Nancy lived in a luxury apartment complex in the Da’an District. We pulled up to one of the entrances and a skinny man in a red uniform stepped out immediately and opened Nancy’s door.
He chirped, “Good evening, Miss Han,” with his head down.
It must have been four in the morning, but he was as lively as if it were four in the afternoon.
“Hello, Yeh-jung,” said Nancy. She left the engine on and stepped out of the car. I didn’t think the man could see me under the low brim of his hat, but he nodded to me over the car roof as I exited.
Another man in a uniform with the same build as the first attendant spun the revolving door for us as we walked through.
“Good evening, Miss Han,” said the man.
“Hello, Chao-tang,” she said.
Chao-tang brought his head up and looked at me casually.
“Hello,” I said.
“Good evening, sir.” I thought I heard his heels click.
We walked the length of a giant salt-water aquarium to get to the elevators. A bright yellow fish shaped like an uncut starfruit kept pace with us before giving me the eye and darting away.
“This building looks really familiar for some reason, even though I’m sure I’ve never been here before,” I said.
“We were on the news a few times,” Nancy said with some weariness in her voice. “Whenever people want to protest, they come here to target the rich and politically powerful. The last group was that anti-nuke group who said that when the New Taipei City reactors leaked radiation we’d have to abandon our luxury apartments. One guy tried to grab my collar when I was walking out.”
“Seems like a small price to pay when you live like this. Do you realize how underdressed I am?”
“Don’t be silly. The men who actually live here dress like slobs, because they don’t care about trying to impress anybody. The women are different, though.”
I looked over the walls near the elevator doors. The only things I saw were smooth tiles and my confused face reflected in the mirrors.
“Where are the buttons?”
“It’s sensor-driven. We call the elevators by just standing here.”
On cue, the door in front of Nancy slid open as a chime suspiciously close to the default ring of an iPhone sounded. As I followed her into the car, another elevator opened up to my right. I turned around in time to see our doors close on a woman focusing an accusing glare on us.
“Do you know her?” asked Nancy.
“You don’t recognize an old schoolmate? That’s Lee Xiaopei. Peggy.”
“Your year?”
“Yeah. I was too surprised to wave.”
Nancy pulled me in close. “Well, you guys can talk later,” she said.
Gee, I’d thought Peggy and I were cool. Something was up.
NANCY DIDN’T HAVE A lot of stuff in her apartment. Not to the naked eye, anyway. Every five feet of wall space concealed some kind of storage bin that opened with a handle and folded away seamlessly in the wood grain.
“I like how there’s no clutter,” said Nancy as she gestured to the wall, “but everything’s right here at your fingertips.” She slid out a CD rack and vinyl album shelf to show me. She lifted up a panel and pushed it in to reveal a home-theater system. Then she bent down to open a bottom drawer before exclaiming, “Whoops!” and slamming it shut before I got a good look at it.
“What was that, a pet cobra?”
“It was just something. I don’t open that drawer often.”
Nancy fast-walked to the bar area. “Want some ice water?” she called.
“All right.” I went over and fiddled with the wall that had the forbidden drawer. I could tell where the handle was, but I couldn’t pop it out. “Nancy, how do you open this thing?”
“You’re so nosy,” she grumbled as a piece of fancy machinery let out a metal mouse whine and scraped crushed ice into a glass.
“Show me,” I said.
She came over and gave me my drink. “This is mountain-ice water. It’s never been brought down to room temperature since it was harvested.”
I took a sip. It tasted like any other glass of water I’ve ever had, although it was impressively cold.
“Nancy,” I insisted. “Show me.”
She sighed and lifted the handle while twisting it. The drawer opened, revealing stacks of folded men’s socks and briefs.
“Ah-ding’s, right?”
“Yes.”
“Still hoping he comes back, huh?”
“No. I just don’t feel right throwing away his things.”
I took too big a gulp of water. It slit my throat lengthwise like a steel sword.
She shifted the cup of water in her hand and stood on her tiptoes. “You said you didn’t want to fall in love.”
“I’m not talking about that,” I said. “I just think it’s weird that you’re still attached to this guy, weird on a purely intellectual basis. You said you don’t love him.”
“I feel obligated to him. After all, he did buy this place for the two of us to hang out in.”
I held my glass with both hands, feeling my palms and fingers begin to burn from the cold. “You did more than just ‘hang out,’ Nancy.”
She flapped her arms twice. “I get it. You’re making a stand for morality.”
“Not so much morality, but personal dignity.”
“Dignity? You’ve been taking me to love hotels! What a hypocrite you are!”
I wasn’t sure who’d slipped me the stupid pill or when it began to take effect, but the way I was going it was going to be a quick, lonely ride down to the lobby. What an asshole I was being! I put my glass down on what looked like a coaster on the closest side table.
“I’m sorry, Nancy. I’ve been talking like a crazy person.”
“Don’t forget who paid for KTV tonight.”
“Thank you so much for taking care of me. I’m such a chump.”
“You’re jealous of Ah-ding, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am jealous. I just wanted to be alone with you, and his boxers suddenly popped up between us, like a fucking spring-loaded crotch.”
That made her smile. She punched my arm just hard enough to hurt.
When a Taiwanese woman is mad at you, if she is able to forgive you, she will punch you. If she remains quiet and doesn’t hit you, you are in big, big trouble. Death-penalty big.
I put an arm around Nancy and tried to pull her to me, but she twisted away in the same practiced way that I broke free of Dwayne’s holds.
“I want to show you something special,” she said. She opened a drawer, took out a box the size of a birthday cake and ducked into what I assumed was the bathroom.
I sat on the designer couch and toyed with my phone as I waited. No voice messages, but there was an email in my junk folder from a Gmail address I didn’t recognize. I heard a clicking sound from the bathroom before the door opened.
Nancy came out in a red teddy thinner than a facial tissue. She had a pair of red-plastic horns on her head. She sashayed over to me and sat on my lap.
“Do you like this? It’s my devil-girl outfit.”
“It looks uncomfortable. We’d better take it off.”
“Hey, you have to get me into the mood. You were mean before, and I was thinking that I should probably go straight to sleep.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want a good, hard massage.”
“All right.”
“My entire back and my legs.”
“I’ve never massaged legs before.”
She sighed. “Well, you’re going to learn. Trial and error, but make the errors minimal.”
“Back first,” I said. She slid onto the coffee table and stretched out. No wonder the top was padded. I put my hands on her shoulder blades.
“Not like that!” she exclaimed. “Wash your hands first! Use hot water!”
“All right,” I said, heading for the room she had changed in.
“And get the oil! On the shelf under the sink!”
I turned on the water in the sink.
“Warm up those fingers, Jing-nan! Nothing’s a bigger turn-off than cold hands!”
It might be a long night, but I was sure it was going to be worth it in the end.
I DREAMED I WAS in a shadowy hall in a temple, standing before a fiery brazier. I heard Julia tell me to do something, but I didn’t want to do it. I looked down at my hands. They were full of reams of bamboo joss paper with small patches of gold foil in the center that were traditionally burned to send money to deceased loved ones. A Western Union to the dead.
I peeled off a sheet of paper and a friendly flame caught in the middle, below the gold mark. I saw letters in the soft little light, but I couldn’t read them. What did they say?
Julia was now standing above me, pointing at the paper in my hands and indicating that I needed to feed it into the brazier. A breeze began to blow, and her full-length, translucent dress flowed back like a jellyfish in a current.
No, I won’t. That would be playing into the whole myth of the underworld I refused to believe in.
I love you, Julia, but I can’t.
The wind picked up. I hung on to the single fiery sheet. Everything around me was being swept into the mouth of the brazier. Now I had a howling wind at my back.
I realized there was only one way I could prevent this joss paper from going into the brazier.
I folded it like a flour tortilla and fought to shove it into my mouth. It became soggy. I began to choke.
I woke up and yanked the sheet out of my mouth.
IN THE MORNING I slid out of bed, trying not to wake Nancy up. I checked my email and my phone promptly died. I fumbled and dropped it on the wooden floor, making the loudest sound in the world. Nancy didn’t even flinch. I had been planning to clean my face in the kitchen sink, but since she was in such a deep sleep, I decided I could wash up quickly without bothering her.
Nancy’s shower fixtures were American, and her shampoo and soap were Japanese. I came out and dried myself off with a big quick-dry towel. My skin had never felt this soft. Even my bruise was looking better. Maybe it was time to ditch the old house, or at least get a new bathroom installed.
I dressed and touched my lips lightly to Nancy’s. In her sleep she reached up and rubbed off my kiss.
I rode the MRT back to the market around noon. I was glad to find my moped where I’d left it. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Cars and motorcycles made much better joyrides. Frankie and Dwayne weren’t due for a couple hours, so I went into a Family Mart for a strawberry milk and sipped slowly as I charged up my phone.
The main market wasn’t open yet, but I picked up a fried chicken leg from a sidewalk vendor and took a few bites. It was old and tasted like it had been fried three times. The meat had hardened into jerky. I soldiered on because I only rarely experience bad food. As I ate, I had an almost transcendent experience. I didn’t register how much I cared about the food we served at Unknown Pleasures until I realized how deeply ashamed I would be to serve something as terrible as this chicken leg to my customers. I picked the bones clean, undeterred by a strip of calloused flesh that lodged between my molars. I even crunched down and ate the cartilage that connected the thigh and leg bones. My disgusting little snack had given me oil-trap breath but left me feeling extremely satisfied. A little bit proud, too.
I checked my email as I walked down Daxi Road to Unknown Pleasures. Nothing in the inbox. Just that one that had popped up in the junk folder last night. The subject line simply read, WARNING. It didn’t offer a Nigerian lottery prize or Viagra, so I opened it.
I will call you soon, read the email.
Creepy. I shrugged it off and opened up the metal gates to my stand.
I took a deep breath and scratched the end of my nose. Suddenly, my nostrils were tickly. It could only mean one thing. I cranked out the three canopies all the way.
Seconds after I finished, raindrops fell in moving sheets. I stood and watched the animated dot-matrix impacts make a story in the empty street. In fifteen minutes, the sun was out again and the air smelled of hot garbage. Or maybe it was stinky tofu.
Frankie the Cat came strolling down Daxi Road and nodded to me. Silently, he unloaded boxes of animal parts from the hand truck he was pushing. Despite the fact that I was never at the stand this early and that I was wearing yesterday’s clothes, he didn’t ask me a thing. Hell, he had probably put all the clues together already, so there was nothing for him to ask.
I helped him wash out grisly intestines and stomachs. Dwayne came in about half an hour later.
“Whoa, Jing-nan, what are you doing here so early?”
“I’m the owner,” I said. “I have a responsibility.”
“If you’re so responsible, then how come you haven’t changed clothes? Look at him, Frankie. What a dissolute man! Carrying on with women during Ghost Month! What nerve! Jing-nan would make the Eight Immortals keel over and die with his insolence!”
Frankie walked to the street and lit up a cigarette before speaking. “The kid’s getting laid and you’re not. Deal with it.”
The rain never came back, and throngs of tourists choked the streets. I called out to a middle-aged male tourist wearing a Clash shirt from the Give ’em Enough Rope era and told him that Joe Strummer should have begged Mick Jones to come back.
“I saw that last tour without Mick, and it sucked!” he roared.
“Mick went on to do great stuff, though,” I said. “Big Audio Dynamite’s first album was awesome.”
He smiled and waved his whole group of six over. Three couples of old punk rockers. The Clash guy came around the grill and hugged me like an old friend.
Over his shoulder I saw Peggy Lee in a black linen pantsuit enter and sit at one of our tables. I had a pet peeve about people putting their bags on empty chairs, and she indulged my annoyance when she plopped her Louis Vuitton down next to her. When I glanced at her again, she was holding her lipstick in a fist and smearing it on.
The group bought up a lot of stuff I wouldn’t normally be able to trick white people into trying: chicken hearts, gizzards, whole cuttlefish. They settled in at a table near the back.
I sat down next to Peggy as soon as I could.
“Did you just get out of work, Peggy?” I asked.
“I did. It’s quite a quick car ride here,” she said. “Could I get a napkin, Jing-nan?”
I swiped some from under the front grill and handed them to her. I thought she was going to kiss off the excess of her lipstick but instead she lifted her bag, wiped the seat under it and then put it back down.
“Are you hungry, Peggy?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Do you want to go somewhere?”
“You can have anything you see here.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’ll get something at home.”
I drummed my fingers on the table. “Speaking of which, funny seeing you this morning,” I said.
“Yes, funny seeing you in my building.”
“It was almost five in the morning. Pretty late for you to be going out.”
“I was going in to work. The market closes in New York at four A.M. our time, and the most relevant financial news comes out shortly after.” She folded her legs under the table and kicked me, maybe by accident. “I need to be up on the latest news before the Asian markets open.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to say hi or introduce you to Nancy.”
“You two seemed to be in a rush.” Her eyes narrowed as my silence fed her imagination. “Are you having something serious with her?”
“Peggy, I don’t see how she’s any of your business.”
“I’m here to save you.” She lowered her head and whispered, “You know about her, don’t you?”
“Sure I do.”
“She’s not a good girl.”
“I think she is.”
“You don’t have money, but you do have morals. You would never have cheated on Julia.”
“That’s right.”
“A girl like that has no standards,” said Peggy as she folded her hands in her lap. “How do you think she lives in a place like that even though she doesn’t have a real job?”
“Peggy, Nancy is a graduate student, and I know about her past.” I put my hands together and built a small wall of fingers on the table to shield myself.
“Look! I don’t want my old classmate to be seen associating with a call girl. Wang Ding-yu would come to stay with her. You know who he was, right? That tech executive who went to jail two years ago?” She slapped my finger fortress hard. “He’s married, and his kids are almost as old as us!”
“Ow! Gan! Well, so what, Peggy? Nobody’s perfect. Look at you! You’re divorced. There’s a stigma to that. Look at me! I’ve been living with a ghost, and this was years before Julia actually died.” I planted my elbows on the table as reinforcements. Even though I was talking to her, I was really speaking to myself. “You can plan on living a great life with someone you love, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to work out that way.”
Peggy’s hands shot to her bag and tore open a pocket. Why was she opening an eyeglass case? Oh, it was a flask disguised as an eyeglass case. Peggy took two quick pulls and grunted. She shoved it at me.
I took a small sip. “Damn, that’s not whiskey,” I gasped.
“It’s soju.”
Korean rice liquor. I wasn’t sure how much alcohol was in it, but it tasted like a hundred percent. She took another mouthful and stuck the flask back in her bag before continuing.
“You know, Jing-nan, that dirty Mr. Wang tried to pick me up at an investing conference in Beijing a few years ago. We were having drinks and he thought he could bring it to that next level.” A dreamy, happy look came over her eyes. “I was married at the time, too. He didn’t care.”
“I’m glad nothing happened,” I said. “You’re not the cheating kind.”
“I hate people who cheat. Boy, Mr. Wang got the shock of his life when I ran into him in the apartment building.”
“He probably wondered who had set you up there.”
Her face reddened and she grabbed my wrist. “Hah! The joke’s on him! My family helped to construct that place! Go read that plaque in the lobby!” She shifted in her seat before triumphantly adding, “We still own the penthouse apartment.”
I glanced back at the counter and wished hard for some customers to walk up. “Peggy, it’s nice that you stopped by, but I’m working right now. Maybe we can do lunch sometime.” I meant it, too. Even though we were completely different people and had a contentious past that sometimes bled into the present, I still liked her.
Her eyes flashed at my attempt to bring our talk to an end, and some programmed business instinct seemed to kick back in. “I came here to offer you something special, Jing-nan. Something no one else here is going to have.” She fished through her bag again and handed me a stuffed legal-sized Tyvek envelope.
“What is this?”
She dropped her voice and cupped her mouth. “It’s a lifeboat for when this night market gets blown out of the water,” she whispered. “This whole area is going to be redeveloped into condos and upscale retail.”
I regarded the envelope. It was unmarked and seemed to hold about twenty pages of paper clamped with a binder clip.
“They’ve been talking about that for years, even decades,” I said. “It’s never going to happen.”
“Oh, it’s going to happen, big boy. In about a year, give or take a few months of protests.” She looked happy enough to burst into song.
“How do you know?”
“We’re doing it. My family’s company. I’m taking the lead on this project.”
I grabbed my kneecaps. The removal of the night market was an on-again-off-again fight that pitted developers like Peggy Lee’s family against vendor families like mine that have built up their business over generations.
In the larger scheme, the well-off mainlanders wanted to bulldoze the night markets in the trendy parts of Taipei, even though the night markets were what made the areas so desirable in the first place. The scrappy benshengren—yams from the country, like my grandfather—had built the night markets with their bare hands and delighted in the simple pleasures of cooking and eating good food late at night.
Everything my grandfather and my parents did with their lives was sunk into my night-market stall. No business cards, letterheads or office doors carry their names—or mine. Threads of meat from that crappy chicken leg were still stuck in my teeth, reminding me how great a place Unknown Pleasures was. I would have picked up a bullhorn to fight for it.
When I was in eleventh grade, in fact, I remember the night-market merchants staged a huge protest when they got word that the city council was about to approve a rezoning of the area. In front of the night market’s Cixian Temple, a man doused himself with cooking oil and threatened to light himself for the news cameras on standby. The developers quickly backed off.
That protester was Julia Huang’s father. The grateful denizens of the night market tacked up posters that featured Mr. Huang standing in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square, with his pasted-on head turned to the viewer, Exorcist-like. Nonetheless, the Huangs sold their stand fairly soon after that incredible display.
I let out a small sigh. “Don’t do this, Peggy.”
“Don’t worry, Jing-nan. We’ll keep an indoor area for many of the vendors. It’s another step forward to help internationalize Taipei.”
I shuddered. Whenever I heard the phrase “internationalize Taipei,” I took it to mean they wanted to do away with lower-class neighborhoods and replace them with Taipei 101 clones. I looked over at Dwayne and Frankie. What place did they have in an exclusive Taipei built for wealthy tourists and rich mainlanders?
I patted the still-sealed envelope. “Now, what’s this about, Peggy?”
She kept her voice down and splayed her hand out palm-down on the table, practicing her grip for grabbing the entire globe. “We’re going to hold a lottery for spaces in the new retail location.” She narrowed her mouth and added, “We could assign you one majorly prime location by default.”
“Is this illegal?”
“It’s not. We’re allowed to designate spaces for the most culturally significant merchants as determined by a nonpartisan committee of which I am the chairwoman.” She gave a closed-mouthed smile and picked at the wax crumbs of lipstick in the corners. I crossed my legs under the table.
“Is the entire committee made up of mainlanders?”
“No! It’s about fifty-fifty. We were going to vote on potential candidates, but we’re finding that it’s easier for each member to simply pick one they want. I pick you.”
“I’m flattered, but I’m also somewhat disgusted.”
Peggy blinked. Her face remained in its neutral position of vague amusement.
“What makes you think you can pull this one off?”
Sure, there would be another ugly public hearing, complete with shouted threats, fistfights, crotch-level kicks and thrown chairs. Status quo won more often than not. But this time Peggy’s family was involved, and they were undefeated against little guys.
“History’s on our side, Jing-nan. They’ve already broken ground on the Taipei Performing Arts Center next to the Jiantan MRT Station. That’s gonna be done in 2015 or so, but before that you have to ask yourself, are well-dressed and well-heeled people going to want to fight their way through a grubby night market?” She opened her eyes wide for emphasis. “Of course not! Now, before or after a night at the theater, they might consider an indoor dining area that’s well-ventilated and clean, not like this.” She waved her right hand around.
It was true that the arts center was going to be completed roughly on time. What else was she right about? “Even if I agreed to this, and I’m not going to unless you put a gun to my head, everybody else here is going to hate me for life.”
“They won’t find out. I promise. I can make it look like you were lucky in the lottery.”
“How do I know you’ll keep your word?”
“We bought out Julia’s father years ago, in anticipation of developing these blocks someday. That troublemaker didn’t have too high a price. So, Jing-nan, you can trust me because I’ve never told anybody that except you just now.”