I met my girlfriend, Nancy, back at my apartment, which is about a five-minute walk from the Shilin Night Market if I cross against the light. It’s not an amazing apartment, but it’s close to work and it has what I need and more. I have a magnificent view of a poorly maintained neighborhood park. My landlord is an investment company, not a jiaotou, a local criminal, like my old landlord, so when something goes bust, a repair guy comes over to work on it, not a low-level hood on a probationary period.
Nancy was sitting on my couch, and by sitting I mean nearly sliding off, her bare feet against the coffee table’s edge the only things preventing her ass from hitting my patchy living-room rug.
She had shoulder-length hair with the ends cut straight across, making her head look like a perfect sphere. Her ears stuck out on the sides of her broad and beautiful face. She was two years younger than me but decades ahead in terms of human achievement.
An overwashed and stretched-out Psychedelic Furs shirt, one of my castoffs, disguised her athletic build while declaring “Love My Way.” I did like the Furs, but by the time that single from their third album was released, they had already started losing what made them cool.
The television was tuned to the Meilidao cable news channel but was on mute, which was the best way to watch it if it had to be on. “Tong-tong Is Gone Gone!” scrolled across the top of the screen while real-estate listings scrolled across the bottom.
“I’m so glad you’re back,” she said with a sigh. “I’ve been waiting for the leftovers.” Her feet nudged a bowl half-filled with rice that was waiting for me to top it with a heap of grilled meats and vegetables from Unknown Pleasures. Also splayed across the coffee table were the biology and biotech journals that Nancy read thoroughly and obsessively. I’m sure she knew more than many of her professors at Taida, which is Taiwan’s top university. Nancy’s the best asset in its biochemistry doctorate program, and they know it. Why else would the department make her the liaison for foreign undergraduate students if they didn’t think she reflected well upon the school, Taipei and the country?
The genius was crankily hungry now, however, and all bets on her behavior were off.
“You don’t have anything good in your fridge,” she moaned. “How is that possible? Aren’t you supposed to be a food guru or something?”
I slid in next to Nancy and put my right arm around her shoulders. “It’s true, I don’t have much food right now. You’ve caught me between personal shopping trips. But I have some bad news for you, honey. First of all, you know that that’s Peggy’s dad that’s been kidnapped, right?”
Nancy stretched and pushed her shoulder into my armpit. “Yes, I know. Peggy’s face keeps popping up every fifteen minutes when they do a slideshow of Tong-tong’s family pictures.”
“Well, Peggy and her police escorts came by late and they ate so much, I don’t have any leftovers tonight.”
Nancy retracted her legs and whirled her body around, slamming her knees into my side. In Taipei, being hungry and not having access to any good food was a serious emergency. “You didn’t bring anything, Jing-nan? Nothing at all?”
I folded up my legs and placed them between us in a defensive move. “It’s all gone. They were hungry because they were waiting so long at Peggy’s office for a ransom demand from the kidnappers.”
She drew a breath and shifted her jaw. “Ransom, huh?”
“Oh, shit, I shouldn’t have said that.”
Nancy’s eyes rolled up and to the right as she picked up her bowl and took a mouthful of plain rice. I couldn’t help but twitch. How can people eat rice with nothing? Texture’s no good without taste.
“Do you want some soy sauce or sea salt on that, Nancy?”
“Nah, it doesn’t matter, Jing-nan. This is just nervous eating now.” She swallowed and took in a sharp breath. “How much money did they want? A million NTs? Or maybe a million American dollars?”
In her voice, I heard the fascination and apprehension of the United States. They reminded me of someone else, my old high-school girlfriend. Curiously, though, she had no qualms about going to the US for college like I did.
“That’s the thing, Nancy,” I said. “They didn’t want money. Can you believe that? They want a chip design that they claimed Tong-tong had stored away. A special low-power chip.”
Nancy chewed another spoonful of rice. “That could be worth a lot of money,” she suggested. “If you own the patent and license something like that to an international company, it could bring in big money for years.”
I couldn’t help but rub my hands. “How much are we talking about?”
“A few million dollars. American dollars. Look at the royalties phone makers or even drug companies pay to license intellectual property. You get a patent on a whole new platform of technology that everybody ends up using, it could even be a billion dollars.”
As rich as they were, Peggy’s family didn’t have that kind of money. There was something that felt wrong, though.
“Well, let’s say the kidnappers manage to get the chip design. What company is going to pay to license stolen technology?”
Nancy rubbed her nose as a faraway look appeared in her eyes. She had entered a deep-think zone and it was a state from which she wasn’t easily aroused—in any sense of that word. I focused on the television to wait it out—her processing of the information.
The sound was still muted, but I was able to pick up the timeline of events leading to the kidnapping from the pop-up text along the bottom of the screen. Tong-tong had just enjoyed a surf-and-turf dinner when Wang Lao-shi, his high-school teacher, was introducing him to speak. Wang’s hair was completely white but it wasn’t thin and the guy continued to wear it in a crew cut. The old man raised a hand and shook a finger at a smiling Tong-tong and noted that his old student was always the first to speak when a mistake had gone unnoticed in class. Even if the teacher had made the mistake. The room erupted in laughter at that remark because what sort of student would be dumb enough to correct a teacher in front of an entire class?
“Aha!” said Nancy as she slapped my shoulder. “I’ve figured it out!”
“Ow!” I said, rubbing the point of impact. “What have you come up with?”
“What if it’s not a company that licenses the technology? What if it’s the Chinese government?” She greedily shoved more rice into her mouth and talked through her food. “It’s China, Jing-nan! It has to be!”
China. Taiwan’s political arch-nemesis even though many of us shared common ancestry. Those ties are ancient history for most people. From the Chinese government’s view, however, Taiwan was a toy that it desperately wanted to grab, and like a toddler, China would rather destroy it than let it get away.
“I hope you’re wrong, Nancy,” I said.
“I could be,” she said, although the pull in the pitch of her voice said she was right. She worked her tongue around her teeth to loosen a stubborn grain of rice.
“Wait,” I said. “One thing I don’t understand. If the chip is already patented, how can anyone else steal it and expect other people to license it from them?”
“Is the chip patented?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll bet it’s not,” said Nancy. “I’ll bet someone offered Tong-tong some or all of the patent for money upfront.”
“Well, they don’t know Tong-tong,” I said. “I don’t even know him that well but I know he’s too cheap to lay out cash like that.” It took the guy a million years to repave the pedestrian walk in my area of the night market. Is there such a thing as waiting for a sale on asphalt?
Nancy ran a finger along her right eyebrow. “It’s a little odd, the timing of this thing. Peggy’s dad was supposed to come to Taida next week to announce a major donation.”
“He didn’t even go to Taida,” I scoffed. I didn’t attend the school either, but I loved someone who did. I could’ve probably gotten in, too.
With the back of her hand, Nancy rolled a stray rice grain from her chin into her mouth. “Anybody can give money to the school. You don’t have to be an alumnus. You don’t even have to be a good person.”
A few years ago, the CEO of a Taiwanese company that made parts for the Apple iPhone referred to his factory workers as “animals” that were a “headache” to manage. He had been donating hundreds of millions of NTs to Taida—right in biomedical engineering, Nancy’s field. She had considered not taking any of the research money, but in the end she chose to be agnostic about it.
I support every choice my girlfriend makes in life. Every single one. But I don’t think I personally could’ve taken that guy’s money. Well, my fake night-market alter ego Johnny could. I slip into that guy every night and he doesn’t take offense to anybody bearing money. Actually, there’s one thing I definitely couldn’t do, no matter what persona I slipped on. I couldn’t call my workers animals. Dwayne would probably break me in half. If I ever made a truckload of money, I wouldn’t let it go to my head.
I imagined what it was like to be rich, as rich as the Lees. Once you had all that wealth, how could you be so insecure that you had to put people down as “animals”? At least Tong-tong was hesitant in speech, as Confucius instructed. Not that I admired Confucian ideals. No one followed them to the letter, but the man’s teachings sure seemed to be profound when taken piecemeal and out of context. The devil could cite Confucius to his purpose, after all.
My hand came across a rice grain on the couch and I palmed it. Nancy really must be hungry. She wasn’t usually a sloppy eater but now rice was going all over the place.
I chucked the rice grain in the general direction of the kitchen sink and was rewarded with a ping sound as it struck the metal. “Is Taida going to name a building or an autonomous car after Tong-tong?”
“He was planning to establish fellowships for eight students to study and do anthropology research in China. I found out about it from my friends in the student council. They have sources in the president’s office. They’re all so gossipy.”
I cracked my neck. The fellowship was the kind of thing that was a headache for the national consciousness.
A large part of the population, particularly the waishengren, the mainlanders, who were predominantly in the northern part of the island, believes that Taiwan is a part of China and should eventually join the motherland, one way or another.
Others, including many benshengren, people of Chinese descent whose ancestors had moved to Taiwan centuries ago, feel that Taiwan had separated from China in antiquity, and is an island nation in its own right.
Then there are the Hakka, people of Chinese descent who could be mainlanders, benshengren or a combination. Their identity is a cultural one, not ethnic, and Hakka have their own customs and language whose origins are obscured by the passage of centuries and the many migrations of their history.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s indigenous people, of both officially recognized and unrecognized tribes, want the waishengren and benshengren to stop developing on their ancestral lands.
Lost in the mix are the newer immigrants from Vietnam, Indonesia and Burma, and the Southeast Asian brides introduced to Taiwanese men through marriage brokers. These men have typically had a hard time meeting a potential mate because they aren’t upwardly mobile enough to attract the women who will indulge them in their misogynistic fantasies.
I’ll bet Tong-tong never had a problem like that.
Tong-tong’s financing of a Taida fellowship to study in China could be seen as a soft-power move to reinforce ties with The People’s Republic. Tong-tong was the ideal tool of the Chinese Communist Party: A charismatic and filthy rich Taiwanese from a mainlander family who could smooth out public apprehension at closer ties and eventual reunification.
But those attributes also made Tong-tong the perfect target for Taiwan-independence-minded kidnappers.
I pumped my left leg in excitement. “Nancy, who knew that Tong-tong was going to donate money to your school?”
Nancy chewed thoughtfully. “A few students, the administrators and I guess Tong-tong himself and the people who run his foundation.”
“Let me guess. This anthropology research will only reveal more cultural ties between the people of China and Taiwan.” There are often reports in media outlets run by mainlanders that Taiwanese customs have their origins in Chinese culture. That’s as ridiculous as saying that American traditions have their roots in Great Britain; everybody knows Americans drink coffee, not tea.
Nancy pulled a few strands of hair behind her ears and let them slip out. “I don’t think there are restrictions on what people can study and conclude. Otherwise it wouldn’t be honest research.”
I rubbed my right ear. “Maybe Tong-tong’s upcoming donation is a clue.”
“Jing-nan, you should probably tell the cops. They should know.”
“You’re right.” I knew where I could find at least two.
I called Peggy. As the phone rang I watched Nancy lope off to the kitchen. She scooped the rest of the rice out of the bowl and into the garbage.
“Hello, Jing-nan,” said Peggy. I heard the television in the background and it was the audio to our muted station. “Did you have a sudden realization or something?”
“You know I never get those, Peggy. Is Huang on the line, too?”
“Yes, I am, Mr. Chen,” he grunted.
“Well, I just heard that Tong-tong was going to announce some Taida fellowships to China.” I heard a tinkling sound coming from my kitchen. Nancy was shaking corn flakes into her emptied bowl. Then she jerked open the fridge and grabbed a carton of mango-flavored milk.
“Hmm,” said Huang.
“This is news to me,” said Peggy. “Not that he would tell me about it. What are the specifics?”
“He was going to sponsor students to study anthropology. In your homeland, Peggy.”
“It’s your homeland, too, Jing-nan. If you only admitted the truth to yourself.” She sighed. “You heard this from Nancy?”
“I did.”
She gave a satisfied grunt before talking because she had me all figured out. “Hey, Huang?”
“Yes.”
“Jing-nan must have heard this from his girlfriend, Nancy, who is some Taida superstar. My dad might have just floated the idea to see what sort of response he would get. Maybe he was fishing for an honorary degree from Taida or trying to get them to name a campus lake after him. He went to Ohio State in America, and even though he did well there, it’s not a real prestigious degree to have in your bio.”
“It’s no New York University,” I said, citing Peggy’s alma mater.
“No, it’s not,” she sang back. “It’s no UCLA, either. Huang, did you know that Jing-nan went to UCLA?”
“Oh, yeah?” asked the cop without a trace of interest.
“I didn’t graduate. Well, that doesn’t matter, anyway. What about the Taida thing, Huang. Does it interest you at all?”
He inhaled slowly. “This is new information. I don’t know if it’s useful.”
Nancy returned to the couch, and I angled away from her cereal-crunching sounds. “Despite what Peggy says, Taida took the offer seriously,” I said. “The students are already chatting about it.”
“The guy talks a lot of shit, Jing-nan,” said Peggy, almost exasperated. “Especially when there aren’t cameras in his face. His mouth is like an old hair dryer.”
Huang grunted lightly. “I’ll have some of our people look into it. I’m sure one of the boys or girls could give some attention to this.” I hoped he meant lower-level cops rather than high-school interns.
“Thank you. Peggy, I feel terrible about your father. I hope we get him back soon.”
I heard her suck in her lips. “Thank you, Jing-nan. I’m not really that worried. I’m sure he’ll be rescued, one way or another.” She was trying hard but her voice wavered. “Listen. Jing-nan, your food was really good tonight. Have you ever thought about opening a real restaurant?”
I stretched my legs. Was she trying to annoy me? “Unknown Pleasures is a real restaurant.”
“You know what I mean. Being in the night market is, well, kinda scuzzy. You should have a nice, big place with banquet rooms and everything! Do you know how many famous people you could be rubbing shoulders with?”
“I already have Nancy to rub my shoulders.” Nancy looked at me and raised an eyebrow.
Peggy clucked her tongue. “I’m glad I’m not in a relationship. It robs you of your ambition! Huang, are you married?”
“Yes.”
“Are you happy?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you probably don’t spend much time with your wife, as a cop. That’s why you’re happy.”
Huang gave a warning laugh. “Say whatever you want. You’re paying me to be here.”
It was time to go. I had gotten the Taida info to the police and subjected myself to Peggy’s annoyances. With those tasks done, I said good night and hung up.
“Did I hear that you wanted a shoulder rub?” asked Nancy.
“I wouldn’t mind one.”
She formed a pair of chopsticks with her index and middle finger and made like she was eating something out of the bowl with them.
Of course Nancy was still hungry even after the cereal.
“I get you food and then you give me a shoulder rub?” I asked. She nodded.
I left the apartment, jogged around the corner to the nearest Family Mart and scooped out a passable bowl of beef noodles from the hot bar. Who knows how many hours the noodles had sat in hot water? A chef should never treat a starch like that. Then again, anyone who considered himself or herself a chef wouldn’t work at Family Mart.
As I was paying, I overheard a snippet of conversation from a straight couple in their early twenties, immersed in their respective phones at an eat-in table.
“Did you hear about Tong-tong?” the man gasped with his mouth full of food.
“Yeah, I did,” muttered the woman. “Fuck that prick. He got what he deserved.”
“Still, it’s embarrassing for Taiwan.”
The woman smacked her lips in contempt. “He should have thought about that before he started throwing his money around for the Double-Nine holiday. What a publicity hound.”
I turned my head but couldn’t bring myself to walk away just yet. I thought I could say something like, “Hey, I’m classmates with his daughter and you’re being incredibly disrespectful.” But confronting strangers won’t do in Taiwan. Here, you can only tell off people close to you. On the way out I waved to them to get their attention, and then nodded. Let them wonder what it meant.
When I returned to the apartment, Nancy bounded off the couch and confronted me even before I had both shoes off. “Oh, thank you so much, Jing-nan!”
I held the bag up, out of her reach. “Well, hold on, now. How are you going to compensate me for getting you this food? I sorta went through hell for this, after all.”
She strutted to the couch, ran her fingers through her hair and delicately put her feet back on the coffee table. “I will allow you to feed me, little boy.” Nancy opened her mouth comically wide and clapped her hands in a call for service. I could only comply.
In the early morning we showered off the crust accumulated from sleep and sex. It was a little after 5 a.m., but no sleeping in today for either of us. Nancy had to do some lab work and I was hitting the day market.
We dressed in front of the TV. There wasn’t anything new in the Tong-tong coverage. His photos cycled through the screen, the same treatment given to newly dead celebrities. Tong-tong looked triumphant and only a little smug in each one, whether declaring a vow at his wedding, walking as one of the bearers of Mazu’s statue in the birthday pilgrimage of Taiwan’s top Taoist goddess (another bearer, behind Tong-tong, was the vice president of Taiwan), or sitting courtside at a Los Angeles Lakers home game.
As I did a standing breaststroke into a tank top, I thought about that couple back at the Family Mart. I could see how they could casually dismiss Tong-tong. He had money. He was comfortable. He was worthy of contempt by those who were stumbling at the yoke end of our country’s gross domestic product.
Taiwan’s economy was sputtering along and the job market sucked for my generation of twenty-somethings. We were a people born in the years following the Tiananmen Square crackdown, and for the most part we wondered what we could possibly have in common with the government and events in China, which is what many non-businessmen in Taiwan regard as a foreign and hostile country.
That mindset didn’t stop people from going to China to try to find jobs. Didn’t the Beatles have to go to Hamburg, Germany, to get decent gigs when they were starting out? If your parents were mainlanders and if you had no problem using “Taiwan Compatriot” forms of identification (China doesn’t recognize Taiwan passports), you could. Australia was another destination for young people. Supposedly you could make more waiting tables in Sydney than sentencing yourself to a sixty-hour workweek in a Taipei office cubicle with no paid overtime.
I was fairly lucky. Well, as lucky as an orphan could get. Yes, my parents were dead, and yes, I never got to finish my degree at UCLA. But look what I had. My own apartment, for starters, which was a big deal because most young people in Taiwan unfortunately lived with their parents until they were married. Sure, I had to pay rent, but think of all the money Nancy and I were saving by not paying for a love hotel on a regular basis.
I had my own business, too, the old family stand, and we were kicking ass. I created food and got paid for it. Quite a bit, at times. Locals may not like the Shilin Night Market because its offerings run too touristy, but the work-alter ego I have cultivated for myself loves the foreigners. Johnny loves hearing their stories, fielding their questions about Taiwan and all Asians in general, and giving prefab answers about his personal history—all up until they pay and for maybe a minute after, depending on the size of the ticket.
The real me is an introvert willing to engage with strangers with little else apart from the topics of proto-punk, punk and post-punk bands of the 1960s through the 1990s.
I will talk to anybody wearing a Joy Division shirt, no matter how damaged and/or deranged they look. We’ll light up to talk about our favorite band and debate which of the studio albums were better, Unknown Pleasures or Closer. I loved the debut album enough to name my stand after it. Maybe Peggy was right. Maybe I should think about opening a big restaurant and naming it “Closer.” Then again, that sounds like “close,” as in my restaurant could do badly and close. Certainly it was an ill-omened name.
I’ve already committee a major faux pas by naming my business after a Joy Division album. One aspect about the band that I loved was that they shied away from anything that could be even remotely construed as commercial. They didn’t put their name on the front cover of their albums and their individual names or pictures didn’t appear anywhere. The pre-Internet listener of the early ’80s had no idea who they were or what they looked like.
That was cool.
Then again, I had read in bassist Peter Hook’s autobiography that they all had gotten screwed out of money. Actually, they continued to be screwed because the band’s members had signed contracts they hadn’t read, much less understood, and had missed out on millions. Surely, that was no way to conduct oneself in business, even if it gave you a superhighway of street cred.
I wasn’t one to talk about pure artistry. I sort of sold myself out by assuming my Johnny persona, but I hadn’t gone further with it. Would it be egregious to take the celebrity chef route and open a place nice enough to have candles on the tables, the kind of place with ambiance, where a person might pop the question? I couldn’t ask Nancy to marry me in the clammy confines of Unknown Pleasures, could I?
Nancy closed the pearl snaps on her blouse and the sharp sounds jolted me out of my anxieties thought piece. I actually twitched. Then I felt ashamed about being selfish in my thoughts, wondering if I was cool enough while my old classmate’s father had been kidnapped.
“Are you all right, Jing-nan?”
“I’m just a little shaken up about Tong-tong.” That was true.
She touched my shoulder. “We’re all worried about him. He was trying to do a good thing, too, for the elderly on the holiday.” She sighed with a measure of futility. “Tonight I have to write something for our department website about the Double Ninth. How our research is connected with respect for our elders.”
“Shit,” I said. “Why do you have to write garbage like that?”
Nancy raised an eyebrow as she adjusted her belt. “My advisor wants it online with a special acknowledgement to Best Therapeutics for supporting our department.”
I waited a few moments. “You don’t have any recent Double Ninth experiences to draw from.”
She evaluated what I said. “I don’t.”
“When do you think you’re going to see your mom and the rest of your family?”
Nancy looked into the corners of the room. “It’s not entirely up to me. Anyway, what families don’t cut each other off for a few years?”
“Or a few decades.”
“It hasn’t been that long.”
“I wasn’t talking about you in particular,” I said, reaching down to scratch my knee. “I was just saying, you know, some people are like that.”
She nodded. “I know. This thing I’m writing, though, it’s more like a service piece to thank the drug company for its support under the guise of the holiday.”
“What holiday are you going to soil in order to thank Tong-tong for his donation?”
She tucked her shirt into her slacks. “I would never do that. I don’t want anything bad to happen to him, but I would draw the line at thanking him. At least Best Therapeutics is saving lives, so it’s more than just a business.”
Did Tong-tong ever save someone’s life? Probably not. A Buddhist would say, maybe that’s why his life was in danger now.
Wait, did I ever save anyone’s life? I sort of saved Dwayne and Nancy, but actually it was Frankie who saved all of us in the end. I wondered if it would come down to Frankie saving Tong-tong. No way. The cops would handle this one.
Nancy was already dressed. “I’ll be back here before you.” She kissed my forehead. “This time, bring back food.”
I shoved a few cloth bags into the biggest one. “You’re still mad about me not bringing leftovers last night?” I asked.
She dismissed me by tousling my hair. “Don’t be silly. If I were mad, I wouldn’t even be talking to you.”