The Old Capital: A Novel of Taipei

Strictly speaking, that was the day I began thinking about making preparations for my own death.

Because a short essay of absolutely no importance was due the following noon, my brain, as usual, defied orders and turned itself on, ignoring the lure of the dream world and causing me to stay awake till dawn.

A few hours later, barely making it there before breakfast hours ended, I set to work in a Japanese-style chain coffee shop, effortlessly finishing that short, unimportant essay. It was then that I had the leisure to notice that, in order to fortify myself against the cold blasts from the air conditioner, I’d already downed five or six scalding refills of coffee, which had turned my fingers and toes numb, as if I’d been poisoned. I quietly stretched in my cramped seat, only to discover that my lips were so numb I couldn’t open them to yawn. Even more strange was that my internal organs, whose existence had pretty much gone unnoticed over the three decades or so they’d been with me, were now frozen and shrunken, like little clenched fists, hanging tightly in their places inside me. I looked up at the girl who, in her clean, crisply pressed, nurselike uniform and apron, diligently refilled my cup over and over, and just about called out to her for help.

I was anxiously pondering the language to use in seeking help from a stranger—even though this stranger was all smiles and would never refuse requests such as “Please give me another pat of butter,” “Let me have another look at the menu,” “Where can I make a phone call?” etc. But, “Help me?” “Please call me an ambulance?” “Please help me stand up?” …

Yet for someone else, obviously, it was too late. The noontime headline news over the coffee shop radio announced that a certain second-generation descendant of the ancien régime had been discovered early that morning dead in a hospital examination room, still in the prime of his youth, cause of death unknown, a peaceful look on his face.⁷ Which meant he hadn’t even had time to struggle or call out for help.

I refused to pass out during the few minutes I spent waiting for a bus or a taxi (whichever came first), but if I’d wanted to, I could have slumped to the pavement and plunged into a deep slumber. Then a series of screams would have erupted around me, mixed with whisperings, and many heads, framed in the light behind them, would have bent down and appeared on the retina of my enlarged iris, as in the camera shot used in all movies for such scenes.

No matter how you looked at it, it would have been a pretty loutish way to go, so I refused to fall or even to rest, though by then the chill from my internal organs was spreading out to my flesh and skin. I forced myself to head toward an old and small nearby clinic. My mind was a blank; I have no idea how long it took me to get there. “I’m going to faint, please help me,” I said to the work-study student nurse, who was about the same age as the coffee shop girl who’d served me.

When I came to, I was lying on a narrow examination bed; the gray-haired old doctor, mixing Mandarin and Taiwanese, answered the puzzled look and questions brimming in my eyes with a voice that seemed very loud, very far away, and very slow: “Not enough oxygen to your heart. We’re giving you an IV. Lie here a while before you leave. The nurse can help you phone your family, if you want. Don’t stay up too late or eat anything that might upset you. Arrhythmia is a serious matter.”

So concise, so precise, he’d pinpointed my problems: insomnia, too much coffee, and arrhythmia. Strange, why was a very, very cold tear hanging in the corner of each of my eyes?

I still felt cold, but it was only the chill of the old Japanese-style clinic, no longer the deadly silent, numbing cold from the gradual loss of vital signs I’d experienced a few minutes earlier. But I hesitated, like a spirit floating in the air, as if I could choose not to return to my body. I missed the body that had nearly slumped to the pavement a few minutes before. The site of the near fall was the bus stop in front of McDonald’s, so there would have been young mothers with their children and old men with grandchildren waiting for the bus. The sharp-eyed youngsters would be the first to spot it, then the mothers would vigilantly pull them away or draw them under their wings for protection, instinctively believing that it must be a beggar, a vagrant, or a mental patient, or maybe someone suffering from the effects of the plague, cholera, or epilepsy. But some of the grandpas who’d seen more of the world would come up to check and then, judging from my more or less respectable attire, take me off the list of the aforementioned suspects and decide to save me.

Looking into my wide-open but enlarged irises, they’d shout, “Who are you? Who should we call? What’s the number?” They’d also order one of the gawking young women, “Go call an ambulance.”

I’d think back to how, on busy mornings, my significant other would lay out his schedule for the day, and I’d promptly forget; it would go something like this: “At ten-thirty I’m going to X’s office; at noon I have to be at XX Bank as a guarantor. Do we have bills to pay? In the afternoon I’ll go…. Want me to get you…. Or page me when you decide….”

And, under watchful eyes, so as to avoid suspicion, he’d open my bag. Let’s see, plenty of money—coins and bills—some ATM receipts, one or two unused lengths of dental floss, a claim ticket for film developing and a coupon for a free enlargement from the same photo studio; here, here’s a business card … given to me yesterday by a friend, for a super-cheap London B&B (16 pounds a night), at 45 Lupton Street, phone and fax (071) 4854075. Even though it would have an address and a phone number, it would of course provide no clue to my identity. So Grandpa would have to check my pockets; in one he’d find a small packet of facial tissues, in the other, after ordering the onlookers to help turn me over, a small stack of napkins with the name of the Japanese coffee shop I’d just visited printed in the corner. Different from the plain, unprinted McDonald’s napkins in their pockets.

Then someone would take out that short, insignificant essay and start to read, but be unable to retrieve, from my insignificant pen name, any information to decipher my identity.

Finally a tender-hearted, timid young mother would cover her sobbing face and cry out, “Please, someone hurry, send him to the hospital.”

That’s what scared me most. Just like that, I could become a nameless vegetable lying in a hospital for who knows how long; of course, even more likely, I’d become an anonymous corpse picked up on a sidewalk and lie for years in cold storage at the city morgue.

From that moment on, from that very moment on, I began to think about making preparations for my own death—or should I say, it occurred to me that I ought to prepare for unpredictable, unpreventable circumstances surrounding my death?

Maybe you’ll say nothing could be easier; all I had to do was start carrying a picture ID or a business card, like someone with a heart condition who’s never without a note that says: whoever finds this please send the bearer to a certain hospital, phone the following family members, in the order their numbers appear here, and, most important, take a glycerin pill out of the little bottle in my pocket and place it under my tongue. But no, that’s not what I meant. Maybe I should say that was the genesis of my worries but, as my thoughts unfolded, they went far beyond that.

Not long ago I found a wallet in a phone booth. It was a poor-quality knock-off of a name-brand item. So I opened it without much curiosity, with the simple intention of finding the owner’s address in order to, as my good deed for the day, mail it back to him or her—before opening it, I couldn’t get a sense of the owner’s gender, given its unisex look.

The wallet was quite thick, even though the money inside amounted to a meager 400 NT. In addition to a color photo of Amy Lau, it was all puffed up with over a dozen cards: a phone card, a KTV member discount card, a student card from a chain hair salon, a point-collecting card from a bakery, a raffle ticket stub, a membership exchange card for a TV video game club, an iced tea shop manager’s business card, an honor card for nonsmokers, etc.

I probably didn’t look beyond the third card before I was confident I could describe the wallet’s owner: a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old insipid (in my view) female student. That, in fact, turned out to be the case; my assumption was corroborated by a swimming pool membership card, which included her school and grade, so I could return the wallet to her when I found the time.

Here’s another example. I don’t know if you’ve read the autobiography of the Spanish director, Luis Buñuel, but I recall that he said he stopped going on long trips after turning sixty because he was afraid of dying in a foreign land, afraid of the movielike scene of opened suitcases and documents strewn all over the ground, ambulance sirens and flashing police lights, hotel owners, local policemen, small-town reporters, gawkers, total chaos, awkward and embarrassing. Most important, he was probably afraid that, lacking the ability to defend himself, he’d be identified and labeled, whether or not he’d led a life that was serious, complex, worthy.

Here’s another related example, although it doesn’t concern death, taken from a certain short story that nicely describes the extramarital affair of a graceful and refined lady. When, by chance, she encounters her lover, and sex is on the agenda, she changes her mind. What stops her is surely not morality, nor her loving husband, who treats her just fine, nor the enjoyment-killing idea that there’s no time for birth control measures. Rather, it’s that she left home that day on the spur of the moment to take a stroll and do some shopping during a time when everything was scarce, and she was wearing ordinary cotton undergarments that were tattered from too many washings.

Let me put it this way: these examples quickly convinced me that, if death came suddenly and without warning, who could manage to follow the intention of “a dying tiger leaves its skin intact”?

And that’s why I envy chronically ill patients and old folks nearing the end of their lives, like Buñuel, for they have adequate time to make their preparations, since death is anticipated. I don’t mean just writing a will or making their own funeral arrangements, stuff like that. What I’m saying is: they have enough time to decide what to burn and destroy and what to leave behind—the diaries, correspondence, photographs, and curious objects from idiosyncratic collecting habits they’ve treasured and kept throughout their lives.

For example, I was once asked by the heartbroken wife of a teacher who had died unexpectedly to go through the effects in his office. Among the mountains of research material on the Zhou dynasty city-state, I found a notebook recording the dates of conjugal bliss with his wife over the thirty years of their marriage. The dates were accompanied by complicated notations that were clearly secret codes, perhaps to describe the degree of satisfaction he’d achieved. I couldn’t decide whether to burn it to protect the old man or treat it as a rare treasure and turn it over to his wife.

Actually, in addition to destroying things, I should also fabricate or arrange things in such a way that people would think what I wanted them to think about me. A minor ruse might be to obtain some receipts for charitable donations or copy down some occasional, personal notes that are more or less readable and might even be self-published by the surviving family. Even more delicate was a case I once read about in the health and medical section of the newspaper: a gramps in his seventies who had a penile implant wrote to ask if he should have it removed before emigrating to mainland China, for he was afraid that, after he died and was cremated, his children and grandchildren would discover his secret from the curious object that neither burned nor melted.

So you need to understand that the advance preparations I’m talking about go far beyond passive procedures to prevent becoming a nameless vegetable or an anonymous corpse; in fact, they have developed into an exquisite, highly proactive state.

The first thing I threw away was the sloppy-looking dental floss; then I tossed some business cards I’d taken out of politeness from people whose names I could no longer remember, a few baffling but colorful paper clips, a soft drink pull-tab to exchange for a free can, a book coupon, etc. In sum, a bunch of junk whose only significance was to show how shabby I was.

What then are the things that are both meaningful and fully explanatory, and are reasonably found in a wallet?

First of all, my career does not require business cards, and I had no employee ID card or work permit. I didn’t have a driver’s license and hadn’t joined any serious organization or recreational club, so I had no membership cards. I didn’t even have a credit card!

—Speaking of credit cards, they create a mystery that causes considerable consternation. I’m sure you’ve experienced this: you’re in a department store or a large shop or a restaurant, and the cashier asks, “Cash or charge?”

Based on my observations, even though the cashier’s tone is usually neutral and quite proper, those who pay cash stammer their response, while those who pay with a credit card answer loud and clear. Isn’t that weird? Aren’t the credit card users, simply put, debtors? The implication, at least, is: I have the money to pay you, but for now, or for the next few weeks, the credit guarantee system of my bank lets me owe you without having to settle up.

But what about those who pay cash? They are able to hand over the money with one hand and take possession of the goods with the other, with neither party owing the other a thing. Why then should they be so diffident? And what makes those paying with a credit card so self-assured?

Could it be that the latter, after a credit check to prove that they are now and in the future will continue to be productive, can enter the system and be completely trusted? And the former, those who owe nothing to anyone, why are they so irretrievably timid? Is it possible they cannot be incorporated into the control system of an industrial, commercial society because their mode of production or their productivity is regarded as somehow uncivilized, unscientific, and unpredictable, the equivalent of an agricultural-age barter system? Simply put, when you are not a cog with a clearly defined purpose and prerequisite in the system, their trust in you is based on what they can see, and that must be a one-time exchange of money and goods, since there is no guarantee of exchange credit for the next time, or the time after that. You are neither trusted nor accepted by a gigantic, intimidating system, and that is why you are diffident, timid, even though you could well be able and diligent, and are not necessarily poor, at least not a beggar or a homeless person who pays no taxes.

By contrast, those whose wallets are choked with cards of every kind are trusted by organizations, big and small, which vie to admit them and consider them indispensable. They are so complacent, so confident, and all because: “I have credit, therefore I am.”

My wallet was empty, with nothing to fill it up and no way to disguise that, but I didn’t want the person who opened it to see at first glance that it belonged to one of life’s losers. So I put in a few thousand-NT bills, which I wouldn’t use for so long they’d begin to look as if they were part of the wallet itself.

The wallet may have been empty, but since it wouldn’t hold a passport, I debated whether to include my ID card to establish my identity—when 20 million ID cards are attached to 20 million people, you see, the meaning is nullified—and I could not follow your suggestion to, in a feigned casual manner, insert a small note with my name and phone number on it. Which meant that putting aside the issue of becoming a nameless vegetable or an anonymous corpse on the sidewalk, this anonymous wallet would, sooner or later, become nonreturnable, even if found by a Samaritan.

Ah! A savorless, flavorless, colorless, odorless wallet. Sometimes I pretended to be a stranger, examining and fondling it, speculating how the Samaritan who found it would sigh emotionally: “What an uninteresting and unimportant person your owner must be!”

After I lost interest in the disguise and the construction of my wallet, for a while I turned my attention to my clothes. Especially my underwear. To be ready for an unexpected sexual encounter—no, I mean for the unannounced visit of death.

Underwear is very important, and it’s not enough just to keep it from becoming tattered or turning yellow. On psychological, social, even political levels, it describes its owner more vividly than many other things. Didn’t Bill Clinton respond shyly that his underpants weren’t those trendy plaid boxers, but were skin-hugging briefs?

Still, I gave serious consideration to changing and washing my underwear religiously, and to the purchase of new sets. For starters, I tossed my black and purple sets, along with my Clinton-style briefs, all of which might have caused undue speculation. After mulling over the replacements, I decided to go to the open-rack garment section of Watson’s, where no salesperson would bother me, and picked out several pairs of white Calvin Klein 100 percent cotton underpants, though their yuppie style didn’t quite match my antisocial tendencies. My significant other was all but convinced I had a new love interest, and we had a big fight over that. But I didn’t reveal the truth. If one day I happened to depart this world before him, then my clear, white underwear would remind that grief-stricken man of what I looked like after my shower on so many nights. Those sweet memories might comfort him, at least a little.

On some days, when I had to go to work, I passed the site where I’d nearly fallen, knowing full well that the strength that had sustained me and would not let me fall came from the thought: “I’ll not be randomly discovered and identified like this.”

Randomly discovered. In addition to the state I was in, the wallet, my clothes, there was also location.

That’s right, location. I thought back carefully to the routes I took when I went out and realized that, even though I was in the habit of roaming a bit, there was a definite sense of order and, in the end, it would be easy for a secret agent, even a neophyte P.I., to follow me. Even so, I strove to simplify my routes, avoiding places that would be hard to explain, even if I was just passing by.

Let me put it this way. An upright, simple, extremely religious, and highly disciplined college classmate of mine died in a fire at a well-known sex sauna last year. The firefighters found him, neatly dressed, dead of asphyxiation, in the hallway. We went to give our condolences to his wife, also a college classmate, and as we warmly recalled all the good deeds he’d performed when alive and said he’d definitely be ushered into heaven, we couldn’t completely shake the subtle sense of embarrassment—what exactly was the good fellow, our classmate, doing there?

So I was determined to avoid vulgar, tasteless little local temples, shrouded in incense smoke; I didn’t want to die in front of a spirit altar, giving my significant other the impression I’d changed religions.

And I didn’t want to go to the Ximen-ding area, which I’d pretty much avoided since graduating from college, afraid I’d end up dead in an area honeycombed with dilapidated sex-trade alleys, fall under suspicion, like that good classmate of mine, and be unable to defend myself.

From then on, I quickened my steps whenever I walked by some of my favorite deep-green alleys, with their Japanese-style houses, where time seemed to stand still. I no longer stopped or strolled there, afraid that my significant other would suspect I’d hidden away an illegitimate child or was having a secret rendezvous with an old flame.

I even stopped roaming wherever my feet took me, as I’d done when I was younger, just so I wouldn’t be found dead on a beach where people came to watch the sunset. Otherwise, my credit card–carrying significant other would be embroiled in a lifelong puzzle and be mired in deep grief.

After all, death only visits us once in our lifetime, so we should make advance preparations for its arrival.

Hundreds of years ago, the Man of La Mancha

howled at the sky—

A windblown quest

Seeking love in steel and rocks

Using manners with savages

And me, afraid that the handwriting would be eaten away by mites and no longer legible, I wrote this down.