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equivalent to the current price back home? A monthly salary of NT$48000 is about $1600 back home, if you save up for three months you'd be able to afford rent on a one-bedroom in Austin for how long…? Every purchase is a comparison, a stab of homesickness. So far he has resisted the temptation to open a bank account at the local post office and buy a personal chop that will allow him to stamp his Chinese name on every official document and withdrawal slip, his identity cemented on the underside of a chunk of stone. Maybe the day will come when he will buy something and not have a single thought of U.S. currency, and that frightening yet liberating moment will signify he has no home to return to. He shuffles through the crowds, smothered by the buttery fragrance of flowers. In downtown Taipei, underneath one of the highway overpasses, a flower market is open on the weekends, and the bouquets seem downright 
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bedraggled, jammed together on carts and display shelves, hot artificial lights shining on them. And yet, even with the dulling stench of the highway above, one can still smell them. People preserve corpses, why doesn't anyone preserve smells? he wonders. It takes time to find Mr. Chen's gravesite~although he can read some Chinese, the act is laborious, and so many of those characters are so similar, a stroke or two separating a name from a curse. The higher one climbs on the hill, the better the feng shui, and there is clear delineation between the workmanlike slabs near the bottom and the more polished, white-marbled monuments up top. Mr. Chen's gravestone is located at what might well be the equator: a simple gray stone sequestered among many, thin and shoulder-high, no photo, only his name and dates of birth and death etched in, the latter rendered in Taiwanese years, dating back to the founding of the original Chinese  |
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