Maybe, I thought, maybe it was just a little joyride for the day. A romp at the love hotel. Mei-ling might turn up at the night market, sheepish and apologetic. Hell, I would even settle for a smug, defiant, and drunk teen as long as she came back.
C’mon, girl. I did make fun of you but really I’ve been trying to help you. I don’t deserve to be treated like this and I certainly don’t deserve Big Eye coming down on my ass.
I could feel hope dying in my chest with every passing hour I stood in front of Unknown Pleasures. Dwayne playfully twisted my arm behind my back but all I did was sigh. He released me immediately.
“Hey, Jing-nan, what’s going on?”
“I have a problem. A big one.”
“Big one, eh?” He said under his breath, “Is Nancy pregnant?”
“Gan! No! It’s Mei-ling!”
“Mei-ling’s pregnant? I’ll kill the guy!”
“She ran away,” I howled. “With her ex-boyfriend!”
Frankie raised an eyebrow. He was too far to hear, but maybe he was reading our lips. I wouldn’t count anything out with him.
Near the end of the night and in the depths of my despair, Frankie came up to me and touched my left hand lightly. “You’re not upset about me taking time off?” he asked, already knowing that wasn’t the case.
“No, not at all,” I said.
“I’ll bet you’re wondering why.”
“It’s none of my business, Frankie.”
“I want to tell you, Jing-nan,” he said. “I’m going to burn incense for Chiang Kai-shek.”
I was speechless. The Generalissimo had presided over the martial law era that saw Frankie wrongfully arrested and jailed.
Frankie, as a teen, had met Generalissimo Chiang while serving in the orphans’ brigade. Frankie drew admiration from the old soldier by showing off his arm tattoos. The ones that he had only recently removed.
“Why, Frankie?” It was none of my business but my curiosity had gotten the better of me.
“I had a dream,” he said.
Dwayne took a seat, put his elbows on the table and held his head up with both hands like a little kid. Frankie didn’t tell stories much and when he did they were awesome.
“The Generalissimo came to me and saluted. I saluted back. Then he bent his head forward in a small bow and when he straightened up again, his face was wet with tears. He apologized for my jail sentence and said that he was suffering for all the injustices he knew about but didn’t stop. I said that I didn’t believe he was sorry. The Generalissimo got down on all fours and banged his head against a stone until he bled. What could I do? I tried to help him up but he refused to get off his hands and knees. I said out loud that this was the strangest dream I ever had. He looked up at me and said it wasn’t a dream. When I protested, he said that he remembered me as a kid with the arm tattoos and that one stroke was missing from the character for ‘country.’”
Frankie paused to unwrap a stick of gum and put it in his mouth. Neither Dwayne nor I could breathe.
“I checked my arm when I woke up,” Frankie said. “The ink is almost completely gone now but I could see that a stroke was missing in that character. I’d never noticed before.”
“Gan!” said Dwayne.
“You must’ve known, on a subconscious level,” I said. “You’ve been hiding it from yourself.”
Frankie leaned over to me. “Jing-nan, did you know on some level that Chong wasn’t going to give up on Mei-ling?”
“He had me completely fooled,” I said.
“Who had you fooled?”
I whirled around to see Captain Huang, holding a half-eaten fried pork chop in his left hand while pointing at me with his left index finger. “You’re not easily tricked, are you, Jing-nan? In fact, you’re the one who’s usually trying to pull a fast one.” He wasn’t happy and looked like he was losing sleep. His normally baggy eyes now exceeded the carry-on limit.
I smiled and nodded. The captain had called me “Jing-nan,” but only Johnny was here now. “I thought you’d be here earlier for dinner, Captain,” I said. “I still have some chicken-anus skewers. I understand they’re your favorite.”
Captain Huang sucked his teeth noisily. “I just came by to tell you that I caught Big Eye’s daughter’s music act,” he said. “I knew about the show and I was considering pulling the plug, since you didn’t have a permit. But Orchids was really good. Me and all the boys were into it.”
“How did you know the show was going to happen?” I asked.
“I saw it pop up on TaiPride.”
“Why is everybody going to that site?”
He casually tossed the remains of the pork chop on an otherwise clean table. He was trying to push my buttons, trying to get me to overreact so he’d have an excuse for giving me lumps. “I do research online to keep abreast of potential disturbances. It’s a convenient place to see when and where unsavory types are gathering. Well, I’ll see you later, Jing-nan.” The captain pointed at the pork chop and the small skid mark it had made. “How about we clean that up?” he said and walked away.
“What a total asshole,” muttered Dwayne, articulating my thoughts perfectly. Frankie said nothing but made some knives shriek against the sharpening stone.
I brushed aside the encounter and cleaned off Captain Huang’s pork chop from the table. I put all thoughts about Mei-ling on the backburner along with the chicken gizzards.
When I heard the sounds of the brooms sweeping out closing stands I imagined I could hear her footsteps in them. I left Unknown Pleasures earlier than I usually did, as if I were escorting Mei-ling home again.
“I should’ve known,” I wailed to Nancy. “That little bastard Chong!” She was lying in my bed, typing away at her laptop yet again.
“You have to tell Big Eye,” she said for the seventh time.
“I will if she’s not back by the morning,” I said, also for the seventh time.
“You should tell him now. The more time Mei-ling and Chong have, the farther away they can get.” A chime rang out as she saved her file. “Wait, I understand now. You want them to get away. You want to see the girl get away from her controlling father and get to be with her boyfriend from the wrong side of the tracks. That’s very romantic of you, Jing-nan.”
Was that true? After all, I wasn’t ideologically opposed to Mei-ling and Chong being together.
Then I thought about where that left me with Big Eye. He couldn’t flat out kill me, could he? I was his nephew, after all! What would he do to Chong and Mei-ling when he found them? I was sure he would find them, too. Chong would get the worst of it, I’m sure. A broken arm? Both legs?
“What should I do?” I asked Nancy, sure that the distress was plain on my face.
“Call Big Eye now. Tell him what happened. Maybe he won’t be mad.”
“Now, let me make sure I understand this properly,” Big Eye said on the phone. He was one of those guys who became joyfully detail-oriented when seized by anger. “Chong picked up my daughter on his motorcycle at the Zhinan Temple and you’re telling me about it now, nearly twelve hours later.”
“I thought she might come back,” I said weakly.
“She’s not answering her phone?”
“She isn’t.”
“Listen, my little nephew. We have to talk in person. Get your ass on the high-speed rail to Taichung. Leave right fucking now and you’ll make the eleven p.m. train. I’ll see you at the station.”
“Big Eye, that doesn’t make any sense. Taichung would be the last place they would go. Don’t you want to start looking here?”
His words were pleasantly marinated in menace and he ended the call with, “I’m going to make some phone calls immediately but in the meantime, get on that goddamned train and I’ll see you very soon.”
“He wants to see me in person, Nancy,” I said.
“He probably just wants to gouge your eyes out.”
“Nancy, this isn’t funny. My cousin could be in serious danger.”
She crossed her arms. “I’m sure she’s fine. It sounds like Chong really loves her. Big Eye is what you should be worried about. Until he gets a hold of her, he might . . . slap you around a little bit.”
I stepped into my left shoe. “Slapping. I can handle slapping.”
The high-speed rail station was actually in Wuri District, a suburb outside of Taichung’s city proper. It was very appropriate that I was bringing my worries to Wuri.
Outside my window I saw lit shades in lopsided buildings teeming together and then whizzing by. Sometimes there were long and bleak stretches of rice paddies reflecting the night sky. Seeing this representation of the universe made me feel small, insignificant, and helpless. It didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things who I was, the things I cared about, the people I loved. The sky would be dark at night and light in the morning.
Then I had something of an epiphany. If the universe was indifferent to each person, it was all the more important to be who you wanted to be, do the things you cared about and be with the people you love because you had to live your life in a way that mattered to you.
I found myself more accepting of recent events. Nancy was absolutely right. I supported Mei-ling completely if she wanted to be with Chong, even if it meant living on the run for the rest of their lives. I couldn’t stop someone from being with the one they loved and neither could Big Eye. Maybe it was up to me to stand up to Big Eye and tell him to back off and leave them alone or he was going to lose his daughter forever.
The train was silent and brutally efficient at bringing me to my uncle. It was only an hour station to station. I wasn’t exactly sure what to say to Big Eye, but as Mei-ling’s big cousin, I had to have her back. I could step up and have a man-to-man talk with her father. I wasn’t a boy anymore.
They picked me up at the station in the bulletproof SUV—Whistle, Gao, and Big Eye. I thought we were headed to the house but then we took a detour down a dark alley. Nobody said anything.
We rolled to a stop near the end.
Big Eye pulled at his pants near the knees.
“I don’t know how to say this to you, Jing-nan,” he said. I was watching his hands. Those rings could really hurt my face.
“I’m sorry,” I started. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t stop Mei-ling from being with the guy she loved, but you can’t either.”
Big Eye snorted. “What the hell are you talking about, Jing-nan? There’s nothing to be sorry about. No. We’re beyond that.” He tapped Whistle on the shoulder and the radio came up. A talk show with a rich and famous adherent to the I-Kuan Tao religion was taking questions about his faith. “You shouldn’t expect to become rich,” someone on the radio said, “but if it is in your fate, you will be.”
Gao stepped out of the vehicle and held the door open.
“Give your phone to Gao,” said Big Eye. I did as I was told. I guess he wanted to go through my history to see if I was lying. I had nothing to hide. Gao closed the door and walked into the shadows.
Big Eye gave me a tight one-arm hug and pulled me over to his face.
“Listen, Jing-nan,” he whispered in my left ear as the rich man on the radio continued talking, “Chong is gone.”
“I know he was missing for a while, but apparently he came out of hiding and took Mei-ling.”
Big Eye gave a wry smile and loosened his grip on me. “Chong didn’t take anything or anybody because he is dead. He’s been dead.”
I shifted in my seat. There was only one reason why he would know.
“He came to see me a few days ago.” Despite his former expressions of disgust and racial hatred for the young man, Big Eye seemed genuinely shaken as he explained. “He said that he had tried to put Mei-ling out of his mind after seeing you. Couldn’t do it. He said he wanted to be a man about it so he came straight to me and said he wanted to be with my daughter. I said no. Chong lost his temper. Things spun out of control. He called me a ‘Big Brokeback.’ How the fuck could he have thought that he could talk like that to me? The kid ended up dying.”
Big Eye patted me and moved away. The radio blabbed on as we sat in silence.
My uncle was a murderer. The realization cut across all my memories of him. The hands that had fed me candy when I was a child had blood all over them. I had never thought that he was capable of such horrors. I think I could accept gambling, prostitution, and even loansharking if he joked about his misdeeds and shrugged. But killing? No.
Captain Huang had mentioned those bodies found in a sugarcane field in Taichung and I’d been so sure there was no way Big Eye was involved. How naïve of me. Not just about that one crime but about my entire relationship with my uncle.
I wished now that I had never reconnected with him. When Whistle and Gao first came for me I should have run down the fire escape and hid in the alley.
Then I wouldn’t have met Mei-ling. Wait, who the hell picked her up on the motorcycle? Big Eye was wondering the same thing right from the get-go. Gan, maybe she was in a lot of trouble!
My thoughts then turned back to Chong. That poor guy. Why did he think he could reason with a shark? My uncle had killed him. That confused kid who’d sat in my kitchen for fifteen minutes or so was now gone forever. What did Big Eye do? Shoot him?
Big Eye snorted and reached into his jacket. I jumped.
He smirked as he produced a flask and offered it to me. I shook my head and he took a long pull. Big Eye was troubled by the murder. I could see that. He’d probably just lost his temper and got carried away.
Wait, what was I thinking? I was trying to rationalize how my uncle killed somebody.
I wasn’t ready to talk to Big Eye yet, so I returned to listening to the I-Kuan Tao celebrity on the radio.
“It’s the true heavenly way,” the man declared. “I’ve been involved with different religions in the past. This is the first one that makes sense and has compassion.”
Without a pause, a chipper female doctor’s voice came on the air to deliver a commercial for hair-transplant surgery, saying a middle-aged man could look and feel young again and do well in online dating. Listening to this stupidity helped me find my mettle.
I turned to Big Eye. “You made a big deal about Chong disappearing. That was a cover story. You knew exactly where he was.” My uncle swished his flask thoughtfully and said nothing. “Are you absolutely sure that he’s dead? Is it possible that he recovered and met up with Mei-ling?”
Big Eye tapped my nose with the edge of his flask. “You think I don’t know what dead looks like, little Jing-nan? Chong’s already on his next incarnation.”
“Where’s his body?” I asked, my voice shredding and betraying me.
Big Eye snapped the flask shut and put it away. “That doesn’t matter, Jing-nan. Let’s worry about who the fuck did pick up my little girl.”
“Did Chong and his boys ever work for you?”
He tapped his fingernails against the flask. “We might have contracted some low-level stuff to them,” he said.
“He told me you made the Indonesians fight one another.”
“I didn’t do shit! What do you think poor people do when money starts showing up? Divvy it up evenly?” Big Eye put away his flask and closed his eyes. “I have to think.”
The last trains back to Taipei, high-speed or conventional, were long gone. I’d have to wait until the morning for a ride back. Whistle and Gao were needed to attend to some unspecified matter, so they dropped off Big Eye and me at the house for the night. Big Eye set me up in a small room crowded with vintage kendo practice swords decorating the wall.
The futon was a traditional one, stuffed with cotton and lacking modern adjustments for comfort, such as springs. The two pillows were filled with buckwheat chaff. The towel-like summer blanket was probably also traditionally Japanese.
Do you know people who are so obsessed with a culture that they have appointed themselves as the guardians of its traditions against change? Big Eye didn’t want to be a contemporary Japanese. He wanted to be who the Japanese were a century ago, those of the powerful, blindly ambitious Great Empire of Japan who drove their own people into poverty as the military overreached. I can understand his obsession. If I lived in a century-old Japanese-style house, I’d have to be pretty psyched for that era, too.
I disrobed and put on a set of static-free cotton pajamas I found in a drawer. I dropped into the futon and rubbed my eyes. When my focus came back I noticed that the kendo swords were all pointing at me, accusing me of losing Mei-ling and causing Chong’s death.
I turned on my side and closed my eyes.
Who picked up Mei-ling? The ghost of Chong? Another boyfriend she had had on the side?
What was it like growing up in this house with this father? One thing was for sure. A man fascinated by Imperial Japan was bound to be a disciplinarian. A harsh one.
I opened my eyes and examined the blade of the nearest wooden sword. It had a multitude of nicks and dents.
I imagined Mei-ling training with this sword, knocking back Big Eye’s attacks while waiting for an opportunity to strike back.
Ah, that’s what this disappearing act was. Mei-ling had deliberately planned her daring escape in Taipei. She knew what she was going to do long before the trip began.
It made me feel a little depressed and I wasn’t sure why. Really, the failed relationship between my uncle and my cousin wasn’t any of my business. Yet these two people were all the family I had left in the world. You don’t get to choose your family but there’s something in not having that choice. We were destined to share our lives together. I thought about Big Eye making me laugh when I was a kid. Was he already a murderer back then?
In the morning I met Big Eye at the dining table. He looked like he hadn’t slept. He stared at cross sections of kiwi fruit on his plate. The seedy eyes stared back as he put his elbows up on the table. I had been prepared to either stare him down or avoid him altogether. But I wasn’t ready to see Big Eye looking so defeated and pathetic.
“I shouldn’t have been so hard on her,” he spoke into his right fist. “Maybe she didn’t need to finish high school. I wanted what I thought was best for her. I didn’t care what she thought.” He grabbed his phone and frantically typed away, checking his email, voice mails, and texts. “No wonder she couldn’t stand me.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, which is an odd thing to say to a killer. “Maybe she’ll come back soon.”
He nodded and drank a full glass of spiked orange juice before speaking. “She’s not coming back voluntarily. Mei-ling has to be found. And when I find her, I’m going to put a fucking bullet in her head.”
I took the high-speed rail back to Taipei. I accidentally sat in a reserved seat when I had an ordinary ticket. The rightful passengers were cool about it. Young man and a young woman. Maybe they were brother and sister. Maybe they were a couple. Taiwanese are so reserved in their manners in public it was hard to tell unless they were carrying a baby. And even then . . .
I slinked down a car to an open seat in a coach car and rubbed my hands. I went over what Big Eye said was going to happen.
It was going to be a two-pronged approach. He, Whistle, and Gao were going to use their own “channels” to try to find Mei-ling. He told me that I should check out the places that she had expressed interest in, such as the arts group in the juancun and Ximending. Just how the hell I was supposed to cover the entirety of one of the most fashionable neighborhoods in Taipei was beyond me, but I was willing to give it a shot. How could I not?
I had had big plans for this girl. I leaned against the window and closed my eyes. Mei-ling, you and I had made plans!
I could see the digital release of her EP and then maybe a little tour and music contract. She could have gone far but I guess the attraction to a life on the lam away from her dad was too strong. I hated to think that she was in over her head.
Was it some guy Mei-ling’s age? Or was it an older guy like in Lolita? Maybe one of those weirdos holed up in that juancun.
I stood outside the juancun. It looked more charming and less rundown up close. The complex reminded me of the toaster-shaped illegal house I grew up in. The toaster house had lived up to its name by burning down. Although I lost nearly everything I owned, the disaster also freed me from living with the memories of my late parents and grandfather.
I entered the courtyard and came upon groups of grandfathers playing mahjongg at concrete tables. Younger people of both sexes were building what looked like a parade float that featured a straw effigy in a paper suit with the President’s name on it. Three young men in tank tops, apparently the lookouts, broke off from the group and confronted me.
“Can I help you?” asked the leader, a guy with spiky hair with Beats headphones hugging his neck. He was friendly but wary. The second guy held a camera phone on me. The third seemed to stand there for moral support.
“My name is Chen Jing-nan. I’m looking for a friend of mine, a young girl named Mei-ling,” I said. “I think she might have come here. Here’s a picture of her.” I held up my camera.
Beats squinted as he gave a cursory look at the camera. “That doesn’t look like anybody here,” he said, curling his bottom lip. “Are you a cop?”
I looked down at my dusty shoes, greased jeans and threadbare shirt that featured the tomb-theme artwork of Closer, Joy Division’s second album. I was going to wear that shirt until it dried up and fell off my back like a dead leaf. “Do I look like a cop?” I asked.
Beats nodded. Really?
“Search him,” he said and motioned to the third guy. I put my hands up and turned to the second guy’s camera.
“Whoa!” I said. “Aren’t you being a little extreme here? Do you guys have guns or something?”
Beats spoke up. “We’ve all had death threats here. The local police precinct has been harassing us, too. People have left dog carcasses in our courtyard as warnings, so, no, we’re not being extreme.” He pulled his right ear. “And, no, we don’t have guns.”
I looked down and noticed that their feet were in neutral stances but ready to fly into action. As the third guy approached me, I knew that I had to let him pat me down if I was going to have a shot at looking for Mei-ling on the premises.
“Sorry,” the third guy said in English as he crouched and ran his hands down my thighs. After he checked my ankles, waistband and the small of my back, he called out to Beats, “I recognize this guy now. I thought his name sounded familiar—he’s Jing-nan, the hero of Shilin Night Market. He’s clean, too.”
“Wait,” the second guy said to me, “you were the one who deflected that bullet?”
“That’s me,” I said, playing to the camera that he still held up. Something touched my left side and I flinched. It was Beats. He was patting me hard on the back.
“Gan!” he said. “You’re the first celebrity to visit!”
Now that I had the full approval of the gatekeepers, other people freely approached.
“Jing-nan,” said Beats, “I don’t know who you’re looking for but, seriously, it’s been months since anyone new has come in.” He cleared his throat. “Actually, we’ve been losing more people than we’d like to.”
“You know my name,” I said to Beats, “so what’s yours?”
He shook his head. “None of us are telling outsiders our names. We have to protect ourselves and our families.”
An elderly man at a mahjongg table pulled off his baseball cap and fanned his face.
“What does it matter?” he yelled. “The government already knows who we are! Sooner or later they’re going to knock this place down. You might as well have some fun, not waste time building an effigy of the President to burn.”
“That’s not for a parade?” I asked Beats.
He nodded grimly. “We’re going to set it on fire and stream the video online to show how the government is taking away our freedoms.”
The elderly man spoke up again. “Start a fire for what? People are just going to think you’re irresponsible! You want to make trouble, why don’t you join up with those idiot students who occupied the Legislative Yuan? Don’t do it here where we all have to live.”
“Well, it doesn’t really concern you, so don’t worry about it,” was Beats’s weak reply.
“I’m glad I didn’t spend my youth doing useless things,” said the man. “I was in the army. I had fun and those memories are still great!”
As the old soldier’s companions laughed out loud, Beats could only shake his head.
When I was at UCLA, I’d discovered that many people had the wrong idea about how Confucianism worked. Americans thought that younger generations of East Asians were completely deferential to older generations. That’s not true at all. We can challenge the thinking of our parents’ generation. Just not verbally.
The effigy burning would go on. So would the mahjongg game.
“Why are you so sure that it wasn’t Chong who whisked away Mei-ling?” asked Nancy. We were walking through Ximending a little after noon. The place was dead. It wouldn’t begin to come to life until the late afternoon when the middle- and high-school kids started crawling in. The young people drove business in the area, especially the rich kids treating less-fortunate members of their entourages to food, movies, or other entertainment.
“First of all,” I said, “nobody ‘whisked away’ my little cousin. She was at least a part of the plan, if not the mastermind of it. And second, I know for sure it wasn’t Chong.”
We stopped walking. “Tell me how you know.”
I looked into her eyes and held her hand.
“Oh my god! Big Eye didn’t!”
I opened my eyes wider. She punched my arm.
“Gan,” I groaned.
“Jing-nan! You have to tell the police he killed Chong!”
“That’s a good one, Nancy. ‘Tell the police.’ First of all, I don’t have any evidence. Secondly, I don’t even know how he did it. And third, it could complicate the safe return of Mei-ling. Anyway, Big Eye’s right-hand man is a cop—the big guy—so you could say ‘the police’ already know about it.”
I wanted to continue walking but Nancy remained rooted. “Why did Big Eye kill that boy?”
“Well, I had nothing personal against him, but Chong was no angel, you know?” I rationalized. “He and his buddies had done jobs for Big Eye. They weren’t boosting their community and actually they contributed to the negative perception that the country has about immigrants. I hate to say it, but Chong knew he was playing a dangerous game.”
“Your beloved uncle is now a murderer,” Nancy said through clenched teeth.
“He may have killed before.” I quickly revised that to, “He probably has.”
She grabbed the insides of her elbows and put her head down. “What a nice family you come from, Jing-nan.”
“I’ve never asked you much about your family. Are they so much better?” I really had no idea.
Nancy lifted her head slightly and looked away from me, across the street. “They sure aren’t criminals.”
I could have brought up her old sugar daddy, the former semiconductor executive who was now doing time for bribery. The guy who gave her the fancy apartment and souped-up sports car. I wondered if he would try to reclaim them both when he was released.
I didn’t want to say anything to hurt Nancy, though. She was clearly in shock after finding out about Chong, at least as much as I was. But there was another young life at stake.
I put my arms around Nancy’s strained shoulders and said, “Big Eye and his whole crew are awful people. I know that. But the important thing now is to find Mei-ling as soon as possible because she might be in trouble.”
Nancy nodded. “Yes,” she said. “She’s not in a good place.”
We began walking again and soon came upon the triangular plaza between Hanzhong Street and a side lane of Emei Street. This was the prime stage in Ximending for a band to set up on the sidewalk and play.
When I was a kid, right here at this intersection was where I saw bands from all over the world playing everything from Mandopop to American country to reggae. As a self-righteous and all-knowing young jerk, I stood there and scowled even if I liked the music. I had to maintain my cool, after all.
Not so long ago I stood at this triangle and watched a band of middle-aged men covering the Moody Blues. The singer would have looked like my father if he had only stopped smiling. During the long instrumental breaks in “Nights in White Satin,” he continued to stand front and center, waving his hands in the air and staring up at the stars.
One wouldn’t think that a bunch of old farts in suits trotting out the songs of the ancients would play well to smoking teenagers but the audience was fully engaged. Boys with their ties pulled loose and shirttails out. Girls with their skirts rolled up at the waist. Me in my long London Fog trench coat with the belt and belt loops ripped out and “HATE” scrawled on the back, just like Ian Curtis. I stood in the Doc Martens boots I was still breaking in.
Julia had stood at my side. When I think about her, I think about her looking like she did that night. Pupils big, dark and mysterious as black holes, a small smile on her face, dark red lipstick that she would rub off before going home. She pulled her hair back over her ears and wiggled them slightly.
“Okay,” I said. “You win.”
“I knew I could make you smile!” she said, as she punched my arm. “You don’t have to frown to impress me.”
“I’m doing it for me.”
“I know you’re happy inside, though, and that you like this music more than you think.”
“Why?”
“I see your head moving with the music.”
“Ha, that’s my head nodding because it’s putting me to sleep!” I crossed my arms. I knew the band was playing the full album version—almost eight minutes long—rather than the edited version that was released as a single. I nudged closer and took her hand. This is a daring thing to do in public but the crowds provided us cover.
“Are you scared?” Julia asked.
“No way, baby.”
“Your hand is sweaty.”
I twisted to the side until I felt my shoulder bones crack. “I’m really hot in this coat.”
She squeezed my hand. “Yes, you are.”
“This is odd, isn’t it?” I asked her. “Of any music we could be hearing tonight, it would be this.”
Julia laughed. “What would you rather hear? Maybe the Sex Pistols would be better?”
“No, they wouldn’t be.”
“At least this music is kind of sexy.”
I let go of her hand, pulled out the key to the love hotel and pressed it to her side. “Well, if you think it’s so sexy, why don’t you offer your virginity to that stud who’s singing?”
She stepped on my foot, right on a blister right between the big and second toes. These damned new Doc Martens!
“Oh, fuck!” I yelled out in English, making the audience gasp. The singer was a pro, though. He improvised a long cooing sound and the crowd was lulled back into his fuzzy world.
“What’s wrong?” asked Julia.
I wiggled my toes. The sock felt wet. “You popped my blister,” I said through clenched teeth. “I think I have to sit down.”
“Maybe we should go to the room now,” she said casually. I nodded and we walked away.
I couldn’t help limping. “This fucking blister’s right where the shoe creases. How the hell am I supposed to walk?”
Julia slid under my right elbow and helped me walk. “Think of it this way. It’s only fair that I popped your blister because you’re going to pop my cherry.” We both laughed and shuffled our way to the love hotel.
“You know,” I said, “when we’re old, you’re going to have to help me into bed. Men’s bodies fall apart faster.”
“That’s a long time from now,” she said. “We’re going to have the rest of our lives together.”
“Dammit. I think the hotel’s a walkup.”
“No elevator?”
“No.”
She supported me as we staggered up five flights of stairs. I wobbled like a drunk. I looked down at her face and when our eyes met I knew that we would be together forever.
Nancy asked, “Are you hungry, Jing-nan?”
“No, not really.”
“Why do you keep staring at that McDonald’s?”
“It wasn’t there before. Something else was.”
“What do you expect?” she said as she snapped open her purse and began to rummage inside. “Nothing stays the same, especially not in this neighborhood. Gum?” I shook my head and she popped into her mouth a block of Japanese gum, a brand that is more artificial color and flavor than sugar.
“Those are so bad for you,” I said.
Nancy waved my words away. “They taste good and chewing helps me think. Hmm. Now why was Mei-ling so interested in Ximending?” she asked herself.
We continued down the street and found ourselves approaching The Red House.
The octagon building was built by the Japanese more than a century ago, yet it looked futuristic and edible. A gigantic layered red-velvet cake with white icing.
It’s one of those places I visited on a field trip years ago but haven’t been inside since. Tourists love it, particularly the combination of Eastern and Western elements in the architecture. Which is which, I couldn’t tell you.
Its former lives included stints as a public market, an opera house, and a movie theater. Now it was a city-owned teahouse and tourist shop in the main rotunda with a series of artist shops in the cruciform wing attached to the octagon.
Nancy and I were compelled to enter the building.
Two bored young women behind the counter of the teahouse acted like the government employees they were, chatting away and chasing off potential customers with scowls.
“Excuse me,” I asked the meaner-looking one. “Have you seen this girl recently?” I held up my phone, the display screen facing her.
She jutted out her chin. “Maybe,” she said, rubbing her nose. Her fingers had an inordinate number of rings on them and a tattoo along the index finger.
“Could you keep an eye out for her?” asked Nancy.
“No, I can’t,” said Mean Girl. The other employee giggled. “Want to order something?”
“That’s funny,” I said. “You two don’t seem the type to take orders.”
Other Girl said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Nancy and I walked away.
“What a bunch of awful kids,” said Nancy.
“I used to hate customers when I was young,” I said, looking over the teahouse’s empty tables. “This is a bust. I can’t imagine young people coming here to this government-run dive and I really doubt Mei-ling had any interest in this place.”
We found ourselves standing in front of several bars that were hidden from the main streets by The Red House itself. A few of them proudly flew the rainbow flag.
“Whoa!” I said. “Is there a gay pride parade coming up?”
“Those flags aren’t up for a parade, Jing-nan,” said Nancy. “These are gay bars. Lesbian and transgender, too. Hey, you seem a little jumpy there.”
“I’m not jumpy.”
Nancy smiled. “Tell me about your first gay experience, Jing-nan.”
“I’ve never done anything, but one time this guy tried to pick me up at the Eslite bookstore.” It’s a flagship bookstore open twenty-four hours a day, a mandatory stop for tourists.
Nancy laughed and the gum shot out of her mouth onto the sidewalk. “Oh, shit.” She worked a tissue out of her purse and promptly picked it up. “Wait, so how did you know this guy was trying to pick you up, Jing-nan?”
“I was looking for Peter Hook’s memoir of the Joy Division days. I wanted it in hardcover because I knew I’d be rereading it a lot. I would have worn out the spine of a paperback. I found the book and I had to start reading it right away. I couldn’t even sit down. I was leaning against a bookrack and this guy sidled up to me and started reading over my shoulder.
“I thought it was a little odd but I was so into the book, I couldn’t look away. It seemed like he was really into the book, too. After a few pages, I closed the book because I wanted to head to the cashier. Then the guy said to me, ‘Should we finish reading it in bed?’”
Nancy smiled. “What did you say?”
“I was honest. I said, ‘I never read in bed.’ Then I walked away.”
“You know that Eslite is a big cruising scene, especially after midnight.”
“I had no idea! I thought 228 Peace Memorial Park was for cruising.” The park commemorated the victims of Taiwan’s most infamous massacre, which began on February 28, 1947. It was still a sore point between mainlanders and yams, but it was created with the idea that all of Taiwan could come together and learn from the experience so that it never happened again. At the very least quite a number of people were coming together in the park’s restrooms.
“The guy selection is much more refined at Eslite,” said Nancy. “They don’t have the rough edges that park encounters have.”
“Makes sense,” I said as I watched a man in a black food service uniform moving chairs and wiping off tables at a bar/restaurant named Magic Wand.
Even though I knew Mei-ling wasn’t a lesbian, she had been active on TaiPride and also interested in Ximending. She had to have known about these queer bars.
“I’m going to ask that guy for help.”
Nancy unwrapped a new stick of Japanese gum and looked at me mischievously. “What are you going to do if he hits on you, Jing-nan?”
“The first thing I’m going to say is, ‘That’s my girlfriend over there and I have sex all the time with her.’” She opened her mouth slightly and made snapping noises with her gum.
I put my hands in my pockets and walked over to Magic Wand.
The man was bigger than I’d thought. He was built like Dwayne with a trimmer waist. “Hello,” I said to the man. “I was wondering if you could help me.”
He folded up the towel he had been wiping tables with. “I’d be glad to help,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“By any chance, have you seen this girl?” I held up my phone.
“Hey, come in closer,” said the man. “You’re too far away.” I took two steps forward. “I don’t think I’ve seen her. Has she run away?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a real shame. There used to be a drop-in center here with counselors, a library, and HIV testing. But it closed. If it were still open, I would say check there.”
“She had help in running away,” I said. “From a guy.”
“That’s a little different.” He took two chairs from a tabletop, flipped them, and set them down. He sat in one and invited me to sit in the other. “Was it an older man?”
“I don’t know,” I said as I lowered myself into the seat.
“The runaways I see are gay youth leaving home—often because they’re kicked out.”
I held up a hand. “She’s not a lesbian.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, she had a boyfriend.”
He smiled sadly at me. “That doesn’t mean she’s not gay, and besides, why are you looking for her here?”
“Well, I know she’d been looking at the TaiPride site, but only because she’s interested in music.”
The man nodded and gave me a little smile. He still thought Mei-ling was a lesbian. “I wish I could help you more. I actually feel relieved whenever I see a runaway because it means they didn’t fall into the clutches of pimps.”
“Do you think my friend could be in the hands of a pimp?”
He raised an eyebrow. “She’s your sister, isn’t she?”
“She’s my cousin. Her name’s Mei-ling.”
“What’s your name?”
“Jing-nan.” I shook his hand automatically and held on as I asked him his to show how sincerely I appreciated his help.
“Omi.” It sounded like an aboriginal name but I wasn’t crass enough to ask if it was. “Jing-nan, if you email me the picture I can post it and ask the community to keep a lookout for her.”
“She had a boyfriend.”
“And she’s not with him.” Omi leaned back and crossed his right leg. “I’ve got a question for you, Jing-nan. Why haven’t you gone to the police? Because you’re afraid your family will be embarrassed when it becomes public knowledge.” He nodded to confirm that he was right.
As forthcoming as I intended to be with Omi, I couldn’t just start telling him about her murdering father and all the associated ugliness in my family. I put my hands up. “Couldn’t fool you, Omi,” I said.
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Omi. “I appreciate what you’re doing because when I ran away, nobody came looking for me.”
I emailed Mei-ling’s picture to him. Maybe she’d see herself online, feel guilty, and text me.