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When they were seventeen, with their whole lives ahead of them, Jing-nan and Julia knew what they would do - they would go off to the United States to college, get good jobs there and then Jing-nan would show up unannounced at Julia's door and they would get married. Until that moment, however, they would not be in touch, fearful of being distracted from their schoolwork. It's a sweetly adolescent romantic plan and, as one might expect, it came to naught.
Jing-nan did not finish his second year at NYU. His father contracted terminal cancer and his mother was killed in a car crash on her way to pick her son up at the airport. He learns that he is on the hook for a debt his grandfather incurred long ago and there is nothing he can do but take over his family's food stall in the Shilin night market. Still in love with Julia, he stubbornly refuses to write to her until he is in a position to marry her, according to their pact. Then one day he reads that she is dead, murdered at a stand selling betel nut off the main Taipei highway.
He reads the news in the paper during the Ghost Month of the title, a period of nervous fear among believing Taiwanese Daoists and Buddhists, who see it as a time when the dead are very near and often jealous of the living. It is well not to offend them and a good idea to placate them with "death money" - elaborately printed notes that may be burned. It is also just as well to avoid big purchases, bodies of water, and hanging clothes out to dry. Neither Julia nor Jing-nan were believers; indeed Jing-nan is outspokenly dismissive of all the ghost superstitions and reverence for the gods and goddesses who are worshipped in various temples. But he does have to acknowledge that he is running into quite a lot of bad luck recently as he fails to honour the dead.
Ed Lin is the author of the Robert Chow crime series, set in the 1970s in New York's Chinatown. This may be the reason that this novel, a departure from the series, is published as crime fiction, but the detection in it, indeed the crime plot itself, is perfunctory at best. Lin's primary focus is Taiwan, its difficult history, its ambiguous present. Readers will learn a great deal about both and perhaps more than they might really care to learn about the post-punk rock group Joy Division and their debut album Unknown Pleasures, after which Jing-nan has named his food stall. Lin provides somewhat teasing descriptions of the component parts of the food served in these stalls -"Unknown Pleasures" refers more than to just music.
Taiwan is a fairly rare locus for fiction in English and not, I think, a place known particularly well to the average reader. So the vividly described local colour is a real attraction here as is Jing-nan himself, a character who seems almost to stand for the Taiwanese as a whole. Many are not fully at home on the island, most are divided between tradition and modernity, some, if Jing-nan is an accurate sample, would rather desert the place altogether to go to the United States, a "real" country. Though Jing-nan's compulsive devotion to Joy Division sometimes threatens to stall the narrative altogether and despite the author's sometimes rather wooden dialogue, this is a book that turns what might have been a pedestrian amateur detective story into a rich and fascinating account of an unfamiliar world.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2014
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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