I also translated most of the items on the menu into English. You don't want to translate all of itâtourists love a mystery.
The biggest change I made was within myself. After being in America for two years, I learned how to sell an idea by osmosis. Tourists come to Taiwan because they want to buy stuff but they also want you to sell it to them. I created an alter ego because I knew my moderately introverted nature would never be able to greet strangers and chat them up. That wasn't me at all. But Johnny could do that. He loved people and he loved their money even more. He could go up to anybody and ask how they liked Taipei before steering them ever so gently, only using a touch on the shoulder, to see the quality of the sausages Frankie was slicing.
“Please try a bite,” Johnny would say. Once the meat was in their mouth, the deal, and a corresponding glassine baggie of sausage, was as good as sealed.
I also gave the business an English name: “Unknown Pleasures.”
Results were immediate. The old-school stall operators decried me as a pimp for actively recruiting customers, but Johnny cried all the way to the cash register. The first night we were back in the blackâfiguratively and literally, as the decor was a blatant rip-off of Joy Division's bleak album coverâDwayne celebrated the event by pinning one of my arms behind my back and nearly strangling me. I had saved the stall but more importantly I had saved his job. Every night since, my ass has been up for grabs.
When I look back to the early days, it's hard for me to remember just how desperate we were. I don't know if I could make such drastic and prescient choices now. People loved us and more importantly rated us highly online, so we have a bit of a cushion to rest on. After all, is anybody else in Taipei going to open a food stand with a Joy Division theme?
I continue to change things, little things that can make us look marginally better. For instance, I asked Dwayne to use more red peppers instead of green ones in the sausages. Red looks better on Instagram through any of the special-effects filters.
A newer ritual I added was more sedate than squaring off with Dwayne and called for precision.
“No horsing around right now,” I warned him as I laid out the wooden skewers. They were light but sharp enough to pierce a hand right through the palm.
All three of us got down to our culinary knitting, folding flesh and piercing it through the center with the skewers. This was our religion. This was our life. Sure, I lured in tourists, but if the food didn't look or taste right, there would be consequencesâfood blogs dissing Unknown Pleasures, or negative reviews on our Facebook page.
The Facebook fan page is new. I try to keep it populated with pictures and other content. I had originally hoped to have a staff picture, but both Frankie and Dwayne refused to let me post their pictures. It actually works out for the better. I put up pictures of me with attractive young visitors.
Marketing note to myself: Get more famous people to come by!
I put my thoughts aside. The three of us filled the first tray with twenty skewers in no time. Dwayne spread out his hands, picked up the first eight, and laid them out on the main grill. These would be used for the offering.
When the skewers were half-cooked, he laid them across an ornate rectangular plate and carried them to the corner below a small altar. He lit a stick of incense and bowed as a scarlet-faced Lord Guan idol glared down at him, one hand on the long staff of his moonblade, holding the weapon upright, and the other hand held over his heart.
Like many deities, Lord Guan is based on an actual person, a hero from China's Three Kingdoms period nearly two thousand years ago. He was a fugitive from justice. While on the run, he obtained a potion from one of those wandering Taoist immortals who pop up every now and then, particularly on mountain paths. Lord Guan washed his face with the potion and it became red like the Kool-Aid Man. Lord Guan never smiled like the Kool-Aid Man, though.
People who run small businesses worship Lord Guan to ward off criminals, because Lord Guan is known for his sense of honor and for punishing the amoral. I'm not sure why Dwayne worships him, though. Lord Guan is a god of the Han Chinese colonizers. But like most Taiwanese, Dwayne believes in all gods, goddesses, and charms. That fool was even crossing himself for a while after seeing
The Godfather
on television.
Dwayne finished bowing before Lord Guan and backed away, leaving the skewers there for the god to “eat.” There aren't any official guidelines on how long it takes a supreme being to consume offerings. In the old days, food would sit out and putrefy, the rotting smells covered up by incense. Now, the divine meal time doesn't even last an hour.
Lord Guan should be able to polish the skewers off pretty quickly. After all, he had help. Dwayne had tucked in a few other idols around Lord Guan's feet. I didn't know them all. The statues of three old men grouped together I recognized as the Three Immortals, who represented fortune (the one holding a baby), prosperity (the guy in traditional scholar robes), and longevity (the one holding a peach). Why the three were close, I had no idea. Maybe they had a co-branding deal to maximize offerings. Apart from them I only recognized Mazu, by her beaded veil. For a joke, I once squeezed a little Hello Kitty doll into the altar, and that really pissed off Dwayne, who was scared of no man but terrified of divine judgment.
Me, I didn't take temples seriously, so how could I put any credence in our little shelf of idols? I could, however, recognize the menagerie as one more thing for tourists to take pictures of and to linger over. Marketing note to myself: Make a video of Dwayne offering skewers before the altar. I looked them over and noticed a few were uneven. That could look sloppy online in a cropped close-up.
I approached the offering plate and Dwayne nearly ripped my arm off.
“Don't!” was all he said.
“Calm down, man,” I said in a soothing voice. I straightened out the skewers to make them all parallel. “Now don't they look better?”
Dwayne held one hand over his heart, subconsciously imitating Lord Guan's idol. “If you had eaten one or played another prank . . .” he started.
“I don't do that anymore,” I said. “I have nothing but respect for Lord Guan's many accomplishments and this particular idol's many Facebook and Twitter appearances.”
Dwayne shook his head at me. “Just wait until the afterlife, when you meet Lord Guan face-to-face,” he muttered. “We'll see how snarky you are, then.”
“Are you going to spend the afterlife with Han Chinese, Dwayne?”
“Ha, the gods don't see race or creed, and the fires of Hell burn everyone equally to a crisp!”
An idea struck me.
“Dwayne, we should have an altar to some of your Amis gods,” I said. “It would really stand out in the night market. Even more people would come here just to take pictures.”
Dwayne scoffed. “Amis gods are no good,” he said, returning to skewering. “They didn't stop you people from invading and destroying our lives.”
“Lord Guan couldn't stop the mainlanders from taking over Taiwan,” I said.
“Listen to the kid, Frankie,” said Dwayne. “He doesn't know that heaven is fickle and always favors the strong.”
“Hmm,” said Frankie, his mouth curling into its characteristically enigmatic smile.
An hour or so
later, I fell into a discussion of Joy Division with a group of young Kiwis in Taipei for a programming confab. New Zealanders are among the biggest fans of the band as Joy Division's songs went Top 10 there. I was older and had a bigger music collection than any of those kids, and in the unspoken rules of fandom, that made me the authority figure.
“Have you ever heard the early New Order demos with the drummer Stephen Morris singing?” I slyly asked. “This was before the band had settled on Bernard to replace Ian as the singer.”
The tallest kid shook his dreadlocks. “How do they sound?”
“Terrible!” I continued talking as I snapped up skewers with my tongs and distributed them in equal portions to five different bags. “They were recorded live and you could tell he was struggling with drumming and singing at the same time. The man's a machine. Just let him drum, already.”
A young woman with two silver studs in her nose looked askance at me. “How did
you
hear those demos, Johnny? You're not old enough to have been there.”
I held up the tongs like I had a point to make. In reality I was pausing to see which sausages were on the verge of becoming overcooked. “A friend of the band had remastered and uploaded all these studio outtakes and live recordings.”
“What's the site?” Dreadlocks asked as I targeted five prime-for-moving sausages with my tongs.
“It's gone now. Joy Division's record company shut it down.” I sighed as I shook each bag to settle them, then handed them out. “That's why the music industry's hurting so badly now. They just don't get the way it works. They didn't know that people downloading bootlegs already own everything that was officially put out. If they had any brains . . .”
My phone rang in my pocket. I could feel that it was the beat to “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” the end of the introductory passage with the crash of the drums before the keyboards kick in.
“Whoa!” the kids said in recognition and admiration.
That ringtone meant that the caller was Nancy.
I clamped the phone between my left shoulder and ear. Instantly I switched from English to Taiwanese.
“Nancy!” I said, dragging out the pronunciation of her name. “I saw you on TV at the protest! I couldn't get through to youâare you all right?” I showed an index finger and then cupped all five fingers to indicate to the Kiwi kids to pay a mere NT$100 each. A bargain for them but, more importantly, still a profit for me. I heard people yelling at her end.
“Jing-nan! I'm so angry!” said Nancy. “Do you know what those so-called student leaders did? They struck out the demand for marriage equality from the platform. I walked out with half the group! I had convinced my bandmates to get together to play our song about gay marriage at the occupation. Now that's not going to happen.”
Boar Pour More, Nancy's on-again, off-again band, was as volatile as the lurching post-punk music they played. Nancy herself was a bedrock-solid drummer whose beat could stamp metal sheets.
“Gan!”
I said as I folded money from the Kiwis into my pockets. “These student leaders are already thinking about their political careers.”
“I should have known by the way they were taking video of themselves, giving speeches on the floor. The worst thing is that Sadao and Chompin' Charlie were going to stop by the occupation to give moral support. All the marriage-equality people have now warned them to stay away.”
Sadao and Chompin' Charlie. Unknown Pleasures' Facebook page could use a few pictures with them.
“Nancy, what are Sadao and Charlie going to do instead?”
“I just talked to Sadao. He wants us, that is, Boar Pour More, to find somewhere else for everyone to hang out and make some noise for marriage equality. I tried calling around to a few clubs but nobody has enough space for us.”
“How many people have you got?”
“About two hundred people, at least.”
“Where is Sadao now?”
“He and Charlie are in a cab. They're just driving around, seeing the city, waiting for us to find a place.” One can actually meander in a cab in Taipei. The rides are notoriously cheap.
“I have an idea,” I said. “Bring everybody here.”
“To Unknown Pleasures?”
“Bring Sadao and Charlie to Unknown Pleasures because I want to take pictures of them here, and bring everybody else to the center of Shilin Night Market. The Americans left the stage up from the eating contest. You guys could have your little rally and concert there.”
“Are you sure it's going to be all right?”
I thought about little unofficial rules all us vendors abided by, about not having overt political messages, not using amplified sound, and giving ample notice for activities that may disrupt others. I also thought about the homophobic remarks from the old guard and hicks who ran some of the less-interesting stalls.
If anybody had a problem with a gay-friendly crowd of two hundred-odd people, they wouldn't as long as it was a hungry crowd.
“There's no problem,” I said.
“Okay,” Nancy said to me. I heard her yell out to her crew, “Jing-nan says there's a space at the Shilin Night Market. Let's go there!”
“Fuck that place,” some woman yelled back. “It's too touristy!” I recognized the voice as belonging to Hazel, Boar Pour More's singer.
I couldn't help but smile. Listen, Hazel, you have no idea what a good thing that is.
Not too long after, Nancy brought Sadao and Chompin' Charlie to Unknown Pleasures with about a dozen star-struck students in tow. “Sadao, this is my boyfriend, Jing-nan. This was all his idea.”
I was about to bow to him but Sadao reached out and shook my hand. He had a tight grip.
“It's a pleasure to meet you,” I said.
“Thank you for thinking this up.” He took his hand back and Charlie came up and gave me a hug.
“People in Taipei have been great,” he told me.
I smiled and patted him on the back a few times.
Sadao recognized Dwayne from the eating contest and the two shook hands. I couldn't help but be amazed that a guy who was much smaller and skinnier than Dwayne could eat so much so fast. Sadao spoke some rudimentary Mandarin to Dwayne, who reciprocated. Jealousy flashed in Chompin' Charlie's eyes.
Frankie told Sadao in Japanese that we were honored to have him at our stand. Sadao asked if he could light an incense stick to Lord Guan at our altar. He pointed at the god's stern smile.
“I'm a big fan of his through the video games,” Sadao told me in English, the lingua franca among Asians from different countries. “I have every version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms on every platform.”