Ray” by The Velvet Underground. The song had been my introduction to that great ’60s band and Lou Reed’s music. The original recording was a seventeen-and-a-half-minute narrative about a party with drugs, drag queens and a murder, with a noisy groove repeated in the background. In concert, The Velvets could extend the song for more than half an hour, but the seven-minute Joy Division version was enough for me.
Unfocused anger and frustration combined with my physical pain to give me a vivid sexual dream. I was in a love-hotel bed, trying hard to hurl myself through a woman on all fours. I couldn’t see her face, just her ears poking out from her tossing hair. She reached back and pulled my chin up and in the mirror I saw that it was Nancy, the girl from the music store.
I woke up gasping. Maybe I needed this girl to offset all the recent horrible people and events in my life.
Maybe I just needed her.