Ever since graduation, Nosey Pao has been keeping tabs on
the fifty-three students in our class. By his reckoning, fourteen
are teaching, three putting food on the table by selling insurance
and nine doing their time in the military; there are seven in sales
and two in business; five are unclassified (including one girl
whose marriage was “arranged” by her unborn child) and five
unproductive (they haven’t yet got their feet on the ground); the
other eight are whereabouts unknown, D.O.A. undivined, among
them a fugitive, a man “wanted” for writing checks as casually
as the chanteuse Fong Feifei signs autographs for her fans.
Chao Chien aspired to be a writer. He talked about it all the
time, telling us how after graduation he was going to put his
nose to the grindstone and write an explosive magnum opus
instead of finding a job. From freshman year on, he often penned submissions for the school newspaper with titles like
“Pale Poinsettia by Moonlight.” Just the other day, I ran into
him in the trendy Hsi-men-ting district in Taipei. He was carrying
a 007 attaché case, his face ashen. I asked him if he was still
writing. The way he looked at me, it was like I was quizzing
him on ancient history. I invited him to lunch but he said he was
busy: he had to go meet a client. “Doing business is hard,” he
said, “about a million times harder than writing.”
Liu Kung-pin and I are neighbors. After graduation, he set
up a stand selling leather wallets and whatnot in the Shih-lin
Nightmarket. He slept during the day and came out to do business
at night. He told me later that too many people knew him
and he was too thin-skinned to haggle with his acquaintances.
So he switched to selling meatballs in Ta-chih; after ten days he
was out over seventy dollars. Now he rides his motorcycle in all
directions selling generic stereo equipment, earning a 20% margin
on each sale. Every time he returns he reports how many
units he’s sold. He says he earns more than a university professor,
and that seems right to me. I’m always telling him to save
money and take a wife; but he says once you’re rich there are
women everywhere. Last month he brought home one of his
stereos and it broke down in two days. He started swearing
about how these stereos were such crap. But the next day he
went out selling them just the same.
Chang Tou is also working in sales in Taipei: his products
are books and honey. From what he says, his mainstay, what
pays his salary, is books; honey is just the family business, a
sideline. But he sells a lot of honey and not very many books.
He says no matter what you’re selling you’ve got to consider the
customer. For a woman in her thirties, you say honey is skinnourishing
and wrinkle-removing. For a middle-aged man, you say honey aids the digestion and won’t go to the midsection. If
it’s a student, you’ve just got to guarantee it’s the real thing.
Most students will buy a bottle “to see how it tastes.” He ended
up selling so few books that his boss let him go; but he simply
switched to selling encyclopedias for another company. A couple
of days ago he brought round a set of encyclopedias for me
to look at. When I refused to buy he called me a blockhead. I
ended up purchasing two bottles of honey: he gave me his personal
guarantee that it was unsweetened. But I didn’t eat any. I
gave it to the proprietress of the variety goods shop across the
way.
As for Ma Nan-ping’s profession, Nosey Pao and I have
been trying unsuccessfully to pigeon-hole it. During the day she
works as a receptionist at her father’s company. She goes in
when she wants and it doesn’t even matter if she doesn’t show
up: there’s already a company secretary. When she gets to work
she and the secretary will have a heart to heart about Sakyamuni
sitting under the Bodhi tree or Chuang Tzu dreaming about
being a butterfly. In the evening she goes to English class, saying
she wants to study in the United States and marry an
American or overseas Chinese “while she’s there.” Nosey Pao
pointed out that her plan contradicted the traditional teachings.
She retorted that this had nothing to do with Buddhism or
Taoism. One time, Nosey Pao went to visit her and she was
hunched over her desk writing modern poetry. The two lines he
stole a glimpse at went like this:
Smiling, the shadeless Bodhi tree
Bites free the funereal frieze of the boreal breeze.
To this day I have no idea what it means.
Lu Yi-jung is recently a bride; she didn’t attend our graduation
ceremony. As soon as final exams were over, amid the chirping of the cicadas, she became a true June bride. She didn’t
send out wedding invitations, either, for fear that we would
laugh at how she was already “showing.” A couple of classmates
in Taipei sent her a decorated banner emblazoned with “a
‘show’ of strength.” I hear she was apoplectic when she opened
it. Last week I received an invitation to her one-month-old baby
shower: I was a bit worried, until I saw a note that said “no gifts
S.V.P.”
Ta-hu—Tigris magnus—is in the army. For his send-off
party, we treated him to dinner at Beautiful Shih-lin Restaurant.
Wiping away tears and snivel, he confessed to scoring eighty on
the intelligence test. He’d made it twenty-three years without
discovering he was a “slow learner.” It was hard to take. Later
he wrote me regretting that he hadn’t made the most of his university
experience:
Though our four years of college now has vanished like a
dream,
I can’t forget the good times we had in the halls of academe.
This is his rewriting of the famous couplet.1 Tiger is still
not used to getting up at five-thirty in the morning: “The bugle
sounds, I sit in shock, remembering the good old days, when I
would be reclining on my comfy couch just like the wise Chuko.
The tears well up: Ah Sheng, do you know how it feels?” I
wrote him back, saying, “Let’s be good little guys, for early to
bed, early to rise will make us healthy, wealthy and wise.” In
his next letter he gave me a piece of his mind. The end of his
reply went, “At mid-autumn, the year’s eighth month, on Phoenix Hill, the grass grows long, the flowers bloom, the warblers
fly: could Ah Sheng be the only one without a heart?” 2
At the end of last month, Little Miss Hua-kan got promoted
to director; she’s found a knack for selling insurance. When I
asked her the trick of the trade, she said the most important thing
was “thick skin.” This came as quite a shock, because in school,
nobody had thinner skin than her. She’d blush with embarrassment
if a boy came to speak to her, and if someone “stood sentry”
outside her dormitory, she’d ask a roommate to buy meals
for her to avoid going out herself. Someone gave her the nickname
“little white flower.” But in a few short months since
graduation she’s changed completely! Her office is close to
where I live,. . .
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