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by Christopher Heise One time I published a flash-fiction story in an online magazine called "Short Rounds," submitting the following as my bio: I was born one pale morning in 1987 on the skirts of the bayou. After my birth, a crocodile ate the placenta, which was considered an auspicious sign by local witch doctors. My parents raised me to be a beet farmer, but when I came of age at 18, I rebelled and got a job at a gas station. After years of itinerant labor as a birthday clown, professional whittler and origami craftsman, I got on a boat that I thought was going to New Jersey and ended up in Shanghai. I applied to be a member of the Communist Party, but they denied my application and I fled to Taiwan in disgust. There, I took a job teaching babies how to pronounce the words 'papa' and 'mama'. After successfully teaching his boy to say 'doggy', the father of one of my students got me a job in his office—an English-language publisher—fetching coffee and fixing ceiling lights. When one of the copyeditors moved to India to live on 1$ a day and smoke weed, the boss of the place—whose coffee I'd consistently made to his liking—offered me the position. I took it and never looked back. Now, not everything in that paragraph is true (my parents raised me to be a radish farmer; we never had beets), but probably the most egregious lie is about how I ended up coming out here to the East (I currently live in Ulaanbaatar). The fact is, I didn't take a boat to Shanghai—I took a plane like everybody else. And now I'd like to set the record straight about my journey, as many of my readers have long been asking me to do. Thing is, I didn't get a chance to register for the Communist Party because I never made it through immigration at the airport. I just happened to be wearing my tie-dyed 'Free Tibet' t-shirt that I'd bought at a Pink Floyd concert, and the guy at one of those little booths where they stamp your passport—after more or less interrogating me about what I'd be doing in China—said I'd have to take it off if I wanted go any further. I told him I didn't have anything else to wear (all my clothes were in my checked luggage), and a kind of standoff ensued . . . I could feel the tension rising as all the yapping nationals nearby went silent. A grey-skinned official with puffy eyes in the next booth over, who'd been observing our conversation, abruptly stood up and pointed to some gift shops behind him. "You buy one there, in shop," he barked. "But how can I do that if I can't get through here?" I said, raising my palms in frustration. His face went white with anger. "You go back into airport and buy at another shop! Understand?" "Um. . . yeah, I guess so," I muttered, not sure what he was getting so bent out of shape about. He shot daggers at me with his eyes, and then first guy bellowed, "Next!" to the person behind me in line. I shuffled away and wandered through the airport in a daze, trying to decide if I should pay 25 bucks for a cheesy souvenir t-shirt ("Shanghai, City of the Future") or just go somewhere else. I was already a bit low on funds, and, frankly, I didn't appreciate the way I'd been treated. At some point I started feeling really tired, as much from jet-lag as from walking around and standing still on moving walkways. Then, after salivating in front of McDonalds wondering what a McEggroll tasted like, I noticed a gentle-looking, mouse-faced agent standing all alone behind a China Airlines counter. "Excuse me. What's the cheapest flight you have to another country?" I asked. Instead of replying, she began frantically typing on the keyboard in front of her. After a period of mild suspense, she looked up and grinned. "Sir, we have one ticket for flight in morning to Taiwan. Not different country, also not China. You want?" I'd heard of Taiwan. Things were manufactured there, although I couldn't remember exactly what. I was curious about it not being a country, and besides, the ticket was only $50. "I'll take it." She arranged to have my suitcase (which was undoubtedly going around and around on a luggage carousel somewhere like a kid stuck on a merry-go-round) put on my new flight, and I went off to watch planes take off and land for the next six hours. After that I slept on a row of hard plastic chairs and heard the whine of floor waxing machines all night. It was an unpleasant experience, but early the next morning, while ascending the set of movable stairs to board the small jet—side by side with vociferous, chain-smoking Chinese businessmen—I stared into the hazy sunshine and felt sweet relief. I'd been planning to teach English in Shanghai, and had already arranged a job online at a third-rate school in a distant suburb, so I had literally no idea what to do in Taiwan. As the plane landed in Taipei, I also felt vaguely unnerved by what the China Airlines' woman had said. If Taiwan wasn't a country and wasn't part of the China, then what was it? A rebel territory? Some kind of no-man's-land? Answers were not forthcoming. At the airport, I found a 7-11 and asked some employees if there was a hostel nearby. Via spontaneous translation from a bespectacled Taiwanese man who was buying a rice pyramid wrapped in seaweed, they told me I could take a bus downtown and stay at a place called the Yin-Yang Youth Center (YYYC). I got off the bus and immediately got lost. All the streets looked the same: signs with indecipherable Chinese characters, street-food stands on the sidewalk and convenience stores on the corner. After struggling to communicate again with some 7-11 workers, I finally found the hostel, which was tucked between a swanky cafe and a foot-massage parlor, the entrance indicated by a red door with a faded Yin-Yang symbol painted on it. The greasy, smiling man at the desk told me they had one closet-sized room next to the bathroom available. Although it would put a dent in my scant budget, I thought I needed a good night's rest after traveling for 48 hours, and booked it. Check-in time was 3pm, so I still had several hours to kill. I wandered aimlessly through the alleys nearby, almost getting run over multiple times by motorbikes that whizzed by like giant metal gnats. At some point I spotted a group of female office workers skittering down the sidewalk. Having nothing else to do and hoping to meet some new people, I followed them. After a couple blocks they seemed to realize I was trailing them, but—to my surprise—instead frowning or glaring at me, they covered their mouths with their hands and giggled. They turned a corner and went down a stairway, and a few seconds later I found myself on the platform of the subway. It was so clean you could have eaten a rice ball off it, and I realized why after a couple minutes, when a worker in a lime-green shirt walked me over to a trashcan and—using amusing pantomime gestures—made me spit out the gum I was chewing. I rode around the city for a while, trying to get a sense of what Taiwanese people were like. Many on the train had surgical masks covering their mouths and noses, but they obviously weren't doctors—they were teenagers and businessmen—while girls wore glasses without lenses in them as though it were a style, and more than one lady had a stroller with her that contained not a baby, but a yippy little dog! After boarding an especially crowded car, an older Taiwanese man with a Fu Manchu moustache got up and offered me his seat, asking in barely comprehensible fashion if I were French. "Oui," I said, declining the seat. It was then that I realized I wasn't in Kansas anymore. I eventually got off at a stop called 'Main Station,' found a park on the map and went out to lounge around. On the way I bought some boiled tea eggs from 7-11 for lunch. I ate them on a bench and then started sweating like a pig in the humidity, so I went over to the central fountain to splash some water on my face. I must have been standing there for a long time, gazing into the water, because a slim Taiwanese lady in a silky purple dress came up to me and asked: "Are you ok?" "No," I replied. "I can't see my reflection." She looked at me in surprise. "Does this mean I'm a vampire?" I asked in a panicky voice. "No," she said. "You not looking at correct angle." "Oh . . . ," I sighed in relief, changing my perspective and finally seeing my face in the water. "You sure you OK? You sick?" she queried. I said I was fine, but that I'd been traveling for two days, didn't have a job and knew no one in Taiwan. She seemed both alarmed and fascinated, and began peppering me with questions. "Why you come here?" "How long you stay?" "What you want to do?" My half-assed answers appeared to satisfy her probing curiosity ("I like tonal languages." "As long as I can." "Anything interesting."). Then, after a long pause, she sighed gently and said, "You can teach my daughter English, stay with my family. You want?" I looked into her intelligent, glittering black eyes and felt grateful as well as attracted to her. "Um . . . OK." The next day, the woman, Jasmine, showed up at the hostel in sexy knee-length rain boots and drove me out to her place in a sprawling district far from the city center. She lived on the 14th floor of a high-rise that was down the street from a massive Japanese department store complex. After I exchanged my shoes for a pair of plastic slippers that were four sizes too small on the doorstep, she showed me around. It was a spacious domicile, with an enormous flat-screen TV, some toys covering the plush leather sofa and a shrine with a primitive statue in the corner. She saw me looking at the statue and said:"That is Guan Gong, god of business. Favorite of my husband." The god had a forbidding red face and a long black beard. "What does your husband do?" I asked nonchalantly. "He a . . . how you say? . . . manager. At trading company." "Cool." "He work long hours every day. Often go to mainland." After lunch I got started with her daughter's—Popsicle's—English lessons. She was six years old and liked to giggle and pick her a lot nose during our 'class'. I wasn't sure where to begin, since—outside of my stint as a birthday clown—I didn't have much experience with kids. I tried to teach her some letters and then we sang the alphabet song, which took about two-and-a-half hours. The song she liked. "Thank you," Jasmine said afterwards. "My husband wants her go to bilingual school, but I think she not ready." "You're welcome. Next time I'll teach her how to say 'pick' and 'nose'." "Good. This please my husband." At about 10:30pm, as I was eating some stinky tofu Jasmine had given me and watching a zany, incomprehensible talk show with lots of off-camera sound effects, her husband—Jarvis—came home. He was a balding, rotund man with a pudgy face and metal-rimmed glasses, and he looked about 15 years older than her. He strolled into the living room, stopped and stared at me wide-eyed, and then stormed into the kitchen. Although I understood nothing of what they were saying, it was obvious he and Jasmine were arguing. Eventually I heard her say, "Hao, hao, hao"—a word that apparently means 'OK' in Mandarin—and she came out nearly in tears. "You cannot stay here. I am sorry," she said in a wavering voice. "My husband think you too young to teach Popsicle." I wasn't sure exactly what that meant—that I didn't have enough experience as a teacher, or that Popsicle, being so young, for some reason needed an old instructor. "But . . . it's just the first day. I'll get better," I pleaded. She shook her head and sighed. "Sorry. He say 'no'." I felt confused as well as annoyed, and looking into Jasmine's pouty, sensitive face, I almost wanted to cry. The only place I could think of to go was the YYYC—hopefully I could get another tiny, windowless room. I wasn't exactly sure how to get back there, so after packing my things, Jasmine wrote down directions in impeccable handwriting and then handed me a bag of freshly made dumplings and pot stickers. "I very sorry," she said at the door. "It's OK," I said to make her feel better. "Thanks for letting me come here today. And tell Popsicle I said goodbye." "Good luck with finding job. I call you." "But I don't have a phone." "I call the hostel." "OK." "Goodnight," she said softly, but instead of closing the door she just stood there staring at me. I felt embarrassed and mumbled, "Xia xia," in a poor attempt at 'thank you' in Chinese, and walked to the elevator. After I stepped inside it, I looked back down the hallway and saw her still standing there, gazing in my direction. When I got back to the YYYC (they did have another windowless room available), I was so depressed about getting kicked out of Jasmine's place that I just lay in bed contemplating the differences between dumplings and pot stickers. I passed the next few days idly watching the World Badminton Championships on the ancient TV in the lobby and trying to determine if I should go back to Jasmine's apartment when her husband wasn't around and make a move. But I decided it might frighten her more than anything else if I showed up on her doorstep unannounced, so after spending almost all the money I had left on soybean milk and grilled yams from convenience stores, I realized it was high time to look for a job. I'd bumped into a brash Australian dude one night while waiting in line to use the bathroom, and he told to me to check the English-speaking newspapers for teaching gigs. (He also invited me out to a nightclub where—according to him—the girls were hungry for 'white meat,' but I told him I was broke.) I followed his advice and bought a paper called The China Post—which, despite the name, was all about Taiwan—the next time I went to 7-11, and it did have a couple job listings in the back. I managed to hand-write some resumes and send them out, but the turnaround time was slow since I was afraid to use my e-mail account. (I expected to find dozens of unread messages from family and friends asking where I was, and I just couldn't deal with it.) Finally, one day the sweaty frog-faced guy at the reception desk told me a man had left a message for me to come in for an interview, handing me a piece of paper with the address and some directions on it. I put on my nicest wrinkled shirt and unmatching tie the next day, but it seemed there had been some kind of misunderstanding—the interview was at the only Irish pub in Taipei, and it was for a dishwasher position. When I told the fat Irish guy who'd called me in that I could make a lot more money teaching English at a cram school, he chuckled and—with his green eyes dancing like cherubs—replied that my resume was 'shite'. He said his English-teacher buddy had forwarded it to him, and if I wanted the job I could start at 6pm on Thursday. Then he said he had to prepare for Salsa Night and walked away. Disappointed, I went back to the hostel and ruminated over what this roly-poly child-like person had said about my resume. Was it really so bad that I couldn't get a job teaching English? I'd heard they hired any native speaker with a high nose bridge and a pulse, and besides having been a birthday clown, I also had plenty of experience as an origami craftsman—skills I could no doubt employ in the classroom. I concluded the problem was the hand-written nature of my resume—people just didn't want to get that old school these days. I'd have to buy a printer, but that was difficult without money. I considered asking Jasmine to print something for me, but in the end I thought it better not to look a gift horse in the mouth and that a little manual labor might do me some good, as all the thinking I'd been doing was starting to hurt my brain (I'd recently spent hours contemplating Irish vs. American word choice.) Since Danny, the Irish bar owner (although he wasn't really Irish, I found out later—he was from California and put on the accent to impress Taiwanese customers), had said I could have the job, I just showed up on Thursday. I was a few minutes late, but that was because just as I was leaving, Jasmine popped in unexpectedly at the hostel and invited me out to dinner. I told her I had to go to my new job, and she murmured that she "missed me". I missed her too, in a way, so I suggested we meet up for lunch the next day. She offered to drive me to the bar, but I explained that as I'd lost the address I could only get there by taking the subway and walking in a certain direction from the exit. She nodded with pursed lips and downcast eyes, and left. Later, I waltzed into the Irish pub with my baseball hat perched rakishly on my head like James Cagney. Danny saw me and grinned, and all the Taiwanese waitresses giggled as he led me into the kitchen. Washing dishes at the only Irish pub in Taipei was no different than when I washed dishes at Boston Chicken when I was 16: dirty, wet and thankless. After a couple hours of scrubbing plates with encrusted onion rings, hamburgers and shepherd's pie, I told my teenage co-worker, Wilson, that I needed a break. "You tired already?" he said, a sudsy pizza tray in his hands. I nodded gravely and walked out into the bar area in my grime-splattered apron, staggering through a sea of pulsating lights and blaring house music. It was Ladies' Night, and looking around the makeshift dance floor, it seemed like most of the girls were young and Asian, and the guys old and foreign. "What kind of world is this?" I thought. Danny was behind the bar barking orders at the staff. The crush of half-drunken businessmen with slicked-back hair and neat button-down shirts was intense, and glasses of Carlsberg draft, which was on special, were filling up like canteens at an oasis. As I was looking around like a deer in the headlights, Danny shouted: "Eh laddie! Too much grit an' grime there in the washin'? I'll git ya a pint for ya troubles." He grinned in a wolfish way and I couldn't tell if he was joking. "Ok, I'll have a Guinness," I said warily. He filled up the glass himself from the tap, looked intently at the bubbling foam head for a moment and slammed it down in front of me. Some of the liquid sloshed over onto my hand. "Sorry laddie. Did I git ya? Over there's the fuckin' tissues. Now git the fuck back ta work!" he roared. I stared at him blankly, keenly aware that Ladies' Night was far less fun for staff than for patrons. After glaring at me for a second, he turned to take the order of a fiftyish man with a thick accent who looked like an overweight version of Novak Djokovic. I leaned back against the bar and took in the chaos all around me. Some of the girls were pretty cute with their short shorts and fit-and-trim bodies. I decided I wasn't ready to feel like a 16-year-old who went home soaked to the bone in greasy water every night again—I was in Taiwan, and I needed to see what it was all about. Like a fool, I drank the whole pint in a couple gulps—the first one I'd had in months—and sauntered onto the dance floor. At first I was just dancing by myself doing a bent-knee foot-grab maneuver I'd perfected during my days as a birthday clown. But as I started to feel tipsy, my balance got worse, and the next thing I knew I landed face-first in a puddle of beer, a pair of golden high heels gyrating inches away from my face. Some Dutch student types picked me up off the ground. "You got it mate?" "I got it!" I said, and started doing my next-best move—the robotic dragon. My clothes were now wet with dance-floor beer spillage, but I barely noticed as they were already soaked from dishwashing. I was afraid of going back to the bar and confronting Danny, so I just kept dancing. Eventually, I started grinding with a heavily made up older lady with overdeveloped breasts—the one with the golden high heels. It was a good time, but then I saw Wilson come out of the kitchen with a where-the-hell's-the-new-guy look on his face. Thinking now would be a fine time to make my exit, I asked the woman dancing with me if she wanted to come along. "Five-thousand," she said, smiling deviously and looking excited. I wasn't sure what she meant at first, but I didn't have much time to consider—from the corner of my eye I saw Wilson talking to Danny at the bar, jabbing his finger in my direction. "Can I put it on my tab?" I said, realizing the woman was a prostitute. "I work here." She turned her back to me and moved towards a lanky kid with glasses who looked like he'd just graduated from MIT. All of a sudden, Wilson's hand was on my shoulder and he was shouting over the din, "Danny wants talk to you!" "Ok!" I yelled back. I walked past the bar on my way out and saw that Danny's face was as red as a new toy wagon. Taking off my soiled white apron, I left it on a table near the door and stepped out into the night. A bunch of beefy Western guys and scantily clad Taiwanese girls were smoking cigarettes and guffawing out on the sidewalk. I stalked past them to the corner, bathing myself in the bright fluorescent lights of the nearby 7-11. As I stood there watching yellow taxis meander through the wet streets, I started to feel worried. I'd just quit my first real job in Taiwan—after about three hours—and I still had almost no money. Desperately in need of someone to talk to, I used a payphone to call the one friend I had in Taipei—Jasmine. It was a bit late, but as Popsicle was at cram school studying physics until 11:00 and her husband was out of town, she agreed to meet me at a coffee shop. "I quit my job," I blurted out as soon as we'd sat down. "But you just start tonight? I don't know why you call me so soon," she said with somber eyes. "Well, I wasn't really—" "You drinking?" she said suddenly. "Smell like alcohol." "Maybe a little. It's a bar, you know." She frowned, small creases forming on her pristine forehead. We studied our menus in silence, Jasmine's strait black hair hanging down over her face like the beautiful star of a horror movie. When I asked her how her day had been, she said, "Same," and shrugged. After a pause she asked, "How you will make money?" "I don't know. Maybe I can become a dog walker. Do they have those here?" "But you don't have dog." "Exactly." "Your visa? I think you not able to stay long," she said sadly. "I've still got like a month left. If I can find a job soon, maybe they'll give me another one?" I had no idea how it worked, I realized, but it wouldn't matter anyway if I ran out of dough. "But you just quit job. I think you not want to work?" "No, no . . . it just wasn't the right job for me. Know what I mean? Not my style." "You go back to China? You don't like here?" she asked sharply while looking down at her cup of steaming tea. "No, I didn't say that. I like it here. I just . . . don't know what to do." I waved my hand in frustration. "Look, do you know of any jobs? Besides tutoring Popsicle, I mean." "Me? Jobs?" She knitted her brow as though it were a profound question, taking a sip from the shot-sized teacup. "Can you teach yoga?" "No." "Do you play chess?" "Not very well." "Teach English still OK?" "Yeah, but I'm not sure I'm qualified." "Lady in my yoga class work at English school. I talk with her next week. Teach kindergarten." "Ok, great," I said, though I actually dreaded the prospect of teaching kids—at least if they were anything like Popsicle. After more silent musing, she looked down at her phone and said she had to go. Outside, as we were saying goodbye, I tried to give her a hug, but she went stiff like somebody in rigor mortis and I ended up awkwardly patting her on the shoulder. She flushed, and then turned and walked away down the dimly lit sidewalk. "If you hear anything, let me know. Thanks!" I shouted after her. She just kept walking with her head down. As I watched Jasmine fade into the distance, it felt like my life in Taiwan were coming to an abrupt and unceremonious end. Ironically, however, that was just when things started to turn around. Trudging back to the YYYC in a disconsolate and hopeless state, I was so put out that I actually got inspired, composing a little story on the back of a napkin. It was about a guy who worked at a bar but quit on his first day, and it turned out to be less than 200 words, meaning it met the submission guidelines of a magazine like Short Rounds. To make a long story short, I sent it in, and a couple months later, not only did I have my first work published, but I started winning all kinds of flash-fiction awards and shit. I'm still not sure if people were more interested in the story itself or my bio, because—as I alluded to before—there was a lot of ink spilled about which parts were true and false. So now, gentle reader, I hope I've cleared up at least some of your doubts. Just for the record, I wasn't born on a bayou, but I did grow up near one, and—if you really must know—I had a brief stint as a professional whittler many years ago. Also, if you're wondering about what happened to Jasmine, let's just say we're still in touch, and I have a sneaking suspicion that one of these days she's going to be filing for divorce . . . . Copyright 2020. All rights reserved.
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