Incensed by Ed Lin Page A

girl,” said Dwayne. “She’ll be fine.”
    â€œThere’s not too much going on right now,” Frankie called out. “Be another hour before things start swinging.”
    Mei-ling shifted her weight to her right leg. “Do you want me to help with anything?” she asked.
    â€œI’m just going to make about a thousand skewers,” I said. “It’s pretty boring work.”
    â€œI want to try it! I’ve never really cooked anything.”
    â€œI don’t know about this. You could cut yourself.”
    â€œLet her give it a shot, Jing-nan,” said Dwayne. “Are you afraid she’ll be better at it than you?”
    â€œI’m afraid she’ll stab her finger, get an infection and then lose her entire arm after gangrene sets in,” I said. Everybody laughed. “All right, young lady, if you want to try this, wash your hands first at the sink. Use lots of soap.”
    When she was done, I gave her a stack of bamboo skewers and a bowl of pig intestines.
    â€œFrankie’s already done the hard part,” I said. “He’s cut them down and washed them out thoroughly. Dwayne’s sliced and marinated them.” I reached in and grabbed a strip dripping with sauce. “You want to take these, squeeze them off but not all the way. Roll ’em up like a sock and then stick it through with this.”
    I was distracted by narrating what I was doing, as the process was intuitive to me after all this time. Talking about it was making me consciously think about what I was doing. A skier wouldn’t say out loud what muscles were doing what while slaloming. When I scratched myself by accident, I played off the pain with a flourish of my fingers. “Yep, the skewers are nice and sharp!”
    Mei-ling cringed. “Your fingers must be tough from this job. I would be bleeding if I did that.”
    â€œThen don’t. So, put four on a skewer and you’re done,” I concluded. “Pretty basic stuff.”
    â€œWhy four? There’s room for more.”
    â€œIt’s a dirty trick,” said Dwayne. “He always wants the skewers to have four chunks each because he wants people to buy two in order to get that lucky number.” The word for “eight” in Mandarin sounds like “wealth,” so the superstitious Taiwanese buy things in eights, and get phone numbers and license plates that include as many eights as possible. It also helps me that four is considered an unlucky number.
    â€œYou should put five on a skewer,” said Mei-ling. “They’ll fit and that’s a lucky number, too.”
    Frankie called out over his plastic tub of organs, “Why sell five when you can sell eight?”
    Mei-ling nodded as she stabbed another rolled-up intestine. “I think I’m starting to understand the night-market culture,” she said. “You’re all a bunch of scammers!”
    It was fun showing Mei-ling what to do. Her presence added a soft note to the usual roughhouse idiocy that Dwayne and I could degenerate into.
    Foot traffic picked up around 5:30 and I stood at the front of Unknown Pleasures, surveying the crowd and listening carefully. I heard a group of men speaking English, of the English-accent variety. I stepped out into the crowd and spied a group of four middle-aged white guys, a little out of shape but cheerful.
    They had no idea what to do with their money, so naturally they needed my help.
    â€œYou lot!” I called to them, using the expression for the plural third person that I learned from the chorus of The Clash song “Magnificent Seven.” “Come over here!”
    The men burst out laughing—a common reaction to hearing fluent English spoken—and ambled over. A guy with wispy dried-garlic-root hair wearing a Hawaiian shirt was the first to reach me.
    â€œHaw haw,” he laughed in a decidedly American way. “You fell for Bob’s fake