By Adam Stumacher
“Which one?” The flight attendant asked as the plane began its descent towards Chiang Kai Shek International Airport. In his left hand he held a stack of customs declaration forms for Taiwanese passengers, in his right the forms for visitors. Mei Ling hesitated a moment before making her decision.
Her friends from university back in Sydney spent their spring breaks on the beaches of the Gold Coast, eating mushrooms in the thatch huts of Bali, riding the rails through Malaysia. But Mei Ling always returned to Taipei. This was one of the ways her parents made it clear where home was still located, as though living abroad since age fourteen might have confused the issue for her.
The plane dropped down through the layer of cloud, and she kept her eyes shut through the landing. Linoleum floors pockmarked as the immigration officer’s face, and an old woman prodded her from behind when it was her turn at the front of the line. The officer yawned and then excused himself, flipping slowly through the pages of her passport. Then, as Mei Ling wheeled her suitcase through the arrivals gate, she saw her family shouting and holding up a welcome sign, her name.
Her father had a new Mercedes with a tan leather interior, and nobody could sit still as they merged onto the freeway. It was raining, as always, and the wipers were silent. Her mother kept turning back and beaming, while her younger sisters asked about her handbag, about the new purple highlights in her hair. Mei Ling answered all their questions. She could remember when these things had seemed important to her, too. She could also remember back when her father used to drive a battered Sanyang scooter that burned through a spark plug every six weeks.
When they first entered the city, she was shocked by the concrete highrises with laundry hanging out their windows, the dusty wiring twisting around street corners, the traffic hazy through bus fumes. But after a good night’s sleep, she could manage. She could force herself to smile through her headaches and return the courtesies of old women at the market.
“She’s finally over that jetlag,” Mrs. Lee said, even though Australia was only two hours different. “Our oldest daughter is back. We are happy. But seven kuai for such a small eggplant? And look how withered the end is here. Our happiness will be short-lived with prices like these.”
After a good night’s sleep, her eyes readjusted, and she could tell herself this was home. After a good night’s sleep, she remembered what she loved about Taipei: it was a place where maps became obsolete before they finished printing, a city that reinvented itself with every sunrise, and where you could do the same.
* * *
In Mei Ling’s lifetime, she had seen rice paddies bulldozed over and replaced by glass buildings climbing skyward with such speed pedestrians suffered attacks of vertigo. She had seen the whorehouses moved to discreet back alleyways, replaced by wedding photography shops, their window displays full of soft-focused brides holding fluorescent yellow umbrellas and matching gowns that seemed to melt into the ground under them. She had seen a simple motorcycle mechanic, her father, become an entrepreneur in an Armani suit, reshaping their entire family.
When Mei Ling was a child, the Lee family lived in a two-bedroom apartment upstairs from Wonpro Repair Shop on Nanjing East Road, and no matter what her mother cooked, it had the aftertaste of engine grease. But Wonpro, her father, had ambitions. When she was seven years old, he scrounged together enough money to send her to a buxiban, one of those new private English schools that were sprouting up all over the city. Classes met every afternoon from 4:30 to 7:00, and the teacher was Charles, a portly pony-tailed American who smelled funny. Mei Ling studied hard, knowing her father would ask endless questions over dinner, wanting to hear all about the school. Only later did she realize Wonpro was more interested in how she was taught than what she learned.
“How many students in each class? How many staff in the front office?” He slurped his noodles vigorously.
“Mrs. Hua in the office said my pronunciation was second-best in the whole school.”
He added another scoop of chili sauce. “How much do they spend on lunch?”
“Today was soft tofu and greens”
He cocked his head, and for a moment his face flashed that same expression he would get when he slid the cover off a cantankerous old Vespa engine and listened to it rattle.
“And the foreign teachers?”
“Teacher Charles sometimes wears shorts, and he has hair on his legs like a gorilla.”
Her father sucked at his noodles and stayed silent for the rest of the meal. Later, she realized he was busy adjusting the choke, watching the rotation of the crankshaft. How much would it cost to get this thing on the road?
Within a few years, he sold the shop and opened up a competing buxiban in the neighborhood. And Wonpro English, Inc., had big plans for the future. There were plans to open a new branch after Mei Ling graduated from Sydney University, as her father was convinced her foreign diploma would give them a competitive advantage.
Back in the early days, all you needed to start up an English school was a bright sign and somebody with a white face to pull out of the back closet and show to parents every once in a while. But clients had more choices now. These days, when they came in to check out your school, they wanted to know how technology would be integrated into the curriculum. They wanted to be invited to Christmas pageants with foreign teachers dressed up as Santa Claus, the little cherubs up on stage performing with wireless microphones. An education degree from a foreign university, framed above the front desk, was just the kind of touch that would put them a step ahead of the competition.
“Wonpro Lee has always been a visionary,” Mrs. Lee liked to say.
Mei Ling didn’t want her mother to lose face, but she had a better explanation. Wonpro’s puttering and shifting, the way he cracked his knuckles and held his breath while he listened, these had been a part of him for as long as she could remember. Wonpro English, Inc. was a success simply because, underneath the new Armani suits, her father was still a very skilled mechanic.
* * *
Despite these meticulous plans, Mei Ling’s parents made one fatal error: they signed her up for piano lessons.
“Straighten your back!” Teacher Chen hissed into her ear. “Elbows in!”
When Mei Ling turned nine, Mrs. Lee insisted her oldest daughter begin studying the piano in order to cultivate that sense of refinement she would need to marry well. She chose Teacher Chen, an ancient crone who lived up in Nei Hu district, on a cousin’s recommendation. So until Mei Ling was old enough to be sent abroad, she spent every Friday afternoon riding the city bus for two hours, clasping the bar to keep the weight of her backpack from sending her sprawling with each stop.
The old woman invariably handed her a ceramic mug as soon as she walked in the door, and put on a record. They would sip their oolong tea without speaking, listening to music crackle through the speakers. Then the height of the bench in front the old Boesendorfer needed to be adjusted, and finally Mei Ling could play.
“Stop swaying!” Teacher Chen said. “You are not a dancer.”
But from the very beginning, something happened to Mei Ling as she sat in front of the keyboard. The melodies tingled her fingertips and gripped the sides of her skull, and she began swaying from side to side. And for the first time in her life she felt unbound to the world, almost weightless.
“Wrong note!” Teacher Chen said.
But one afternoon as they drank their oolong, they listened to a live recording of some Russian pianist named Vladamir Horowitz, and even though Mei Ling lost count of the wrong notes, the music was still flawless. That was the day when Mei Ling realized that notes were less important than phrases, and when she understood what she wanted to do with her life.
Years later, when she moved to Australia for boarding school, she was only content when she could close herself into a soundproof practice module, when she could muffle the chatter of the world and just play.
And then, at Sydney University, she heard jazz for the first time. She could never forget that moment back in her dorm room, when she first heard a man with improbable name Thelonious Monk twirling that slinky, syncopated dance around the melody. The record belonged to Edgar, her Australian boyfriend. She could still see his hairy hands sliding the vinyl from its lining with the same deliberate care he showed when unhooking her bra.
Edgar was different. Most of the men she met in Sydney came on like a pack of street dogs back home, assaulting a bag of trash on the curb. She got so tired of these brawny swarms that she stopped going to the clubs, even though she loved dancing. But Edgar took his time. Sophomore year, while they were studying in the library, he caressed her hand. Junior year, when she felt a migraine coming on, he massaged her scalp. And senior year, after she had emptied out a shelf for his underwear and made a space for his toothbrush, he would play Billie Holiday’s “I’m a Fool to Want You” late at night, and they would lie back together on the futon, surrounded by candles melted into the necks of wine bottles.
Her mother would have liked Edgar’s patience, if she’d ever met him. But of course, she would never have been able to see past the fact that he wasn’t Chinese. This was a college fling, and Mei Ling knew better than to pretend otherwise.
“Your father and I have someone we want you to meet,” Mrs. Lee said. After the drone of Mei Ling’s professors, the lilt of her mother’s Mandarin through the telephone sounded almost operatic. “He is very interesting, you will think.”
“I don’t want to talk about this now,” Mei Ling said. She saw Edgar puffing out his cheeks and flaring his nostrils, trying to make her laugh as he always did when her family was on the other end of the line.
“He studied at the Sorbonne,” her mother continued. “Very sophisticated. Then he got his MBA from Wharton. Very ambitious. Now he works as a senior manager at Nine West, the shoe company. Very stylish. You will like him.”
Mei Ling squinted and wound the cord around her forearm to keep herself silent.
“Your graduation is this spring, and it is time to think of the future,” her mother continued. “Next spring break, you can take a day off from work and meet him. You will meet him at the new Starbucks on the East Side.”
Mei Ling took a deep breath. “What if I don’t want to go?” she said. “What if I’m not interested?”
“You don’t want to disappoint Wonpro Lee. And besides, it’s just a frappuccino.”
“I need to think about this.”
“Just one latté. Twenty minutes. Then you’ll have the rest of the day to yourself.”
And Mrs. Lee’s voice settled into that tone that let Mei Ling know the conversation was finished. Talking to her mother was like feeling her way through a piano solo only to be drowned out by an aggressive horn section. The tune ended on a single pitch, and Mei Ling realized she was pressing the telephone against her ear, listening to the dial tone.
* * *
Once Mei Ling got over that jetlag, she just kept smiling through the bus fumes and the headaches, kept smiling through elaborate multicourse dinners and costly trips to the boutiques with her sisters, kept smiling through finance charts at her father’s buxiban, the spreadsheets of bribes paid for fudged visa paperwork, kept smiling through the endless gossip of the office girls, the endless snot of the students, the endless inane questions of their parents. Mei Ling kept smiling by sheer force of will, because there was really nothing else she could do.
The one moment she had to look forward to in her entire spring break, the thought that had to get her through until her return to Sydney, was that single day she would get to leave the school to meet some dull rich boy for coffee. At least, after she met with the suitor Nine West, she would get an afternoon alone in the practice modules. Not that the pianos over at National Taiwan University were anything special, but she needed a chance to shut out the rattle of Taipei’s streets, to hear her own music.
Mei Ling told herself she would make it through to that moment when the plane lifted back up through the haze, when she was once again free. She told herself she had survived years of miserable school vacations exactly like this one. But she knew it was a lie; this visit was different. This visit, even after her eyes had readjusted, her headaches kept coming back with such intensity she had trouble getting out of bed in the morning, and sometimes she had to find an empty classroom in her father’s school and turn off the lights, rest her head on the cool surface of a desk. Because no matter what she told herself, there was no escaping the truth: this spring, she was going to graduate. In other words, this visit wasn’t a visit at all; it was a preview of the rest of her life, unless she did something about it.
Part Two
Jacob first met the unforgettable girl at The Five Senses, a bar down by National Taiwan University where he spent most weekends. Weekdays, he taught kindergarten at Wonpro English School, dancing around the classroom like a monkey and killing them with his poopoo jokes; hopping on his Vespa to battle swarms of scooters on his way downtown to teach private classes, collapsing onto his mattress every night. By Saturday, all he wanted was the subtle throb of breakbeats, track lighting over dark leather booths, anime playing on suspended flat screen televisions.
Before the unforgettable girl walked in, Jacob was telling a story. Girls from the university came to The Five Senses to meet foreign men, and since he wasn’t much of a dancer, he camped out by the bar and talked to them, weaving absurdly Canadian tales about Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, his hometown. He told them all about hockey goons and bobsleds, Molson and maple syrup. Every once in awhile the story ended with a slim body clinging to him on the back of his motorcycle as he negotiated the neon swarm of late-night traffic, a pair of Hello Kitty panties scattered on the floor of his apartment.
Jacob was aware of the irony; he had spent his entire childhood dreaming of escape, and now that he made it halfway around the globe, he couldn’t stop talking about Canada. He had always been the kid who, when they warned not to dig a hole too deep or you’d end up in China, he just dug harder. Maybe this was because he spent his schooldays alone in the cafeteria and his weekends alone in a rundown apartment, his only company a dog-eared library book and a stressed-out single mom. Jacob was the one kid in Alfred E. Peacock Collegiate who didn’t like hunting or fishing, the one member of his graduating class who went to university outside the province. But University of Calgary wasn’t nearly far enough, so he majored in East Asian Studies, and after graduation he maxed out his credit card for one-way a plane ticket. And he landed here on the bar stool at The Five Senses, where all he seemed to do was look back.
“In Moose Jaw, we have a lot of polar bears.” He took a sip of his pint and smiled at Han Li, whose name he had just learned. She had one of those boyish haircuts bleached at the ends, a military-style jacket and short skirt. Jacob wanted to hold her face in his hands and kiss her forehead. He wasn’t like the foreigners on the dance floor; he really loved these Taipei girls. He wanted to see them again in the morning, and if only they would let him, he would hold their hands on park benches and charm their grandmothers with his goofy attempts at Mandarin.
“Every winter, the annual migration takes the bears right through the center of town, so be careful. Three thousand pounds, teeth sharp enough to cut through bone.”
Han Li shifted a step away along the bar. “I don’t like,” she said.
“Let me refresh that for you.” Jacob nodded at Tong, the bartender, for another drink. “Don’t worry about those polar bears,” he said as he handed her a glass. “I’ll keep you safe.”
Han Li took her drink, nodding with a wavering smile, and slid away along the bar. Too late, Jacob recognized the look from his ESL students: slow down, simplify the vocabulary. He polished off his beer, feeling empty. He was considering paying his tab and heading home early when he noticed another girl, purple-highlighted hair and a shimmering halter-top, coming up to the bar. Something about her looked familiar, and he wondered if he’d seen her here before, another weekend.
“Ever feel the ice on a glacier?” he asked.
She raised an eyebrow, lifted a fluorescent green martini glass to her lips, and stayed silent.
“I’m from Canada,” he said. “I was born on a glacier.”
She squinted at him for a moment, shrugged, and sat down on a barstool.
“Born on a glacier and raised by wolves,” he said. “Know what I miss most? The chill in the air.” He placed the cool pint glass against his cheek, closing his eyes. Then he opened them and leaned towards her. “May I?” Gently, he reached out to touch her face with the glass.
She ducked away, guiding the pint glass down to the bar. “You have no idea who I am, do you?” Her voice was assured, her accent vaguely British.
Jacob never had much luck with Taipei girls who had been overseas, but he tried not to let his intimidation show. “Let me guess: you’re a pop star? Perhaps I’ve mumbled along to one of your songs at karaoke.”
She smiled, sipping the luminous green drink, and then she reached out her hand. “Mei Ling Lee,” she said. “Wonpro’s daughter.”
Jacob took the hand, then sat back. Of course: his boss’s oldest, the one who was getting her degree in Australia, who was going to come back to take over the family business when she finished, poor kid.
“I visited a cousin in Vancouver last year,” she said. “I remember some lovely buildings and very clean parks, loads of coffee shops. Can’t recall any polar bears.”
“You’ve never seen Moose Jaw,” he said. He imagined Mei Ling standing on the windswept sidewalks of Caribou Street, looking up past the silos and used car lots to that infinite slate sky.
“How can you stand it here?” she asked, her eyes on the dance floor, where middle-aged men in half-unbuttoned shirts were grinding against sleek young bodies on under the strobe lights.
“Like I said, you’ve never seen Moose Jaw.”
She laughed, and polished off her drink. Jacob signaled Tong for another refill, grateful this Taipei girl didn’t stand up to leave.
“It’s a serious question,” she said.
“I guess everybody needs to set down anchor somewhere.” He met her gaze for a time, and the dense hum of drum-and-base seemed to fade, leaving them alone. “How about you? Why are you here?”
“I figured I’d try Taipei on for a night,” she said.
“You wear it well.”
“I can’t get my head around the idea of actually living here.” She paused, sipping her drink. “Not that I have a choice.”
“Must be tough, having your whole life planned for you.”
She shook her head, making an irritated face, and then the music returned, the rhythm shaking Jacob deep in his chest. Mei Ling reached over, picked up his pint glass, and placed it against her cheek, eyes closed.
This Taipei girl didn’t get onto the back of his Vespa; she had her own motorcycle, a sporty red Kymco. She drove wild through the traffic, cutting between scooters and gunning around taxis, and it was all he could do to stay keep her within sight. At a stoplight, he pulled up next to her, and she turned to him, her purple hair blowing out her helmet and around her face. For a moment he thought she had been crying, but it must have been the wind.
“Where do you live?” she shouted over the tumult of traffic.
He wondered what she would think about the rusty elevator gate, the half-empty bottles of Taiwan Beer on the kitchen counter, the pile of discarded instant noodle bowls in the corner. But she didn’t stop in the living room or the kitchen or even the hallway. Once again, it was all he could do to keep up as she led him into his bedroom and pulled at his shirt, guiding him down to his unmade mattress, their skin flashing red white red as the neon billboard across the street lit up the walls.
Neither of them spoke until hours later, as he was drifting off to sleep, and he heard her getting dressed, making her way towards the door, helmet under her arm.
“Can I call you?” he asked.
“I’ll be around the school for a couple weeks.” She stopped, turned back towards him, and stayed silent for a long time. “But no, please don’t call,” she said. “This never happened.”
And before he could answer, she had already shut the door, her heels clacking down the hall. He thought about pulling on his boxers, chasing her down the stairwell. But he’d been down that road before, and it never worked. Instead he lay back and watched the neon lights flash against his ceiling, remembering the confident way she held her martini glass and steered through traffic, her delicate neck when she threw her head back on his pillow. This was the one Taipei girl he would never forget; he knew this already. Just maybe, he thought, he could find some way to get her back. Just maybe, he could convince her that they had both found the right place to drop anchor.
* * *
This was not the first time a woman had told Jacob not to call.
“You’re such a good listener,” they always told him, in the beginning. Back in high school, they would shake their heads like he was some sort of miracle: the boy who listened. As soon as they figured this out about him, the most beautiful girls in school slid into the front seat of his beat VW Jetta, where they unburdened themselves about how nobody really got them in this place, especially that bastard who didn’t know how to treat a woman. More than once they literally cried on his shoulder. But somehow they never noticed the shoulder, and sooner or later they always went back to the bastard.
Later, in college, some of them finally began to see the shoulder, but it never lasted long. The problem was, Jacob fell in love too easily. By the second date, he had already thrown himself into their lives. He could name their best friends and ex-boyfriends, describe their childhood traumas and the decorations in their dream houses. He never said much about himself, and when they asked he just laughed. I don’t want to bore you, he would say. By the fourth or fifth date, he was terrified they were going to leave. And it didn’t take long before he was waiting on park benches outside their dorms, following them to class, calling them late at night, the phone ringing and ringing until they picked up and slowly annunciated the words: don’t call me, please.
Still, this much was true: Jacob was a good listener. He had been practicing since childhood, sitting across the kitchen counter as his mother smoked her Camel Lights down to the filter and ranted. She complained about the technical college where she worked as a secretary, where even accounting professors who couldn’t add receipts on their expense reports. She railed against this sorry little town where the only cultural offerings were those over-the-hill country singers who played the main stage at the casino. She kvetched about Jacob’s deadbeat dad, who had roamed from one prairie town to another before finally getting a job at the local hog processing plant, where he showed up to work drunk and inhaled chlorine while cleaning out blood tanks, dying slowly of burnt lungs and blistered skin before Jacob was even five years old.
Even though there were moments when Jacob loved Moose Jaw, the way the clouds moved over the pastures on an August afternoon, he learned it was best not to mention this at the kitchen table. He learned, instead, to join in the complaints. He would mimic his hick history teacher reciting monotone straight from the textbook, describe the boys in school as buffoons and the girls as airheads with poofed-up hairdos. Sometimes, when he came up with a particularly cutting quip, his mother would come around and hug him, enveloping him in a cloud stale tobacco and brandy.
“Some day we’ll get out of here, kid. You and me.”
So he figured if anybody would understand why he bought that one-way ticket to Taipei, it would be his mother. But in fact, when he called home from the Happy Family IV youth hostel, where you had to keep your voice low on the shared hallway phone because none of the walls reached the ceiling, he could hear the hurt in her voice. He could hear that deep rasp of pain audible even through the three-second delay on the crappy international connection.
“You’re exactly like him,” she said. “Just like your damn father.”
“Mom,” he whispered, aware of the silence of the youth hostel. “It’s not like that. Come visit. You’d like this place, I mean it’s so – ”
He paused, trying to figure out the right way to finish that sentence. He tried to picture his mom having a breakfast of steamed buns and coffee-in-a can from 7-11, elbowing her way onto a jammed city bus. But before he could find the words, she broke into a coughing fit. He swore she did it on purpose.
Even after he found his first apartment, a filthy fourth-floor walkup above a dumpling shop on He Ping Rd, and even after he saved up enough cash to cover her airfare, his mother refused to come visit. In fact, by the end of his first year in Taipei, she had stopped returning his calls, and by the end of his second year, she stopped returning his letters. He imagined her sitting alone, ranting at the television now, the ashtray overflowing on the kitchen table.
Only later, after his aunt Nelda called him in the middle of the night, her voice flat and accusatory as she enunciated the words carcinoma, advanced stage, did he realize maybe he wasn’t such a good listener after all. Sure, he had taken in every word, but his mother was trying to communicate something with her silences, and he’d missed it. That money he had saved for her airfare, he spent it to fly himself back home, where he held her shriveled hand in the hospital, where he sat alone on the front pew of Parkview Funeral Chapel. And when the preacher spoke in English, it sounded like gibberish.
Since his return flight to Taipei, Jacob had tried to learn his lesson, to interpret silences as well as words. And now that he had met the unforgettable girl, Mei Ling, he was determined to use this skill. He thought about that moment when she turned back just before the door, helmet under her arm, and stared at him quietly. Maybe her silence in that moment of hesitation was telling him she wanted a reason to call this place home. Jacob was determined to make himself that reason.
So the morning after Mei Ling left, he got up early and drove his Vespa through the drizzle to the university bookstore, where he bought a stack of volumes on ESL pedagogy, small business management, four-character idioms in Mandarin. He carried his books through the downpour, slogging over to one of those restaurants with roast ducks hanging in the window, where he sat at a greasy back table and formulated a plan. This time there would be no waiting outside her home, no late night calls. He wouldn’t throw himself in quickly; he would take his time. He would become the best damn teacher at Wonpro, impress her father with his business savvy, impress her mother with his language abilities, and when Mei Ling came back from overseas, she would be slowly drawn to him. He finished his styrofoam plate of duck and smiled to himself.
Monday morning was the first day of his plan, so he ironed his best shirt, donned his one necktie, and arrived to school early. He checked his reflection in the elevator until it dinged for the fifth floor, and as he entered Wonpro English, he shook his head at the Easter bunny decorations still up two weeks after the holiday. But when he walked past the front desk, Mei Ling was gone.
Part Three
Perhaps she should have worn a longer skirt. The air conditioning was bringing out goose bumps on the backs of her legs while she waited. The man from Nine West was late, so she ordered a second espresso.
The loop of music playing through the speakers contained exactly four tracks. Candy jazz, Edgar would have called it. Sticky-sweet on the sax, a synthesized backbeat and a basic three-chord progression. To her left, a teenager in a silver scooter helmet chattered into his cell phone, tapping out an unconscious beat on the table. The kid wasn’t bad, actually, and in her mind Mei Ling played counterpoint to his rhythm, imagining dissonant chords around that saccharine sax, an ironic juxtaposition that just might turn that three-chord foundation into something like real music.
“Mei Ling?” a voice behind her asked.
She turned, and saw a maroon silk shirt and a gold tie. “I’m so sorry,” said Nine West. “I was caught in a meeting.”
“It’s no trouble.” She stood up and pulled the table further into the corner to make room for his chair.
“You’re more beautiful than they told me,” Nine West said.
She straightened the skirt under her legs.
“When did you get back to Taipei?” he asked.
“Too long ago,” she said. “Last week.”
Nine West laughed, and his front teeth were somewhat crooked, which made her hate him just a little bit less. “I know what you mean. Once you’ve been overseas, you can never completely come back.”
There was a pause between tracks on the loop. She finished the last of her espresso, the clink of the cup on the saucer echoing in the sudden silence.
“Anyway, I’m glad to finally meet you.” He put a small velvet box on the table. “I’ve brought you a small gift.”
“You’re too kind,” she said, but she didn’t open the box.
While Nine West waited in the long line to order coffee, Mei Ling examined his shoes: buffed loafers with a crocodile imprint. Her head began to ache as she contemplated the light reflected on their polish.
By the time he returned to the table, a full-blown migraine had arrived. She excused herself and made her way over to the bathroom, where she sat on the toilet for a long time, resting her head in her hands. She remembered when she was a girl, how East Taipei still had squat toilets. At least these Western toilets gave you a moment to sit and wait out a headache. The walls in here muffled sound like a practice module, and slowly, the ache began to recede from her temples.
When she was finally ready to open her eyes again, her reflection in the mirror looked comical, perched over the porcelain like a nesting bird. Shaking her head, she stood up. She should not deceive herself: Nine West was just the first in a line of suitors her parents were going to assemble for her, and they expected her to choose one of them. Not so very different from the club scene back in Sydney, a trash bag on the curb, chewed to shreds by street dogs. Something clicked in Mei Ling’s mind, and she had decided: this was not where she belonged, and she was going to do whatever she had to do to get away.
By the time she walked out of the bathroom, the silver-helmet kid had finished talking and was now using his cell phone to play a video game, punctuating the candy jazz loop with troing bleep. As she approached the table, Nine West stood up, and she noticed he hadn’t even taken a sip of his coffee while she was gone. This brought a faint ache back to her temples.
“Is everything okay?” He handed the jewelry box to her once again as she took her seat, his hand shaking. “This is for you, but – if you don’t feel well, I can call a taxi for you.” He dropped his hand and fiddled the knot of his tie.
“I’m fine,” she said. She liked his nervousness, glad it had somehow survived business school at Wharton. If she had been a different person, she supposed she might have chosen a man like Nine West, which would have made Mrs. Lee very happy.
Nine West picked up his coffee and took a sip, blinking several times. “So tell me about yourself.”
“Me?” she formed her face into a vacant smile. “I don’t want to bore you.” The monotone of candy jazz and clanging spoons surrounded her as she absently opened the box and caught a glimpse of a shimmery silver necklace.
“It’s lovely,” she said, even though she wasn’t really looking. “But I can’t accept it.” She slid the box towards him and stood, desperate to get back to her own music.
* * *
Next afternoon, Mei Ling decided to make the phone call during her lunch hour, the one moment in her day when she could be alone. She knew the rest of the front office whispered about the antisocial way she spent her lunch break, about the fact that, rather than eating at her desk with the rest of them, she went for walks, alone. But she treasured this hour, taking her time as she wandered up to the restaurants on San Min Road, trudging slowly through the rain and peering into storefronts.
The drizzle was beginning to pick up, but Mei Ling kept her umbrella closed. She nodded at Mrs. Nie from the noodle shop, but the old woman scowled and shook her head, scooping niu rou mian into a plastic bag. Mei Ling could read the thoughts on the old woman’s face. These girls who spend too much time in another country: dying their hair, using a spoon with their chopsticks, riding home late at night on the backs of foreigners’ motorcycles. They have lost their sense of shame. And without the anchor of shame, these girls bob aimlessly, swinging back and forth like bags of noodle soup carried down the sidewalk.
At the restaurant, Mei Ling dipped a potsticker into spicy vinegar and stared out the window, watching a uniformed schoolboy talk on the pay phone. He kept his head out of the rain, huddling over the receiver. Every once in a while he pulled back and looked at his reflection in a storefront, frowning at himself as he patted down his hair, sucked in his cheeks, picked at a blemish on his forehead.
Something about this kid reminded her of Jacob. She thought back to the other night, the horrible electronica at The Five Senses, Jacob leaning forward hungrily on his bar stool. She found most of the foreign men in Taipei singularly uninteresting, their only real asset the happy coincidence of being born speaking English. But there was something about Jacob; she genuinely liked his isolation in that crowded bar, the vulnerability way he looked into her eyes during his failed attempts the cynical self-parodying humor of the expat. She even liked his beat up old Vespa and his crappy little apartment, which brought her back to her childhood. So she felt terrible about what she was about to do to him, but what choice did she have?
She picked up a dumpling and held it up to the light, examining the vague shadows of its filling. Then she noticed the schoolboy had disappeared into the downpour, leaving the phone open, so she paid the check and walked out onto the sidewalk.
“Foreign affairs police, please,” she said.
The receiver was strangely heavy. She imagined the telephone lines stretching for miles in every direction, the weight of suspended wires pulling down on her hand.
“I would like to report an illegal school,” she said.
There was a long pause. “Please state your name.”
She leaned against the pay phone, sheltering herself from the rain. “My name isn’t important, but the school is Wonpro English,” she said. “Incorporated.”
“What are their violations?”
“Their foreign teachers have invalid work permits.”
“Who should we ask for there? Give us a name.”
Mei Ling paused for a moment. “There is a foreigner who will cooperate. A Canadian. His name is Jacob.”
There was a long pause, and she heard what sounded like a throat swallowing on the other end of the line. “Why are you making this call?” the voice asked.
Telephone wires spiderwebbed in every direction, weighing down the receiver. Rain began to fall harder, slamming down onto her, and the pull on her hand grew strong. Mei Ling found that she had hung up the phone, and that she was crying.
Part Four
The officer’s face was rotund as a boiled dumpling, extra skin bunched below his jaw. His glasses flashed as he held up a stack of witness statements and glanced over the penciled Chinese characters, the red ink of name chop stamps. He hummed softly to himself and then looked back at Jacob.
“We should help each other,” he said. “I think you will not like the jails in Taiwan. Maybe they will be not be so comfortable for you.”
Jacob was in the back room of the police station, seated beside Mei Ling on an old sofa. Across a coffee table sat an unsmiling lineup of cops, though the dumpling-faced officer seemed to be the only one of them who spoke English. There was a hole in the cushion to Jacob’s left, a spring crimping out through the opening. To keep his jeans from being punctured, he had to practically lean over onto Mei Ling. He glanced down at her legs, glossy in a black spandex skirt, for maybe the thirty-ninth time that night.
The officer stifled a yawn with his hand. “Please just to tell the truth of what happened and we can all go home for some rest.”
Jacob needed to concentrate on the present moment, he knew, but Mei Ling’s legs kept bringing back the memory of her skin, butter-sleek on his hands.
“We must work together,” said the officer. “My colleagues will never accept this statement.” He smacked at the stack of papers as though swatting at an insect.
Jacob’s own legs were cramped from sitting for so many hours. He couldn’t move, even as the world seemed to blur with motion around him. His stomach had that Space Mountain sensation he remembered from Tokyo Disney: that moment when the roller coaster hurtled suddenly down into blackness, schoolgirls screaming and flailing their arms.
Earlier that afternoon, a team of foreign affairs police had conducted an undercover operation at Wonpro English. The sting featured a pug-nosed pregnant sergeant, who observed classes under the pretext of looking for a kindergarten for her unborn child, then came out into the main office and pulled out her badge.
Jacob was teaching Wombat Class, as the newest pre-k group was called, when it happened. All the classes at Wonpro were named after Australian animals: Kangaroo, Kookaburra, Emu. Just before the call came, they were playing a game called Robot, in which the teacher stands inanimate, and his students control the movements of his body.
“Raise your right hand!” shouted little Aretha. Jacob shot his arm into the air, making gadget sounds.
“Raise your left hand!” said Otis. Jacob’s favorite part of the job was that you got to pick out English names for new students in your class.
“Beep Joooop!” Jacob answered. The room filled with unabashed three-year-old giggles.
That moment, he heard Mei Ling’s voice crackle through the intercom, and he almost fell to the floor from the sound.
“Jacob please come to the office. Now.”
On his way into the office, he tried to catch Mei Ling’s eye, but she just looked down at her desk. Then someone was holding onto his wrist, and the pregnant sergeant slid a pair of handcuffs onto him. Before he knew what was happening, he was in a locked cruiser, steel wire enclosing the back seat, traffic haze giving way to thick jungle outside the window.
As far as Jacob could make out, the charges seemed to be teaching with an invalid work permit. Not that anybody in Taiwan could say what a valid permit even looked like. Legality was a slippery concept here; every school he ever worked for cut corners with visas, and he couldn’t name a single foreigner in this city who didn’t pick up extra hours on the side. So something else must be going on.
He shifted his weight back and forth on the sofa, fighting the impulse to glance back down at Mei Ling’s legs by forcing himself to look around the room. Behind the sofa, he saw several goldfish swimming around a fish tank. From this distance, he couldn’t be sure if there were six or seven of them circling the murky water. So he stood up and walked over to the tank to get closer look.
“I think you will be very uncomfortable in the handcuffs again,” said the officer. “Please sit down.” He smiled warmly. “I want you to feel comfortable.”
“This is crazy,” Jacob said. “I’m calling the embassy. Where is the phone?”
The officer tittered, the way people here laughed whenever you did something irrational, foreign. “That will not be necessary,” he says. “We only need to – how do you say? – clarify some parts of your statement.”
Jacob rubbed his hands on the outside of the fish tank, and then smeared the cool moisture on his face. “You can’t do this. There are laws.”
“And if we follow the laws, you will be in jail. Call the embassy if you want this.”
Jacob sat down.
The officer smiled, reaching across to offer Jacob a cigarette. “I’m glad you are a reasonable man,” he said. Then he picked up the stack of statements again and considered them briefly before dumping them into a pink plastic trash bin.
“Now. Another time please to tell me how many foreign teachers work for Mr. Wonpro Lee.”
“I – ” Jacob looked back towards Mei Ling, sitting on the sofa “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
The cops said something to each other in the Taiwanese dialect, and rest of them stood and walked out, leaving only Jacob, Mei Ling, and the dumpling officer. Mei Ling turned, looked him straight in the eyes for the first time since that night at The Five Senses, but there was something different, something sad in her expression.
“Whatever you say, it won’t change your situation,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t understand.”
She leaned in, her breath tickling his face, and whispered in his ear. “Just tell them the truth.” Then she stood up, leaving him alone on the sofa. When the door opened, he could hear the whir of typewriters and shuffling papers out in the front room of the station. Then the door creaked shut, and the officer leaned back in his chair.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you are not telling the story right. Maybe you are making a mistake?”
Jacob sat forward on the sofa. “Possibly. Yes. What kind of mistake?”
“I can suggest some of the details you might have forgotten.” The officer opened a desk drawer and pulled out another witness statement, this one typed in immaculate rows of characters.
That moment, the door opened again, and Wonpro Lee strutted in, his suit silken and impeccable. The police officer quickly opened a desk drawer and tossed in the statement.
“What are you up to here?” Wonpro tapped his cell phone across his chest. “I’ve called some people I know in the foreign affairs ministry.”
The officer jiggled a cigarette loose and offered the pack to Wonpro.
“There is the matter of the fine to be negotiated.”
Jacob listened, glancing back and forth between the two of them. He had often found it useful to fake incomprehension of Mandarin. For instance, whenever a traffic cop pulled him over on his Vespa and asked for a driver’s license, all he had to do is shrug and answer in English. They always got embarrassed and let him go.
“And the Canadian?” Wonpro asked. “What happens to him?”
“That depends on the fine, of course.”
“Keep costs low. Foreigners are easy to replace.” Wonpro smiled, walking over to Jacob.
“You don’t have to worry,” he said, patting Jacob on the shoulder. “I’ll take care of this.” Then his phone rang and he glanced down at the screen. As he hurried towards the door, he turned back to Jacob.
“Whatever happens, don’t sign anything until I get back,” he said. “Trust me.”
After the door groaned shut once again, the officer pulled out the witness statement back out and slid a cigarette between his lips.
“Ni yao bu yao?” He offered the pack to Jacob, winking.
“Bu yao. Xie xie,” Jacob answered, shaking his head.
So this interrogation was just part of the process of bargaining for a bribe. Jacob was relieved to understand his own insignificance.
The cigarette dangled between the officer’s lips as he searched for a match. After a minute, he gave up and settled into his chair.
“I can see,” he said, “That you are smart.”
“I just want to get out of here soon,” Jacob answered.
“Smart,” said the officer. “This is what we all want.” The unlit cigarette bounced as he speaks.
“What do you need from me?”
“This statement includes some details you are forgetting. We just need you to sign.”
Jacob closed his eyes and leaned forward, staring hard at the stack of papers. “What does it say?”
The officer finally found a matchbook in his chest pocket. He closed his eyes and inhaled, holding his breath for a long time.
“It says that you want to go home,” he said.
Jacob hesitated, breathing deep, remembering Mei Ling’s words, her breath on his face. Cigarette smoke curled slowly over their heads as he reached out for the pen.
* * *
The next morning, as Jacob drove for the last time through Taipei, he felt soothed by the traffic. The usual swarm of vehicles reminded him that, for everyone else, this was just another day. Scooters zipped past, cutting between luxury cars and careening taxicabs, accelerating into the gap between curb and public bus. An old man flew by to his left, wearing one of those cellophane-thin rain ponchos you buy at Circle K. Six gas tanks were piled on the back of his Yamaha, held in formation by a single piece of twine.
Driving in Taipei is a wholly absorbing activity, Jacob wrote in one of those early letters to his mother. Somewhere between Zen meditation and a video game. Back when he was fresh-off-the-boat, he went through a phase of concocting clever observations in his letters home, trying to make her understand how utterly crazy this place was. Only somewhere along the line, he switched to telling stories about some crazy place called Moose Jaw in order to pick up Taipei girls at The Five Senses. He wondered which girls he would be telling stories to next, and where, but he tried not to linger on the thought.
When the dumpling officer had handed back his passport last night, he gave Jacob twenty-four hours to leave the country, not enough time to ponder much of anything. Jacob knew he wouldn’t be going back to Canada, of course. Maybe Bangkok? Kuala Lumpur? Seoul? He had a bit of cash saved, and he’d have time to figure out his destination when he got to the airport.
He concentrated for the moment on turning onto a side alley and, for the last time ever, looked for a parking space near the train station. Eventually he managed to squeeze in next to a trim 50 c.c. Honda Sniper. There was a slogan in fluid script on the side of the scooter:
We reach for the sky.
Neither does civilization!
He pulled on his backpack and glanced back at his Vespa, wondering how many days it will sit there before some kid stripped it down for parts. And then he considered the improbable pile he left out on the sidewalk when he left his apartment this morning: that suitcase full of wrinkle-free dress shirts, that mini fridge full of Taiwan beer, edamame, and Häagen-Dazs, that stack of novels he never got to, that little log of hash wound tight in plastic wrap. What kind of lives would these objects lead from now on? Jacob wished he could hide behind the noodle shop and watch, but he had only nine hours to catch a flight out of here, to disappear.
On the corner where the alley met the main thoroughfare, he passed an old woman selling shengjianbao from a cart. Rain pounded onto a sheet of clear plastic above her. Today, the sesame smell of these fried buns made him want to cry.
“Duoshao qian?” he asks.
“Wu kuai.” The woman held up five fingers. “You speak Mandarin is very good.”
The meat filling burned his mouth as he joined the stream of traffic moving towards the Chunghsiao East overpass, a footbridge spanning from the Mitsukoshi Department Store to the train station. A pool of rainwater had formed on the bridge, and the lunchtime crowds jostled their way through. A businessman clenched his briefcase in his armpit as he rolled up his trousers, preparing to slosh into the water. People elbowed towards the puddle’s edge, claiming space in the downpour with their umbrellas.
To survive the sidewalks of Taipei, Jacob wrote in another letter to his mother, one must master the subtle art of umbrella chicken. But he didn’t write letters any more, didn’t have anyone left who would bother to read them. So he never got a chance to explain what he learned about sidewalks in the rain: how you approach, umbrella held low, but at the last minute you shift the handle diagonally and slip past. How this way, everyone stays dry.
Yesterday, he would never have noticed the street below as he began to wade into the water. He would not have paid attention to the neon of noodle shops reflected in bus windows, to the commercial of the slim woman singing in the shower, a bottle of Pert Plus in hand, projected onto that massive screen on the side of the Mitsukoshi Building. Yesterday, he would have kept his head down and pushed through the pool like everyone else.
But today, he stopped at the crest of the footbridge and leaned against the railing. He stood there for a long time, eyes closed, listening to the traffic clatter below. Rain slammed down, soaking him around the edges his umbrella, but he did not move. As he shivered, he realized he already missed this place, and he hadn’t even left. And then it occurred to him: he could take that footbridge in either direction. He had all his possessions in his backpack, all his money in his pocket, and it would be easy enough to turn around and make his way back to the train station. It would be easy enough to buy a ticket to another city in Taiwan, to ride the express train to the other side of the island, to find a new apartment, a new school to fudge his paperwork. Legality was, after all, a slippery concept here.
Jacob stood a moment longer in the rain and breathed in his city. And then he opened his eyes, turned around, and began to retrace his steps.
Part Five
“This is your captain speaking. We have reached our cruising altitude and I have extinguished the fasten seat belt sign. A list of portable electronic devices approved for this flight can be found on the back page of your in-flight magazine.”
Mei Ling slipped on her ear buds and chose a piano quintet by Dmitri Shostakovich, her current obsession. The cellist slid bow across strings and a low sound emerged. The cushion was soft against her head, and she closed her eyes. She had survived another visit home. She had survived, and Wonpro English, Inc. was now in downsizing mode.
“Never mind,” Mrs. Lee said. “Wonpro Lee is resilient.”
Mei Ling wasn’t sure, though. On the way to the airport, the Mercedes had been strangely silent. Her younger sisters just looked out the windows, and even the rain had stopped falling, although the clouds were still thick overhead. And her father’s eyes in the rearview mirror looked tired, old.
For now, there was no reason for her to come back to Taipei after she graduated. Wonpro English couldn’t afford to open the new branch until they could earn back the bribe money, which would take a long, long time. And time was exactly what she needed right now, time to close herself into a soundproof room, to play. Time, maybe, to move in with Edgar, to take that next step past the shelf and the toothbrush slot. He had been very patient, after all. And he had great taste in music.
Mei Ling was already airborne, and her hair flew loose as she threw her head back and let the melody take her. Slowly, achingly, a violin joined the cello, and there was a disembodied interplay of voices. Then, unexpected and dissonant, the viola entered, almost but not quite blending in harmony. And finally, the subtle drip-drop of the piano, drip-drop building strength and rhythmic drive higher and higher until the piece launched into a crescendo that blasted up through the cloud cover, no landing in sight.