The male voice calls out from behind me, “What are you looking at, bro?” Overtaking on my right, a balding man in his fourties, wearing a work jacket with white dust on the right shoulder. I make eye contact with him, this was no Taiwan slasher madman, he was a lumpen picking a fight because he was grumpy. I throw caution to the wind and make eye contact with the man, expression unchanging, partly because I am tired from flu medication and partly out of the realisation that he will not touch a hair of mine, his words were just that, words, and he was, fake crazy. Maybe it is my auraful stare that unsettles him, or maybe he detects the aura of a Marxist-Leninist who can perform dialectical materialism on any subject and write a 4000 word essay on Joyce in the same evening, but he averts his gaze and moves on to the next target. Master, he says, master, to another man in a suit with earphones in, and he doesn’t respond so he concludes the interaction with a “Fuck your mum”.
I was looking for something short to read, I just finished Los detectivos salvajes and Los suicidas and Fatimah Busu’s short story collection (please read this!! it just got a translation this year). I found a Katabasis by RF Kwang but when I flipped open the book and read randomly I suffered through a horrific scene where the main character’s thigh is poked by her friend’s morning wood and decided to get another book. Death with Interruptions, José Saramago. Saramago was a lifelong Portugese Communist Party member. He worked as a car mechanic for two years. The cashier spoke to me in English, which I thought was weird, then I remembered I was in an English bookstore. I went to another bookstore, with books in Chinese and English, and it was funny that the literature translated into Chinese were divided into sections… German Literature, French Literature, Japanese Literature, Literature from the Americas (but it should have been called US literature because there were no Mexican or Argentinian authors) (Is Latin American literature that unpopular in Hong Kong?).
Dinner with the family I haven’t seen in a year. Topics: the Taiwan slashers, my 16 year old cousin who struggles to order food, my 18 year old cousin who is lonely in college, driving tests in Canada, the right amount of sourness for Sichuan sauerkraut fish. The slasher, I proclaimed, wouldn’t have gotten away with it if I was there. The order-struggling cousin should take a job in retail or food service, that would give him sufficient XP in social matters. The lonely cousin should try to meet new people. But all the college students were busy studying, they protested. She should start drinking, I say, she should start drinking and going to bars, maybe a club too and hit the Milly rock. Driving tests are easy. One should pick a favourable timeslot after lunch. A timing like 11am or 5pm before the instructor leaves spells certain death. If possible, an instructor of the same race or similar is preferable. The aunt recalls her driving test in Minnesota. The white devil, she says, questions if she speaks English and immediately she knows she is doomed. He looks like he wears a hood on the weekends. Behind, the previous candidate is sobbing. I smoke a delicious Zhonghwa cigarette.
Santa Claus on a Honda wheelies past.
