Monkey

The plane from Seoul to Taipei was even worse than the seventeen trans-Pacific hours I’d just spent in a smoke-filled JAL seat that wouldn’t recline.  Or at least my idea of “recline” involved the seat top leaning back at a visually discernible angle.  I now had to sit sideways in my seat because my femurs were apparently too long for the seats, and the smoke from this shorter flight was so thick I could see the whorls of “air” enter and exit my body with each breath.  The man next to me offered a Chinese cigarette called Long-Life.  “For Long-Life,” he said, and insisted I join the rest of the plane in a smoke.  Even the stewardesses had the ashy stumps of cigarettes dangling from their lower lips, Bogart-style, as they patrolled the aisle.  Instead of pilots’ wings, I thought I saw them doling out smokes to the few living children scattered throughout the plane.

By his laughter, I knew my companion understood the irony, “Long-Life,” but he didn’t understand anything else in English, and I didn’t speak any Chinese.  On the first flight I’d sat next to a nice Korean husband-wife combo whose only conversation had been, “Taiwan? Ahh…Formosa! R.O.C.!”  They didn’t really speak any English either, and I hadn’t known enough about the country in which I was about to spend the next four months of my life to realize it had more than one name.

When I finally got off the plane in Taiwan/Formosa/R.O.C. the air wasn’t any better, and I was immediately dizzy from the humidity.  I felt like lox, cured and dried and, now that I was deplaning, I felt as though I was laid out on a plate next to the tofu.  There was a sea of black hair, and though I’d shaved my head before the trip I was still tall and red and very pale (maybe greenish, by this point).  I didn’t know where I was heading so I walked forward into the airport.  The yellow signs were all in black Chinese ideograms and English script, but it didn’t help.    Kaohsiung, or  Chang-hua, or   Taipei. They all could’ve read TUBERCULOSIS – THIS WAY, and I would’ve kept walking.  Finally I reached a chain-link fence.  There were hundreds of Taiwanese on the other side of the fence holding signs in Chinese.  It looked to me as if I’d landed just outside a refugee camp.  I felt like I should now hand Long-Life cigarettes through the mesh.  I’d been given several packs from the people next to me, though I’d pantomimed furiously “I don’t smoke!”

“I’m Jackson,” someone said.  He looked like a Chinese Steve Buscemi, and was one of the few men I could see then, or would see the whole four months whose hair dipped over his shirt collar.  Maybe it was the humidity.

“Betty’s husband?” I asked.

“No,” he said with a laugh, “Not husband.” He laughed again and then took my bag from me and led me around the fence and out to a very small car.  He’d been talking the entire way, in English, but none of it had registered.  All I could do was ask myself, “Who the fuck is Jackson?” and “Why am I following him?”  When we got into the car Betty was waiting in the shadowy back seat like some 1930s movie star.  “Do you like Jackson’s car?” Betty purred.

“It’s very nice,” I said.  It was small and dark, but it was more room than I’d had on the plane, and it was clean and I could recline my seat, and roll down my window.  I don’t like not being able to roll down my window on a plane.  “Hi, Betty,” I said.

She and Jackson began to talk and laugh in Chinese.  At least that’s how it seemed to me at the time, that even their laughter was in another language.  I knew Betty from the previous summer, when I’d worked as a National Park tour guide cum ESL teacher, and had shuttled a group of her wards through seven states and half as many levels of comprehension.  I was going to be staying with Betty and her family, and she would arrange tutoring work for me.  What she was getting out of the deal I wasn’t exactly sure.  Money, maybe, or simply the prestige and indebtedness of “providing” an English tutor.  If I’d learned anything the previous summer, it was that no good deed went unreciprocated with Betty.  But whatever the reasons, she sure seemed to be enjoying her time with Jackson.  They laughed and laughed.

When we got away from the airport and lurched to a halt in front of a complicated intersection, about fifty motorcycles and Vespas pulled up on either side of us.  The men wore similar-looking jackets and scowls.  “Do you have trouble with gangs in Taipei?” I asked Jackson.  It was the early nineties, and I had just come from L.A. where there were still two primary colors of bandanas.  Even in Utah, we had no short supply of news with the Tongan Crypts.  And I was still a victim of Reagan-era gang terror and paranoia.

“Gangs,” Betty said from the back seat and she thrust her head between us.  “What is gangs?”

Jackson explained to her.  Jackson’s English was better than Betty’s and I decided I liked him better than Betty.  I also decided to direct all my conversation through him.  She harrumphed and went back to speaking Chinese.  I couldn’t tell if she was speaking fast, or if it was a fast language, but the syllables went by like little fish.  And when I looked out my window I saw that behind the “toughs” on their motor scooters were young women on their scooters.  And behind them were elderly women on scooters.  And finally, an entire family, father in front, mother in back, children squeezed into the middle, on one motor scooter drove past us.  “No, not like America,” Jackson answered me.

As we approached Betty’s neighborhood Jackson began telling me how much each house cost.  I didn’t see any houses, and I assumed he meant apartments.  Even with accomplished English speakers like Jackson, there are always certain cultural idiosyncrasies that defy translation.  The prices for these “houses,” though, were in the millions, and I couldn’t be sure if he meant each building cost that much, or if each apartment in each building cost that much.  One was taller or shorter than the next, and the Chinese banners on one might be written in red letters, while the next was in black.  Otherwise, they all looked exactly alike from where I sat – uniformly dingy behind the neon and banners and rusting bars over the windows.  I wasn’t impressed with how much things cost at that age.  I was just waiting for one of the houses to open its doors and show me my bed.

Jackson dropped us off in an alley and Betty walked me up one flight to an apartment door.  I strained to tow my two immense pieces of luggage, weighted down with some classics I’d brought along to pass the time, quickly enough to keep sight of Betty rising through the endless helix of apartment homes above me.  I had picked War and Peace, The Brothers Karamozov, Pride and Prejudice, and a few others I hadn’t read yet, all in hard cover because I didn’t know any better.  When Betty opened the door I walked in, dropped the luggage, and was met by her two kids, Danny and Tammy.  They began yelling something in Chinese and pointing at the floor.  At first I’d thought maybe I’d damaged the floor by dropping the luggage, but then Betty explained: “No shoes in house!”  The way they were carrying on you’d have thought I had two giant turds for feet.  She pointed to a large pile of shoes outside the front door that I hadn’t seen as I was carrying in my bags.  “Here, take these for your feet.”  She handed me a pair of rubber slippers that looked to be Danny’s size.

“Can I just keep my socks on?” I asked.

Betty nodded, and sighed, and when I looked down the kids had already dismantled my suitcases, strewing my stuff around the living room.  “Hey!”

Betty said something to them in Chinese and they disappointedly dropped my soap and my underpants onto the floor and disappeared into the house.  “Chinese house,” she said, “is all open. Everybody share.”

“I’ve got things in there that aren’t for kids,” I said, and seeing one of my disposable razors, held that up as evidence that I was just looking out for the kids.

Betty shrugged her shoulders and I drug the carcass of my suitcase along as she showed me to my room.  It was a small room, but that was offset by the fact that there was nothing in it.  Not even a bed.  I had remembered the odd joy of the kids at finding beds in their hotel rooms the previous summer -- every couple of nights one of the kids would have to go to the nurse because the amateur acrobats had flown off their new-found trampoline and put a dent in the night stand with their heads, or they’d landed like a tuna on the hard floors of the hotel and cracked a rib.  These kids never got tired of flying off the springs in the mattress, no matter how many of them I carted away each night.  They were just like American kids – all energy, no limits.  But it hadn’t occurred to me that, when I’d come to China, I would be sleeping on the floor.  Betty, to her credit, had thoughtfully found a thin mattress roll that she unfurled for me.  It was about the thickness of a blanket, and since there were no blankets I figured it was up to me to either sleep on it or under it.  I was so tired, I didn’t care.  “My doctor said this is good for the back,” I told Betty.

“Chinese don’t have back problem,” she said. “Not so fat.”  And she poked me in the stomach.  I was fat, but I wasn’t used to being reminded about it; especially from relative strangers like Betty.

The next morning Betty was busy chasing the kids around the house.  Her husband, who’d been asleep when I arrived, and whom I hadn’t yet met, had already gone to work.  “What’s for breakfast?” I asked.  “And where do I shower?”  Betty and the kids all stopped in mid-Chinese-sentence and stared up blankly at me but with some penitent curiosity, as if everything I said was a joke waiting for a punchline.

Tammy grabbed me by the hand and began, I could tell, cursing her fate as she led me to the bathroom.  I was already the dog of the house, for some reason, and it was her turn to walk me.  She showed me to a little bathroom that was tiled from ceiling to floor and contained a sink, a mirror which nicely reflected my fat stomach, a toilet, and what I took to be a larger sink.  “No, I need a shower,” I said.  I said it louder before realizing that never works.  She stared at me, and so I turned again to the best foreign language I know, though one I am hardly fluent in: pantomime.  “Shower,” I repeated, rubbing my armpit with my hand.  I was, after all, supposed to be teaching her and her brother English in exchange for my room and board.  Tammy had thick glasses that shielded her eyes in those moments when she turned reflective.  After she quit staring at me she pointed to the large sink where, I noticed, a short hose, about one and a half feet long, was attached to a cruddy, copper shower head.

“Betty!” I called out, frustrated that I couldn’t make myself understood. “Betty, I need to take a shower and Tammy keeps pointing me to the sink.”

 “That is shower,” Betty said, pushing past me into the tiny bathroom. “Take shower. Take shower.”

“Are there any towels?” I asked.  Betty rolled her eyes at Tammy and Danny, the boy, and found me a towel that looked like it had been issued during the Japanese occupation and hadn’t been washed since.

Now it is a commonly known and frequently ridiculed fact amongst my family and close friends that I am in constant state of anxiety when I haven’t had a shower.  There was no way I could make it through another three months of this.  I wanted to find the embassy and seek asylum, or at least a Howard Johnson’s.

I’ll bet that’s the easy way shrinks sort out the pansies from the neurotics; the pansies whine, but they live through it.  Neurotics are frozen in that feeling I had standing in a bathroom several thousand miles from home.  How awful.  And so, being a pansy about my shower, each night I’d lie on the floor, sometimes on my mat, sometimes under my mat, and sleep or not sleep or pretend to sleep until everyone had left the house.  Then I’d walk across the hall to the bathroom, get undressed, and squat in the big sink to wash the lower half of my body.  Then I would roll onto my back like a turtle on the cold tile and try to get the rest of my body washed off.  This was why I waited for everyone to clear out before I showered – I didn’t want to risk being caught nude and in the turtle position by any of Betty’s kin.  There was no lock on the door, and Chinese house or not, naked-fat-man-turtle-position wasn’t something I wanted to share.

After my shower, though, the day was mine.  Betty worked full time down town doing something with import/export (most of Tai Pei’s economy is export – from computer cables to plastic monkeys that play the cymbals with mechanical glee), and she was also trying to get me some tutoring jobs.  But while she worked, and worked at finding me work, we negotiated that I teach her two kids after they got home from school and finished the other tutoring they undertook.  Taiwanese kids have reason to take on additional studies.  They are tested at every level of public school, where-by those who succeed in the tests advance to the better junior high school.  And from the better junior high school the best advance to the ultimate high school programs.  Betty liked to brag to me that her husband, who I had yet to meet, had graduated from a very good high school – no mention was made of his college career, though I had been making plenty mention of my own over the phone to the prospective “clients” Betty was working on.

As the first few days peeled off, I was getting the idea that I wouldn’t make any money at all tutoring, in spite of the fact that the tests were approaching and this was the desperate season for parents and kids alike.  Betty was finding me a few hours here, a few there.  But most of my time was spent sitting on the floor of my room racing through War and Peace and writing shrill, complaining letters back home to my fiancee.  Preteens were already jumping to their deaths all around Taipei, succumbing to the pressures of the tests, two young girls were dead by the end of my first week.

However, by the end of my second week Betty was filling up my time nicely.  Even with her cut I was bringing in anywhere from $15-$50 an hour.  The lower paying jobs were at “bushi-bans,” where I’d be teaching rooms full of little kids, all around the city.  These were mostly daycare jobs, where the hard-working, wage-earning Chinese parents sent their children with their familial hopes tucked between the pages of books clearly written by other, earnest Chinese who had only a technical grasp of English: “How do you carry under your armpits, Ming Fai? I carry my tooting horn for making merry.”  And this is about as well as most of my conversations were going in and out of the classroom.

Nearly everyone I met was exceptionally nice to me, offering me food, drinks, gifts, as if I had come to change their lives for the better.  But even Betty couldn’t carry on past a couple of declarative sentences.  “You work for Mr. Chow. He pay nice. Very important man.”  I had the feeling that even if Betty was fluent in English she might not carry on past a couple of declarative sentences.  She was all business all day long.  And so, when I came to my first bushi-ban I was excited to see that there was a bohemian-looking European working there.  I’m usually fairly shy with strangers, but I shot my hand out and gave him my best American put-her-there grin.  He was German, and understood little English, but like a lot of the European teachers I would meet, could make understood in written English what he could not speak.  He passed me a note before he disappeared into a room of screaming kids that said English was more in demand than German, and it was generally understood by the bushi-ban management that all westerners were competent in English.  He was working on his English, maybe later “we try friends,” the note had said.  What needed no translation was that he was meekly asking me not to blow his cover – not much more than that.  I figured, by this point, I was doomed to loneliness during my remaining three and a half months.

Suddenly though, Betty’s efficient and persistent efforts were paying off and I was beginning to worry about my days filling up too quickly.  After just two weeks I was working every day of the week.  I would leave Betty’s house, usually without seeing her husband, who I’d named Barney.  There weren’t many Chinese I met without an alternate Anglo-American handle, and he seemed happy to be so christened.  Barney was a nice guy, shorter than Betty and with a grizzled math-teacher’s hair-do.  He didn’t speak any English, but every night he would break out the green tea and show me how to prepare the pot, not a ceremony really, but something that puts a little more pizzazz into drinking tea than, say, filling up the Mr. Coffee.  We’d stay up late listening to the street noise and watching MacGuyver in Chinese.  MacGuyver was huge, though the show had been cancelled stateside, I think, for a couple of years.  At least its zeitgeist had dissipated by this time.  But every morning after I left Betty and Barney’s place I’d pass at least a dozen billboards with MacGuyver hawking grass-jelly drinks, calculator watches, various powders that could’ve been for eating or cleaning out your stove, I didn’t know.  A big part of the appeal of MacGuyver was probably the Chinese kitsch factor, an American with a practical (in the sense that you might one day be kidnapped and forced to explode your cell door with a piece of gum and some dog food) whiff of science.  It was the culturally reverse appeal of Kung Fu.  But it made me homesick to see his big face all over Taipei on my way to what seemed like hundreds of jobs, thousands of locations.

I took the trains and buses everywhere I went, and though I still couldn’t speak any Chinese, read any Chinese, or write any Chinese, I managed to know where to stand when the big machines pulled up, and where to get off to make it to my jobs.  Public transportation was always crowded, and I had to stand most days holding onto the ceiling rail.  I’d taken to wearing tank-tops every day because of the intense humidity, and every day on the train someone would have to stand staring into my armpit.  I wore deodorant, but I don’t think that mattered.  Betty told me one of the stereotypes of Americans is that they smell like sour butter.  I imagined my armpit smelled ridiculously sour pressed moistly up against somebody’s face, especially after the gym.

My days were full, by my third week, from 7:00 a.m. until nearly 11:00 p.m. seven days a week, with the exception of a couple of hours around lunch time, so I was doing a lot of traveling, a lot of pressing my armpits into unsuspecting faces.  I’d asked Betty to find me a gym, so that I could work out in the afternoons, and, I’d hoped, meet up with some other Americans.  It seemed like the best place to meet other Americans.  Betty grumbled about the task, but she found a place that wasn’t too expensive, and was on my way between jobs.  It was near the Sun Yet Sen Memorial, and I could see his golden statues and the Chinese walking through their Tai Chi from the Burger King next to the entrance to the gym.

The gym was down in a basement under the Burger King.  There were weights on one side of the room, a lot of mirrors, and a wooden floor with a beam screwed unevenly into the wall that looked like the place old, pathetic ballerinas go to die.  This cost me $100 each week, and the first day there I was greeted by a huge Chinese guy with a buzz-cut.  He had biceps like two bowling balls and tits like the lunch ladies at my high school.  So, I guess, you knew he worked out.  He handed me some forms that were all written in Chinese, which Betty quickly snatched away and began stabbing at with her pen.

“It smells bad in here,” Betty said, not looking up from the forms.  Her script, I could tell, was sloppy.  “Sour.” Everything smelled sour to Betty. “You could be working, you know.”

“I’ll go insane,” I said. I needed the break, but this was something Betty did not understand.  She took no quarter herself, with anything, and would get home each night around six or seven o’clock toting a dinner she’d bought off a street vendor.  It was the same shit in Taiwan as it is in the U.S.  Betty worked her butt off, but was still chief of the housework.  Her one sheepish moment since I’d arrived was to admit, shamefully and unprompted, that she was a terrible cook, whereas her sister-in-law, who did not work outside the home, was the marvel of the family inside the kitchen.  This was Betty’s self-effacing, humbling failure.

Eat-out food was cheap and good in Taiwan, but I knew it was going to make me even fatter if I didn’t find time to work out.  “I will get sick and die,” I said. “Americans must exercise.”  I tugged at my spare tire and Betty shook her head.

“You fat because you eat too much. Now you work harder to come here and pay your money.”  She handed the forms to me and left in Thoreauvian disgust at my wasteful ways.

Big China, as I began to call my host at the gym, was there every day I came in.  He spent a lot of time staring into the mirrors and turning over and over the one Wham! tape the gym owned.  It was an extended-remix-mix version of every “hit” song Wham! had, and during one trip to the gym I’d hear the tape through twice.  Big China never got tired of the tape, or of the mirror.  He’d stand close to the mirror looking for hairs on his massive tits, and pluck them out with his fingers and examine them as if each one might yield the cure for cancer or George Michael before flicking them onto the carpet.  I wondered if it was really carpet at all, or just a matted mess of Big China’s tit hairs.

Most Chinese had very little body hair, but Big China clearly shaved his tits and chest so that they would shine under the phosphorescent lights like polished leather.  I’d seen his type back in college when my roommate, a Hawaiian bodybuilder would point out the guys on juice.  They had bitch tits as a side effect of shooting up steroids, and they hung around the gym staring into the mirror and bullying the newcomers off the benches by standing around and sniggering and playing things like Wham! too loudly on the stereo.

Each day I would hope that someone would come into the gym that I could talk to, but most days it was just me and Big China.  A couple of women did come in after awhile and began to do aerobics.  One was Irish and one was Romanian and they conversed in Chinese and didn’t want to be bothered by me.  I was just figuring I should start to learn the Mandarin words for “tit hair,” when, after about a week, my patience paid off.  A tall, new guy came into the gym.  He had a body like a professional athlete, and he spent a lot of time working out without his shirt on (which leaves a nice puddle of sweat on all the equipment for everyone else to slide around in).  I was desperate to meet someone I could speak whole sentences with by this point, so I worked my way over to where he was doing one-armed pull-ups.  “You like all this Wham!?” I said.

“That fat fuck plays this shit just to bust my balls,” he said.  It was music to my ears. “I’m Mark,” he said. “Mark from Minneapolis.”  I introduced myself and we traded stories.  He was in Taiwan at his dad’s behest, so that he could work up some Chinese business contacts and learn the language.  He was taking lessons in both from someone named Chocolate.  I think it was his name for her. “She’s Chinese,” Mark said. “And I’m going to get busy with her before the end of the summer.”  He was probably the last guy I’d want to talk to back in the states (an over-muscled business boy with misogynist and racist implications in nearly everything he said).  Back home at the time I was caught up with a politically correct bunch of my fiancee’s friends who clearly lacked Mark’s arrogance and candor, but who could make it through two or three sentences without referencing their dicks.  And yet after nearly a month in Taiwan, there I was asking for his phone number like some star-struck schoolboy from the chess club getting the nerve to ask the quarterback where the cool parties were.

I left the gym and traveled across town to another bushy-ban where I taught back-to-back classes to little kids whose first English lesson needed to be the word “no.”  They climbed on the desks, they ran around the classroom, and they screamed at each other in Chinese while I was diagramming things like parts of a dog on the board in colored chalk.  I had been riding the high of meeting another American, and fantasizing about meeting fascinating Americans at a party somewhere, and being equally fascinating myself, when one of the bushi-ban kids threw a book at me while I was writing at the board.  In my politically correct mind, they hadn’t only assaulted me, but they’d assaulted my little fantasy of being “international.”  So I went off.

The little shits weren’t learning any English from me, but they’d heard a lot of the words I used when they saw American movies and they chanted them back at me: “Asshole! Asshole! Asshole!”  When they didn’t settle down I stormed out and went to the office to complain to the boss, a sweaty, middle-aged Chinese guy who, from what I could tell, spent his time slurping hot tea and staring into the travel posters of Greece and Poland on his walls.  He’d gone into the room alone and said some magic words in Chinese that made the kids all calm down, then he put his sweaty arm across my shoulders and explained something to me: “We don’t yell at kids like Americans. The parents don’t like this. They don’t send us moneys.”

“The little twerps nailed me with a book,” I said.

“You tell me when they do this,” he said, and he stood there with his arm draped around me long enough that I was uncomfortable on several important levels.  I wasn’t paid to yell at the kids any more than I was the captain of my own destiny here.  I couldn’t even shimmy out from under a sweaty Chinese guy’s arm.  “You come tell me. I tell them, ‘Stop this. This is bad, you kids.’”

As I left I went down stairs and walked through the Mom & Pop store that was the front for the school.  A few of the really poor kids, whose parents couldn’t afford a tutor or a bushi-ban or a bribe to the test committee (and who wouldn’t be pitching themselves off any roofs in the coming weeks), were licking their corn-flavored ice cream.  Corn is huge in Tai Pei, and “ice cream” comes shaped like an ear of corn.  I’d even had corn on pizza at the Pizza Hut.  Cheese was in short supply at Pizza Hut, but there was plenty of corn.  These kids watched me come into the bushi-ban, and they watched me walk back out to catch my train – slowly slurping their corn and making me feel cheap.  I wondered if the German felt this way too, only more so.

One of the first things I noticed when I began riding the buses and trains of Tai Pei was that things like a profound loss of personal space, rigorously shoving your way onto and off of public transportation, and staring at strangers were de rigeur -- for nearly everyone but me.  After two weeks of walking around with pieces of paper tucked into my pocket, I could navigate my way to and from my jobs by holding up the ideograms Betty had written out for me and comparing them to the placards and billboards at the stations.  I’d only missed one train, on the way to the bushi-ban, because I had been standing on the wrong side of the track.  I knew as soon as the train pulled away from the station that I was headed the wrong way.  When I got to Tanshui  I pulled out another slip of paper, poured six pounds of Chinese coins into a pay phone, and roused the boss out of his Greek and Polish dreams.  He told me several times that I wouldn’t get paid, and then he sighed, and then, I think, he went up to teach my class.  I’ll bet they didn’t call him “asshole,” though I think he fit the definition better than I did.

I found the slip of paper with the symbol for my stop near Betty and Barney’s place, and pantomimed to the ticket agent that I wanted both a ticket and some idea of when and where the train left from.  The next train wasn’t for two hours, and so I sat down on a bench and plugged in my walkman.  It was cooler in Tanshui, and I could smell the ocean.  I wrote another letter to my fiancee, and I played my one hour tape through twice.  I was sick of the tapes I’d brought over with me, some compilations of music I liked at the time.  After a few listenings you start to hear the Beach-Boys-with-machine-guns genius of the Jesus and Mary Chain.  After two hundred straight listens you want to hunt down both the Beach Boys and the Jesus and Mary Chain and pummel them to death what’s left of your walkman knock-off.

I was alone at the Tanshui station, and I thought about wandering into the town.  But the train I was waiting for was the last listed train heading back into Tai Pei for the day, and I didn’t want to risk it.  That night Betty was supposed to take me to a Chinese wedding.  Weddings are fun, no matter the culture or the place, and it was something I was actually looking forward to.  My train pulled up, I boarded, and walked down several cars trying to find an empty seat.

There hadn’t been any stops on the way to Tanshui, but there were several dozen on the way back into the big city.  And at each stop a dozen more people crowded onto the train until I thought it might start spewing limbs through the open windows.  The ocean air at Tanshui had since been gobbled up by the hungry, sweaty crowds.  When I looked up there were a half-dozen school girls in their green and navy plaid-checked skirts and untucked white blouses standing over me.

They must have come from a private school in the country, or an outing, or a dirty escape from their exams and from school.  Though I doubt Chinese kids are as adept at sloughing class as American kids.  They huddled close together, each with one yellowish stain blooming under the arm holding them to the rail.  And they whispered and stared at me and then began to giggle.  I heard the word “houzi” which I knew meant “monkey.” I didn’t know much Mandarin, but I had already picked up on a few animal names that passed for insults: “xiaoxiami” shrimp, “wugui” turtle, and “houzi”.  And then one of the girls, the brave one, as with all groups of girls, reached down and stroked my arm.

At first I thought it might be some act of kindness, but the girl said “houzi” again to her friends.  I wasn’t sure if they assumed I couldn’t understand what they were saying so I asked in English: “Monkey?”

This brought forth a gasp and a lot of shrieking and then laughing and shrieking.  When the brave one got her face back on straight she nodded emphatically and repeated, in English, “Monkey. Yes, like monkey.”  And she rubbed my arm again.  I held my arm out and the other girls stroked it and giggled.  As the train pulled into the station I beat on my chest with my unstroked arm and laid a little Tarzan yell on them.  They smiled, those smiles that say, “It was funnier when you were the monkey.”

When I told Betty about the train and the girls on the ride back, she looked at my arms and said, “Chinese don’t have so much hair like you have hair. You be more careful, not get fired at jobs because not going to jobs.”  Betty liked to repeat key words or phrases in her sentences.  I didn’t know if that was a common thing in her native Mandarin, or just style points on her part.

Things were still cool with Betty when she and I left for the wedding later that evening.  As we walked out the door she gave Barney some rapid-fire directions, and then did the same for the kids who were constructing plastic models of chemical compounds on the floor.  Barney, who had his shirt off, his pants unbuttoned, and was slouching down in his easy chair staring at the MacGuyver episode, waved his hand at us and said, “Yeah, yeah,” only he said it in Mandarin.

Jackson was waiting for us outside in his roomy car.  He opened the door for Betty to get into the back and I sat in the front seat.  I’m used to getting front seats because of my size, but as I had been riding the public transportation so much lately this felt like a special comfort.  I rolled down the window and listened to Jackson and Betty talk very rapidly back and forth and I imagined that they were taking me back to the airport.  That I’d be seeing my fiancee sooner rather than later.

I don’t know how far away the wedding party was.  It took a half an hour to drive one mile in downtown Tai Pei sometimes.  But Jackson parked the car and Betty hurriedly pulled a red envelope out of her purse and put it into my hands as we descended the steps of a basement banquet hall.  To my great surprise the bride and groom were right inside the door.  Jackson said something to the groom, who eagerly shook my hand.  Then Jackson turned to me and said: “It is good luck to bring a foreigner to a wedding.”  For whom, I wondered.  Then I met the bride, who looked bored and pawed over.  She pulled the red envelope out of my hand and handed it to an elderly woman sitting before a pile of red envelopes.  Each envelope had money in it.  That was what you did.  And then she leaned over, gave me a smudgy kiss on cheek, and said, “Shi-shi,” thank-you.  Betty handed over her own envelope and began scanning the room for a place for us to sit.

The entire place was done in red.  Red banners over red curtains on all of the walls.  Red linens and napkins on the table.  We made our way to a table, after a lot of hand-shaking and hugging.  Betty introduced me around the table while Jackson translated.  A big, hale-looking guy next to me was already lit and he kept saying, “American friend, drink.”  After my fourth or fifth beer, Jackson explained this was also good luck, to drink with the foreigner, though by now I was starting think Jackson was full of shit.

The bride and groom moved to the center table not long after we were seated and made a toast or something like a toast (“Here’s to feeding the American drinks until he pukes!”), and everyone cheered.  Then the food came.  The center of the table was a giant lazy-Susan (though I’m sure her name is something else in Tai Pei), and wait-staff began to fill this circle with platter after platter of food.  No expense had been spared for the food.  I wasn’t eating red meat at the time, and I asked Jackson to tell me what was in each dish, a job he seemed to enjoy and had a real skill for.

“Bird’s nest soup,” Jackson explained. “They take the nest from a bird and cook it. Very nice.”

“Do they wash it out?” I said, incredulous. I knew about fried dog, and cobra, and crushed rhinoceros horn, but this sounded particularly nasty to me.  “I mean, isn’t it full of bird shit and feathers?”  I had an African Gray parrot back home filling my apartment with bird shit and feathers while I was in Tai Pei.

“I don’t know,” Jackson said, and he ladled over a couple of bowls.  It looked and tasted like boiled twigs.  There was shark’s fin soup, which I had been warned by my P.C. friends not to eat because the Chinese were over-fishing the sharks.  It was quite salty, but very good.  Fried chicken feet, which you mostly just sucked on like chicken-pops, or used the toe nails to get the twigs out of your teeth.  Boiled octopus, which was also tasty, but with the texture of pencil erasers.  And then a couple hundred dishes of baroque and spicy vegetables and fish.  “Just don’t let me eat any panda,” I told Jackson.

Betty leaned to ask what I had said.  Jackson explained, and then Betty leaned across the two of us and excitedly asked: “They have panda?”

As the meal starting to wind down, and the lazy-Susan began making slower and slower revolutions with emptier and emptier platters, the belching began.  Again, this was something I had already been introduced to the summer before, when I was calming trying to keep a van-load of Chinese kids from belching when we took them out to eat in public.  You can’t do that with American kids half the time, and they’re culturally attuned.

Betty could really cut loose with some good ones around her house.  Since, it had been explained to me, belching was considered an “expression of gratification,” I assumed Betty’s vociferous burps were compensation for her cooking (which, by the way, I never thought was nearly so bad).  Barney could fire up a good one now and again, but as the summer wore on I began to think he was holding them in just to be passive aggressive.

The wedding guests were beginning to compliment the chef, usually in the waiter’s face as he bent down to pluck an empty platter off the table, ostensibly so the waiter could deliver the good news back to the kitchen, I’m guessing.

Now, perhaps because I’ve always been big and felt like I’ve had to always had an uphill battle against the lummox label, I’ve always been a bit of a prude about bodily functions in public.  Even at summer camps I would sit far back in the shadows when the sacred lighting of the blue flames took place.  And in college, at fraternity parties, when the really good-looking guys belched the Greek alphabet to the amusement of their dates, I always kept a low profile.

Maybe it was the beer at dinner.  Or maybe it was because I wanted to fit in, after sitting and smiling and enjoying such good food for hours while everyone around me was having a genuinely good time.  Maybe I thought a belch would be one of those things that expressions everybody could understand.  So I summoned one up.  What came out, though, wasn’t the audible-but-not-ostentatious belches my dinner-mates were exchanging.  This was more a plate-rattling, food-particle-expelling, just-bottomed-out-the-beer-bong belch that seemed to broadcast its presence, oscillating up and down the belching scale all the way back to the kitchen.  As if the intensity of my belch wasn’t enough, I seemed to have timed its inception just as one song was ending and another beginning.  My table fell silent.  The room fell silent.  Even my belch was, apparently, in crass, American English.

“Good beer, Taiwan beer,” my drinking buddy said, pouring me another tall boy of Taiwan’s best.  I could count on the table drunk not to be bothered by my emission.

“Not bad,” I said.  And it’s not, though from experience all Asian beers kind of taste the same.  Light and crisp, but pretty low on alcohol and satisfaction.  I covered my embarrassment with some self-castigation: “This is why big guys should never belch in public. It’s not cute. I promise I will never-never-never do it again.” And by going toe-to-toe with Hale-fellow, who had been getting sloppy drunk and sliding out of his chair onto the floor, for most of the night.  After a later round of empties had been cleared he fumbled out a pack of Long-Life cigarettes and offered me one.  Then someone else at the table offered me one.  Then someone at the next table.

“Good luck,” Jackson said.

“To give the foreigner lung cancer?” I said.

“No, good luck to you trying not to smoke tonight,” Jackson said.

He’d pulled off a funny enough joke I had to break down and have a smoke.  And then another and another.  At one point the bride even came over to light my cigarette for me.  When I took a puff off of it the groom came over and began shaking my hand while the photographer captured the whole thing.  I was green by this point, and I was between being really bored by my conversational limitations, and having a really fun time being shit-faced.  I’d begun talking to Hale-fellow in English, and he talked to me in Chinese, and it seemed to work okay.  After a while we were both sitting on the floor watching the old people and the kids dance.  Hale-fellow had enough clout to simply use a hand gesture to have one of the guests bring us two new bottles of beer and two more cigarettes.

When it was time to leave I noticed that most of the guests (with the exception of the bride and groom, who now seemed to have switched appearances – while he could barely hold his head up, she seemed to have found a second wind) gave each of us a big hug and another kiss on the cheek as we climbed out of the banquet hall.

“That was fun,” I said, when we emerged onto the street.  I noticed Betty had the perfect imprint of the bride’s red lips on her cheek.  As walked under a flashing green sign, though, the pretty imprint flashed black.

“There’s another party,” Jackson said as we walked toward his car.  He had something scrawled on a little piece of paper he had pulled out of his pocket.  It reminded me how glad I was not to be finding my own way back tonight.  That I had left my slips of paper back at home.  And that, to my surprise, I was already calling Betty’s house “home,” even to myself.

Betty was drunk.  She was rolling around the back seat of Jackson’s car doing things that were obnoxious and out of character, like giggling.  And she was speaking only in English.  “Another party. A-nutter pahhh-ty.”

Jackson drove us around and around the city, but we couldn’t find the other party.  Jackson was starting to act like any old bar would do, and I was getting very tired.  I knew I would be hung over from the smoking, and I had to teach at 8:00 a.m. across town.  If we hurried back I might get four and a half hours of sleep.  When I asked to go home Betty said something in Chinese which meant “party pooper.”

I saw that it was very late when Betty and I climbed the stairs to her apartment.  She teetered near the top of the stairs taking off her shoes, and though I noticed that she’d done that, I also teetered – more from exhaustion, I think – taking off my shoes.  Just then the door flew open, and I had to grab the railing to keep from falling backwards down the stairs.  It was Barney, his hair looked like mad-scientist-hair, and he was pissed off.  He started right in on Betty, yelling at her in words I was glad not to understand.  I was sure Betty was going to yell back, but to my surprise she just took it.  This seemed to fuel Barney’s certainty and he pressed on in his attack, gobs of white spit flying out of his mouth and landing on his chin and in his mad-scientist-hair.  They pretended I wasn’t there, and I slunk past the two of them and fell down on the floor of my room.  It was times like this that you really miss having a bed to sleep in.  And I missed my fiancee.

I didn’t want to go to the gym the next afternoon, but I knew I couldn’t go back home and take a nap (for one thing, my slips of paper were circuitous, taking me from bus to train to bus to train in a specific order to get me to all my jobs with the gym sandwiched in between. Breaking the circuit would be impossible and I would have to endure all the different rides back, effectively eating up my time and the Spartan per diem Betty had been giving me), I couldn’t just sit in a restaurant and stare (which I did sometimes when I was really tired), and I couldn’t handle any more reading (I was hauling War and Peace around with me wherever I went. I was nearing the end, and I couldn’t bear it. “Natacha and Boris were so meant for each other, I thought.”  I knew they would somehow end up together, and yet I also knew that meant the end of the novel.  Then I thought, “I wonder if that’s where Bullwinkle’s nemeses got their names?”).

Big China nodded at me as I came into the gym, and then turned up “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” on the tape deck.  I was the only one there, and I set to the simple rote of the bench press.  Before I was done Mark came in.  He whipped his shirt off and started in on the pull-ups.  Everyone has a “favorite” exercise, and Mark’s was, of course, one of the flashier.

“How’s it hangin’?” he said.

“I’m hung-over. I went to a wedding last night,” I said.

“Cool,” Mark said. “You going to that party in __ tomorrow?”

My heart leapt. “Party?”

“There’s going to be a lot of Americans there,” he said. “You got a scooter?”

“No,” I said, dejectedly. And then I knew there was no way I could get to a party even if I had been invited.  I’m sure Betty wouldn’t take me, and if she did she would insist on acting as my chaperone by scowling at everyone and telling them they smelled sour.

“Where do you live?” Mark said. “I’ll pick you up.”

“Really?” This was a genuine act of kindness. I didn’t really want to be friends with Mark, but I now saw that I could probably meet some people through Mark.  I could have real conversations again. But, then, I didn’t exactly know where I lived.  I started pulling my pieces of paper out of my pocket and arranged them on the bench, trying to retrace my steps for Mark.

“I’ll meet you here, instead,” he said, and we agreed on a time.  It would make for another long day and short night.  I’d be working eleven hours that day.  Be able to go out for a few hours, and then get maybe four hours sleep before starting it all over again.  But I was excited.

I was even feeling optimistic at the bushi-ban the next day.  One of my least favorite kids, the one I suspected of hurling the book at me a couple of weeks earlier, had put a sentence together: “I like the blue hat.”  It wasn’t going to get him into the Tai Pei Harvard, but it was probably more English than either one of us thought he’d master that summer.

That night Betty wanted to know who “Mark” was, and where I was going, and when I’d be back.  “I’ll be quiet,” I said. “I promise.”

“This is not a good idea,” Betty said. “I will find you Chinese friends.”

I took the last bus to the Sun Yet Sen Memorial and waited for Mark.  It was late evening, and the sun was going down and it was warm outside.  There were few people out.  Most Taiwanese, it seemed, retreated into their homes in the evening, and the streets were peaceful and sober during the transition to the night, when the younger Chinese would get on their scooters and go and do what young kids everywhere do.  Only on scooters.

I heard the loud, clattery racket of a motorcycle and saw Mark come barreling down the empty street, trailing an immense cloud of black smoke.  He jumped the curb in front of me and said, “Hop on, we’re late.”

“I wanted to show you this,” I said.  My fiancee had just sent me a couple pictures of herself and I handed them to Mark.

“I’d do her. Come on,” he said, pushing the photos back into my hand. “We’re late.”  I don’t know if I expected anything different from Mark, but I shouldn’t have.  He’d told me he too had a serious girlfriend back home, but this always came on the heels of his “work” on Chocolate.  He was sure they were going to get busy soon.

It’d been years since I’d ridden on motorcycle.  And Mark was so cock-sure about his driving, jumping curbs and leaning into his turns, that I had to cling to him as if we were on a date.  For a date, he did smell good, though, and I was pretty sure he wasn’t taking showers laying on his back in a little tub.  He had hair-gel in, and a lot of cologne, and I felt suddenly underdressed.

I was wearing one of the few short-sleeve button-down shirts I owned.  Betty’s washing machine was older than my grandmother, and the only soap I could find turned all of my clothes a little gray.  When they line-dried they were gray, wrinkled, and crunchy.  I wasn’t so sure I wanted to go any more.  But Mark drove on, popping up over sidewalks and racing between street vendors shouting “Huh?” and “What?” over his shoulder whenever I tried to converse.  We went out of the city and into the mountains where the clouds were.  I couldn’t see to the next street corner, but Mark blazed on until we stopped at a mansion very high up.  It was torch lit and there were dozens of makes of expensive Italian model sports cars scattered about the street and the long, sloping driveway that led to an enormous balcony where the party was taking place.

The music was loud and European sounding – ethereal, synthesized, dance pop with more moaning than singing.  The kind of music I guess I expect hip, wealthy people to listen to.  The minute we arrived I morphed from Mark’s date into Mark’s nerdy little brother, and he crashed through the crowd shaking hands and doling out high-fives with such vigor I could hear the smack over the moans and boings on the stereo.

Everyone seemed to know everyone else, but no one seemed to be talking much.  There were very few Chinese there, and the ones I did see were dressed in Italian silks and low-cut French numbers.  Some of the Chinese were cutting drugs in the dark corners of the rooms for the Americans sitting next to them.  I didn’t want to stare so I moved out to the very crowded balcony where the music was louder and more ethereal, but at least people began handing me drinks.

Mark was out on the balcony, too, talking to several women in very tight clothes.  And standing next to him was a tall, guy, dressed like one of those rich kids who likes to surf a little too much at his age.  And he had an enormous monkey on his shoulder.  This wasn’t a little, small-headed monkey, like the monkey my friend Mike Mosling had back in second grade I suddenly remembered.  Mike used to invite me over when he folks weren’t around and we’d play Richard Pryor records.  One Pryor bit talked about a pet monkey that would run up his arm and fuck him in the ear.  And that’s what Mike’s monkey did, so it sat in its cage and threw poo onto the walls.  But this monkey, on the surfer’s shoulder, was the size of an infant and glared and scowled at everyone.  And it didn’t appear to have a neck.  Not like Mike Tyson doesn’t appear to have a neck, but like an owl doesn’t have a neck.  It swiveled its head around to look at me, and once our eyes met it stared.  Having a monkey stare at you is a bit like walking around a corner and having a strange Doberman stare at you.  I almost wanted to jump off the balcony I got so nervous.

Fortunately, the surfer guy and his evil monkey moved into the house, to get the monkey good and stoned, I hoped.  I lost sight of Mark for a while and so I leaned against the rail and looked out over the clearing sky towards where I thought Tai Pei was.  As I stood there, the millions of lights from the city seemed to pull the fog apart as if it were bread.  What scared me, when the fog cleared, was that the lights seemed to extend infinitely in both directions.  Tai Pei wasn’t out there in the distance, it was everything in front of me.

A young American woman approached me and offered me a drink.  She tried to say something over the music.  I’m not really into party small talk, though I had told myself I was coming to the party to meet some people.  I don’t know what I expected, frankly, that I’d walk in and be the toast of the place just because everyone recognized a familiar soul.  That they were all just biding their time until they could go back to their fiancees and their comfortable graduate programs too.  When the fact of the matter was, most of these people probably loved it here.  They were certainly having a nice time looking good and cutting drugs and talking small.  I nodded at the young woman, as if I had heard what she said.  She grew impatient with this and directed my ear down to her mouth, “Are you Derek?”

“Darren?” I yelled back.

“Whatever. Mark’s down front, he’s waiting for you.”

When I got back outside I couldn’t find Mark.  I walked a couple of blocks back the way we came before I heard his loud motorcycle come down the street.  “Where’d you go?” he said.

“I thought you left,” I said.

“And let you get home with your scraps of paper?”

“I didn’t bring them,” I said.  He told me we were going to a club to meet some more American friends of his.  The drive down the mountain was just as treacherous.  I could feel the rear tire trying to slide out from underneath us.  Mark wasn’t smelling so nice anymore, and his back was sweaty, so in spite of the fact that I didn’t want to hold onto him anymore, I had to.

“My buddy Ken’s there. He’s a laugh riot,” Mark said, as we coasted up to the entrance. “And there’s this dirty little bitch I’m dying to get with.”  The doorman could’ve been Big China’s ugly brother, but Mark winked at him like they were old buddies, and we got let in ahead of several Chinese standing behind a velvet rope.  The interior was a let down after the exclusive-seeming entrance.  A little green neon here and there.  A bar.  A lot of smoke.  And an obviously disproportionate number of Chinese women and white men.  This was like a bar I’d expect to see outside of a military base in Okinawa or the Philippines.

I met Ken, who was built a little like Big China.  He had receding hair and a Chinese girlfriend who left as soon as Mark showed up.  Our conversation was about as limited as my conversations with Big China.  He was very into business philosophy and money and when I mentioned I had read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and wondered if he was into that kind of business philosophy he countered with another book I should read if I really liked that kind of business philosophy.  I met Mark’s “dirty little bitch,” who he insisted on calling his “dirty little bitch” at every opportunity.  She was very attractive and completely bored with Mark.  So when the conversation somehow turned to length of Mark’s penis, and she dared him to pull it out and prove it, he said he would, but only in the back, where he wouldn’t get kicked out, and only if she promised to measure it.  I watched a lot of dancing, which is what I usually do at clubs, since I don’t particularly like to dance.  I drank a lot.  And when Mark returned, and his “dirty little bitch” shrugged her shoulders, we left.

Mark didn’t want to drive me all the way back, since he lived somewhere in the opposite direction.  That was fine with me, but I had to enlist his help in getting me back home.  The cabby didn’t speak English, and Mark’s Mandarin wasn’t as good as he claimed.  I couldn’t pronounce the name of my own street, so I had to think of a landmark.  I remembered Betty’s house was near an air carrier’s headquarters, but I couldn’t remember the name.  It was red.  So I spent a few moments making like an airplane on the sidewalk in front of the club and pointing to a splash of red paint in a store front window.  It worked, but if it hadn’t I would’ve been up shit creek because Mark was long gone and I had no way of getting a hold of Betty.  I realized I didn’t even know her real Chinese name.

The next day I was too tired to work out, and so I decided to do some shopping on my lunch break.  Betty had taken me shopping a few times already, but it was too much like shopping with your mom when you’re a kid.  I would go to pay for something, and Betty, doling out my money like a mother at back-to-school days who’s trying to strike that balance between what their kid wants and the plaid tough skins (which I always liked anyway, Mom), would run interference.  “Too much. My friend get you better one.”  I didn’t buy much of anything on those trips.  A couple of silk ties for the few times each decade I wear a tie, some clothes for my fiancee, and some jade.

I found a CD store, but I couldn’t recognize most of the artists.  There was someone called Tiger, a few of my students had been gooey eyed over, and myriad faces of smiling Chinese and Japanese pop singers all dressed in last year’s prom outfits.  There was a Peter, Paul, and Mary CD, a band I hate, but my fiancee liked.  The moment I picked it up the refrain from “Lemon Tree” lodged mercilessly in my head.  I also found a Pink Floyd greatest hits CD.  This was a band I’d listened to in junior high school, but I wanted to buy some CDs with Chinese writing on them.  The kitsch factor seemed more important than the music, though I was too meek to just buy one of Tiger’s albums.

When I got home it was early evening.  We all ate dinner, and then Barney took the kids somewhere.  They did this sometimes without bothering to tell me where they were going.  I was laying on my floor, looking at my CD purchases and wondering why they were my CD purchases when Betty barged into my room.  This was how they entered someone’s room in a Chinese house, she’d explained to me earlier that month.

“You buy something today?”

I held up the CDs.  She wrinkled up her nose.  “Come here,” she said. “I show you something.”

I followed her into her and Barney’s room, and sat down on the floor because there was no where else to sit.  Betty emerged from her closet with a big jewelry box and set it down gently on the floor behind her.  She began taking out jewelry and looking at them.  I could tell she wanted to show me some of what she had.  For some reason it reminded me of Mark showing his goods to his “dirty little bitch.”  Everyone likes to show off when they’ve got a little more of something than they should.

“Take this,” Betty said, handing me a jade bracelet like the one she’d helped me buy for my fiancee.  “This two hundred years old. My grandmother’s. Scott,” her older brother, and the head of the family, “has most, but I have this.”  A lot of Chinese families still hold to the belief that the eldest son is the favorite son, and that he should inherit the wealth so that it all stays with one family; the family.  I held up the bracelet, more afraid of it than interested in it.  Betty held up a similar bracelet and reached over and smacked it against the one in my hand.  I gasped and nearly dropped the stupid thing.  “You hear?”  She said.  The bracelet was ringing like my mother’s Irish crystal.  “Pure jade. Very valuable. But I like it because it is my family’s.  When Chinese women get married, they always wear this.”  Betty returned the clapper bracelet to her wrist, pausing to hold it up and look at it. “This one nice, but not so nice.”

“How nice is the one I bought?” I asked.

“Nice. Not so nice. Good price. Your fiancee not be embarrassed.”

“Well, it’s the thought that counts,” I said.  Betty took the still resonant ring out of my hand and sighed.  She put it back into the box and began to pull out intricately carved pieces of jade and gold.  Jade comes in three basic colors: red, ivory, and green.  The red will sometimes combine with the ivory, but Betty’s pieces were each of an individual color.  I don’t know if that related to value or to Betty’s personal aesthetic, but I’m guessing a little of both.

Some of the pieces were small spheres with independently moving spheres inside.  They had been carved from one, solid and cold piece of jade and were thematically detailed.  Often with a vicious battle taking place between men on the outside, and moving toward a more peaceful conclusion in the inner rings.  I was also afraid to touch these pieces.

“You have friend now?” Betty asked.

“I guess so. I’m not particularly fond of him, though. It’s an American thing, I guess.”

“I don’t see my friends since high school,” she said, turning over a piece of gold in her hand and then putting it carefully away.

“What do you mean?”

“Work. Family. You are young. You can have friends. I have work. I have family.”

“What about Jackson?”  I asked, almost afraid of the answer I might get.

“Jackson is work. He work for Scott, like me.”

“There was a big monkey at the party. It scared the shit out of me,” I said.  I figured monkey stories were always good for a laugh.

“Ach! I don’t like monkeys,” Betty said, and she began hurriedly putting away her jewels.

“This one was big and it stared at me. It gave me the creeps.”

“When I was young, eight years, my friend has pet monkey. One time, her parents left, we are playing in her room, and we heard the baby crying. Screaming?” She was clearly searching for a word and “screaming” had to do.  “We run to the baby. The monkey pulled out the baby’s eyes.”

I didn’t think I caught that right, so I repeated the last bit back to her.

“Yes,” Betty answered. “So I don’t like monkeys. No pets here. I don’t like pets.”

We sat there silently for a few moments, looking at the rest of Betty’s jewelry.  Then she changed the subject: “You buy more diamonds and jade for your fiancee. Then she always have something when you die. And she give these to daughter, and daughter to daughter. One day – rich family.”  This was the kind of thinking that comforted Betty, but had the opposite effect on me.  Plus, I was still thinking about the monkey.

Suddenly Betty decided to finish putting away all of the jewels, nearly snatching them out of my hand.  “You don’t know this friend, Mark. Maybe he kill you and you don’t know.

“I’ll be careful,” I promised, and I walked back to my room to feel even crummier about those CDs I’d bought.

I didn’t see Mark for another week, just a couple of weeks before the end of my time in Tai Pei.  He didn’t come to the gym, and I lost the little slip of paper I had written his phone number down on.  I wasn’t even sure it was the right phone number anyway, since the last time I’d tried it the machine answered in a woman’s soft Chinese voice.  I felt more and more like I was biding my time in Tai Pei.  I would go to my jobs, go to the gym and listen to that same Wham! tape over and again, and read my books.  I was running low on romanticism, having finished Tolstoy and Austen, and was now rereading The Brothers Karamozov.  I hadn’t liked it as well as the other works I’d brought along, but it was shorter, and I didn’t feel I had the emotional energy to get into another of the romances.

When I did run into Mark again he was accusatory: “What the fuck happened to you?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, I thought we’d parted on decent terms.

“You look like you dropped about twenty pounds.”

“Really?” I said. This was one of the best things I’d heard since I’d been in Taiwan.  And it was probably true.  Between slogging through the bushi-bans in 100 degree heat and humidity, and Betty’s careful accounting, giving me just enough to catch my buses and trains and to find a little lunch on my break, I had been losing weight.  Maybe I blushed.

“We’re going to a Jazz club, there’s this dirty little bitch I want to get with who’s going to be there. You want to go?”

“Sure,” I said.  And I think I said it with enthusiasm.

We met at the gym again, and again I was struck at how quiet the big city can be at times.  The humidity had blown back out to the ocean, and the sun was setting all orange and pink. Without the scores of insect-like scooters, and the flotilla of buses and cars, I could hear birds in the garden at the Sun Yet Sen Memorial.  A black baseball player (Tai Pei has a four team “league” loaded with foreign players) was walking past with his bat and glove slung over his shoulder.  And with the Burger King next to the entrance to the gym, this could’ve been any town in the U.S.

Mark’s bike broke the silence, and I got quietly onto the back without saying anything.  “We’re going to my place first,” he said, and we took off down the sidewalk, narrowly missing some cafe tables at the end of the block.

Mark did live quite a ways from Betty’s house, in a big, red apartment building.  He and his roommate, Amy, lived on the twelfth floor and, since there were no elevators, we took the steep and slippery stairs all the way to the top.  Mark didn’t need the gym, I thought, with this kind of walk everyday.

Mark opened the door and I walked inside, but he quickly collared me and pulled me back out again.  “Your shoes,” he said.  There was a pile of shoes next to the door, and Mark sat on the iron railing, his back to twelve story plunge, to remove his shoes.  I knew my socks both had big holes in the toes, and I didn’t want to take my shoes off since I hadn’t met Mark’s roommate, or any of the other people that were going to be there.  I leaned against the wall and slowly unlaced my shoes until Mark disappeared inside the apartment.  When he was gone I folded the torn sections of my socks between my toes and clenched them there, hoping I wouldn’t have to walk very far and then we’d be on our ways.  Holes covered and forgotten.

“This is Amy,” Mark said, introducing me to his roommate.  She was tall, and freckled, and Chinese, though she looked a little like the band girl from The Muppet Show.  There were a couple of other, American, friends there, and they were all busily drinking.  No one offered me anything, and Mark disappeared into one of the bedrooms.

Amy finally asked how I knew Mark.  Her English was very good.

“At the gym,” I said, and realized how that sounded.  She worked for Mattel Toys, which I thought was kind of funny.  I could envision the MADE IN TAIWAN stamp I’d seen on most of my toys growing up, but Amy didn’t think this was very amusing.  One of the other people asked me what we brought to drink, and I told Amy I didn’t know we were supposed to bring anything.  I thought we were going out.

“I’ll get you a drink from Ken,” she said.

“Ken’s here?” I said. “I know Ken.”  I followed Amy into Mark’s room.  It was easy to tell it was Mark’s room, with all the posters of half-dressed women decorating the room.  I was disheartened to see that Mark slept on the floor as well, for some reason.  He was busy working on his hair and Ken was sitting messily on the floor with a bottle of vodka in his lap.

“He’s fighting with his girl,” Mark said, and returned his attention to himself.

The bottle was half empty, and I wondered if he was drinking it straight.  Ken was slurring, and I thought he said something derogatory to me, but it could’ve been something in Chinese for all I could tell.  It was just his tone that gave me that impression.

“Can we borrow some Vodka, Ken?” Amy asked.

“For him?” Ken slurred and pointed at me with the bottle.

When Amy nodded Ken put the bottle to his lips and drained it down.  He was wearing a tank top and his arms were at least as Big China’s, I noticed.  I’d never seen someone drink a half bottle of vodka like that except in the movies.

“He’s fighting with his girl,” Mark said again, unaware that he had already made this proclamation.  He took one last poke at his hair, and said, “Let’s go.”

“What about him?” Amy asked, pointing to Ken who was still sitting with his legs sprawled out across the floor.

“Help him, will you, Darren.”  And Mark left the room.  I offered a Ken a hand, which he refused.  He stumbled to his feet, the empty vodka bottle rolling around the room like a spent bowling pin.  The best I could do was follow behind Ken, enduring his insults and bad language,  and try to keep him from knocking over shelves and furniture as he made his way to the front door.  I don’t know why he’d decided to take it out on me, but he had.  Ken was huge, and as we made our way out I couldn’t see around him to know that everyone else was already making tracks down the stairs.

When we got to the front door I heard Mark call up from several floors below, “It’ll lock by itself. Hurry up.”  And then I saw them disappear into the bowels of the building.

I unclenched my toes and began tying my shoes, leaning safely against the wall, when I noticed Ken was teetering on the railing trying to put a shoe on his enormous foot.  “Ken, Jesus. Be careful,” I said.

“I can’t fucking do this,” he said, though I wasn’t sure he meant the shoes or the trip to the club.  I was pretty sure he couldn’t do either one so I bent down to help him get his shoe on.  He put two hands onto the rail and held his foot up like a child waiting for his mother to dress him.  As I maneuvered his stinking shoe he began to dance his foot around, making it impossible for me to shoe him.  “Come on you stupid fuck,” he said, and he stared me in the eye.  He couldn’t focus on much, but I could tell he was focused on me.  Ken was drunk and bumbling, but I still got the impression he could smash my face in if that’s what he decided to do.  I tried again, and again he danced his foot all around. “You stupid mother-fucker.”

“Why don’t you come away from the rail,” I said.  He was making me nervous, leaning his huge weight on that little, black railing.  And I thought if I could get him to stand against the wall he would have a harder time moving his foot around.

“Why?” Ken shot back.  It was accusatory, and I was worried that any answer I gave was probably wrong.

“Well, for one, you’re making me nervous. I don’t want you falling off the rail,” I said.  My voice was nearly cracking, and I could tell Ken was seriously mulling over whether or not he wanted to spend his night kicking my ass.  Mark’s door was still open, and I thought maybe I could just convince him to go in there and sleep it off.

“Well, you better grab my dick then...” he said, and with that he leaned all the way back over the railing and started his descent.  My first impulse was to grab at him, but I knew his weight would pull me right over with him.  I watched him fall.  The only thing I have to compare a fall like that to is the movies, where people seem to fall in slow motion.  Vertigo comes to mind, as does Ghost Story.  I watched Ken fall backwards down into the dark space below.  His big body went limp like an infant in his crib, and he got smaller and smaller, until his body turned over and his head hit a stair edge a couple of flights below.  The impact crumpled his body and I watched as his huge body snapped forward over his neck.  He lay face down on the stairs and convulsed for a few moments before going still.  Then, right on cue, a pool of blackish-red blood emerged from somewhere inside of him and pooled around his head.  I thought, “I just watched this guy die.”

I ran down the stairs yelling for Mark and Amy.  I couldn’t bear to stop and do anything but a cursory check of Ken, and leapt the ten or so stairs over his body and bloody pool.  He didn’t seem to be breathing, and the pool of blood was so big I nearly slipped in at when I landed.  “Mark!” I shouted, “Amy!”

I ran the entire twelve floors back.  I remember seeing everyone waiting in the parking lot with impatient looks on their faces even after I broke the news.  I don’t think I conveyed what had actually happened, out of breath, excited, terrified, and they seemed to be moving awfully slowly.  In a crisis I always know I’m the only one moving at full speed.

When we got back to the stairs, Ken was still lying in the pool of blood.  Mark looked him over, and I said, “We’ve got to get an ambulance!”

“No ambulances!”  Mark snapped back. “Those things are death here!”

Amy looked at me and nodded, as if this was a given fact of life in Taiwan.  “Well what then?”

“Ken,” Mark said, putting a hand on Mark’s back. “Ken, are you all right?”

“He just fucking fell three flights of stairs onto his fucking head!” I said. “He’s not all right!”  But suddenly, Ken stirred.  Then, he tried to stand.  I got under one arm, and Mark got under the other, and we walked him down toward the parking lot.  He was bleeding on both of us, and muttering something about his girlfriend.  He couldn’t walk much, and his weight made navigating three big bodies down the narrow stairs hard work.

“Why couldn’t you have fallen all the way to the bottom,” Mark said. “So we could’ve just backed up the car?”

I was covered in blood by the time we got to the hospital.  And the hospital looked like something from CNN’s coverage of the so-called third world.  Ceiling tiles were missing where plumbing work had been started and then abandoned.  Blood-stained gurneys lined the halls.  I could hear people moaning everywhere we went.  If this was what the hospital was like, maybe it was a good thing we didn’t take an ambulance.

We waited there several hours while Ken was tended to.  Finally, Amy and the others took cabs home.  I stayed with Mark when they told us it would just be a little while longer.  He promised to take me home on his bike.  I knew Betty would insist I go to work in the morning, so I hoped that we could get away pretty soon.

It was after 5:00 a.m., however, when the doctor, bearing a couple of x-rays came out with Ken in a wheelchair.  Ken’s head was bandaged and he was wearing dark sunglasses.  He hung his head low as if he was ashamed.  The doctor held the x-rays up to the florescent lights and showed us the crack in Ken’s skull.  “He’s very lucky,” the doctor said in perfect English.  He had probably been schooled state-side as a result of not doing as well as he should have on his high school exams.  “If he hadn’t been so drunk he would’ve tensed up and snapped his neck.”

“If he hadn’t been so drunk,” I said, “he wouldn’t have pulled that stupid shit.”  I wasn’t scared of Ken anymore.  And if he did get out of his wheelchair and finish what he intended, at least I was already in the hospital.

Mark reneged on his word to take me home, but he did put me in a cab, and made sure I was going in the right direction.  The fog was back, and the streets were still empty when I got home.  It didn’t look like the place I’d left that evening.  Emptier, strange.

I was able to get about an hour of sleep before heading off to my first teaching job that morning.  Betty knew I came home late, and she saw I was covered in blood, but she didn’t say anything.  She made me a hot breakfast and then she left for her work.  There were more storms moving in, and I hoped they wouldn’t interfere with my flight home.

I saw Mark again once more, and we said our good-byes, but didn’t bother to swap addresses.  Ken was there too, and we didn’t say anything to each other.  I had a little teaching left to do, and somehow, after parting company with Mark and Ken I enjoyed most of it a little more than I had been enjoying it.

The only job I still didn’t like was the bushi-ban where the kids had thrown books at me on my first day.  I brought a camera to class with me on the last day, and held up a dry erase board onto which I had written “Total Monkeys” and  “Complete Bunch of Bastards.”  I made the kids hold up the boards and pose for a picture.  They hadn’t bothered to learn much English, so the words didn’t mean anything to them.  But they sure liked having their pictures taken.  I wondered how often kids like this got the simple attention of having their picture taken.  It made me feel bad for them, but I still didn’t like the little bastards any better.

The boss paid me in cash (the money had previously always been routed through Betty), waved and smiled a weird smile.  “I’m going here,” he said, pointing at a forest in Poland.  “One day,” he said. “One day.”   The cash in my hand seemed like a lot of money, and I wondered how much I had actually earned.  Betty had kept tight tabs on my income, and even if she did take a cut, beyond my expenses, I knew she probably did better with it than I would have that summer.

On my way out of the bushi-ban the rain started.  Normally, I liked the rain in Taipei.  Like in most humid climes it cooled the place off for a while, and filtered the bad sounds (the clatter and belch of scooters and buses) and bad smells (the exhaust fumes and rotten-flesh smell of the tofu and durian vendors) into something more private and agreeable. 

But this was monsoon rain and it came down hard.  In my excitement at finishing up at the bushi-ban I had forgotten my umbrella, and all of the umbrella vendors I usually passed had packed up shop and headed indoors.  I ducked into one shop, hoping to find an umbrella, but they were sold out.  It was a long, long walk from the bushi-ban to my train so I gritted my teeth and steeled myself against the chilly rain.

As I walked I could feel the rain working its way into my ears.  I could barely see where I was going, the rain was coming so hard now, and I tried to jog through it, though I would occasionally bump against a wall or a cart left out in the street.  The rain was coming down so hard I didn’t hear the Chinese man come running up behind me.  He was carrying one umbrella and holding another under his arm.  He held out the second one to me.

“Thanks,” I said, and took shelter underneath it.  The rain was so fierce I could barely see him, and we were standing so close our umbrellas were touching.  I pulled my soggy wallet out of my back pocket. “How much?”

He shook his head.  He didn’t want any money.  He tried to yell something to me above the rain in Chinese and turned around and walked back the way I had just come.  It was one of those acts of simple kindness that sticks with you.  And all I could think to myself, still soaking up some of that cold and scentless rain, was “Wow, how come I’d never think to do that?”

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