Ghost Month (43 page)
Authors: Ed Lin
“No,” I said. “It hasn’t been love for a long time. Just my pride in keeping a promise to her.”
Another team had inched up on the leaders, so another group, near the back, also began to chant,
“Jia you!”
“I never came here with her,” I told Nancy. “So I especially wanted to come here with you. It’s time to try new things.”
Disgusted that the policemen weren’t contenders, Dwayne threw down his sweet potato, mashed it with his foot and pointed at me.
“This was rigged right from the start to let some Han Chinese win,” he sniffed.
“I’m not Han Chinese, Dwayne. I’m Taiwanese. Like you.”
He turned around and grunted.
A siren went off. The contest was over. No one on the ground could tell who the winner was. The crowd grew restless and pressed in. Nancy and then Dwayne were pushed into me as I looked up.
High above, the silhouette of a man bathed in light raised one arm in triumph. I shielded my eyes and stared at him hard.
A high-energy hostess came out on the stage in a sparkling dress and announced that some group from Tainan down south was the winner. She mentioned the drink sponsor every other sentence as she congratulated the team, all the participants and beautiful Toucheng in Yilan County.
Dwayne rounded us up like a sheepdog scared of losing its job.
“Look, you guys,” he said, “it’s one in the morning and there’s gonna be a big-ass traffic jam back to Taipei. We have to move
now
!”
D
WAYNE WAS DRIVING WITH
Frankie sitting shotgun. Both listened intently to a CD of melancholy songs by Jody Chiang, the queen of Taiwanese music.
I was sitting in the back with Nancy slumped against my left side. We seemed to always be in a tunnel, and at times traffic threatened to come to a complete standstill.
“Jing-nan?”
“Whoa, Nancy, I thought you were asleep.” We spoke underneath the sound of Jody pouring her heart out to a cold world. Nothing ever made her happy. Wow, is this what other people feel when they hear Joy Division for the first time?
Nancy stirred a little and pushed her head against me to rebalance herself before speaking. “I saw you give money to the people collecting for the Taoist temple.”
I stiffened. “I didn’t give that much.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in those things.”
I made a pyramid on my right thigh with my thumb and index and middle fingers. “I came to an understanding in Longshan
Temple, Nancy. We’re all human. We break promises and screw up our lives, sometimes by design and sometimes through circumstances. It’s a good thing that we can find some comfort in goddesses and rituals.” Without words, Nancy took my left hand. “Or in music.”
“Are you glad,” asked Nancy as she traced her fingers across my palm, “that Ghost Month is over and the gates to the underworld are shut again?”
I leaned my head against the window. “The gate is never shut, Nancy. The dead are always with us, because they live on in our hearts. We just can’t talk to them.”
Nancy wove her fingers through mine. “Some people say that the dead can talk to us in our dreams.”
I made a pessimistic groan. “I don’t know if I buy that.”
“I hear you talking to Julia in your sleep.”
“You do?”
“Yes. Every night.”
The last dream I could remember with Julia, the one where she told me to burn her diploma, had been about a week before.
“What do you hear me say?” I asked cautiously.
“You usually laugh. Like a little boy. Sometimes you sound sad, and I want to wake you up.” Nancy stretched her back briefly before continuing. “A few nights ago, though, you told her you’ve found someone new, and you sounded happy.”
I took in a deep breath and settled back. “I sounded happy,” I repeated.
As I was nodding off, our car broke out of the final tunnel, and I looked for home.
The moon pinned a perforated black bowl to the sky. The stars above and the man-made lights of the ancient basin that held Taipei blinked to each other and formed overlapping constellations too close together to name.
Taiwanese people are known for their politeness and tendency to work long hours. They throw themselves into eating and overworking as comfort from painful memories and nagging political questions. Good eats and an office cubicle are tangible and have their own permanence—valuable attributes in an island that is prone to uncertainty in the form of natural disasters and political reckonings as a young democracy continues to figure itself out. It’s not always something that can be done politely.
As I write this, there are three major protests rocking the nation. One is in response to the death of a young man serving in the army who was allegedly being punished too severely by superiors. Another is against the construction of Taiwan’s fourth nuclear power plant. The third is in response to the demolition of private houses in Miaoli County to make way for planned developments. The path to the resolution of these issues will determine Taiwan’s future, even as some unresolved and unresolvable issues continue to fester.
All Taiwanese bear the scars of history. The native Taiwanese were pushed out of their lands and are still marginalized in society. Taiwanese descended from early Chinese immigrants suffered the capricious taxation whims of the Qing Dynasty of China, then colonization by the Empire of Japan and subsequently the brutal early
years of the Kuomintang regime. The mainlanders who arrived in Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War were cut off from families left in China; when contact was established decades later, they found out their relatives had been executed, starved to death and tortured. All Taiwanese can relate to the island’s history on a personal level.
When my father was a boy, he watched American planes bomb Taiwan during World War II as Japanese anti-aircraft guns fired back. As a young man, he served his mandatory military duty for the Republic of China on Kinmen Island, which is about a mile off the coast of China but controlled by the Kuomintang. China bombarded Kinmen with shells that dispersed Communist propaganda leaflets upon impact. The Kuomintang retaliated by blaring their loudspeakers, encouraging the Chinese people to rebel and promising that the forces of Chiang Kai-shek would provide military support to overthrow the Communists.
My mother’s family is from northern China. Her father, my grandfather, was an officer in the KMT, while his older brother was a prominent Communist. If my grandfather’s brother hadn’t died of cholera at a young age, he would have been one of the revolutionaries they used to sing about in the ’50s. When I watched
The Sound of Music
with my mother, she told me that her family had escaped from China like the von Trapp family, eluding Communists block-by-block, all the way to the boat. Ironically, when
The Sound of Music
was shown in Taiwanese theaters, the censors chopped the film in half, lest any viewers compare their lives under martial law with that of Nazi Austria.
My parents met in New York, where my sister and I were born. Even though I have never lived in Taiwan for an extended period, my life is a part of the stories of my
benshengren-and-waishengren
family. These have become the stories of my characters.
I’d like to thank everybody in my family for opening up upon repeated questioning.
Thank you, Uncle Danny, for taking care of Cindy and me in Taipei. Within ten minutes of landing, you handed us a rental cell phone, and less than an hour later you had us feasting.
Aunt Lily, thank you for taking us to Din Tai Fung for an incredible meal that remains current in my memory.
Dennis Cheng, thank you for taking us places in your car and in your stories. I’ll never be able to eat shrimp again without feeling the need to shoot hoops.
Anna Cheng, thank you for your humor and for translating your junk mail.
Amer Osman, thank you for showing me the ins and outs and ups and downs.
Catherine Kai-lin Shu, thank you for hanging out with us in the night market and for providing a bunch of background info. Some of the best “Inside Scoops” you’ve ever filed!
If you’re in Taipei, Jo Lu and NCIS (Northern California Inspired Sushi, natch!) will rock your world. Check out
ncisushi.com
.
Thank you, unnamed and anonymous people.
Thank you: Juliet Grames, for your insight and encouragement; Bronwen Hruska, for your vision; Paul Oliver; Rachel Kowal; Meredith Barnes; Rudy Martinez; Janine Agro; Amara Hoshijo; and the entire crew at Soho.
Thank you, Kirby Kim, for being game.
Thank you, Cindy, for your love, your careful eye and your brave heart. And thank you, Walter, for falling into a regular sleeping schedule.
Epigraph from Tao Te Ching, translated by D.C. Lau.
www.facebook.com/edlinforpresident
BENSHENGREN:Descendants of Han Chinese, mostly from Fujian Province, who emigrated to Taiwan essentially before Japanese colonial rule began in 1895. Also known as Hoklo and “yams,” because Taiwan is shaped like one. The “home province people” constitute the vast majority of Taiwan’s population—84 percent, according to the CIA’s World Factbook—and are concentrated in the middle and southern areas of the island. Although collectively they represent about 80 percent of the island’s population,
benshengren
subgroups traditionally had sharp divisions.
Benshengren
originating from rival towns in China made a practice of burning down one another’s temples during bloody conflicts.
Orphan of Asia
by Wu Zhuoliu, a novel written in 1945, details the life of a yam villager’s hardships under the Japanese and disillusionment during travels through China, embodying the “sorrow of being Taiwanese” half a century before the phrase was famously spoken by then-President Lee Teng-hui.
Benshengren
were once viewed by
waishengren
as people brainwashed by the Japanese who didn’t appreciate the sacrifices made by the Kuomintang and the Republic of China during the civil war. The view is more complicated and subtle now, as most of the KMT membership is made of
benshengren
.
A phonetic system used by those learning to speak Mandarin and also a shortcut for inputting Chinese characters in electronic media. In the song
Rose, Rose, I Love You
by Wang Chen-ho, blue-collar
benshengren
joke that when they struggled to learn Mandarin, “Bopomofo” sounded like “boar pour more.” I thought that would make a great name for a band.
The most important figure behind the architecture of modern Taiwan, with a divisive legacy. To some, he was the brave Generalissimo, the president of the Republic of China who defended the island from the clutches of Communist China and inspired his followers’ hopes that someday he would unleash his armed forces and retake the mainland. To others, his Kuomintang party oversaw a period of martial law (in 1947–87, the longest imposed in the modern era) marked by ruthless repression and outright assassinations of dissidents. No matter your view, I think you’ll enjoy reading the excellent
The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China
by Jay Taylor, probably the only objective assessment of the man. In recent years, with the opposition Democratic Progressive Party gaining power, Taiwan has renamed many places that had been named after Chiang. Most notably, the Chiang Kai-shek International Airport is now Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport. Some Chiang statues have been removed from public areas, as well, usually occasioning some high-profile clashes with supporters trying to block the removals. Interestingly, during a three-day trip to Beijing in July 2012, I saw only two representations of Chiang’s old foe Mao Zedong. It’s especially curious because as the Communist Party of China and Kuomintang have grown closer in recent years, the men who once embodied those respective parties are fading from view. Note that “Chiang Kai-shek” is actually a Romanization of the man’s name in the Cantonese dialect, although it’s by that moniker that most of the English-speaking world knows him. Jiang Jieshi, written in Pinyin, is the name that Mandarin speakers praise and curse him by.
