Ghost Month (11 page)

What would have happened if I had called her in New York, told her I would be stuck in Taiwan and that she had to go on without me? I don’t think she would have been able to abandon me. She loved me so much, she would have ditched everything and come back to Taiwan to be with me. It would have had to come down to me to set her free, and I would have had to act cruelly.

I’m sorry, Julia, but I’m calling to break up with you because I love you. You’ll have to go down that great path alone …

“J
ING-NAN
,”
SAID
M
RS
. H
UANG
. I had been mumbling to myself out loud.

Mr. Huang was bringing in people I didn’t know. Mrs. Huang stood over me and touched my shoulder gently. Time for me to go.

“You loved each other so much,” she sobbed.

I could only nod as I rose to my feet.

“Go talk to them, your old classmates. Find out if they talked to Julia when she came back.”

“I’ll find out what I can,” I said.

I
RODE THE ELEVATOR
down and hit the ground floor with a thud. The door lurched open, and I had just managed to step out when it closed with a slam.

How could Julia have told her mother everything? She hadn’t promised not to, but I assumed she would be like me and only tell her parents the parts of our relationship appropriate for the general public. For example, our impending marriage.

“Still going to marry Julia, huh?” were among my father’s last words to me. It was as close as he could come to expressing approval.

I grabbed my helmet and leaned against my sun-baked moped seat. I hadn’t been in touch with my high-school classmates Peggy or Ming-kuo in years, and I wasn’t sure they were two people I wanted back in my life. Funny how I needed to get in touch now. Maybe it was time for me to start a Facebook account.

Peggy Lee was from a well-off mainlander family. Her great-grandfather had been a confidant of Chiang Kai-shek, and their family had privileged status when the Generalissimo established the capital of the Republic of China on Taiwan after bravely retreating in the face of inevitable failure.

Peggy’s family had a fancy house that Japanese officials had once lived in, the nicest one I knew of in Wanhua District. It had clay roof tiles that ended in slightly upturned corners. Every few feet there were fanged and horned demon faces making agonized expressions. I can only describe the roofs because I couldn’t see anything else over the exterior wall. Apparently Peggy’s family had a private garden with stone lanterns and a pond with kumquat-colored koi as long as your arm.

Mainlanders who didn’t come over with money or connections grew up in
juancuns
, military residential communities hastily built on public land for families of low-ranking officers and soldiers.
People from every province were thrown together—something the normally clannish Chinese weren’t pleased by—as those
juancuns
were meant for temporary housing. Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang party and Republic of China Army were going to launch that counterattack any day, after all. That day never came. Several generations of families ended up living in
juancuns
, patching up crumbled cinder blocks in their walls to keep the rain out. Meanwhile, Peggy grew up leisurely feeding the same koi in the Lee family pond her father and grandfather had cared for years before.

Today, most of the
juancuns
are gone. It wasn’t the typical
waishengren-benshengren
politics that pushed them out—it was money politics. Condos had to go up.

And Peggy’s family had a lot to do with that. The Lees were big in real estate and helped the government “monetize” the land. Let’s face it. The
juancuns
were a major eyesore. Gangs like Black Sea were originally formed by disaffected mainlander youth living in those blocks, but a lot of those kids made it out and did something with their lives, including Ang Lee, the film director, and Teresa Teng, the immortal and yet dead singer. Supposedly Teng’s lifelong asthma was caused by childhood exposure to asbestos in a
juancun
.

After a public outcry to preserve
juancuns
as historical sites, the Lees recently turned their wrecking ball against their own antique Japanese house. A hotel stands there now.

T
HE LIGHTNESS
I
HAD
been feeling earlier was gone. Thoughts of Julia weighed on me again. I had been tasked by her parents to find out more about her mysterious return to Taiwan.

I saw I had received a news text on my phone. The member of the Black Sea gang who had made allegations about the CIA and drugs was recanting his story, saying he was completely wrong. What an asshole.

I searched online for Lee Xiaopei—Peggy’s business name.

Surprise. She had decided to play it close to home. Peggy was a senior vice president of Lee & Associates, her family’s hedge fund. Of course it was headquartered in the most expensive office space in the country—the eightieth floor of the gigantic Taipei 101 building.

The phone number was right there, but I took a breath and hesitated.

I’ll admit Peggy had striking looks. Even if Peggy’s family wasn’t rich, she’d still have attracted a lot of attention. She had a sharp nose, a sharp chin and a sharp tongue. A lot of boys liked her. They left things on her school desk—candy, flowers and notes in fancy envelopes. But the only guy she was into back in high school was already in a committed relationship—me. You always want what you can’t have, and there was very little Peggy couldn’t have.

I looked at my phone again. I had to call her. Peggy might know something about Julia’s return to Taiwan. That information might provide some comfort to Julia’s parents. If not, I wouldn’t tell them.

I was reluctant as hell to open that door again, but still I’d rather call Peggy before trying to get in touch with Ming-kuo.

I hit the number and waited. An automated voice menu answered. I wasn’t a current client, so I guessed I was a prospective one. Why else would anyone call? I pressed 2.

Soothing light jazz began to play. Was I scheduling a dental appointment? Oh, I should probably schedule a dental appointment.

As if reading my thoughts, a man wearing cheap sunglasses and a grey linen sports jacket approached me slowly. He was a big man, almost two meters in height, and he had a crew cut. I thought he was Japanese, but he gave himself away when he smiled. Straight, white, American teeth. I looked at him, but he kept a respectful distance while I was on the phone. An operator took my call.

“Hello, thank you for calling Lee & Associates,” a man said. “You seem to be calling from a mobile phone.”

“Hello, I am calling from my cell. I’m actually trying to get in touch with Ms. Lee Xiaopei, please.”

“I’m sorry, if you’re not already a client, we don’t accept calls from mobile phones. You have to come in person or call from an office.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Have a good day, sir.” The son of a bitch hung up.

I crossed my arms as the man approached me. “Are you done with your call?” he asked. His Mandarin had an American accent.

“I’m done. What do you want?” I’m usually not this curt with strangers, but I was still annoyed by the phone call, and this guy wasn’t a customer of mine. He lifted his sunglasses and regarded me. The man seemed too young to have those bags under his eyes.

“I just want to see how you are. No big deal.”

“I’m doing fine,” I said.

The sunglasses dropped back down and he headed into the Huangs’ building. Man, some strange people lived there. “Take care, man,” he said in English over his shoulder.

Now, did he say “man” or “Jing-nan”?

I had about an hour before I had to be at Unknown Pleasures. That wasn’t enough time to go to Peggy’s office. That would have to wait until tomorrow.

I was frustrated and annoyed, and buying new music was my usual coping mechanism.

The music stores around National Taiwan University, known as Taida for short, were the best. No one bought mainstream, conventional CDs anymore, so the stores survived by stocking limited editions from indie labels, imports and bootlegs of live shows.

I rode east into the Da’an District. The big government buildings and wide sidewalks of the Zhongzheng District gave way to the residential buildings, churches and MRT stations of Da’an. The smell of incense grew heavier. A small hatchback drove by with a young boy and a girl crawling around in the rear cargo space. It made me think of Julia and me as small kids—until the girl gave me the finger. I had to smirk as I thought about what my father used to say: younger generations had no respect for their elders, and Taiwan was in danger of backsliding and becoming as uncouth and boorish as China.

Taida is the best university in Taiwan. Like a lot of Taiwan’s best institutions, it was originally established by the Japanese during the colonial era.

I parked near the Gongguan MRT station on Luosifu Road, which was the way they chose to render “Roosevelt Road” using Chinese characters. Bunk racks of parked bikes marked the edge of campus. It was summer, but Taida was buzzing with activity. The academic calendar was twelve months long. Classes were always
in session. It sounds grueling, especially to my American college friends, but we never had such a thing as summer vacation all my years of school and cram school.

Taida students oversee the PTT, the Professional Technology Temple, an online bulletin-board system. It’s like America Online, only it remained cool and influential for marketing and networking. Older people thought it was only used for idle chatter and dirty jokes until Typhoon Morakot slammed into Taiwan in 2009, and the PTT organized hundreds of volunteers to haul supplies to disaster areas. Those kids were better than the government at responding to the deadly storm. They also set up blood drives and other public service opportunities that young people are into.

There are a lot of good things about the PTT, but I haven’t been on it in years, since I was chased out of a music discussion group when I said the former members of Joy Division shouldn’t have carried on as New Order after Ian Curtis killed himself. Sure are a lot of New Order fans in Taiwan. All of them came after me over the entire system, in every discussion I entered.

The first time I heard Joy Division and New Order (which I perceived to be the lesser band by far at the time) was at Bauhaus, a store on Luosifu Road that caters to Taida students with good taste in music. It’s the first CD store I go to when I’m up for a big shopping trip. I have a history with the place.

When I was still a kid, I went through a Black Sabbath phase. I think all teenage boys do. Bauhaus had been having a grand-opening sale, and I went in to check it out. I couldn’t find a single Black Sabbath or Ozzy CD. I went up to the guy working at the counter. He must have been a student at Taida, because he looked relaxed. Once you got into a school that good, you could finally ease off the pedal a bit. After graduation, you were set with a decent job. You could even sleep in on the weekends for the first time in your life.

“You don’t have any Sabbath?” I asked him.

He stroked both corners of his mouth with his thumb and index finger. “We don’t. We’re a
music
store,” he said, looking like he wanted to spit on my school uniform. “I’m going to do you the biggest favor of your life, kid.” He stood up and grabbed a CD
from the rack above the cash register. “I’m going to allow you to buy this. It’s the in-store playing copy, but we can get another one.”

The CD cover art matched his shirt: a bunch of lines that looked like undersea mountains. It was
Unknown Pleasures
. He wasn’t kidding—it really was one of the biggest favors anyone ever did me. The music scared me in a way Sabbath never had. I studied English harder so I could understand the lyrics beyond surface-level literal meanings. There was a whole world hidden in those squat and loose-looking written words. Maybe Ian had encoded the secrets of life and death in the lyrics before committing suicide.

My English bookshelf expanded beyond two Shakespeare plays to include five costly paperbacks about Joy Division that had been printed in England.

I bought a black trench coat like the ones the band members wore in pictures. I soldiered on with it in the face of heat, humidity and open mockery from other students who didn’t get it. Julia was worried that I looked like a gravedigger, but she understood after I played her the music and explained the songs to her.

Early in senior year I sang “Love Will Tear Us Apart” for the karaoke competition and won. A picture of us was laid out right in the middle of the yearbook, me on stage during the instrumental break, reaching down to her outstretched hand. It was the most triumphant moment of my life. When I think about it, I see myself in the third person, looking down from the balloons on the ceiling at my perfectly poised body on that stage. I couldn’t have known then that it would all be downhill after that.

Time claimed the coat not long after. The sleeves and the lining were fraying, and mold spots popped up on the back before the fabric essentially disintegrated. I didn’t get another one, because by that time I didn’t have to flaunt my attachment to Joy Division’s music. It was already deep inside me.

I
F
I
HADN
’
T GONE
into Bauhaus that day and met that guy, I might have ended up as a pimply dude in his twenties who didn’t know much English. I would probably still be working at the night-market stall, but I certainly wouldn’t have as much style.

I never actually cared for Bauhaus, the band the store was named after. I didn’t like the theatricality of the guy’s voice and the lyrics were too “art school.”

Still, there was no denying Bauhaus the store was a great place. I stepped around an offering table on the sidewalk and admired a sticker by the door handle that read, “This is the way, step inside.” Those words were taken from the lyrics to “Atrocity Exhibition,” the first song on Joy Division’s second and final album,
Closer
. I did as the sticker instructed.