Free Ghost Month by Ed Lin

tonight. The first year alone was probably the worst timeever in my life. For some reason I couldn’t shake off the jetlag, and I was struggling at the stall. People heard that both my parents had died and, while they were sympathetic, they avoided my “cursed” booth.
    In my weakness, I allowed Dwayne to set up a small shrine at work with photos of my grandfather and my parents. What really got me was how worried Dwayne looked. The big guy was shaking in his sandals. I’d never realized how much he needed this job. We kept joss sticks burning on one of the corner shelves, and he was always paranoid that they had gone out.
    I told myself there was absolutely nothing religious about the shrine. It was just a sign of respect, not ancestor worship, and there were no idols. I never bowed when lighting the incense. I merely watched the smoke waft around and remembered the three of them. None of them ever seemed very happy with the way I cooked, but maybe negative reinforcement was their way of training me.
    I knew I had hit rock bottom when I bought a bulk pack of joss sticks. I was buying into a system I despised. What a hypocrite.
    Desperately, I began to yell out to tourists in English to eat our food. I am an introvert by nature. I hate calling attention to myself, which is basically what I started doing. The “Johnny” persona was born. It worked better than I expected. I learned how valuable English fluency was as the skewers flew from our grill like greasy sparrows.
    The first profitable week we had, Dwayne was so relieved he tried to wrestle me to the ground. That was when the nightly matches started.
    The business wouldn’t have made it if I hadn’t made a concerted effort to pull in tourists who knew nothing about me, my family or my stand. Random strangers saved us, and I never forgot it. I tossed out the shrine and returned the photos to a desk drawer back home. Dwayne said I was courting disaster, but not even he could deny that our sales remained strong.
    M Y FAMILY HADN ’ T BEEN cursed by angry spirits and gods. My parents were haunted and hobbled by the debt accumulated by my grandfather decades before I was even born.
    When my father first nervously sat me down to tell me the whole story, I was worried he was going to try to explain sex. It turned out to be something even more immediately intangible to a ten-year-old.
    Not long after my grandfather came to Taipei with my grandmother to set up Tastes Good with a single charcoal hibachi grill, he found he had some free time in the late mornings and early afternoons. The night market was a lot smaller back then and had far fewer tourists.
    The two of them were already living in this toaster building in the 1950s, when the Wanhua District was primarily a red-light district. It was probably a “pretty girl” (the term my father used instead of “prostitute”) who first brought my grandfather into a gambling parlor that was open at all hours of the day.
    The cops, many of them former soldiers, left the joint alone. Martial law was still the rule of the day over all of Taiwan, and the gambling operated under the guise of buying “patriotic bonds”—money that would go toward outfitting the army to “retake the mainland.”
    We don’t know what games my grandfather lost at, but he never seemed to win at anything. He considered fleeing to Japan, a typical refuge for those who had grown up in colonial Taiwan. But my grandmother told him she was pregnant. The news renewed his spirit. Unfortunately, he believed his luck had turned. My grandfather exchanged the deed of the toaster building for a bundle of patriotic bonds and proceeded to lose them as fast as if he had fed them into a fire. He returned to the gambling parlor with his set of knives and the singular hibachi, seeking to hock them for more bonds. The teller called out to the boss, German’s dad.
    “You can’t exchange these,” the elder
jiaotou
had said, “because I already own them. After