What we can’t see is more horrible than what we can see.

Writer:

His name is Chen Sihong , lives in Germany and was born in Yongjing. He graduated from Changzhong Senior High School in 1983. He is a book writer, storyteller, and gay. He has been ashamed of himself self for many years. Now, he finally feels like someone who likes . He doesn’t know if he is outstanding or not, but he never gives up.

 

"Ghost Town", set in Yongjing, Changhua, won the annual award at the Taiwan Literary Awards. The English version of "Ghost Town" was recommended by the 2022 New York Times Autumn Book List, recommended by website book reviews, and was selected into the U.S. "Library Magazine" ranked the top ten best books in world literature in 2022. So far, the copyright has been sold in 12 languages ​​including English, Greek, Polish, Thai, and Korean.

 

Ghost Town, a novel by Kevin Chen and the winner of the 2020 Taiwan Literature Award. Now translated into English thanks to Darryl Sterk, Ghost Town is reminiscent of the dreamlike narratives of Can Xue and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and will require readers to hold on tight to their sense of reality as the prose blurs lines between the living and the dead, the past and the present, and finally, the guilty and the innocent.

A multigenerational family saga, so intense and operatic!

 

Kevin Chen began his artistic career as a cinema actor, starring in the Taiwanese and German films Ghosted, Kung Fu Panda , and Global Player. Now based in Germany, he is a staff writer for Performing Arts Reviews magazine. He’s published several novels, essays and short story collections, including Attitude, Flowers from Fingernails, Three Ways to Get Rid of Allergies and other titles.

 

Story:

They live at the first row of townhouses. the fifth from the left. The sixth from the left used to be his eldest sister’s place, but now it was sitting empty. The seventh was once a VHS video rental store, but now the whole building was charred black

 

His five older sisters (Beverly, Betty, Belinda, Barbie,Plenty) were unwanted children and are all unhappily married. Heath, Keiths older brother, has become Yongjings corrupt mayor. Heath called for AWOL, Keith was in prison, a cuckolded father who never talked, and a guilty mother who never stopped. There are sexual awakenings (Keith learns he is gay, for starters), sexual assaults, marriages, affairs, births, business schemes, political schemes, suicides, marital rape, adultery, verbal abuse, drug use, torture, a police raid, family arguments, local rituals ,White Terror, murder etc, spooked in the story

 

Beverly, the eldest sister, has stayed near home and married a forklift driver with a gambling problem. Betty is a civil servant in Taiwans capital, Taipei, enduring the negligence of her own husband. Belinda, the only university-educated sister, is married to a news anchor who browbeats her about her weight. Barbie has wedded the local magnate, who made his fortune by selling crackers and keeps his wife locked in their mansion while he cavorts with mistresses. Plenty committed suicide for the abandoned love. Keith Chen, the second son of a traditional Taiwanese family of seven, runs away from the oppression of his village to Berlin in the hope of finding acceptance as a young gay man.

 

Keith’s father goes into business with Jack Wang, a canny entrepreneur who sells rice crackers, and much else besides, in Taiwan and China. The Wangs back the mayoral campaign of Keith’s brother, Heath, in hopes he will favor them with construction contracts. Baron Wang, Jack’s son, builds a gaudy mansion in Yongjing and woos one of Keith’s sisters, then another. A different sister, Beverly, cranks out piecework sewing for international fashion brands.

 

Keiths youngest sister, Plenty, died by suicide. His four older sisters (Beverly, Barbie, Betty and Belinda) are all unhappily married. Heath, Keiths older brother, has become Yongjings corrupt mayor. Beverly, the eldest sister, has stayed near home and married a forklift driver with a gambling problem. Barbie has wedded the local magnate, who made his fortune selling crackers and keeps his wife locked in their mansion while he cavorts with mistresses. Betty is a civil servant in Taiwans capital, Taipei, enduring the negligence of her own husband. Belinda, the only university-educated sister, is married to a news anchor who browbeats her about her weight.

※Chen, the author, grew up in Yongjing and lives in Berlin. “Ghost Town” is the first of his novels to be translated into English. In his afterword, he writes about leaving Taiwan because of anti-gay sentiment there. This makes it all the more poignant that the novel’s most successful character is Yongjing itself: a place where the author doesn’t feel welcome. Through the scrim of the family’s overlapping — and hotly contested — memories, we get a pleasantly dense evocation of a rural town becoming enmeshed, through the second half of the 20th century, in increasingly globalized, increasingly fast-moving, networks of industry and capital. The same reference points — family arguments, local rituals, a chrysanthemum field, a fateful hailstorm, a local temple, a haunted drainage ditch, an old soy sauce factory, a chaotic wedding party — appear again and again, looking slightly different, sometimes because we’ve switched perspectives, other times because we’ve been picked up and carried, like Yongjing, by the tides of history.

What did Keith do in Berlin? Why? The answer, when it comes, is tied up with dark trends in German society and politics. It is, by far, the weakest part of the book. All the other components, however rushed, exist in a harmonious artistic circuit, each node supporting and energizing the others. The fact that the characters sometimes feel two-dimensional doesn’t stop their relationships from pulsing with heat and feeling. The story of Keith’s time in Germany is disconnected from this grid. In the book’s flattest moments, his crime feels like a crude lure dangled to coax the reader along. It’s sealed in its own compartment in the overstuffed suitcase, and would have benefited from getting tangled and smushed with the rest. It might have been messier. But, as the rest of “Ghost Town” shows so well, life gets messy, and Chen is an author who can handle it.(r.18)

 

Quotes:

1.“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

— W ILLIAM F AULKNER , Requiem for a Nun

 “We are all in the gutter,

 but some of us are looking at the stars.”

— O SCAR W ILDE , Lady Windermere’s Fan

2. Yongjing. It was an expression of their aspiration for eternal ( yong ) peace ( jing ).

 The terrain around Yongjing was flat, not rolling, but gazing east you could see green hills and, on a clear day, the mountains of the Central Range beyond. Gawping west, you couldn’t see or even hear the Muddy Waters

3.The first row of townhouses

1.      The project was supposed to be a prelude to prosperity. The building materials and methods were also unprecedented: reinforced concrete, ceramic flush toilets, and crushed granite floor tiles, Taiwan - style terrazzo.

2.      Ghosts weren’t scary, people were. The living were the cruelest, not the dead

3.      Beverly and Betty thought he looked funny when he did that. They’d never been anywhere. They’d certainly never seen a waterfall before, but when Keith spit up that milk, well, it was the most amazing waterfall they had ever seen.

4.       The failure of several business ventures had left Father totally broke.

5.      Every time she thought of him she would get a hankering — a hankering to smoke a joint.

6.      The failures had left Father totally broke.

7.      Chewing for her had never been about enjoyment, it was a burning compulsion.

8.      Memory drifts, volatile, deceitful, self - expunging, fact - distorting.

9.      When the flamboyant phoenix tree burst into gorgeous red bloom overnight, the children would pick the scarlet calyxes and corollas and make butterflies

10.  I am “present,” here and now. I cling to memory, like a parasite. Anywhere there is memory, and stories to be told, that’s where I reside. Whenever history is told orally, I am in people’s throats and mouths, on the tips of their tongues.

11.  Not to mention trees and streams, earth and grass. That banyan I used to climb remembers me, as does the bishopwood tree to which I prayed. The bamboo grove I helped cut down remembers me, as does the field where I lay down to sleep. This small town remembers me, for I lived here and died here. Where else was I going to be a ghost?

12.  Was the congee you just ate thick or thin? Then everyone would remember it differently. And the answers wouldn’t just be thick or thin, because between thick and thin lies an expanse of “in - between.” Imagine a crooked line.

13.  The deceased was at peace, while the living were evasive.

14.  Smell was the sense by which he would orient himself. The orchard smelled of ripe starfruit, the Lady at the Foot of the Wall of stick incense, the graveyard of spirit money ash, and the soy sauce plant of the mellow sweetness of fermenting soybeans. Now that the factory was abandoned, there was nothing to smell, but something to see. The outer wall was covered in a mottled canvas mural

15.  A leaden cloud blocked the silvery moon. It was pitch black in the apartment.

16.  According to Jonice Webb, Ph.D. in psychology, "Parents love for their children must go through conflicts. It is also through the process of these conflicts that a healthy child can be created."

   As a tiger baby: I forgive my mother’s hurt and appreciate her efforts

How to be willing to work hard again and again to achieve the best version of yourself

17.  Whoever dared to go light would have to inflict double the punishment.

18.  His childhood had dried up. His adolescence had dried up. And so had the pool. Maybe the entire Baltic Sea had dried up.

19.  “Barbie Chen!” she yelled at the White House. “Get your ass out here this minute. If I can come back, you can come out!”

20.  Keith had seen this expression before, several times: when Nut climbed out of the water cistern, when Sam said farewell, and when Plenty watched the fireworks at Barbie and Baron’s wedding.

21.  the myriad things revived, the air was crisp, and lovers were fresh

22.  When summer came, they went to the bearleek wood agai. By this time bunches of little white flowers of six petals each had appeared among the leaves. From a distance it looked like snow in June.n The Bärlauche were bitter now that they’d bloomed

23.  People with terminal cancer are just counting down the days, but every day is like a thick novel you can’t finish reading

24.  You wrote stories on paper, she made waves on rice.

25.  At eighteen years old, when she was studying for the university entrance exam, pressure would nibble at her body like termites.

26.  Everyone is going to die of poverty, or drought

27.  There’s a chasm in her body, into which all the words fall.

28.  They knew they were all ashes and dust, waiting for the wind to come

29.  The raindrops were needles, not arrows. Arrows would pierce her skin and split her organs, killing her. But these damn raindrops were needles that would keep pricking her without doing her in. It was slow torture.

30.  Spring was in the display cases and on the hangers.

31.   The Chen children can fall asleep anytime, anywhere, thought Beverly. We aren’t choosy about the material or the location. Wood, grass, bricks, cement. On a sofa, in a waterbed. Under a tree, by a field, in a car — no matter where, that’s a place to lay our heads. Sitting, lying, or standing, reclined or curled up on our sides, we can always get to sleep. Even when there isn’t any place for us in Heaven and Earth, at least we can escape into sleep. Sleep your fill and all will be well, Mom always said. Heaven is great, Earth is great, but Sleep is Fate.

 

Conclusion

※Kevin: "We strive to be an important part of other peoples lives, whether through work or marriage, but when it comes to shame and body, we cannot speak out. All we can share with others is glory, beauty, and splendor."

In his story, Keith has five sisters: Beverly, Barbie, Betty, Belinda and the fifth sister. Plenty committed suicide. One elder brother called Heath

Parents:

Cliff: never talk father, Keith’s father goes into business with Jack Wang, a canny entrepreneur who sells rice crackers, and much else besides, in Taiwan and China. He is suffering from the liver cancer and passed away.

Cicada: never stop talking mother, in order to delete the past, she burned the fire to kill her fifth daughter and herself and the snake killer

Characters:

Grandmom(Cicada’s mom):

Mother said labor pain wasn’t pain at all. But compared with other kinds of pain, giving birth is nothing. When Cicada’s mother was a girl, her mother got gang - raped in the bamboo grove. A farmer found her naked, pressed beneath a man while another waited. The farmer chased those men away with a hoe, wrapped her in a rice sack, and took her home. But her husband’s family would not let her in. They told her to go home. “I want to die,” she told her young daughter. “I’m going to go hang myself in the bamboo. Don’t tell today,” she said. “Tell them where they can find me tomorrow.” The daughter did as she was told, and went along the next day. She saw a thin body hanging from a thick stalk of bamboo. As the bamboo started to sway in a gust of wind, so did her mother’s corpse.

Another story. For a firewalk ceremony at a temple fair, a thick layer of black sand was spread out in the square, with spirit money on the sand. Barefoot men lined up, each holding a statue of the deity and waiting for the right time. They were all men, both elders and teenage boys. Women were not allowed to firewalk. The fire was lit, and the men raced one by one over the piles of burning paper. One man hesitated, but when an elder cursed him, he hurried into the fire, only to trip and fall and drop his statue, which rolled into the flame. Everyone was aghast. “Save the god!” they yelled. Nobody was going to save that man. So Cicada’s mother rushed in to pull him out. “Cicada, oh Cicada, let me tell you, they cursed me for that, for breaking the prohibition, for contempt of the court of Heaven. But Cicada, that man was your father.

 

Grandma(Cliff’s mom) She went to the school and searched class by class, for Beverly, Betty, and Belinda. She dragged them outside one by one and interrogated them in front of their teachers and classmates. Kneeling, the sisters were crying and shaking their heads as Grandma’s palm walloped their bodies. When she got tired of hitting them with her hand, she ran into a classroom and grabbed a cane.

The three sisters didn’t have the chance to get their book bags, they were yelled at and shoved off the school grounds. The whole school watched them go. At home they knelt in the courtyard, where, with endless endurance, Grandma continued flogging them. Mother rushed out carrying Barbie and Ciao, who were crying and fussing in her arms, only to have to kneel down beside her three eldest daughters. “I don’t care about the necklace!” Grandma yelled. “I just want to know who it was! If somebody admits it, we’ll call it a day.”

Betty stood up sobbing and said, “It was me!”

Grandma picked up a big broom and walked closer and closer to Betty, who was  thinking: “I’m a goner!”

The broom handle hit her in the gut, sending her little body flying.

She bounced off the brick wall and fell face down on the ground. She braced herself for more broom handles. Suddenly Grandma screamed. Blackie had bit her arm and would not let go.

Later that day Grandma stunned the dog with a brick. Then she dumped it in a cauldron of boiling water. She skinned it with gusto, chopped it up with a cleaver, and cooked it, while Betty and her sisters cowered in their room. They shut the window as tightly as they could, but they still smelled it.

Her second uncle came home with his son just in time for the dog - meat feast. Through the window, Betty saw her cousin with that necklace around his neck. Although she couldn’t hear the conversation, she could see her uncle remove the necklace and hand it back. Everyone took a bowl and enjoyed the meal. They were all smiles.

Father(Cliff):A descendent from the landlord, after the Nationalist government carried out land reform. The family fortune was in decline. He was hired as an apprentice mover, he was now in charge of selecting, transporting, and washing the soybeans and got his start wholesaling betel leaf.

The Nationalist government carried out land reform. When his father came home after graduation, they weren’t rich landlords anymore. The family fortune was in decline. Yongjing at the time couldn’t be described as barren, but the meadows were weedy, the roads muddy, the snakes fat, the mosquitoes nasty.

He was the first son in a country clan, and that he had three younger brothers, five daughters, and two sons. He remembered that he got married one time. I remembered how much a certain customer owed me in a certain year and how many big cargo trucks I owned. I remember my liver function index before I died.

I bought the first townhouse in the row. A couple of doors down a coffin maker moved in. When his mom died, he could go next door and buy her a coffin, to fulfill my responsibility as the eldest son.

The matchmaker told Cliff’s mom that the suitable girl was the eldest daughter of the owner of the soy - sauce factory. The mother was a widow, the daughter had just turned eighteen. She was hardworking and obedient, and round in face and ass. One look at her would tell you she would bring good fortune into her husband’s household, that she’d have sons for sure. Her name was Cicada Lin, her nickname Saucy. She was the prettiest girl in town. She was illiterate, but she was frugal and hard - working. She was born to be a good daughter - in - law. The matchmaker pointed at the soy sauce on the table and said, “Meals in every household in the township are seasoned with this brand of soy sauce. That tells you the family’s financial situation is decent. Her dowry will be generous.” She’d compared the Eight Characters of her birth and mine. According to her, a marriage between the eldest son of the Chen family and the eldest daughter of the Lin family was a match made in Heaven.

He only saw Saucy Cicada twice before he married her. The first time was at the factory, where the two clans met. The matchmaker brought Cicada in. She served oolong tea and betel nut to the guests, but she didn’t say a thing. She didn’t even look up, so he couldn’t see what she looked like. He couldn’t smell the tea — the sour, salty odor of fermenting soybeans was too strong. The soy sauce apparently sat in vats in the courtyard for six months before bottling. He could follow the conversation, barely, over the sound of the cicadas that were crying in the trees outside the factory.

 

But, to his great surprise, his mom lived to be a centenarian. he predeceased her. The next coffin I had made after Plenty’s was my own.

Father had kept a lot of secrets in his life, such as his wife loved the snake killer but in this photograph he looked at peace. His wife sent her to live at the temple at the end of the livercancer to get the blessings from the God.

 

Mother(Cicada):

One of her relatives mentioned that the cicadas cried just as loud on the day she was born. They cried so loud nobody heard her mother cry that it hurt so much, that the baby was coming. So they called her Cicada.

Cicada was born late in the Japanese colonial era, but early enough to start school before the war ended. She only went for two days. She didn’t learn a thing, besides what to do in the event of an American air raid. She’d always regretted her lack of education, because her illiteracy turned the modern world against her.

Cicada was eighteen years old, and about to get married to the scion of the Chen clan, formerly the richest in the township. After the Japanese left, the nationalist government came to Taiwan and instituted land reform. Many hectares of land were forcibly appropriated by the government for well under market value. The Chens were no longer big landlords.

Cicade set the fire. When she heard that Keith was going to jail, she went down into the basement of the snake killer’s place, the only one in the row. Plenty knew. After Baron decided to marry Barbie instead of her, she had a full body breakout, a rash from head to toe. The snake killer opened a secret door, took her down into the basement, and uncorked a bottle of medicinal wine. Everyone knows Baron had  fun with Plenty. No one wanna merry Plenty.

After the wedding Plenty kept trying to do herself in. Cicada thought it was a passing phase. They would visit the matchmaker and find another suitable boy. But the silly girl went on cutting herself. She held a suicide press scrum in front of the White House. She cut her face and breasts in front of Baron. She even left a pool of blood in the basement for your mother to find.

When she heard Keith had gone to prison, Cicada hid down there in the basement of the snake killer, unwilling to come out. She seemed to hear every mouth in the town saying: “She had a bunch of girls, then finally two boys, both jailbirds.” She told the snake killer she wanted everything to burn. The basement, the snake killer and herself, the past. She was a failure as a mother and as a wife. Both her sons were convicts. Her husband was dead. She had no reason to keep living here. She was too ashamed to keep living here.

The fire broke out in the middle of a windy night. In an instant the snake killer’s house, every floor, fell into a sea of fire. The fire spread quickly on the first floor, from VHS to DVD. The snakes and other critters on the second floor all got burnt to a crisp.

 

Plenty lifted it when the snake killer wasn’t looking, put it on, and went to see her mother. When Cicada saw her, her eyes flashed lightning, her voice thundered. Plenty threatened her.

 

Siblings: The Chen children can fall asleep anytime, anywhere, thought Beverly. We aren’t choosy about the material or the location. Wood, grass, bricks, cement. On a sofa, in a waterbed. Under a tree, by a field, in a car — no matter where, that’s a place to lay our heads. Sitting, lying, or standing, reclined or curled up on our sides, we can always get to sleep. Even when there isn’t any place for us in Heaven and Earth, at least we can escape into sleep. Sleep your fill and all will be well, Mom always said. Heaven is great, Earth is great, but Sleep is Fate.

 

Five daughters: ( Beverly,Betty, Belinda, Barbie,Plenty)

Beverly(the first daughter): She was the only one who stayed. She now lived in the fifth house from the left, his old home.

She remembered the day of the earthquake. Her husband Little Gao tore into the back yard, grabbed a few potted orchids, and ran out, without a glance at her. She hadn’t gotten up at all. She just kept treadling. She had a batch of garments to deliver the next day. The earthquake didn’t matter. The walls could fall, the house could collapse, she didn’t care.

When she was young, she wished she were an orchid. But after that earthquake she felt sorry for those orchids.

The pay and the atmosphere were so much better there, but her mother absolutely forbade it, reminding her that any girl who switched jobs during Ghost Month would spend the rest of her life picking duds; she was sure to marry the wrong guy. She obeyed and stayed. If she hadn’t, she never would have met Little Gao.

The year baby Keith was born, they finally left the three - wing compound and moved into one of the new houses in this row. Counting on your fingers, it was the fifth from the left.

She’d dropped out of school at fifteen years old to go to Shalu to work as a seamstress. Now she was in her sixties, her hands callused. She did piecework at home.

One year, Little Gao announced he was going to invest their life savings in a soap factory, another of his get - rich - quick schemes. A few days later the factory called to say they’d stopped production. The investment evaporated.

Gao admitted the investment was a ruse to pay a gambling debt.

The perm she had gotten half a year before was limp and faded. She looked bitter, like she’d had a hard life. Her eyelids drooped, her wrinkles were deep. Her face was quaking night and day.

 

Beverley’s hub: Beverley hadn’t completed secondary school or traveled abroad, but she did know that China wasn’t a begonia leaf anymore: Mongolia had been independent for ages, she also suffered from chronic insomnia after the earthquake.

Beverley married a forklift driver with a gambling problem. He was a driver. By day he drove the forklift. In the evenings he often drove a truck, taking odd delivery jobs. He carried concrete, watermelons, or Chinese cabbage. He almost never spoke. He reminded her of her father. Later he starts to run Moth Orchid business, all got destroy by Typhoon, later he had put up all their savings down as collateral for a bank loan to buy a mountain in Nantou County to the east of Yongjing. He ends up with collapse, in debt! So they move back to live with her parents.

He had three kids. His wife was a seamstress just like Beverley.

Beverley had a child out of wedlock was scandalous in a small town like Yongjing.

A few months later, she was pregnant. As soon as the foreman found out, he came to her dorm and told her to pack up and leave. She had no place to go, besides home. “Didn’t you say you were going to go out and make some money?” her mother yelled. “You were out there living it up, until you got yourself knocked up.” Having a child out of wedlock was scandalous in a small town like Yongjing. It so happened that the next townhouse in the row was for rent. Father put up the money for the damage deposit. That was their bridal suite. The wedding was rushed, the dowry shabby. She had been working for three years, planning to save some money and settle down in downtown Taichung. She didn’t want to spend her whole life as a seamstress. She wanted to open a store and sell pretty clothes. But now she’d come full circle. Her time in the city was like a dream. Here she was, back in this row of townhouses. She tried her best to get away from her family and ended up living next door to them. Now her mother was only a wall away.

 Little Gao quit his forklift driver job in Shalu and followed her back to Yongjing. He did odd jobs at construction sites around town. Only after the wedding did it dawn on her that her quiet husband was a gambling fiend: rummy, mahjong, baseball, he was game for anything. He had a bookie the way an addict has a dealer. After nine months of pregnancy, not a penny remained of her years of savings. She had to go next door to ask for a loan. A distance of a few steps, it was the longest, and most humiliating, journey. Her mother got out a wad of bills and shot her verbal daggers. “At fifteen you went out to make it and here you are, still borrowing money from me. Silly girl, you’re the only one who doesn’t know that he’s been gambling behind the god - of - the - earth temple.” Beverly ran home, stashed the money, grabbed a cleaver, and charged over to the temple. She overturned tables. She pushed bystanders out of the way. She hacked at a few would - be peacekeepers. She even hacked at the holy statue of the god of the earth, but she never got close enough to her husband. Little Gao slipped out and ran into a rice field. She chased him, knife in hand, and the police chased her, blowing their whistles as they went. She ran across the rice field and the chrysanthemum field. She was running across the swamp spinach field, the future site of the White House, when her water broke. She gave birth in that field before the ambulance arrived. Frogs were croaking, in harmony with her labor cries.

When Little Gao showed up to see his firstborn, the baby girl she’d given birth to in the swamp spinach field, he said that he was going to go to the temple to swear on all he held dear that if the next baby was a boy he would give up gambling and take her to see his parents. His parents? She thought he was an orphan, but he turned out to be the eldest son of a farming family from the neighboring township. So she kept trying. She kept getting pregnant and miscarrying. She overheard him tell the snake killer that the Lady at the Foot of the Wall had answered his prayers. Obviously, the fetuses his wife was losing were girls. The year her daughter turned three, she finally gave birth to a strapping baby boy. She didn’t have to go to see her parents - in - law, they came to see her in the hospital. They brought a red envelope and held their grandson. They accepted her as their daughter - in - law and asked about her family. But they paid no attention to their granddaughter, who was crying and fussing to the side.

 Her husband really did give up gambling after she gave him a son, but he hadn’t cured his addiction, just found a new outlet for it: orchids. It was the snake killer who gave him the idea.

There’s been an accident. Your husband’s truck turned over. He spilled a load of milk on the highway.” She didn’t panic, just calmly asked where it had happened and said she would be there as soon as she could. He’d done it again. In the past few years, he’d been causing trouble everywhere he went. Nothing he did could surprise her anymore. From Paris’s tone just now, she knew he was still alive. It was so hot today, she decided to take it easy. In any case, Paris was there.

The snake killer made it into the paper for winning the gold medal in an international orchid competition.

 Her husband aspired to a hobby, too. He didn’t dare kill snakes, but growing flowers was so simple, anyone could do it, even him. So he made himself a flower rack and threw himself into orchid rearing.

A few years later, a moth orchid from Little Gao’s Orchid finally won a prize. It was a small amount of money. But it attracted the attention of a professional judge, who came over to look at the rest of his collection. He offered him a high price for one of the potted orchids. But her husband refused. She was so angry she felt like hacking him with a cleaver.

Several days later a typhoon hit central Taiwan hard. It blew everything in the back yard away, leaving not a single petal, pot, or grain of soil behind. Little Gao stood at the back door and watched the ruthless wind tear his or chard apart. She thought that he would go out and rescue the orchids. But all he did was say, “Go next door and borrow money from your father. I’ll go buy new ones tomorrow.”

When Beverly and her husband moved in with her parents, Little Gao’s back - yard orchid orchard had to move, too. That was where Cicada liked to sleep most of all before she passed away, in that orchard. After lunch, when Beverly’s sewing machine grew particularly insufferable, she walked out back, sank into the reclining chair, and entered into a conversation with the orchids and the chickens, just by snoring. Her nostrils were like trumpets and her mouth like a tuba. Each exhalation was a blaring note. She was louder than the sewing machine. When she snored, even the cock with the lustiest cry would lie down in the corner of the yard, stick his feet up, and fall into a stupor. That was the best time to grab it. Beverly would take the opportunity to tie up its feet. By the time it woke it was well on its way to turning into a pot of stew.

After that mountain disappeared, Beverly and her husband were completely broke. No, they weren’t just broke, they had a mountain of debt, and an empty nest. The kids were working in China and came back only once a year. Her parents were the only ones left next door. Just move in, Father said, there’s only a single wall between us. Your mother needs someone to fight with. I don’t give her that luxury, I’m not that much of a talker. She just isn’t happy. If you move in, you can save rent. You just have to remember to schedule arguments with your mother.

Little Gao had put up all their savings down as collateral for a bank loan to buy a mountain in Nantou County to the east of Yongjing. After the earthquake, all their dream came into dust. Without asking her in advance.

When the ritual is over she wants to give you a big hug, but her arms stay stuck at her sides, she can’t reach them out. Your friend Sam’s there,

 

Betty(Taipei): a civil servant If she didn’t pass the exam, maybe she could just get married. But the boys the matchmaker brought had no interest in her, the plain second daughter. Their dry eyes would gush as soon as they caught sight of her sisters. Each of them had her own allure. Beverly’s chest rose like a mountain range, Belinda’s nose soared like a skyscraper. Barbie was as fine and pale as a piece of paper. And Plenty was the most beautiful girl in all of Yongjing. She didn’t have any postsecondary education. She couldn’t speak any foreign languages. She stuttered or fell silent in interviews. She dressed in muted colors. So she started to prepare for the national civil service exam. She wasn’t good for anything except memorization. She threw herself into the practice tests for six months, never leaving the house. in Taiwans capital, Taipei, enduring the negligence of her own husband .

Betty was smart to marry such a boring guy.. Boring is good. Boring is the best.

 

This was actually the kind of marriage that she wanted, with a conservative husband from an older era. He was a civil servant, a nine - to - fiver just like her. He didn’t like to go on vacation, he didn’t long to go abroad. He would stay home on holidays and sleep. He didn’t spend much money, he had a stable salary. She’d had two children with him, a boy and a girl, no surprise. Boring and predictable. A colleague had introduced them. She knew that she would marry him on the first date. He had no opinion about what to eat or where. His features were like a bowl of unseasoned broth, his emotions lukewarm. He was neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin. He talked in straight lines, never went on tangents. His clothing was cheap. He didn’t have it in him to dress stylishly. After they said their goodbyes, she struggled to drag his contours into mind. When their bodies came together after the wedding, it was only for procreation, not for pleasure. Her body was a dry mesh sieve.

Household Registrar Chen in Taipei, her window handled household registration. She updated registers, issued transcripts, and replaced ID cards. It was simple work, an ideal job. It was perfect because it was all of a piece and the pay was regular. It wasn’t complicated. Everything was so orderly she took it for granted.

But in the past few years, her “ideal job” had gone haywire. Civil servants of her generation had to learn to use a computer as adults. Technology crashed over her like a tidal wave. She also needed to face the unreasonable clients and a pervert hub.

 

Betty had gotten off work and walked out of the office before realizing that today was Ghost Festival.

Many stores had set out tables of offerings and smoking braziers. Betty hadn’t done that in years. How was she supposed to, living in a small apartment in Taipei? In the first few years after moving in she’d put a little table out on the balcony, but it was too narrow to burn spirit money on. She was afraid she might burn the whole building down. Her only offerings were chicken boiled in brine and seasonal fruits. Without even lighting incense, she put her palms together and pumped her hands up and down to pray for good luck and a good life for the family.

Grandmom thought that Girls(Beverley, Betty, Belinda) cleaned her room and stole her necklace and run to school to them in front of their teachers and classmates, Betty was so afraid and admitted it, Her grandmom was so upset and killed her blackie who rushed out to save her. Later her cousin visited them and found out he wore the necklace one his neck, no one scold him , just keep smiling.

Her lie condemned the dog to death. After she grew up she kept on hurting people.

If back in the day she had not said anything, if she had not told on them, then maybe bosses Ming and Ri would still be alive today. Later on, she saw the thick boss’s picture in the newspaper. His face wasn’t so round anymore. In fact, he was thin as a rail. She initially thought that the reporter had got the wrong man. But she did a double take and, yes, that was the thick boss’s face. It had just been a few months. She shuddered to think about what might have become of the thin boss.

 

Belinda(Taipei): The only university-educated sister. The top student in Yongjing that year, and the only one to win test - based admission to National Taiwan University, turned out to be a girl. Her hub is a news anchor , her husband was a marionettist; she was the marionette hanging on the string. Her news anchor husband intercept her family’s contact.

As anchor’s assistant, by helping him to publish the biography about Nut. After married the anchor who brought her to Taipei to leave this God - forsaken place . She accepted his proposal. She kept her mouth shut, but he knew, and she knew, that she didn’t have to say it: she’d already accepted. Yes, he saw through her. She would make a Good Wife for sure. A Good Wife who would keep her mouth shut. She would be a piece of furniture, an ornament. She sure looked good on him. She would be the great woman behind the great man. In pain, she would stay tight - lipped. She wouldn’t tell a soul. She wouldn’t have a soul to tell.

 

She got baptized, converted to Christianity. But she’d helped with the tables and talked with a few ladies about the festival. Growing up in the country, she dreaded Ghost Festival but also looked forward to it. It was scary because the Hellgate was agape. At the thought of all those lonely souls flitting around

As soon as she came in the door she got pushed down on the floor.

 “I saw you holding incense.”

 Her husband hit her with such skill and just the right amount of force, but without touching her face and arms. It would hurt, she would bruise, but never bleed.

Are you sneaking sweets when I’m not looking? No more sugar for you! Are you just like your mother, illiterate? From now, read the nutritional information! If there’s any carbohydrates, whether sugar or starch, you’re not allowed to eat it.

 In mentioning her mother he meant to humiliate her.

Belinda wouldn’t be attending any part of Plenty’s funeral.

She’d had two abortions in the first few years of her marriage. Her husband went with her both times.

 “What are you crying for?” he said. “Didn’t we decide we were going to be happy just the two of us? Look at your family. That’s what happens when you have a bunch of kids.”

Belinda’s hub:

“I will arrange the elegiac couplets and the floral wreath. Don’t worry, it’ll be covered in high - profile names, of famous stars, legislators, the president. It’ll be an event. You won’t be there, though, because the paparazzi will be out in force. You stay put for now. You can go home when it’s all over.”

Barbie:

Baron could still hear Barbie moan. Baron was originally going to marry Plenty. But later on he suddenly stopped coming for Plenty, he came for Barbie instead. He had no idea that Barbie was moaning so loudly so that Plenty would hear next door.

She has wedded the local magnate, who made his fortune selling crackers and keeps his wife locked in their mansion while he cavorts with mistresses

Now she lived in a spacious upstairs room at the White House with an en - suite bath and a full - length window that overlooked the entire town. But actually she had no idea what Yongjing looked like now.

Baron still hadn’t removed it. That chandelier was one of Plenty’s demands.

The dehumidifier operated industriously all day long, but started to beep in the middle of the night. She hit it as hard as she could but it would not hold its tongue. She opened it to find it full of water. She happened to be thirsty. So she drank the entire pail.

Between her and the outside world, the air - tight window blocked sound, and the curtains light. Sun, moon, and wind could find no crack to enter.

What should she do? Mom would know. Oh my God. Mom’s gone missing. Unable to recall where Mom had gone, she made calls to her elder sisters.

 “Mom’s gone missing! Mom’s gone missing! Mom’s gone missing! ”

 Her yells echoed in the room and woke up all the mites and the spiders, the roaches and the rats. In the past few years the moldy publications had absorbed all of her yells, which would come back out again whenever she nudged them, along with a menagerie of corpulent vermin.

 When the newlyweds moved in, the echo was really loud. When they were writhing on the bridal bed, the shrieks of ecstasy resounded in the room. They often forgot to close the window. And so the sounds of newlywed pleasure seeped out over the balustrades and the fence wall, through the rice fields, and down the highways and byways of the township. They woke up domestic animals and even reached Plenty’s ear. Sometimes he would yell “Plenty!” when he climaxed. Barbie felt the ecstasy of victory. What with the window refusing to close and all, Plenty must have heard it. It was because this room would leak secrets that she later had to seal it up like a crypt.

 In those days he did not call her by her full name, he just called her Barb.

 “Barb,” he said, “I built the White House for you. It’s your wedding gift. Do you like your bridal suite? From now on, I’m going to buy you whatever you want. So tell me, what do you want?

 At the time she only wanted one thing. For Plenty to disappear.

What they wore to the airport, what airline they flew on, what hotel they stayed in, what brand of car they drove — the reporter listed all the travel details, specifying brand and price. Baron came along, but with his new squeeze, not his wife.

Keith:

 I haven’t written you back, but I got your letters. All the letters you’ve written me the past few years. You sent them to the old townhouse. Beverly snuck them over to me. Baron doesn’t know. He really doesn’t. He thinks that it’s shameful that there are people in my family, two of them, who are locked up. What a moron! As if no one from his family has ever seen the inside of a cell. Moron. He can go to hell.

 I didn’t answer your letters, I didn’t. Because I can’t. You know how dumb I am. It’s really hard for me to write a letter. I can’t do it. I’m dumb,

I want to burn the White House down. If I burn it, it won’t be white anymore. It’ll turn into charcoal. The white will be black

The next morning, the cicadas were crying, driving you away. Before you left you lit incense in my mourning hall and said a prayer for me. You were mumbling, so I couldn’t hear the words, but I knew that you were bidding me farewell. I wanted to tell you to leave, as soon as possible. All right, you’ve said goodbye, now you can go. Hurry up, go! Reticent in life, I was silent in death. I tried as hard as I could to give you a sign, by lifting the tablecloth or extinguishing the candle in the mourning hall, to tell you I had heard your prayer. But the tablecloth didn’t move, nor did the candle flicker. I couldn’t move in my picture, I was freeze - framed.

She hadn’t gone out since Plenty’s funeral.

She thought she was the winner, because she was the bride, not Plenty. She played the leading role at the wedding. But Plenty had still upstaged her. Her funeral made everyone in town forget all about the wedding.

Plenty:

Voluptuous, long - haired, pale - skinned. Red lips, big eyes. A sneeze volcano

Plenty tried to kill herself with the razor found by Keith in the chrysanthemum field when Barbie married Baron.

Wang’s eldest son Baron said he wanted to marry Plenty and build a mansion, the biggest Yongjing had ever seen, for her to live in.

locked the door. She’s still afraid of hippos. She doesn’t dare to go outside.

 She wakes up terror - stricken every night to the sound of a sobbing baby. The fool.

 I spread that rumor, about me being pregnant with Baron’s child, before I died. I let the hippo out of its enclosure, too.

Plenty died by suicide, murderer was actually her mom. That she was the fifth daughter. The score she got on her high school entrance exam. The digits on her scooter plate. That she slept on the third floor. That she sneezed a record fifteen times when she woke up in the morning. That she’d been in hospital six times on suicide attempts before she finally did herself in. That she was 165 centimeters tall.

 

 I only found out her height when I ordered the coffin next door. The coffin maker came over to measure the corpse. “165 centimeters,” he said. “She had fine bones and a good figure.” The make - up artist applied lipstick and eyeshadow. I’m sure she looked fabulous, but at the time all I could think of was the plastic bag.

 

That chandelier was one of Plenty’s demands.

 

Barbie was so envious. She didn’t need to say it, Plenty always knew. They ate the same things every day, they did all the same activities. They went to the same elementary and junior high, they drank the same water. They went to bed at the same time and got up at the same time. Why was Plenty so full, and she so flat

The neighbor’s eldest son Junior — as I mentioned, I called him Junior — came over to discuss a business proposition. He said my tits were the talk of the town. All the girls wanted to be me. He wanted me to tell people it was because I took a certain brand of Japanese multivitamin. He would be responsible for sourcing and selling it. Who cared what was in it, as long as it didn’t kill you and had a Japanese label. He proposed a sixty - forty split. He would handle everything else, all I had to do was say I took those Japanese vitamins. I said sixty - forty suited me just fine, but it would be sixty for me, forty for him. He said it wasn’t worth it, why didn’t we just forget it then. I said he could feel my tits, ten seconds a side. Then we’d split it sixty - forty. Sixty for me, forty for him.

 Ten seconds for the left side. I counted down slowly.

 

Two Sons: she’d finally had two sons. Now one was in jail and the other was AWOL

Heath/Elder son:

He worked in a coffin shop, Baron persuaded him to elect for the township mayor.

He’d gone to China with Jack Wang and invested everything. Trusting Jack completely, he didn’t check the fine print or the transfers. In a few years Jack was rolling in dough, while his slice of the pie had somehow gotten eaten. Father warned him against working with the Wangs and told him he was a spoiled brat. “You can’t do anything, but at least you can do carpentry. Focus on that, not on what you think you want. You’d be a disaster as mayor.”

 So there he was, crying like a child in the back seat of the police cruiser.

He was once the township mayor, for goodness’ sake. He was elected by a landslide. But he didn’t survive the construction scandals he got caught up in in less than two years into his term. He exhausted his appeals and went to prison.

Baron promised Heath to take care of Barbie even she was just a basket case. He would support his campaign. He would get elected by a landslide if Heath opened the back door for him, he would support him with cash. He has got a property to rezone and he needed a permit to develop it

Soon the district prosecutor had Heath in his sights. Baron promised to hire the best lawyers to prove that due diligence had been done on the environmental impact assessments, and that everything was above board. Heath had nothing to worry about! After all, the Wangs were like Teflon, nothing ever stuck. They always got away with it, whatever it was. A graft scandal broke after the Wang headquarters in Taipei won a green building prize. It was all over the news for quite a while, but in the end Jack and Baron escaped unscathed. The panels on the roof kept sucking up the sun by day. The building never stopped shining at night.

 Heath burst out crying when he got in the cruiser. He hadn’t done anything wrong. Why was he going to prison? When Nut Wang was thrown in jail, Mother told him it was Nut’s own fault. He was a pervert, he had it coming. But Heath hadn’t done anything wrong, he wasn’t a pervert, so why was he “guilty?” Everything he had done was for the good of Yongjing. And why didn’t the Wang Foundation have to pay a price? Why did he have to be the fall guy?

 He made a lot of improvements during his short tenure. Wherever there was a blank wall, he had artists paint his portrait on it. His mom liked those portraits. She put on a bespoke peach cheongsam and stood proud beside one for a photo op. When Heath was elected, firecrackers were set off three days and three nights.

 

“The Chens and Wangs are one big family. Your sister Barbie’s a basket case, but have I abandoned her? No, I still take care of her, I’m her husband. We’re brothers - in - law, we should help each other out. Don’t worry about the money, I’ll fund your campaign. I promise you, you’ll get elected by a landslide. These country people will vote for you if they get their hands on some cash. All you have to do is promise to open doors for me. I’ve got a property to rezone. And I’ll need a permit to develop it.

A corrupt Yongjing mayor, the canny entrepreneur Jack Wany’s scapegoat who sells rice crackers between Taiwan and China. Keith has just been released from prison for killing his boyfriend. He is about to return to his family’s village, a poor and desolate place. With his parents gone, his sisters married, mad, or dead, there is nothing left for him there.

The township mayor was his elder brother.

His home was charlatans and usurers, gangsters and matchmakers. It was politics and corruption

Under his leadership, Yongjing was going to take off. Agriculture would soon be upgrading, along with local industries, betel nuts and leaves, and cultural and historic sites. He would lead the way towards internationalization, attracting tourists from all over the world. How could Yongjing globalize if people kept speaking Taiwanese?

 When he called for a general “upgrade,” he meant that the original or traditional approach was bad. It needed to be phased out, at least improved on. So he took a delegation to Paris and New York, came back, and reported to his citizens in his policy truck. He wanted to turn Yongjing into a petite Paris of the Orient, a miniature New York in the East. Corner grocery stores were backward; he’d introduce American superstores. The big open - air market was too old; he’d invite designers to come in and design some new stalls for vegetable vendors, fishmongers, and pork peddlers. He’d inject some European style, minimalist design, low - key luxury, to create the charming scenes he’d seen in a traditional

Heath never comes home from the mainland, not even for his father’s funeral. She said it loud. She was saying it so the neighbors would hear. Actually everyone knows where he’s hiding out. So what if he doesn’t come back? I don’t particularly want to see him, either.”

Keith/ writer

Relentlessly harassed about his homosexuality by both schoolmates and his especially harsh mother, Keith Chen, the novels primary protagonist, flees his hometown of Yongjing to live a freer, bohemian life in Berlin, where he enters a romance with a German named T.

 

There wasn’t a single solitary soul on the beach. A huge Second World War submarine lay on the beach, he was alive!

Keith got P.H. D. Keith got registered with T. Later he got divorced. He just wanna to spite his mom. But finally, it turns out to understand himself better.

Folks say that at six months babies sprawl, at seven they crawl, and at eight they drool. But you did everything faster than anyone. You started crawling at six months. At seven months you stood up and learned to walk. You were in such a hurry. You crawled, walked, and ran. Then you turned towards the door, wanting to go outside. If we carried you back inside you cried. If you saw a locked door or a shut window, you wanted to open it. If we said you weren’t allowed to go somewhere, you’d find a way. Your mother and I enjoyed scaring you. We said that there were ghosts out there — in the water, the bamboo, the field, or the road. If you go there a ghost is going to get you and then you’ll be an SOG, a son of a ghost. That got your attention. Your elder brother would frown and burst out crying, but you opened your eyes even wider. You were fearless and curious.

 

from the margin to the center. He was reassigned from Class 17 to Class Two. The second son of a traditional Taiwanese family of seven, runs away from the oppression of his village to Berlin in the hope of finding acceptance as a young gay man, ends up as a gay murder, back from Jail in Germany back to Taiwan.

Keith has just been released from prison for killing his boyfriend. He is about to return to his family’s village, a poor and desolate place. With his parents gone, his sisters married, mad, or dead, there is nothing left for him there.

He’d never visited his father’s grave, but he knew where he must be buried. Now that he was back for Ghost Festival, he should make the trip.

Keith finally left. So he missed his father’s funeral. Soon after he returned to Germany, he went to prison.

In front of the soy - sauce factory, I can watch my younger son Keith looking at the mural of his elder brother Heath. It’s so hot that he’s about to faint. Otherwise he wouldn’t have lost the way. When he left Berlin, it was fifteen degrees. When he got to Yongjing, it was thirty - eight. It’s the hottest day this year.

He imagined that this starfruit orchard was like a little local version of the Amazonian jungle, with a boa constrictor wrapped around a starfruit bough. Red Shorts put down the ladder, grabbed him by the waist, and whirled him around in place until he begged him to stop. Giggling, he hugged him tight. “No more, please, or I’ll be sick!” He took a deep breath to get a whiff of his armpit, then slid down to his waist. It smelled like a tree or an herb or a river, faintly pungent. He took another sniff and there it was, the dense jungle, the perfume of sharp - toothed alligators and piranhas. Their jaws clamped onto his body, leaving bite marks that he would never be able to forget. According to the story in the picture book, the tortoises and the butterflies were bosom buddies. The butterflies had a taste for tortoise tears, and as the tortoises had no way of cleaning away the crud around their eyes themselves, they let the butterflies land on their heads and suck. They loved each other. He imagined that he was a butterfly, that Nut was a tortoise, and that the starfruit orchard was their secret Amazonian jungle.

Actually Nut was a tortoise that shed no tears, not even in the cruelest moment of his life.

“I. Got. Out.” The I, the two ts, and the g had sharp edges that scraped the sides of his throat and the walls of his oral cavity. It hurt. But now that he’d said it, he felt lighter.

Writing a novel at home, he first heard the city sounds stealing in through the window. All the sounds were new, of the language, the wind, the rain. He couldn’t read anything, neither notices nor posters, neither signs nor books. Effectively illiterate, he finally understood his mother’s angst. But for now he enjoyed being an outsider.

The lawyer mentioned that her brother had attempted suicide several times but his situation had improved after counseling. Even so, he’d refused to see her at first. Then Shakespeare changed his mind. Ingrid, T’s mom came to see his show.

 

I’m going to be in a play. Shakespeare’s Hamlet .”

A Berlin theater had approached the authorities about a penal production. They’d cast the prisoners and give public performances. The audience would come into the prison.

 “What part are you playing? The ghost?”

 “As if, someone else is playing the father. The director arranged for five guys to play Hamlet. I’m one of them. I am memorizing the soliloquys, in German translation. It’s so hard. It’s killing me! But it’s been educational. I only realized I’m small fry compared to some of the guys when we started rehearsals. The guy who is playing Ophelia in drag killed three people. Another of the Hamlets killed five. I only killed one.”

 “And you didn’t do it on purpose.”

 

Keith’s novel:

The bodies of the men and women in those stories were always humid, like a tropical rainforest. The rivers were treacherous with rapids, the tree trunks erect. Serpents slithered, leopards howled, birds chirped.

 

Ingrid:

T’s mom, come to the prison to see the Hamlet played by Keith whom she had seen three times before T was dead.

Sam:

Sam taught Keith to swim.

Sam came back from Vancouver to Yongjing to do electrical and plumbing work

Their homeroom teacher, Sam’s mother accused Keith in front of his parents of seducing Sam. He would never forget his seducing block Sam to enter the medical school at NTU. Keith’s parents promised to arrange a transfer.

He’d met Sam in junior high school, on the first day of the second term.

He’d heard Sampan Yang was the teacher’s son. Sampan got the highest marks in the school. He was going to be a doctor. Keith would always remember how he introduced himself. “My name’s Sampan, as in ‘The sampan’s passed the piled - up peaks.’ You know, the boat that carried that poet out of exile down the Yangtze through the Three Gorges. Nice to meet you!”

 Everyone besides his mother called him Sam for short. Sam was the same height as him. He had a big nose and little eyes.

Sam’s gaze had come to rest upon him. It was light, that gaze, like a butterfly alighting on a fingertip, like a willow catkin skirting the surface of the river, like a spider’s thread falling on silver hair. Sam really was like a sampan, rocking gently back and forth. It always made him dizzy. He looked slowly up.

Sam and Keith ate their bah - uân with chopsticks out of the plastic bags.

“It’s mainly the sauce. Without Fragrant brand soy sauce, the bah - uân taste different. But sometimes I still feel like having one. I know it’s not going to taste good, it’s not going to be the same as when we were kids, but I still drive the truck over. Fortunate that I bought extra today, isn’t it? Considering that I ran into you.”

Keith gave Sam another glance. Short hair, swarthy, lean. He was wearing a sports vest, khaki shorts, and muddy trainers.

Sam rested his hand on his shoulder but didn’t speak. Keith took a look at that hand. It was deeply lined, with dirt around the fingernails. In thirty years, small hands had gotten big, and pale skin crow - black.

Many years later, your homeroom teacher came to the house accusing you of seducing her son. She demanded that we arrange for you to transfer to another school.

Your mother apologized for not raising you right.

Back in junior high school, his mother suddenly announced they were moving. He had to switch schools immediately. He had no idea what had happened. A few years ago he finally heard from Beverly what his mother had done.

 Growing up, he did whatever his mother said. He tested his way into the top high school in Taiwan, and then the top university major. After his elder brother got a Ph.D. at UBC, the whole family emigrated to Canada. Sam went to graduate school in Vancouver, too. He met a girl there, his doctoral classmate. They did research in the forest, observing owls from a bird blind. He told his mother that he was getting married. Mother took one look at the girl and said her skin was too dark, she wouldn’t allow it. Sam didn’t dare translate what his mother had just said into English. So, after a pointed glance at her son, she looked the girl in the eyes and said it herself. And then she switched back into Mandarin.

Sam’s whole family emigrated to Canada. Sam is the only one who came back. When Sam told her mom she was pretty pissed. The angrier she got the more of a sense of achievement Sam felt.

Sam came back to do electrical and plumbing work. Everyone else left, I’m the only one who returned. It’s actually gone pretty well.

Sam said he was raising bats in the back yard. When he moved home, a lot of the critters he had grown up chasing were gone. There were no yellow butterflies or bats that he could see

Jack Wang:

the Wangs had built a bunch of big factories in China. Her father had invested a lot of money. They had made a killing on the stock market. They are tycoons now, business is booming on the mainland.

Baron Wang(first son of Jack Wang):

He enjoy doing business since kid, like selling Japanese Vitamin(split the money with Plenty, Plenty as the using partner, Baron (Junior)as the selling partner.

elder son Baron’s got his head screwed on straight, just like his old man. He loves money, and he’s a ladies’ man. He’s got what it takes to make it in business.

Baron Wang, Jack’s son, builds a gaudy mansion in Yongjing and woos one of Keith’s sisters, Belinda, Plenty, then merry Barbie.

Hicks like me may not be good at school, but at least we know how to respect people who are. Look at my little brother, he’s about to graduate from university. He’ll stay in Taipei and work. I’m so happy for him. He even wants to go to America for further study. I’m envious. Look at me, I suck at school, all I can do is follow my old man around.

Communists, started allowing people to cross the Strait to visit family in ’87. Two years later, Wang Senior and Dad went over to prospect the market on that pretext. In June that year, there was a big disturbance in Beijing. Father said no way, no way he was staying, it was too scary. He fled home to Taiwan. The whole of Beijing was a silver water cistern, he didn’t dare go back. From then on, Wang Senior only took Junior along to sign contracts and build factories. Not long after that the Wangs came back saying that everyone else had pulled out of the market, now was the perfect time for them to get in. They’d made the right arrangements and pulled the right strings. Any crisis was a commercial opportunity. They were going to get filthy rich.

 The Wangs didn’t actually get their start selling crackers, they brought out cookies first. The packaging was covered in Japanese. “Chinese people have it tough,” Wang Senior said. “They look hungry. Like they don’t get enough to eat. So we’ll sell them sweet. They’ll eat sweet and forget how bitter their lives have been. With food in their bellies, they’ll forget their cares, and we’ll clean up.” Wasn’t it a bad idea to sell Chinese crackers made to look like Japanese imports? “Of course they say they’re anti - Japanese,” Wang Senior said. “But every last one of them feels a secret admiration for all that Japan has achieved. Eating Japanese is being Japanese. Everyone’s going to buy them.”

 So many cookies sold they had to expand the factory. Having scored with sweet, they tried their hand at salty. “Nutritious and sanitary, White House Crackers are perfect for any kind of spirit offering. When adults eat them, they can’t go wrong. When children eat them, they’ll grow up strong.”

 After making it big in China, they made a killing on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. In the late ’80s the index took off. By the early ’90s it hit ten thousand. Wang Senior imported German sedans for his two sons.

 “Nut was a dumbass,” Junior said. “Whatever his dream was, he was dumb. What good did going to university do him? He died so young. Look at me, I’m living high on the hog. I’ve made a shitload. Have you seen that book, the biography of my little brother? The author made a hell of lot of money off his death. Did Nut make even a single penny off his life? Moron. I’ll break their legs before I’ll let any of our kids go to university.”

 He asked if we could get married now. He wanted to try the titty fucking he had seen in Japanese adult videos on me. Titty fucking? I asked. He stuck his pointer finger between my tits and moved it up and down. The instant he touched me, my cleavage started itching like crazy, turning into a flowerbed. I covered that bed of roses up with my jacket right away.

 “When I get married, my old man’s going to build me a mansion. Whatever you want, tell me, I’ll stick it in.” The blueprint was drawn up and the ground was broken. I wanted a fountain. I wanted a zoo. I wanted a hippo to put in the zoo. Wang Senior gave my father and mother a big engagement gift. A Chen - Wang wedding would be the union of our two clans. The best materials would be used in the White House, and all the construction workers in the county would be hired to build it at top speed.

 “Now can we do it?” he asked after the engagement ceremony.

 He raced the German sedan to a big hotel in Yuanlin and dropped his pants as soon as we got in the room. He said he’d been hard the whole way. He was really big. And hairy. They didn’t call him Wang for nothing.

 He wanted me to suck him off but as soon as I got close enough to smell it, I barfed on him. Then on the carpet. And on the bed.

 I begged him to wait. “Please, I’ve not been feeling well recently.” Okay, he would wait.

 We tried again. This time he wanted to try titty fucking. I asked him to take a shower and wash himself with soap, until he’d washed away the smell. He did as instructed. He still reeked, of smoke, booze, and meat. I still felt nauseated, but this time I managed to stop myself from throwing up.

Nut(second son of Jack Wang):

An academic prodigy. Jack’s younger son was tall and wiry, like a betel nut palm tree, hence his nickname.

Nut was the first student in the township to test into NTU. He graduated and did his mandatory military service, but he wouldn’t stay and work in Taipei. He came home and said he wanted to farm the land. Jack gave him an abandoned carambola orchard to tend. “Nut was a dumbass,” Junior said. “Whatever his dream was, he was dumb. What good did going to university do him? He died so young.

Nut was thrown in jail, Cicada told Keith it was Nut’s own fault. He was a pervert, but she had no idea that Nut sacrified himself without speak one more word that Cliff was also the member of the book club at the Tomorrow’s bookstore. He saved Cliff’s whole family.

 

Nut Wang’s college classmate, Belinda’s hub is a news anchor who was a close associate of the Wang family. After Nut passed away, he paid many visits to Yongjing to write his biography, and hired Belinda to be his assistant to interview Nut and later they got married.

Nut Wang wrote it. You can’t have forgotten him! Green thumb. Red shorts. Lived next door.

Keith thought Nut was a tortoise that shed no tears, not even in the cruelest moment of his life., and that the starfruit orchard was their secret Amazonian jungle.

Keith had actually touched one when he was very young. The one in the red shorts.

Jack had two sons. “People say he’s some kind of an academic prodigy,” Jack said, “but I guess none of those books he reads ever told him about the palms on the old hundred - dollar bills. Talk about money growing on trees; in Taiwan trees grew on money. And Nut just doesn’t know the value of money! He won’t go out and make any, he just hangs around in the orchard. They say he’s got a green thumb, but if you ask me he’s a greenhorn. Bet he won’t last more than a few months as a farmer. Young people don’t understand how tough manual labor can be. Nut aroused Keith sexual awakenings (Keith learned he was gay, for starters) young I spent all that money sending him north to college so he could get ahead and make it big, and then he says that he can’t stand the big city.

Cicada carried a bowl of hot snake soup over to the Wang house. She went upstairs and through the open door of Nut’s room.

 I wasn’t there.

 I didn’t see a thing.

 The only way I can reconstruct what happened between Nut and you that evening is through the oral testimony that Cicada waited through the night to blurt out the next morning.

 This is what Cicada said. Nut was lying on the bed with his hands behind his head and his eyes closed. His expression was odd, while you were all red. You were resting your head on his waist and your hand on his root. Nut was very hard.

She froze for several seconds. Then she put the snake soup on the table, walked over to the bed, and took you in her arms. You were burning up, and fast asleep. But you kept gripping his root. You wouldn’t let go.

 She pinched your thigh and twisted, giving you a snake

, always staying next door at the Wang place. By that point, the Wangs had built a bunch of big factories in China. Her father had invested a lot of money.

 

The Baltic.

 That was where he was from

T:T and Keith will have quarrel sometimes, but will back to compromise with each other. T is an outdated cellist, and later lived with Keith in a cheap flat in Eastern Berlin. They were “getting married.” And who happened to be a man. T is a Nazi fallguy. T bully Keith and they got divorced. T tried to kill him accidently and Keith also wanna commit suicide. There wasn’t a single solitary soul on the beach. A huge Second World War submarine lay on the beach, he was alive!

 

 

To a German. T was over a decade younger. But at the time ,he had no idea. T burst in with rope and tape, grabbed him, and choked him and tied Keith up, feeding him pills. He was in a daze. He remembered shitting and pissing on the chair, he couldn’t help it. T wiped it up with a towel, then rubbed it on his face. T cut him with a razor. T kissed him. “Sorry,” he said. “I love you.” “Goodbye.” T ripped off his clothes. T helped him change into clothes that he’d soiled. T hit him. And himself. T threw him into a wall. Then himself. T played the cello so hard the strings broke. A neighbor pounded on the door. “Knock it off, for Christ’s sake!”T asked him non - stop questions while adding layer upon layer of tape. He would cut a slit for pills only to seal it again. He wanted to answer T’s questions, but how could he? He wanted to ask, “What the hell happened?” Then T severed the rope with a razor, grabbed a carving knife, and stabbed it at him. The two grappled on the piss - and - shit covered floor. The knife entered T’s body. His hands were all bloody, he was covered in blood, piss, and shit. He pushed the broken window out and honey rushed into his nostrils.

He found T’s mobile in his pocket and the keys to the car. He gazed in T’s eyes. He knew where to go. There were murky waves in the blue irises. He took the murder weapon with him. He would drive to the Laboe and kill himself on the beach.

 

T said, he would stop going out in search of lone gloves or to play the cello. He would get a job. He would find ways to make money.

Then T got a job posting stickers. An advertising company gave him a bag. All he had to do was ride around on his bike and post the stickers up along busy Berlin streets.

T also found a part - time job as a cashier in a fast - food restaurant.

The cello was fun to play, and they wouldn’t have met without it, but T couldn’t make much money with it.

All they had available was a gofer job, and the pay wasn’t great, but if it worked out a full - time position might come up.

They drove back to the Baltic Sea and stayed at T’s friend’s place.. He didn’t mention his father or mother.

Thinking back now, he wondered if there was a clear point in time when he and T started to fall apart.

He found smooth pills in T’s pocket.

His style changed dramatically. He no longer clothed himself in night. Fashionable threads appeared in his wardrobe. He got a slick hairdo.

 Keith discovered numerical combinations in the stickers that T was posting. Soon a pair of small tattoos appeared on his upper arms, 18 on the right and 44 on the left.

 

 The first way was handmade, and homemade, clay animals: seals, trouts, Kiel herrings, eels, all animals that lived in the Baltic Sea. The figurines were palm - sized, a staid grayish brown, but delightful. The scales on the fish were finely done. T made a big batch in the living room, put them in his backpack, and went out to sell them.

From one side, T is exquisite to create all handmade woodwork. From the other hand, T is a violent, mental-problem cellist from Baltic T’s family lived in a small town called Laboe on the Baltic Sea in northwestern Germany. T, now I’m an atheist, just like you, but I want to show you the temples I frequented as a boy.

Before killing T, he hadn’t slept in a long time.

when I first met you, you, too, were black as the night. Black coat, black gloves, black hat, black boots, black cello.

 Actually he first “heard” T’s black before he saw it.

Keith imagined that the cellist was a child. But the Schubert that followed was so world weary, it sounded like it must have been played by aged fingers.

 The snow fell for days on end. He stayed inside, watching it fall and writing. He didn’t go out at all. Every evening after eight o’clock the traffic abated and the cello appeared. He’d get ready for it by making a simple supper. Lettuce and tomatoes with olive oil, a fried egg and stir - fried garlic shredded chicken, simmered rice. He’d sit by the window and wait for the cello. When the sound came in he dug in. He ate very slowly, reading a few pages from a book. By the time the cello faded away he would have finished the last bite. One night when the cello did not come, he finally realized how awful the meal tasted. Without a cello to hypnotize him, his sense of taste was wide awake. The cello was gone, so were the groceries. Oh no, he really had to make a trip to the supermarket.

The temperature rose precipitously during the day, as sunlight forced jackets deep into dressers. The bald trees on the street budded tender new leaves overnight. He went for a stroll with his dictionary, stopping at every road sign, store sign, and notice in the neighborhood. There was a plaque to Lenin on the wall of the next apartment building. He looked up all the words, but couldn’t get the meaning to cohere. In 1895, in August, Lenin . . . A black dog sat down beside his feet. When he squatted down to pet it, a black shadow blocked the spring sun. A black jacket was trailing on the ground.

 Still wearing a black hat, Black Jacket pointed at the relief of Lenin .He kept talking, but this time he included a lot of English words.

 

The flame in Keith’s body rekindled. There he was, standing on an unfamiliar street in Berlin, when he suddenly thought of Red Shorts in the carambola orchard and Sam Yang in the swimming pool. And all that physical friction after he moved to Taipei. He got an erection.

The black jacket, black cello, and black dog all followed him into his little apartment. He was about to open the window when Black Jacket embraced him from behind and kissed his neck.
Black T got lighter and lighter. He took off his boots, his jacket, his sweater, his pants, and his underwear. The night died on the floor of the apartment.

They met in the subway and they enjoy bearleeks, kissing, making love. Keith is not so familiar with T. One day, T brought him to an art gallery opening, T can’t understand that Keith is reluctant to be social and really upset. They are not so close at all. T pull him out of his room.

Berlin:

What did Keith do in Berlin? Why? The answer, when it comes, is tied up with dark trends in German society and politics. It is, by far, the weakest part of the book. All the other components, however rushed, exist in a harmonious artistic circuit, each node supporting and energizing the others. The fact that the characters sometimes feel two-dimensional doesn’t stop their relationships from pulsing with heat and feeling. The story of Keith’s time in Germany is disconnected from this grid. In the book’s flattest moments, his crime feels like a crude lure dangled to coax the reader along. It’s sealed in its own compartment in the overstuffed suitcase, and would have benefited from getting tangled and smushed with the rest. It might have been messier. But, as the rest of “Ghost Town” shows so well, life gets messy, and Chen is an author who can handle it.(r.2)

 

The queen of striptease

She used to do striptease. Everyone in her family did, her grandmother, mother, and aunt. But now anyone can watch a striptease on a mobile phone any time they want. Business got so bad she switched to selling fried chicken. She used to be Keith’s classmate. She saved Keith from bullying by his teacher, Sam’s mom,

After school that day, the day Keith tried to slip Sam a note, the teacher cornered him under the bishopwood tree. The teacher’s scorching palms left red welts on his cheeks. “You pervert! Homo! I went to your house to warn you to stay away from my son.

At the sight of Keith all bruised up and unable to stand, the snake killer bundled him into the wagon and drove him to a big hospital in Changhua City. Keith remembered how fast his neighbor drove, going well over the speed limit and running every red light.

“I hope you don’t mind, I’ve come here to pray and practice. A few days from now my family has a gig here. I hear someone won big at the gambling table and has come back to show his gratitude.

Striptease save him

 

The queen of striptease has taken off her crown. Now she’s deep - frying chicken fillets on the street

Keith remembered her all right, copying his homework, dancing buck naked. She saved his life one time by dancing.

times have changed, and there aren’t as many invitations for her to strip as there used to be. The queen of striptease has taken off her crown. Now she’s deep - frying chicken fillets on the street.

Jack Wang:

Look at how skinny they are. They look malnourished. They must not be eating well enough. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll sell food, splash a few Japanese characters on the packaging. I know they like to holler slogans about resisting Japan and killing the Jap devils, but in their hearts they envy the Japanese. So we’ll disguise it as a Japanese food product. They’ll sell like hotcakes. After we find a factory, equipment, and financing, we’re going to make that pile. We’ll go back to Yongjing to renovate our ancestral abodes. Then we’ll build mansions.”

 

White House:

They change the orchard into White House.

orchard was now the grounds of a prize - winning green building. There were solar panels on the roof that protected the environment by powering the neon White House logo, lighting up the night.

She really didn’t get it. What was so “green” about it? To build a fortress that only the Wang family could enter, what was environmentally friendly about that? There didn’t used to be any fences around here.

Ghost:

How ghost like

I’m just a farm boy who lived and died in central Taiwan. I harvested crops in the field. Later I drove a truck, making deliveries. With only a junior high school education, I could never have expressed myself so articulately in life. But death induces incredible transformations. After I became a ghost, all linguistic boundaries instantly dissolved. Everything I could not say before, I can say now.

Now she was no longer afraid of ghosts or the dark. She felt her way to the bathroom in the dark.

Pear will make ghost come to you

You can’t pray with pear, or the ghosts will come to you.

I can’t find any other ghosts, either. When I was alive I thought that ghosts could see each other. But when you really become a ghost you discover that being a ghost is the loneliest existence. Without fixed form, odor, color, or temperature, I can’t relate to any person, place, or thing, any animal, vegetable, or mineral, anywhere in space and time. I can only circulate in the tiny crack between tick and tock, hanging inverted with the bats from the branches or hibernating with the cicada nymphs in the soil.

He couldn’t attend summer classes, he had to call in sick. Mother said he must be bewitched. She immediately covered a little porcelain cup of rice with a garment of his and recited the spell to collect his wits. Then she lifted the garment and observed the distribution of the grains. A thick and mighty tree had appeared in the rice. After a gust of cold wind, something dirty was dangling out, something long and thick. No wonder he was burning up.

 

Ghost in Berlin

His first week in Berlin, he stayed in a little ground floor apartment in the east end that the writers’ association arranged for him. It had a little window looking out onto a noisy street. One window, one door, one bed, one table, one chair, one room, one bathroom, one kitchen. With one of everything, it was a perfect bachelor pad. After nightfall booze fiends raised hell outside in a language he couldn’t understand. It was all of five steps from the front door to a U - Bahn station. The floor would rattle with every train. It got cold out, but he always invited the world outside to come in and make itself at home by leaving the window gekippt , “ajar.” The dictionary listed it as the past participle of kippen , “to tilt.” It described the kind of window that opens from the top, a tilt - and - turn window. It kept people out but let breezes and voices shuttle freely in and out. No matter how cold it got he would leave it gekippt . He did not want to go out. He had not let himself get to know Berlin. Writing a novel at home, he first heard the city sounds stealing in through the window. All the sounds were new, of the language, the wind, the rain. He couldn’t read anything, neither notices nor posters, neither signs nor books. Effectively illiterate, he finally understood his mother’s angst. But for now he enjoyed being an outsider. He was only there for a short stay. He did not want to become a part of Berlin. He actively excluded himself from everything. He passed all the strangers by. He had arrived without ceremony and he would leave without fuss. He wouldn’t bother anyone.

 

Spirit Money

Beverly takes a lighter to a fistful of spirit money. Tracing three clockwise circles above your head and three counterclockwise circles in front of your chest with the smoking paper, she chants, “Right left, left right. Burn fire, burn bright. Straight back, pure heart. Burn bad, new start.” She tosses the rest of the paper in the stove as the flames start licking at her fingers. Soon it’s ablaze. You take a deep breath, close your eyes, and step across the fire.

※There are many ghosts in the story:

1.      The five sisters respectively sacrificed their years to their original families, public life, domestic violence husbands, and their own jealousy.

2.      There is a Nazi ghost in Germany and white terror in Taiwan.

3.      All ghosts are made of the state violence, domestic violence ,political violence gender violence, verbal violence ,superstitions violence, bias violence, furthermore: marital rape, adultery, verbal abuse, drug use and torture.

4.      Ghost Town weaves a mesmerizing web of family secrets and countryside superstitions, the search for identity and clash of culture

5.      What a lovely day it had been! Every time her husband beat her from then on, Belinda would force herself to recall the day in Berlin, stepping on the fallen leaves, smelling honey, looking for the candy factory, all by herself in a city of strangers. She wasn’t afraid of getting lost and didn’t feel like going home.

6.      The rumor was swept up on a breeze. Soon everyone had gotten wind of it. As it spread it mutated, evolving variant strains. In the most virulent, Nut was a pedophile, a monster who preyed upon prepubescent boys.

7. Betty takes the train home for the climactic family reunion and feels herself becoming, in a way, a living ghost.

She looked out the window, no longer able to see her reflection. Every time she went home, she felt herself getting lighter and lighter. The closer to Yongjing, the more spectral she became. By the time she got there, she was translucent.

8.The same wind blew when Nut disappeared, when the Tomorrow Bookstore ceased operation, when the hippo escaped, when I vanished, when Keith was subpoenaed, when Father died, when Mother died

9. The lady ghost in the bamboo grove is grandmother. Cicada’s mother. When Cicada’s mother was a girl, her mother got gang - raped in the bamboo grove. A farmer found her naked, pressed beneath a man while another waited. The farmer chased those men away with a hoe, wrapped her in a rice sack, and took her home. But her husband’s family would not let her in. They told her to go home. “I want to die,” she told her young daughter. “I’m going to go hang myself in the bamboo. Don’t tell today,” she said. “Tell them where they can find me tomorrow.” The daughter did as she was told, and went along the next day. She saw a thin body hanging from a thick stalk of bamboo.

Snake Killer:

He used to be the apprentice at the soy sauce factory of Cicada’s family.

He also the Yellow Emperor, who will tell us about how to navigate the various taboos and make it through the spookiest month of the calendar in one piece.”

 A man in a full - length yellow robe appeared walking out of a temple to address a gathering of over a thousand devotees, all of them prostrate on the ground in the same color shirt. “Yellow Emperor, save humanity!” they all cried out in unison. “Deliver all sentien beings from suffering!” The camera zoomed rapidly out to show the entire temple t in flamboyant maroon. The design was ridiculous, with a snake, a dragon, phoenix, and a tiger on the roof. The camera cut to the head shot of the yellow - robed man. “On Ghost Festival, when all the ghosts come out to roam, Yellow Emperor is at your service, helping you keep your family safe. You, too, can avoid calamity and make a heap of money during Ghost Month.”

Nut ripped up the posters and took the books, the snake killer got a safe place that they won’t be able to find you.  Indeed, when the police arrived, he was nowhere to be found.

He lived at the seventh which was once a VHS video rental store, but now the whole building was charred black where Plenty burned the fire and hid all the secrets of Cicada ,Plenty and all the forbidden books of Nut . There was a "For Sale" sign on the balcony. The place had been 出售 "For Sale" for years. The top half of the second character 售 had fallen off, leaving a yawning 口 "mouth" that transformed "For Sale" into "Way Out."

 

Farmer:

Petal - laden torrents flooded the neighboring fields, dyeing swathes of collapsed rice corpses yellow, purple, and bright, bright red.

 After the hail it rained, for three whole days. The rain formed posts, and the posts fences, confining folks at home. Farmers who tried to save their crops were carried away by the flood. That year’s harvest was a total washout, as all the produce in the township was pounded into pulp by the hail and left to rot in the rain. The water level rose in the slough, spilling dead hogs, dogs, cocks, and trash onto the road.

Cicada saw an earthworm wriggling out of the ground. “That’s a sign of rain,”

Temple:

Temple in Yongjing was really quiet, without many pilgrims. Following the keeper’s schedule, he kept early hours. He nursed his illness and waited for death to come.

 And wouldn’t you know it, a man who, according to his doctors, only had a few more months to live ended up holding on for a decade in that temple.

Grandma had gotten up that morning planning to go to the temple to pray for a baby son for her eldest son. His wife had not had any boys, just useless girls, five in a row.

Before Keith’s father is sick, even the doctore can’t cure him, his mom pushed his father live in the temple.

Taiwan:

On that globe, Taiwan did not exist. He pointed at that patch of sea and said, I’m from a little island around here. The island is my home, my home is on that island. That island must be so small the globe in the Berlin prison forgot to include it.

Straits:

The year the authorities allowed relatives to visit one another across the Taiwan Strait

Jack said Beijing was the place for us to make a pile. But what would we sell? He said whatever people lacked, that’s what we’d sell.

Wang quoted a line from a poem by Chairman Mao: None who hasn’t seen the Wall can call himself a man. “

Yongjing

(1)A rural backwater in central Taiwan, his hometown was first settled by immigrants from Guangdong Province in China early in the nineteenth century. On level wasteland, they built their settlement, a street surrounded by homesteads

Early on, there were internecine brawls, not to mention never-ending disasters that put the fear of Fire and Flood in people’s hearts. No wonder the settlers called the place Yongjing. It was an expression of their aspiration for eternal (yong) peace (jing).

 

The rain is different from Yongjing and Berlin

That was Berlin rain. It was a far cry from Taipei or Yongjing rain, which turned into grenades when it hit the ironskin roofs, interrupting even the deepest sleep and frazzling nerves.

(2)bookstore:

As a vocational high school student, Betty used to come to the Tomorrow Bookstore on weekends to stand in front of the shelf and read. One time she fell into a long novel until closing time. The thick boss came over and asked her for Japanese noodle dinner. Both of the boss may be bachelors, but they wouldn’t lay a finger on her. 

The noodles were fine, tender, slippery. The thin boss’s parents ran an export and import business, and had access to a lot of Japanese food products. The noodles were from an old shop in Tokyo.

The walls were lined with bookshelves, the shelves with books. The thick boss said that nobody in Yongjing bought books, but they could at least move magazines. Forget about selling literary books, absolutely nobody was interested. So they only ordered books they were interested in. They brought them up here, added them to the collection, and read them themselves.

One shelf was for English and Japanese language - learning books. The thick boss said that they were trying to save money for further study in Japan or America. They didn’t rake it in, but they made do. They could save a bit of money every month by keeping their expenses low. Maybe in a few years they would have enough stashed away to go abroad.

Betty became a regular on the second floor. She would take it upon herself to help make dinner, saying that she’d grown into an amazing cook growing up in a three - wing compound. No dish was too hard for her to make. Why were the thick boss and the thin boss only stealing glances at each other but not at Betty, Betty cried.

“Betty,” Keith said, “it’s almost dawn. I want to go pay my respects to Dad.”

Betty had not mentioned that Nut and the bosses weren’t the only members of the reading group. There was a fourth-her father.

The cops discovered that Jack Wang’s youngest son, the one who was nicknamed Nut, often went to gatherings at the Tomorrow Bookstore with Thick and Thin.

The Tomorrow Bookstore was cordoned off when Betty finally made it. She saw the thick boss and the thin boss being pressed into police cruisers. Nut wrote a letter to his father: I know that you greased all the palms and pulled all the strings you could to get me out. Now I’m out. If something happens to me, please tell him to dispose of them, to avoid implicating anyone else. Thank him for me.

 I’m not afraid of death. My only fear is not being free.

(3)movie

The bosses made a proposal at the township office. They would find a venue, set up a screen, and give their neighbors the opportunity to see a film. They ended up deciding on the temple square. The street in front was not an important thoroughfare. They could block it off for a few hours, it wouldn’t impact anybody. The square could accommodate a hundred people. Which was about right.

 When the towering screen and the hulking projector were in place, the Foot of the Wall Theater held its first screening. At the time the popular movies were works of political propaganda. The first film was a war movie about how the nationalist government had led the resistance against the Japanese. The square was packed. There weren’t enough chairs. Many people brought their own from home, but it was too crowded to set them all out. Folks were jostling for a good seat. Sausage stands and ice cream sellers did a brisk business that summer night. Betty also remembered a grilled hard tofu stand in a dark corner. You could buy chunks of tofu on a bamboo stick, crouch down, and grill it yourself on a little stove, one of several such stoves puffing out a smokescreen for crouching lovers to kiss behind. Before the screening began, there was a general clamor in the square. Children cried, adults cursed, and mosquitos ganged up on everyone. Suddenly the projector shot a ray of light and an image appeared on the white screen. Hundreds of pairs of eyes opened wide. Even the mosquitos that were feasting on people’s arms and legs pulled their proboscises out and looked up at the play of light and shade.

 The thick boss described the scene: “It’s like everyone in Yongjing just saw a ghost.”

(4) Yongjing itself: a place where the author doesn’t feel welcome. Through the scrim of the family’s overlapping — and hotly contested — memories, we get a pleasantly dense evocation of a rural town becoming enmeshed, through the second half of the 20th century, family arguments, local rituals, a chrysanthemum field, a fateful hailstorm, a local temple, a haunted drainage ditch, an old soy sauce factory, a chaotic wedding party — appear again and again, looking slightly different, sometimes because we’ve switched perspectives, other times because we’ve been picked up and carried, like Yongjing, by the tides of history.

(5) Yongjing, a "rural backwater" in central Taiwan, feels like its own character, a setting-sized ghost that looms over the lives of the Chen family. The words yong and jing mean eternal peace, but the town comes to be nicknamed "Always Quiet."

(6) As Keith and his family members each relive their pasts in alternating chapters, descriptions of Yongjing make it clear that the towns best days are behind it.

 

 

Ghost Town is very vivid, with the emotions at its maximum, the plot at its most intense, and the speeches are extremely loud. They are not the airy whispers of ghosts that we imagine, but the scorching sun, a family of nine squeezed into the open air. The hustle and bustle in Ghost Town is a noisy past. The reading experience of "The Ghost Town" is very complicated and overwhelming. You need to put it down at any time to take a breath, but you will be reluctant to let it go. You will quickly pick it up and read it again, repeating this until you finish reading.(r.6)

There is resentment and hatred but also reluctance. It combines popular elements such as white terror, Berlin, June Fourth etc., and finally there is a big twist, and the story is full of surprise.(r.9)

The “goodfellas” were the spirit mafia who came round once a year to collect spirit protection money and enjoy a feast.

Taiwan background:

In 1979, the year that America broke off diplomatic relations with Taiwan, the music teacher and her husband suddenly absconded. Apparently assuming Taiwan was doomed, they moved to Argentina, leaving the bookstore behind.

the police came to town. That was the last day of operation for the Tomorrow Bookstore. The building was cordoned off, the shutter rolled down. Betty stood on the other side of the Do Not Cross line until the shutter rolled up again and the thick boss and the thin boss were dragged out in handcuffs and pushed into cruisers, after being pulled apart by the police. “Ming!” the thin one cried out in anguish, right before a cop landed his fist on his face. “Pervert!” the policeman yelled.

 That was the last time she ever saw them.

Afraid that America had abandoned Taiwan, they’d made a run for it. That was stupid, if you asked him. You had to stay in the game to make your name.

Love?

(1)   The butterflies had a taste for tortoise tears, and as the tortoises had no way of cleaning away the crud around their eyes themselves, they let the butterflies land on their heads and suck. They loved each other. He imagined that he was a butterfly, that Nut(redshorts?) was a tortoise, and that the starfruit orchard was their secret Amazonian jungle.

(2)   She compared the Eight Characters of your births, the signs under which you were born, and your ancestries, but thank Heaven she didn’t tell the Chens that the ghost of the lady who hanged herself in the bamboo is from our family. Ignorance is bliss. Nobody will find out.

 

Grazing water buffalo class(17Class):

The highest scoring students were assigned to two A - plus classes, Class One and Class Two. The next highest were assigned to two A - minus classes, Class Three and Class Four. It was all downhill from there. Keith had never taken an intelligence test in his life. He had no idea how to answer. There were seventeen classes that year, and he ended up in Class Seventeen, though he only realized that students in the “grazing water buffalo class” were considered unteachable until he went home and his sisters told him. Expressions twisted, features distorted, they wondered how he’d gotten assigned to the most marginal frontier of secondary education, as he wasn’t dumb.

 Class Seventeen was a lot of fun. Half the class ate the proverbial duck egg — they got a big fat zero — on exams, which were races to the bottom. There was a spirit medium classmate who held a séance in math class. The teacher prostrated himself and begged him to reveal the winning numbers in the lottery. There was a classmate with tattoos who brought a samurai sword to class, saying he was going to go settle a score right after they got let out.

Expressions twisted, features distorted, they wondered how he’d gotten assigned to the most marginal frontier of secondary education, as he wasn’t dumb.

“We’re not like the other classes,” said Sam. “Other classes start at 7:30, but the teacher said we had to come early for quizzes on English vocabulary at 6:30 and math at 7:00. If you get less than ninety you get the cane, once for every point you fall short. No exceptions. We have art class, shop class, home economics, and music, but all we do is more math and English to prepare us for the grade - wide test that establishes the all - important ranking.

The next day he was in the news. There was another round - faced, slow - moving boy who was always smiling. There was a classmate in a wheelchair. There was a classmate who was missing an arm. His elementary school classmate who did strip teases for the spirits was also there. Class Seventeen was always a blast. The teachers didn’t really teach. The math teacher wrote the Heart Sutra on the blackboard. The English teacher admitted that she couldn’t speak any English. The physical sciences teacher often didn’t show up. The history teacher spent classes nursing a glass of sorghum liquor. The geography teacher, a former soldier from Sichuan province, kept hollering: “Retake Mainland China!” The National Language teacher showed the class a nude album he’d bought in the Yongnan Bookstore, of a mixed - race AV idol from Japan. Keith’s classmates always brought lots of snacks to class. Pork sausages with raw garlic. Taiwanese popcorn chicken. Bah - uân , bah - tsàng , and bí - ko : deep - fried saucer - shaped dumplings with a pork filling, pyramids of sticky rice steamed with chunks of pork in a bamboo leaf, and cylinders of sticky rice that looked like they’d been steamed in sections of bamboo. Everyone was always eating. You share with me and I’ll share with you. Everyone was always laughing, too. Good times.

Earthquake and typhoon:

Beverly suffered from chronic insomnia after the earthquake. She wasn’t afraid of quakes, but as soon as she fell asleep she would dream of that mountain, the one the big quake pushed over. She would wake in the middle of the night, a shower streaming from her eyes. Dream and reality would have gotten so tangled up she would have no idea where she was.

“It’s all gone and there ain’t nothing left. See how bare all those mountain slopes are now? The trees and grass and the waterfalls are all gone.”

She still didn’t believe it, so she went on foot, letting memory lead the way. She couldn’t see any biting cats underfoot. She hadn’t taken more than a few steps when she found herself at the edge of a precipice. Another step and she would have fallen into a raging river. This was nothing like the terrain she remembered. There was no bamboo, no biting cats, no plum trees, and no mountain.

The mountain was gone. Something in her body had caved in, leaving a gaping hole. What would she do? She did not feel like going home. But where to go? She drove around in the hills of Nantou, stopping in front of an old house. The posts and walls had collapsed, and the second floor had fallen to the ground. So she drove to Shalu. The building was still there, but from the looks of it, it had been left empty for years. A fellow seamstress had mentioned that the factory had moved to China. Apparently, it was exactly the same, in construction, specification, and installation. The only difference was the size. It was several times bigger. She walked behind the building, hoping to see the dormitory. But it was gone. There wasn’t anything there except a mound of moldering fabric. The hole in her body gaped even wider.

 Ever since, she had had two recurring dreams. One went down and the other up.

 Going down. There is a serious tectonic slippage in the depth of night. In just a few seconds, the fault swallows the mountain. The slope plummets, along with the plantation, the plum tree, the table, and the stools. Sleeping beneath the tree, she plummets, too, with Little Gao’s orchids, her sewing machine, her savings from Shalu, the garment factory, and a headless corpse. Everything falls into the black earth.

 Going up. A severe typhoon land warning has been issued. She stands on the roof of the townhouse amongst the things that Mother has arranged for the whistling wind to take. The wind comes and blows everything away, all of Mother’s offerings to Heaven. The soy sauce flies up, and so do Plenty’s shoes and Father’s old newspapers. Now it’s her turn. Beverly gets ready. Her toes leave the ground. Then the wind stops, the typhoon is gone, the warning is lifted.

Same sex relationship

1.      Why were the thick boss and the thin boss only stealing glances at each other but not at Betty, Betty cried.

Hippo

Walking around, we saw a hippo by the road. It had fallen over in a rice paddy. Its mouth was hanging wide open. Such an absurd sight, and I had forgotten it. When you think about it, it’s ludicrous: a hippo in Yongjing! Actually the hippo is raised in the White House which Baron got from the snake killer but Plenty didn’t like it at all, that’s why Plenty let it go on the wedding day of Barbie and Baron.

Highlights vs self- reflection:

1.      Betty takes the train home for the climactic family reunion and feels herself becoming, in a way, a living ghost. She looked out the window, no longer able to see her reflection. Every time she went home, she felt herself getting lighter and lighter.

2.      

Golden Sentence:

Conclusion:

1.      It’s hard to understand yourself when you are too close to your self.

2.      Ghosts are all the people who are our relatives, ancestors, they are the bridges to help us go through the past to here and now

3.      Some ghosts are the victims of the social gender inequality or the political issues.

4.      Tears are the language for gratitude, not for sadness.

5.      “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

6.      What we stand on the dirt is filled with the past spirit to form our perfection.

7.      The story is filled with climatic spooky atmohsphere, some roles floated everywhere. and some creepy karma seem unpredictable.

You can hold the true answer for sure, after you read it, you are not sure where you are. It blurs the line between the dead and the living.

8.Chen Tien-Hong, the only and desperately yearned for son of a traditional Taiwanese family with seven daughters, runs away from the oppression of his village to Berlin in the hope of finding acceptance as a young gay man.

 

The novel begins a decade later, when Chen has just been released from prison for killing his boyfriend. He is about to return to his family’s village, a poor and desolate place. With his parents gone, his sisters married, mad, or dead, there is nothing left for him there. As the story unfurls, we learn what tore this family apart and, more importantly, the truth behind the murder of Chen’s boyfriend.

 

It was told in a myriad of voices, both living and dead, and moving through time with deceptive ease, Ghost Town weaves a mesmerizing web of family secrets and countryside superstitions, the search for identity and clash of cultures.(r.8)

9.The eldest sister, Chen Shumei, stayed in Yongjing Township to work as a garment worker, and lived a mediocre life with her husband, who was a bad gambler and ambitious. The second sister, Chen Shuli, was admitted to the civil service and lived in Taipei. Her intimate relationship with her husband was untroubled. The third sister, Chen Shuqing, has the highest academic level. She is married to a well-known anchor, but she suffers from domestic violence with words and fists every day. The fourth sister, Chen Sujie, marries a rich man. At first glance, she seems to be the winning team in life, but ends up crazy. The fifth sister is the most beautiful and mysterious. Her story is always circumstantial, and everyone seems to deliberately avoid talking about this beautiful sister. It seems that there is something unspeakable. Also narrating the story through other peoples mouths is the eldest brother, Chen Tianyi, the son Achan had to give birth to five daughters in a row. He became the head of Yongjing Township, and then was imprisoned for fraud.(r.10)

10. Home is like a pigeon cage where no matter how far you fly , you will be back with wound or award.

11.In the lover’s eye, you are perfect , not loser, in the normal people’s eye, you are nothing but a loser!

12. "Who doesnt run away from home when they grow up?"

But knowing that we have a home to go back to, where the lights are bright and loving people are waiting for us, is extremely lucky

.

We lived in one place after another,

Wandering from place to place,

But there is only one place to go home.

──Yun Danfengqings "Distracted Thoughts: Small Steps to Dance with Touches in the World"

 

 

Questions:

1.      Kevin spent 10 years for trying to write ghost town till he went to German and make this dream come true, why makes it so difficult while in Taiwan to write this story?

2.      Keith’s father passed away, no children look for him, why Keith’s siblings look for mom?

3.      Betty takes the train home for the climactic family reunion and feels herself becoming, in a way, a living ghost. She looked out the window, no longer able to see her reflection. Every time she went home, she felt herself getting lighter and lighter. What’s the reason make her feel lighter and lighter?

4.      Keith escaped from ghost town, later he still chose to go back to the ghost town after he released from prison for killing his boyfriend, how about your response to this decision?

5.      Which character gives you the deepest inspiration, why?

The plot about jealousy between sisters (Barbie and Plenty)reminds me of "Little Women". Sometimes jealousy makes people say "I dont want to be your substitute if you cant get her" to push their lover away. Sometimes jealousy makes people give up everything and become someone elses. alternatives.(r.9)

6.      Do you agree with the author that you know how deep you love your hometown till you are far away from him?

7.      What’s the meaning for you to define home town?

8.      Do you feel spooky for this story? Which the most weird plot for you?

9.      The story Stay true we read , Hsu Hua couldn’t understand why his parents wanted to go back to a place they had chosen to leave. Can you understand here why Keith even has just been released from prison for killing his boyfriend. Why he is so yielding to return to his family’s village, a poor and desolate place?

10.  Why Yongjing?

11.  A rural backwater in central Taiwan, his hometown was first settled by immigrants from Guangdong Province in China early in the nineteenth century. On level wasteland, they built their settlement, a street surrounded by homesteads

12.  Why the story happened in the Yongjing, a rural backwater in central Taiwan?

A rural backwater in central Taiwan, his hometown was first settled by immigrants from Guangdong Province in China early in the nineteenth century. On level wasteland, they built their settlement, a street surrounded by homesteads

Early on, there were internecine brawls, not to mention never-ending disasters that put the fear of Fire and Flood in people’s hearts. No wonder the settlers called the place Yongjing. It was an expression of their aspiration for eternal (yong) peace (jing).

13.Why the story called "Ghost Town" ? Did you see any spooky ghosts?

 "Ghost Town" is very vivid, with the emotions at its maximum, the plot at its most intense, and the speeches are extremely loud. They are not the airy whispers of ghosts that we imagine, but the scorching sun, a family of nine squeezed into the open air. The hustle and bustle in Ghost Town is a noisy past. The reading experience of "The Ghost Town" is very complicated and overwhelming. You need to put it down at any time to take a breath, but you will be reluctant to let it go. You will quickly pick it up and read it again, repeating this until you finish reading.(r.6)

There is resentment and hatred but also reluctance. It combines popular elements such as white terror, Berlin, June Fourth etc., and finally there is a big twist, and the story is full of surprise.(r.9)

 

Questions:

1.Kevin spent 10 years for trying to write ghost town till he went to German and make this dream come true, why makes it so difficult while in Taiwan to write this story?

To go home with fame is our motto, so it’s hard for him to go back home, while he fulfill his duty in prison and went back to Taiwan, his friend Sam picked him up ,his family prepare pig trotter mī – suànn is something beyond words. Barbie. Barbie and Belinda and Keith hadn’t seen each other in nearly thirty years.

Coming home was not out of a duty. It was too stifling. But he had to come home.

Safety, belonging, relaxation. To sleep, shower, and watch TV.

2.Which character gives you the deepest inspiration, why?

The plot about jealousy between sisters (Barbie and Plenty) reminds me of "Little Women". Sometimes jealousy makes people say "I dont want to be your substitute if you cant get her" to push their lover away. Sometimes jealousy makes people give up everything and become someone elses. alternatives. (r.9)

 

3.Do you agree with the author that you know how deep you love your hometown till you are far away from him?

(1) According to Jonice Webb, Ph.D. in psychology, "Parents love for their children must go through conflicts. It is also through the process of these conflicts that a healthy child can be created."

As a tiger baby: I forgive my mother’s hurt and appreciate her efforts

How to be willing to work hard again and again to achieve the best version of yourself

(2) If Keith got home, he got kick out. Different culture shock makes him feel who he is.

4.The story 「Stay true」 we read , Hsu Hua couldn’t understand why his parents wanted to go back to a place they had chosen to leave. Can you understand Keith never liked coming home as a boy ,here why Keith even has just been released from prison for killing his boyfriend. Why he is so yielding to return to his family’s village, a poor and desolate place?

 

5.Why the story happened in the Yongjing, a rural backwater in central Taiwan?

(1)A rural backwater in central Taiwan, his hometown was first settled by immigrants from Guangdong Province in China early in the nineteenth century. On level wasteland, they built their settlement, a street surrounded by homesteads

Early on, there were internecine brawls, not to mention never-ending disasters that put the fear of Fire and Flood in people’s hearts. No wonder the settlers called the place Yongjing. It was an expression of their aspiration for eternal (yong) peace (jing).

(2) Writing a novel at home, he first heard the city sounds stealing in through the window. All the sounds were new, of the language, the wind, the rain. He couldn’t read anything, neither notices nor posters, neither signs nor books. Effectively illiterate, he finally understood his mother’s angst. But for now he enjoyed being an outsider.

(3) The rain is different from Yongjing and Berlin

That was Berlin rain. It was a far cry from Taipei or Yongjing rain, which turned into grenades when it hit the ironskin roofs, interrupting even the deepest sleep and frazzling nerves.

 

 

6.Why the story called "Ghost Town" ? Did you see any spooky ghosts?

 (1)"Ghost Town" is very vivid, with the emotions at its maximum, the plot at its most intense, and the speeches are extremely loud. They are not the airy whispers of ghosts that we imagine, but the scorching sun, a family of nine squeezed into the open air. The hustle and bustle in Ghost Town is a noisy past. The reading experience of "The Ghost Town" is very complicated and overwhelming. You need to put it down at any time to take a breath, but you will be reluctant to let it go. You will quickly pick it up and read it again, repeating this until you finish reading.(r.6)

There is resentment and hatred but also reluctance. It combines popular elements such as white terror, Berlin, June Fourth etc., and finally there is a big twist, and the story is full of surprise.(r.9)

(2)We need the ghost’s help to deal with what had happened on earth.

 He couldn’t attend summer classes, he had to call in sick. Mother said he must be bewitched. She immediately covered a little porcelain cup of rice with a garment of his and recited the spell to collect his wits. Then she lifted the garment and observed the distribution of the grains. A thick and mighty tree had appeared in the rice. After a gust of cold wind, something dirty was dangling out, something long and thick. No wonder he was burning up.

(3)The five sisters respectively sacrificed their years to their original families, public life, domestic violence husbands, and their own jealousy.

(4)There is a Nazi ghost in Germany and white terror in Taiwan.

(5)All ghosts are made of the state violence, domestic violence ,political violence gender violence, verbal violence ,superstitions violence, bias violence, furthermore: marital rape, adultery, verbal abuse, drug use and torture.

(6)Ghost Town weaves a mesmerizing web of family secrets and countryside superstitions, the search for identity and clash of culture

(7)What a lovely day it had been! Every time her husband beat her from then on, Belinda would force herself to recall the day in Berlin, stepping on the fallen leaves, smelling honey, looking for the candy factory, all by herself in a city of strangers. She wasn’t afraid of getting lost and didn’t feel like going home.

(8)The rumor was swept up on a breeze. Soon everyone had gotten wind of it. As it spread it mutated, evolving variant strains. In the most virulent, Nut was a pedophile, a monster who preyed upon prepubescent boys.

(9) Betty takes the train home for the climactic family reunion and feels herself becoming, in a way, a living ghost.

She looked out the window, no longer able to see her reflection. Every time she went home, she felt herself getting lighter and lighter. The closer to Yongjing, the more spectral she became. By the time she got there, she was translucent.

(10) The same wind blew when Nut disappeared, when the Tomorrow Bookstore ceased operation, when the hippo escaped, when I vanished, when Keith was subpoenaed, when Father died, when Mother died

(11). The lady ghost in the bamboo grove is grandmother. Cicada’s mother. When Cicada’s mother was a girl, her mother got gang - raped in the bamboo grove. A farmer found her naked, pressed beneath a man while another waited. The farmer chased those men away with a hoe, wrapped her in a rice sack, and took her home. But her husband’s family would not let her in. They told her to go home. “I want to die,” she told her young daughter. “I’m going to go hang myself in the bamboo. Don’t tell today,” she said. “Tell them where they can find me tomorrow.” The daughter did as she was told, and went along the next day. She saw a thin body hanging from a thick stalk of bamboo.

(12)

For a firewalk ceremony at a temple fair, a thick layer of black sand was spread out in the square, with spirit money on the sand. Barefoot men lined up, each holding a statue of the deity and waiting for the right time. They were all men, both elders and teenage boys. Women were not allowed to firewalk. The fire was lit, and the men raced one by one over the piles of burning paper. One man hesitated, but when an elder cursed him, he hurried into the fire, only to trip and fall and drop his statue, which rolled into the flame. Everyone was aghast. “Save the god!” they yelled. Nobody was going to save that man. So Cicada’s mother rushed in to pull him out. “Cicada, oh Cicada, let me tell you, they cursed me for that, for breaking the prohibition, for contempt of the court of Heaven. But Cicada, that man was your father. Who else would have saved him? You don’t remember him, do you? All of his skin was burnt. He wailed for several days at home before giving up the ghost. His eyes were open when he died. I tried to close them but they wouldn’t. A temple elder said I had angered the spirits by stepping into the fire, that I was to blame for your father’s death. Actually I, too, wanted to wail: woe is me. The soles of my feet were badly burned, but death did not put me out of my misery. Do you know how painful it was? My feet still hurt to this day. I imagine they will keep hurting after I, too, give up the ghost.”

(13) ghosts are cursed by the social discrimination, sextial disparity, value evaluation.

Human-being is doomed(subpoenaed) by the taboo, rumor, nitpick.

All this make the life in Taiwan so filled with myriad scenery.

We are ghosts or on the way to be the ghosts!

7.In the story, Kevin felt relieved while played the drama of Hamlet and found out that Hamlet killed more people than he did, and what he did is coincidently, he felt relieved and found his own respect. Do you agree with the abolishment about the death penalty in Taiwan? Or any way to cultivate death row prisoner?

8.      In the story, Jack said” Beijing was the place for us to make a pile. But what would we sell? He said whatever people lacked, that’s what we’d sell.” From your point of view, do you agree with it?

 

9.      In the story, the author mentioned about that the rumor was swept up on a breeze. Soon everyone had gotten wind of it. As it spread it mutated, evolving variant strains. In the most virulent, Nut was a pedophile, a monster who preyed upon prepubescent boys. From your point of view, do you think here in Taiwan still the heaven for the same sax marriage?

 

10.  In the story: Grandmom thought that Girls(Beverley, Betty, Belinda) cleaned her room and stole her necklace and run to school to them in front of their teachers and classmates, Betty was so afraid and admitted it, Her grandmom was so upset and killed her blackie who rushed out to save her. Later her cousin visited them and found out he wore the necklace one his neck, no one scold him , just keep smiling. Do you feel the female discrimination and inequality? How you deal with it?

 

11.In the story, Barbie thought she was the winner, because she was the bride, not Plenty. She played the leading role at the wedding. But Plenty had still upstaged her. Her funeral made everyone in town forget all about the wedding. How do you think about the sibling relationships? Cooperative or competitive in our life?

(1)competitive and cooperative spiral upwards

(2) The two brothers were always getting new clothes and shoes, while the sisters had to wear hand - me - downs.

 

12. In the story, after that earthquake, Beverly and her husband were completely broke. So they moved back home to live with parents. How do you think about the parent-child relationships in Taiwan?

 

13.  Keith’s sisters all have bad marriage, all are hoodlums, fiend, hick, prodigal, slacker, do you think marriage is a gamble ?

(1) A friend is divorced, has a high school child, and recently wanted to remarry, so she asked me for my opinion. Many people say that single mothers should think carefully before remarrying.

A story comes to mind.

Everyone has seen April Day On Earth, when Xu Zhimo forced his first wife Zhang Youyi to divorce for Lin Huiyin. In the end, Zhang Youyi raised her son by herself, started a business, and became a banker and entrepreneur, which was very inspiring.

53-year-old Zhang Youyi met her next door neighbor, Dr. Su, and planned to remarry. But Zhang Youyis thoughts are still very traditional. In fact, after Zhang Youyi and Xu Zhimo divorced, some people pursued her, including Luo Jialun (the first president of Tsinghua University), but Zhang Youyi did not dare to think too much for the sake of her children.

This time she met Dr. Su, and she was moved by his sincerity. She wanted to get married, but she didnt dare to make a rash decision, so she wrote to her second brother, fourth brother and son to seek their approval.

That was seventy or eighty years ago. Zhang Youyi was not young. Her sons with Xu Zhimo were already married, and their grandchildren were all very old. The atmosphere at that time was also very conservative, and everyone was negative about the remarriage of a middle-aged woman. Attitude.

Is there any point in remarrying at this age?

Does the other party covet Zhang Youyis property?

Will this person bring trouble to the family?

The fourth brother did not respond.

The second brother sent a telegram and said first: OK. But another telegram was sent, saying: Not good.

Finally, Zhang Youyi received another letter from her second brother, which said: "Brother is not talented. For more than thirty years, you have been a widow, and have never been exhausted. I am now old, but fortunately have not yet died." I am going to fill the ravines, how come to teach you, I don’t deserve for your praising me? You are a wise man, and I hope to you make your own decision."

The general idea is that her brother is not talented. She has been a widow for more than thirty years and raised her children alone. He has not been able to help her. Now that he is old, he dares not to express his opinion. Sister, you are very smart, so you can do it on your own decision.

Zhang Youyi’s son also replied.

"My mother has been a widow for more than thirty years. She gave birth to me, caressed me, bowed me and raised me, and the grace of hard work is greatly appreciated. Fortunately, I have established a solid foundation and can support myself. The growth of my grandchildren is all due to my mothers instructions. Summary There is very little joy in a mothers life. Her duty as a mother has been fulfilled, and her heart should be comforted. Who comforts the mother? Who accompanies the mother? If the mother finds someone, as the son, I will  serve him."

Reading this letter was very touching. My son said, "Mom, you have been observing the festival for more than thirty years. You gave birth to me, raised me and took care of me. It is my mothers teachings that I can be successful. You have fulfilled your responsibilities as a mother. As the son, I am willing to be filial to the person you like.

"A mother is like a man, and a son asks his father to serve him." This sentence made Zhang Youyi very relieved. She was grateful to her mother for caring for her, looked forward to her mothers happiness, and encouraged her to take a new step. Maybe her life was not smooth in the first half of her life, but she could It is worth having a son like this.

Regarding remarriage, the fourth brother abstained, the second brother had no objection, and the son approved, so Zhang Youyi got married.

In 1989, Zhang Youyi died of illness in New York. Before she died, she told her son who was accompanying her that the four words "Su Zhang Youyi" should be engraved on her tombstone.

Some people say that these four words are the best revenge on Xu Zhimo, which means that Zhang Youyi is still thinking about him in her heart.

But did Zhang Youyi ever love Xu Zhimo?

Zhang Youyi said: "You always ask me whether I love Xu Zhimo or not. You know, I cant answer this question. I am very confused about this question because everyone always tells me that I have done so many things for Xu Zhimo , I must love him. However, I cant say what love is. I have never said "I love you" to anyone in my life. If taking care of Xu Zhimo and his family is called love, then I probably love him. Among the several women he met in his life, maybe I loved him the most. "

ps: When I watched April Day On Earth, I liked Lin Huiyin the most because Zhou Xun was so beautiful, but now I like Zhang Youyi the most.

 

14.  Cicada hear every mouth in the town saying: “She had a bunch of girls, then finally two boys, both jailbirds.” What’s the meaning for us to live iff all the fame, fortune are gone?

 

7.Keith had never taken an intelligence test in his life. He had no idea how to answer. Expressions twisted, features distorted, his sisters wondered how he’d gotten assigned to the most marginal frontier of secondary education, as he wasn’t dumb.

After years. Education reform is in full swing. Do you feel any changes? What are your views on education in Taiwan?

Conclusion:

The quiet sound of rain in Berlin will keep him awake

The loud sound of rain in Taiwan’s tin houses is an auditory lullaby

Nostalgia is in the taste of pigs trotters vermicelli

Ghost town is the homesick in his mind

We are the unknown ghosts or on the way to the unknown ghosts .

Sometimes, life will be blessed with a bowl of redolent trotter vermiceili

Sometimes, life is not reticent, arid, apathetical at all if we not give up too early.

Life is so helpless and doomed by the environment that we can’t help but give up.

With death as our shield, we obviously had nothing to worry about.

Even the fall guy is better than the dust in the dirt.

 

Even though the plot kicks off with a murder mystery, the heart of the novel is about Keiths coming of age of a gay man in a conservative rural town. His sisters, each in their own ways, are empathetic to Keiths difficult upbringing and pine for their brother to come home. The Chen familys collective longing to reunite in the face of constant tragedy fuels an exhilarating and often quite moving reading experience. Ghost Town is simply tough to put down and youll be thinking about the Chens long after youve left Yongjing. .(r.3)

William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

So the past is like a shadow that hunts us wherever we go, and everywhere there are memories and sorrows we want to bury

Questions:

 

1.Which character gives you the deepest inspiration, why?

Nut, Jack’s second son, who aroused Keith sexual awakenings. (Keith learned he was gay, for starters). Nut was the first student in the township to test into NTU. He graduated and did his mandatory military service, but he wouldn’t stay and work in Taipei. He came home and said he wanted to farm the land. Jack gave him an abandoned carambola orchard to tend. “Nut was a dumbass,” Junior, Nut’s brother said. “Whatever his dream was, he was dumb. What good did going to university do him? He died so young.

Nut was thrown in jail, Cicada told Keith it was Nut’s own fault. He was a pervert, but she had no idea that Nut sacrified himself without speak one more word that Cliff was also the member of the book club at the Tomorrow’s bookstore. He saved Cliff’s whole family.

 

2.The story 「Stay true」 we read , Hsu Hua couldn’t understand why his parents wanted to go back to a place they had chosen to leave. Can you understand Keith never liked coming home as a boy , here why Keith even has just been released from prison for killing his boyfriend. Why he is so yielding to return to his family’s village, a poor and desolate place?

-William Faulkners famous line: "The past is not dead, the past is not even past." We chose to forget and passed by all the bitter memory. Kevin leads us to open our heart to see the truth.

- All the splendor in life will be repaid with solitude-One Hundred years of Solitude-Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez

Not to mention solitude itself, One day we’ll be cured by death,too

-“Its enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”

-Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez

No matter what we face, to live here and now

-"la vraie vie est ailleurs."- The real life is elsewhere.

"The life around me is so mediocre and dead. The real life is always elsewhere."-Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud

The wound from the past is too hurt, we need to leave for a while, after we cure ourselves, we will come back and help others,too

 -"For example, some of my ways of thinking and speaking are influenced by her and become a part of me; so some parts of her are alive, living in me and through me."

-"You once put the moon in my heart

-Let me remember that there is still hometown. now

Wherever I am, its far away. "

-What was originally the end was just the starting point of his life. The person he really wanted to reconcile with was actually himself.

3.Why the story happened in the Yongjing, a rural backwater in central Taiwan?

Yongjing never be quiet

Totally different from the word Yongjing. It’s so noisy

Everything behind the curtain is the real truth

 

4.Why the story called "Ghost Town" ? Did you see any spooky ghosts?

-The five sisters respectively sacrificed their years to their original families, public life, domestic violence husbands, and their own jealousy.(ghosts of sadness)

-There is a Nazi ghost in Germany and white terror in Taiwan.(ghost of terror)

-All ghosts are made of the state violence, domestic violence ,political violence gender violence, verbal violence ,superstitions violence, bias violence, furthermore: marital rape, adultery, verbal abuse, drug use and torture.(ghost of pressure)

-Ghost Town weaves a mesmerizing web of family secrets and countryside superstitions, the search for identity and clash of culture(ghost of solitude)

-What a lovely day it had been! Every time her husband beat her from then on, Belinda would force herself to recall the day in Berlin, stepping on the fallen leaves, smelling honey, looking for the candy factory, all by herself in a city of strangers. She wasn’t afraid of getting lost and didn’t feel like going home.(ghost of bully)

-The rumor was swept up on a breeze. Soon everyone had gotten wind of it. As it spread it mutated, evolving variant strains. In the most virulent, Nut was a pedophile, a monster who preyed upon prepubescent boys.(ghost of social terror)

-Betty takes the train home for the climactic family reunion and feels herself becoming, in a way, a living ghost.(ghost of solitude)

She looked out the window, no longer able to see her reflection. Every time she went home, she felt herself getting lighter and lighter. The closer to Yongjing, the more spectral she became. By the time she got there, she was translucent.

-The same wind blew when Nut disappeared, when the Tomorrow Bookstore ceased operation, when the hippo escaped, when I vanished, when Keith was subpoenaed, when Father died, when Mother died(ghost of past)

-The lady ghost in the bamboo grove is grandmother. Cicada’s mother. When Cicada’s mother was a girl, her mother got gang - raped in the bamboo grove. A farmer found her naked, pressed beneath a man while another waited. The farmer chased those men away with a hoe, wrapped her in a rice sack, and took her home. But her husband’s family would not let her in. They told her to go home. “I want to die,” she told her young daughter. “I’m going to go hang myself in the bamboo. Don’t tell today,” she said. “Tell them where they can find me tomorrow.” The daughter did as she was told, and went along the next day. She saw a thin body hanging from a thick stalk of bamboo.(ghost of traditional pressure)

 

5.In the story, Keith felt relieved while played the drama of Hamlet and found out that Hamlet killed more people than he did, and what he did is coincidently, he felt relieved and found his own respect. Do you agree with the abolishment about the death penalty in Taiwan? Or any way to cultivate death row prisoner?

In contrast, those who believe in the efficacy of rehabilitation tend to oppose capital punishment policy. Unexpectedly, experience with crime victimization and perception of high crime levels in one’s residential neighborhood reduce support for capital punishment policy. We end our analysis with a call to political leaders to exercise enlightened leadership on the death sentence policy.

When to give others a chance depends on our awareness of sympathy and empathy.

 

80% of Taiwanese oppose the capital punishment

The position of not abolishing the death penalty is based on human rights, but the biggest problem with death row prisoners is that they are the first to infringe on human rights. "If you disregard the human rights of others and have reached the point of imposing the death penalty, then you must be very serious. You harm other people’s human rights first, but then you ask everyone to protect your human rights.”

The death penalty is agreed upon for habitual offenders and those who show no remorse.

If the murderer was mentally ill when he committed the crime, the Constitutional Court held that they did not have complete ability to recognize the law and should not be sentenced to death. If prisoners on death row "have mental problems due to being detained", the Constitutional Court also believes that they lack the ability to understand and the relevant legal provisions do not prohibit the execution of the death penalty.

https://hakkanews.tw/2024/09/20/the-death-penalty/

 

Akio Yaita put forward the hypothesis, "If a Taiwanese citizen is arrested in China in the future and is indeed sentenced to death," he pointed out that Taiwanese society may not be able to remain calm. It also quoted political commentator Huang Pengxiao: "If China determines that a Taiwanese in China is a Taiwanese independence activist in the future and threatens him with death, the Lai Ching-te government will face a difficult choice."

Akio Yaita further analyzed and said that true Taiwanese independence advocates will not go to China and therefore will not be arrested; on the contrary, they tend to understand cross-strait reunification. More than 1 million Taiwanese working in China are more likely to become targets of arrest by the Chinese authorities; As a result, the Taiwan government had to raise its travel warning for China to the second-highest risk level at the end of June. Akio Yaita believes that from this point of view, fewer and fewer Taiwanese people will go to China in the future, and China-Taiwan decoupling may accelerate.https://www.msn.com/....../%E6%8B%BF....../ar-AA1r7EWy......

-Mental-problem killer doesnt need penalty, it happened to be a hidden bomb for society. its our responsibility to care of them and prevent all the consequence we need to pay

Conclusion

1.It’s hard to understand yourself when you are too close to your self. After you solve your own problems from somewhere else, you find your energy back and can come home to cure others.

2.Ghosts are all the people who are our relatives, ancestors, they are the bridges to help us go through the past to here and now and to be who I am with all the blessings.

3.Some ghosts are the victims of the social gender inequality or the political issues.

4.Tears are the language for gratitude, not for sadness.

5.“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

6.What we stand on the dirt is filled with the past spirit to form our perfection.

7.In the lover’s eye, you are perfect , not loser, in the normal people’s eye, you are nothing but a loser!

8. "Who doesnt run away from home when they grow up?"

But knowing that we have a home to go back to, where the lights are bright and loving people are waiting for us, is extremely lucky

 

We lived in one place after another,

Wandering from place to place,

But there is only one place to go home.

──Yun Danfengqings "Distracted Thoughts: Small Steps to Dance with Touches in the World"

 

9.William Faulkners famous line: "The past is not dead, the past is not even past." "The Ghost Place" is not only the past of writer , but also reflects the memory of Taiwan as a whole.

10.All the splendor in life will be repaid with solitude-One Hundred years of Solitude-Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez

Not to mention solitude itself, One day we’ll be cured by death,too

11.“Its enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”

-Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez

No matter what we face, to live here and now

12."la vraie vie est ailleurs."- The real life is elsewhere.

"The life around me is so mediocre and dead. The real life is always elsewhere."-Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud

The wound from the past is too hurt, we need to leave for a while, after we cure ourselves, we will come back and help others,too

13. where silence hides something more than words

14. A journey without end is the true journey of life

 

Oct. Meeting Report & Book Discussion for Nov. 4, 2024

Thank you for all the hidden figures to sparkle our spooky topic to a shining torch with the assistance of Belinda and Alice’s support to work out for the connection via line.

Lydia showed her respect to Cicada and Beverly to play the important roles as mom and daughter to hold family so strongly from falling down to the precipice.

Shannon reminded us the quote of Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990 “Whenever makes you feel like home, is your hometown. Faye appreciated to be invited to work back here in Taiwan 30 years ago, she felt so lucky and blessed. Sherry enjoyed “Fallen leaves return to their roots”. Lydia also shared us “where your route is born with gene”. Belinda wished that we have strong team of citizen judge to make the right decision for death penalty. Lily shared us her spooky story for the Sleep Paralysis in the hotel of Kenting.

“A journey without end is the true journey of life “ . “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” ” Once we found out who we are, then we can figure out where to go!

We do have a wonderful time and we are looking forward to reading our next book!

 

 

 

Book: Life After Life

Author: Raymond Moody

Leader: Faye Wang

Time: 1:00 pm. Nov. 4, 2024

Place: Qubit Cafe (Hanshin Arena) No.6, Lane 50, Bo-Ai 3 Road, Zuo Ying District, Kaohsiung. Tel:07-3459477 高雄市左營區博愛三路50巷6號

We usually have lunch before 1:00, between, or after our discussion. We look forward to seeing you soon, please let me know if you are absent.

 

 

Related reading:

1.       https://www.europaeditions.com/book/9781609457983/ghost-town

2.       https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/books/review/kevin-chen-ghost-town.html

3.       https://www.npr.org/2022/11/13/1135093196/ghost-town-kevin-chen-book-review

4.       https://lithub.com/ghost-town/

5.       https://mirrorfiction.com/news/307

6.       https://okapi.books.com.tw/article/16477

7.       https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57680782-ghost-town

8.       https://www.europaeditions.com/book/9781609457983/ghost-town

9.       https://henryshu.pixnet.net/blog/post/49679484-%E3%80%8A%E9%AC%BC%E5%9C%B0%E6%96%B9%E3%80%8B

10.    https://www.facebook.com/dayoffwellspent/posts/431219821558222/?paipv=0&eav=AfbWXJQyS_--MXXy0ExtbKzrvzIA6ge5c2oEFF9vfeHeAwxAtS4FVq49zaVw5-sgGmo&_rdr

11.    https://www.amazon.com/-/zh_TW/Kevin-Chen-ebook/dp/B09S8KCDQ8/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

12.    Bärlauche:野韭菜https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E7%86%8A%E8%91%B1

13.    Busy beaver: https://www.google.com/search?q=you+busy+beaver&oq=you+busy+beaver&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIICAEQABgFGB4yCggCEAAYBRgPGB4yCAgDEAAYBRgeMggIBBAAGAgYHjIICAUQABgIGB4yCAgGEAAYCBgeMggIBxAAGAgYHjIKCAgQABgIGAoYHjIICAkQABgIGB7SAQkxMTQ4ajBqMTWoAgCwAgA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:d26df43a,vid:6mpGpjFbAVU,st:0

14.    Laboe: https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E6%8B%89%E4%BC%AF_(%E7%9F%B3%E5%8B%92%E8%8B%8F%E7%9B%8A%E6%A0%BC-%E8%8D%B7%E5%B0%94%E6%96%AF%E6%B3%B0%E5%9B%A0)

15.    Leland Cheuk is an award-winning author of three books of fiction, most recently No Good Very Bad Asian. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle and Salon, among other outlets

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52355028-no-good-very-bad-asian

16.    White Terror: The White Terror is generally considered to have begun with the declaration of martial law on 19 May 1949. For its ending date, some sources cite the lifting of martial law on 15 July 1987, while others cite the repeal of Article 100 of the Criminal Code on 21 September 1992, which allowed for the persecution of people for "anti-state" activities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)

17.    Interview with Kevin Chen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf84TP8wY1w&ab_channel=%E5%90%8D%E4%BA%BA%E6%9B%B8%E6%88%BF

18.    A Family Drama, Taiwan History and Murder Case, Rolled Into One https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/books/review/kevin-chen-ghost-town.html?unlocked_article_code=1.w00.6Bzf.LR3TFou8chz8

19.    Summary of ghost town https://vocus.cc/article/62d2b621fd897800019e20df

20.    Death penalty: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344466852_Death_penalty_in_Taiwan

Writer:

His name is Chen Sihong , lives in Germany and was born in Yongjing. He graduated from Changzhong Senior High School in 1983. He is a book writer, storyteller, and gay. He has been ashamed of himself self for many years. Now, he finally feels like someone who likes . He doesn’t know if he is outstanding or not, but he never gives up.

 

"Ghost Town", set in Yongjing, Changhua, won the annual award at the Taiwan Literary Awards. The English version of "Ghost Town" was recommended by the 2022 New York Times Autumn Book List, recommended by website book reviews, and was selected into the U.S. "Library Magazine" ranked the top ten best books in world literature 2022. So far, the copyright has been sold in 12 languages ​​including English, Greek, Polish, Thai, and Korean.

 

Ghost Town, a novel by Kevin Chen and the winner of the 2020 Taiwan Literature Award. Now translated into English thanks to Darryl Sterk, Ghost Town is reminiscent of the dreamlike narratives of Can Xue and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and will require readers to hold on tight to their sense of reality as the prose blurs lines between the living and the dead, the past and the present, and finally, the guilty and the innocent.

A multigenerational family saga, so intense and operatic!

 

Kevin Chen began his artistic career as a cinema actor, starring in the Taiwanese and German films Ghosted, Kung Fu Panda , and Global Player. Now based in Germany, he is a staff writer for Performing Arts Reviews magazine. He’s published several novels, essays and short story collections, including Attitude, Flowers from Fingernails, Three Ways to Get Rid of Allergies and other titles.

 

Story:

Yongjing is so quiet...

The whole book of "Ghost Place" is filled with a depressing emotion from beginning to end, just like during the white terror period, the dark, gloomy and low-color text tightly strangled the readers throats.

The book describes the two days when Keith returned home during the Hungry Ghost Festival. The author uses the memories of each member of the Chen family and the souls of his deceased father and fifth sister to outline the ugly history of the Chen family.

This ugliness is the secret of the town, the horror of the times, the ruthlessness of the family... and the most unbearable and unwilling memories hidden in everyones heart.

There is this sentence in the book: "Human memory will be filtered and obscured. In some extreme situations, people will take the initiative to delete too painful chapters of growth. When he thinks of his hometown, of course he will think of the beautiful things... but he has not forgotten it. Those ugly and dirty ones. The death and departure he caused, the insults and beatings from my mother. Her fists were like knives, her feet were like swords, but the most vicious thing was her mouth, where she poured out all kinds of Taiwanese curses, every word of which was hot."

This paragraph really reminds me of an unrelated comic book "Chainsaw Man". In order to live a normal life, we will try our best to forget those shameful memories, and those that cannot be forgotten will be kept in our hearts , never want to take another look.

In those fragmented and vague memories, it may be the dress in the neighbors basement, the rotting corpse lying in the ditch, the humiliated rattan in the classroom... At an unspecified period of time, bits and pieces of scattered memories, all of them... They are all connected by a thread called Karma, and these thousands of threads will eventually guide the protagonist and guide us back to our hometown.

Re-examining the title of this book "Ghost Place", what does the word ghost mean? Literally speaking, it is a place where there are ghosts, whether it is the female ghost in the bamboo forest, the peeing ghost in the toilet, or even the ghost of the father and the fifth sister... But from a colloquial point of view, it is an extremely remote place. People from other places will never know or have heard of where Yongjing in Changhua is. And it wasnt until I read the entire book that I learned about the third meaning of ghosts: everyone is a ghost, that is, the ghost in the human heart - that is what is truly worth fearing.

The eldest sister came to Lukang to work as a female worker in order to make a living, but in the end she returned to her hometown after giving birth and was ridiculed by her family; the second sister was seduced by the police and was lured out of the reading club of the fat boss and the thin boss; the third sister In order to maintain his own image, the husband of the anchor constantly bullies the third sister and even looks at Yongjing with contempt; the fourth sister and the fifth sister are intrigued by each other because of their jealousy, and break up because of a man. In the end, one person committed suicide and the other went mad; the eldest brother listened to the second brother of the Wang family and ran for the township headship, but in the end he was involved in a corruption case because of the Wang family; the younger brother has been gay since he was a child, but his family instead wanted to bully him, and even deliberately ignoring the time when he needed help the most...

I think the ghost place not only describes "Yongjing", but also describes the ghost island "Taiwan".

Male chauvinism, the patriarchal concept of the times, the white terror of gays and reading clubs, political prisoners who must die, and the Wang family’s money-making trajectory from Taiwan to China... these are all the epitome of Taiwan!

Until now, the government has maintained "spontaneous forgetfulness" and is unwilling to remember the terrible past.

William is quoted in the postscript of the book. William Faulkners famous line: "The past is not dead, the past is not even past." "The Ghost Place" is not only the past of writer Chen Sihong, but also reflects the memory of Taiwan as a whole. And until one day, when we are willing to open the unknown curtain and gaze at those fragmented and vague memories, we may be able to repent, reflect on ourselves, and comfort ourselves softly while the past is blown away by the wind like pieces of paper. Oh… …Stop crying──

 

Questions:

 

1.Which character gives you the deepest inspiration, why?

Nut, Jack’s second son, who aroused Keith sexual awakenings. (Keith learned he was gay, for starters). Nut was the first student in the township to test into NTU. He graduated and did his mandatory military service, but he wouldn’t stay and work in Taipei. He came home and said he wanted to farm the land. Jack gave him an abandoned carambola orchard to tend. “Nut was a dumbass,” Junior, Nut’s brother said. “Whatever his dream was, he was dumb. What good did going to university do him? He died so young.

Nut was thrown in jail, Cicada told Keith it was Nut’s own fault. He was a pervert, but she had no idea that Nut sacrified himself without speak one more word that Cliff was also the member of the book club at the Tomorrow’s bookstore. He saved Cliff’s whole family.

 

2.The story 「Stay true」 we read , Hsu Hua couldn’t understand why his parents wanted to go back to a place they had chosen to leave. Can you understand Keith never liked coming home as a boy , here why Keith even has just been released from prison for killing his boyfriend. Why he is so yielding to return to his family’s village, a poor and desolate place?

William Faulkners famous line: "The past is not dead, the past is not even past." We chose to forget and passed by all the bitter memory. Kevin leads us to open our heart to see the truth.

 

3.Why the story happened in the Yongjing, a rural backwater in central Taiwan?

Yongjing never be quiet

4.Why the story called "Ghost Town" ? Did you see any spooky ghosts?

7.      The five sisters respectively sacrificed their years to their original families, public life, domestic violence husbands, and their own jealousy.

8.      There is a Nazi ghost in Germany and white terror in Taiwan.

9.      All ghosts are made of the state violence, domestic violence ,political violence gender violence, verbal violence ,superstitions violence, bias violence, furthermore: marital rape, adultery, verbal abuse, drug use and torture.

10.  Ghost Town weaves a mesmerizing web of family secrets and countryside superstitions, the search for identity and clash of culture

11.  What a lovely day it had been! Every time her husband beat her from then on, Belinda would force herself to recall the day in Berlin, stepping on the fallen leaves, smelling honey, looking for the candy factory, all by herself in a city of strangers. She wasn’t afraid of getting lost and didn’t feel like going home.

12.  The rumor was swept up on a breeze. Soon everyone had gotten wind of it. As it spread it mutated, evolving variant strains. In the most virulent, Nut was a pedophile, a monster who preyed upon prepubescent boys.

7. Betty takes the train home for the climactic family reunion and feels herself becoming, in a way, a living ghost.

She looked out the window, no longer able to see her reflection. Every time she went home, she felt herself getting lighter and lighter. The closer to Yongjing, the more spectral she became. By the time she got there, she was translucent.

8.The same wind blew when Nut disappeared, when the Tomorrow Bookstore ceased operation, when the hippo escaped, when I vanished, when Keith was subpoenaed, when Father died, when Mother died

9. The lady ghost in the bamboo grove is grandmother. Cicada’s mother. When Cicada’s mother was a girl, her mother got gang - raped in the bamboo grove. A farmer found her naked, pressed beneath a man while another waited. The farmer chased those men away with a hoe, wrapped her in a rice sack, and took her home. But her husband’s family would not let her in. They told her to go home. “I want to die,” she told her young daughter. “I’m going to go hang myself in the bamboo. Don’t tell today,” she said. “Tell them where they can find me tomorrow.” The daughter did as she was told, and went along the next day. She saw a thin body hanging from a thick stalk of bamboo.

 

5.In the story, Keith felt relieved while played the drama of Hamlet and found out that Hamlet killed more people than he did, and what he did is coincidently, he felt relieved and found his own respect. Do you agree with the abolishment about the death penalty in Taiwan? Or any way to cultivate death row prisoner?

In contrast, those who believe in the efficacy of rehabilitation tend to oppose capital punishment policy. Unexpectedly, experience with crime victimization and perception of high crime levels in one’s residential neighborhood reduce support for capital punishment policy. We end our analysis with a call to political leaders to exercise enlightened leadership on the death sentence policy.

 

Oct. Meeting Report & Book Discussion for Nov. 4, 2024

Thank you for all the hidden figures to sparkle our spooky topic to a shining torch with the assistance of Belinda and Alice’s support to work out for the connection via line.

Lydia showed her respect to Cicada and Beverly to play the important roles as mom and daughter to hold family so strongly from falling down to the precipice.

Shannon reminded us the quote of Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990 “Whenever makes you feel like home, is your hometown. Faye appreciated to be invited to work back here in Taiwan 30 years ago, she felt so lucky and blessed. Sherry enjoyed “Fallen leaves return to their roots”. Lydia also shared us “where your route is born with gene”. Belinda wished that we have strong team of citizen judge to make the right decision for death penalty. Lily shared us her spooky story for the Sleep Paralysis in the hotel of Kenting.

“A journey without end is the true journey of life “ . “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” ” Once we found out who we are, then we can figure out where to go!

We do have a wonderful time and we are looking forward to reading our next book!

 

 

 

Book: Life After Life

Author: Raymond Moody

Leader: Faye Wang

Time: 1:00 pm. Nov. 4, 2024

Place: Qubit Cafe (Hanshin Arena) No.6, Lane 50, Bo-Ai 3 Road, Zuo Ying District, Kaohsiung. Tel:07-3459477 高雄市左營區博愛三路50巷6號

We usually have lunch before 1:00, between, or after our discussion. We look forward to seeing you soon, please let me know if you are absent.