gpc

(greenpoint chinaman) 绿点中国男子

[greenpointchinaman]

Joe Sacco, “The Rude Blues” (2000)

[greenpointchinaman]

Scotch

At the diner on New Year's Day, the waitress looks at me — “Just you?” — and points to the tables behind her: “Any of the small booths.”

I have been here before under similar circumstances; it might have been a Christmas Eve or the day before Thanksgiving, surrounded by people in transit or the people who are not in transit but simply orphaned, as the Chelsea Narrator would say.

The half wall on my right rises up just past my shoulder. A woman takes a seat at the table on the other side of the wall, but once she realizes I will be in the periphery every time she takes a forkful of her eggs, she moves to a table farther back.

“Anything to drink? Coffee?”

“Coffee.”

In the small booth, I imagine a table from a few days ago that is about the same size but much farther away, in a cafe on the Rua de Belém. There is a brown linen runner laid down the middle of the table, and in front of me a plate of rice, shredded carrot, and pastéis de bacalhau.

“How is it?” she asks.

“It's good.” Not great, but good.

Across from me, she is carefully dissecting the ham out of her omelette and pushing the meaty strands to the outer rim of the plate. I steal some of her fries. “There's something weird about the fries here,” I say. “I can't tell if it's the potatoes or the oil. They're not as soggy.”

“Hmm.”

I look over at the bakery case filled with pastries. “I think I'll get something.”

She flags down the waitress for me: “Oh, excuse me, he would like to order.”

“An espresso,” I say, and then the name escapes me — pastel de... “And one custard tart.”

“Cut-ser-tark,” the waitress repeats.

“Yes.”

A few minutes go by before a waiter stops by our table with my cup of espresso, a saucer, and an empty glass. He shows off the label of the bottle he is holding, and pours three fingers' worth into the glass. I nod, and he leaves.

“Did you order that?”

“Yes and no,” I say.

“What is it?”

“Whiskey,” I reply. “Here, you can have some.”

“Wait...what happened to the egg tart?”

“It turned into whiskey.”

She laughs and reaches over to take a sip from the glass. “Ooh, that's really good. This is going to make me drunk...”

I look down at my cup of coffee in the small booth of the diner, and imagine where she is now and when she will be back. I suppose I could take her to this place as a kind of joke. This is where I go to kill time. This is where I drink coffee and hope never to return.

I can see us walking in together: She would take a quick glance at the place before whispering, “Let's try someplace else.”

“Okay,” I would reply. Then I would follow her out the door.

[greenpointchinaman]

Cue music.

[greenpointchinaman]

Night vs. Morning

The small talk from the tandem crew on the Dunkin’ graveyard shift is not quite as refined as what one hears during the 6 a.m. shift.

“Eh...good morning,” says one before I order.

“Good morning, sir,” says the other, after he has handed me twenty-one cents in change and a receipt. As in, Have a good day.

I remember an old conversation with the UWS narrator about the phrase good night, after having watched Mystery Train with her. “It doesn’t make sense, does it?” she had said. “Why is ‘good evening’ used to start off an exchange, but ‘good night’ is used to end it?”

I can remember another time when I was introduced to a girlfriend’s parents for the first time, at a dinner at their home. Say something, she whispered, after I had stepped through the front door.

“Good night,” I said to them.

[greenpointchinaman]

Nasi Padang I-IV-V

At the nasi padang joint near Arab Street, I make a rookie mistake by pointing at the tauhu telor in the display, thinking I could get just a piece of it to go with my plate of rice, fish curry, and sambal green beans. But behind me, my friend K—— waves off the request; “I don’t think you’re really that hungry,” he warns.

When we sit down, he asks me what I ended up paying the cashier and I tell him.

“Fourteen dollars? Wah lian, tourist trap, I think they got you.”

But a few minutes later, the server brings out the semi-communicated tauhu telor order on a separate plate, with the omelette sitting high on a bed of bean sprouts and shredded cucumber, drenched in kecap manis and covered in ground peanuts.

“Now I know why got to pay fourteen dollars. Hey, this might turn out to be a bargain. You’re lucky I can eat, I think you gonna need my help to finish.

“This actually quite easy to make,” K—— adds. “Maybe harder for you to find ingredients for the sauce in States. But the rest pretty easy lah.”

By seven thirty, the staff has started stacking up the empty chairs and tables. Across the street, tourists are trying to land the perfect night shot of the Sultan Mosque.

We head up the road to a Southern themed bar, to check out open mic night. Over here, fourteen bucks won’t get you much; an appetizer maybe (something that is buttermilk-fried or maple-glazed). A pint of beer runs sixteen dollars.

“What exactly is the host act going to play?” I ask. “Anything vaguely New Orleans? Or country?”

K—— laughs. “This is Singapore. If they call themselves a ‘soul food’ place, you’ll be lucky if you can hear a James Taylor song.”

...Or Neil Young, in this case. The host graciously allows us three songs, and he hands me his expensive Godin guitar, which I am terrified of accidentally dropping. K—— tests the vocal mic by introducing me as his “friend from America.” A brief negotiation then ensues between me and my old bandmate.

“How about a funk in A?” he suggests.

“Uh, how about a shuffle in G?” I counter. “Or ‘Scratch My Back.’ I’m rusty, man.”

“You don’t want to play in A?”

“I can do A, but my left hand is gonna fall off. Just warning you.”

“Let’s do A.”

“Okay. ‘T-Bone Shuffle’?”

“No, more like ‘Hi-Heel Sneakers.’ C’mon, man.”

Second song:

“I think I need something slow,” I offer. “In E.”

“Let’s do G.”

“Killing me, man...”

“We keep it slow — how about I sing ‘Stormy Monday.’”

Third song:

“Okay, we do E lah but gotta be fast. How about ‘Pride and Joy’?”

“Fucking serious?”

“Hey, you say you want to play in E lah, I give you song in E.” 

I laugh and reluctantly hit the SRV intro that is really a Lightnin’ Hopkins quotation but who is keeping track? My guitar playing is messy and incoherent. But by the middle of the last song, my brain is less fixated on stop fucking up and I’m starting to remember what it was like playing in these kinds of places, what you had to do to please customers, and how to enjoy it even if not everything is going right with the gear, your hands, or the song in your head. One of the ang moh customers starts recording video with his phone, which feels strange to me in a place this small. Are you actually listening, or just documenting?

Later, as we walk back to the MRT station after another night of drinking, K—— is talking up the places he’ll bring me next time for makan, for the next time I make it out here. 

“There’s one place I like, when I make new American friends in Singapore, I take them out for nasi biryani. And I tell them, ‘Okay, so meet me at Islamic Restaurant.’ And they look at me in shock with this terrified face: ‘Islamic what?’ It always cracks me up. The biryani there quite good lah...

“Well, you didn’t get to stick around for very long this time. But, hey, we got to play some blues. That’s at least something.”

[greenpointchinaman]

Makan

“Maybe I take you later for nasi padang,” says my friend K——, whom I haven't seen in almost thirteen years. “Or we go Chinatown for makan. Also, I haven’t take you to the one place they got beef rendang curry puff, wah lian aye. But I just had biryani earlier, so not yet hungry.”

I point to the corner across the street. “Wasn’t Red Octopus down that way?” I ask. “On Purvis Street?”

“No, no. I think it was further up there. Or, maybe you are right. Purvis Street. Maybe you are right...”

“There was a chicken rice place around there too.”

“That one gone already. I remember it, too. Gone already.”

We take the bus to Chinatown. “Do you remember Smith Street, the hawker center there?” he asks me. “You must have been before.”

“I remember the one on Maxwell Road.”

“Maxwell is nothing compare to this. You’ll probably remember.”

We head upstairs; his stall of choice is not particularly busy, but he assures me this is the real stuff.

“So you know yú piàn hor fun? I get us the same thing but serve it over rice instead of hor fun. This is the local Cantonese style, cannot find anywhere else. The gravy is to die for.”

The food vanishes in a few minutes. He tips the plate toward my bowl so that I get all the remaining gravy. “See, this is why I can’t leave Singapore,” K—— says. “How can I leave all this food behind?...Hey, I’ll show you something else that’s new since you left. Let’s get a drink.”

I follow him to the northeast corner of the building, where, across from an herbal tea stall, there are people queuing up for beer. 

“This is the new thing,” he explains. “Craft beer on tap. Not a bad deal, twenty bucks a jug. I like the brown ale they got. I’ll get first round.”

We sit at a table overlooking Smith Street. “I’ve got a friend who lives near here, I told him to move to Hong Lim. He was out in Balastier before, I’m like why the fuck you want to live out there? So now he rents a room over here. Some other expats live around here, too. I met one guy, an oil reporter, he even rent the HDB nearby, it’s a good location.”

I notice a congregation of ang mohs assembling a few tables down from us. “See, even the hipster ang mohs rather drink here than in the fucking bars,” K—— tells me. “But that stall over there, all the beers they got are imported. To them, we are drinking the local stuff. The cheap stuff.”

“It tastes fine to me.”

“Is okay lah,” he notes. “Maybe they need to be reminded of home.”

[greenpointchinaman]

Hock Hiap Leong, where I used to get coffee (and sometimes a two-dollar plate of char kway teow) is long gone. I would spend hours at a time here. Everyone who worked there knew why and they would kid me about it. Or, they would joke about it in Hokkien so I wouldn’t understand.

Twenty years ago, you could get a cheap hostel room upstairs. The drinks stall owner in the coffee shop was a middle-aged man named Albert. He would bring over the kopi. Then he would stand there by my table, look out across the street just like I was, and ask: “You wait for her again, is it?”

[greenpointchinaman]

I first met Professor Zhang in the seventh-floor cafeteria back in April (his go-to breakfast: congee and a banana), but shared only a single exchange with him: He looked at me, pointed to his ear, and angrily shook his head. I nodded back.

My father later explained that Zhang lost his hearing during a surgery: “I am not sure what it was for.”

A few days ago, I sat down with Professor Zhang again, and this time he spoke to me: “So you came back.” As I was about to respond, he again pointed to his ear and shook his head. Then with his right hand, he gestured that I would have to write.

I took out a pen and a notebook and started a conversation with him. He used to teach Chaucer. He had spent a year and a half at Princeton, doing research. He suggested that I find translations of The Water Margin and Luo Guanzhong’s Three Kingdoms. 

Then he glanced down at my breakfast: peanut butter on toast.

“You know, when I was in graduate school in U.S.,” he said, laughing, “I live on peanut butter sandwiches for two years.”

[greenpointchinaman]

Seven Bowls

The cafeteria at my father’s Taiwanese retirement home serves three squares a day: congee and assorted bao for breakfast; a protein, vegetable, rice, and soup for lunch (except on dumpling day, an infrequent but highly anticipated oasis); and a protein, vegetable, hard-boiled egg, rice, and fruit for dinner. When you list it all out, it sounds quite generous, and I suppose it is. But if you want serious Taiwanese food, you must go elsewhere, and that is why I am walking down Zhongzheng Road, just before noon, trailing behind my father as he gazes into the restaurant kitchens and inhales the fumes.

“There’s a lot of stuff here we can’t get back at the cafeteria,” he declares. Let us not squander the opportunity.

We walk a good half mile before he settles on a place for lunch and proceeds to order two bowls of sticky rice, fried bee hoon, and pig intestines herbal soup.  

“This place, the name is 呷七碗, Seven Bowls,” my father tells me. “It means they have enough different things where you might order seven dishes to eat. If you are that hungry.”

We eat fast and finish everything. I am a bit surprised when my father gets up, wanders over to the front counter, and returns with the menu. 

“You’re still hungry?” I ask.

“No,” he replies. “I just want to look at the menu again, so I know what I’ve been missing.”

[greenpointchinaman]

Keelung

Bitter gourd stir-fried eggs, pork daikon soup, stinky tofu, gua bao, shrimp with asparagus, forty soup dumplings, a drunken chicken, gold and silver mantou with condensed milk. And several bottles of Taiwan Beer.

“Should we order more?” Brother Eight asks.

“I think we have enough,” says my father, a.k.a. Brother Seven. They are the only ones left; Brother Five died in France a few years ago. 

I show Uncle Eight two photographs that I brought with me. In one, my mother, holding a young girl, is sitting between my uncle and a woman wearing glasses. In the other, my uncle is standing next to the woman with the glasses — just the two of them.

“This was in Keelung,” he says. “Where did you get these?”

“My mom kept a lot of old photos from Taiwan.”

He picks up the second photo. After turning it over, he pulls out his glasses to read the writing on the back, and laughs. 

“Can I keep this one?” he asks me.

“Of course.”

[greenpointchinaman]

Driver said, “Son, I just had to ask ya / Did you find yourself a greener pasture?” “No, sir” / I said, “No, sir.”

-- Larry Jon Wilson, “Ohoopee River Bottomland” Heartworn Highways (1976) Directed by Jim Szalapski

[greenpointchinaman]

Walk It Off

Another holiday, another episode with the orphans.

“Did we really just watch that?” asks the Third, as we try to forget about the matinee over Mexican food.

The driver sighs a bit. “Keanu, man. He’s looking pretty slow. He must be like sixty now. I’m gonna look it up.”

“It helps that they surround him with these lightning-fast Asian dudes,” I point out.

“Fifty-four. Supposedly he doesn’t like to use a stunt double. I think he coulda used a few of them.”

“I thought he looked really good,” notes the Third. “But, yeah, he seemed to move kinda slow.”

Did we really just watch that? Yeah, we did. And once I saw Man of Tai Chi, screened for an audience of two. And once I saw Honeydripper, screened for an audience of one...

The Third is talking up the It sequel: “It can’t be as bad as what you just made me see.”

“What’s with girls and scary movies?” asks the driver. “I can already tell you what happens in the end of that movie. What’s the point of watching?”

The Third rolls her eyes. “Can we like get the check and walk or something?”

During the walk, I ask how long each of them has lived in the neighborhood.

“I think three years,” says the Third.

“No, you’ve been here longer,” the driver nags.

“Really?”

“For me, I think it’s been four years. But I was living here like ten years ago, too.”

“Let me see. Yeah, maybe you’re right. It’s probably like four years for me, too. But back then I was living with J——.

“Yeah, I think you were. I had just gotten my place, but we were renovating it, so I actually didn’t move in until the next year.”

For both of them, moving here was not just a where but a who with. Been a while since I’ve done one of those, I realize...

“How did you end up here?” the Third asks me. “I mean, weren’t you in Brooklyn before?”

“Yeah. I’m not exactly sure how it happened,” I explain. “I remember asking people for advice on where to move, when my lease was up. But I’m not sure how I ended up heading this way. Maybe I just felt I had to get out of where I was.”

None of us seems interested in rehashing any of this. The driver is the first one to change the subject.

“Guys, I think I need ice cream.”

And with that, we ditch the past and steadily walk toward the future.

[greenpointchinaman]

There is not much of a plan other than to ask, “Can you tell me where this was? Who’s the one in the middle? The person on the left? The right? The one in the back... 

“What happened to them? Do you remember?”

[greenpointchinaman]

Pork Chop Express

In Tamsui, my father tries to relive a moment that happened more than a decade ago: meeting an old friend at the consulate house and then walking to a restaurant off Zhongzheng Road.

“You never met him,” he explains, “but we grew up in Pintung. Whenever I would go back, we would try to meet and he would take me around. He always knew the good places to eat. Maybe we can find where we went out to eat that time.”

“Do you remember the name of the restaurant? I can try to map it.”

“Oh...I think it’s called Black Face.”

“Black Face?”

“I think so. I wonder if it’s still around.”

“I’m not finding it on the map.”

We are sitting in the courtyard at the top of Fort San Domingo. “Are you hungry?” he asks. “Let’s see if we can find it and we can have some lunch.”

The ticket seller over by the vending machines has heard of it — down the hill, take a right, down the road, it’ll be on the right. She doesn’t say how far.

“Let’s just walk,” my father decides. He walked it then, so he will walk it now. Never mind the knee replacement surgery in between.

About halfway down the hill, we stop so he can rest. “I think it’s not far,” he assures me. The sun is scorching, but he insists we stay on the side of Zhongzheng Road closer to the hill, away from the sea breeze. “We have to stay on this side, in case I see the sign.”

“Okay.”

A kilometer later, I am now ten years old and asking, “How much further, Dad?”

“It should be close.”

Just past the Youchekou bus stop, we see a taxi driver get into his cab and my father rushes over to him. The driver is confused. Black Face Restaurant? You mean Dark Palace?

About a block away, around the corner from the Family Mart, we stumble into Dark Palace Gourmet and sit at a table. I’m surprised to hear a Little Walter song piped into the dining room.

“We should get you something Taiwanese,” my father says. “You like pork chop rice? That’s what I got the last time.”

“That sounds fine, Dad.”

[greenpointchinaman]

Danjin Road

The 862 hurtles on and I try not to think about how much longer. The sticker reminds me of a Chris Ware panel. If this is really the nausea area, I guess I’m glad to be standing in it.

Up at the front, my father is standing over the bus driver’s shoulder and asking if he’s ever heard of the place. When we get off in Jinshan, will a taxi know how to get there? And where do we get off the bus to find a taxi?

An older passenger overhears these questions and chimes in. “I’ve heard of it,” she is probably saying. “You have to find someone else who’s heard of it and they’ll take you.”

She gets off the bus with us and points to a yellow cab across the street. My father approaches the driver and they settle on a price: NT$600.

“We need you to wait for us,” he reminds the driver, who nods.

It’s off a side road that heads up the mountain. My father points out the window toward a fork in the road. “Apparently there is also some Buddhist college around here.”

As we pull into the parking lot, he warns: “You are going have to help me find it. I know where it is, but I may not remember.”

The main grounds are the shape of a semicircle with a diameter about twice as long as a football field. Along the curved edge is brick footpath that leads you to the lots: six smaller semicircles, arranged like a scalloped neckline.

“Why don’t you start that way,” my father instructs, “and I’ll go this way. I remember it’s close to the edge.”

I start walking, looking at the ground, taking small steps, wondering if I’m violating some sort of etiquette. As I make my way through one of the middle lots, I see two groundskeepers in straw hats, sitting in the shade. One calls out to me. She gets up and and asks me a question.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Oh...”

I ask her to wait a moment. I pull up a photo of the gravestone on my phone and show it to her. She nods, pointing to the marker in the bottom corner.

“Yī, shí sān, èr."

I follow her.

The first lot is the one closest to the ocean. I remember my father once telling me, “Your mom’s brother picked the spot, he said it’s good to be facing the water.”

The groundskeeper points out the stone and I thank her and she heads back down the footpath. I wave to my father, who is a few hundred feet away, to try to get his attention. He finally looks up. This high up the mountain, there is no noise, so he doesn’t have to raise his voice at all when he says, “So you found it?”

[greenpointchinaman]

The Juice

As he comes to halt at the first red light out of the airport, the taxi driver checks his GPS and looks up at me in the rear-view mirror. “Fifty-five kilometer.”

I feel obliged to talk to him. But, really — what is he? Brother from the homeland? Just a stranger?

“I hear it’s close to Tamsui” — but I botch both syllables and he has no clue what I just said. Silence.

Later, on National Freeway 2, we start passing scooters driven by middle-aged men, many of them slinging long, padded cases.

“They all going fishing. On the ocean, or by the river.”

“Do you ever go fishing up here?”

“No...it is ridder boring for me. I don’t like to wait, so I don’t make a good fisherman. I like drink beer, much more. Eat and drink. That’s what I like.”

“What should I eat while I’m here?” (I sound like an idiot.)

“Eat in Taiwan? Oh, my favorite is like a meatball: ròu yuán. But not your kind of meatball. Special meatball.

“Actuary,” he continues, “you have to try McDonalds in Taiwan. Taiwan McDonalds is best in all the world. I really mean it.”

“What’s so great about it?”

“It’s the juices. The juices they have are very, very good.”

“The juice? Like, juice that you drink?”

“Maybe I don’t say collectly. The juice you eat with everything there. It’s different here than what you have. Sauce. That’s what I mean.”

“So, you mean like dipping sauces?”

Silence. After another traffic light, he adds: “Twelve kilometer.”

[greenpointchinaman]

“I’m afraid this place is quite suspicious.”

— King Hu, The Fate of Lee Khan (1973)