The Brightest Star in Tan-Zih: Part #3 (last) "Star on the Ground"

“Dad, we’re turning the café into a pub!”

“What?” her father screwed up his face on an invisible sour lychee. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” is all he said. “The clientele is rough. It could be dangerous. You’ll have to pay off hoodlums and the police.”

Lin Shu-Jing listened. “My fellow investors think it will save our investment. We want to bring in liquor and karaoke.”

Father stood up painfully and began to walk out of the room. “You better think it over. Be careful.”

One of the regular customers at the new pub was one tall lump of a man I called “Chip’ n’ Dale,” not the sexy Chippendale men with six packs, but the cartoon chipmunks with six nuts in each cheek.

Chip ‘n’ Dale had a thing for Lin Shu-Jing, among other female interests. He told Lin Shu-Jing he was a college graduate, a plus in her book of potential boyfriends, and he was tall, dark, and lean with an air of confidence you could cut with a knife. She neglected the pub, too, as she went out eating, drinking, smoking, and gambling, scheming and borrowing money.

      Her sister was going away; to be with me in America, perhaps marry me. Lin Shu-Jing was dumbfounded. How could her younger sister get married before her? She was a thirty-year-old single woman in Taiwan. Time was running out. She had to get married soon. Chip n’ Dale would be the man.

Sure, he had three children from a previous marriage, two living with him, but if her sister could handle me with three children of my own, she could do it, too. It might be her only chance.

She married Chip n’ Dale a year after my future wife came to America and married me.

“Don’t do it, Lin Shu-Jing. He’s not for you!”That’s what her family and all her friends told her. That’s what her brother and sister told her. 

“You can do better than that,” they said, one by one, but she wouldn’t listen. She was ready to get married and Chip ‘n’ Dale was the lucky one to grab the ring, and keep it. Despite all the men Lin Shih-Ling had met – sophisticated, worldly, responsible, hard-working, and gentle – she went the opposite direction – provincial, ill-mannered, lazy, blameful, and arrogant. To this day, twenty-two years later, not much has changed, and still no one knows why. 

“Ba-ba, please come to our wedding.”

     “What? You’re marrying?” He knew it would happen.

 Lin Shu-Jing had brought “Mr. Shieh, Chip ‘n’ Dale, with his two kids to live with them earlier in the year.

 “Lun-chi-ba-tsao!” (trans: “messed–up.”) But father was too kind. He went along with it.

They had a big wedding, well beyond their means, but no one from the groom’s family came. There were five large empty round tables where his family would have sat. Why didn’t they show up? He had just gotten divorced from his first wife and his family was mortified.

“Hey Ba-ba, why don’t you divide your property for your children.  Before it’s too late,” said Lin Shu-Jing at Chip ‘n’ Dale’s suggestion.

     “Why? You can’t wait?” said Father

     “Don’t be regretful,”

     “I’m not dead, yet.”

“Baba, we’re starting our new kindergarten. We need some collateral.”

     “What’s wrong with having classes here at home or the boutique?”

     “We need room to grow. Help us buy the store-front house. We’ll be able to live upstairs.”

     “How messed up. Lun-chi-ba-tsao! Lun-chi-ba-tsao!” Father started drinking again.

     “Lun-chi-ba-tsao! Lun-chi-ba-tsao!”

     So they moved out of the Lin home and rented a store front nearby.

     Then they moved to another building, five floors, but only used two. Meanwhile, they rented another building for the bushiban.

      The telephone rang loudly in the Lin home. “Ba! I’m going to have a baby!”

      “Lun-chi-ba-tsao! Lun-chi-ba-tsao! Can you afford it; you just opened a new school.”

     “Ba, that’s why I called you. We need to borrow money to buy our new home.”

     “But you just rented a new home.”

     “Our place upstairs from the school is too small.” It was tight with Chip ‘n’ Dale raising his two teenage daughters from his first marriage with them.

     Once again, Father went to the bank and took out a loan for his daughter and son-in-law. Chip ‘n’ Dale had no bank credit because of past bad transactions. Lin Shu-Jing had no credit history because all her earnings had been off the books. They got the loan, guaranteed by Father, but the loan wasn’t enough. The school needed fixtures, furniture, and a little school bus for Chip ‘n’ Dale to drive and pick up students.

     That’s when Lin Shu-Jing went to her friends and relatives for loans. All her best friends were hit upon and her favorite aunt, too. But the loans weren’t just for the school. They lived a good life together, staying out late, leaving the elder child to watch the youngsters and baby. Late night snacks of goose meat and liver, imported liquor and cigarettes, pachinko games; they had a very nice life and neglected the children, at home and in school.

     Chip ‘n’ Dale was a teacher now, teaching the older students because they cried and complained less when he yelled at them.

     “What are you, stupid or something?” he would say to his class. “Didn’t your parents teach you anything or are they stupid, too? Sit the hell down and pay attention or else you’ll get a whack!” That’s the way he taught and that’s the way they began losing students. 

     “You have to stop talking to the students like that,” Lin Shih-Ling pleaded.

     “Who’s the boss around here?” was his response.

     “I am! Don’t you know? This is my school,” she retorted, but a lot that did. He stopped cursing but he still couldn’t teach very well. The students kept on leaving.

     “From now on, teach and drive the school bus, okay?” Lin Shu-Jing told him. So drive the school bus he did. On bald tires he careened around Tan-Zih streets corners with a cargo of children. Swine had better commutes to the slaughter house. Luckily, no accidents occurred.

     For Lin Shu-Jing’s best intentions, she let Chip ’n’ Dale play boss. Every good thing Lin Shu-Jing did, Chip ‘n’ Dale took credit. Every bad thing that happened, he blamed her. And he blamed his girls from his first marriage for ruining his life. He treated them like little slaves getting him cigarettes and washing the floors. Eventually, they ran away from home, but Lin Shu-Jing wasn’t that wise.

“Baba, we need to have a larger home. We need to move our school to a better location. We’re losing business where we are located. It’s a bad location. We need to move to be more professional”

     “Lun-chi-ba-tsao! Lun-chi-ba-tsao!” But father gave her the money again. They moved to a new condominium a few blocks away and moved their school to another location. Furthermore, they had another child, a daughter this time. The end was near.

“Lend us the money or she’ll commit suicide. She’s home, crying, right now.”

     “Who says?” her family asked

     “She says! Do you want to take a chance?”

     “Let her try,” they called his bluff.

     “So lose the condo. Finished!” said Father.

Chip ‘n’ Dale and Lin Shu-Jing couldn’t get their last loan from the family. She went to her friends, all her friends, and borrowed from them.

 “We need the money or we’ll lose the condo! We can’t pay the mortgage!” Her friend Mazy lent her a million Taiwan dollars

The loan was for a year and Mazy needed the money back. They didn’t have it.

 Lin Shu-Jing borrowed money from an aunt to pay back her friend.

Her aunt, who loved her niece even more than she did her own daughter, still trusted her. She lent her niece all the savings she had but it wasn’t enough.

All of her friends were expecting their loans paid back and Lin Shu-Jing was broke. By the way, Chip ‘n’ Dale didn’t ask his family to lend him money and he didn’t have any friends with money to lend.

So their spending, their gambling, and their late-night goose meat and liver snacks came to an end.

Their goose was cooked.

They went on the lamb.

They just got in their car with what they could carry, with their two children, and drove into the abyss heading south down freeway #1, ending up in Tainan, a city a few hours south of Tan-Zih. They found an inexpensive place to rent and they hunkered down, incognito, incommunicado.

     “No, she isn’t here. I don’t know when she’ll be back. She left no number.

     “No, she isn’t here. I don’t know when she’ll be back. She left no number.”

          The phone calls and angry visits to the Lin home wouldn’t stop. The family had to change their phone number. Everyone wanted their loan re-paid. The parents wanted their children’s tuition paid back. The bank wanted the mortgage due. The condo was going into foreclosure.

     Angriest of all was Lin Shu-Jing’s aunt. She had lent her niece one million Taiwan dollars, every dollar she had saved for her retirement. I’ve heard that she was ready to kill herself and had to be restrained. “How could she do this to me?” she sobbed. “I trusted her! What am I going to do?”

Her poor aunt cried her eyes out for weeks. Still, Lin Shu-Ling didn’t call, couldn’t be reached, and seemingly didn’t care what grief she had caused.

     “No, she isn’t here. I don’t know when she’ll be back. She left no number.

 “How many year has it been now?”

     “Ten.”

     “Ten years, huh.”

     “Ten.”

     “Nothing new?”

     “Nothing.”

     “Same old story?”

     “Same old.”

     Once, a few years back, a police car stopped her as she rode her scooter late at night to get boiled goose meat and liver for a late snack for her and Chip n’ Dale. She didn’t have a license so they took her in for questioning. Found out she owed the bank money. Found out she owed one friend who sued her money. She was brought to court. Made to make monthly payments to one friend, one of many; the others had given up looking for her. All except for her aunt. Her aunt still wants to know how she could have done that to her. Lin Shu-Jing still hasn’t paid her back.

     Her children can’t get grants from the government because she’s not registered in a household; the children are registered at a new friend’s address or they couldn’t get to school at all.

     Lin Shu-Jing teaches in someone else’s bushiban these days. They make ends meet. She lives her life through the academic accomplishments of her son.

 She’s still married to Chip ‘n’ Dale, a man who, she confessed, years ago, she didn’t really love and never sleeps with because of that and his sleep aphnea; his mammoth snoring. 

As the stars come out in the bright Tan-Zih sky as the soaked clouds of another typhoon pass west on their circular path to China, the common people of Taiwan recover from the deluge, sink holes, broken bridges, drowning, washed away roads and homes, flooded rice paddies and orange groves. The people move on and they’re happy. They watch TV and gloat a little over others fates even worse than their own. The friends who lost money in the storm are happy to be alive. The relatives who lost every earthly possession still have the love of their families. Lin Shu-Ling is one of those survivors. Whether she caused or was victim of the storm is unimportant. The storm is over and it’s time to clean up.

Lin Shu-Jing, the storm is over. It’s time to clean up. Shu-Jing? Oh, there’s the smell of death around you. Is that Chip ‘n’ Dale on your back?” Bring out your garbage! The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven plays on the sanitation trucks. Lin Shu-Jing, Bring out your garbage. She is still, and will forevermore be Tan-Zih’s shining star.

  One day. a little girl with her mama are walking down a street: 

 “Look Mama, there is a star on the ground.” 

Lin Shu-Jing; The Brightest Star in the Tan-Zih Sky, Pt. #2: "Shooting for the Stars"

      In Part#2: "Shooting for the Stars," Lin Shu-Jing parlays her talents into becoming an early working-class entrepreneur. Even family tragedies cannot stop her career from reaching the heights. 
  
         Two deaths in the family within two years!
          Lin Shu-Ling, my wife's sister, had another brother. He passed away at twenty-one. Lin Shu-Jing was just getting started in her career and the family ruptured. A few year later, at forty-nine, her mother passed away from the same illness, liver cancer; two years later!
          Dear readers, could you imagine how broken up this Lin family was?  I don’t have to; I was there,  in far-away Taipei, falling in love with my sweet young wife-to-be, who when she got the call that her mother was going to die, had to rush home to Tan-Zih. I was there when the tears stopped. The hard life they lived had taught them enough.  
          Father started fading, closed his laundry business; he couldn’t go on without his son and his wife. Somehow, the Lin family carried on. Lin Shu-Jing carried on; she really carried on.

          Lin Shu-Jing had to move on; she asked father to let her use his shack down the street and turn it into a boutique; father agreed. Work commenced.

          “Lights there will make the lingerie more beautiful,” said an interior decorator in a thin short-sleeved button-down shirt. “And these high-intensity lights will highlight whatever you put on these racks.”

          “Wonderful! Let’s do it!” 
          My wife stood by her side. She agreed with the decision. Her sister was her hero.

          “Yes, it will look fine with the rosewood veneer," said the interior decorator with the modern haircut. A carpenter  took his pencil and wrote down ‘rosewood’ on the wall.   A new lingerie boutique being built out of father’s extra space; it would be painted the woodwork done.

          It was a grand opening; braziers, panties, nightgowns, delicate blouses, accessories, away from the west-facing windows which magnifying the setting Taiwan sun, changing clothes’ colors. The boutique would fulfill Lin Shu-Jing's  dream; entrepreneurship, her classmate’s lingerie, spiced with items she’d purchased on trips to Hong Kong, the jet set, boyfriends waiting.

          Dad didn’t need the space in the simple one-story frame flat with a second plywood loft. After the tragedy of his wife’s passing, it would keep his favorite daughter occupied and close to home. It would supplement her income teaching home-study classes.

          Business took off like a rocket. Her students’ parents and fashion-minded Tan-Zih neighbors had a piece of Paris just down the street. The after-school bushiban classes and boutique put Lin Shu-Jing on the map in the world of business. She would make her first Taiwan million dollars before she was thirty years old. Quite an accomplishment for a dry cleaner’s daughter!

          Lin Shu-Jing reached further into the limitless sky. She was on a roll. Next, a café was in her future; a café to serve the sophisticated tastes of young upward mobile western-leaning Taiwanese in the big city south of Tan-Zih; Taichung.

          Dear readers, when you shuck your working-class roots for some foreign bourgeois ideals, all hell can break loose. Lin Shu-Jing felt she had to rise from her station in little town Tan-Zih; right? Her life as the eldest daughter of a dry cleaning farmer just wouldn’t do; not that there was anything wrong with cosmopolitan fashion, but it best be an embellishment, not a replacement for one's own heritage. Ms. Lin was heading full-throttle into a capitalist nightmare, a nightmare where money’s never enough even after you’ve climbed the ladder of success.

          “Father, I was thinking about opening a café,” she said one evening as the family sat watching the news on TV, peeling lychee over the waste basket, spitting out the black pits.

          “A what?” he said glancing over to her like he’d just eaten a sour one.

          “How great! What a good idea,” her sister was ecstatic for her.

“The boutique isn’t enough?” father said as he spit the sour lychee meat out, picked out another, and started peeling.

          “I have enough money to invest from the boutique and the bushiban. With three of my friends investing, I think the four of us could do it.”

          “Like the café I saw on that American TV show yesterday?” said her sister excitedly.

          “Right! Like that; dim lights, marble tables with candles, even an Italian cappuccino maker behind the counter. Lin Shu-Jing's bright aboriginal eyes twinkled with excitement at the prospect of having her own café.

          “Well, I don’t know,” said father. “Running a restaurant is a risky business with keeping the food fresh and all.”

          “My friends have experience,” she explained. “They know what to do.” She looked at her sister. “Can you help out?”

          “Sure. What would you like me to do?” asked her sister excitedly, hoping to become a barista.

          “Could you take over my evening class so I can be in the café?”

          “Oh, that? Okay, but only temporarily,” she said dejectedly.

          “And who’s going to watch your boutique?” said father sharply.

          “Oh father, most of the business there I can do by appointment or over the phone,” she said assuming he knew what she meant. She’d never used advertising, anyway; business was all by word of mouth.

With that, Lin Shu-Jing had three ventures going at once; the home school classes, the boutique, and the café, all without having to borrow a red Taiwanese dollar.

           Why did she do it? Most people would say because she was capable of doing it. A therapist might have a different explanation. She had just suffered through the sorrow of losing her mother and brother to liver cancer. Despite her meltdown in high-school, she had something to prove to herself and a reason to do it: escape.

          The café on the Westside of Taichung, “Four Ladies’ Breeze,” was beautiful. The carpenters did a great job creating a modern western ambiance, and the four ladies had a select menu of French pastries from a local bakery and hot and cold coffee beverages. This was all before anyone in Taiwan dreamed of a Starbucks.

          Lin Shu-Jing worked the counter herself with her three high school classmates. The boutique was put into mothballs, lingerie into boxes, and her sister took over the evening class at home, father’s dry cleaning apparatus having been removed from the space. But my future wife couldn’t stay long; she had her own destiny.

          After she graduated from junior college, Shu-Fang got a job in Taipei, a receptionist at my after-school English center. That’s where we fell in love. Then the news of her mother’s cancer came. She was summoned home to help the family and be with mother. Reluctantly, her sister returned to Tan-Zih. Meanwhile, I got hepatitis, took my three children, left my abusive wife, and returned to the States, but that’s another story.

          Back in Taichung, business at the café wasn’t going well. The café was an idea that was too soon for Taichung lifestyle. The area, now a fashion center, wasn’t hot yet for a café. Lin Shu-Jing’s partner had an idea.

          “Dad, we’re turning the café into a pub!”
          Lin Shu-Jing was shooting for the stars on that bright Tan-Zih night. 

Taiwan Literature in English Translation at the Tainan Library

All the Taiwanese literature in translation can be found at the Tainan Library.

Lin Shu-Jing; The Brightest Star in the Tan-Zih Sky, Pt.#1: "First Star I see Tonight"

Lin Shu-Jing

The Brightest Star in the Tan-Zih Sky

          Of all the people I’ve met in Taiwan, Lin Shu-Jing is the most painful to write about. I’m on the verge of rage, and hope, every time I think about her. I never give up believing that one day she will shine like the brightest star in the sky, the only star visible in the night sky of smoggy Tan-Zih. On this chilly Christmas morning in Central Taiwan, I know Santa is looking for her. He wants to find her but even he doesn’t know where she lives. Perhaps she is hiding from him, too. But Santa never stops looking for the good boys and girls on his merry way around Taiwan. He wants to kiss Lin Shu-Jing on her brow and give her the biggest gift in his sack; the gift called “starting over from scratch.”

          Shu-Jing had always been the star in my wife’s family. The eldest of four children, she was the one destined to succeed. Endowed with a soft smile, easy-going happiness that she spread all over Tan-Zih, she was Lin Shu-Fang’s hero, indeed, the hero of the Lin clan. She was always number one in her classes in elementary and middle school, the most likely to succeed in life, her parents’ favorite child, to my wife’s chagrin; Lin Shu-Fang never got the recognition she deserved in her sister’s shadow.

          Then, somewhere in the pressure cooker that was every school-child’s nightmare in martial law Taiwan, through all the tests, all the teacher abuse, wall-to-wall homework and noodle-bowl haircuts with ugly coarse uniforms, Lin Shu-Jing blew a fuse. She had a nervous breakdown and no matter how much her parents wanted her to make the number one high school, all Shu-Jing wanted to do was dance, dance, and dance the night away.

          My wife, Lin Shu-Fang, used to be Lin Shu-Jing’s cover-up. She was paid well, as far as a child is concerned, for not letting anyone know that her elder sister was breaking curfew, liable to be arrested by marching soldiers who patrolled the streets of “Free China” as the U.S.A. had us believe; KM-Taiwan, more in fear of their own citizens awakening than an invasion from Mainland China that they said would one day be reunited with them by the Three Peoples’ Principles of Sun Yat-Sen. 
          Lin Shu-Jing broke curfew to go to underground dance halls, to meet young men, smoke cigarettes, and be modern in this stoic police state. So many late nights, way after her parents had gone to bed, Lin Shu-Jing would steal back into the Lin home and pretend to be back asleep. Little sister, Shu-Fang, would stealthily open the gate just a tad so Shu-Jing could crawl under and back into bed before anyone found out she was missing. My wife was sworn to secrecy, and received a cookie for her allegiance.

          Lin Shu-Jing didn’t make the list of fortunate students who would be placed in Taichung’s number one high school, and it saddened her father so; her mother, too. He had pushed her and pushed her to be the number one student. What went wrong? What happened to their bright daughter, their favorite child? Father wouldn’t believe that the teacher wasn’t always right, that the school system wasn’t always good, and that his children weren’t always to blame for all their failures. So he drank, he drank heavily and crashed his motorcycle into the glass showcases in his laundromat, lined the four children up against the wall and admonished them for being failures, for being the embarrassment of his life, indeed, for ruining his hard-working life. Shu-Jing would have none of that. She sneaked out as he snored to find a new clandestine dance hall, listen to banned music, to escape from the pressures of Taiwan and her family.

         Lin Shu-Jing parlayed her confidence into ventures that would get her out of her blue collar background. After a period of stuffing herself with comfort food to ward off the demons from her failed academic pursuits, she knew she was better than that. She would make it without being in the number one high school.

          Lin Shu-Jing had many friends and classmates in the clandestine night clubs she visited, young men and women who, like her, had rejected the stiff life reserved for them in this last of the fascist dictatorships; there was nothing ‘free’ about ‘free China.’ Everything from your hair length and style to your school uniform was regulated by the authorities, authorities that, to this day, place a military adviser in every public school. Listen to the metal taps on the boots of the brigades marching through the streets after nightfall. Feel the white terror of curfew Lin Shu-Jing tried to ignore and slip into the world of ICRT, the American military radio station with Casey Kasem’s Top 40 playing Philadelphia Freedom. Nowadays, the American CIA has learned more from the KMT white terror with its ‘see something, say something’ policy than they taught though ugly American occupation, the ‘R&R’ resort spot from Vietnam slaughter. In Lin Shu-Jing’s ‘Free China,’ noisy planes flew the sky at night dropping leaflets exhorting finders to bring such notes to their nearest police station to win a prize for fighting the evil communist terrorists. The western world seemed a lot more fun to Lin Shu-Jing with its rock and roll music, cosmetics, lingerie, and style. She brought this style home, secretly to her sister, my wife, who kept her secrets and internalized Lin Shu-Jing’s open mind.

          Her parents knew their daughter was changing. She wasn’t going to be a scholar at Taiwan University one day. Father led the way, begrudgingly, accepting his daughters’ westernization, to an extent. He punished her brutally when he discovered she was sneaking out at night to go to dance clubs, not because he didn’t like dance clubs, but he didn’t want the neighbors to know his daughter was breaking curfew and even worse, could be arrested. What a face-loser that would be!

          So when Lin Shu-Jing spent hours on the phone with her modern friends from the junior college, an extended high school, father let her; she was still his first and favorite child. One friend had gotten a job at a lingerie factory. That was exciting; western lingerie. Lin Shih-Ling herself had graduated from junior college and gotten a job in a factory but she didn’t like that.

          She had done well enough with school subjects in school to start a class, first in the empty store front of a friend and then in her father’s dry cleaning store front, teaching children after school. An early after-school teacher she was, way before the bushiban chains, and her knowledge and positively effervescent personality propelled her to success. The students stayed to learn, and more came. She convinced father to let her use the shack up the street to expand her school classes, and business was taking off. But Lin Shu-Jing wanted to get closer to the western world than merely teaching the English to Taiwanese children.

          This is where this story changes into a tragedy;

...to be continued

The Haunted Pinball Hanger

The Haunted Pinball Hanger

 The sanitation trucks don’t play melodies down his back street on the outskirts of Taichung for two reasons; first, his street has only a warehouse or two; no residents for public sanitation pick-up. Second, Hung doesn’t throw anything out, anyway. He doesn’t need to contract a private carter.

Hung’s Quonset hanger houses hundreds of hunkered heaps of electronic hoodoo that he is hard to sell or give away for cheap. He’s a mechanic (reconditioner?) and salesman (antique dealer?) of used arcade games. He calls it a warehouse but it’s just a place for worn out video games, pinball machines, and juke boxes that bars, pachinko, and bowling alleys have discarded.

He doesn’t sell his goods; he can’t sell them. He loves them too much to sell. They mean a lot to him. Each arcade game is from a time he’ll never forget, a time that will never return, from the prime of his life, all in his past. That’s why he wants too much money for them. His past is more valuable to him than his present or future.

When a buyer is attracted to his company by the flashy Website his adult daughter set up for him, she is there to answer in English; she wants him to get rid of some crap. (She wouldn’t dare call it crap to his face.) But no one can buy anything for him. It makes his wife crazy. She is tired of living in a room behind his office in the warehouse.

Let me not get too far into the story before I share with you Hung Well’s promising beginnings. It was a long, long time ago when Taiwan was under Martial Law and American servicemen stumbled drunken across the streets of Taipei’s Ba-De Lu district with its bars, clubs, and massage parlors. That’s where his story begins.

 Hung Well-Hung was born in Taipei in February, 1947, just a few days before the infamous 228 incident, a couple of blocks behind the Taipei railroad terminal. He was the first son of a Japanese-speaking Taiwanese father who did a brisk business in a clock and watch shop that washed money on the side. His mother, who kept up her Taiwanese dialect until the Japanese threatened to arrest her in1937, did the washing and pawning. She was sick of the bowing to the Japanese dogs and facing Emperor Hirohito on the Japanese mainland. She spit on every worthless Japanese-Taiwanese Yen coin that some poor fool tried to exchange for US currency. It wasn’t worth anything anymore since the Chinese of the Kuomintang devalued the currency into New Taiwan Dollars when they took over the island. It was still best to have U.S. currency in those troubled times after World War II. It has been the currency of choice to wash Taiwanese money into ever since. Father did a brisk business selling old Japanese watches to poor Chinese servicemen shanghaied into going to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek. It was better a Japanese dog than a Chinese pig but what could he do. He fixed up the time pieces and sold them cut-rate.

Hung was just a twelve-year-old student in 1959. He loved to go home and watch his father work in the back room of the shop a block between Taipei station and Yuan-Huan West Nanjing Road, at Zhong-Qing Road. His eight year old sister did homework, helped alert mom to customers in the store and, on shopping day, helped mom prepare dinner in the back of the house while Brother Hong Well watched the counter. In the little space near the stairwell, under a bright naked bulb, with eye-piece strapped to his head, Father sat motionless fixated to wind-up mechanisms in the dark windowless room. The technology magazines, many of them in English, like reading material in a barber shop, sat swept to one side on the bare, round chip-wood table that mother used to serve dinner upon.

Occasionally, an American serviceman would come in to sell U.S. dollars at a higher rate than Taiwan Bank would give him and buy a souvenir Japanese watch abandoned by the evicted imperialists. 

Hung took up gluing model airplanes together while his dad worked. Then, his father went from fixing watches to soldering transistors in shortwave radio amplifiers. Mother sold jade necklaces, bracelets and gold rings to the G.I’s with girlfriends, usually Taiwanese girlfriends. Occasionally a girlfriend back in the States was thought of by a homesick sailor who was heading back to Viet Nam on the next transport.

It was an entry to the Ta-Tung technical institute that the family celebrated in the Year of the Horse, 1966. Hung was nineteen and excited about the technological promise of Taiwan as it prepared to take back Mainland China. Hung would be there to lead the steed of horses charging back after Red China’s defeat.

Once, the city served notice that six feet of storefront had to be scalped from the houses on their street. The family soldiered on through the dust and open drainage ditches and moved the shop back into the space formally occupied by Father’s workshop. Dad lost his room to tinker with watches and amplifiers and his son, Well-Hung, grew out of his model airplane fixation. He was a full-time student now at the Ta-Tung institute up Chung-Shan North Road. He mastered the fields adequately covered by academic textbooks and by detailed repair manuals. He moved on from the elementary facts about the engines in use during his day – automobile, aircraft, and Diesel and stripped the internal combustion engine of some of its more technical mysteries. He was moving on to the exciting field of electronics.

Tatung Institute of Technology, which was accredited as a four-year institute of technology in 1963, a few years before Hung entered. After classes at Tatung Institute, Hung stayed on campus talking with classmates about how they were going to make a million dollars one day. The private campus off Jung-Shan North Road was like a park; land that had belonged to the company founded by government officials. It was after an electronics class one day that he met his wife to be, Mei-Ling, a quiet girl from Taichung. She was studying marketing. They talked about their electric future with excitement.

     Hung walked home from the institute every day, sometimes stopping off at a coffee shop with Mei-Ling for a taste of American coffee in fine china. But, usually, he walked home alone along Chung-shan North Road and made a right at Ba-De Road behind the train station. He relished his walks home in the late afternoon amid the hustle and bustle of hundreds of buses running their noisy routes alongside taxis and YueLoong scooters, busy bus-girl ticket-punchers blowing their whistles and warning drivers as smoky buses rounded corners at break-neck speed. He saw uniformed American servicemen walking in twos and threes along the road, stopping in front of brightly painted store fronts with covered windows, soon to be illuminated by light bulb signs. He wondered what they were doing in there.  

He saw the young Taiwanese women approaching and entering the storefronts around five o’clock. Each time a door he passed was opened, he heard the music, local and western rock ‘n’ roll, wailing through the thick Taipei air. And Hung smelled the smell the air-conditioners pushed into the streets; sweaty drifts of alcoholic drinks and cigarette smoke pouring out onto the sweltering streets like curling fingers welcoming in tall American G.I’s with “R & R” cash to spend.

The Taipei Club and Bar District was located several blocks around the intersection of Chung-shan North Road and Min Chuan East/West Road. The Lin-Kou Club was the "Officers' Club" just below "MAAG" and "PX". The 63 Club ("Club 63") was above the Keelung River and MAAG Compound. The Navy Sea Dragon Club, shown as "R & R" on maps, also served as the Taipei "R&R" Center from January 1967 (when "R&Rs" to Taipei commenced) until 1972 when the "R&R" program ended toward the end of the Vietnam War.

The Flamingo Club, Florida Bakery, Suzie Wong Bar, OK Bar, and

The Oasis Hotel was up ahead on the left. The King's and Central Hotels illuminated the street in the distance. Wu-Chou's Massage Parlor’s blue vertical sign was partially visible above the red and white bus off to the right on the opposite side of the street. The Pillbox was on the corner across the street from the King's Hotel. The San Francisco Club and Prince Club were to the right of the Pillbox. Taipei's clubs were open late or all night daily except for a couple of weeks preceding the Lunar New Year when they closed early. All the Taiwan clubs were closed on Lunar New Year's Eve and for several days afterward during the 15-day observance and celebration of the holiday.  

Every bar and club had a jukebox. The 1970 Number One ("Ding Hau") and hit songs blared from every open door. Wurlitzer Jukeboxes and Bally pinball machines were a common fixture in Taipei Clubs and Bars in 1970/71 including the ABC Club, Prince Club, and King's Club.
     You could get five plays on a jukebox for 20 cents NT (5 cents U.S.) The China Night Club, Mona Lisa Club, Sharon Club, and (new) Flamingo Club, King's Hotel, King's Club, 77 Club, Pink Bar, and Monte Carlo Club all had jukeboxes. Eventually, after thousands of plays of soft-plastic pirated 45’s, those jukeboxes broke down. How many tilts could freeze a pinball machine?  Hung had an idea that he shared with Mai-Ling: Why not become a jukebox/pinball machine repairman? He knew all about electric circuits and Mei-Ling knew about marketing. They would start a business together!

America positioned thousands of troops in Hong Kong and Taiwan, abruptly starting in 1954. At their peak, there were 4,539 American soldiers in Hong Kong in 1957, which were quickly drawn down to levels of 290 and then 26 over the next two years. The situation was similar in Taiwan, with a sudden buildup from 811 to 4,174 troops in 1954, peaking in 1958 at 19,000 and then stabilizing between 4,000 and 10,000 until 1977. All American forces were pulled out in 1979; a withdrawal that clearly began in 1973 after President Nixon’s diplomatic opening with the People’s Republic of China. With the departure of the troops, the clubs were in trouble, and so was Hung Well’s career.

     After 1979, it became more difficult for Hung Well to earn money. Instead of repairing jukeboxes, he started collected them. He’d go to closed-up clubs to take the broken music machines away. He brought them in a truck to an obscure warehouse down in Mu-cha. There they stayed in the darkened warehouse collecting dust. There his hair started turning gray. He thought he could make a living fixing and reselling but there were too many and not enough customers. He used parts from some machines to fix others. The entertainment industry moved into the future and Hung had to change with the times or be doomed.

TV video clubs began catering to teenage sub-culture. Hung jumped on the bandwagon.
     In 1988, MTV clubs offered a wide selection of films, state-of-the-art video equipment and privacy. Taiwan's MTV clubs were once considered just another fad in this society where variety is a way of life--but then, with more than a thousand clubs all over the island, they seemed to be there to stay. Hung would repair the VCR’s that broke down. Business was hopping again. Hong Well’s eyesight started faltering.

MTV, which has been redefined by Taiwan entrepreneurs as "Movies on TV" instead of the Western world's concept of "Music Television," had survived oft-heated public debate over the proliferation of alleged "pirated" foreign films; that the real or imagined threat to traditional Taiwanese values were the privacy these clubs offered to teenagers.

The controversy that first surrounded them had to do with the failure of many opportunistic operators to not bother to obtain proper business licenses to compete with traditional movie houses. U.S. movie makers complained that such commercial use of copyrighted films, whether pirated or not, were in violation of laws governing "public" viewing.

 Hung didn’t care about technicalities; he just wanted to repair the VCR’s and laser disc players, but Hung learned that no matter how fast you run, the devil is still on your ass.

The ROC Government Information Office, concerned about violations of international copyrights, had been cracking down for months on unlicensed MTV operators and confiscating "pirated" films being rented to patrons. But the clubs continued to blossom all over the dynamic, modernistic, metropolis because the teenagers like them.

Mr. K.T.Yang, assistant to the director of the Radio and Television
Department, said GIO had been mainly concentrating on seeing that the clubs did not violate copyright laws by handling pirated copies of tapes. He said that, at the moment, enforcement of regulations "was effective,” and that there was no danger the MTV industry would be shut down because of legal problems over the showing of pirated tapes, but he was wrong

Hung held on and hoped for the best. He had started collecting jukeboxes and pinball machines and now VCR’s and laser disc players from MTV clubs and bowling alleys in Taichung where the American air force had also left, and the teenagers were disappearing with intensifying crackdown on illegal MTV centers.

 Hung retreated and his white hair receded. He found an inexpensive out of the way place not far from the air-force base in Taichung and trucked all the abandoned entertainment machines there from Mu-Cha. He ended his lease there and moved his business office down to Taichung as well. Anyway, it was his wife’s hometown.

In 1995, a fire at Wei-Er-Kang KTV Restaurant in Taichung marked the end of the KTV era. Hung Well had sold many reconditioned karaoke machines to clubs like that all over town. Sixty-four people died in that blaze. Well Hung felt partly responsible and was devastated by the sad news. An investigation revealed that the restaurant violated the Urban Planning Act and opened without applying for a proper license as had most others. Emergency exits were blocked. The city government and fire department had the club pass 21 safety inspections.

After a fire killed dozens of young people in an MTV in Taichung, the government really cracked down. Dozens of entertainment centers closed with their arcade games in disrepair. Hung’s collection grew; his warehouse haunted with arcane American arcade machines.

Before long, a new entertainment, called computer video games, was taking over the market. Hung didn’t know how to repair computers and had to pass on the new industry. He became a dinosaur stuck in past technology. He was left out to dry with a warehouse full of broken machines. His hair grew thin as his income shrank.

Hung was getting old. His back hurt from lugging machines and he was losing money ever month. At least the warehouse was his, bought cheaply when the market price was low. He couldn’t go around town schlepping juke boxes and pinball machines any more. No one called to have their machines repaired. Instead, like a lepidopterist collects butterflies, Hung collected arcade games. 

Then, one day at the turn of the century, Hung Well saw an ad in the Taiwan newspaper from an American arcade game company looking for sales reps in Taiwan. Mr. and Mrs. Hung Well would become importers.

      It was 2012 when I moved to Taichung. I was looking for a jukebox or pinball machine for my new condo. I took a bike ride one morning and was able to find SAX, the company that imported and serviced jukeboxes and pinball machines. I couldn’t find the address on MapQuest but Google Taiwan showed it on their street map of Da-Ya.

Address: 台中市大雅區車身南路524巷18號   Tel: 886-4-2374-2438 Fax:886-4-2490-1235  Email: sax.pc@msa.hinet.net

      I took a chance and rode there on my bike without calling.  I rode along the Han River bike trail to the Tan-Zih Bridge and through the old grade-level railroad crossing near my wife’s old home, then down Tan-Xing Road past my eyeglass store. After finding the warehouse down a nondescript lane, I rang the door bell of the seemingly closed office.

 A man in his sixties came to the door followed by an elderly matron; his wife. They let me in. Right there, I saw a brand new Avengers pinball machine and a used Rowe CD juke box from the ‘80’s. We sat in the office and Mrs. Hung made me a cup of coffee. I told him I was interested in buying the AC/DC Pinball Machine I saw on the website. Also, I was interested in buying a CD or 45 juke box. Our conversation, in Mandarin, could go just so far. He told me his daughters had gone to school in America and spoke English. Edsel was in Taiwan now and could be contacted. He gave me her business card. I had to call my wife at home to speak with Mr. Hung and get more information.

He told my wife that they wouldn’t be getting more shipments of pinball machines for another nine months, however he had sold one six months ago to a man in southern Taiwan who wanted to re-sell it. It was 180,000NT ($6000us) new but I could get it used for 165,000 ($5,500us). He said he would call the man and ask him if the pinball machine was still for sale and call me back. He then showed me the used Rowe CD jukebox.

 The jukebox still had the old song title labels. Three decorative revolving CD’s in the top chamber needed a new motor to get them to spin. He plugged the machine in and the lights went on but I heard no music from the three large speakers. He would fix that. He said the juke box would be re-conditioned and would be much cheaper than the almost new AC/DC pinball machine. My dream was to get both of them for under $6,000. I told my wife that she could make it my 60^th birthday present. It would be cheaper than buying me a Jaguar.

I took another long bike ride to Da-Ya to the SAX warehouse the next week to hear the Rowe jukebox. The jukebox sounded good but Mr. Hung couldn’t figure out how to erase years of song memory punched in by patrons years ago, still to be played in the ‘favorites’ queue. He walked away slowly and then returned with an English language manual. With his daughter’s help, he saw that by pressing ‘reset’ and ‘8’ the memory could be cleared. A number of things needed to be repaired inside the jukebox, it was plain to see, and a lot of cleaning and painting on the outside had to be done, but for $2,000, it was ridiculous!  I’d give him $1000 if it were in working order and he included servicing as long as I owned the machine; I’d buy the parts but I’d only take the jukebox if it was under $1000. I didn’t need to buy it; I saw the same Rowe jukebox on e-bay, in better condition, for $800. I would show him the ad if he insisted on two grand.

80,000 ($2,666us) is what Hung wanted for the jukebox. He had told my wife he wanted it for $2,000us (60,000NT) and I was ready to pay, but he changed his mind. I told him I was not willing to pay more than 50,000NT ($1,666us) for it. I may have to say goodbye to it. I would invest in nice speakers instead and use the iPod which had all my CD’s. He saved me the trouble of shipping one thousand CD’s from Brooklyn. The jukebox only held one hundred at a time.

I didn’t hear from Edsel Hung the next day after I sent her an e-mail refusing to pay $2,600 for a refurbished twenty-year-old bowling alley juke box with three hundred thousand plays. The machine could die at any time and would be a waste of money without a commitment by Hung to include parts and repairs for at least a year. He’d sell it to me as-is, for $2,000 but it wasn’t worth it without a warranty. He had to change the motor for the revolving discs on top and the rubber washer he showed me under the CD player for it to be worth $2000us. I could get a motor myself, paint and clean up the rest for $1,000. I would have to let it pass. Perhaps I could find my own juke box in a bowling alley in Taiwan somewhere.

Two days later, there was no response from Mr. Hung. I could kiss the juke box goodbye because I didn’t want to pay $2600us for it refurbished and he wouldn’t let me touch it for under $2,000 which he was ready to sell it for, with no servicing or parts. You know what? I didn’t need it. I had a CD player to play my CD’s, and a turntable to play my 45’s and what’s left of my albums. I had an iPod with 26,000 songs and another MP3 player with more music. If Mr. Hung agreed to $1000-1500 as it was, I’d say okay. For $2,000 he had to fix the rotating decorative CD’s on top and the rubber washer he said needed to be replaced. He had to give me a one year service contract with parts included, as I said in my last and final offer:

“If the 1994 Rowe jukebox is in good playing condition, with all motors working properly, without being refurbished, it is within my affordable range, 50,000-60,000NT ($1,666-2,000us). Please indicate exactly what parts will be replaced. For example, your dad said a new motor was needed to spin the three CD discs on top and a rubber washer was needed to balance the playback mechanism. It must be in working order with a guarantee for labor and parts one year, and labor alone (parts excluded) for two to five years.”

 Mr. Hung Well was going to have another arcade game in his dusty dark warehouse. His daughter and wife would be left to throw his junk away one day. They could call me then. Hung could have made a fair deal with me to get the jukebox off his hands. The music never left me.

After a month, my wife got a phone call from Mr. Hung. He acted like he didn’t get my last e-mail I had sent to his daughter with my refined final offer. My wife called him back yesterday and repeated my offer. He told her he would think about it. After a month, I’d gotten used to not having a jukebox but it has piqued my interest again. I had seen two model Rowe jukeboxes on e-bay the night before for around $700 before shipping, not knowing the condition. The jukebox here in Taichung played and I’d heard it. There may be no other jukeboxes in Taiwan for sale. It would be ridiculous to ship a 400 lb jukebox here from the States. Under $2000 would be still look good in the enclosed patio with shipping and servicing included in the price. I hoped Mr. Hung would see it my way.

Mr. Hung hadn’t finished thinking about selling me the jukebox for under 60,000. He said he’d think about it. Our land line is at our new home and any message would be received there.

Mr. Hung from the jukebox/pinball place has ‘been thinking’ about my final offer for the Rowe jukebox since my wife called him back months ago. He’s going to be thinking about it for a long time as he ponders all the haunted arcade machines he hasn’t sold in his warehouse. If I don’t hear from him by the weekend, I will put it out of my mind again.