“Younger,” I said as I poured tea for everybody, my own cup last.
I couldn't remember the first time my parents brought me here, but I do remember coming here with my childhood sweetheart. I hate that term. It's clichéd and even worse it undermines the seriousness of the relationship. “Childhood sweetheart” sounds like something you grow out of or maybe even laugh about one day. But I will never laugh about it nor will I ever really feel completely at ease while eating here.
Yes, Din Tai Fung was definitely an old haunt and I remained haunted by it.
“My cousin's not looking too happy,” said Mei-ling. “He's annoyed because he didn't like the way I ordered.”
Nancy looked at me with her gentle eyes. “Jing-nan has a lot on his mind,” she said. “If you had a business you'd probably worry a lot, too. Right now he's comparing the customers and the tickets for each table.”
“Is that right, Jing-nan?” asked Mei-ling.
“I can't help it,” I said. “The prices and the typical wait here would never fly at the Shilin Night Market. Where I play, it's got to be good, fast, and cheap. Here, they're only good. So I beat them on two out of three counts.”
Mei-ling sat up. “I've never been to the Shilin Night Market!”
“Do you want to go to his stand?” asked Nancy. “I'm sure Jing-nan would love to take you tonight.”
My lips peeled back, revealing my clenched teeth. “I think Mei-ling has to rest tonight,” I said. “She must be bushed.”
“I feel fine,” she said. “I wanna go! When are you going?”
“Honestly, I wasn't counting on having an extra person on hand. You might be in the way.”
“I won't be! I'll be good! Let me come!”
A woman dropped off the spicy cucumbers, stacked stumps of jade in garlic sauce as thick as gauze. Even though I hadn't used my chopsticks yet, I did the Taiwanese thing by reversing them and using the handle ends to transfer a few cucumbers to Mei-ling's plate. It's a polite way of forcing food upon someone without involving a saliva transfer.
“That's enough,” she said.
“They're very good,” said Nancy.
Mei-ling chewed one thoroughly. “I like them,” she said. “Not too spicy.” A swirled dome of pea shoots with a shallow moat of garlic sauce arrived at the table. “Why did you order so many vegetables?”
“Because we're not at McDonald's.” I dumped a healthy portion of pea shoots on her plate.
“If I eat all these vegetables, I get to go with you to the night market.”
I wiped the handles of my chopsticks against my napkin. “I'm responsible for you, so you have to promise me that you won't go off with some boys or drink or take drugs. You understand?”
She frowned and kicked me lightly under the table. “You sound like my dad! Do you think I shouldn't get pregnant tonight, too?”
“No, I'm all right with you getting pregnant. Nancy will help you raise the child.”
“Crazy talk,” said Nancy with her mouth full.
“I have to be at the night market until almost one in the morning. You're probably going to run out of things to do there way before then. How are you going to get back to your apartment?”
“I'll just take the train back.”
“You know how to ride the train by yourself?”
She crossed her eyes and stuck out her teeth. “Duh, I no know how to do anything, duh!”
When my cousin excused herself “to go piss,” I told Nancy about my gangster uncle, the gambling den in the sugarcane field, the shootout, and the crazy temple. She told me that she had joined a protest group that was going to storm a government building and occupy the space.
We were each surprised the other wasn't.
When we hit the street the full weight of my exhaustion fell upon me. I staggered to the MRT subway system while Nancy escorted Mei-ling back to her apartment. From there Nancy would walk south through Da'an Park to the university and go on plotting revolution.
I met Mei-ling at
3:30 in the afternoon just outside the northern exit of the MRT at Jiantan Station.
“You're on time!” I exclaimed.
“Why wouldn't I be? Did you get enough sleep?”
“A few hours are all I need. Did you sleep, too?”
“I stayed up and read about the student movement. I appreciate Nancy's activism.”
“I appreciate that you changed into something less flammable. Anyway, you can never go wrong with jeans and a T-shirt.”
She did that Big Eye hand dismissal. “I changed for me, not you.”
Mei-ling and I walked briskly through the early hours of the night market as vendors were unloading their goods and setting up signage.
“This is like watching a circus set up,” she said. “Only there aren't any animals.”
“Just wait for the people to show up. They're all beasts. I have to tame them a little and take their money.”
We entered Cixian Temple, where the vendors prayed each night before the market opened.
“You know who that is?” I asked, pointing to the goddess seated behind a table overlain with offerings of lit joss sticks, flowers, and baskets of fruit.
“Of course I do,” said Mei-ling. “It's Mazu.”
The indifferent eyes of the idol of the Empress of Heaven stared at us through her beaded veil.
I bought a pack of incense sticks from a shady-looking guy at a booth in the temple. The tattoos went above his inner elbow and under his rolled-up sleeve. Half these guys who work at the temple look like criminals, or
heidaoren,
because they are. They're not at the temple to cultivate their karma. They're here to handle the menial work of collecting tax-free money for their outfit. After all, almost every neighborhood temple is owned by criminals.
Don't think they don't take the gods and goddesses seriously, however. This is Taiwan. Everybody's superstitious. Nobody blindly believes in any deity yet nobody wants to incur their wrath. Even the most cold-hearted, willing-to-sell-his-own-mother-for-money thug wouldn't release intestinal gas until leaving the temple, or at least getting a respectable distance away from the offering table.
Personally, I wouldn't give a dime to this enterprise. But my hands were tied. The temple had been complaining that the night-market merchants weren't being supportive enough and suggested that everybody at least burn some incense every night. As a strictly pragmatic matter, I agreed that it made the temple and by extension the entire night market look more legit to the tourists. Cixian Temple is cited in all the guidebooks as the origin of the night market, so people like to start there.
Sometimes it's a pain in the ass to maintain history for the sake of tourism. I'll go along with it, though, because I like having money.
I handed several lit joss sticks to Mei-ling.
“Bow three times to Mazu,” I told her.
“I know what to do,” she said as she proved it. As I paid my respects to the Mother Ancestor, another one of Mazu's many aspects, I heard Mei-ling mutter, “This whole thing is stupid, anyway.”
My hands shook as I planted my sticks in the ash-strewn urn.
“Don't ever call it stupid,” I warned her. “If people find comfort in something without hurting anyone, it's not stupid. How would you like it if I told you your singing's stupid?”
“You've already told me my singing's stupid.”
“And it was a hurtful and wrong thing to say, right?”
She slapped my arm. “You're so annoying!” she said, her mouth curling into a playful frown. “I can't believe I came to the night market with you.”
“If you think I'm bad, you should meet the guys I work with.”
Dwayne's blood-splattered arms worked
like hairy pistons as he cut up organs destined for skewers. As Mei-ling and I approached Unknown Pleasures he glanced up and immediately adjusted his body language to bulk up his arms.
“Dwayne, this is my cousin, Mei-ling,” I said and made a point to emphasize every word of, “She is sixteen years old.” It was a warning for him to watch his language, but Mei-ling was the one I should have warned.
“Hello, Dwayne,” she said. “Are you a mountain person?”
I tensed up at the use of the phrase as Dwayne put down his knives and crossed his arms. At best, “mountain person” was outdated. At worst, it was plain racist.
But I knew Dwayne. A pretty girl who was related to his employer could never offend him. “Please call me an âoriginal inhabitant,'” he said with gleaming eyes. “Many people prefer that term. We didn't all live in the mountains.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “I'm sorry.”
Dwayne made sounds like he was cooing to a baby. “Don't worry. It's all just words, anyway.” He rubbed his nose roughly with the back of his right hand.
Frankie the Cat, subtle as ever, appeared out of nowhere and presented himself to Mei-ling before I had a chance to. “I'm Frankie,” he said. “You must be Big Eye's kid.”
“Yes, he's my dad.”
Frankie face softened. He gazed across the years. “The last time I saw you, you must have been about a year old.”
“But this is my first time in Taipei.”
Frankie nodded. “Yes, I believe it is.”
I was dumbstruck. “Hey, Frankie.”
“Yeah?”
“You've met my cousin before?”
“Yeah.”
“When did you meet her?”
“I was down in Taichung briefly with some old acquaintances.”
“Why didn't you tell me I had a cousin?”
“It wasn't my business to tell you. It wasn't my business to know, either, but I couldn't help that. Now you know, so I guess Big Eye's back in touch with you.”
He turned and went back to his station. Sometimes I forget how attuned Frankie is to the
heidaoren
and all their misdeeds. As a political prisoner on Green Island, he was treated the same as the flat-out criminalsâlike shit. By the time Frankie was released, he had brothers for life who would kill for him.
“He knows my dad,” Mei-ling said slowly.
“Frankie knows a lot of things.” I wondered what else he was holding close to his vest.
“Well, what are we gonna do now?”
“Mei-ling,” I said. “I have to help set up. If you walk around, you won't get lost, will you?”
“She's a big girl,” said Dwayne. “She'll be fine.”
“There's not too much going on right now,” Frankie called out. “Be another hour before things start swinging.”
Mei-ling shifted her weight to her right leg. “Do you want me to help with anything?” she asked.
“I'm just going to make about a thousand skewers,” I said. “It's pretty boring work.”
“I want to try it! I've never really cooked anything.”
“I don't know about this. You could cut yourself.”
“Let her give it a shot, Jing-nan,” said Dwayne. “Are you afraid she'll be better at it than you?”
“I'm afraid she'll stab her finger, get an infection and then lose her entire arm after gangrene sets in,” I said. Everybody laughed. “All right, young lady, if you want to try this, wash your hands first at the sink. Use lots of soap.”
When she was done, I gave her a stack of bamboo skewers and a bowl of pig intestines.
“Frankie's already done the hard part,” I said. “He's cut them down and washed them out thoroughly. Dwayne's sliced and marinated them.” I reached in and grabbed a strip dripping with sauce. “You want to take these, squeeze them off but not all the way. Roll 'em up like a sock and then stick it through with this.”
I was distracted by narrating what I was doing, as the process was intuitive to me after all this time. Talking about it was making me consciously think about what I was doing. A skier wouldn't say out loud what muscles were doing what while slaloming. When I scratched myself by accident, I played off the pain with a flourish of my fingers. “Yep, the skewers are nice and sharp!”
Mei-ling cringed. “Your fingers must be tough from this job. I would be bleeding if I did that.”
“Then don't. So, put four on a skewer and you're done,” I concluded. “Pretty basic stuff.”
“Why four? There's room for more.”
“It's a dirty trick,” said Dwayne. “He always wants the skewers to have four chunks each because he wants people to buy two in order to get that lucky number.” The word for “eight” in Mandarin sounds like “wealth,” so the superstitious Taiwanese buy things in eights, and get phone numbers and license plates that include as many eights as possible. It also helps me that four is considered an unlucky number.
“You should put five on a skewer,” said Mei-ling. “They'll fit and that's a lucky number, too.”
Frankie called out over his plastic tub of organs, “Why sell five when you can sell eight?”
Mei-ling nodded as she stabbed another rolled-up intestine. “I think I'm starting to understand the night-market culture,” she said. “You're all a bunch of scammers!”
It was fun showing
Mei-ling what to do. Her presence added a soft note to the usual roughhouse idiocy that Dwayne and I could degenerate into.
Foot traffic picked up around 5:30 and I stood at the front of Unknown Pleasures, surveying the crowd and listening carefully. I heard a group of men speaking English, of the English-accent variety. I stepped out into the crowd and spied a group of four middle-aged white guys, a little out of shape but cheerful.
They had no idea what to do with their money, so naturally they needed my help.
“You lot!” I called to them, using the expression for the plural third person that I learned from the chorus of The Clash song “Magnificent Seven.” “Come over here!”
The men burst out laughingâa common reaction to hearing fluent English spokenâand ambled over. A guy with wispy dried-garlic-root hair wearing a Hawaiian shirt was the first to reach me.