Ghost Month (5 page)

“You, too,” she called out as I left.

M
Y NEXT STOP WAS
Big Shot Hot Pot.

Kuilan’s son, Ah-tien, was at the front counter, seasoning a spicy soup base and a sour soup base. When he saw me, he gave the smallest nod and yelled out for his mother before assuming a sullen and resentful look. The son and I had never really hit it off. He was a bit of a delinquent and seemed to regard people who finished high school as sellouts. I shuffled my feet as the silence between us swirled and thickened like the soup.

Ah-tien was thirty, five years older than me, and still wore the
buzz cut left over from conscription. He probably hated me because I’d been able to defer the mandatory military service, and then had been excluded from it because I was an orphan and running a business that employed others.

His black tank top showed off tattoos of tigers as well as a
ba gua
, the octagon-shaped Taoist symbol with a black-and-white yin-yang swirl in the middle. The collar was low enough to expose the face of a dragon with lobster-like eyestalks. He noticed me looking and puffed his chest out more.

I had never done anything to make him hate me, but I’m sure his mom had beaten him over the head with my good example of what a son should be. I had heard Kuilan talk about Ah-tien, always in a disparaging way, for years before I actually met him. I thought she was doing the overly modest thing parents do. Maybe this supposed “bad kid” was really the class salutatorian and not the valedictorian, merely an above-average pianist and not a virtuoso. Maybe the “trouble” Ah-tien was having with the cops was just an argument about a parking ticket.

Ah-tien’s slouching form showed up at the night market about two years ago. The first time I saw him, with his tattoos, wild eyes and suspiciously crooked fingers, I had no idea who he was. This man I didn’t know was counting money and smoking in the men’s restroom in the indoor part of the night market. I looked at him, not accusingly, but with curiosity.

He straightened up and seemed pleased he was taller than I was. Thinking that I was focused on the cash, Ah-tien stuffed the wad partially in his front pocket. Try to take it, kid, his smirk seemed to say. Then he coolly rubbed out his cigarette on the plastic No Smoking sign and left without saying a word.

Less than an hour later, Kuilan brought him over to Unknown Pleasures and introduced him to me.

“Jing-nan is a
good
young man!” she emphasized, to my horror.

I got my hand to him as quickly as possible and we shook. I’d never met anyone with scars on their palm before.

“Hello,” he said in a quietly furious voice.

From now on, Kuilan said, Ah-tien was going to be working at her stall, and he and I were going to be best friends. I nodded and
faked a smile. Ah-tien was better at it than me. We hadn’t had a substantial exchange of facial expressions since.

K
UILAN GREETED ME WITH
her hands on her hips and a nod. She had to be in her early sixties now, but she still looked the same as when I first saw her two decades ago. Kuilan often cited her Mongolian blood for her strength and slightly heavier-than-average build.

“Jing-nan, I forgot my hat today,” she said. “All this flour in the air is going to turn my hair even more grey!”

“That’s the only way I can tell the difference between you and Dancing Jenny,” I said.

She rubbed her ears. “You’re just a kidder! I know I look like her father. Say, have you heard about that new rumor going around? The district is going to pass a law that we’re all going to have to close by midnight!”

I laughed out loud, but too heartily for the beginning of Ghost Month, so I dialed it back a little. “There’s no way they could do that! Midnight is when Taiwanese first get hunger pangs.”

“It’s the tourists they’re thinking about. The image of Taipei is that we’re too morally loose, eating so many hours after the sun has gone down. Christians think it’s a sin! I know because my sister married a Christian. They call it ‘gluttony.’ ”

“The problem is that your soups taste too good!”

Kuilan’s son had had enough of our small talk. He wiped his hands on his apron, jammed a cigarette in his mouth and headed outside.

“Hey, Ah-tien!” his mother snapped at him. “You haven’t finished yet!”

He didn’t bother to remove the cigarette to talk back. “They have to simmer now. Do you expect me to make time go faster?”

“Why can’t you be like Jing-nan? Look how nice he is. Everybody likes him, and he’s never in trouble.” Luckily Ah-tien was out of earshot before she was even halfway done talking. She sighed and said to me, “I just hope the tourists and not the good brothers are hungry for our food. I’ll set another table outside for them.”

I didn’t want to, but I thought of Julia. I imagined her in pain and confused, wandering about with no relief, covered in blood.

“Do you want some water, Jing-nan?”

“No, thank you.”

“You’re swallowing a lot.”

“Your soup smells so good.”

“Such a kidder! So funny! How come you’re not married yet?”

I laughed soundlessly, feeling a cutting motion across my guts. “It’s not time yet.”

“Are you kidding me? When I was your age, I was already picking out baby names!” At that remark, Kuilan’s rarely seen husband, Bert, poked his head out from the kitchen in the back. He seemed to be sitting on a stool, and his hands were dutifully twisting dumpling skins over ground-pork fillings.

“Kuilan, looking at your husband reminds me that I should get my own show on the road. Don’t sell so many that you fill up my customers!”

“Bert!” Kuilan chastised him. “You didn’t say hi to Jing-nan the entire time he was standing here, and now he’s leaving!”

“Uh?” Bert looked up at her in awe before focusing on me. “Yes, hello, Jing-nan. You’re a good worker and a testament to what a good son is.”

I walked out just in time. Ah-tien was coming up Dabei Road, wearing a big pair of noise-canceling headphones.

I
APPROACHED UNKNOWN PLEASURES
with more than the usual dread. I was an actor who had lost his motivation. I wasn’t fully confident I could pull off the role tonight.

My two employees—colleagues, really—were prepping for the evening’s business.

Dwayne, the half aborigine who cooked and did pretty much everything else at the indoor counter, ran out and grabbed me around my arms. He didn’t use his customarily tight grip. It was soft. Caring, even. It brought me back to reality.

“I read all about Julia,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

Shit. Dancing Jenny and Song Kuilan didn’t pay attention to the news and Dwayne did?

I slumped a little. Dwayne led me inside to a metal prep table next to the sink in the corner. I sat down and lay my head sideways
on top of my folded arms. Dwayne slid over a serving of spicy entrails stew in a ceramic bowl.

It looked and smelled exactly how my grandfather and father used to make it. The pig intestines and the pudding-like, coagulated lumps of duck blood were in the same proportion. We hadn’t slipped at all. If I didn’t hate my life completely at this moment, I’d say that I was rather pleased.

“Eat up, Jing-nan. Best thing you can do,” Dwayne said. He pulled out a chair and sat on it backward so he could perch his upper body on the backrest. He was close enough for me to see the red lightning-bolt veins radiating from his pupils. “This is terrible news, but we need you to be functional tonight, boss.”

He tilted his head down and regarded me over his cracking knuckles. You couldn’t tell he was part Amis. Dwayne looked like just another dark-skinned Taiwanese man in his late thirties, albeit on the heavier-built side. He fought back against his receding hairline by maintaining a crew cut.

I watched my hands turn the bowl of soup clockwise ninety degrees. “You remember Julia well, don’t you, Dwayne?”

“ ’Course I do. Me and the Cat both remember her. Wonderful little girl. Real nice and smart and pretty.”

From the other prep table on the other side of the sink, Frankie the Cat closed his eyes and nodded to us. Frankie was in his seventies, but he was ageless and silent in his appearance and movements. As always, he wore a clean, white long-sleeved kitchen uniform in spite of the humidity. With his big smile and oversized eyeglass lenses, he looked like the Cheshire Cat. Now, though, his mouth had sobered into two sad earthworms.

Dwayne and Frankie. Those were not their given names, but like a lot of people at the night market, such as Jenny, they were on their second or third chance at life. I was at a disadvantage here because I only knew certain episodes from their pasts, but Dwayne and Jenny had known me for most of my life, and Frankie, all of it. I couldn’t pretend to be someone different around them; that’s why they called me Jing-nan and not Johnny.

My right hand picked up a pair of chopsticks, and I watched red oblong shapes of hot oil stretch and slide into the hollow of the
soup spoon my left hand was pushing into the soup. Steam lightly scorched my forehead as I bent down and ate mechanically.

“You and the Huangs haven’t been close in a few years, right?” Dwayne asked.

“I think the last time I saw Julia’s parents was at the funeral,” I said. “The funerals, I mean. Those were the last conversations I had with them. They sure sold their stall at the right time, when the economy was good.”

“What about Julia? You never … talked?”

The evening was getting a little too real for me. I had hoped to grieve inside and keep everything I felt in that soundproof darkroom with no doorknob. But Dwayne had kicked in that door and turned on the lights. I wasn’t used to talking to him in this way, either. We both had these playfully antagonistic, guy-guy personalities that we wore during work hours. When my parents died, he had mercifully said next to nothing. Now he wanted me to talk things out?

I scooped a few peppercorns from the stew into my mouth and crunched them one by one, feeling a burst of hurt every time.

“It was so stupid, Dwayne,” I said to a shaky reflection of myself in a shimmering oval of chili oil. I slurped up a stretch of chewy intestine. It broke easily in my mouth, with just the right amount of give. The ginger flavor had burst through the spicy firewall and became prominent in my mouth. “You knew about my plan, right?” I asked when my mouth was empty enough.

“Sure I did. You guys were going to ignore each other for a few years and then you were going to swoop in one day like a prince on a horse. Just like
Sleeping Beauty
.”

“Not quite
Sleeping Beauty
.” I stirred the stew and watched a cloud of pickled cabbage surface briefly. I picked out a dried chili that looked like a little devil’s tongue. I chewed it but didn’t swallow. “More like
Snow White
without the prince showing up. I couldn’t pull it off, Dwayne.”

“You tried. It was beyond your control.”

That set me off, because I wasn’t ready to stop blaming myself yet. “Beyond my control! Everything’s beyond my control! Look at me. Still doing the same shit my parents and grandfather—”

Dwayne stood up and kicked the chair across the tile floor. Frankie simply lifted his leg and clamped the chair down before it could fly into the street.

“Hey, you watch your mouth, Jing-nan!” said Dwayne. “This is a respectful business and one of the best restaurants in the market. Your grandfather, rest his spirit, and your parents, rest their spirits, put everything they had into this to make life better for you. For us, too.”

“I’m sorry, Dwayne. I didn’t mean to insult you. You too, Frankie.”

“Don’t apologize to me and the Cat. We can take it. You apologize to your ancestors and set up an offering table for them. You have to. It’s bad enough that you took out the Guan Gong altar when you redesigned the place.” Like most Chinese gods, Guan Gong was based on an actual person, a famous general, in fact. He’s the red-faced guy holding a giant sword with a blade that looks like a lobster claw.

“No more fake gods here,” I said, my throat raw from the spices and anger.

“The previous management would be appalled!”

“It doesn’t matter, because I’m in charge now!”

“You lousy Han Chinese,” Dwayne said. “You destroyed my culture and you don’t even respect your own!”

Finally. We were both going back into work mode. Dwayne was the indignant native Taiwanese and I was the super-upbeat Johnny Taipei. Wrestling was definitely on the menu tonight. Frankie the Cat was going to go on being his silent self as he kept the stews fully stocked and fresh ingredients prepped throughout the night. The guy runs in the background like security software on a computer network.

I charged back into the stew with renewed vigor, never once letting go of my chopsticks or spoon. I wiped my forehead with the back of my right forearm and ate until there was nothing but pepper grit at the bottom of my bowl. I heard a scraping sound. Frankie was pushing out the front grill—Johnny Taipei’s pulpit—to the street. I stood up and put my bowl and utensils in the sink.

“Be happy,” I told Dwayne. “It’s the first day of you-know-what and we’re going to make a lot of money.”

“Oh, I know. Your restless undead are up and walking, trampling upon my people’s graves.”

“There’s no rest for us because we’re going to have customers in two seconds, my good
Pangcah
.”

“You don’t get to call me that! Only Amis get to call each other that. The way you say it, you murder my language.”

“Then how do you say it?”

Dwayne snickered and wiped his face. He went to the big back grill and tossed more wood chips and charcoal under it.

At some point Frankie had cleared out the sink, and now he was washing out pig and cow intestines, stomachs and chicken butts. The water washed down through a tube to a metal vent in the street curb. Who knew where that went to. The air smelled like wet feces and blood. It was comforting and felt like home.

I strode out to the front grill, feeling brand-new.

“That’s my boy, Johnny,” said Dwayne softly.

I set up the smaller skewers in a display behind my sneeze guard, to catch the eyes of people walking by. When they got hooked, people could move on to the larger skewers inside. Frankie brought over a tub of marinated, chopped-up meats and entrails. We each gathered a handful of wet bamboo skewers and began to spike them until they were full. As I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Frankie, he regained his full smile.