Ghost Month (2 page)

“How can you say that?” she said, her eyes brimming with tears.

Part of me felt sorry for her. Another part of me was nauseated, maybe from all the incense. I reached out and touched the woman’s left elbow. “Your son will be here soon,” I told her before leaving.

In both directions of Jianguo Road, the sidewalks were crowded with offering tables and streaming rivulets of smoke. I couldn’t
handle it, not right now anyway. Luckily, Da’an Forest Park was nearby. I crossed the northbound lane of the street and walked under the Jianguo Elevated Road, listening to car tires moaning overhead like mournful spirits.

Why had Julia come back to this horrible island? Why was I stuck here now? We didn’t belong. After all, neither of us believed in religion or astrology, and Taiwanese are the most superstitious people in the industrialized world. For example, the Da’an District is home to the country’s top universities and brightest professors and young people. Yet these supposedly educated people would chuck their books and degrees into the fire if it made them more pious for Ghost Month.

Essentially, Ghost Month is the entire seventh lunar month of the year, when everybody on the island spends nearly five weeks indulging every crazy belief they hold about the spirit world. Supposedly the gates of the underworld are opened and spirits of the dead are allowed to walk among the living once again. It feels like hell’s doors have been opened, as the festival usually straddles the two hottest months of the year—July and August.

Why the hell did we need to appease spirits and idols? We Taiwanese are capable of so many miraculous things on our little rocky island, such as building the tallest building on earth and operating the world’s largest semiconductor plant. Yet we are also held back by our bizarre beliefs.

Car and house sales fall off during Ghost Month because Taiwanese stay away from big-ticket items out of fear that ancestors would feel they were being neglected. The ghosts could also “claim” such purchases by cursing them. Cesarean delivery rates go up the month before. It’s unlucky to give birth during Ghost Month, and if you’re unfortunate enough to be born during it, nobody will celebrate your birthday out of fear of offending jealous spirits.

All year round, Taiwanese avoid the number four because it sounds like “death” but love the number eight because it sounds like “luck.” Buildings lack fourth floors, and it’s not possible to get a license plate with a “4” digit. The way people drive in Taipei, you need all the luck you can get.

Taiwanese also believe China would attack the island should
we formally declare independence, mainly because Beijing vowed to. So we maintain a flimsy fiction to the international community that we are citizens of a wayward Chinese province. In the Olympics, we marched as “Chinese Taipei.” How embarrassing. We were like the perennial kid in the playground whose mother made him wear a sweater in the summer—only in our case, if we didn’t wear the sweater, she was going to invade and kill indiscriminately.

I
FELT A DULL
throbbing in my head as I waited for a spot to open up so I could cross the southbound lane of Jianguo Road and enter the park. Traffic was nuts.

All my plans, hopes and dreams collapsed into each other like sections of a blurry telescope being slammed shut. I realized the futility of the stupid life plan I had set for us. How Julia and I were going to live the American Dream and leave behind all the backward thinking and backward politics of Taiwan.

We loved America because it was the kind of place where religion and superstition didn’t dictate the culture. The US president didn’t burn incense to gods, bow down to idols in temples and worship his ancestors. The Taiwanese president did.

America also didn’t have the “black gold” problem that Taiwan had.
Heijin
—the practice of politicians working with the criminal underworld—was an embarrassment to any Taiwanese who truly believed in democracy. Vote buying was rampant. Gangsters openly ran for seats in public office—and won titles and immunity from prosecution while serving.

We didn’t think America was perfect, but it was better. It was a country with ambitious people doing great things, not a tiny island that was getting more crowded and dirty every day.

Tens of thousands of Taiwanese attend college in the US. A lot of them intend to come home and become big-shot bankers, lawyers and politicians. In fact, the last three Taiwanese presidents were all Ivy Leaguers. That wasn’t our thinking at all, though. Julia and I were done with Taiwan. We thought we were as destined to settle down in America as we were destined to be together forever.

Now, and only now, I realized that it was the stupid teenage
dream of a stupid teenager. I was just another in a long line of men in Taiwan talking big and delivering nothing.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek said he’d regroup his military and retake the Chinese mainland. He ended up dying here in exile.

Chen Shui-bian promised he’d fight corruption. Now the former president was in jail for embezzlement and bribery.

I had promised Julia we’d be happy and somewhat successful in America. But in the end, she had been reduced to working at a betel-nut stand, and I was running my family’s crummy food stall at the Shilin Night Market.

I checked my phone again. Two more details had been added to the story. Julia hadn’t graduated from college, and she had apparently returned to Taiwan a few years ago.

So neither of us had finished school. Damn.

How could she not have graduated? Julia had been the smartest person in high school and possessed an intuition about things that can’t be taught. For example, she could guess the number of beans in a glass jar with a single glance. Too bad she hadn’t been able to see that I was missing a few marbles.

I punched myself several times in the stomach as I continued pacing on the corner.

“Stupid, stupid!” I yelled. People edged away from me. If a cop were here, he might try to shout some sense into me.

I had bigger things to worry about, like what was I going to do now?

Until I’d learned about Julia, I had been working on Plan B. I was going to return to the US, finish my degree at UCLA, get a great job and then we’d get married. The details of the plan were always a little murky.

Now both of our lives were over. There was no future and the dream was dead. Like my father and my father’s father, I was an uneducated yokel cooking up skewers at the night market.

The only girl I’d ever loved was dead, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. I couldn’t even cross the fucking road.

CHAPTER TWO

A phalanx of mopeds and motorcycles that had formed at the last light blasted by as the traffic signal was finally winding down. Businessman riders wore dress shirts or short-sleeved polos. Young and elderly people wore hoodies. Some vehicles carried two people, some carried fully packed plastic crates and many of them carried more than what was probably a safe weight for steering or braking in time. It didn’t matter. As long as you wore a helmet, the cops would leave you alone.

When Jianguo Road was mostly clear, I shuffled across the street and entered Da’an Forest Park. On a superficial level, I registered that it was a beautiful place as I walked among the maple and camphor trees. I should come here more often. If I had a better nose, I could probably pick up the magnolia and jasmine scents, but years of grill grease and smoke from the night-market stall have destroyed my ability to smell anything but a customer.

It’s a fairly big park considering it’s in the middle of Taipei, about sixty-four acres. I had entered at the northern border, Xinyi, right where the MRT stop is. A group of melting Australian pensioners had tentatively entered the park and couldn’t decide whether to explore more or enter the subway.

“Pardon me,” I interjected. “Are you all lost, mates?” I looked from face to face. About a dozen of them. I searched for the one
with the biggest smile. She was wearing a traditional Taiwanese farmer’s hat, which featured a wide brim topped with a cone.

“It’s our first day here,” she said. “Do you think we should spend it in the park or go to Taipei 101?” We all looked up and to the east. Taipei 101, which had been the tallest building in the world from 2004 until 2010, loomed in the distance, a jade pendant hanging down from the sky.

“I think you should be ambitious, since your flight wasn’t that long—not as long as it takes the Yanks to get here,” I said, pausing for the laughs I knew would come. “Go to Taipei 101, take the elevator up and see Taipei from all directions. Get your bearings and enjoy the air conditioning. You can come back to the park some other time, when you’re used to the humidity.”

“That’s what we’ll do, then!”

“Oh, by the way, tonight or any night, you should come to the Shilin Night Market and check out my stand, Unknown Pleasures.” I dealt my card out. “My name’s Johnny and I’ve got the best food in Taipei. Follow the map on the back.”

“We will definitely stop by,” she pledged. I gave it a fifty–fifty chance.

“Please come by,” I said, adding, “I’ll put a shrimp on the barbie for ya!” They laughed again. Maybe it was fifty-one–forty-nine now.

I waved goodbye. Ah, the happy-go-lucky Johnny Taipei persona. Cultivated over years of calling out and bringing people in like a sideshow barker. Johnny was everybody’s best friend. As Jing-nan, I didn’t have any friends. Johnny loved being out with people, but Jing-nan wanted to be alone. Johnny was Mr. I Love Taipei. Jing-nan was distant and lost in his thoughts.

With Julia’s death, I felt that much more removed from my Johnny personality, even as I slipped him off. I coughed and wiped my mouth. There. Now I was sad again.

I
WALKED BY THE
children’s playground. The multicolored slides and tunnels made it look like a giant board game, big enough to climb over and crawl under. The kids in the sandpit tried to form mountains and monsters before pulverizing them to look for buried treasure.

I continued walking south. The park was just like any in Los Angeles. Palm trees. Big bald spots in the grassy areas. Elderly men playing Chinese instruments.

I came across the open amphitheater near the center of the park. When I was a kid, I’d seen an Elvis imitator on this stage. I remembered that when he spoke English he seemed to have a Filipino accent, but when he sang he sounded just like the recordings.

I looked at the people hanging out on the benches before the barren stage. All the guys seemed to be with their girlfriends or families. I didn’t have either anymore. As an orphan I had more in common with the squatters and homeless old soldiers who’d been thrown off the land to make the park.

Somewhere in the park was a Buddha statue that a typical Taiwanese in my distressed state would probably seek out to pray to. I decided that I’d rather see animals than a good-for-nothing statue, so I headed northwest to the giant lotus pond. I leaned against the railing and listened to hidden insects make whirring sounds. The egrets seemed to be out to lunch. I looked over the floating green muck and found a group of turtles doing nothing. It seemed to be a life free of worries.

To my left, three older men in baggy slacks sprawled on top of a bench, mirroring the turtles in the pond. They spoke in a Chinese dialect I didn’t know. Maybe they were soldiers who’d been stranded in Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War ended sixty years ago. More likely, younger relatives had brought them over more recently from rural China, thinking they’d be better off in a modern city. The men didn’t look or sound too happy to be here. Content Chinese people do tai chi in the park. Bitter Chinese people complain until the sun goes down.

It was a common story, that elderly Chinese couldn’t enjoy the urban conveniences of Taipei. They could have anything they wanted except for the foods, places and people they had left behind—which was all they wanted. I know what it’s like to be unhappy where you are.

I
STILL RUE THE
day five years ago when I came back to Taiwan from UCLA because my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
My mother was killed in a car accident on the way to the airport to pick me up. After that my father lived only three more weeks.

It was the hardest thing in the world for me to tell my father that his wife was dead. He burst into tears, and the rare display of emotion created an uncomfortable situation for both of us. Then he told me that it was up to me now to keep the food stall going after he was gone. There was an old gambling debt my grandfather had accumulated that had never gone away, and those people had to be paid. I’d known about it, but I hadn’t realized how large it was and how little of it we had whittled down over the years. Selling everything my family owned would cover maybe a quarter of the debt. If I tried to return to UCLA, leaving the country without repayment would put a price on my head.

Just like that, my American sojourn was over. I didn’t even get to finish my sophomore year.

If only I had taken a different flight or not come home at all, my mother would still be here, I would have an American job and Julia would be alive. Maybe she’d be sunning in her bikini on a California beach with me instead of being shot dead in her bikini at a highway betel-nut stand.