The Stolen Bicycle Read online

  My mother had given birth to four daughters in a row, which made my father despair even more than poverty. He wanted a son, and he made my mother a proposition. They would take a gamble and have another child. If it was a boy, their child-bearing years would be done. If it was a girl, they would give her away and give it another go. ‘She’ll have a better fate,’ he said. In Taiwanese, this was ē khah hó-miā—the same miā as in ūn-miā. Out of an ill-advised faith that ūn-miā would not make a fool of her, my mother agreed. And wouldn’t you know it, she had another girl. Ma had always been resigned to whatever fate sent her way, but this time she wasn’t going to grin and bear it. Father, his own heart uneasy, did not press the matter, and there was no further talk of giving the baby to our aunt in the country. They had not, however, given up on their desire to have a son, not by any means, and since they hoped the next child would not be another girl, my fifth sister was named A-muá, meaning ‘full’—or ‘Enough, enough!’

  The latest addition to the family meant they had to work harder and harder, to throw themselves into their work all day long. But they could hardly rush the tailoring process. From taking the measurements to the basted fitting to adjustment and delivery, even a modestly priced western suit required several weeks of work. To help make ends meet, my mother did piecework for a garment factory. According to my eldest sister, there was a time when all Ma did was make pockets. She filled every corner of the house with stacks of the exact same kind of pocket, tens of thousands of them. Ma and Pa both worked from dawn till dusk, and often much later, but come evening their longing for a son remained unsatisfied.

  Ūn-miā guarantees nothing, though, except that nothing people promise is for sure. A year later Ma gave birth to my elder brother. With an extra mouth to feed, the family could barely scrape a living, and my father, who now had the son he’d always wanted, decided that five girls in the house was one too many, one more than had been allotted by fate.

  Early one morning, just after my mother set out for the market, my father took A-muá in his arms and without saying a thing left for Taipei Station, planning to take the first train to the countryside to deliver her to our barren aunt. Having had her midnight meal of thin rice gruel, A-muá was fast asleep in her bamboo basket. The early summer sun had risen, and the city was coming to life. Meanwhile, my mother had carried my brother all the way to the farmers’ market before realising that, with the paltry change in her purse, she couldn’t get much of anything but a pair of sore legs. So, despondent, she came home early to find First Sis tending the fire with Fourth Sis on her back, Second Sis rinsing rice, and Third Sis wiping the display windows. Brother had bawled the whole way home on Ma’s back—well on his way to a career of annoying everyone around him to no end.

  My mother quickly discovered that our A-muá was not at home. She asked her eldest and found out that Pa had gone out, taking A-muá with him. Those conversations they’d had, night after night, flashed through her mind. ‘Oh no!’ she cried and rushed out into the street. But with my brother weighing her down, there was no way she would make it in time to catch my father before he departed on that train. So she came back and gave my brother to her eldest. Then, with single-minded determination, she got the key out of the secret compartment of the cabinet and opened the four-corner spoke lock that Pa oiled every day. Nobody knew why Pa hadn’t taken A-muá to the station on his bike that day. Maybe carrying her in his arms hinted at his irresolution?

  By my mother’s own account, this was the first time in her life she’d ever ridden an iron horse. And the last. (She must be misremembering, or maybe deliberately neglecting to mention her true first time.) Incredibly, she grasped the principle by instinct, in just a few seconds, just like she knew how to lean into the wind in a rainstorm, her broad bamboo hat pulled low as she planted the rice seedlings, just like she knew how to nurse her children, just like she knew how to grit her teeth and bear all pain. She rode the iron horse through the Chung-hwa Market, where we were living, travelling north beneath its covered walkways, then right at the roundabout around the North Gate, onto Chung-hsiao West Road, which she took all the way to the locomotives.

  If you happened to pass by Taipei Station that day, you would have seen her fly by in a floral print dress so sweaty it stuck to her back, her white slip billowing in the wind behind her like a blooming flower (Pa had made that dress for her). My mother, who couldn’t read a single word, didn’t bother looking at the departures board but went straight for the ticket window, pushing and shoving her way through the hordes of desperate ticket-buyers trying to flee the city to ask when the early train that her husband might be taking was leaving. And from which platform!

  When my father saw her, he was initially shocked, then ashamed, and finally enraged. He sighed a long sigh and handed A-muá, who was howling at the ride around the roundabout her fate had taken, to his wife. Then he walked, silent as usual and with his hands behind his back, out of the train station. My mother, also silent, trotted close behind. Anger had lengthened my father’s strides, meaning my mother had to scurry along to keep up. In her haste, she forgot all about the iron horse. As a result, they lost the bike—worth several months’ takings from the shop.

  Nobody knew how my father really felt about this episode, because he never expressed any opinion, just like he never commented on current events when he read the paper, never shared his memories and never chimed in when my mother shared hers. It was like he’d sold the right to reflect on his life to someone else. It was as if none of this had anything to do with him.

  The incident has always made me think about the two aspects of time: the concrete and the abstract. In concrete terms, the train was a minute late that day, and by riding the bike my mother was twenty minutes faster than she would have been if she’d gone by foot. Those twenty-one minutes ensured that A-muá remained in the family. This fact is part of my family’s history. But in abstract terms, those twenty-one minutes never passed, for in the following decades my mother has recounted them over and over, complaining to A-muá and reminding us all how she suffered. It’s one of the topics she turns to when trying to claim the sympathy she sees as her due. Those twenty-one minutes, and my father’s shamefaced look, were her proofs of how poor and pathetic the family was at the time, and testament to her love for us all.

  And the one who almost sent A-muá packing, usurping her place in the bamboo basket as the baby of the family, my oblivious elder brother—well, he was the reason my father lost his second bicycle. But that happened sixteen years later.

  The loss of my father’s third bicycle had to do with me.

  I’m the youngest child in the family, by far—I was a ‘tail baby’, born unexpectedly fourteen years after my mother vowed never to have another child. As a result, all the anecdotes I’ve been relating are hearsay—mainly my mother’s, with some supplementation from my sisters. They aren’t my own personal experiences and couldn’t possibly be.

  Yes, I was born long after that—my parents had me when they were both past forty, a whole generation behind my older siblings. Too young to remember their shared past, I never felt part of my family’s story. They always liked to tell me what the Chung-hwa Market was like in ‘back in the good old days’, what a struggle it had been, how poor they were, and the conclusion would always be, ‘You’re so lucky’—lí siōng hó-miā. Which always seemed so unfair. Why had I been denied the chance to experience the golden era my parents had lived through or endure the dire poverty my siblings had known, their only amusement high-jumping over an elastic band on the roof? Who were they to sneer at me as ‘lucky’?

  As an adult, I found a way to be part of those times—to grow up alongside my siblings, or even my mother—by listening to their stories and recreating ‘the good old days’ in words. I could suffer with them, laugh with them. I couldn’t grow up with my father, though, because he said so little about himself, which was a shame. His life before he married my mother was a blank. I know about as much about it
as we do about the tribal history of the mysterious little black folk of Taiwanese tribal myth.

  To my surprise, I became so accustomed to recreating the past in my own words that I ended up writing stories for various magazines, and have even been called a writer on occasion. Of course, my mother was initially contemptuous of my profession (she always hoped I’d be a lawyer), and even now she’s doubtful. (To her, anyone who doesn’t make their living by producing something concrete is dubious.)

  Sometimes I wonder what kind of job it is, being a writer, and why society allows a particular group of people to take writing—a semiotic system humanity invented for entirely different purposes—and use it to make their living telling stories. And how do the people who do this job get away with bending, forging or casting words so as to excite, haunt or even torment their readers?

  I must admit that I have my mother to thank the most for whatever feeling for language I have as a writer. It was she who initiated me into the power of words, and the true meaning of abstract terms like ‘love’. The way she used the word love, the meaning she gave it, couldn’t be found in the dictionary. When she told me stories about how hard she had it when she first married my father, she’d always end by saying, ‘None of you’ll ever know how much I sacrificed.’ Of everyone I know, she’s the most given to taking stock, and her assessment, freely offered, is that she has made an enormous sacrifice for the family—and that we must love her and care about her as much as she has loved us and cared about us.

  Only much later did I start to understand that when my mother said ‘sacrifice’, she meant love. Sacrifice = love. That is the profound, solemn, obscure equation she’s spent her whole life teaching me. As a result, I’ve always, as an adult, been afraid to say the word love or even hear it, because whenever it appears, sacrifice will follow close behind. If someone makes a sacrifice for you, you won’t feel all of a flutter inside. Likewise, when you make a sacrifice for someone else, they’re not likely to feel like celebrating. Sacrifice is a proof of love and love is the result of sacrifice, and vice versa. I wonder if this is why ‘I love you’ has always been difficult for me to say.

  My ma said that before I turned eight I was truly hard work. I spat up milk, was a picky eater and got the chickenpox and the snakes (our word for shingles). I was always falling down. But after the age of eight I grew strong and tall as a birdcrap banyan.

  Two things happened when I turned eight. The first had to do with death, and the second with life. No, it’d be more accurate to say that life and death were intertwined in one and the same event.

  When I was about seven, I had to learn to go to the bathroom on my own, because I had already started school. As none of the shops in the market had its own toilet, we all had to use the public restrooms at either end: the men’s toilet was at one end, the ladies’ at the other.

  What genius designed the cubicles in the men’s room? The doors were only 140 centimetres high, providing no privacy: they were just slat doors, the slats nailed none too flush. When you squatted inside, you could look out at an angle, and anyone squatting at a certain angle outside could peep in. Later on I learned that the design was supposed to stop people from hiding inside and sniffing crazy glue.

  To celebrate my eighth birthday, my mother splurged on a chicken leg, and she even went to the western-style bakery to buy me a one-twelfth wedge of chocolate cake, with a bottle of Yakult yogurt drink to wash it down. Even without candles, I was happy to wolf it all down after my brother and sisters sang ‘Happy Birthday’, but I gave myself a terrible stomach-ache.

  I had to go to the bathroom on my own, of course. When I started school, Ma had told me that any schoolboy who went to the ladies’ room with his mother would be called ‘birdless’—‘bird’ being our word for dick.

  I could see what a loss of face this would be, but humiliation paled in comparison to my anxiety and fear about going to the toilet on my own. I’d never told my parents the real reason I didn’t dare go by myself. On my first solitary trip, I’d witnessed something utterly bewildering, which got me in the habit of resisting the urge. My record was going seven days without taking a number two.

  When I’d first started making ‘practice’ trips, my sister would wait outside for me until I was done. Later, my mother told her she should let me go on my own. The day I got up the courage to go to the public toilet by myself, grasping a wad of paper in my hand, I chose, as was my custom, the least filthy cubicle, at the very end of the row. Soon after I crouched down, an unfamiliar middle-aged man wearing a floral print shirt walked in and stopped at the urinal directly opposite. I watched his back as he pulled down his fly. Soon another man, wearing a green jacket, walked over, and they seemed to look at one another. (I couldn’t see their heads, which were blocked by a slat.) Then the man in the green jacket knelt before the other’s open fly, cupped the erect penis that jutted from his black pubic hair (something which, never having seen my father naked, I had never seen before), and started sucking it. I couldn’t help but stare, and for a while I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t dare stand up, flush and leave. I forgot that I could close my eyes.

  That evening, I came down with something. I was struck by an inexplicable high fever for two days and left constipated for an entire week.

  At first I thought it had been an accident, that it wouldn’t happen again. But time after time, the same ‘accident’ recurred. In retrospect, I think maybe they waited until I went in, so they could follow me and put on a ‘show’. Indeed, I think it was a deliberate performance with only a seven-year-old boy for an audience because every so often the faces blocked by the slats seemed to glance in my direction. In my imagination, both men smiled obscenely.

  From then on, going to the men’s room was torture. My mother had to nag me into going to the bathroom every day. I would run up onto the skywalk—a pedestrian bridge that crossed the road—clutching a wad of paper, wait the time it took to take a dump, toss the paper in the bin and run back home.

  The day I ate a chicken leg and a wedge of chocolate cake, drank a bottle of Yakult yogurt drink and got diarrhoea for my birthday, a strange man, maybe new to the market, came in wearing a pair of grey flares and a Hawaiian shirt—the height of fashion at the time. Nobody else followed him in, but when he was still standing there long after he should have finished peeing, I got a bad feeling.

  Then he turned around and faced the cubicle I was crouching in. The slatted door prevented me from forming a complete picture of him, but I could still see his penis, seemingly chopped into two equal lengths by one of the slats, headed right for me.

  Then he squatted down, looked at me with puffy eyes so narrow it was almost surreal, and said, ‘You’ll only live to forty-five.’ He said it so calmly and softly that he could have been patting my head and saying, ‘Good morning, little boy.’

  When I got home, I felt dazed, my head heavy. I came down with another fever. The age of forty-five seemed as far away as Mars back then, but the man’s eyes and his smile gave me a feeling I had never felt before, like an ice-cold needle working its way through a vein towards my heart. I had a high fever for three days, slept fitfully for another three. I kept talking in my sleep. Years later, my mother would frequently remind me of it. She would always say that there were two saviours in my life: the first was the Holy King, and the other was Dr Lîm.

  For the first two days of my fever, my parents didn’t take me to the doctor, because it was simply too expensive. My father went to the pharmacy to buy me something over the counter, to see if we could ‘press the fever down’, while my mother went to the Holy King for a paper charm, which she burnt to ashes, mingled with water and had me swallow.

  I still remember that druggist’s, a space so cramped only a single person could pass through its narrow aisles, so filled with poultices and pills, one stack after another, that it reminded you of a grocery shop. I remember the owner, too, with his thick-lensed spectacles and his head that was bald except for a fringe of
hair at the sides. You just told him your symptoms and he would prepare you a prescription. The residents of the market had never asked him to show them any kind of licence or permit. He was so self-assured, taking his time picking up the bottles and pouring out the pills with a clatter, his movements so nimble as he wrapped up the medicine, that we never doubted his credentials as a healer.

  Back then, we had to go outside the ‘city wall’—an expression that had survived the wall’s demolition early in the Japanese era—to see a real sian-sinn, a real doctor. My father had to ride with me on his iron horse past the Benevolence, Filiality and Loyalty buildings (he would turn his head and tell me, ‘We’re at Pún-ting!’) to the North Gate (where many years before Ma had taken a right to try to make it to the train station in time to save my sister A-muá). We rode around the roundabout, through the neighbourhoods the Japanese had named ‘Eiraku’ (Eternal Happiness) and ‘Taihei’ (Peace), all the way to the Taipei Bridge. By the time we got there, his shirt was soaked with sweat. I could feel the heat steaming off him from my place in the wicker chair mounted on the front of the bike.

  We went all that way not because there were no doctors in the Westgate neighbourhood, but because my father only had faith in one particular paediatrician, who had treated every one of his children from my eldest sister on down to me, the seventh child. Even my elder sisters’ children were taken to see him, from birth to adulthood. He was practically our family doctor. Even today, if my mother gets sick with something that cough syrup can’t cure, she’ll insist on a visit to this paediatrician’s clinic.

  The decor had not changed in many years. A chequered glass door pushed open onto the waiting room, basically a bench along a wall. There was a frosted glass window with an arc cut into it so that paperwork and medicines could be passed back and forth. From the first time I went there, the nurse was a puny, sad-looking middle-aged man. I really liked to watch him mix the medicine. He’d pour the powder into a little plastic container and add lukewarm water. Then he’d hold the container next to his ear and shake it, as if he was listening to a kind of music, until the water turned a faint red.