The Stolen Bicycle Read online

  Twenty years ago, when my father first went missing, it occurred to us that if we could find his bicycle, we might find him. Only then did we discover that his bicycle was gone, too—that Pa and his iron steed had left us together.

  A writer embarks on an epic quest in search of his missing father’s stolen bicycle and soon finds himself caught up in the strangely intertwined stories of Lin Wang, the oldest elephant who ever lived, the soldiers who fought in the jungles of South-East Asia during the Second World War, and the secret worlds of the butterfly handicraft makers and antique bicycle fanatics of Taiwan. The Stolen Bicycle is both a majestic historical novel and a profound, startlingly intimate meditation on memory, family and home.

  Contents

  Parts of the Bicycle

  One Hundred Years in Taipei

  Before Time

  A History of the Bicycles My Family Has Lost

  A-pu’s Cave

  Bike Notes I

  Kyoko’s Place

  Bike Notes II

  Psyche

  Bike Notes III

  Moon Like a Silver Wheel

  Bike Notes IV

  Bicycle Thieves

  Bike Notes V

  Forests of Northern Burma

  Bike Notes VI

  Chokushi Boulevard

  Limbo

  Bike Notes VII

  The Tree

  Postscript: A Time Beyond Mourning

  Translator’s Note

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  Copyright

  Before Time

  I must describe that morning for you, because every time something is described anew it becomes meaningful anew. I must start by letting the dawn spread out, the morning light stroll over the land. I have to take the trees, the houses in the village, the local school, the fields with their medleys of colour, and the little fishing boats swaying with the wind at the seashore, and place them one by one like chess pieces in the landscape.

  There’s no smoke puffing from the chimneys of the houses, so the air is fresh and sweet. The countryside looks so clean, like every stalk of rice was washed by rain the night before. Stand here and you’ll see, way over there, a wistful, simple, lonely-looking village of farmers and fishers. Beyond the village is a sandy beach, beyond the beach the sea.

  The sound of the sea brings a desolate loneliness that paces on the breeze through the village to the fields, pressing waves into the rice. Dawn’s faint light shines on arcs of grain, new ears of rice that from afar appear eerily still and fine.

  Darklight birds—night owls and herons—are returning to the roost in scattered formations, while the early birds tweet and chirp. On a distant ridge appear several black dots, which get bigger and closer, until we see that they’re kids, running towards us through the fields. Four of them, all in pants, all short-haired, so that only when they run close enough do we see a boy and three girls.

  The boy is dark, his features plain, but he’s long-limbed. Two of the girls seem to be twins, alike in appearance, in skin tone, both wincing as they run, even breathing with the same rhythm, but if you look close, one moves like there’s no tomorrow, as if she has a plan to go carry out, while the other is a bit knock-kneed—although her most striking feature, even when she’s not smiling, is her pronounced dimples. The last in line is small and seems to be the youngest. She’s running hard, as if afraid of getting left behind. Their clothes are a bit worn, a bit too big, but fairly clean.

  As the children draw near, they huddle together to talk something over. Then they split up and run to different corners of the closest field. Soon, like swooping skylarks, they vanish into the grass. The rice field shelters them.

  ‘Yay!’ the children call to one another, their voices shrill with delight.

  Crouching in the field, the children are hidden, but soon four scarecrows who’ve been lying around all night stand up and start to sway. This is their job for today, to scare away the grain birds—little sparrows—who come to eat the rice. It’s the time of year when ears of grain grow bristles—they’ll be scything the rice soon, you know. Until then, they have to stop the grain birds from eating the rice. But wouldn’t you know it, those grain birds are too smart to be afraid of scarecrows who stand there stock-still: they’d soon see through the ruse and eat up every last grain, blithely cocking their cute little heads, chittering about the taste of this year’s crop.

  Now that everyone in the village can take a break from farm work until the grain is ripe enough to reap, the grown-ups always tell the youngest children to go sway the scarecrows. Then the men go out fishing while the women stay at home to tend their gardens. It’s a division of labour on which a family’s livelihood depends.

  Still crouching in the field, the children shout back and forth joyfully, each voice wafting the scent of rice to another’s hiding place. They take turns calling out and waiting for a reply. But sometimes all they hear for the longest time is the sound of the wind, because some kids fall asleep.

  After a burst of talk and laughter, the little dimpled girl sees not far in front of her a tiny nest on a rice stalk. It’s the home of a no-yellow-belly-oh, another bird that eats rice. Father told her. Father usually plucks the nest and crushes the eggs or kills the hatchlings, not out of spite, but to protect his crop. The little girl peers in. Inside are a few birdies, who crane their necks at first and cheep, assuming the commotion means their mama has returned. When they discover she has not, they quieten down and crouch low in the nest.

  ‘Ooh! Four little birdies!’ says the girl with the dimples. She doesn’t plan on telling Father about her discovery. At this age her sympathies still lean more towards the birdies than the rice. She tilts her head back to look at the scarecrow she’s holding. Worried that the mama bird won’t dare approach, the girl slowly withdraws. The sun gets brighter and brighter. From afar comes a queer rumbling sound the girl has not yet noticed. She looks up at the glistening dew in the sunlit paddy. She finds it beautiful and a bit…well, disconcerting. She’ll have to wait till she’s a bit older before she’ll hear from her mother’s mouth the word hi-bî—forlorn. Maybe the other kids are all asleep, she thinks. She lets herself fall asleep, too.

  *

  Time passes, who knows how long. The girl with the dimples wakes up and smells something strange on the air. Her head feels heavy—she’s never felt like this before. She tries to speak but can’t hear her own voice, which seems to dart about, like a bug, without ever reaching her ears.

  She gets up, stubs her toe on the fallen scarecrow, runs out of the grass and sees gaps in the green horizon, like chunks of land have been inexplicably dug away. There are clouds in the sky, dark, leaden. ‘Is it nearly evening now?’ the girl with the dimples wonders.

  No, that’s impossible! It just felt like a short nap. She looks around and again calls the names of her companions—no answer. Nothing. Not even the sound of cicadas, or the glub glub of the little fieldclams who live in the field. It’s like they’ve been gagged and dragged away. At first she feels like running back into the grass to look for her friends, but the field has become so strange, so threatening. It intimidates her. The little girl feels frightened, but the dimples have not disappeared. She starts running, not knowing where she is going, or even that she is running. Is this the way she just came? Is it?

  ‘Run on home, quick,’ says a voice in her heart. That was what her mother told her: if anything happens, run on home and find a grown-up. She hurries at the thought, but soon trips and falls. She scrambles up and sees a shiny black bicycle—that must be what tripped her. One time she saw a Japanese policeman chasing someone on a bicycle just like it. How fast he went! If she rides it, she can make it back to the village, quick.


  ‘Go on home!’ say the charred rice stalks.

  ‘Go on home!’ say the cattle egrets, flying in single file.

  ‘Go on home!’ say the trickling irrigation ditches.

  The bicycle is so big and tall it seems like an iron horse, impossible to lift. But from somewhere she finds the strength, so great is her desire to go home. Gripping the handlebar stem, she drags the bike upright and then pushes it forward with an ooomph, sets the wheels turning, runs along beside it. The hub, the axle, the chain—the whole bike follows the rhythm of the girl’s running, gathering speed and growing lighter. Click clack, click clack, click clack. The little girl isn’t tall enough to mount the seat; even if she could, her feet wouldn’t reach the pedals. With a surge of animal instinct, she sticks a leg through the bicycle frame so that she can reach the left pedal. It’s a way of riding a bicycle the children call sankakunori—triangle-riding.

  Hi, ya! Hi, ya! She starts pedalling. Hi! Back to the village! Yak! Hurry! Hi!

  A black rain begins to fall. No, look closely, and you’ll see it’s a sooty, almost granular haze that’s blocking the sun’s rays and wrapping the land in ashen gauze. It’s not really rain, just looks so much like it.

  A History of the Bicycles My Family Has Lost

  No matter how I tell it, this story has to start with bicycles. To be more precise, it has to start with stolen bicycles. ‘Iron horses have influenced the fate of our entire family,’ my mother used to say. I would describe my mother as a New Historicist: to her, there are no Great Men, no heroes, no bombing of Pearl Harbor. She only remembers seemingly trivial—but to her fateful—matters like bicycles going missing. The word for fate in Mandarin is ming-yun, literally ‘life-luck’ or ‘command-turn’. But ‘fate’ in my mother’s native tongue of Taiwanese is the other way round: ūn-miā. It belies fatalism, putting luck in front of life, suggesting you can turn the wheel of fate yourself instead of awaiting the commands of Heaven.

  Sometimes I wonder if I can really call myself a bicycle fanatic. Maybe not. To be honest, there are things about bicycles I like, and things I can’t stand. I love their geometric simplicity, the double triangle design with a wheel at each end. Could there be anything finer than two chain-driven wheels turning ceaselessly down roads and paths, through forest and farmland, by lake and bay? But I hate the sore bum I get from a long ride. I also hate cyclists posing in sunglasses and all the pro gear, thinking they’re cool when they couldn’t even pedal up the modest slope of Yang-teh Boulevard. You know the type: guy with a bulging gut who parks his expensive bike by the side of the road to show it off. Whenever I see a guy like that, I hope his chain falls off. Or that he gets a flat or a broken spoke.

  Sometimes I think what fascinates me isn’t bicycles per se but the names people have called them by, and all those names imply. Monsieur Pierre Michaux et fils, the guys who invented the machine, called them ‘fast feet with pedals’, vélocipèdes à pédales. Another Frenchman, Pierre Lallement, modified the design, producing the modern ‘bicycle’, meaning ‘two circles’ (a bilingual compound, from the Latin bi and the Greek kyklos).

  For as long as I can remember, I’ve asked everyone I meet who speaks a different language how they say bicycle: bike, vélo, cykel, 자전거, велосипед, jízdní kolo, ةجارد…I can only speak two languages, Taiwanese and Mandarin, but I can say bicycle in thirty-six. When it comes to bicycles, I’m a polyglot.

  In the world I grew up in, the word a person used for ‘bicycle’ told you a lot about them. Jiten-sha (‘self-turn vehicle’) indicated a person had received a Japanese education. Thih-bé (‘iron horse’) meant he was a native speaker of Taiwanese, as did Khóng-bîng-tshia (‘Kung-ming vehicle’), named for an ancient Chinese inventor. Tan-ch’e (‘solo vehicle’), chiao-t’a-ch’e (‘foot-pedalled vehicle’) or tsuhsing-ch’e (‘auto-mobile vehicle’) told you they were from the south of China. But everyone uses these terms now, so they’re no longer a reliable way to tell how old someone is or where they come from.

  If you ask me my own preference, it would have to be khóngbîng-tshia and thih-bé, spoken by my mother in Taiwanese.

  Especially thih-bé—iron horse. Such a beautiful expression, evoking both the natural world and human endeavour! Imagine the Creator laying down seams of iron-rich rock for people to mine and cast into carbon steel in the shape of a horse. What a pity thih-bé is now in decline. That’s just life: something may be inherently superior but end up getting replaced anyway. So has it been with thih-bé, replaced by tan-ch’e or chiao-t’a-ch’e. It’s foolish, if you ask me, a kind of cultural devolution.

  Another thing I find intriguing about bicycles is how each machine is unique to the era in which it was built. I believe someday someone could write a history of the iron horse, with each era named for a particular model. This was the year the Fuji Monarch was released. In this year endeth the reign of the Kennet. This year witnessed the ascendance of the Lucky Three Speed Hub Racer. From this point of view, you could call me a Historical Materialist: the world would have evolved in a different way if the iron horse had never been invented.

  As I was just saying, to tell you the story of my family I’ve got to start with all those stolen bicycles—with one theft in particular, which took place in the thirty-eighth year of the Meiji era, the tenth year of the Japanese period in Taiwan: 1905.

  If you dabble in history, then you’ll know that in January of that year the Russian troops who had been holed up at Port Arthur on the Liaodong Peninsula in Manchuria for 157 days finally surrendered. Not long after, Russia lost the Battle of Mukden, the last battle of the Russo-Japanese War. Japan’s victory might have started to warp its national military ambitions. Soon after, a massive earthquake in Kangra, India, claimed nineteen thousand lives, while the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, then in exile in Japan, was founding a secret society dedicated to overthrowing the Ch’ing dynasty. At about the same time in Britain, the keel was laid on the HMS Dreadnought, which ushered in a new era in naval history. Also in 1905, Fritz Schaudinn discovered Treponema pallidum, the pathogen behind a dark disease which had tormented countless thousands of people: syphilis.

  It was also the year in which my maternal grandfather was born.

  His birth was not a historical event by any stretch of the imagination. There was no notice in the newspaper or anything like that. But in my mother’s memory, my grandfather’s birth has always been tied to a newspaper, and a bicycle in a picture in that newspaper. Ma used to say that Grandpa had vowed as a young man to buy a bicycle of his very own to carry the rice harvest and tools into town—even, someday, his pregnant wife, when she went into labour, so she could give birth in a clinic. This was a vow he never forgot as long as he lived. And what prompted this vow, if you can believe it, was a page from an old newspaper, the Taiwan Nichi Nichi Shimpō, Taiwan’s first daily newspaper, dated 27 September in the thirty-eighth year of the Meiji era.

  I’m told my maternal great-grandfather, who couldn’t read a single word, had found the newspaper while selling fish in town that day and brought it home as a gift for his newborn son. To him, that newspaper was a symbol of social mobility: he hoped his child would one day get an education. My great-grandfather folded it up to the size of a handkerchief, wrapped it in two pieces of sackcloth, and put it in a kind of iron box that was still quite rare at the time. He even went to town to ask a sian-sinn—a teacher or doctor or simply someone who could read—to read him the news. So it was that my grandfather came to know what had happened on the day he was born like the back of his hand.

  According to my ma, the first time she saw the crisp, yellowed newspaper, my grandfather pointed to the bottom-right corner, at a news story he considered particularly significant. The headline read: Self-Turn Self-Turns. It was about how a well-known doctor from Tainan lost his metal steed while making a house call. One day he leaned his two-wheeler against a wall and rushed inside to see a patient, who ordered his boy servant to go out and wheel it in—bu
t when the boy went outside it had already been ridden off. ‘Like the yellow crane,’ the newspaper said, ‘the steed of the immortal gives flight, going who knows whither.’

  People who’ve studied the folk history of the Japanese era in Taiwan might know that a bicycle then was like a Mercedes-Benz today. No, it was more like owning a house. If a bicycle was stolen, the newspaper would report it: that’s how important it was. To my grandfather, the news of this particular theft was poignant. As he put it, ‘To think that in the year I came into the world there were already people who had iron horses for people to steal! Really makes a man feel hard done by.’

  My grandfather died in the prime of his life. It was in 1945, the year the war ended—after an American air raid. The cause of death was a stolen bicycle. Again, the bicycle wasn’t his. Grandfather never had a bike of his own, his whole life long: he died without fulfilling his youthful vow. Every one of his nine children was delivered at home by the village midwife, and they’d all survived, every one. For a poor farming household with so many mouths to feed, losing the head of the family was really unfortunate.

  Of course, if you talk to my mother long enough, sooner or later she’ll tell you about the third time the theft of an iron horse featured in my family’s history. The iron horse in question actually belonged to my father this time: it was his very first bicycle. Brand unknown, model unknown.

  My father made western-style suits. Later on he also sold jeans, but my mother said making suits suited his personality better, because he was é-káu—the quiet type. As long as he had scissors, pattern paper, needle and thread, he could work the whole day without saying a thing. All we would hear was the swish swash of the shears flowing like water across the fabric, or the click clack of the treadle like a mine car trundling down a track. My mother was a factory girl, trained in fabric edging. Having spent such long periods focused on a fixed point, her beautiful eyes always looked like they were dreaming.