Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

As the nurse stood by my intravenous drip with a bottle of Clorox and a disarmingly unsure smile, I wished I’d learned the Mandarin for ‘You’re not going to put that in there, are you?’ But I hadn’t, and in any case I was dying. So I just kept quiet.

Things were not going well at all. Now, whenever anyone asked for any first impressions of Taiwan, my answer would have to be: the most agonizing stomach cramps you’ve ever had in your life, followed by five hours stuck to the toilet bowl, crapping so hard you were sure your intestines were now in a drain somewhere. If Anita hadn’t fortuitously come back home a little bit early and called an ambulance while there was still some semblance of a human being left, I honestly think I might have done an Elvis.
As it was, on the way to the hospital, sirens yowling us faster and faster through the night, I started to cry.
‘What is it baby?’ Anita leaned over me and tried to smile, but she couldn’t kill the worried, and somewhat exasperated expression crinkling her forehead. We were only a week and a half into my stay, and quite clearly this was not how she had imagined the start of our life together.
‘Well, it’s… it’s…’ I hiccupped, but the sobs were winning.
‘It’s what? Are you sad because you will go to hospital?’
‘N-no, it’s….’
‘Because you broke our toilet?’
‘No, n-not that, it’s…’
‘Ah,’ she nodded. ‘It is because you feel you let me down.’
‘Erm.’ I swallowed a little of my tragedy and tried to compose myself. ‘Well, yes – a little bit. But it’s mostly Freddy.’
‘Freddy? Because he is dead?’
Which started me off again.
Freddy had been my best friend since the age of fourteen. He was a short, eternally optimistic guy who suffered from a rare skin disorder that left him looking like he had just walked out of a fire. He never seemed to let it get to him though; countered every stare with a smile, or the offer of an autograph, and turned his alarming appearance into an advantage by becoming one of the most well-known and well-liked guys in school. Even a bout of tongue cancer, shortly after a big move to Edinburgh, wasn’t enough to stamp on his irrepressibility. Although the partial amputation left him barely intelligible at times, he still had the same spark in his eyes and a witty, though occasionally garbled, retort for every occasion. What finally did for poor Freddy, just a month before my trip to Taiwan, was lung cancer. Right up to the end though, he kept his spirit. On one of the last times I visited him, I was accompanying two mutual fiends who hadn’t seen him since the disease struck. We arrived late, and the two were nervous about seeing our pal and how he might look. Fred, too, was nervous that they wouldn’t be able to handle his extreme loss of weight and elderly demeanor. As we walked through the door, he lifted a hand weakly in salutation and said:
‘Guys, you’re too late – I died yesterday!
So I was crying for Freddy, because he wasn’t so long gone, and the ambulance, the feeling of helplessness, the hospital stay awaiting me, it was all too reminiscent of what he must have gone through in the few weeks before his death. I was also crying because I imagined that the feeling in my bottom was akin to what he must have felt in his chest, and that while he had wasted away from lung cancer, I was about to experience the long and dramatic fall from grace that came with a tumor of the arse.

Never ever, and I’ll repeat this for dramatic effect, never ever get so incredibly drunk that you decide to order some kind of food that you wouldn’t usually eat if your life depended on it. My second weekend in Taiwan, I was feeling fairly brave and had already secured a job. So when Anita suggested we venture out a little, meet her sister and two nieces to go for some local Taiwanese food in town, I readily agreed.
‘Here’s to everyone,’ I hoisted a virtually empty bottle of Taiwan beer, dribbled the remnants into a glass and drank.
‘Everyone,’ Anita echoed, and her sister did the same. The two nieces – seven and nine years old – ignored us, squabbling over the last few pieces of something that had once been a duck, but now looked more like John Hurt after that thing exploded out of his chest.
‘Baby,’ Anita said, having adopted this as my name the moment I landed on Taiwanese soil, ‘you want to try some special food?’
Her sister seemed to understand what this meant, and looked like she might be about to start salivating. I thought back to the intestinal stews, poultry feet and fragments of anus that I had turned my nose up in the last ten days and decided that it was time to let caution fly out of the window.
‘Of course! Bring it on!’
Perhaps ten minutes later, a big bowl of steaming pink seafood arrived.
‘This like tiny shrimp,’ Anita explained. ‘Very delicious.’
‘Right,’ I tried to sound hopeful, but I wasn’t feeling it. To me, that bowl appeared to be filled with hundreds of dirty pink fingernail clippings. ‘Erm.’
‘Deerishes,’ the sister pronounced, scooped up a whole community of them with her chopsticks and filling her mouth.
‘Really,’ said Anita. ‘It’s true. You try.’
‘Oh well.’ I chugged back half of a newly arrived bottle and balanced a very modest triplet of cerise commas into my mouth.
‘God! These are delicious!’
By the time the two nieces had disappeared the rest of the duck and were ready for this latest dish, it was too late. All the dirty pink fingernails were in my stomach, plotting their revenge.

The first day in hospital was the worst. I had no idea what a Taiwanese medical facility would be like. My only memory of foreign emergency care came from visiting a friend in the middle of the Hungarian countryside, so I was understandably afraid. Thankfully, Wanfang Hospital had actual beds, proper nurses and when it was time for medication, they didn’t send round a box of different colored tablets with a homeless man who kept asking you which ones you thought might be for you. Unfortunately, what Wanfang hospital did have was an old man with a very persistent moan in the bed next to mine. After several early morning hours of trying to stuff bits of the bed into my ears in order to muffle his cries of ‘Ayohhhhhhh’ and the babble of his chattering relatives, I rang the bell for the nurse.
‘Can you make him be quiet?’ I asked politely.
‘He’s dying,’ she answered in surprisingly good English. It occurred to me that she might have had a lot of practice in that particular phrase.
My initial reaction wanted to be ‘any idea what time? I’m trying to get to sleep’, but I rather tenderly said nothing and decided to put up with it. He did, in fact, expire a few hours later, allowing me to get some much needed rest. Unfortunately for me and everyone in my immediate environment, during those scant hours of unconsciousness, I shat the bed. This may or may not have been some kind of cosmic revenge for my near indelicacy concerning the old man.
‘If you are the same this afternoon, the doctor will do… examination.’ The nurse was replacing my bed linen, while I sat on a rather uncomfortable wooden chair.
‘What kind of examination?’ I winced and clenched my arse cheeks; things were happening again.
‘Rectal.’ She pronounced carefully, giving a big smile.
I pondered the idea.
‘Can you tell the doctor that if he sticks anything up there, I can’t be responsible for what might happen?’
‘What?’ I would have to try simpler English.
‘If he puts anything inside me, I might have an accident.’
‘Huh? Accident? Falling over?’
‘No. Look, tell the doctor that if he puts anything up my bottom, I’ll shit on him.’
I think she understood that. In any case, there was no further mention of rectal examinations.

Ironically, just as I was shitting all over Taiwan, it seemed Taiwan was doing something similar to me. I had left a reasonably well paid and respected job as a teacher trainer in the UK, after realizing that things were going pretty well with Anita, but we needed to take it to the next level. We had slowly built up a relationship over two months, but then she went back home, and for the next half a year we were forced to survive on intercontinental phone calls.
‘How are you,’ I would ask, desperately, barely even able to remember what she really looked like.
‘I’m fine,’ she would answer, always the same. ‘But I miss you.’
‘I miss you too.’
‘Love you.’
‘I love you too.’
Then one day…
‘I love you too, but… I think you are never coming here.’
There was such sadness in her voice, such resignation to an awful, but certain truth, that I immediately realized it was time to, well… shit or get off the pot. Within a month of that phone call I had resigned my job, packed my flotsam, jetsam, knicks and knacks and booked a flight to Taipei.
‘You mean you are coming!’ She exclaimed with joy, when I told her the news.
‘Yes,’ I exhaled, the tone of her voice instantly wiping away the doubts that had been keeping me up at nights.
‘But… what will you do here…?’
‘Erm…’ I hadn’t really thought about that. ‘Love you?’
‘Ha, ha. That funny. But really, what will you do here?’
‘Well, I suppose… I’ll teach English. That’s what I was doing before I got into teacher training.’
‘O-kay.’ And the tone in her voice this time made me wonder if I’d somehow got it spectacularly wrong, and that English was in fact Taiwan’s first language. Perhaps all the people from there I’d met so far were simply retarded, and your normal Taiwanese person spoke the Queen’s tongue more fluently than I did.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘Well… for teaching English here you just need a white face.’
‘I have a white face!’
‘I know… but it’s too easy.’
‘Erm…I could wear black make up?’
‘No, I mean it’s too easy to get teaching job here, so quality very low, so some people think English teachers are similar level…’
‘Similar level to…erm... office workers?’
‘Oh no! Office workers quite respected.’
‘Right…maybe… well… cleaners?’
‘No, no, not. What I’m thinking is - in the street, with the rubbish…?’
‘Trash collectors?’ My heart sank.
‘Ah! No – cockroaches.’
‘Cockroaches?’
‘Yes, cockroaches.’

‘It is salmonella poisoning,’ said the doctor halfway through the second day of my incarceration, a grin on his face. ‘We have found it in your… stool.’
But as a fully fledged hypochondriac who’d been laid up in bed for a day and a half with agonizing stomach pains, I was fairly sure what I was actually experiencing was:
(a) Chronic Death Syndrome
(b) An extreme case of Chronic Death Syndrome, or
(c) Just Plain Death.
I wasn’t going to let this go without a fight. Surely someone couldn’t go through this much pain and still be expected to live.
‘Are you sure it’s not dysentery?’
‘No, not dysentery.’ He smiled again, and started to move away.
‘Appendicitis? I have a specific pain in my left side. Very painful.’
‘No.’
‘Aren’t you even going to check?’
He shook his head sadly. This was clearly a man who had my number.
‘Not dysentery, not appendicitis – not death syndrome that you told my nurse about. Salmonella.’
‘Necrotizing phlebitis?’ I offered as a final gambit.
‘Huh?’
‘Page 63 in the medical dictionary,’ I offered helpfully.
He gave me a kind look, smiled again and left. That same doctor was back a few hours later to inform me that I did not have the South African organ-eating virus last heard of in the 1850’s. But by then I was onto something else anyway.
‘I’m…’ I gasped, not sure whether I was putting it on or not, ‘short of breath. Very. Difficult. To. Breathe.’
‘Yes?’ I was relieved to see his look of concern.
‘Yes.’ I nodded emphatically. ‘Yes!’
‘When did this start?’
‘Two hours ago.’
‘You had this before?’
‘Ah…’ I considered lying, but couldn’t summon the energy. ‘Well… sometimes when I think about breathing too much. Sometimes I find it difficult to breathe then, but then something takes my mind off it and I’m okay again. Maybe. Maybe it’s just in my head. I don’t know.’
He began to look unsure, so I gave another few gasps to underline the seriousness of my possibly imaginary condition.
‘Okay, I order an ECG.’
‘Wow, thanks!’
Bingo! An ECG – that would sort everything out. My long suspected hole-in-the-heart syndrome would finally come to light. At last, I was about to be medically exonerated; no longer would society look down on me as the whinger, or cast knowing glances whenever I came down with another ‘symptom’.
A nurse arrived some time later with the contraption, and attempted to arrange it on my body.
‘Difficult to attach to you,’ she confided, after about half an hour of trying. ‘You Westerner very tall. Not sure where to put wires.’
Once more she attached the rubber suckers all over my body, looked at the screen, sighed, then took them all off and tried again.
‘That’s it!’
She fiddled with the dials for a while, made a few curious, and rather worrying noises, and gave her horrifying diagnosis:
‘Nothing there!’
‘Nothing there!’ I repeated, clutching at my empty chest in terror. ‘Nothing!!?’
‘Nothing wrong there.’
‘Oh.’ I calmed down and tried to make like nothing had happened.
‘And what about the hole?’
‘There is no hole.’ She patted the machine maternally. ‘This new machine.’

Taiwan, upon leaving the airport for the first time, felt like Singapore. It was the middle of summer, so as you left the air-conditioning a wall of dense heat hit you, and it took a few minutes to adjust. Even the short walk to the taxi had me feeling as squeezed of moisture as a dead sponge.
‘You will get used to it,’ said Anita, climbing into the cab.
‘When?’ I asked desperately, wondering if I’d make a mistake after all.
‘Just few days. Also, you are lucky.’
‘Lucky?’
‘Yes, you not have to worry about meeting my parents.’
Oh God, I thought, they’ve heard about the unholy union, disowned her and cut her out of the will.
‘I’m sorry. Are they unhappy about us?’
‘No! They have gone to America to stay my Aunty for a while. She live in Las Vegas.’
‘Because of me?’ I was confused now.
‘No,’ she gave me a frown. ‘Because of having a holiday.’

Seventy-two hours later I was more or less accustomed to the temperature, and definitely accustomed to not having to meet her parents yet, there was enough to be getting on with. What I wasn’t accustomed to was being told by every language school I tried that I was overqualified, and really was lowering my expectations too much by applying for their job.
‘But I’m happy to teach here!’ I argued with one Taiwanese woman, who was insistent that my experience, qualifications and ability to wear a shirt and tie put me out of her league.
‘You not happy here. You go other place!’
As I turned, exasperated, I bumped into one of the teachers about to go into class.
‘Hey,’ he lazily lifted a hand with a cigarette in it and acknowledged me.
‘Hi.’
‘Nice threads, dude – is that a tie?’ He fingered it curiously.
‘Yes. Yes, it is.’ I answered, feeling vaguely silly.
‘You from Head Office?’
‘No…ah… nice shorts. But there’s a hole in your t-shirt.’
‘Yeah, I know. But my other one’s at the laundry. You know what it’s like.’
Well, I did now.
Just as things were getting desperate, and I had resorted to buying Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Stop Worrying and start Living’ in an effort to postpone suicide, I struck lucky.
‘I got something for you,’ said Anita as she came in the door from work. ‘I got it from work.’
It was a copy of Taipei Times – one of three English language newspapers in Taiwan.
‘Thanks. Did something interesting happen today?’
‘No – there is a classified section of jobs in back. Maybe more quality – because they can afford advertisement.’
She knew what she was talking about – Anita worked as a Marketing Executive at one of Taiwan’s top business magazines, and spent a large part of her day examining advertisements in different magazines and newspapers. The upshot of this was that:
(a) she earned enough money that my lack of a job was not life threatening
(b) if you offered her a magazine to read for pleasure, she would curl up into a ball and start to make weeping noises.
I looked in the paper, and sure enough, there in the back was an advertisement
for an English teacher at He-Ping Junior High school.
‘This is no good,’ I said, after excitedly reading through the requirements. ‘They want someone with twenty-five years experience and a double Masters in Linguistics and anthropology.’
She laughed.
‘Do not worry. They just try to get better applications than other schools.’
‘I really don’t think I can get this job.’
‘Yes, you can get it.’
‘What makes you so sure? I don’t have that much experience or those qualifications.’
‘Yes, but you have some of experience and some of qualifications. That will be enough.’

By the third day of hospital life I was able to summon enough energy to slowly hobble over to the window and look outside. It was a wonderful, blue-sky day and I could feel the intense heat trying to get through the glass and into my air-conditioning. Outside, sixteen floors down, people were doing what people do when they’re not languishing in hospital or dead: visiting the 7/11, waiting for the bus, grabbing some chicken-to-go at KFC. At which point my stomach decided to remind me that I hadn’t eaten for over seventy-two hours. Up until that point I had hardly thought about food, hunger had seemed a far-away, otherworldly concept. Not anymore.
‘Oh God,’ my system rumbled alarmingly and a faint, light-headedness washed over me. I looked out again, but now it was even worse. Not only could I see into the KFC and the people there enjoying their meals, but I could even… yes, it was impossible but true. I could smell the Colonel’s secret recipe. And, as I continued staring at the KFC, more tempted than a pedophile in a playground, my eyes were magnetically drawn to the sign. Colonel Sanders’ big white face turned fractionally in my direction and gave me a great big dirty wink.
‘Are you okay Mr. Andrew?’ came the nurse’s voice from behind me.
‘No. Colonel Sanders is winking,’ I admitted, like it was a dirty secret. ‘Colonel Sanders is looking at me and winking.’
‘Oh! You disgusting!’ said the nurse, perhaps not completely understanding me, and stormed off to try and get me committed.
The next morning, despite the protestations of several members of staff who claimed that I had both threatened to defecate over the doctor and was having pornographic hallucinations, I was allowed out.
I took a taxi home and staggered over to the phone, in need of moral and emotional support. My parents, back in the UK – surely they’d make me feel better, that good old blend of care, wisdom and comfort.
‘Hi Dad.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘It’s Andy?’
‘Andy?’
‘Andy, your son Andy.’
‘Right. Well the rugby’s on.’
‘Oh… well, it’s just that I’ve just come out of hospital.’
There was silence.
‘Dad?’
‘Oooh, nice try. What was that?’
‘I’ve just been in hospital for a few days. I’ve had salmonella.’
‘Well that was bloody stupid, wasn’t it? I told you to stay away from that stuff – me and your mam won’t touch it.’
‘Right, erm, well I’m okay now.’
There was silence.
‘Dad?’
‘Sorry – the adverts. What was that?’
‘I’m okay now.’
‘Oh you think you’re okay, but it always comes back you know – your Great Aunt Ethel had it in her back for seventeen years.’