The Stolen Bicycle Read online

  As I eventually discovered, A-pu was somewhere between an aficionado, a collector and a dealer. Talking about something he collected made him light up—you could see it in his eyes. But his passion wasn’t purely aesthetic. He was always calculating the value of his collection. For instance, I saw several old iron window grilles in A-pu’s cave, the kind with cast-iron bars twisted and bent into elaborate designs and held together with rivets. A-pu explained that a window grille was once a way for a craftsman to show his skill. Each design was unique, he said, and showed me: some were twisted into sprays of cherry blossom, others bent like Mount Fuji. In one case you could even make out the surname Lim (no relation, I’m sure, to old Dr Lîm) among the lines. For a moment, A-pu was just like a guide in a folk art museum. ‘In this piece, you can see the style characteristic of the disciples of old Master Liu in Ta-tao-ch’eng. They all liked to twist curves like this at junctions and joins, which later became the area’s signature style. As I see it, an artisan who makes such fine adjustments shows he cares about his craft and how the window grille is going to look when it’s fitted. He must hope that people will know when they see it that the window grille is his work.’ A-pu smiled. ‘And you can bet I’ll sell her for a pretty penny, given how rare she is.’

  ‘How much?’

  A different kind of light gleamed in his eyes. ‘Twenty-eight thousand a pair. Seeing as how we’re friends and all, I’d give you a twenty per cent discount.’

  I thought of something my mother used to say: ‘A merchant who fails to practise thrift is like the pander who pays the engagement gift.’ In other words, if you don’t understand the difference between gross and net, you can’t do business.

  But there were still some things in A-pu’s cave I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to buy. For instance, a syringe used to inoculate pigs. A pig needle! What would you do with it?

  ‘Someday, the right buyer will appear,’ A-pu said mysteriously. ‘There’s no rush. You never sell low. You got to have a thousand times more patience than you do when you’re selling bread.’

  He told me there was a tradition, a lore to collecting old things. You learn as you go. You have to collect a lot before you realise what you’ve got. A buyer must be found to pay the bill before you know what need an object might fulfil. A-pu took an old black vinyl LP down from the expensive Cunninghamia wood bookshelf on his left. The cover was signed Cowboy the Comic Artist and decorated with Cowboy’s art. The LP was a recording of a Hokkien Comedy Theatre production called Saucepan Man. I didn’t recognise any of the actors’ names on the cover. It had been released by Crown Records, a company based in T’ai-chung. A-pu explained that comedy shows used to be recorded and pressed. ‘I never imagined, you know? But when you find your first comedy record you start wondering. When was this sort of thing popular? Were the voice actors big at the time? I get interested in stuff like that. Then one day I discover there’s people out there looking for these Taiwanese comedy albums, waiting for them to reappear. If you have no idea, you won’t know what the albums are worth. Some people are just going to buy them from you, knowing they’re getting a bargain—but eventually someone will let you in on the secret, and you’ll find out their true market value.’

  ‘So who specifically might want to buy a comedy album?’

  ‘Well, linguists studying Taiwanese, historians of popular culture, someone opening a retro restaurant. Or someone with too much money.’ A-pu started laughing. ‘For folks like that, you don’t go out of your way to make them a deal.’

  ‘You seem to be enjoying yourself,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, it’s a hell of a lot better than being a security guard. I’m looking after all these things, taking care of them, often until the middle of the night. My family just didn’t get it, though, so I moved out. My neighbours here all think I’m a weirdo.’ As he said this, I was thinking: My family doesn’t know what I’m doing, either, but do I know what they’re doing?

  From then on I was a regular customer at A-pu’s. I bought a set of glass tumblers that had been given away free during a local department store’s anniversary sale many years earlier. The store’s motto—Anything Anyone Could Ever Need—was etched on each glass. I also bought a four-corner Fuji brand bicycle lock dating to the Japanese era, and a vintage wind-up alarm clock made by a German company called Peter, among other things. Every time, I chose to pick up my order in person, so that I could sit at that folding desk and have a little chat with A-pu. A curious bond was slowly forged between us.

  One time I asked him if anything interesting had happened to him while he was out looking for second-hand goods. Holding a Jade Rabbit pen in his mouth (the cap of which he had already chewed up), he thought it over and replied, ‘Too many! It’s hard to know where to begin.’

  Then he launched into a story about collecting parts from a certain Lucky bicycle shop.

  For local antique bicycle fanatics, several brands have a special allure, like Fuji, from Japan (the first bicycle introduced into Taiwan), Raleigh, an English company, and Taiwan’s very own Lucky. Lucky’s dove logo, and the company’s slogan—Ride Your Way to Luck—are to us fanatics emblematic of a certain era in history.

  When bicycles gave way to mopeds, scooters and motorcycles, most Lucky workshops, which were famous in their day, closed. Older places that still hang a sign in the window advertising the Lucky brand naturally attract the attention of collectors looking for spare parts. Particularly this one old shop.

  This old Lucky workshop often hosted Japanese technicians who’d come over on exchanges, leaving not a few special parts behind in the inventory when they went home. Now that the boss’s sons were all grown up, though, and able to support themselves, the old boss seldom opened for business.

  The shop was in the middle of a row of shacks. Everything else in the vicinity had been knocked down to build walk-up apartments. Only this row of remained, the owners determined to refuse all offers from the developers. This one shop was partitioned into two: to the left was the shop proper, and to the right the family room, with a shrine for the wooden tablet inscribed with the names of the boss’s ancestors. A few crates in the family room told A-pu that the family had got its start selling rice and other grains, and that bicycles had come later. The old shop and the family shrine meant that the boss wasn’t the sort to forget his roots. A-pu noticed that the boss’s wife would push open the front door of the house first thing in the morning and burn incense to the ancestors and T’u-ti Kung, the neighbourhood god of the earth.

  Sometimes, when he was lucky, he would come by when the boss was open for business. He would wheel his bicycle in and make an excuse about needing to mend a tyre or make some minor adjustment, just so he could make conversation. The boss had reached that age when loneliness starts to choke you and any company will do. Whenever someone sat down and pushed his button, he’d automatically jerk into action, cutting his whole life story down to a few paragraphs, splicing them together and then playing them on a loop, over and over, for as long as his audience cared to listen.

  A-pu didn’t mind hearing the stories again and again. He wasn’t like all the other buyers, always in a hurry, interrupting the boss’s life story to ask if he was willing to part with certain bicycle parts in his shop. He just listened quietly, responding from time to time as appropriate. One time the boss’s wife joined them, and asked what A-pu did for a living. Only then did A-pu produce his card and announce that if they ever decided to close the shop he would make them a good offer and take all the old stock off their hands. The boss and his wife said nothing, just started shutting up the shop, and politely showed A-pu the door.

  It turned out the boss refused to listen to anyone wanting to buy up his stock. Every single thing in that shop was there for a reason, he said, waiting for the right customer to come along. ‘If some day you decide to close the shop…’ was also taboo. He was very particular, and whenever rude buyers fished through the wooden trays for parts without his permission, the boss would immediately get up and get rid of them, then shut the door behind them and lock up.

  A-pu still went to the shop, but he never mentioned buying up the stock again, just chatted about bicycles with the boss, and started calling him lāu-sai—old master—because he sensed it would please him. He knew that the boss, who was in his eighties, didn’t lack for necessities, that he kept the business going because he enjoyed repairing bicycles.

  The next summer, A-pu lingered outside the store as usual, but was never lucky enough to catch the boss opening the shop. A month or two went by before he saw the boss’s wife one morning as she made her daily offering and asked her what was up. That’s how he found out that the boss was sick. So A-pu would go over every so often with some fruit and talk to the boss’s wife about the good old days when the boss was young, but he never said anything more about buying up the inventory.

  One day the boss’s wife let out a long sigh and said, ‘This poor old shop’s fallen on hard times. Didn’t you say once that you wanted to buy us out? We’ll sell the whole kit and caboodle to you, everything. But you can’t be picky about it—it’s all or nothing.’ A-pu was happy, but not as happy as you might expect, because he gathered that the boss must be very sick to want to sell all the leftover inventory in the shop.

  A-pu remembered how people had occasionally wheeled a bike in for repairs while he was chatting with the boss. Most of the time a punctured inner tube or some such problem. The master would take the trouble to remove the wheel, feel around the rims (because all it took to pierce an inner tube was a pebble), and brush and grease the front and rear hubs while he was at it. All this for a little loose change, and the boss did his job more conscientiously than anyone A-pu had ever seen in his life. The boss told him: repairing bicycles is
ten times more interesting than selling them.

  ‘Because let me tell you son, a thih-bé can last fifty winters, or even longer. And you know what? Back in the old days, a man’s most valuable possession was his iron horse. One life, one bike.’

  Someone who understood this—that was the kind of person the boss repaired bicycles for.

  Later that day, A-pu drove a borrowed Kei-type minitruck to the shop, but he wasn’t in a hurry to look over the stock and start loading it up. Instead he went upstairs to the room at the end of the hall to see the old master, who had just come home from the hospital. In just a few weeks he had become surprisingly small and shrivelled, insignificant-looking, as if some part of him had been removed. He and his wife had discussed the sale and he knew she’d insisted A-pu take everything that remained in the store, but the look in his eyes told A-pu he wasn’t happy about it. At the sight of A-pu, he pointed at a toolkit on the table and said, ‘Only this is not for sale. Give me a fair price for the rest.’

  The toolkit on the table, which he’d had since he was an apprentice, included a double-headed spanner, a spoke wrench, a set of Torx-type hex wrenches, a pedal spanner and a chain tool, though the master had always referred to them in Japanese: ryōguchi supana, supōku renchi, Torx renchi, pedaru supana, chēn kiri. These tools had been with him for decades. Each was pitted and scarred, and had a distinctive gleam. The master said that of all his tools, these were the handiest. He never seemed to get used to the new tools the sales reps gave him and had carried on using his own instead. A-pu felt the heft of a cast-iron wrench, examined the serial number stamped on its handle, and imagined how bright and shiny it must have been when the young master first picked it up, confident that with it there was no bolt he could not turn.

  The boss’s wife said that since he’d come home, her husband, now bedridden, would have breakfast in the morning and then lie there all day, turning his tools over in his hands. He couldn’t help it: his palms and calluses had been so close to those tools, knew them so intimately, that there was no separating them. Having held those tools every day as he worked over so many years, the bones in his fingers and palms fit their ridges and grooves perfectly. The tools trusted his hands and his hands trusted the tools. They were a part of his body, like when a tree grows a new branch, like when an injured branch grows a burl.

  A-pu was not the kind of guy who found it easy to express his feelings. He just said, ‘I don’t want ’em. You keep ’em.’ If you didn’t know him, you’d have thought he was ticked off.

  A-pu waited until the following day before he got stuck in. He drove away truckloads of inventory, but he felt heavy, like the grey sky was pressing down. The shop was still there, even the sign, which A-pu had decided not to take. He just left it there, hanging above the old lintel.

  ‘So did the Lucky fork protector I bought from you come from that shop?’ I asked.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘And the mudguard?’

  ‘Ditto.’

  ‘And the tool saddlebag?’

  ‘That too.’

  But the Lucky bicycle was not from that shop, nor had A-pu found it on the street.

  He’d seen a picture of it online, posted by a fellow called Little Hsia, another Lucky bicycle collector. The bicycle wasn’t for sale, but A-pu told me as soon as he saw it, because he knew I was after this particular model. I asked him if he could get in touch with Little Hsia and arrange a visit, and he soon sent me a message saying no problem. He would take me to Little Hsia’s workshop.

  Not wanting to wait even a minute longer than I had to, I asked if we could go now. Soon I got another message: Meet me at the train station.

  On the MRT I sat looking around the carriage, watching people staring at their cell phones or tablets, watching every tired face, and felt like I was dreaming. Was the bicycle I’d been searching for so long really about to reappear? Was I about to see it with my own eyes, after twenty years?

  Once, quite some time after my father went missing, I found a photo in a family album I was looking through that really grabbed me. It was of three men and a boy standing in front of a cramped shoe store. The shopfront was unfamiliar, and I didn’t recognise any of the people. I took the photo to my mother, who had serious cataracts, and asked who they were. Somehow she didn’t know any of them—but she did recognise the shoe store as the one run by A-bî’s family, two doors down from ours.

  One of the men stood astride a bicycle. He wore a long white scarf, a suit coat and a baggy pair of trousers. His right elbow was resting on the shoulder of his neighbour, who was wearing a pinstripe. The man in the pinstripe was looking not at the camera but off to the left, as if at something outside the frame. And by his side, there was a pudgy, slightly prim little boy in what might have been a khaki shirt and trousers of the same colour. Another man stood behind the boy, but his face was obscured by shadow. What caught my attention was that the two men in the suits were both wearing beautiful leather shoes, while the boy was wearing a smart pair of army boots. They must have been off to a New Year’s celebration or a wedding, for why else would they be dressed so respectably in front of such a dismal little shop?

  The suits reminded me a bit of my father’s handiwork, and the bicycle of the bike he used to ride. Twenty years ago, when 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 Father and his iron steed had left us together.

  Now, my memory jogged by the photograph, I asked my mother if she remembered what brand Pa’s bike was. She said she’d forgotten, so I looked up all the bicycle brands made in Taiwan between the 1950s and the 1980s, especially around Taipei, and read them to her one by one.

  ‘Was it a Victory Wheel?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Rivermouth?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Rabbit?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Triangle?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Lucky?’

  ‘Oh, that sounds right—must’ve been a Lucky.’

  So that was it: Pa’s last bicycle was a Lucky. The only thing I remember about that bike is that it was unisex: you could adjust the top tube, turning a man’s bike into a woman’s. From then on, wherever this early Lucky unisex model turned up, I would go take a look. And that was how it started: my obsession with antique bicycles flowed from my missing father.

  *

  In 1993, the market that our family of nine lived in—and depended on for our livelihood—was inevitably torn down, a victim of urban development. It was cast off by a city itching to re-create itself, to become brand new. But the hardest blow we suffered came the day after the demolition, when my father went missing. We filed an official report and consulted the Holy King, exhausting all avenues to try and find him. But it was as if some power had deliberately erased all traces of his existence from the earth. He never reappeared, and we never found a single clue.

  ‘If he’s dead, where’s the body?’ my mother said, but only once, as if she was afraid her words would cut like knives—and it did seem like knives had sliced through all the sinews in my mother’s body. When he’d first disappeared she just crumpled, and for many days could not sit straight or stand up. She got very sick; her health has never been the same since.

  Father was gone for good, and we didn’t know what to do. Though he wasn’t easy to get close to, he had always been a pillar of the family. I didn’t know how to deal with any of it, and for a long time afterwards I was complete mess—anxious, easily flustered, incapable of making a rational decision.

  Many years later, I wrote a novel about a young Taiwanese man—one of more than eight thousand like him—who volunteered to go to Japan to work in a warplane foundry. After the war, the young man returns to Taiwan, opens an electrical appliances store in the Chung-hwa Market, gets married and has a son, but he never tells his son about his wartime experiences. Many years later, right after the store into which he’s poured a lifetime of sweat and toil gets torn down, he goes missing. When he fails to reappear, his son contracts a bizarre illness in which the rhythm of his sleep is disturbed. He’s always falling asleep at any hour of the day, entering strange dreamscapes. To understand his father’s life, he decides to take the photographs, books and notes his father left behind and go to Japan, following the route his father had taken as a young man.