Incensed (10 page)

“If I'm not skinny, people won't love me.”

“That's a healthy way to think,” I muttered.

We waited to cross Xinyi Road. Small flocks of overloaded mopeds zipped by. A souped-up sports car and a delivery truck raced to beat the light. The truck went through the red while the sports car rolled to a stop. As we crossed we heard bass beats emanating from the car's speakers.

“That's what I want more than anything,” Mei-ling said. “To make music that people play and feel good about, whether they're on a dance floor or driving around.”

“Music's more than that to me,” I said.

“What's more important than feeling good?”

I had to admit that I was stumped. It was enjoyable to listen to music I liked. Was that all there was to it? Wasn't there something intellectual to it, too? Maybe some guys named Johnny at the record labels, both major and independent, were laughing at how they were selling songs to suckers.

“Mei-ling, I really hope you do make music that makes people feel good.”

“I already do! Read the comments on my music page. You know where to go, you've got my cards.”

I had a flash-forward to Big Eye going through Mei-ling's suitcases upon her return to Taichung and finding the pictures of a naked little girl. If he thought I had anything to do with it, surely he would thrash me to the extent that any man is allowed to on a nephew. “Mei-ling, about those cards—I think you should throw them away altogether.”

“I want to mail them out to radio and TV stations! They're not dirty. I want people to come to my page!” She stared at me defiantly.

“What the hell would your father say if he saw them?”

She hunched up her shoulders. “I don't care what he would say. I've seen porn on his computer!”

What a family. My family. I was throwing in the towel. “I can't control what you do with your cards. Just don't do it when you're around me.”

She nodded. I decided to try to be around her as much as possible.

We went up a side street to her apartment building. A group of twentysomething guys spilled out of a Friendly Mart. Obviously they were on their way to a club. One guy with spiky hair stared at Mei-ling.

“She's too young for you,” I said pointedly.

“Sorry,” he said.

I watched as they turned the corner.

“He was just looking,” said Mei-ling. “What's wrong with looking?”

“Looking is how it all starts.”

In the lobby I told her to have a good night and watched her board the elevator. As I left the building, I wondered how I could keep this energetic teen out of trouble. Maybe she should use this time for a job or a productive internship. If she could learn discipline, she could get things back on track in the spring semester.

When I stomped down into the train station, I noticed a Japanese food stand doing pretty good business. The main attractions were the hot entrees. I looked over the racks of plates ready to be snapped into bento boxes. Breaded and fried chicken and pork cutlets were matched up with mounds of rice or glistening tangles of
yakisoba
, pan-fried noodles. I was impressed with the evenness of the dark-amber crust on the cutlets, a sign that the oil was very hot and the temperature painstakingly maintained throughout the cooking process. Feeling the panko crisps breaking down on my tongue would be sublime.

Some people say that panko are just breadcrumbs, but they are pure magic. First of all, they are slivers of special Japanese bread cooked by a live electric current, not heat. This method creates a light and fluffy bread with no crust. The crumbs made from this bread are crumbs from heaven. When used as a deep-fry coating, they retain less oil than conventional breadcrumbs. I liked the way those cutlets looked—browned by a benevolent sun god.

The little things in food service are actually as important as the big things, and this tiny stand had it covered. I noticed small pleated-paper portion cups of hot mustard whose horseradish kick would cut through the grease and meld the starch with the yielding strands of meat. If this condiment isn't offered with your fried cutlet, you are not getting a complete experience.

“May I help you?” asked the counterman. I looked up. I hadn't realized that it was now my turn. The man was about my age and clean-cut. We locked eyes. I recognized instantly the lonely look of fraught-filled proprietorship. Likewise he knew right away I was minutely evaluating his technique.

“Well done,” I said. “I mean it.”

•••

As I entered my
building, I saw a shadow cross the street headed directly for me.

I stood in the entranceway and allowed the street door to swing shut behind me. I switched the plastic bag to my left hand and unlocked the building door with a measure of resignation. I wouldn't have time to get in and secure the door behind me. The lock was cranky from the interior side.

“Hey!” I yelled out. “Are you coming in or what?”

I was taken aback when a young man wearing a BMX jacket opened the street door and entered, a helmet under his left arm. I saw some Chinese DNA in his face, maybe a quarter's worth. He was dark-skinned and had broad shoulders that would serve a lover or a fighter. The man looked me over, determined and yet uncertain. I showed him that my palms were empty as my bag slid to my left wrist.

This had to be Mei-ling's boyfriend. He looked like the kind of guy a father wouldn't trust with his daughter.

“Are you Chong by any chance?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said in lousy Mandarin. “Are you Jing-nan, the cousin?”

“That's me,” I said.

“Is she upstairs?”

“Mei-ling?”

“Yeah, Mei-ling. Who the fuck else would I be talking about?”

“Calm down.”

He leaned his head back and glared at me. “Don't tell me to calm down! I just rode my motorcycle all the way from Taichung!”

I sighed and opened the building door wider. “Come upstairs with me.”

“What's in the bag?”

“Food.”

He stepped forward, grabbed the bag and searched for himself. “Two bento boxes. She's upstairs, right?”

“Nobody's upstairs, Chong. When we get up there, it's just gonna be you and me.”

“Then why two bentos?”

“Research.” I planted my feet. “I had to try both the pork and the chicken cutlets. I have a stand at the night market and I have to know what the competition is up to. Are you hungry? You can have one.”

He was indeed hungry. Actually, Chong was starving. He scarfed down the pork so violently I wondered if he had access to hot meals on a regular basis.

“That's some good shit, huh?” I asked him. He nodded. That was the extent of his appreciation but I felt compelled to go on anyway. “I could tell it would be by the presentation and how wary the guy in charge was. He was on top of everything. Chong, have you ever been to one of those crappy sidewalk joints where you know right off the bat they don't care? The dude running the place has his face buried in the paper or is asleep against the wall?”

“That sounds a little like my family business,” said Chong. “It claims to be an Indonesian restaurant but it's really just home cooking.”

I brought out a pair of Kirins from the fridge. We popped them open. “We have something in common,” I said. “We're both food professionals.”

He growled. “I don't work there,” he spat. “I'm not feeding racist Taiwanese assholes who fucked over my family and friends.”

“Fucked you over? We let you into the country.”

Chong slapped the table twice. “To work all the shitty jobs no Taiwanese wanted! My father worked his ass off in illegal construction, until the scaffold he was working on collapsed. My aunts still work as housekeepers. Their employers treat them like shit because if they complain, they'll be fired and deported.” He took a big swig of beer and swallowed hard. “My father sleeps against the wall in the restaurant. It's too painful for him to sleep lying down because those injuries never healed properly.” He tapped the side of the bottle. “I want to cry when I see him limp.”

I nodded. “I'm sorry to hear about your dad.”

Chong drained his beer. “He doesn't need
you
to feel sorry for him. Doesn't need anybody to feel sorry for him.”

I picked up my chopsticks and lifted the last piece of chicken cutlet. I gingerly dipped the flat bottom in the thick brown
katsu
sauce, then dragged the long edge along a squib of hot mustard. I popped it in my mouth. The horseradish in the mustard opened up my passages and I inhaled through them, highlighting the cool and sweet taste of the
katsu
sauce on my tongue. The flavors stabilized in my mouth and I began to chew. The still-firm breading broke up like shattered corn flakes as the juicy chicken flesh succumbed to my teeth. Five millimeters of chicken fat and skin underneath the coating was exactly the right thickness to add to the mouthfeel without compromising the taste profile.

I chewed thoroughly and swallowed. Why is this chef in a subway stand, I wondered. More importantly, why was Chong here in my apartment and why was he comfortable enough to get up and grab a second beer on his own from my fridge without even asking?

“Chong,” I said. “Why did you come up here? Are you looking to cause trouble?”

He tossed his bottle cap into my sink and shrugged. “I came here for my girl. That's all I want.”

“You think you're just going to take her back to Taichung? How is Big Eye going to feel about it?”

He cradled his beer. “I don't give a fuck. That guy is a big snake! All the Indonesian boys of Taichung used to be united. We had different sets, you know, cliques, but we all got along. Then Big Eye got us beefing against each other, giving each other lumps. I don't know how he did it, but he did it!”

“I'll admit that Big Eye isn't a nice guy. But isn't that even more reason not to date his daughter?”

He took in a slow, noisy breath. “You can't help who your parents are,” he said. “You also can't help who you fall in love with.”

“I'll be honest with you, Chong. Mei-ling doesn't care about you. She talks about being a singer but she doesn't talk about you. Don't chase after someone who doesn't value you.”

I heard his shoes jog against the floor. “I bought her a nice microphone for her birthday. She uses it all the time!”

I rubbed my hands together. She probably didn't even have his cheap-ass microphone anymore. “Apart from the singing, Mei-ling has to graduate from high school. She has to hang out with a new crowd. You don't want to hold her back, do you?”

He looked over his knuckles. They were worn out like he'd been punching holes in walls for years. “No,” he said softly.

“Take it from me. Let her go for now. If it's meant to be, you'll hear from her again soon enough.”

“She never even said goodbye. My boys told me they saw her leave today.”

“I thought you two had broken up.”

“She didn't mean it,” he told himself.

“You can sleep on my couch, but in the morning, you have to go back to Taichung.”

He stood up and crossed his arms over his head. “I'm gonna go now.”

“Are you sure? It's really late.”

Chong looked at me funny. “Why do you talk like you care about me?”

A picture was becoming clearer in my mind. Chong may be a low-level criminal, but he was aware of kindness and how to be kind. I don't think Mei-ling was the same way. In fact, I'll bet their relationship was perennially one-sided and that Chong spent most of it nodding and keeping his mouth shut.

“I'm worried about you, Chong,” I said. To tell the whole truth, I was worried about my own well-being, too. Big Eye would not be pleased if he found out I'd had any contact with Chong, much less fed him and allowed him to stay over.

Chong walked over to my kitchen sink, ran water over his hands and splashed his face. “Don't worry about me,” he called.

Could he drive so soon after two beers, though? A lot of these kids have trouble driving while completely sober. “You're good to drive on your motorcycle?”

He laughed as his face dripped. “I could ride that thing with my eyes closed and my hands behind my back!”

Ride right off a cliff, I thought.

If I wasn't going to see him again, I wanted to know something, man-to-man. “Did you really think the bento box was good?”

“It was great!”

Gimme a break. He had eaten it all without tasting a single bite.

Chapter Seven

I had a scary
dream that involved a trail of flaming footsteps in a sugarcane field at night that were dying out faster than I could catch up to them. Any other details fled from my memory as soon as I looked at the time on my ringing phone. Ten-something in the morning.

I hit a button and growled, “Why the hell are you waking me up so early, Mei-ling?”

“It's not that early,” she said. I heard the television in the background. “I've already been up a few hours.”

“I had a visitor last night. You know anything about it?”

“Who was it?”

“Your ex-boyfriend, Chong. Or is he still your boyfriend?”

She sighed so heavily I could feel her breath. “I ended it with him weeks ago! He doesn't mean anything to me.”

“He was waiting for me at my house.”

“It's not hard to find out where you live, Mr. Shooting Victim Who Exploits Himself.” I heard her chuckle to herself. “What do you want to do today?”

“Let's start with lunch in a few hours.”

“Lunch? I want to eat now, Jing-nan! I'm hungry!” She spoke through a yawn. “Let's go to Fu Fu Dou Jiang! I've read about it!”

“Aw, fuck that place,” I said. “Wait, I'm sorry, I shouldn't be using that sort of language with my little cousin.”

She snickered. “I know curses you don't even know, older cousin. Anyway, what's wrong with Fu Fu?”

“It takes an hour to get through the line and they charge too much for their
youtiao
and
doujiang
.”

Youtiao
are foot-long deep-fried sticks of dough stuck together in pairs. They live up to their literal name, “oil stick.” Oversimplified English signs call
youtiao
“crullers.” The oil stick is airy and almost as hard as a dried loofah. They detonate with each bite, sending crumbs and flakes everywhere.
Doujiang
, meanwhile, is thick soy milk served up warm in a bowl and sweetened to taste with white sugar.

I thought about the hot crispy
youtiao
floating across a mouthful of creamy, syrupy
doujiang
and I swung my feet from the bed to the floor.

“We're going to Yong He Soy Milk King,” I told Mei-ling.

I heard her hair brush the mouthpiece as she switched the phone to her other ear. “Let me look up the rating online.”

“Don't look it up,” I said. “I know the place and it's good.” I didn't want to give her a chance to see the no-frills decor and paper plates. Yeah, the Soy Milk King doesn't photograph well and young people don't look so cool in selfies taken there so they don't post them; Mei-ling wouldn't get how great the place was by Googling. I told her to meet me there in fifteen minutes. It was practically across the street from her apartment, just south of the Da'an MRT station. It's good to live so close to someplace worth getting up to eat at.

Mei-ling stood outside of
Soy Milk King. Her arms were crossed and her head was down, although I could see her mouth twisted to the side.

“This place is SPP, Jing-nan,” she said to her shirt.

SPP is shorthand for
song piao piao
. No class.

“I know it's not very pretty,” I said. “But for a restaurant, only the food matters. Please, just try it for me.” I touched her arm. She dragged her leaden feet inside.

We picked up plates of
youtiao
and freshly made stuffed
shaobing
, a dense sesame-seeded pan-fried bread packed with eggs and veggies. Unstuffed
shaobing
was also available but why would you get that? I was surprised by the number of tourists chowing down. Loud Chinese tourists. I grumbled about the lack of seats and how one of my favorite places was being invaded. Sure, I can be a hypocrite when I want to. I know my livelihood depends on tourists, but I need my safe spaces. Look at this! Nowhere to sit. Well, good for Soy Milk King.

Mei-ling looked around, frowning. I nudged her with an elbow.

“This place is so good there's not even a free seat,” I joked.

“If you can't sit and eat, it doesn't matter how good it is.”

Two seats opened up at a table near the back and we squeezed in with the Chinese people. They were city folk from Shanghai, judging by the slurred-sounding Mandarin they spoke. They were loud as hell and really good at ignoring people who weren't a part of their group. They had been told not to smoke numerous times, so one ingenious man, the leader of the table, held his cigarette under the table between puffs. He didn't have access to his hands so he talked with his broad shoulders. Every sentence out of him was peppered with curses and he misted the air with
doujiang
.

“This fucking bumpkin showed up at the office with two baskets on a carrying pole. He opens one basket and it's full of chicken and duck eggs. He says, ‘You said it was bad to put all your eggs in one basket, so I brought you another so now you have two baskets!'” The three other people roared with laughter and the table shifted and our
doujiang
spilled out of the bowls. Mei-ling and I didn't mind much. The man was captivating.

He was probably in his early sixties and had the jaded eyes of someone who had survived the Cultural Revolution. The man's hair was a marble swirl of grey, white, and black. Unlike his friends, he hadn't been swindled into buying a Taipei 101 shirt, or at least if he had he wasn't wearing it. In fact he was dressed in a long-sleeve T-shirt that he possibly had slept in. His body was free of jewelry. The only indications that this man had money were the Japanese cigarettes that he snuffed out half-smoked. He lit another one before continuing.

“So then the guy opens up the other basket and it's full of smallish tomb artifacts. Little dolls, some jade. He said that he dug these up while drilling a new well a few years back and maybe these were worth something. I've been around, as you all know, and I've come across some clever fakes. These were the real deal and the man really had no idea what he had.”

Middle-aged Chinese women had their elbows on the table while the men twisted in their seats to get a better view. Even the staff behind the counter held off on chopping chives so they wouldn't miss a word. The best old Chinese stories are about war and killing. The most gripping modern Chinese stories are about making a killing.

“I told him I would credit him a thousand yuan for every piece he could bring in but he said those were all he had. He gave all he found to the head of the village and the artifacts were split evenly amongst all the families.”

Everything paused as the Chinese man made a token attempt to duck under the table to take a drag on his Mevius stick. The storyteller held in his smoke while surveying the audience. He seemed to look at me and winked. With a dramatic exhaling of smoke through both nostrils, the Chinese man resumed the story.

“I said to myself, this guy is the worst kind of idiot. The honest kind!” He took advantage of a burst of laughter and ate a chive omelet in two bites before going on. “Well, he was happy with what he got and later I showed the pieces to my partner. He knows people who used to smuggle artifacts out of the country. Now they make more money keeping it in the country, selling to collectors, but back then, there weren't Chinese millionaires.

“My partner told me the jade was from the Han Dynasty and he could probably get millions of yuan for them but he would need time to sneak them out of China. I let him have them and about a month later he took off for Canada for good. I don't even know what city. He claimed political persecution. My ass. He should be persecuted for being a thief!

“I was ripped off by a pal while the guy I was trying to rip off was completely honest with me. So I made things right by hiring the bumpkin to clean my offices. He does a good job, too!”

He squeezed off his cigarette and reached for his Mevius pack. For some reason he focused on me again.

“Hey, my friend, have a cigarette,” he said to me.

“No, thank you,” I said.

“Hey, you're not a part of my group, are you? You're a
taibazi
, eh? Too good to take a smoke off me, huh?”

Taibazi
is one term that Chinese people use to put down Taiwanese people. It's meant to be applied to people who want to declare independence from China, but the slur insults all Taiwanese as it means “Taiwanese dicks.” He sure didn't know me well enough to call me a dick in jest.

I could get mad and call him something, maybe
gongfei
, “commie bandit.” Mainlanders brought the term to Taiwan when the civil war ended and it lives on to describe the atrocious behavior of Chinese tourists.

Then he would have to come back at me with something terrible. After all, his crew was watching. He couldn't be shown up by some Taiwanese punk like me wearing a New Order shirt from the
Low-Life
era. Maybe he'd call me a worse name, like “brokeback,” a
duanbei,
a faggot—a term that came from the film
Brokeback Mountain
. The film was never officially shown in China, but everyone had seen it on bootleg DVD.

Then things would have gotten really ugly.

Instead, I allowed my inner night-market persona to surface. Johnny could handle this. Every confrontation was an opportunity. I matched the Chinese man's big smile.

“Well, now that you're in Taiwan, you're a
taibazi
, too!” He laughed and then his friends joined in. “You might as well get used to our food now before we declare independence.” I handed him a card for Unknown Pleasures. “Map's on the back.”

He ran his right index finger along the edge and raised his eyebrows. He could tell it wasn't printed in China because the corners were precise but smooth. Chinese cards are designed for paper cuts.

“How does your food compare with Soy Milk King?” he asked.

“Let's put it this way,” I said. “I only come here to tell people about my place.”

Someone from behind the counter charged over at us. As the guy who lifted out the
youtiao
from the hot oil, he was in charge of the kitchen since his skill made the business. In fact, he was the Soy Milk King himself. He looked to be in his mid-thirties. His face was smooth and soft as a silent-film star's. His retro glasses frames and animated expression completed the look.

“Are you trying to do business here?” His Royal Highness accused me.

You could smoke, yell, and probably even piss on the floor and it would only warrant a minor rebuke. Hand out a business card and you threatened the sovereignty of the restaurant.

The Chinese guy held up his free hand. “We're old friends,” he said. “And look, he just got engaged! You should congratulate him!”

The King wasn't buying it. “Don't come here anymore!” he said, pointing to me and then shifting his finger to Mei-ling. “Neither of you!”

My heart sank. Or maybe I was feeling the grease seeping through my arteries. It would really suck being barred from this place. I licked my lips. Well, it was good to the last drop.

Then the Chinese guy did something unexpected. He dropped all the friendly play and his smile faded. “Don't be like that, friend,” he said to the King. “I bring a lot of people through here. You don't want to be mean to people I like. How would you like me to bring my groups to that other place, aw, what's the name?”

“Fu Fu,” Mei-ling offered.

“Fu Fu!” declared the Chinese guy, saying it with conviction as if it were a Taoist deity who kept
youtiao
crispy. “I'm going to take my groups to Fu Fu instead. What do you think of that?”

The King crumpled a little. “Okay,” he said in a restrained growl.

The Chinese guy nodded and said, “Okay.”

Dismissed, the King walked back to the fryer, his head held high.

“God, what a prick!” the Chinese guy cracked.

“He can hear you!” exclaimed Mei-ling.

“I hope he does!”

I had to speak up for a decent chef. “You have to admit he fries a mean oil stick.”

He crossed his arms and nodded enthusiastically, using his full neck in the way Chinese people do. “He does, doesn't he?”

I hadn't tried a cigarette since middle school, but I clapped the Chinese guy on the shoulder. “I'll take that cigarette now,” I said.

He laughed heartily and obliged. What a great guy!

As he was lighting me up, he said under his breath, “That's one sexy bitch you got there.”

“She's sixteen,” I said through my chokes. I wasn't going to tell him her name or our family relation. No need to bring him into my confidence.

“Age of consent in Taiwan,” he said coolly. It was a litmus test he had applied many times before. “Ah, this is my card. Sorry about the shape it's in, but it's the last one.” He handed me a card that said his name was Li Jishen and his occupation was “Best Taiwan Province Tour Guide.”

Mr. Li hooked an index finger into his mouth to pick the back of his teeth. He dislodged something and I heard him swallow it as he rose to his feet. “Maybe I'll see you soon, Jing-nan.”

After we left Soy
Milk King, Mei-ling was anxious to go out and do stuff. I casually asked her if she wanted to visit the offices in Taipei 101—a part of the landmark skyscraper the tourists never got to see—and she fell for it.

Taipei 101 was barely a decade old but it had already become a symbol of the city, as iconic as the Eiffel Tower but loaded with an upscale shopping mall and two million square feet in office space. The food court has a number of comforts the night market didn't offer—there are chairs and tables, and you can pay with credit cards. But the food itself? If you're willing to sacrifice quality for convenience, well, you should learn to hold your tongue because there was nothing actually worth tasting here.