The Old Capital: A Novel of Taipei

During the spring of the sixth year of professional baseball in Taiwan and my ninth in my profession, the urge to buy a diamond crept into my head for the first time, and it had to be a solitaire diamond ring from Tiffany’s—not from another company or from some local jewelry store, and not a ring with colored diamond chips … it had to be a classic round, brilliant cut Tiffany diamond ring in a platinum setting with six prongs.

Common sense tells us that all the diamonds on the rings of all the people in the world total at least half a billion carats, and that if one day De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd., which controls 80 percent of the world’s production and trade in raw diamonds, were to lose that control or collapse (a remote possibility at best), and could no longer dominate the extant rich diamond mines in countries like Australia, Russia, Zaire, and Botswana, then the value of the less-than-one-carat diamond someone as strapped as I could afford would be little different from that of a fresh rose or a lovely cobblestone lying in the road, just waiting to be picked up.

It was my misfortune to have placed the highest bid for this month’s accumulation of the office banking cooperative, which put me in possession of seventy or eighty thousand in spare cash. I couldn’t finance a trip abroad, since I’d used up all my vacation time, and I wasn’t dumb enough to buy a CD at the bank for the interest and then watch it be gobbled up by inflation. I didn’t even know anyone who needed a no-risk, low-interest loan. There wasn’t enough to buy a house or a decent car, but I had hopes that my future spouse would already have one or both of these, or that, at the very least, our love, like a magic potion, would supply the motivation to work hard together to get them.

But it wasn’t just the fact that I’d come into possession of this spare cash that spawned my desire to buy a diamond ring. In the past, whenever my bid won the bank or I got my share of the money at the end of the period, I never hesitated to use it to go abroad or invest it efficiently and rationally, such as handing over a deposit and the first year’s rent on an illegal add-on attic suite in a lane in my favorite district in the city. Once I put it all into the annual reinvestment campaign of a magazine where I’d once worked; another time I gave it to my father to help some of his relatives on the mainland set up a local business, with no expectation I’d ever get any of it back.

Diamonds were first discovered several centuries before the common era, in India. People believed they protected wearers from snakebite, burns, poisons, acute illness, the plundering of their wealth, and curses.

The Greeks called diamonds adamas, which means indestructible. The Romans used them to cut metal. The Chinese used them as carving tools.

Sparkling diamond, a sign of love,

Love that will never die,

A diamond is forever,

With you till the end of time.

That’s what the ad says, and it sends shivers down my spine. Of course it isn’t really about true love or all eternity or genuine feelings, things like immortality or permanence; stop and think for a minute—when something you possess will outlive you, maybe even last forever, it does not cease to exist just because you, its owner, cease to exist. A good illustration would be the 44.5-carat blue Hope Diamond, which you highly value in spite of its legendary history of misfortunes; is named for its first buyer after being cut, Henry Philip Hope; and now, after bringing calamities to several of its owners, resides in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

The Florentine Diamond, an exquisite golden yellow stone weighing 137.27 carats, cut in a double rosette pattern with 126 facets, was Italy’s most famous precious gem, and was said to have first been owned by a French nobleman, and then, after changing owners many times, fell into the hands of the King of Austria; it was, however, lost forever in the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Needless to say, it probably resembled the eye of a heathen idol and still emits a cold glare as it rests amid the scattered bones of a member of the royal family.

Slightly unfair, and somewhat frightening … why? Why would you want to own something that will not rot or decay after you die?

Not long before New Year’s, by acting on impulse I succeeded in securing an appointment with someone who, it was rumored, had not sat down for a media interview for a very long time. How to define her? She straddled two or three realms, first gaining prominence through environmental protection–like essays. I say I succeeded by acting on impulse because I could see in my colleagues’ faces, no matter how much they tried to hide it, that I had hit the jackpot.

Xiaohui, who was a bit more willing to reveal a weakness around me, said that the others lacked the nerve to go looking for that writer, to whom I’ll refer as A from here on. In recent years, A had let it be known that she would not agree to a media interview even if you put a gun to her head; if you somehow ferreted out her phone number, a closely guarded secret, in that brief moment before the fax machine squeal or the answering machine kicked in, she’d come on the line and immediately turn you down in a severe and cold voice, and she would demand to know how you’d managed to get her number in a tone that left no doubt that she was determined to identify the guilty party, one way or another.

I thought back to how I’d managed to get A to agree to an interview, with little hesitation on her part. I think I blurted out, without so much as a nod to etiquette, that I’d been a fan of hers since high school, and wanted to know how life had been treating her in recent years, and wondered what she’d been doing, since she’d been out of the news for some time and had published nothing.

As a matter of fact, I’d been working for the specialty magazine for less than a year, and hadn’t yet grasped the conventions regarding who were the big shots and who weren’t, who required a joint interview and who was difficult to handle, so I had no preconceived stance, which made me seem as innocent and earnest as a newborn calf, someone you couldn’t bear to turn down—at least this was how Xiaohui saw it.

The long and the short of it were, A and I met, at a time and place of my choosing. Our company’s year-end dinner presented an obstacle, requiring a change of date and time, though that was her call, since she said she had no commitments, and that we could meet when I was free and at any place I preferred—my co-workers’ faces actually twitched when they heard that.

It had probably been nearly a decade since I’d last seen A, and on that occasion we’d been separated by a crowd of people. She’d come with some activists to lend support in the third day of a hunger strike as we sat at the base of the campus clock tower. I informed her of that in order to substantiate my next comment: “You haven’t changed a bit.”

A didn’t respond with a self-effacing reply, nor did she show any sign of wanting to reminisce, and gave mostly irrelevant answers to my questions. Although the magazine I worked for differed from periodicals that were heavily into advertising, I still found it hard to work A’s reclusive, simple philosophy of life into the story I’d planned to write, so we quickly agreed to bring the interview to a close and become normal people again.

Here’s something interesting. In my experience, interviews are a sort of performance. The interviewer pretends she’s the soul of ignorance, while the interviewee assumes the role of someone in command of all heavenly and earthly knowledge and a bellyful of unique views concerning the affairs of the world, which is why I particularly like the moment when the interview ends; it is as if a demonic curse has been lifted, and both parties are back to being human again. My interviewees are often out of touch with everything, from such unimportant concerns as the history and renown of the restaurant where our meeting takes place all the way up to hot topics in the realms of contemporary politics and economics, media, or the performing arts.

Now that we were back to being normal human beings, we ordered drinks, and while we waited for my jasmine tea and her coffee, she told me, rather apologetically, that she’d agreed to the interview mainly so she could chat with me.

She quickly added that no people my age, members of the so-called “new human” generation, had entered her circle of friends in a very long time, so for her this was a perfect and quite normal opportunity, and she hoped I wouldn’t mind.

Not venturing a response, I was reminded of how our national leader had recently instructed relevant government organizations to study the “new humans,” our Gen-Xers; his self-confident, explicit use of the term convinced me that a new generation of humans had, it seemed, been discovered, and that scientific methods, including basic rules of anatomy and biological characteristics, could be employed to classify them accurately, as if each pair of chromosomes were thus and so, and the front lobe of the left side of your brain was one thing or another.

In A’s eyes—no, ears, since we were talking on the phone when she agreed to the interview—was I one of those new humans? I recalled from the material about her that she was ten years older than I, at most, but I felt that I was ten times wearier, far more burned out than she (it made no difference if, as she said, she did in fact lead a simple life), and that my life was ten times tougher than the simple life (let’s say she was being honest) she led.

In the midst of my tactful silence (she was so considerate she mistakenly took my silence for anger), I spotted a brilliant diamond ring on the middle finger of her left hand, in a six-pronged, platinum Tiffany setting, one I hadn’t taken note of in an ad I’d seen. Maybe her finger was so thin that the ring twisted easily back and forth, and during our interview “performance,” it must have been turned into her palm and escaped my attention. But now it rested calmly on the back of her finger, a tiny diamond, no more than half a carat, a very, very ordinary diamond ring.

The idols of the heathen are silver and gold,
the work of men’s hands.

They have mouths but they speak not; eyes
have they, but they see not.

They have ears but they hear not; neither is
there any breath in their mouths.

They that make them are like unto them: so is
every one that trusteth in them.

Psalms 135

I was reminded of a romantic writer I’d once been fond of; he had described how, when he was traveling in Japan, he’d seen Japanese office ladies on streetcars choose not to sit down, even when there were empty seats, preferring to stare out the window, neither talking nor smiling, and that reminded him of the story of Wei Sheng’s promise in the Zhuangzi: Wei Sheng had agreed to meet a girl under a bridge. The girl did not come, but the water did and he did not leave, so Wei Sheng died with his arms around a pillar.

Afterward, I read somewhere in a lifestyle piece that when Japanese office ladies, who had spent the day smiling at customers or male co-workers or bosses, got off work, they would rather stare at a wall and let their faces show the annoyance and exhaustion they felt than sit down and face someone across the way, even a stranger, and be required to once again wear the mask of modesty and poise.

In the post–economic bubble era—I mean, in Japan—exhausted office ladies who could not afford to buy a house or an apartment often used money they received beyond their salary, such as year-end bonuses, to buy a one-carat diamond ring to reward or console themselves for a year of hard work, and thus we have the so-called one-carat ladies. Of course it’s been nearly two years since I read this report, and it’s possible they’ve become two-carat ladies by now.

Had I decided to buy an ordinary diamond ring like the one A was wearing in order to reward or console myself for my hard work?

Star of the South, 128.8 carats, was found by a Brazilian slave in a diamond mine quite by accident. Needless to say, this happy discovery bought her her freedom.

According to Constantin Pecqueur’s A New Theory of Social and Political Economics: A Study of the Organization of Societies,⁹ putting your labor up for hire constitutes the beginning of your life as a slave—well, I’d been a slave for nine years already!

At about this time, a building that workers been hammering away at and decorating for at least a year finally opened for business near where I waited for the bus to go home; it was a high-end department store. One day, when I was more presentable than usual, I went in for a quick look. It was like strolling through a modern museum, and there wasn’t a single item I could afford; the business likely relied on the patronage of the wives of government ministers or entertainment industry godfathers or major players in the stock market, people who lived in the apartment building behind the store. “The production of too many useful things produces too large a useless population”—or so it says in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.¹⁰ But did this “useless population” refer to me or to the wives of high officials and moguls who kept this department store in business?

I was forced to wait at that bus stop every day, and on cold, rainy days the wait was longer than usual; but even on those days, and even if I’d forgotten to bring an umbrella, I was unwilling to wait inside, in spite of the fact that the building’s main floor provided handsome, comfortable sofas and chairs, the kind you’d find in a five-star hotel lobby.

They were putting the finishing touches on a roadside display window of the modern museum, keeping what was inside hidden behind a curtain. I often stood in front of it, in an almost trancelike state, assuming the pose of Wei Sheng’s promise, in order not to have to confront A, B, or C, who had become familiar faces, since they waited for the same bus every day. Gradually, this became the only time in my day when I was free and in tune with myself. I even gave up my habit of reading the evening paper with a thirty-five-NT cup of coffee to escape rush hour traffic.

“In the Middle Ages a social estate was emancipated as soon as it was allowed to carry the sword.”

“Among nomadic peoples it is the horse that makes a free man and a participant in the life of the community.”

How could I have believed that a diamond could set me free in that cold, damp moment as I waited to return to my lair?

Naturally, my thoughts turned to Xiao Ma, whose standard comment was, “That is a false need created under the control of an impulse of commodity aesthetics …,” but my God, a diamond, isn’t that the standard symbol of commodity fetishism? Think about it: even more transnational than AT&T and Nissan, De Beers quietly but ingeniously controls the world’s production and supply of diamonds, and at the same time promotes diamonds by advertising in all media, stressing the vital association between diamonds and romance. You don’t believe me? Many of my co-workers who were in romantic relationships believed that love cannot exist without diamonds; there are even more men who actually believe that they cannot find love without diamonds.

Xiao Ma and I never, of course, celebrated each other’s birthday or were together on Christmas or Valentine’s Day or its Chinese equivalent, any of those holidays for which businesses mobilize in a big way. Naturally, back then, Valentine’s Day was not taken as seriously as it is now.

These days, the push for Valentine’s Day starts when the New Year’s holiday ends, and the atmosphere in offices everywhere is no less charged than when people begin guessing how big their annual bonuses are going to be. This tense atmosphere reaches its peak a couple of days before Valentine’s Day, and when a flower delivery girl walks in the door with a big bouquet, the feigned indifference on everyone’s face resembles nothing so much as the breathless wait prior to an announcement of personnel changes.

But the results are almost always unanticipated. For instance, four or five bunches of roses and a box of chocolates appear on the desk of X, whom no one thought had a boyfriend; or there is only one bunch of roses on the desk of Y, who goes out nearly every night, and we assume that they must have come from a factory owner, who has bouquets delivered on Valentine’s Day to just about everyone, except his wife … in the main, no one’s desk is left out, although I must admit that over those few days, as my desk remained unadorned, I could barely resist the temptation to order a bouquet and write on the card that it was a gift from a secret admirer.

If Xiao Ma had been there, I wonder if he’d have felt an obligation to ritually give me something or send his current girlfriend flowers or some other gift.

Not long ago, I was flipping through a recent issue of a political magazine while I was taking my afternoon tea, and Xiao Ma was a former student activist interviewed for a sort of “where are they now?” piece.

In response to the reporter’s inquiry about his plans for the future, Xiao Ma, who must have been in his seventh year abroad, said that after getting a Ph.D. in a year or two, he’d return to the island to continue his participation in opposition movements, that he’d never leave the opposition camp, which, of course, meant the Democratic People’s Party. On that he was emphatic.

Xiao Ma, a poli-sci major, could not have predicted that within a month of that interview, the opposition party he’d sworn to support forever would hold the reins of power in the nation’s capital, and could never have imagined that the comrades with whom we’d participated in a hunger strike at the foot of the campus bell tower now held regular suit-and-tie jobs or that many of them had the power to do things that directly affected people’s lives. Xiao Ma, who had left the country before the lifting of martial law, likely viewed Taiwan through the eyes of someone still living under martial law, and it stands to reason that only that Taiwan, only those Taiwanese could get his juices flowing; they were the ones he wanted to protect, the ones he wanted to save, I guess.

In this respect, Xiao Ma and A are a lot alike, or so it seemed to me. For them “the people” are an abstraction, not real at all, and it is these unreal people to whom they feel especially close; the mere mention of those two words bring tears and a warm light to their eyes, as if such decent, oppressed, wholly virtuous people, who await protection and salvation, really do exist.

Why do I call them “unreal people”? Because if “the people” were to rest on the shoulders of those associates of mine, or on mine—the current me—for that matter, whether we’d need to protect and save them would be of secondary concern. Most importantly, it’s absurd to believe that there are actually so many “people” in need of protection and salvation!

That is probably why such people so desperately miss the martial law era, for only in that aesthetic climate is there both the room and a need for them to exist.

Now I finally understand the inexplicable agitation I felt toward A that day, even though, when she asked a question, whatever it might have been, it was accompanied by pronounced solicitude and a caution born of breeding unique to people of her generation. When she asked about my political leanings, for instance, she actually blushed, as she might have had she asked if I had a boyfriend, and if we’d slept together. I told her who I voted for in the mayoral election, and when she asked me why, I said it was partly because he was so good looking and partly because I got a kick out of how a certain individual mimicked the way he talked.

I said I don’t really see how his party differs from the others, since, as you know, everything they say sounds great but is dead-on boring.

Then A asked if I knew anything about my candidate’s background, such as how he’d suffered for his participation in the Taiwanese democracy movement, even spending time in prison.

Prison? Isn’t that a sort of investment gamble? Isn’t it the risk you assume when you join an opposition movement against a third world totalitarian government? It’s like when we invest in a friend’s business, or when we buy stock: sometimes we make money, sometimes we lose it. Compared to members of the older generation, these people—still in the prime of life—have promptly reaped visible gains, so in my view, the returns on their investments seem reasonable.

Wanting not to believe me, she kept the questions coming. Is that how all you new humans feel? Can you find even a little gratitude in your hearts for his sacrifices and his contributions to “the people,” and just support him for that?

How naïve A seemed. Give me a break. It’s not only marriages of love that have legal standing. Do marriages between families of wealth and status, undertaken for mutual benefit, have no legal standing? If this were a society in which every member of “the people” who voted for him were intelligent and selfless and did so for lofty and sacred reasons, there’d be no need for him to step in as savior or enlightened leader. Give me a break. My reasons for voting are as valid as anyone’s, and she should have expected that at the beginning.

Outside of a history course, they (at this point I too was beginning to describe unreal people) have neither the need nor the time to look back at the past. If that’s a short memory, then the way they’ve overlooked the KMT’s contributions to Taiwan’s economic development also constitutes a short memory, but the fact that the KMT occasionally seeks public acknowledgment of their contributions disgusts you, doesn’t it? Same logic.

But how can that be called “the past”? They’re all still living, still around, not part of history…. A said patiently.

In my case, unless you force me to sit in a history class that outstrips my experience, I’m still at the kindergarten stage (I lowered my age five or six years), and that old dictator you folks still rail against is no longer around. When I was in middle school, there were times when protests out on the street made me so late for school I had to stand in class as punishment. A political party was formed the year I took the high school entrance exam, and during my junior year, rare was the teacher who wasn’t listening to stock market developments during class time, and if I don’t marry someone who owns a house before I’m fifty, there’s no chance I’ll ever have a place I can call my own….

Meanwhile you people, you activists or entrepreneurs, sometimes both, incorporate idealism and a sense of mission when you do business, like my boss, and I simply can’t imagine what you have to be worried about. Compared to people like me, who don’t live with their parents, a “nomadic people” forced to wander the city in search of the next illegal attic to keep a roof over our heads, you already possess status and houses and cars that would take us a decade of scraping by to manage. That goes double for a certain legislator in the opposition party, a woman who doesn’t do a damned thing but get up on stage from time to time to engage in antiauthority posturing, vowing to love this land and forcing everyone else to vow to love it as much as she does. Then one day, thanks to a sunshine provision in the law, we find out that this woman, who relies on lower-middle class contributors of fifty or a hundred NT to get elected, owns a dozen pieces of land and real estate, so no wonder she loves this land, and loves it so much….

It’s hard to say who’s working for whom. I voted for him because I saw him on a TV variety show, where he was made to do the cha-cha, and he came across as both pitiful and lovable, and, give me a break, that was reason enough for me.

Not only that, I also managed to answer some questions I’d initially rejected as being silly, such as how to identify myself. Taiwanese? Chinese? Taiwanese and Chinese? Chinese, but in Taiwan …?

In all honesty, if I could choose right now, I’d rather be Japanese, or spend the year in London with nothing to do, or go to Vancouver or Seattle for the summer. Or why not go to California, for no reason, like Faye Wang in the movie Chungking Express?

I also told A, who was ten years my senior, that I’d always thought that TV sets grew out of the walls in people’s living rooms; always thought that the NT exchange rate was twenty-eight to the dollar and that it was the strongest currency on the China mainland and in Southeast Asia; always thought that the Zhongxing Department Store, which was the only thing that gave any meaning to “window shopping” and “fads,” had always been there; always thought that there never was a President Chiang; always thought that the DPP had always existed; always thought that Chen Shui-bien had always been Mayor of Taipei—all you have to do is turn on the TV evening news and look at all the schoolchildren fighting to shake his hand or line up behind him to make “look at me” gestures for the camera to see I’m not exaggerating.

In my view, A’s “short memory” was an integral and important element in the construction and consolidation of new memories.

Cuban Capitol, at 23.04 carats, which I consider to be the loveliest round-cut yellow diamond in the world, came from an African mine; it isn’t set in jewelry, but has been inlaid in a pedestrian path in Havana, the capital of Cuba, and marks a military route.

It goes without saying that there’s also diamonds and Russia—but here I’m definitely not referring to Paul I, the 13.35-carat purple diamond set in the Royal Crown of India, once the property of the Russian tsar and, named to commemorate the reign of Paul I, stored in a Russian diamond vault.

Russia is planning to begin manufacturing industrial diamonds next year in a 200-meter wind tunnel, built to test the reaction of rockets and ballistic missiles when they reenter the earth’s atmosphere. The Director of Ballistic Technology in the Machine Manufacturing Unit of the Central Institute of Science told a Reuters reporter: “Our goal is to make this facility more economically viable.”

More economically viable? He and his research fellows fed pieces of stainless steel into the wind tunnel collider and drove them into a piece of pig iron at ten times the speed of light; the collision created graphite chips that turned into diamond dust.

As a result, 250 grams of diamond dust were created on a 30-kilogram piece of pig iron. The director said they were updating the facility to create larger diamonds, estimating the largest to weigh in at 2,000 carats, or roughly four times the size of Star of Africa, currently the largest known diamond in the world. The institute plans to repeat the procedure 40 times a year, producing 15,000 carats each time, or an annual total of 600,000 carats of diamonds.

Just then, a curtain dropped in front of the modern museum at my bus stop, and a high-end boutique, work on which had been under way for a long time, opened. The riddle was solved: it was Tiffany’s.

I was stunned. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that after all this time, this would be the confessional object I’d silently faced during my mental exile. It made me feel like a pagan worshipping the golden calf.

But that absurd feeling was quickly replaced by the magnetic attraction of the place. On an evening of freezing rain, when nearly all the traffic lights were out, my time facing it grew longer with each minute I spent waiting for the bus.

It turned out that the place offered more than just jewelry (which I discovered by gazing at the display window day in and day out). There were silver pen and pencil sets, tableware, exquisitely hand-painted pottery and porcelain, wristwatches, silk scarves, all false needs created by commodity aesthetics; before the curtain rose, I’d truly felt I had everything I needed, but now, thanks to my desires, I felt I had nothing.

I was like the little girl selling matches on the street, standing barefoot on a bitter cold, snowy Christmas Eve, looking in the window at a happy family in a warm house.

I decided to buy a Tiffany diamond ring for Valentine’s Day, even if my desk at the office was noticeably bare of roses or chocolates.

Long ago I’d decided not to participate in my co-workers’ games, like when they asked, “Where will you go for your lovers’ dinner?” The assumption—you must have a lover, so you’re definitely going to have a lovers’ dinner—disguised the questioner’s real intent, which was to let me know that she was going to enjoy a lovers’ meal—“lover” being the key word.

Naturally, I did not decide on Valentine’s Day just so I could wear it on my finger the day after as a silent but unmistakable means of showing off in front of my co-workers.

Labor produces beauty, but deformity for the
worker;

It replaces labor by machines, but it casts
some of the workers back into barbarous
forms of labor and turns others into
machines.

It produces intelligence, but it produces idiocy
and cretinism for the worker.

It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker.

I return to what the Manuscripts said, that the slum created by my labor is located on the windswept rooftop of an apartment building, and it is as cold and dark as a dank cellar, and so the quixotic horse and sword, the coffeemaker, and the CD player at the head of my bed, which I move around with me, are all rusted beyond salvation; my precious Wedgwood handkerchief and red teacups from the same company are all streaked with wild berry patterns, but the ambience of springtime in all its fullness can neither cover nor conceal the books packed in two large cartons that I don’t open because I’m afraid of moving. This is the table where I sit to drink and to write letters and journal entries. Dirty clothes under the cheap wooden bed that the landlord would not let me throw out, and which is covered by a navy-blue Elle towel, emit a strange odor that reminds me of when Xiao Ma and I lived together.

The savage in his cave—a natural element which freely offers itself for his use and protection—feels himself no more a stranger, or rather feels as much at home as a fish in water. But the cellar dwelling of the poor man is a hostile element, “a dwelling which remains an alien power and only gives itself up to him insofar as he gives up to it his own blood and sweat”—a dwelling which he cannot regard as his own hearth—where he might at last exclaim: “Here I am at home”—but where instead he finds himself in someone else’s house, in the house of a stranger who always watches him and throws him out if he does not pay his rent.

I flooded the room with every light I could turn on and lay on the moldy cotton Indian blanket to read magazines I hadn’t yet opened, since the end of the month was rapidly approaching. I subscribed to four general-interest magazines of various types, including some from abroad, an indulgence of sorts. Even though I could read copies at the office or at one of the neighborhood teahouses, or could stand in a bookstore and read them off the shelf, for some reason, having my own copies gave me a greater sense of security than buying a pretty Chanel lipstick or doing aerobics regularly or swimming in a heated pool.

But it was predictable that sooner or later among them I’d come across A’s fervid, assured observations of new humans, her descriptions so vivid and lively you felt as if you were hearing her voice or seeing her in person: how the new humans carry no historical baggage, how traditions, good and bad, have been completely done away with, which has led to an absence of any concept of beliefs or values worth mentioning; new humans are nihilists, they have no interest in differentiating between politicians and political hacks, they view involvement in a democratic movement as commercial activity, in which profit and loss are one’s personal responsibility; there is only success or failure, winning or losing, and that eliminates the need for either praise or scorn.

New humans worship the media, a god that determines all meaning and value. Any entity that has no place in the media simply does not exist. What that means, of course, is that any knowledge or wisdom can be discarded immediately after use (fifteen minutes of fame).

New humans have even lost touch with their emotions—they can neither give nor receive. Because they have never actually experienced poverty, war, or separation, their emotions are as pristine as the day they emerged from their mothers’ wombs, no more and no less, which is why they must use high decibels and the exaggerated motions of deaf-mutes to express emotions and views that are either ill-defined or virtually nonexistent.

Among new humans, the men are like women, the women are like men—gender neutral (for my interview with A that day I’d had my hair cut short like the actor Lim Giong, and I was wearing a gold ring in one ear, straight-legged khakis, and ankle-high boots).

Among new humans, women are much more willing to take the initiative sexually and are not hung up on traditional gender differences (what if I’d said to A that day that sometimes my current boyfriend and I satisfy each other’s needs by trying out new ways of making love in one of those MTV private rooms?), or, to the contrary, view emotions and desire as burdens, and, as a hedge against suffering, prefer to go without sex (like I told her that day).

I told A—as soon as I became conscious of the answer she might have been waiting for (such as what I occasionally or frequently did with a boyfriend in one of those MTV private rooms)—I gave her a different response. I told her that not having sex could signify an obsession over cleanliness, since you can’t be sure that a man who looks neat and clean doesn’t actually have bad breath, which, as you know, is certainly possible. Anyone with a job these days has an ulcer, pyorrhea, hepatitis, or insomnia, problems like that. Most important, how can you accept on faith that your partner may be a strong, handsome man, the kind you read about in romance novels, always ready to perform and always wearing clean, sexy underwear? And what if he can’t get it up or is soso in bed, leaving me unfulfilled, all hot and bothered, or wet and dirty? Give me a break, I’m not his wife, I have no moral or emotional obligation toward him or willingness to provide him with patience, sympathy, forgiveness, or consolation.

New humans also prefer images over the written word, by far (what if I’d told A that day that I’d watched the Japanese animes Urban Hunter and Crayon Shinchan many times and had gotten a lot of creative pointers from them?).

Having grown up in the wake of Taiwan’s economic boom, the new humans have no concept of savings or of frugality, and are devoted materialists. They have an astonishing ability to spend, and on extended credit, and I urged her to read reports by Roper, the American polling company: new humans spend $1.25 trillion every year (if, what if, during our interview I’d worn a Tiffany diamond ring just like hers?).

Diamonds range from a subtle yellow and an off brown to the rare pink, sea blue, green, and other bright colors, but the finest ones are colorless, since, like prisms, they can break rays of light into their component rainbow of colors. Giving her a colorless diamond is the same as giving her a pure heart, is how De Beers puts it.

Purity—most diamonds have tiny flaws; the fewer the flaws and the smaller, the less they affect the reflective quality, and the lovelier they are. A diamond is more brilliant and transparent than any other gemstone. Flawless diamonds are extraordinarily rare, and therefore, very pricey. When selecting a woman—I mean, a diamond—the fewer the blemishes, the prettier and the more valuable, is how De Beers puts it.

Carat, that is, the weight, is, as everyone knows, one of the four Cs that determine the quality and value of a diamond, and it is the easiest to measure. High-quality diamonds are available in a variety of sizes and shapes, and we believe she will never object to the additional weight a high-quality diamond bestows upon her, is how De Beers puts it. (Master wordsmiths!)

In the refining process, diamonds are cut in a variety of shapes, depending upon the quality of the stone: round, olive-shaped, pear-shaped, oval, rectangular, and heart-shaped. Besides being the hardest object known to us, diamonds have unique light-dispersing properties; they can reflect light from their interior and separate rays into their component colors (dispersion), thereby creating a brilliant, dazzling luster and fiery hues. The responsibility for this, obviously, rests with the master diamond cutter, is the claim De Beers makes.

It was once thought that something as hard as a diamond must be indestructible. Until, that is, an Indian diamond cutter discovered that the surface of one diamond can be scratched by another, producing a special luminosity.

Then, in the fifteenth century, Belgian diamond cutter Van Berquem discovered that you could shave the facets of a diamond with a steel disk lined with diamond dust.

At the close of the seventeenth century, the Venetian Peruzzi discovered a way to cut fifty-eight facets into a diamond, and to this day that remains the benchmark for all forms of cutting.

On October 21, 1879, Thomas Edison invented a lantern that used a carbon filament (Give me a break—what does this have to do with diamonds?). Royalty and rich merchants who owned diamonds discovered that the wearing of diamond jewelry was no longer restricted to daylight hours, that displaying it in a lighted room during a social gathering enhanced its attraction. The popularity of diamonds grew.

In the early twentieth century, Marcel Tolkowsky used a mathematical formula to calculate the most appropriate angles and ratios when cutting a round brilliant diamond … that was what A wore on her finger and what I planned to own.

I’d saved up enough money—in order not to be like the country bumpkin in the joke who carried baskets of cash into town and asked, “How many pounds of this for a lady’s wristwatch?” I went out and got a credit card. Before Valentine’s Day rolled around, on the daily return to my poor girl’s basement, I lingered in front of the rich girl’s palace window, and it didn’t take long to shift from appreciating the display and feeling breathless over the NT 100,000+ price tags for average-looking wristwatches to falling helplessly into all sorts of scenarios….

The door, is it bulletproof? It looks heavy. No matter how natural and unaffected the man or how affected or coy the woman, they all must push. It doesn’t move, so they wonder if it’s an automatic door. They stand and wait for it to swing open. But it doesn’t move, so they push real hard—hair flying, face red—not a very dignified start.

So I study the situation, trying to figure out how to open that really heavy glass door without making my face turn red or gasping for breath, appearing as casual as if I were walking into a convenience store.

This isn’t the only door, but the other one is kept locked for some reason, and the last thing I want to do in my nervous state is try to enter through the wrong door. I’ve seen several sophisticated customers try and fail to enter through that door; they feel around for a way to go through the transparent door, even bang on it, but to no avail, and wind up putting on a Marcel Marceau pantomime.

Beyond this, the display case for the solitaire diamond ring I’m interested in is located in the far left corner of an area with two U-shaped counters; the distance between it and the heavy door is roughly six or seven steps by a man, eleven or so by a woman in heels, for me probably nine or ten. The floor is covered by a tightly woven Oriental rug with a faint dark pattern, removing any possibility of slipping as I walk, so, little sister, hold your head high and get over there, go on, don’t look back….

Sales clerks? That didn’t seem like the right thing to call them. The men were courteous and reserved, like English butlers; and the women? They were like bank managers or flight attendants, each with a controlled facial expression, assuredly not people who would burst out laughing if asked, “Hey, Miss, how much for a pound of diamonds?” or “Color? I want ‘A’ grade.”

Outside the palace, I considered everything that might occur during the purchase. It was more like planning a robbery than studying the multifarious phony and complex but necessary (why?) palace protocols.

No, you say? I even took pains to baby my hands by wearing thick, lanolin-lined gloves in bed at night, something I’d never done before, not to smooth out the loops and whorls of my fingers, but to avoid having someone think these were the hands of a slave when I tried the rings on.

I planned my wardrobe for the day, seeking a fashionably casual look; thanks to my survey of the lay of the land (the carpet I mentioned earlier), I knew I could confidently wear patent leather Mary Janes with heels, and not have to worry about slipping or falling (during the escape?). I bought a bottle of the newest Armani perfume at a tax-free import shop. (Was I covering my tracks the way a herbivorous animal rubs up against a rotting carcass to throw a carnivorous predator off the scent?)

All was in readiness, all but the D & G suede backpack purse, now selling at a 30 percent discount, soon to go to 50 percent, with its mossy color and feel, the one the fashion magazines were pushing as the essential accessory of the season, even though, from a distance, it looked like an army canvas bag. With one of those on my back, I was sure to look like a gung-ho young warrior. But what to put in it—a canteen? a hand grenade? a marching map? Hey, what difference could it make?

“The result is that man [the worker] feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions—eating, drinking, and procreating, or at most in his dwelling and adornment—while in his human functions, he is nothing more than animal.”

The day before the robbery, every desk in the office was a sea of flowers; even I was the recipient of a bunch of champagne roses, sent by Xiao Jin from the print shop, who treats everyone the same, giving us all bouquets, sort of like the Mid-Autumn Festival, when everyone receives moon cakes.

While waiting for my bus, I stood quietly in front of the palace window, as usual, feeling nothing special about what I’d do the next day.

They were at my display case, sniffling from time to time because they had to bend down to see the diamond rings. They were casually dressed, as if they’d decided to come on the spur of the moment. The man was holding an umbrella, minus its plastic cover, water dripping down to form a wet spot on the carpet. Yet they were focused on what they were looking at, probably memorizing the cost of each ring, spending much more time than most consumers did, on average, by my observation.

Eventually, they straightened up and signaled to the butler or flight attendant. While they were waiting, the woman looked at the man, who was sniffling loudly, and brushed something off his shoulder, probably dandruff, just as the flight attendant walked up and began taking out rings for the woman to try on, one after the other, each time both of them exhaustively questioning the flight attendant about something, and it was almost as if they were buying a house they planned to live in for the next thirty or forty years.

Admittedly, it was also possible that this was a modern version of the story about the poor couple at Christmas: in order to buy her husband a chain for his pocket watch for Christmas, the wife cuts off and sells her long hair, and the husband, in order to buy his beloved wife a hair ornament, sells his pocket watch….

Let me put it this way: one third of the money for which I rent my labor goes to my landlord; in the Manuscripts it says that landlords get rich on the bodies of the poor, but most of the landlords I’ve rented from have had to use the rent they collect to supplement their mortgage payments, and most likely their property has been financed by financial conglomerates.

“The worker’s crude need is a far greater source of gain than the refined need of the rich. The cellar dwellings in London bring more to those who let them than do the palaces.”

But enough about that. The remaining two thirds of my wages should be mine to spend as I wish.

But make no mistake about it, a third of the money I spend on food winds up eventually in the hands of property owners. Putting aside income taxes paid to the government, think about how much a cup of coffee costs, or a hamburger and a soft drink, or think about the standard French fare at one of our five-star hotels, and compare those to the costs in other countries (and please, don’t give me Japan as your sole example).

Most of my clothing allowance goes to pay the rent of department store women’s departments and clothing manufacturers.

A significant portion of the money I spend on taxis goes to pay the cabbies’ rent, while property owners who pay no real estate taxes zip along in their Mercedes Benzes and BMWs ride down highways paved by income taxes I’m forced to pay, every cent of them.

At least 20 percent of what I shell out for subscriptions goes to pay the rent for magazine offices and warehouses, not to mention the factory rents for printing and typesetting, plus those paid by magazine employees and various workers—like me.

Beyond that, say we choose not to spend our money, but put it into a savings account in some financial institution, just so the real estate speculators can get megaloans and, reaping vast earnings, continue to speculate in properties we could never afford, no matter how long we lived, thereby forcing us and our descendants into lifelong backbreaking labor just so we can pay the rents we owe them.

And still we consider ourselves to be freemen, in spite of the fact that we are fated to be no better off than the Russian serfs, who were inextricably tied to the land for life.

That is because the Russian serfs could direct their anger and disgust (or adoration or envy) at the landlord, while we neither see nor know the identity of the individuals for whom we work ourselves to death, even though we are surrounded by their castles and fiefdoms.

“Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”¹¹

“They draw interest from the base habits of the impoverished proletariat, such as prostitution, drunkenness, money lending”¹² (and buying diamonds?).

I don’t know why Xiao Ma, who planned to spend his life in the opposition camp, stopped talking about the class issue.

I don’t know how to avoid that sort of predicament, the predicament of the serfs, and regain my freedom.

The evening arrived. I opened the door and walked into Tiffany’s. The door was exactly as I had calculated from long observations—neither too light nor too heavy—and I took exactly nine steps—no more, no less—up to the display case. In a word, everything progressed precisely as I had confidently predicted. Seventeen minutes, from start to finish, was a bit longer than I’d estimated, but that was because there were probably four times as many customers as usual on that Valentine’s Day night.

The ease and speed with which I carried out my robbery amazed a woman beside me, someone who looked a lot like A in age and attire. She was bent over the counter, closely examining the diamond rings in the display case. She was not sniffling, but she did glance my way in a feigned nonchalant manner, and the look in her eyes said it all: “A new human, no wonder!”

Without making a fool of myself and without setting off an alarm, I walked out of Tiffany’s, a modern-day tranquil palace, with my Star of the South, shouldered my way onto a bus, and returned to my basement.

I turned on every light in the room, untied the white ribbon, removed the robin’s-egg blue paper outer box, and opened the Prussian blue silk box. There it was.

Its ID card described it: brilliant, round cut, weight—39 points, overall quality good, clarity VVS1, a tiny flaw, H on the color scale, which is nearly colorless. Below that was a pompous description of its cutting ratio, like giving a woman’s height, weight, and measurements … in a word, it went to great lengths to inform you how this diamond differed from all other diamonds in the world, the false individualism of consumer capitalist aesthetics.

Nonetheless, my Star of the South did bring indescribable brightness into my basement room. I picked it up with my right hand and slid it onto the ring finger of my left, slowly, the way a lover would do it, and my heart filled with a tranquil joy, like, like that of the little boy who was playing on the bank of the South African Orange River when he picked up Eureka.

Eureka originally weighed in at 21.25 carats, and was sparrow yellow; its discovery attracted a flood tide of greedy visitors to South Africa, vying with one another to mine for diamonds.