Ghost Month (9 page)

I was still asleep when someone grabbed my left shoulder and tried to drag me out of bed.

I woke up in a fright, but then I realized that it was my own right hand doing the pulling.

It was about nine in the morning and the sun was fully up, but it was still an hour earlier than my alarm was set to go off. So annoying.

I stretched out, experiencing a feeling I hadn’t expected.

Relief.

I didn’t have to keep saving money because I didn’t have to go back to UCLA because I didn’t have to keep my promise to Julia any longer.

For a moment I felt a light giddiness, as if my entire body were hollow. But despair quickly seeped into the vacuum.

What was I living for now?

I reached for my phone and began to scroll through the news. A Japanese right-wing group had erected a shrine on the largest island in the Tiaoyutai chain—the latest move in the ownership dispute between China, Taiwan and Japan. A group of undocumented Vietnamese women had been arrested as they arrived at a whorehouse. They said they thought they were coming to Taiwan for arranged marriages.

Nothing about Julia.

I was concerned she had been swept under the rug, but I wondered if it was better this way. I wanted the killer caught, but I didn’t want the entire island examining her corpse.

My thoughts were interrupted by some people shouting in the street. I went to the window.

Two compact cars, a Nissan and a Toyota, had swished to a halt just outside my gate. Both cars were pretty beat up, so if a fender bender had just happened it was tough to tell. Two middle-aged women standing at the side of the street were yelling insults at each other. Both were Taiwanese and both were screaming in Mandarin, but one had a heavy accent, giving herself away as someone who primarily spoke Taiwanese. It was a classic confrontation.

Y
OU COULD SPEND ALL
day talking about the history and culture of the people in Taiwan. We have twenty-three million people, the same population as Texas, packed on an island slightly bigger than Maryland. If familiarity breeds contempt, then the people of Taiwan are very familiar with each other. On top of that, our long and complicated relationships with larger and more powerful countries have created an interesting entrée.

I wish I knew how to make
zongzi
, the glutinous rice dumpling packed with a bunch of different fillings and wrapped in dark green bamboo leaves in a tetrahedral shape (think of a soft, three-sided pyramid). I love them, and I also feel they sum up Taiwan as it is now.
Zongzi
are served fresh from the steamer or boiling pot, still tied with twine. Cut or untie the string and slowly unwrap the leaves. Contents will definitely be hot. Try to avoid getting your hands too sticky from the melted pork fat that has permeated everything and is now leaking through the leaves. Once the
zongzi
is fully peeled, spread out the leaves to keep the table surface clean. Admire how the rice and other fillings retain the tetrahedral shape.

There’s no neat way to eat
zongzi
, but whatever you do, chew slowly and taste everything in there. You can sense all the separate and sometimes contradictory components, and how they come together as a whole.

Taiwan is like a compact
zongzi
, tied up together whether
we like it or not. The rice is the land. The melted pork fat is the humidity and precipitation. The yams are the
benshengren
, the “home-province people,” descendants of people who came to Taiwan from China before the Japanese colonization in 1895.
Benshengren
actually refer to themselves as “yams,” because Taiwan is shaped like one.

The taros are the
waishengren
, or “outside-province people,” people who came to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949. They are also known as “mainlanders,” even later generations born in Taiwan. They say China looks like a spade-shaped taro leaf, the Bohai Gulf corresponding to the indent by the stem.

The fungus and salted eggs are the Hakka, probably the only distinct ethnic group of Han Chinese that hasn’t been assimilated into the larger population. They are known for their hearty food and hearty people. Traditionally farmers, Hakka never bound their women’s feet, as they needed everyone to be mobile and working. Although Hakka can be
benshengren
or
waishengren
, those identities are secondary.

The pork represents the native Taiwanese, as the various tribes who lived here centuries before any Chinese arrived hunted wild boar, among other animals. They weren’t all hunters, of course, and most of them are gone. They make up only about 2 percent of the country’s population now. Dwayne’s people, the Amis, are one of fourteen recognized tribal groups. The government says the rest are extinct or too integrated to matter.

All of these groups have historically fought and struggled against each other over the years, and new events make sure that the pot’s stirred frequently. Announcements of new major highways might bring condemnations from the Indigenous Peoples’ Action Coalition of Taiwan if any sacred lands are involved. They usually are. Hakka are roused to action whenever the Hakka language (and dialects) are excluded from public discussion, or when their culture is marginalized.
Benshengren
, the yams, take to the streets whenever the subject of closer ties to China is brought up, as they are mostly against the idea that Taiwan is really a province of the People’s Republic.
Waishengren
, the mainlanders, are indignant that none of the other groups thank them for the
economic miracle that has unfolded over the last forty years. They also don’t understand why nobody seems to appreciate the transition to democracy that they presided over—after the era of harsh martial law they had imposed.

My family was
benshengren
. My grandfather and grandmother had left the farms of Taichung County near the middle of Taiwan’s west coast in 1954, headed north for Taipei and started the food stall.

“Damned mainlanders,” my grandfather would call the
waishengren
. He would call them worse names, too. I asked him why he sold them food if he hated them so much. He told me to be nice to anyone who put money in my hand. It was the best advice he ever gave me.

It was difficult to take his hatred of mainlanders seriously, though. Most of our neighbors in the Wanhua District were
waishengren
. Also, grandfather’s number-one employee wasn’t my father: it was a mainlander, Frankie the Cat.

Julia and her family were also yams. Dancing Jenny was a Hakka. Song Kuilan and her family were mainlanders. Dwayne was a native Taiwanese and had taken his English name from Dwayne Johnson, with whom he shared Pacific Islander heritage.

Of course I didn’t think of my friends in a categorical sense, but then again, we never really had serious political discussions.

The mainlanders are mostly associated with the Kuomintang, or KMT, the political party that lost the Chinese Civil War and still claims it is the legitimate ruler of not only Taiwan, but its definition of China, which includes Mongolia and Tibet. The KMT was in power in Taiwan from 1945 until 2000. That was when the DPP, or Democratic Progressive Party, which is mostly backed by yams, won the presidential election. The DPP is known for seeing Taiwan as an independent country from China, and the eight years the party held office were the most combative with the mainland. The KMT came back to power in 2008, and China was happy again. Even though the Communists had fought a bloody war with the KMT, they were united in the view that Taiwan was an inalienable part of China.

Political candidates from these two major parties, the KMT and
the DPP, know they have to appeal to anyone and everyone for the presidential election, so they soften up their stances and appeal to the four major population groups through endless campaigning and giving away food and prizes. The candidates say that they won’t declare independence for Taiwan and will seek more trade agreements with China to keep the mainlanders happy. They tell the
benshengren
in the Taiwanese dialect that they are native sons and daughters of Taiwan. They proclaim haltingly in Hakka that they carry the mountain songs in their heart as they help dye fabrics in the traditional blue. After donning aboriginal clothing, the candidates conclude that modern Taiwan still has much to learn from its original communities. They all promise to do something about the undocumented workers from Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. Then after the election, we all go back to being our parochial selves.

But what are we, really? Do we have a broader identity that covers us all? Someone came up with “New Taiwanese” as an umbrella term to include everybody, but that phrase fell out of use, mainly because it just sounded stupid. We are people who work hard and disagree about a lot of things. Luckily for me, everybody loves to eat, and no one ever says the food in Taiwan sucks.

T
HE SHOUTING OUTSIDE REACHED
a new pitch. I drew back my bedroom shades and saw that the women were now each restrained by a stoic, silent man.

German Tsai, accompanied by one of his boys, came between the women and spoke too softly for me to hear. Open hands slid out from the sleeves of his linen jacket and gestured at one woman and then the other. He took off his sunglasses so they could see that he was sincere.

His underling produced two plastic bags. I couldn’t believe what German pulled out of one of them. A wrapped
zongzi
. He held it up in the sunlight as if it were a prism. He smiled and gave each woman a bag of
zongzi
.

The situation was defused by two bags of
zongzi
German had picked up for his crew. I’m sure that he could get another two bags with no problem.

I
TURNED AWAY FROM
the window. Now that I was wide-awake, I felt the weight of what I had to do. I wet a towel and wiped my face. I dressed in my least-wrinkled buttoned shirt, black slacks and good shoes. I didn’t eat anything, but I had half a cup of soy milk to coat my stomach. It was something my mother told me to always do because it could prevent stomach cancer. It hadn’t helped my dad, though.

It was about ten in the morning now, and I was on schedule to see the Huangs. I rolled my moped out. In the daylight my ride looked old and dirty. There was a big tear in the seat that I hadn’t noticed before. Overall it wasn’t much better than what I had been riding in high school. I’d told Julia that when I came for her, I’d be driving a red sports car. What would she think if she saw me, a college dropout, riding this thing? What would I think if I had seen her wearing next to nothing, slinging
binlang?

W
HEN THE
H
UANGS SOLD
their Shilin Night Market stall ten years ago, they also left their old ground-floor house to move to an apartment in a new building in the Zhongzheng District, the next one over, east of the Wanhua District. Zhongzheng houses the national government buildings and the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. The Huangs’ building had been banged out during one of the construction booms that come around every few years. It looked impressive from a block away, but a casual observer need only enter the building and walk across the loose porcelain tiles before a number of shortcomings revealed themselves.

The panel to the apartment buzzers was crooked because it was screwed into a frame that was a few millimeters too small. Hammer blows on the protruding edge indicated someone had attempted to cram it in anyway. Luckily visitors didn’t have to worry whether the buzzer system was functional or not, because the solid-steel front door was propped open by a plastic bucket with a chipped cinder block in it. The lock was probably out of order, and all the residents probably assumed somebody else had notified the repair service. What did it matter, anyway? Taipei didn’t have many
thieves, they reasoned, and surely even those few bad men would be punished by the good brothers during the holiday.

I felt odd about simply walking into the building, so I switched my bag to my left hand and buzzed the Huangs’ apartment. I heard Mrs. Huang say hello, her voice fuzzy and faint, as if transmitted from Pluto.

“Hello, Mrs. Huang, I am sorry to bother you. This is Chen Jing-nan,” I said. The exposed lock made a clicking sound, and I stepped through the open doorway.

In the elevator I had a small anxiety attack and looked into the bag. My pack of joss sticks, some mixed CDs of music Julia liked and a few Snickers bars, her favorite candy. Everything was there.

Whatever I do next, I’m doing only for your parents, Julia. Don’t take it personally. Then again, why am I talking to you?

The elevator opened on the thirteenth floor, and I saw Mrs. Huang was holding the door open. She was dressed in burlap mourning clothes. Her hair was noticeably greyer since I had last seen her, at my parents’ funerals, an event where we’d held hands but said nothing.

It was tough seeing Julia’s mom, because only now did I notice how similar the lower parts of their faces were. Mrs. Huang was looking up to me, fusing her eyes to mine and pursing her lips off-center in the same way Julia used to when she was lost in a thought.