by Ed Lin
I looked around and ignored the next customers, who were yelling something at me. A survey of the assembled crowd showed that it was eighty percent male. Men ate more, so good for me. I glanced to my left and right. Show and Attun stood on either side of the Unknown Pleasures’ counters. Scowling with arms crossed, they were my brave temple-door guardians. If they had swords they wouldn’t be any more intimidating.
Where are you guys? I texted Peggy.
Here, she wrote back.
I scanned the sea of black hair and baseball caps but failed to see an entourage approaching. Then I saw Tong-tong’s bare hand and suit sleeve cutting through the black-headed crowd like a shark fin. He was probably thirty feet away, but I could hear him even above the whoops of support.
“Excuse me! Pardon me! Thank you for being here!” It was just him with Peggy in tow. When they were close enough, I saw that he wasn’t worse for the wear after pushing through the boisterous crowd. Tong-tong’s suit was not even rumpled and his tie was still straight. Peggy was holding his briefcase. They both had big toothpaste-commercial smiles on.
As the two crossed the goal line and entered our dining area, Show and Attun closed in and blocked the entrance. Maybe I had been overcautious in hiring them. After all, there were already plain-clothed police in the crowd and the people were more concerned with solemnly recording the event on their phones.
Peggy grabbed my hands. “Jing-nan, thank you for doing this,” she said. “People have been saying horrible things about my dad that just aren’t true. I’m glad you’re giving him a forum where he can clear the air.” She pulled at the armpits of her pantsuit with anxiety.
“You’re my friend, so he’s practically my dad, too,” I said as I tried hard to stitch sincerity into my voice.
Tong-tong came up and clasped each of my shoulders with a powerful hand. He gave me a big smile, which I was forced to return. The guy had charisma.
“You’re going to introduce me, kid?”
“Yes, Mr. Lee.”
He released me and patted my right arm. “Call me Tong-tong—everybody does!” He turned and waved to the crowd. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said to me out the side of his mouth.
I flipped on the kitchen boom box and patted my hand against the karaoke microphone plugged into it. A light thumping sound came from the speakers. I cleared my throat and did my best to sublimate myself into my public persona. Johnny wouldn’t be nervous addressing a few hundred people.
“Thank you all so much for coming out to Unknown Pleasures. We welcome everybody here. That is the spirit of Taiwan. Over the centuries, how many immigrants and refugees has our island taken in?”
I heard Dwayne sarcastically grumble, “Too many.” Well, as an indigenous person, he did have a point.
“We must remember the original inhabitants of Taiwan,” I said. “They shared their land, often by force, and we recognize their sacrifice. Everybody who’s here now simply wants to be at home here.
“I’m sure that many of you have heard bad things about Tong-tong in the media.” A chorus of boos rose up. It was my first reaction from the crowd and it was loud enough for me to feel the vibrations in the air. “You’ve heard that he’s a racist, that he’s against immigrants, that he has hate in his heart. None of that is true. He is a victim of crime and is only looking for justice. Anybody who supports justice must support Tong-tong. Thank you.”
I bowed slightly to the crowd and was nearly carried away by the applause. It was addictive and I allowed myself two selfish seconds of it before handing the mic to Tong-tong.
“That was a very nice introduction, Jing-nan. Very nice. Yes, you’re right. Nobody loves immigrants more than me. I’m an immigrant myself. My family was torn apart by the Chinese civil war and some of us managed to escape to this beautiful island. I’ll tell you something, my grandparents grabbed what valuables they had and they shoved them in their, ah, orifices. You know what I mean? So when people say that the Lee family shits gold, it’s not because we are particularly rich, but because that’s where we hid the jewelry.”
The crowd erupted in laughter and applause.
“You’re all good people. It means so much for me to see you all here. Now, it’s true. You heard it. I am the victim here. You’ve all seen me humiliated. I’m passionate about finding these criminals and punishing them. Anybody else here witness their friend killed right in front of them? A part of me died, too, when I saw Associate Vice President Peng Wan-chang shot to death. It was horrible.” He paused and reached out an arm. Peggy immediately placed an opened bottle of water in it. He took a swig and passed it back before continuing.
“Don’t you think, though, that while we search for the particular guys who abducted me, we should also weed out other criminals, a lot of whom are in our country illegally? Shouldn’t we stop them before they commit crimes? Am I wrong?”
Enthusiastic cheers let him know that he wasn’t.
One voice yelled out, “Boo!”
Tong-tong shaded his eyes and searched the faces.
“Hey, who said that?” he said in a voice thickly sweet with venom. “Over there, was that you?”
About ten people deep on the right side, an arm rose up and extended a middle finger. Men pounced on the heckler and dragged him off to the side in a four-person tangle to even louder cheers.
Tong-tong dropped his hands and shook his head. “Man, I would love to punch that guy right in the face.” The crowd laughed. “But we are a peaceful people. I would never do that. I know for a fact that nobody here would ever commit an unwarranted violent act. Then again, we don’t back off when someone raises a fist at us, right?
“So, let’s give the police department of Taipei a big round of applause, they deserve it.” The crowd dutifully clapped. “And let’s do our part by continuing to flush out these, ah, problem neighborhoods. Let’s nail these guys, huh?” He was about to hand the mic over to me but he decided to add, “Hey, buy food here at Unknown Pleasures and support Chen Jing-nan, a really great guy who makes a mean skewer. I don’t want any food left over whatsoever.”
We sold out that night, in more ways than one, Nancy later told me.
“Anybody who supports justice must support Tong-tong.”
My words came back to haunt me. Another night, another incident of men from Southeast Asia being beaten by a crowd of Tong-tong supporters.
There was phone-filled footage of him in the lobby of the Taipei 101 skyscraper shrugging off the episode. “What’s everyone complaining about? They knew how to fight back. They’re no angels.”
News coverage was rather wide—every channel I switched to, in fact. Even the Taiwan Indigenous Television station found the time to condemn Tong-tong’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. The report ended with a clip of me, as they all did, because they needed positive quotes for balance.
“You need to do something soon, Jing-nan,” Nancy told me at lunch at a B-list noodle shop on Xinyi Boulevard that catered to tourists, who were in the dark on current events and wouldn’t recognize me.
We usually went someplace around her campus but she told me it was too dangerous for me to set foot at Taida. Apparently Tong-tong was as toxic as the legacy of Chiang Kai-shek, and I was being identified as a Tong-tong supporter.
After taking our English orders for “beef noodle soup,” our waiter looked at me and did a double-take before he left.
“Shit,” I said. “What should I do, Nancy?”
“You should hold a rally for immigrants. I don’t know, call it ‘Justice for Immigrants’ or something. If you don’t, people are going to boycott Unknown Pleasures.”
“Luckily for me, I’ve always got my tourists. It’s all right if the locals turn their backs on me.”
She straightened up. “What if the tour guides start telling them to skip your stand? What if the English-language travel blogs single you out as
a hatemonger?”
I straightened up. Ma de, those travel blogs have been pretty damned good to me. They post almost every picture I ever send, along with my written caption, as long as each shot I send to rival blogs is slightly different. I’ve been interviewed by email more times than I have fingers. I’m always complimented on how great my English is and I return the kind comments on their Chinese-character phrases pasted-in from Google Translate.
They’ve always been on my side, and hundreds of Americans have told me they’ve only found Unknown Pleasures through these blogs. If they stopped covering me, I would miss out on some of the most ardent eaters. I saw American dollars fluttering in the wind.
“Jing-nan!”
“Urgh?” I said.
Nancy glared at me. “You were spacing out!”
“No, I wasn’t. I was thinking. You’re right. Let’s hold that rally for immigrants tomorrow night.”
After lunch, I got on my phone and posted about the rally on Unknown Pleasures’ social media accounts. I declared that I needed to clarify that I and my business were pro-immigrants, and that Tong-tong was not voicing my sentiments. I promised there would be a diversity of speakers and encouraged people of Southeast Asian descent to speak.
I felt good. It was the right thing to do.
But later I arrived at Unknown Pleasures to find a furious Peggy, backed up by the cops Huang and Kung, who both looked sheepish. My old classmate screwed up her face and pointed at my nose.
“Jing-nan! Is this some kind of joke? Are you really hosting an event tomorrow that disparages my father?”
“It’s a pro-justice event,” I said coolly. “So it’s really in support of what your father’s looking for.”
“We were so good to you, Jing-nan! He didn’t charge you anything to show up here and Frankie told me you sold out of food for the first time ever!”
Frankie shrugged. “That is a fact.”
“Dwayne told me his friends had a great time with my dad.”
Now it was Dwayne’s turn to shrug. “Tong-tong stuffed thousand NT bills into their hands and called them indigenous hero warriors. They love him now.”
Exasperated, I said, “I thought you people didn’t care about money!”
Dwayne raised an eyebrow. “We didn’t used to, but we’ve been corrupted by the ways of the Han Chinese.”
Peggy waved a hand in my face. “Listen, Jing-nan. This little anarchist rally of yours is not going to happen. Consider it canceled!”
“Who’s canceling it?”
“Me! Your fucking landlord, that’s who!”
“It doesn’t say in my lease that I can’t hold gatherings. In fact, now that I think about it, I don’t actually have a written lease with you. It’s all on the honor system.”
“That’s funny because you’ve been acting dishonorably. You and Nancy! This was all her idea, right? You wouldn’t have been able to come up with this yourself. Your cute little moral compass put you up to this.”
I felt needles sticking into my neck. “I wanted to do this because I want to give everyone a chance to express themselves. I even did your father the courtesy of letting his event happen first.”
Peggy shook her head and snapped her fingers. “I’ve heard enough! Huang and Kung, shut down this rickety old stand now!”
Huang wiped the side of his nose with his left thumb. “We’ve explained this to you already, Peggy. This is outside our jurisdiction. If you want to close his business, you have to bring it to the court and let a judge decide. If he’s been paying rent, it will be really hard to close his business, even if you don’t have a formal written lease.”
“I’ve been paying,” I said. “I pay good money for rent!”
Peggy tossed her hands to the ground. “Fine! I don’t need your help, I’ll shut this thing down myself!” For some reason, she thought the first step in this process was to give me a shove and stand with her arms crossed. Peggy was smaller, but her center of gravity was lower than mine, and she actually caused me to stumble. Dwayne grabbed my arm to help me recover my balance. I crouched slightly to make my words more menacing.
“Listen, Peggy, if you really do manage to close down Unknown Pleasures, do you have any idea what sort of backlash you’ll face? Students, who have nothing better to do, are going to raise hell against all the Lee family businesses. How would you like them to move their rally to the lobby of Taipei 101?”
Peggy snorted and jammed the toes of her right foot into the ground. I knew from experience that that was a common sign of indecision. If she were a potential customer, I’d offer her both of the things she was considering at a discount. But she didn’t need a value meal. She needed one more push to force her decision.
“If the rally is here,” I said, “there won’t be any media coverage. If they go to Taipei 101, it’s going to be on every cable station.” I touched her shoulder. “You don’t realize it now, but I’m actually helping you by having it here.”
I felt her body quiver. She sighed and nodded. “What you’re saying makes sense. This is like a controlled demolition instead of letting a wrecking ball run loose.”
I tried not to nod too hard. “You see?”
“Okay, Jing-nan. But if anything goes wrong, you’re completely responsible!” She added a final dig. “You and Nancy!”
“She had nothing to do with it!”
Peggy whipped out her phone with an exaggerated flourish. “Nothing, huh? What do you call this?” She pushed the display in my face. It was an email chain, and it started with an original post from Nancy that read, Hey guys, I’ve convinced Jing-nan to hold a rally for justice at Unknown Pleasures.
After my face fell, Peggy withdrew her phone and raised her chin in triumph.
“Where did you get that from?” I asked her.
She got a distant look in her eyes and smiled faintly. “I’ve got paid informants in the student movements who let me know what’s up. It’s insurance that our businesses won’t suffer from any misguided notions that could pick up steam.” Peggy looked me in the eyes. “I might even have Dwayne and Frankie on the payroll to keep tabs on you!” I looked over. Both men shook their heads vigorously. Peggy snapped her fingers to get my attention. “You tell Nancy to watch her step!”
“I never tell her what to do.”
Peggy stalked off. Huang rolled his eyes and slinked after her.
“Sorry,” said Kung. She put her hands in her pockets and followed Huang.
Chapter 11
The crowd was smaller than Tong-tong’s event, but the hundred people who showed up were younger, louder and rowdier.
One held up a sign that I think went too far. It featured Tong-tong’s face with a big bone glued across his mouth. Put him back in the dog cage! it read.
Nancy stood next to me and patted my back. “I’m so glad you’re doing this.”
“We’re doing this,” I said. Nancy tilted her head away slightly to acknowledge that she was pleased that I included her. She handed me her phone. “These are the speakers and short bios for them.”
“I’m the MC?”
“You’re so good at it!”
I shifted my feet. “I am, aren’t I?” I glanced at the list. Whoa, the first one was Liu Ju-lan, the woman now running a B&B! “Ju-lan got in touch with you, Nancy?”
She shook her head. “Not directly. The signup sheet was online. Anybody could add their name.”
“I hope this isn’t some weird prank.”
She tapped my shoulder. “You’re the only one who does online tricks, writing reviews for your own business.”
I held up a hand. “I don’t do that anymore.”
“And signing them with fake American names, too.”
“Well, people had fun reading them, judging by the marks my reviews got.”
I looked at the front counter wit
h concern. These students and lefties didn’t seem to be into eating or at least spending money on food. A lot of them looked like vegans. It’s too bad those jujubes were all gone. At least I got my money’s worth out of them before Dwayne absconded with the last of them.
It was now about fifteen minutes after the rally was supposed to start, so it was the time to get things rolling. Everyone who was going to show up was already here. I approached the mic stand.
“Hello, people! How are you doing tonight?” Enthusiastic applause rained down on me. “I’m sure a lot of you have seen me on television. I want you to know that my comments were taken out of context—never trust the media!” More applause.
“Well, just to let you know, I’m offering a special sale tonight, ten percent off all our items because I support an inclusive society. Look at our stand. Unknown Pleasures employs a mainlander, a benshengren and an aborigine!” Dwayne clasped his hands and waved them over his head. “We all work together!”
Someone yelled out, “How come you don’t have any women workers?”
This was a direct challenge. Years of thinking on my feet have taught me to address skeptics quickly and directly but with humor.
“Women are too smart to do this kind of work for the low wages I pay.” The crowd liked what they heard and the potential heckler was defused. I should write a book about street-level marketing.
“Speaking of smart,” I continued, “I’d like to bring up our first speaker tonight. She’s Liu Ju-lan, a proud small-business owner and a recovering corporate employee. Please give her a round of applause.”
I backed away from the mic as Ju-lan emerged from the crowd. She waved a dog collar in the air. “Tong-tong should be wearing one of these, not a tie!” The crowd roared.
As she continued to slam the guy, my eyes strayed to the counter. Only about five people were lined up. This sucked. Not only were they not buying food in a material sort of way, they were blocking traffic from potential hungry customers. I knew there were many rich liberals in America, but there didn’t seem to be any in Taiwan. People with money here were like Tong-tong. Why couldn’t we have a fun billionaire like Oprah Winfrey or Bill Gates who goes around buying stuff for people?
