Ghost Month Read Free Page B

remember that exchange, I see her eyes flicker with doubt, her eyebrows twisted with concern. She knew even then I wouldn’t come through.
    A turtle plopped into the water and startled me. How patheticwas I? I was taken by surprise by one of the planet’s slowest-moving creatures.
    I checked my phone. No more news on the murder, but I got a text from the
Daily Times
, noting that I might be interested in a related story. I knew there’d be a drawback to registering for updates. The new offering was a story about how an incarcerated member of the infamous Black Sea gang was making allegations that the American Central Intelligence Agency was helping them smuggle in heroin and other drugs on American vessels that weren’t subject to search by Taiwanese authorities.
    Who cares? I deleted the message. Damn, it was getting late. Almost three o’clock.
    In my haste to get back to Jianguo Road, I inadvertently walked by the Buddha I had wanted to avoid.
So you got me after all, huh?
    At least it wasn’t the fat, happy guy my parents had prayed to. This statue was of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion. She stood with a serene expression on her face, eyes closed, her dress flowing down in smiling folds.
    I WAS STRAPPING ON a helmet when a bus swerved to a stop just inches from my face. A stern-looking man—apparently a shipwreck survivor, judging by his tattered clothes—held a thick rope in one hand and with the other thrust a bottle of cologne at me. “LA Calling.”
    LA certainly had come calling, and I had gone. Now I was stuck back in Taipei. Pride had kept me from calling Julia and telling her of the change in plan. After all, I might still someday make it back to UCLA, and then everything would be back on track. All I had to do was find a buyer for the night-market stall, and then I could pay off the debt and fly back to Los Angeles. The recession killed that plan, though.
    I never heard from Julia when my parents passed away, even though she must have known. I admired her discipline and how she could stick to a promise. Sometimes I was angry she hadn’t broken down and called me, but I always loved her for it. Every day I didn’t hear from her meant we still had a chance.
    Why did we want to be Americans so badly? We were bothsmart and ambitious. Not that people who wanted to stay in Taiwan weren’t. But whenever there was a global event and Taiwan was allowed by China to take part in it, our national flag was banned, along with our name. It was embarrassing. Especially since we were one of the most advanced economies and societies in the world. Taiwan’s continuing strange and strained estrangement from China wasn’t going to end anytime soon, and it sure wasn’t going to end well—certainly not for the island.
    The US didn’t take shit like that. The Americans stood up for themselves.
    I had wanted to be an American since July 1, 1998. That was when American President Bill Clinton, while on a formal visit to China, said there was only one China and that Taiwan was a part of China. The
Daily Yam
, Taiwan’s most inflammatory tabloid, ran a huge headline on its front page: US TO TAIWAN: DROP DEAD .
    I showed the newspaper to my father and he said what he always said: “doesn’t matter.” When I showed him a perfect test score, when I pointed out that another stall in the night market was charging more or less for the same items, when I told him I was going to marry Julia someday.
    “Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter!”
    I wanted to live a life that did matter, and maybe it would in America, because it sure didn’t seem to here in Taiwan.
    My father was right, though. It didn’t matter what I wanted. I was trapped living the same life he had, cutting, cooking and skewering meat for most of the night, a shadowy existence in a shadowy country the US didn’t even formally recognize. I had no time for friendship or love, and if I’d had a family, I wouldn’t have had time for them,