Ghost Month (13 page)

Look up. There’s the moon grazing on cotton.

Maybe Julia will come round a corner and I’ll hold her and tell her I miss her.

If Taipei comes alive at night, it reverts to undead during the day. Workaholics walking by ghostly grey buildings and breathing in air that’s like gauze.

Give me the night any day.

I
FELT A SLIGHT
headache. Atmospheric pressure was up. That meant a rain was coming. It was going to be hard and fast.

I parked and walked over to Belle Amour.

Dancing Jenny was wearing a neo-
chipao
made of metallic fabric as she attended to an offering table in front of the store.

“I think this dress makes my tits look like Christmas-tree ornaments,” she said, holding her chest out.

“Is that bad?” I asked. I didn’t mind the mild flirting from her. What really unnerved me was a genuine connection, like what I’d felt briefly with Nancy.

“Depends on what the wearer’s trying to say with her body.” She lit up a cigarette and used it to light a few joss sticks placed in front of a carton of cigarettes, holding off on her first inhale until the incense was going strong. “This is for my dad. He was a big smoker.”

Jenny put her hand behind my right ear and scraped something off the lobe with her fingernail.

“You’ve got a dry patch there,” she said. “You’re not drinking enough water.”

“I’m avoiding water,” I said. “The good brothers might try to steal my body if I go near that stuff.”

She let go of my ear and slapped my shoulder. “Ha, I know you
don’t believe. But tell me something, Jing-nan. Would you mind if I kept burning money for your parents? When the economy’s bad, it’s even worse in the spirit world.”

“Are you doing this for them, or for you?”

“It’s for them and for you, too. Just in case it works.”

“Jenny, it doesn’t work.”

“How do you know? You can’t tell me millions of people following this tradition have been doing it for nothing.”

“I do think it’s useless.” I felt something like a little cut inside my nasal passage. I rubbed my nose.

“Then all those people who have died are gone forever? As if they never existed?”

“Do you remember, Jenny?” I asked, feeling tears sliding down my face. “Do you remember Julia?”

A worried look came over her face. “The girl whose family ran the fruit stand here? Of course I remember her, your little girlfriend! How could I forget!”

“She’s dead. She was the betel-nut girl who was murdered!”

Jenny hugged me. “I’m so sorry! What a terrible thing!”

Jenny had never felt so soft and warm. As I stood in her arms, sobbing, I missed my mother.

“I used to give that little girl clothes for her birthday, but I never saw her wear them,” said Jenny, holding me and sighing.

Julia’s mother had made sure they went straight into the trash, calling Jenny a whore and a pedophile.

“Julia was always a little funny about clothes,” I said haltingly. “She liked a certain fit.”

When I was cried out, I washed my face in Jenny’s bathroom and held a cold, wet towel to my closed eyes.

After a few minutes, I met up with Kuilan. I wasn’t as close with her as I was with Jenny, so she had never known about my master plan to make it big and marry Julia. She thought I merely wanted to get back to the US and finish college.

“I have to burn money for your parents,” said Kuilan. “All the masters say the spirits are having a hard time right now.” The Taoist and Buddhist masters on TV, anyway.

Kuilan waved a sheaf of coarse bamboo paper. I think she
wanted to show me she was using the higher-denominated notes with gold patches rather than silver patches.

“It’s my gift to them, Jing-nan. I would like to do something nice for your father and mother.”

How could I fight her on this?

“Thank you, Kuilan.”

“All of us are going to burn money, me, my husband and definitely Ah-tien. We want him to do as many good things as possible for his karma.”

Ah-tien glanced at me with accusing eyes. Because of me and my parents, he was going to have to wait in line at some temple and flop around for a bit.

“Ah-tien shouldn’t have to go,” I said. “He didn’t even know my parents.”

“Nonsense!” said Kuilan. “Ah-tien insists on going! It’s so long since he’s been to a temple. He’s a stranger to the gods. No wonder so many bad things have been happening to him. So much unnecessary trouble.”

Ah-tien was openly glaring at me now. I had embarrassed him by allowing his mother to complain about him in public.

Kuilan’s husband approached the stand with a sack of flour on his back. “Good to see you, Jing-nan!” he called, grunting as he flipped the sack to the ground.

“Sir, that’s much too heavy for you to be lifting on your own!”

“It’s a good workout, don’t worry.”

“Of course it’s too heavy,” Kuilan said. “My good-for-nothing son won’t even do the smallest tasks for his father.”

“I said I would do it!” Ah-tien grunted. “He didn’t even give me a chance to!” Then he bared his teeth at me. “What’s so great about you, huh? You think you’re so smart and rich you can go to America? Look at you now. You’ve got the same job as me!”

“You apologize, you little ingrate!” said Kuilan’s husband. Kuilan herself brandished a rolling pin in an obviously well-rehearsed gesture.

“Jing-nan doesn’t have a police record!” she yelled. “He doesn’t have obscene tattoos all over his chest and back!”

“It’s all right, Kuilan,” I said, moving away. “He was only
kidding.” I nodded to Ah-tien, but the gesture wasn’t returned. If I shared an elevator ride with that guy, only one of us would make it to his floor.

“W
HAT ARE YOU DOING?
” Dwayne asked as I untied the power cord to the boom box on the shelf.

“I’m going to play some music and psych myself up.”

“The CD function’s busted, boss.”

“It worked fine the last time I tried it.”

“Wait, let me see it first.” He reached out a hand slick with meat runoff.

“No way!” Dwayne would rather smash the entire stereo system than listen to Joy Division again. I clicked open the lid and found another CD in it. Dwayne swooped in and quickly palmed it.

“Just play anything but you-know-what,” he said, as he managed to stick the bare CD in a back pocket.

“I’m the boss and we’re going to listen to my music.” I examined the playing surface of my CD for scratches out of habit and then popped it in and cued it to “In a Lonely Place.” The funereal synthesizer sounds washed over all of us.

“For Christ’s sake,” moaned Dwayne, “do you really have to play this mopey-motherfucker music?”

“It’s good,” I said.

“This is a problem. Don’t you get it? The singer hanged himself! This music scares all the girls away. That’s why you don’t get laid! Ain’t that right, Frankie?”

Frankie the Cat took a drag on his cigarette and wiped his mouth with the back of the same hand. “You can get used to it,” he offered.

“No, this has to go,” said Dwayne. “We’ve listened to this lousy band five hundred times already. Let’s just switch it to the radio. Or turn it off.”

M
USIC HAD CHANGED
D
WAYNE
’
S
life.

He had been a star baseball player as a kid. Outfielders backed up to the fence for him. My father told me if Dwayne had played on a stronger team, he would have been bound for Williamsport,
Pennsylvania, for the Little League World Championship. Taiwanese teams have won the title there seventeen times over the years.

He downplays it a lot, but Dwayne’s smart. He can do math faster than me. With his grades and athletic ability, Dwayne could have gone to almost any college he wanted to; apparently some college in Japan wanted to recruit him.

In 1994, though, Taiwan’s native community suddenly found worldwide fame. The German electronic-music group Enigma had a global hit, “Return to Innocence,” that sampled a recording of an Amis folk song about drinking. Aboriginal culture became trendy.

That summer Dwayne went to a week-long retreat at an Amis village in Taitung County in the boonies in Taiwan’s southeast. He met other high-school kids like him who were out of touch with their culture. Dwayne learned some Amis words, wore a headdress, stepped through some dances and made his own shoulder bag.

When he came back to Taipei, he had changed completely. Dwayne told his urbanized parents he wouldn’t be going to college; he wanted to explore his lost heritage and understand who he was. Dwayne spent his days listening to indigenous reggae and hip-hop while studying the Amis language on CD.

Dwayne moved out within a year. He was determined to join an active Amis community and reject modern Taiwanese society. Aboriginals shouldn’t have to be a part of the society foisted upon the island by the descendants of Chinese immigrants—whether they were mainlanders or yams. Even baseball, which used to be all Dwayne loved, was a game that had been brought in by the Japanese colonizers. There were other, authentic Amis activities he could be doing. There had to be.

Dwayne made his way back to Taitung County and headed to the Amis village that was the site of his reawakening. He was in for a shock, though.

The village’s main source of income was the busloads of tourists streaming in. Men and women danced in their native costumes for the cameras, and then backstage they would smoke cigarettes, drink beer and listen to American or Japanese heavy metal.

After the shows the performers changed out of their Amis wear and into their street clothes, which meant jeans and T-shirts, before
a night of Hollywood movies on VHS or hitting the bars in Taitung City.

This was what life was really like in the village. “Being Amis” was just a job. The high school retreat Dwayne had participated in was something the management level of the village had come up with to show there was a socially redeeming value to the whole enterprise. It helped preserve the corporation’s nonprofit status with the government.

But there was plenty of profit. The managers drove nice cars and lived in homes built in the mountains nearby. The performers, who ranged in age from the teens to the sixties, were housed in dorms on the site. They had come from all over the island. Some were runaways. Some were army veterans. Only a handful of them said they could speak the Amis language, and all of them declined to teach Dwayne.

“Too much trouble,” an older man said, not specifying which party would be more troubled.

The managers liked Dwayne’s physical build. They offered him a position in the chorus of the harvest dance. As he hopped around bare-chested in the steps being taught to him, he began to feel slightly ill, and then after a few days, angry. Dancing for tourists like a trained monkey wasn’t something a real Amis would do. And despite all the talk about how Amis culture is traditionally matrilineal, all the managers of “the village” were men.

After spending a fitful night in the dorms, Dwayne went to the older performer, the one who wouldn’t teach him the Amis language, and told him the performance was a sham.

The old man nodded and like all the other actors—because that’s what they were—continued to eat his breakfast of fried dough, soupy rice, peanuts and eggs.

When Dwayne suggested the performers unionize to earn better wages, the old man put down his bowl and chopsticks.

“That is an idea,” he said.

About an hour later, Dwayne was forced into a van and driven to the Taitung City station. He was put on the next train north and warned never to come back.

After Dwayne got back to Taipei, he put on weight and lost his
touch at baseball. Odd jobs led to working at the Shilin Night Market, and that led to working for my father.

I
TORTURED
D
WAYNE BY
playing “In a Lonely Place” twice before turning off the boom box. “I’ll save this CD for more discerning ears,” I said. “You want to put your Amis language CD back in here?” He handed his CD to me without a word.

“It was a good song,” Frankie offered as he sliced squid into rings.

“You can’t be serious,” said Dwayne.

“Most music is too happy.”

“You want me to play it again?” I asked.

“No,” both Frankie and Dwayne said.

“I went to see Julia’s parents today,” I offered.

“That was good of you to do,” said Dwayne. He patted my back. “How was it?”

“It was sad, but it was fine.” I wheeled out the front grill to the street.

“Her folks are pretty religious.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t want to mention that I was going to do some digging into Julia’s past. It probably wasn’t going to amount to anything, anyway.

“So, how are you doing, Jing-nan? Are you sure you’re up for working? You know me and Frankie can handle the stand ourselves.”

I smiled as hard as I could. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be, Dwayne. I want to keep myself busy.”

More customers came up, and I was busy right until close. It was the second night of Ghost Month, and people were a little less subdued. Of all the activities typically shunned, eating wasn’t one of them. I met some Jewish friends in college who told me they fasted during some holidays. I was surprised to hear of such a thing. Starving yourself on purpose would never happen in Taiwan.

D
URING A SMALL BREAK
in the action, I looked around to the other three corners of the intersection and took it all in.

Kuilan’s Big Shot Hot Pot was really packing it in. It looked
like some students were having a dumpling-eating contest, while in another part of the dining room a bunch of tourists were taking pictures and yelling as one of them ate a bowl of pig-brain soup.

“Man, it’s like a freaking
brain
!”

“How can you put that in your mouth?”

Then, without even a clap of thunder or flicker of lightning, rain plunged from the sky. A group of young women coming out of Belle Amour stood under its narrow awning and waited. I once went home with a girl that way, by walking over and offering her an umbrella. I hadn’t meant to pick her up. Just happened.

Guilt began to gnaw at me.
Well, Julia, I wasn’t betraying you because I never said I’d never sleep with anybody else. I certainly have never loved anybody else
. That’s for sure. I tried to picture that last woman, but I kept seeing Nancy’s face.