Ghost Month (15 page)

“It’s no problem,” said Kuilan as she also took up a cleaver. There was no such thing as having too many chives. “The whole thing started somewhere else, and they just happened to run here. Nothing to worry about.”

“Well,” I said, “I’d better get back to the stand before Dwayne kills me.”

Jenny muttered to me, “This cop was sent to hush things up, not to figure out what happened.”

“Seems like it. What a fucking asshole he was to Ah-tien … and to you!”

“Jing-nan, I never did porn. It was nude modeling. They tried to … anyway, the judge threw it out.”

“I believe you, Jenny.”

“I wasn’t underage or anything.”

“Jenny, I’m sure you were doing the right thing.”

She smiled and gave me a big hug. “Stay safe,” she said. I watched her walk away and wondered what sort of life Jenny had had.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Traffic on the way home was light as people were still avoiding routes along the water. There didn’t seem to be any more ghosts than at any other time of year, but I did notice a modified black pickup truck keeping pace with me. I slowed down a bit, and so did the car. I sped up, and its red lights zoomed past me. It pulled over and stopped on the shoulder. I nearly flipped my moped trying to brake in time.

A man got out of the passenger side. It was the American who had confronted me earlier in front of the Huangs’ building. Now he was wearing a dark suit that rendered him nearly invisible in the night.

“Jing-nan,” he said. “You’re poking your nose where it shouldn’t be.”

“Is this about the
liumang
?” I asked.

“Don’t get smart with me, bitch!” Typical conceited Taiwanese-American asshole. “You stay away from Julia’s family and the investigation!”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know for sure you saw the Huangs this morning. Let’s make it your last visit there.”

“They’re family friends. Julia was my girlfriend.”

“I’m giving you one warning. Do you know how easily I could
have knocked your sorry ass over into the river? Might happen next time.”

I crossed my arms and felt my skinny biceps. “Who are you?” I asked.

He shifted stance so his feet were even with his shoulders. “I’m a guy with a gun. That’s who I am.”

“What happened to Julia?”

“She’s dead. Unless you want to join her, stay far away from the Huangs.”

“I get it,” I said. It lacked conviction, but it was good enough for him. The American got back in the car, which eased away from the shoulder before peeling out. I got back on my moped like a little fucking boy.

It wasn’t until I was taking the highway exit home to the Wanhua District that I started shaking. I’d never had my life threatened before by someone who could possibly back it up.

Looking into Julia’s story was dangerous. Who the hell ran the betel-nut stand she’d worked at? Gangs? Cops? Americans?

Who was the Taiwanese-American, and why was he watching the Huangs’ apartment? He knew who I was. If he really wanted me dead, he’d already had a few opportunities to pop me. But why would he? He had already written me off as a shadow from Julia’s past. A love-sick schoolboy chasing a ghost. I was something to brush aside, not a threat.

M
Y HOME DISTRICT
, W
ANHUA
, is the old part of Taipei, settled by Chinese from Fujian Province after the Ming Dynasty fell in 1644. I say “settled” in the American sense: the Chinese immigrants drove the natives from the land. The Mandarin name “Wanhua” is derived from the name the indigenous aborigines had given it, which was closer to “Banka,” the Taiwanese pronunciation. Taiwanese also called it “Monga,” and that was the source of the title of that blockbuster gangster film that has made Wanhua a tourist destination.

Many areas of Taipei still have the names given to them by people who were subsequently forced off. Two of Taipei’s biggest districts by population—Shilin, which has my night market,
and Beitou, famous for its hot springs—still carry names derived from the extinct Ketagalan language. The Ketagalan homeland was unfortunately in the same footprint as the future Taipei, and they were pushed out as Han Chinese arrived and built out the city. The Japanese after them claimed even more land when they renamed the city “Taihoku.” When the city reverted back to “Taipei” at the end of World War II, there weren’t any Ketagalans left to push out. We killed them off and took their land, but at least we kept their place names. That was an American thing to do.

I felt bad about the way aborigines had been treated over the years. I wasn’t alone. The government had made small but symbolic concessions to Taiwan’s first people. Long Live Chiang Kai-shek Road—seriously, that was the name—in front of the Presidential Building was renamed “Ketagalan Boulevard” in the 1990s. The Generalissimo’s reputation had slipped by then from Savior of the People to The Wedge That Continues to Divide Us.

The Ketagalan aren’t even one of the fourteen tribes recognized by the government. Taiwan doesn’t acknowledge their existence, but they are still here, somewhere. The early Chinese immigrants to Taiwan were almost all men, and they hooked up with native women. Around the Taipei settlement, that would mean the Ketagalan.

The Japanese administration recognized the tenacity of Taiwanese aborigines after fighting many deadly skirmishes against them. In World War II, Japan organized native peoples as the dogged Takasago Volunteers. How dogged? The last holdout of the Imperial Japanese Army to surrender—in December 1974—was Amis, like Dwayne. When Private Teruo Nakamura, whose Amis name was Attun Palalin, was brought out from the Indonesian jungle he had been hiding in, his years of resigned solitude came to an abrupt end. Palalin said he had kept his mind off his wife (who had remarried) and son (who was born after he left Taiwan in 1942) by focusing on gardening.

My story wasn’t too different from Palalin’s. I was living and working among other people, but it was a solitary existence. Julia’s death had dragged me out of my crude hut to reality. I was stunned, naked and blinking back at the world.

I
DROVE BY
L
ONGSHAN
Temple, a gigantic open-air complex built in 1738, probably the top foreign-tourist destination in Wanhua. Taiwanese people come here in droves, too, to flop in front of Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, Mazu, the goddess of the sea, and other idols.

The temple stood here when the British invaded Taiwan in 1840 during the Opium War. It was here when the French invaded in 1844 during the Sino-French War. Longshan Temple was already one of Taipei’s oldest temples in 1885, when Qing Dynasty China finally decided that Taiwan was indeed a Chinese province and not merely a “ball of mud.” When the Japanese took over Taiwan in 1895, they wisely decided to leave Longshan be, although they destroyed other temples that featured Chinese folk deities in a quest to desinicize the island. The temple survived World War II, when the US bombed the shit out of it, convinced that Japan was hiding armaments among the idols of the immortals. There were stories of miracles the goddesses performed during that war. In 1945 believers witnessed Mazu materializing in the sky, spreading her skirts to deflect most of the bombs from US planes away from the temple. Despite her efforts, the main hall was completely destroyed. But underneath the rubble, the Guanyin idol, eyes still closed in meditative serenity, was completely intact. People see these incidents as proof of divine intervention. I see it as proof that the people operating the temples will spread such stories in the name of preserving their livelihoods.

Lit up by the moon, lanterns and streetlights, Longshan, literally “Dragon Mountain,” looks just like a temple should. Even a nonbeliever could agree to that. Dragon sculptures in full color prowl around the tiled roofs and columns while phoenixes and other supernatural-creature pals do their best to keep up. The walls and ceilings are covered with painted, carved wood and stone. Angry guardians painted on open doors warn evil spirits not to enter. For Ghost Month, the temple hangs lanterns and bamboo hats to guide lost spirits to Longshan.

The temple was the last place I wanted to go when I was a
kid. We had a smaller one on our block that my parents bypassed because it only had Taoist idols. They brought me to Longshan for their weekly stop to ask the blessings of the gods and goddesses, every single last one of them. “The most forgotten ones are the most grateful,” my mother often said. I think my parents expected me to bow and pray with them to each idol as we made our way through the inner courtyard, where there was a new god or goddess every few meters, but I just stood by them and waited. So many old people came to the temple, there was never a seat available. One time, out of frustration and out of view of my parents, I discreetly gave the finger to Mazu, the sea goddess, the mother of heaven and essentially the patron deity of Taiwan. Nothing bad happened to me. Well, not immediately.

The Longshan visits were more than a waste of time. I found the energy of the miserable people at the temple to be completely draining. Most people weren’t regular visitors like my parents. Most people only came to beg the gods for help because they were suffering from health or money problems, or their loved ones were. Maybe some people had come to give thanks for their good fortune, but they were drowned out by whimpering elderly people begging for forgiveness before death and muttering young people who had just been laid off.

Most galling of all—and even my parents found them offensive—were the slick characters rolling dice before the altars, thinking one of the iterations of Buddha or a Taoist demon would give them winning lottery numbers.

On certain days my parents left wrapped pieces of candy at the pedestals and altar sills. Those were good days for me, because I would swipe most of them and hide them in my pockets for a sugar boost later. I was scared the first time that I would be punished for stealing a treat left for the divinities.

I asked the oldest kid I knew at the time.

“Dwayne, is it true the gods can punish people?”

“Not for taking candy, Jing-nan. The gods exist, but they don’t really interfere down here for minor infractions. My ancestors prayed to our gods to make the Han Chinese go away, and look what happened. You guys took over. Maybe we weren’t good
enough to our gods.” Then he laughed. “Hell, maybe you people are our punishment for not being pious enough!”

T
HE FAMILIAR STREETS WERE
dark and empty from the temple to my house. Not my house. My home. This was my home. I stopped at a red light for nobody and got mad.

Who the hell did that Taiwanese-American asshole think he was to threaten me? Now that I was back on familiar turf and my antagonist was long gone, I was feeling brave, even cocky.

I wasn’t going to back off one bit, you motherfucker. I was going to find out why Julia came back and tell her parents everything.

He made me think about all the mean American-born Chinese and Taiwanese, the ABCs and ABTs, back at UCLA, who used to talk around me as if I didn’t understand English just because I had the slightest accent. I ended up being best friends with pretty much every other kind of people, because they didn’t shun me for the way I spoke.

Let any of those fake Asians try to speak the same languages their parents did. They’d choke big-time.

That American asshole should be ashamed of his Mandarin, instead of thinking he was superior and had authority over me. I was going to show him. I was going to keep one eye on my rearview mirror, but I was going to keep going forward.

I bathed and instead of drying off completely, I put on a shirt and boxers to absorb the water and walked around in the damp clothes. It was one way to beat the heat. They helped cool my body as the moisture evaporated.

It was a hot night, but that was hardly breaking news. Every night was going to be hot until November. Only then would the temperature dip back down below twenty-one degrees Celsius.

To do this right, I had to put myself in the right frame of mind. I was going back to high school, after all.

I pulled out a bottle of Kirin from my squat refrigerator and drank it as quickly as I could. I didn’t drink that often and a single beer would hit me harder than a lot of people. I only wanted to numb myself a little. Two beers would send me straight to sleep.