The Stolen Bicycle Read online

  Then he would write my name on a piece of rice paper. His handwriting was beautiful, looping up and down like a bridge. (I’m really sorry, but that’s the only image I could think of, and I thought of it because the street the clinic was on was right by the bridge.) He would also write ‘three times a day, after meals’ and then, whipping the glue brush so fast you couldn’t possibly see it clearly, he’d stick the rice paper label on the plastic container, on which the following words were printed in a sober, regular typeface:

  台北橋小兒科

  TAIPEI BRIDGE PAEDIATRICS

  My mother says I only stopped crying and making a fuss when we went to that clinic, where I let Dr Lîm insert a suppository into my rectum.

  The third day, in the middle the night, my father took the thermometer out of my mouth and saw the mercury had hit forty-one degrees—a dangerously high fever. He decided that he’d take me to see the doctor, no matter how much it cost. He pulled out his iron horse, attached the wicker seat and placed me in it. My mother took another charm, burnt it, stirred it into hot water and made me drink it, before perching herself on the back of the bike. That iron horse carried us, a load of 130 kilograms, all the way to the clinic. It was closed, of course. My father frantically pressed the bell until the sad-eyed male nurse opened the door. Shortly thereafter Dr Lîm appeared, woken up but wearing a smile, and a stethoscope around his neck. Without saying a word, he picked me up and sat me down on the examination table and made me sit straight, as if I were going to meditate. Then he took cotton gauze, dipped it in alcohol and vigorously rubbed my back and chest. My mother says my skin was as red as a cooked shrimp in its shell.

  ‘Has he had a bowel movement?’ said Dr Lîm. He spoke in Taiwanese, but his accent was different from my parents’.

  ‘I don’t know why, but nothing for these past three days.’

  So Dr Lîm gave me an enema. I could feel the cool liquid flow through my hot anus up, up into my belly. Then my mother carried me crying into the bathroom, where I shat out a putrid filth that reminded me of nothing so much as fish guts, until there was nothing left. The doctor recommended that I sleep in the clinic, so he could keep me under observation. My mother sat on a stool by the cot and watched me all night long, while my father slept on the bench in the doctor’s surgery. Just before dawn, my fever broke, and when he woke up Dr Lîm used his little flashlight to check my eyes and my throat. He told my parents to take me home, give me my medicine punctually and keep me under observation.

  ‘Can you spray me with that stuff?’ I asked Dr Lîm.

  He smiled and gently sprayed sweet cough medicine down my throat, which I found infinitely satisfying. I felt like it’d really been worth it to get sick just for that.

  Day broke when we walked out of the clinic door. The iron horse was nowhere to be found.

  My father slapped himself in the face, so hard and so loud that Dr Lîm came out to see what was the matter. I remember my father walking up and down the street a dozen times before giving up. It was like he’d lost one of his own legs.

  My mother always gave half the credit for my recovery to Dr Lîm and half to the Holy King. ‘Mā ài jîn, mā ài sîn,’ she would say—it took a man, and a god. That afternoon she took me again to the altar of the Holy King, near the Shuang-lien Market. She thanked the deity and asked him where we could find the bicycle. The Holy King said that we should count ourselves lucky either way—if the bike could be found, or if it couldn’t. But he still drew a couple of charms for her. One was for my father to drink, the other for the whole family.

  Maybe because the Holy King had mercy on us in our poverty, he magically returned the iron horse to us two weeks later. That second-hand bike (for which my father had reluctantly parted with a small fortune after his previous bike went missing during my brother’s joint college entrance exam) was the same one I wrote about in another novel, the very same Lucky bicycle that was left parked at the Chung-shan Hall after the Chung-hwa Market was torn down and that disappeared without a trace.

  A-pu’s Cave

  A long twenty years later, that bicycle reappeared right in front of me.

  It was A-pu who told me about it. He’s a seller I met collecting parts for antique bicycles. Over time, we became friends. He’s a bit younger than me, though I don’t know how much. I guessed his age by how lax his facial muscles were. It’d be hard to tell his exact age just by talking to him, because the massive amounts of scrap he’s scavenged over the years—from dead men’s rooms, from the dump, from the recycling depot, even from the street—are all jumbled together in his memory, until it’s impossible to separate one era from another.

  He always stands with his hands stuck in his jeans pockets, hair unkempt, looking like he doesn’t have anything special to do today. But actually he has a knowledge of old things that makes him seem wise far beyond his years.

  I asked him once how he got started collecting. He thought it over and said, ‘I couldn’t be bothered carrying on with my studies, so I went to technical school and then straight into the army to do my mandatory service. After I got discharged, I found a job as a security guard at a superstore, where I often worked night shift. One morning on the way home, I saw an old lady in an alley piling old junk onto a three-wheeler. She had corrugated paper boxes, cardboard and a random assortment of other recyclables, as well as a record-player. I was usually exhausted by that time of day, and would go straight upstairs, but that morning it was like there was something bugging me. I went to bed, but I just couldn’t get to sleep.’

  Maybe it was that record-player, with its understated grain, resting like a beetle on that old lady’s bike, its broken lid like the transparent sheaths that cover an insect’s wings. A-pu went back downstairs. He didn’t ask whether the record-player worked or not, just whether it was for sale. He made an offer a lot higher than what she could get at the recycle depot. She had no reason not to sell it to him.

  ‘So did the turntable turn?’

  ‘Course it did. If it hadn’t, that would’ve been the end of it. There was a fold-out compartment with a record rack. A typical design for players from that period. I bought a needle, hooked her up to a dodgy set of wooden speakers I already had sitting around at my place and gave her a test listen.’

  A-pu said he hadn’t really listened to songs much, before that. When he was younger, he’d just listened to stars like Tracy Huang, Sarah Ch’en and Teresa Teng if they happened to be playing on the radio. His folks sold fruit from the shop at the front of their house, and his mother would put the record-player in a corner of the room and play it all day long.

  The turntable had come with four records. One was by Teresa Teng, and the other three were in English. He didn’t expect that he’d like the other three, because his English was hadn’t progressed much past the first lesson of grade eight. (In those days we only started studying English in junior high.) But when the needle found the groove and started turning, sending sound to those dodgy old speakers, he got goosebumps. Over time, he got accustomed to coming home, eating his breakfast of soya milk and deep-fried doughstick and playing the few records he owned on the player, a Realistic LAB-59, while getting ready to go to sleep. He told me that all the English words he knew more or less added up to the sum of the titles of the songs on those records: ‘Somethin’ Stupid’ by Frank Sinatra and his daughter Nancy, Patti Page’s ‘With My Eyes Wide Open, I’m Dreaming’, and One Hundred Practical Exercises for Piano by Czerny. He laughed, but awkwardly, maybe because he thought he sounded weird or something, speaking in English, and gave me a sheepish grin. It made him seem easygoing, just a regular guy, and brought us a little closer.

  ‘I got an old classmate to teach me the words so I could sing along,’ he said.

  ‘Do you still have the records?’

  ‘Sure do—I’d never sell those records, not in a million years. This might sound crazy, but it’s like they unlocked something in me, opened it up. It’s been fifteen years since I found that
record-player, you know. They weren’t so old at the time.’

  A-pu had developed a radar for old things. When he walked down the street, he wasn’t just making his way from A to B—he was always on the lookout for cool stuff. He’d noticed something interesting: when you tell folks you want something they’re going to throw away, they’ll suddenly see value in it. When they realise that their junk isn’t junk to other people, that it’s worth something, they get attached to it all over again. But the newfound attachment is temporary: they’ll try to drive a hard bargain, but once you propose a price that satisfies their petty vanity, most people don’t really care.

  At first A-pu just bought stuff he liked, but he soon discovered he didn’t have the economic wherewithal to pursue his hobby in the long run. He quickly ran out of money, and his room was so cluttered with junk, it was like a garbage dump. Maybe six or seven years later, he decided to open a shop. He took the money he’d saved working as a security guard and doing odd jobs, and rented a space near a busy nightmarket in the Yung-ho area of Greater Taipei. The rent wasn’t cheap, though, and when it comes to antiques, many look but few buy, so at the end of the lease he cut his losses, closed the shop and focused on the online auction scene, which was only just starting to take off. A couple of years later, A-pu was a well-established and highly regarded online auctioneer dealing in antiques, no longer a simple collector of old things. And that’s how I met him: I became a buyer at A-pu’s Antiquarian Emporium.

  I remember the first time we met. I bought a Global brand friction lamp—a kind of bicycle light with a rubber spinner that rubs against the turning rim to run a magnetic dynamo. At the online check-out, I chose ‘payment on pick-up’. The address he gave me was in an old industrial part of Taipei, San-ch’ung. Soon after I got to the place and gave him a call, he arrived riding an old Yamaha motorcycle with an elegant rumble. Instead of a helmet, he wore a blue baseball cap embroidered with the LA Dodgers logo, faded blue jeans and a plain green T-shirt. He had a bit of a stutter, and held his head low, as if he were searching for dropped coins—very much as I’d imagined him.

  At first we were just chatting like your typical buyer and seller, but when I mentioned my interest in antique bicycles, he lit up. He answered some of my questions about restoring older models, and I found myself starting to wonder about him—how he’d come by his lore, how he knew so much about so many different things. Then I asked if he could take me to see his storeroom. After a brief hesitation, A-pu agreed.

  A-pu took me on his motorcycle down an alley that ended in a cul-de-sac. In the sheltered yard out the front of his building, there was an unlocked Flying Tiger bicycle and a Wu-shun bicycle, along with a wreckage of frames and countless parts from other bicycles. Cardboard boxes were stacked in front of the rolling shutter door that opened up into the apartment; through a narrow gap between them you could just see the half-open wicket gate. He took out one of those old folding desk-chairs that everyone my age remembers, with the multiplication table and the English alphabet painted on the desk, but he didn’t sit down himself—just leaned on his old Yamaha and lit a cigarette. At the end of that cul-de-sac, we talked about all aspects of classic bicycle design, just like literary types talk about Milan Kundera and Italo Calvino or modern art buffs talk about Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.

  I don’t know how long we’d been talking when he went to 7-Eleven to get a couple of lattes. Only after we’d drunk our coffees did he pull up the iron shutter door to let me have a look at his ‘workshop’.

  I popped my head in and felt as if I’d entered a cave.

  Even now I still don’t know exactly how big A-pu’s workshop really is, because the whole space is piled high with stuff. There were all sorts of antique wooden tables and chairs stacked ingeniously all the way up to the ceiling, from which hung old chandeliers of various designs. There was one extremely striking piece: an old rocking horse with zebra stripes. Some boy must once have imagined it was more than an old rocking horse painted to look like a zebra, that it was actually a beautiful beast galloping across the African savanna.

  A cupboard on the right was stacked with plates and bowls and glasses from different eras. I rummaged around and happened upon a bowl and spoon printed with Thank You, Squid Stew, a hole-in-the-wall eatery in Westgate. To the left were a few wardrobes, each with a row of Ta-t’ung electric fans lined up inside it. From those old fans, which always seemed as if they’d turn until the end of time, hung several fisherman’s lanterns. To the side, a metal box—printed with Ministry of Education, Province of Taiwan—contained several bubble-glass candy jars. I used to always go to the second floor of the market to Old Fellah Sundry Goods Store to buy loose cookies that were stored in jars just like them.

  I asked A-pu if I could use the bathroom, and discovered a cave within the cave. The light fitting was the sort guaranteed to arouse a wistful nostalgia in the viewer, its shade plated in ‘horse-mouth iron’—the old-fashioned name for tin—and a dangling electric cord of intertwined red and white. At the end of the cord was a pendant ‘egg switch’ with a slider: you pushed the slider to the left, exposing white, to turn it on, and to the right, exposing red, to turn it off. I managed to lift the toilet lid, and I say managed because even the toilet seat was stacked with boxes. I opened those boxes to find toys from my childhood, popular when I was in grade five or six. There were Ultraman figurines, assorted model cars made of iron or aluminium, and hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of slammers—the little plastic discs printed with portraits of film idols and pop stars that we used to trade with our classmates. The edges of the bathtub were hung with lucky-draw prizes, and in its centre sat an antique Gashapon gumball machine, the kind that used to dispense candy and little toys in capsules. Those machines have been replaced now by electronic versions with flashing LED lights, and it was only when I saw this old-fashioned model that I recalled how they used to make them ovoid, like a space capsule, sitting on an iron foot. Once upon a time, those monsters with their iron feet ate up all my pocket money.

  I picked up a cap gun made of tin-plated sheet metal that was sitting in the sink and pointed it at my reflection in the mirror. Too bad there were no paper bullets, because I really felt like blowing myself away. I held the barrel to my nose and smelled gunpowder. How long could the smell of gunpowder possibly last? Or was my imagination running away with me in A-pu’s cavern of wonders? I found it hard to keep my breath even—the place had an alien ambience, a sense of time disorientingly different from that of the outside world.

  When I returned, we sat down on the porch. ‘How’d you get all these things?’ I asked.

  ‘Lots of ways. I ride my motorbike up and down the streets of Taipei, and sometimes even head south. When I see something I like, I ask if it’s for sale and if so how much. Sometimes I see an old bike by the side of the road. Or I see a cabinet someone’s going to chuck, and I press the doorbell. Another way I acquire stock is when some old shop is going out of business, and I make a special trip. Or if one of those veterans’ villages is going to be razed for a new housing development, I’ll hang out there for a few weeks, watching to see what everyone’s bringing out to throw away.’

  ‘How do you know when some old shop’s going to close? Somebody must have to tell you.’

  ‘The guys who run those places are really sentimental about the stuff they sell—it has lots of memories for them. So the trick is to make them feel like you want to help them, like you’d be keeping the stuff on their behalf, not buying just to sell…They don’t always agree straightaway, but then they’ll give you a call down the track, when they’ve run out of reasons not to. In any case, you got to make them feel that giving you their stuff is different from tossing it into the back of the recycling truck or auctioning it off.’ A-pu paused, then added, ‘You got to pay in the right coin, if you know what I mean.’ He smoked as he talked, looking a little bit like the Marlboro man, and I saw how easily he’d win someone over. I asked him whether he made enough mon
ey to get by. He said he had a couple of sidelines, but in the past few years his income from reselling old stuff had been enough to live off.

  ‘You don’t need much when you’re by yourself, seriously,’ he said.

  ‘What kind of odd jobs do you do?’

  ‘I do piping and wiring, and I know my way around concrete,’ he said, taking a leather wallet from the back pocket of his jeans and producing a business card. I took a look and saw his title: Antiquarian Artefacts Collection Consultant. Below that it read: Specialty Plumbing and Electrical.

  Just then, I saw a living creature—a huge lizard—crawl out of a cypress pantry and up onto the mechanical arm of an industrial floor lamp. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but then A-pu grabbed a fistful of greens soaking in an old aluminium bucket and placed it in front of the lizard: it was a real live green iguana.

  He looked at me and said, ‘Another way I acquire things is from dead folks. Some guy leaves a bunch of stuff behind, dies without having anyone to leave it to. In that case you gotta take care of this scaly fellow along with everything else.’

  I’d also caught the antiques bug, sometime between my college years and military service. Ma used to lament that I was a scavenger, a hoarder of crap and scrap, of rusty old junk. In her eyes, people like me are useless. So when I saw A-pu’s collection of old televisions, electric fans, scissors, turntables, cans and jars and glasses and plates, I understood him better than most would. I was even a bit envious. Thinking back, I’m no longer sure when these things, whether picked up or purchased, had lost their appeal for me. Like most people, I’d become a slave to what in Taiwan are called 3C products: computers, cameras and communication devices. I’d grown accustomed to planned obsolescence, and to using things that I could never repair myself. I haven’t sold any of the things I collected when I was younger—I just packed them up and stored them at our old apartment in Chung-ho, out in the suburbs past Yung-ho, without giving them another look.