Incensed (A Taipei Night Market Novel, Band 2) - Softcover

Lin, Ed

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1616958324 ISBN 13: 9781616958329

Verlag: Soho Crime, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

"Ed Lin’s Incensed is a stylish, smart thriller for the mind, heart, and gut. Sex, music, history, politics, food, humor, and just a touch of violence and death—you get it all. And when you're done, you’ll beg for more." —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer 

Family secrets come to light in this dark, comedic crime caper set in Taipei during the annual Mid-Autumn Festival. 

In Taiwan, the Mid-Autumn Festival is a time for prioritizing family. When 25-year-old Jing-nan’s gangster uncle, Big Eye, asks a favor, Jing-nan can’t exactly say no, especially because two goons are going to follow him around to make sure he gets it done right. The favor is this: Big Eye’s 16-year-old daughter, Mei-ling, has a biker boyfriend from the wrong side of the tracks—in Big Eye’s gangster opinion—and Big Eye wants Jing-nan to bring her to Taipei, away from the bad influences, and straighten her out.

It doesn’t take Jing-nan long to discover Mei-ling is even more trouble than the average bratty, rebellious teenager. She’s been spoiled rotten and doesn’t know how to take no for an answer. She has her father’s thugs wrapped around her finger and quickly becomes the miniature dictator of Jing-nan’s life. But Mei-ling is also hiding a secret—one that puts her in harm’s way. If Jing-nan wants to save his cousin from her own demons, he has to figure out the truth, even if it tears his family apart—again.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ed Lin is a journalist by training and an all-around stand-up kinda guy. He’s the author of several books: Ghost Month; Waylaid, his literary debut; and his Robert Chow crime series, set in 1970s Manhattan Chinatown: This Is a Bust, Snakes Can’t Run, and One Red Bastard. Lin, who is of Taiwanese and Chinese descent, is the first author to win three Asian American Literary Awards. Lin lives in New York with his wife, actress Cindy Cheung, and son.

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I don’t care how much you hate your family; there are certain things that you just don’t do, and you certainly don’t do them during the goddamned Mid-Autumn Festival—the one time of the year where you’re all supposed to pretend to love each other.
     Number one, you don’t lie to your family. If you don’t want to say something that you know will upset them, just don’t say anything. As a general rule, eat more, say less.
     Number two, show gratefulness for the things your family does for you. Even if it doesn’t help you all that much, when, say, your cousin tries to give you advice about your music career, say thank you and try to do something nice in return, like leaving halfway-decent clues about your whereabouts when you run away with your gangster boyfriend.
     Speaking of which, number three, don’t run away with your gangster boyfriend, especially when you’re only sixteen and your father—my uncle—is one of the most powerful figures in the underworld of central Taiwan. He’ll come after you hard.
     I’m a twenty-five-year-old man, so I know these things full well. I was raised properly and I am humble at my core. My little cousin Mei-ling, however, is of the younger generation of Taiwanese. She’s stubborn and ready to fight for what she believes in. She is also very cute. These are all qualities that a future singing star needs in order to make it, but they can also hurt your family, put your life in danger, and kill the people who fall in love with you.
     And the Mid-Autumn Festival is supposed to be about living, not dying.
     I will remember this particular holiday because it was the first time I celebrated it with my girlfriend, Nancy—a solidifying moment in our relationship. It was also the first time in a long time that I reconnected with my uncle, who last I heard had been in self-imposed exile. It was also the first and possibly last time I would see my darling little cousin Mei-ling, unless she pops up in tabloid news.
     I will sometimes wonder if I would have been better off not getting back in touch with my uncle and living the rest of my life thinking that I had no family left.
     When the full moon rises, I’ll put on one of Mei-ling’s songs. I’ll think about her, feel wistfully sad and then deeply ashamed that I couldn’t do more for her. I have to believe that she is in a better place.
 
 
 
Chapter 1
 
If you want to get hustled good and proper in Taipei, try to buy some freshly cut fruit at the Shilin Night Market.
     The vendors are fluent in several languages when they’re giving you the hard sell, poking at your face with toothpicked samples of creamy cherimoya and pretty-but-bland-tasting star fruit, but once you agree to buy something, they start filling up your bag with every fruit in stock and suddenly don’t understand when you say “stop.” Ask for half a kilogram of some bell-shaped wax apples and they’ll cut up a whole kilogram, bag it, and then grab two dragon fruit, dice them up and drop them in as well. After giving the bag a token sweep on a tipsy scale, showing a weight of more than four kilograms, you’ll be asked to pay 400 New Taiwan dollars for a bundle of stuff you mostly didn’t want.
     In the scheme of things, you, being a tourist, may not think that thirteen American dollars is a lot to pay for a fairly heavy bag of exotic fruit. As you stab into a sticky cube with your bamboo skewer and pop it into your mouth, maybe it will taste sweet. Maybe the dragon fruit hasn’t been sprayed with saccharin. Maybe the wax apple hasn’t been dipped in formaldehyde to preserve its pale flesh. But even if your lychee were lopped from a tree this morning and trucked in from a farm this afternoon, the wholesale price of fruit is less than a fifth of what they charge tourists—and that’s when they’re honest.
     A few years back a group of Singaporeans sued Taiwan’s tourism bureau after one stand charged them three times the normal price for atemoya, a grenade-shaped hybrid of the sugar apple and the cherimoya whose flavor explodes in the mouth with the taste of a slightly tart piña colada. The Singaporeans weren’t aware they’d been overcharged until one of them just had to have another and went to the one honest fruit seller in Shilin Market. When the tourist saw how much cheaper it was, the atemoya hit the fan.
     Now all the fruit stands have posted prices and digital scales. It’s a new level of transparency that is nonetheless still subject to some old tricks—for example, the piling on of extra fruit you didn’t order, or the concealed thumb under the bag on the scale.
     I’d let a pickpocket get closer to me than a fruit vendor. Which is why I kept my eyes peeled and my hand on my wallet as I saw one of the latter making her way toward us.
     Nancy and I were hemmed in by the rest of the crowd, so that offered a measure of protection. All of us were gathered in an open area to watch an eating contest, and Nancy and I were here in particular to see our friend Dwayne destroy the competition. A Taiwan crowd is respectful of personal space, so there was enough room for the big American cameras to maneuver through the spectators.
     Unfortunately, that also left enough room for the fruit vendor to wend her way over to us. Nancy and I happened to be standing next to a film crew that was shooting “B-roll,” footage that would run beneath stats and sponsor logos, as they explained to us. It was the Americans the fruit vendor was after, not us. I could practically hear the woman panting as she drew closer.
     I shifted my feet so that my body shielded Nancy from the inevitable fruit pitches.
      “Fresh, fresh!” she yelled in English at the Americans. She was dressed in traditional farmer garb, a brightly colored short-sleeved blouse over a long-sleeved one of a different pattern. The outfit lent an aura of authenticity and nearly compensated for the craftiness in her eyes as she sized up the men. Who to hit up first? The white man dressed like a biker wearing a fisherman’s vest and brandishing the boom mic? The balding black man who had just finished laying down the steel track for the camera dolly?
      “Perfect for Moon Festival! Perfect for Mid-Autumn Festival!” the tiny woman declared in English, articulating both names for the same holiday. Her pronunciation was good but the rising tone through the sentences made her sound like a liar.
     She stepped between the big Americans and menaced them with her toothpicked samples.
      “Sweet sweet, fresh fresh!” she yelled up at the men, meeting their tight smiles.
      “Don’t bother them,” I told her in Taiwanese. “They get their food free, as much as they want and better than what you have.”
     The woman violently turned her head to the right, cracking her neck. “These Americans,” she hissed. “They never want to pay for anything! So cheap!”
      “They’re cheap because they don’t want to be ripped off by you!” “They’re ripping me off!...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Soho Crime
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1616958324
• ISBN 13: 9781616958329
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: eucomplyOÜ; hello@eucompliancepartner.com; ; Pärnu mnt. 139b-14; Tallinn; 11317; Estland