Hunt for Jade Dragon (18 page)

The woman then brought out small plastic bowls of thin broth with chopped scallions. The soup was simple and salty but good. While we finished our soup they brought out chopsticks, soy sauce, and a shallow porcelain dish of red hot sauce, followed by bamboo baskets stacked on top of each other. They were filled with white steaming dumplings.

“What are these?” Taylor asked.

“There's meat inside,” Ian said.

“I just thought of something,” Taylor said, smiling. “If someone ever gives me a box of chocolates I'm bringing them to you.”

“I don't like chocolate,” Ian said.

“Not for you to
eat
,” Taylor said. “So you could tell me what's inside them. That way I won't have to stick my fingernail in the bottom of each one.” She looked at me. “That makes my mom so mad.”

“These are called
syau lung bau
,” Ben said. “That means ‘little dragon dumplings.' They are very delicious.”

I had trouble lifting one with my chopstick, so I finally just speared it. Something yellow and oily came out where I had pierced it.

“What's that?” I asked.

“There is soup inside,” Ben said. “I do not think you have this in America.”

“In America the dumplings are
in
the soup,” Taylor said. “Not the other way around.”

“Try it,” Ben said. “You will like it.”

I lifted a dumpling and bit half of it, and the other half fell to the table. I picked up the other half with my fingers and quickly put it in my mouth. Ben was right. I did like it.

“You may put them in the soy sauce or hot sauce,” Ben said.

“What's the meat inside of these?” Taylor asked.

“Poke.”

“Poke?”

“Pig meat,” Ben said.

“You mean
pork
,” Ostin said.

Ben looked distressed. “I am very sorry, my English is not always so good.”

“Your English is very good,” I said. “And a million times better than our Chinese.”

“I can't use these things,” McKenna said, setting down her chopsticks. “Can I have a fork?”

Ben's brow furrowed. “But you are Chinese.”

“Only my genes,” McKenna said.

Ben looked at her pants. “Your jeans are from China?”

McKenna shook her head. “Never mind.”

Next they brought out bowls of noodles with broccoli and snap peas and pieces of some kind of filleted fish. The skin of the fish was thick and decorative, almost like snakeskin. The noodles were set in a yellow-brown mucus-like broth.

“I think I'm going to be sick,” Taylor said, looking at the bowl.

“What is this?” I asked Ben.

“Fish.”

“It looks like a snake,” Zeus said.

“Eat,” Ben said. “You will like it. It is famous in Taitung.”

I ate a few bites. He was wrong this time. It was awful. “What kind of fish is this?”

“It is
shan yu
. I do not know how to say it in English.” He took out his smartphone. “I will look it up on Wikipedia.” He typed in some words, then handed me the phone.

“Swamp eel,” I said.

“I'm going to throw up,” Taylor said.

“You should see how gross it looks
in
your stomach,” Ian said.

Taylor grimaced. “Now I'm definitely going to throw up.”

“Generally speaking, I don't eat things from swamps,” Tessa said.

“Me neither,” I said, pushing the bowl away from me. I drank some of the apple soda to get the taste out of my mouth.

Ben looked at us all curiously. “You do not like noodles?”

“We like noodles,” I said. “It's the eel.”

“And the yellow mucus puss stuff,” Tessa added.

“You do not like eel?” Ben asked.

“Only electric ones,” I said.

“Do they taste good?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

The woman brought out more bamboo baskets, which I was glad to see since I was still hungry and the dumplings were good. “What are these?” I asked.

“These are steamed buns with sweet meat.”

“Barbecue,” Ostin said.

They were as good as the dumplings, maybe better. Ostin clearly liked them because he ate like six of them, and Ben ordered more for the rest of us.

We finished eating, then boarded the van and headed off to Kaohsiung. We drove south along Taiwan's eastern coastline for more than an hour to a small city called Daren, west for another hour to another small town called Shihzih, then back north along the western coast to Kaohsiung, which was the largest and most crowded city I had ever seen. The streets were filled with cars, bicycles, motorcycles, and scooters.

Ben had booked us in a five-star hotel called the Grand Hi-Lai. It was the tallest building in that part of the city and overlooked the Kaohsiung bay. He parked across from the hotel's entrance, shut off the van, and turned back to speak to us. “This is where we will be staying. Please wait while I get your rooms.” He went into the hotel and about ten minutes later returned with our room keys. We split up into four rooms: Ostin and me; Jack, Zeus, and Ian; Tessa and McKenna; and Taylor and Nichelle.

“I think we must walk in two or three at a time to avoid suspicion,” Ben said. “It is best if you do not leave the hotel. There are many restaurants inside, but you should only be two or maybe four together. There is a nice mall with the hotel if you want to shop. Do you have any questions?”

“Where are you staying?” I asked.

“I am stay here too. I am in room 7011.”

“Seven, zero, one, one,” I memorized. “What's our schedule?”

“The Elgen boat
Volta
is still at least a week away. Tomorrow we will drive to look at the Starxource plant. I think you will be jet-lag, so we will not start too early. Maybe around ten.” He looked around for confirmation.

“Ten's good,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “We meet in the hotel lobby at ten. I will take you to breakfast. Do you need anything?”

“We're good,” I said.

“Then we go.”

Ben handed us our plastic room keys, and Jack, Zeus, and Ian went in first, followed by Tessa and McKenna, then Taylor and Nichelle. When it was just Ostin and me, I said to Ben, “Thank you. We'll see you in the morning.”

“
Shr dyan
,” Ben said. “Ten o'clock. And welcome to Taiwan.”

T
he Grand Hi-Lai Hotel was the nicest place I'd ever stayed. It had like five or six restaurants and a large fitness center with a yoga room and spa. Ostin and I had a room that faced west with a view of the Kaohsiung harbor. Across the street, twenty-two stories below us, was some kind of temple with green and blue dragons and tigers on its roof. It also had symbols that looked like swastikas.

“That's a Buddhist temple,” Ostin said, looking over my shoulder. “The Buddhists and Hindus used the swastika symbol thousands of years before Hitler flipped it around and made it the symbol for the Nazi party. Ironically, the word ‘swastika' is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘well-being.' The Nazis kind of ruined that for the rest of the world.”

There was a lot that I wanted to see, and I kept thinking what a shame it was that we weren't there on vacation.

Ostin and I ordered room service (something we'd never done before), and a waiter brought us Cokes in Chinese bottles, ham fried rice, and barbecue chicken. Even though it was just a little after two when we finished eating, we were both exhausted, and I drew the room's blinds and we went to sleep.

* * * 

I woke early the next morning to the sound of classical music, like a symphony. I tried to turn off the radio, and then I realized it wasn't on. The music was coming from outside our window. I got up and looked out. On the street behind the hotel a garbage truck was playing music from a sound system.

“That's weird. It's a garbage truck,” I said. “People are bringing out their garbage.”

“They do that in Taiwan,” Ostin said. “It's like the ice-cream trucks in America; they play music to let people know they're there. He's playing Beethoven's
Für Elise
.”

There was something funny and happy about the combination of garbage and Beethoven.

“What time is it?” Ostin asked.

“Time to go back to bed,” I replied, lying back down.

“I'm going to watch television.”

“It's just going to be in Chinese,” I said, hoping to deter him.

“I know. I can practice my Chinese.”

“Practice softly,” I said. I pulled the pillow over my head and tried to sleep, but couldn't. About forty-five minutes later I got up and looked out the window again. The harbor was filled with boats of myriad shapes and sizes. The sky was overcast and my view was slightly obscured by fog.

“I think it might rain,” I said.

“Rain's never hurt anyone,” Ostin said.

“Tell that to Zeus,” I replied.

* * * 

Ostin and I went down to the lobby a few minutes before ten. Everyone else was already there, though it took a while before I could tell since they weren't standing together. Zeus, Jack, and
Ian were sitting in the restaurant, and McKenna and Tessa were looking at jewelry in a display case on the far side of the lobby.

I could see everyone but Nichelle. Taylor had shared a room with her (in part because no one else was willing to, and also to keep an eye on her) and she was standing alone in the center of the lobby beside a massive display of flowers. I left Ostin next to the concierge desk and casually walked up to her. “Where's Nichelle?”

“She'll be down soon. She didn't want to wait around down here with everyone.”

“I don't blame her,” I said. “How was she last night?”

“Quiet. She went out to buy some clothes. She brought back some pastries from the bakery over there. She gave me one.”

“She gave you a pastry?”

“I know, amazing, right?”

“Anything suspicious?”

“No. She just ate her pastry, then rolled over and went to sleep.”

At that moment Nichelle came walking down the hall from the elevator. She glanced furtively at us, and then kept walking toward the front door and went outside.

Less than a minute later Ben walked into the lobby. He looked at me and nodded, then went back out. I looked around at everyone else to make sure they'd seen him; then we individually started toward the door. It took about five minutes before everyone was in the van. Tessa and McKenna were the last out.

“Do you really think this pretending we don't know one another is necessary?” Tessa asked as she climbed into the van.

“We don't want to find out,” Ostin said.

“It is better to be careful,” Ben said.

“I'm hungry,” Taylor said.

“I have a breakfast surprise,” Ben said, then added, “It is not fish noodles.”

“Thank Buddha,” Tessa said.

Ben drove out of the hotel's driveway, down the street toward the harbor, and then several miles up the coast before we turned
off on a side street and parked outside a small open café. “We will eat breakfast here,” Ben announced, shutting off the van.

An elderly man was sitting on a stool in front of the restaurant using the longest pair of chopsticks I had ever seen—at least twenty inches—to lift long bread sticks from a vat of boiling oil. We went inside the café and sat down.

“What's for breakfast?” Tessa asked. “Monkey-brain mush?”

Ben looked at her quizzically. “They do not make mush from monkey brains.”

“Glad to know,” Tessa said.

“We are eating
syau bing yo tyau
. It means ‘little cookie oil stick.' ”

The man brought over plates with sesame-seed-covered biscuits and a plastic basket with long golden sticks of deep-fried bread.

“How do you eat this?” Taylor asked.

“Fold the oil stick into the sesame cookie, then dip into
dou jiang
,” Ben said.

“Dough what?” Taylor asked.

“Sorry,” Ben said. “Soy milk. He has not bringed it yet.”

“
Brought
it,” Ostin corrected. “Brought it yet. ‘Brought' is the past tense of ‘bring.' ”

“Sorry,” Ben said. “My English is poor.”

“Quit correcting his English,” Taylor said. “It's embarrassing.”

Ostin looked at her quizzically. “How else will he learn?”

The old man returned and set out a bowl of hot soy milk for each of us. Ben folded one of the oil sticks into a cookie, then dipped it into the milk. The rest of us followed his lead. I thought it was pretty good.

After we had eaten for a few minutes, I asked Ben, “What's our plan for today?”

He glanced around, then said, “I will take you up to the Starxource plant to prepare.”

“Have you been there before?” Ostin asked.

“Many, many times.”