A Chen, My Fictional Taiwanese,

[Taipei, 9/24/24]

from my 2010 novel, Love Like Hate:

By 2004, the Taiwanese had become the ugly foreigners in Vietnam. They were rich, they swaggered and the prostitutes loved them. Some had come to do business but most were there only to shop for a woman. A few had picked out their brides on the internet, and were in Saigon to pick up the goods. Unlike many Viet Kieus, the Taiwanese didn’t charge, but paid relatively good money to marry a Vietnamese woman. Most of these bachelors were old, ugly, diseased, or handicapped. The Vietnamese press loved to ridicule this phenomenon. One article began:

When A-Chen first arrived, he lived in the Dien Bien Phu Mansion on Ly Tu Trong Street. For a furnished one-bedroom, he paid twenty-three hundred bucks a month. He didn’t mind it because it was designed according to the highest standards of luxury, comfort and taste. After work, he could relax with a body-toning session or chill in the outdoor kidney-shaped pool, with a perfect vodkatini in his hand. He could also lift weights in the fully equipped gym, sweat in the steam bath, or sing in the karaoke room. Only later, after A-Chen had grown more comfortable with being in Vietnam and had learned to speak some of the language, did he move into a house near his toothpick factory—just down the street from Paris by Night.

He waved these people away, but saw a girl in rags still standing there. About eight years old, she was holding a naked two-year-old boy on her hip. Both of their faces were darkened with grime, their hair disheveled and burned brown by the sun. Transparent mucus cleared a short, pink path down the baby’s face, from his nose to his upper lip. Buzzing flies orbited around their heads. He gave them several bills, only to be immediately surrounded by a dozen more beggars, coming from God knows where. He patiently gave money to each beggar in turn, but finally decided enough was enough, he would now try to enjoy his bowl of noodles. But as he ate, he noticed a leg stump pointing at the side of his face. He looked up and saw a middle-aged man, a vet or simply someone who had lost his limb in a traffic accident. One hand was upturned in supplication, the other bracing a dirty, nicked-up, duct-taped crutch. A finger or two was missing from each hand. The one-legged man said nothing, but would not steer his leg stump from A-Chen’s face. It was more or less a holdup. Quickly losing his appetite, A-Chen ate only the sweet pork, the battered shrimp and the wontons, leaving most of the noodles untouched. When he shoved the bowl aside to drink his iced coffee, the one-legged man quickly grabbed it to gulp down the leftovers, slurping the excellent broth with relish. As A-Chen got up to leave, the one-legged man finished the watery remains of his iced coffee.

Another time A-Chen was sitting in the back of a dark café, trying to sip a beer, when a tiny ragged boy approached. Before the boy could open his mouth, A-Chen gave him ten thousand dong. The boy refused the money and walked away, looking hurt and angry. It turned out he was a shoe-shine boy and not a beggar. Other beggars tugged at A-Chen on the streets, and cursed at him in Vietnamese, Chinese or English if he ignored them. A-Chen could not give money to every beggar in Vietnam. He could not save millions of people, he figured, but he might be able to save one.

Everywhere A-Chen went in Saigon he saw either socialist billboards boasting of heroic, exuberant workers, soldiers and peasants, or capitalist billboards seducing the masses with images of the affluent hitting golf balls or sipping martinis. As with all billboards, the people on them had nothing to do with the working stiffs milling on the streets, but the contrast between the superrace shown on Vietnamese billboards and the dazed and wasted specimens sprawled on the dirty sidewalks just below them was so startling as to be comical. An appropriate image on all Vietnamese billboards would have been a Hieronymus Bosch painting. There were few beggars in Thanh Da, A-Chen’s new neighborhood, because there were few foreigners. A-Chen also found a few restaurants with second floors, where beggars don’t venture. Stopping in Paris by Night for a beer one day, he was delighted to meet Sen, who could speak Cantonese, and the two became fast friends. A-Chen wasn’t much of a chess player, but he enjoyed playing with Sen. Though he always lost, he didn’t mind. “I’m paying you for chess lessons. I’m slowly getting better, no?”

[Taipei, 9/24/24]

[Taipei, 9/24/24]

[Taipei, 9/24/24]

[Taipei, 9/24/24]