Yu-Han Chao's Blog

This is a tutorial on how to turn your poem into a short film using MagicLight.ai. You can read this post or just watch the video here.

You start with a MagicLight.ai account, you can get a free trial, or the basic plan is less than $100 a year. 

I like ChatGPT for script conversion for stories or poems because it doesn't add too much extra stuff, and you can tell ChatGPT what length script you want, with additional prompts. Here, I told ChatGPT, "please write this poem into a script for a 3-minute short film set in a hospital."

ChatGPT has created my script, I copy and paste it into Word,  add details here because I want more control over setting and what characters look like.

Now, I'm in MagicLight.ai. The most important thing here is to select on the upper left hand if you want landscape or portrait. Later it will be too late to change once the images are storyboarded in landscape or portrait. Lower left hand side you can see the animation styles. The big box has a smart script and a basic script option--I use the smart script. For animation style, I like Suspense, but the anime and storybook ones are nice, too.

I copy and paste my script into the smart script box, select the duration of the film at the bottom, and click next.

The AI analyzes, then comes up with a lot of scenes. You can read and edit these, or just click next and fix things once you see the images. 

The next step MagicLight.ai generates your characters based on descriptions in your text, but you can go in and edit or regenerate the characters until you're satisfied for free.

You click on the character to edit or regenerate. Using the character prompt you can change their age, clothing, face, build, anything. 

This is my final cast. See if you can fix mistakes before the next step. I didn't notice my nurse is wearing slippers and had to fix those slippers in every scene later on. Clicking next step is a big deal because it costs credits.

Once you've clicked next, the AI generates your storyboard. 

How many scenes you have depends on how long a film you requested when you selected the duration.

Once the initial excitement of seeing your poem come to life has worn off, you notice all the "mistakes" AI has made.

No worries, upper right hand box has the description of each scene, which you can edit and click Re-Gen for free. Regeneration can fix things, or make it worse, completely change the character, it's hit or miss. 

For instance, this girl was a skeleton because there were the words hollow and bony and AI took it literally. I regenerated after removing those words and she was fixed. You can also click on the yellow banana prompt and spend credits to fix something specific. You have to be very specific in your instructions, however. AI will not hesitate to decapitate someone in an overzealous attempt to apply your new changes--you may have to say do not change anything else besides xyz. 

Some of the weird scenes, there's no real explanation...but don't rush to delete a scene out of horror in case you need it as a placeholder in the future. If you have no words in the caption below the image, it won't make it into your final film anyway. If you need it later on, you can completely change the upper right hand prompt and regenerate a new scene out of that placeholder. You can also reorder the scenes by dragging them. 

Once again, AI makes the strangest mistakes. This is not how masks work.

Not sure what genre this is.

I was wondering why AI was struggling so much with blood pressure cuffs and why everything was bloody, then I realized the word "blood" was in there, so I removed that word, and the people were not bloody anymore.

Tinkering with the scenes as well as the captions that will be read out loud in the film will take some time. You can select the voiceover voice that will read the captions. Once you select a voice, it stays consistent throughout the film. 

If you're finally happy with your scenes, captions, and voiceover, click next. 

You can pick subtitles.

You can also pick background music, and how loud you want the music.

Next step you select the specific aspect ratio (remember, landscape or vertical was selected already early on) and resolution. Standard is fine. Clicking Ok takes you to the next step.

Congratulations! You just made your very first short film!

You're probably going to catch little things that need to be fixed. Or big things. No worries, click Back on top and you can go back to before the subtitles and music to your storyboard to fix scenes or typos or AI mistakes or words the voiceover can't pronounce...

Once you're happy with everything, you can download your video from MagicLight.ai and upload to youtube, instagram, facebook, etc. 

Have fun bringing your poems to life in your first short film!

After thinking about it for quite some time, I finally tried to make a short film using AI. After testing the full text of our children's book, Magic, as a prompt on a few platforms, I decided to go with the coincidentally named MagicLight because their anime/manga-style options seemed most appealing.

It's not perfect, of course. In fact, some of the "mistakes" were quite horrifying. It wasn't until the video was uploaded that my brothers pointed out, too late, the completely unironic conjoined limbs between Zoe and her best friend in one scene.

Anyway, here are two versions of the "Magic" book trailer.

Version 1. My original illustrations, with some animation.

I attempted to "animate" the illustrations from our original book. Some of the images simply didn't come to life at all, cost me credits to just zoom in or out or left or right, which is free anyway. Guess AI can't really understand original human art sometimes.

Version 2. Embracing the AI...mistakes and all.

There was certainly a learning curve here. It costs credits to try to tweak a scene or fix "mistakes," and sometimes it just gets more screwed up. The AI will not hesitate to decapitate or amputate a character in an overzealous attempt to follow your instructions if you fail to be ridiculously specific, and even then, it's a gamble. If you regenerate a scene, you may end up with different characters. Or a different genre altogether (all of a sudden horror, vampire, photorealistic...)

My initial response was to delete the horrifying mistakes, including a short animation of Zoe and the black cat named Magic mouth kissing (I did download it for my own private horror and evidence). Then I decided to embrace at least some of the mistakes, because some were so bad they were almost good. You think your cat is muscular? You ain't seen nothing yet...

Passport Baby from Sex & Taipei City by Yu-Han Chao
When my hugely pregnant balloon of a wife and I got on a plane to the United States we had one goal: to have an American baby. The timing was impeccably planned to fit into the visit allowed by our costly three-month tourist visas. Our prize: Seng Seng, my nervous, large-headed son; the bruise marks that my wife, in labor, squeezed onto my wrist; special front row seats on the airplane behind the galleys so we could use a bassinet attached to the wall. Blonde stewardesses cooed at our baby all the way from San Francisco to Taipei. And the final reward: When Seng Seng turns twenty-one, he will apply to his government to bring us all to America.

At least that’s the plan. My wife’s plan, mostly.

Here’s another new plan of hers: hiring help at home.

The new maid, Lin Lin, could be anywhere between nineteen and twenty-six—you can’t tell with the baby-faced ones. She’s pretty enough, I guess, with soft Southeast Asian features similar to many Taiwanese women, but with paler, porcelain-like skin. When she wears her hair in a ponytail I almost mistake her for my wife sometimes, except for her slim figure in contrast with my wife’s generous, post-pregnancy form.

I don’t think about either of them in a lustful way. At this point women are a tiring presence in my life: three of them, all under my roof. The scariest one of them all? My mother-in-law.

“Why don’t you let me buy you a new suit, you’re always dressed so shabbily. You’re a businessman. Appearances are important,” my mother-in-law says, not even looking at me, but checking her professionally manicured nails.

“This suit was very expensive,” I say. It’s true.

“But it’s old! An expensive old suit is much worse than a cheap suit. It’s shabby to wear old clothes. At least put on one of those new shirts I got you.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“You think nothing is necessary. Just put one on, they weren’t expensive, two for a thousand NT, marked down at the department store sale.”

“I tried one on a few days ago, remember? It made me itch.” It’s an allergy I inherited from my mother’s side of the family. Synthetic fabric leads to my breaking out in hives every time.

“You’re just neurotic, imagining things. You’re not a real man. My daughter married a fake.”



In addition to having an unreasonable personality, my mother-in-law also has diabetes. No doubt her kidneys will worsen and require dialysis every three weeks, emptying our bank accounts while her bitterness eats up our souls.

One night I was reading the evening paper in the living room, minding my own business, and in she walked in wearing one of her favorite green nightgowns. She gave me the full frontal view of her sagging, scary body veiled in the color of moldy, spotted olives. I don’t even remember the question she asked me, so stunned and scarred was my mind. She had the longest nipples I had ever seen, long, droopy ones like a stack of one NT coins with dark areoles at the base of each sag, so dark one could see their shadows through an entire layer of fabric.

Her daughter’s nipples aren’t especially small or short either. I’m glad she keeps her bra on most of the time. It’s too much, really, the sight of bare breasts, so real with swollen, uneven, goose-bumpy areolas, especially after the baby when the veins showed like tree branches and the orbs were engorged with fresh human milk, nipples inflated into balls. Luckily, my loving wife finds the fact that I like her underwear kinky. She imagines I have a brassiere fetish. She does not know what horror I feel every time she pops a breast out of her convenience bra, ripe melon from a sack, to feed Seng Seng.

My wife is attractive enough. Just not to me, not in that way anymore.

Something happened to my overgrown schoolgirl. Once she was adorable, the smile on her peach-like face or a glimpse of a smooth limb always stirring something I thought was happiness in my heart. Even the way she bit into a steamed bun I used to find moving.

Now, watching her eat just frightens me.



When we were dating, she only let me hold her and touch her through a bra and panties or one piece swimming suit. The transition point was our wedding night: after the ceremony with its toasts and drinks and clothes-changing and bowing, she climbed on top of me and rather forcefully claimed me as her husband. Perhaps it was the stress of the wedding, the champagne, or shock, or fear in response to her aggressiveness, but I could barely get it up for my bride.

Now she won’t leave me alone. Sometimes she reaches for me in front of her mother—it’s indecent—all those ideas the Chinese version of Cosmopolitan must be putting in her head. She buys imported lace nighties from France and Italy and a ridiculous assortment of candles and massage oils with dirty-sounding names. Half the time I want to run away. The rest of the time I just want to watch television, or sleep.

I don’t want to be like one of those tormented men on TV who are always being nagged by insatiable wives. I’ve considered stocking up on the little blue pills that one can buy whispering, leaning over the counter, from most Taiwanese drugstores. Not that I’ve ever done it. I’m only thirty-one; I’d have to be at least thirty-five to stoop that low.


From the outside, our middle class home looks modest. My wife and her mother picked everything they wanted from various home décor catalogues and traditional furniture stores. I appreciate that nothing matches. In the living room, a sofa of crocodile skin and a floral patterned love seat cluster around a modern, wavy-looking coffee table, the TV an enormous fifty-inch thing balanced on a small brass table with S shaped legs. Ratty tapestries depicting mythological menageries hang side by side with framed Chinese watercolors on our light green and cream-colored walls. Curtains line every window and doorway—heavy cotton in the living room, lace in the bedrooms, translucent plastic sticky from old grease in the kitchen. The kitchen, unlike most Taiwanese ones, boasts a built-in oven and the two-door, ice-making refrigerator my wife said she always wanted. A row of appliances line the marble counter: automatic can opener, four slice toaster, ten cup coffee maker, blender, food processor. Too bad all those wonderful chef aids haven’t produced as many satisfying meals as one might hope.
I’m proud to own a house in the best neighborhood in Shing Tien while most of Taipei squats in tiny apartments. But this house has its flaws. Soundproofing was an issue I never considered before. How could I; I didn’t know my bride was going to be a screamer. And when she makes too much noise, I lose my erection. The idea of her mother hearing us might just drive me into celibacy.



It’s a good thing that first the pregnancy, and now the baby, has kept my wife preoccupied. We must be doing something wrong, however, because my son is a fussy bundle of nerves. Any sound at all startles him horribly and after a few such shocks he wails. A dog bark, a door slam, or a car siren going off in the neighborhood—anything can set him off.

“You’re me, Seng Seng. You’re nervous and feel threatened by the women around you. I agree. They’re scary,” I whisper to him.

He looks at me with large, watery eyes. He wants me to stop talking, I can tell. Shut up, useless dad. I shake my head, folding my fingers around one of his chubby feet, and sure enough, he bursts into tears.

Aside from his mother’s sizeable nipples, Lin Lin is the only remedy to Seng Seng’s tantrums. The maid loves it when Seng Seng goes off; it gives her an excuse to drop whatever housework she is doing and run to take care of the baby. She can hold him for hours, watching television, napping with him, singing him Vietnamese songs. For all I know those songs might be a bad influence on him, but what can I do—the child likes her. She likes to grab Seng Seng and swing him around, something that makes me nervous because I think his arms will be dislocated from the rest of his body at the armpits.

My wife’s jealousy flares when she sees that the child she carried for nine months in her womb prefers Lin Lin instead. She yells at Lin Lin for trivial things such as a dirty corner in the bathroom or unscrubbed bathtub, though her anger never lasts long. After all, the maid makes it possible for her to take naps in the middle of the day. I tried to get a raise for Lin Lin for her extra work with the baby, but my wife, who manages household finances, refused.

“She does not deserve it. The baby is only an excuse for her to avoid housework. Besides, who changes his diapers? Who gives him baths and gets wet when he kicks or pees everywhere? Who feeds him and gets vomited all over when he’s sick? Me! And you want to give the maid more money?”



Even when Seng Seng is being difficult and we are exhausted, neither of us approaches my mother-in-law for help because she acts like we’re abusing her or treating her like help when we asked her to do the tiniest baby-favor for us in the past. You would think that a grandmother wouldn’t mind taking her grandson out in his stroller after dinner, but she screws up her face when we ask.

“You think I’m old and useless and have nothing better to do than do your chores? Young people these days, no sense of responsibility. Old Mrs. Jian’s children would never ask her to lift a finger to do housework for them. When are you going to begin to treat me right, huh?”
She wasn’t a good mother; how could she suddenly become a good grandmother? her daughter mutters under her breath.

This morning I woke up to a disconcerting silence in the house. Something was wrong. I could feel it in my bones. We had slept too long, too well. Sitting up in bed, I spotted the empty crib at the foot of our bed. I shook my wife, who was curled up to my left, hogging the extra blanket that she had rolled into a big sausage-like thing sandwiched between her legs.
“Where is Seng Seng?”
“Huh?” She let go of the sausage and rubbed her eyes.
“Seng Seng isn’t in his bed.”
“Maybe Lin Lin took him.”

I didn’t like the idea of Lin Lin “taking” the baby. I shoved my feet into plastic house slippers, almost tripping on them, and pushed open the bedroom door. The living room was empty. Someone had left the TV on last night, mute, flickering. Dust flew uncannily in rays of sunlight peeking through unevenly drawn curtains.

I knocked on the maid’s door, then, met with no answer, banged.
“Open up, Lin Lin, is Seng Seng in there?”

I opened the door with more force than necessary, thinking it would be locked from the inside. Lin Lin’s room was messy and impersonal: the bed unmade, towels lying around, the trashcan overflowing, but there were no photos or underwear or anything that indicated even the gender of its resident.

I headed for my study, next to Lin Lin’s room, and reached into the secret panel in the top right drawer, which yielded some objects. There used to be a few thousand NT in the drawer since we were going to pay the cable company and gas people—that was gone. My IDs and bankbooks were there, but where was my wife’s ID? And Seng Seng’s American passport and birth certificate?
I felt sick as I remembered that we had no identification of any sort from Lin Lin because she wasn’t legally hired. All we knew was her name, which could have been fake. She might not even be Vietnamese. She could be Thai, Filipino, Malaysian, even Taiwanese—there was no way for us to know. How would we find her, and our son, the American?

Passport Baby from Sex & Taipei City by Yu-Han Chao
When my hugely pregnant balloon of a wife and I got on a plane to the United States we had one goal: to have an American baby. The timing was impeccably planned to fit into the visit allowed by our costly three-month tourist visas. Our prize: Seng Seng, my nervous, large-headed son; the bruise marks that my wife, in labor, squeezed onto my wrist; special front row seats on the airplane behind the galleys so we could use a bassinet attached to the wall. Blonde stewardesses cooed at our baby all the way from San Francisco to Taipei. And the final reward: When Seng Seng turns twenty-one, he will apply to his government to bring us all to America.

At least that’s the plan. My wife’s plan, mostly.

Here’s another new plan of hers: hiring help at home.

The new maid, Lin Lin, could be anywhere between nineteen and twenty-six—you can’t tell with the baby-faced ones. She’s pretty enough, I guess, with soft Southeast Asian features similar to many Taiwanese women, but with paler, porcelain-like skin. When she wears her hair in a ponytail I almost mistake her for my wife sometimes, except for her slim figure in contrast with my wife’s generous, post-pregnancy form.

I don’t think about either of them in a lustful way. At this point women are a tiring presence in my life: three of them, all under my roof. The scariest one of them all? My mother-in-law.

“Why don’t you let me buy you a new suit, you’re always dressed so shabbily. You’re a businessman. Appearances are important,” my mother-in-law says, not even looking at me, but checking her professionally manicured nails.

“This suit was very expensive,” I say. It’s true.

“But it’s old! An expensive old suit is much worse than a cheap suit. It’s shabby to wear old clothes. At least put on one of those new shirts I got you.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“You think nothing is necessary. Just put one on, they weren’t expensive, two for a thousand NT, marked down at the department store sale.”

“I tried one on a few days ago, remember? It made me itch.” It’s an allergy I inherited from my mother’s side of the family. Synthetic fabric leads to my breaking out in hives every time.

“You’re just neurotic, imagining things. You’re not a real man. My daughter married a fake.”



In addition to having an unreasonable personality, my mother-in-law also has diabetes. No doubt her kidneys will worsen and require dialysis every three weeks, emptying our bank accounts while her bitterness eats up our souls.

One night I was reading the evening paper in the living room, minding my own business, and in she walked in wearing one of her favorite green nightgowns. She gave me the full frontal view of her sagging, scary body veiled in the color of moldy, spotted olives. I don’t even remember the question she asked me, so stunned and scarred was my mind. She had the longest nipples I had ever seen, long, droopy ones like a stack of one NT coins with dark areoles at the base of each sag, so dark one could see their shadows through an entire layer of fabric.

Her daughter’s nipples aren’t especially small or short either. I’m glad she keeps her bra on most of the time. It’s too much, really, the sight of bare breasts, so real with swollen, uneven, goose-bumpy areolas, especially after the baby when the veins showed like tree branches and the orbs were engorged with fresh human milk, nipples inflated into balls. Luckily, my loving wife finds the fact that I like her underwear kinky. She imagines I have a brassiere fetish. She does not know what horror I feel every time she pops a breast out of her convenience bra, ripe melon from a sack, to feed Seng Seng.

My wife is attractive enough. Just not to me, not in that way anymore.

Something happened to my overgrown schoolgirl. Once she was adorable, the smile on her peach-like face or a glimpse of a smooth limb always stirring something I thought was happiness in my heart. Even the way she bit into a steamed bun I used to find moving.

Now, watching her eat just frightens me.



When we were dating, she only let me hold her and touch her through a bra and panties or one piece swimming suit. The transition point was our wedding night: after the ceremony with its toasts and drinks and clothes-changing and bowing, she climbed on top of me and rather forcefully claimed me as her husband. Perhaps it was the stress of the wedding, the champagne, or shock, or fear in response to her aggressiveness, but I could barely get it up for my bride.

Now she won’t leave me alone. Sometimes she reaches for me in front of her mother—it’s indecent—all those ideas the Chinese version of Cosmopolitan must be putting in her head. She buys imported lace nighties from France and Italy and a ridiculous assortment of candles and massage oils with dirty-sounding names. Half the time I want to run away. The rest of the time I just want to watch television, or sleep.

I don’t want to be like one of those tormented men on TV who are always being nagged by insatiable wives. I’ve considered stocking up on the little blue pills that one can buy whispering, leaning over the counter, from most Taiwanese drugstores. Not that I’ve ever done it. I’m only thirty-one; I’d have to be at least thirty-five to stoop that low.


From the outside, our middle class home looks modest. My wife and her mother picked everything they wanted from various home décor catalogues and traditional furniture stores. I appreciate that nothing matches. In the living room, a sofa of crocodile skin and a floral patterned love seat cluster around a modern, wavy-looking coffee table, the TV an enormous fifty-inch thing balanced on a small brass table with S shaped legs. Ratty tapestries depicting mythological menageries hang side by side with framed Chinese watercolors on our light green and cream-colored walls. Curtains line every window and doorway—heavy cotton in the living room, lace in the bedrooms, translucent plastic sticky from old grease in the kitchen. The kitchen, unlike most Taiwanese ones, boasts a built-in oven and the two-door, ice-making refrigerator my wife said she always wanted. A row of appliances line the marble counter: automatic can opener, four slice toaster, ten cup coffee maker, blender, food processor. Too bad all those wonderful chef aids haven’t produced as many satisfying meals as one might hope.
I’m proud to own a house in the best neighborhood in Shing Tien while most of Taipei squats in tiny apartments. But this house has its flaws. Soundproofing was an issue I never considered before. How could I; I didn’t know my bride was going to be a screamer. And when she makes too much noise, I lose my erection. The idea of her mother hearing us might just drive me into celibacy.



It’s a good thing that first the pregnancy, and now the baby, has kept my wife preoccupied. We must be doing something wrong, however, because my son is a fussy bundle of nerves. Any sound at all startles him horribly and after a few such shocks he wails. A dog bark, a door slam, or a car siren going off in the neighborhood—anything can set him off.

“You’re me, Seng Seng. You’re nervous and feel threatened by the women around you. I agree. They’re scary,” I whisper to him.

He looks at me with large, watery eyes. He wants me to stop talking, I can tell. Shut up, useless dad. I shake my head, folding my fingers around one of his chubby feet, and sure enough, he bursts into tears.

Aside from his mother’s sizeable nipples, Lin Lin is the only remedy to Seng Seng’s tantrums. The maid loves it when Seng Seng goes off; it gives her an excuse to drop whatever housework she is doing and run to take care of the baby. She can hold him for hours, watching television, napping with him, singing him Vietnamese songs. For all I know those songs might be a bad influence on him, but what can I do—the child likes her. She likes to grab Seng Seng and swing him around, something that makes me nervous because I think his arms will be dislocated from the rest of his body at the armpits.

My wife’s jealousy flares when she sees that the child she carried for nine months in her womb prefers Lin Lin instead. She yells at Lin Lin for trivial things such as a dirty corner in the bathroom or unscrubbed bathtub, though her anger never lasts long. After all, the maid makes it possible for her to take naps in the middle of the day. I tried to get a raise for Lin Lin for her extra work with the baby, but my wife, who manages household finances, refused.

“She does not deserve it. The baby is only an excuse for her to avoid housework. Besides, who changes his diapers? Who gives him baths and gets wet when he kicks or pees everywhere? Who feeds him and gets vomited all over when he’s sick? Me! And you want to give the maid more money?”



Even when Seng Seng is being difficult and we are exhausted, neither of us approaches my mother-in-law for help because she acts like we’re abusing her or treating her like help when we asked her to do the tiniest baby-favor for us in the past. You would think that a grandmother wouldn’t mind taking her grandson out in his stroller after dinner, but she screws up her face when we ask.

“You think I’m old and useless and have nothing better to do than do your chores? Young people these days, no sense of responsibility. Old Mrs. Jian’s children would never ask her to lift a finger to do housework for them. When are you going to begin to treat me right, huh?”
She wasn’t a good mother; how could she suddenly become a good grandmother? her daughter mutters under her breath.

This morning I woke up to a disconcerting silence in the house. Something was wrong. I could feel it in my bones. We had slept too long, too well. Sitting up in bed, I spotted the empty crib at the foot of our bed. I shook my wife, who was curled up to my left, hogging the extra blanket that she had rolled into a big sausage-like thing sandwiched between her legs.
“Where is Seng Seng?”
“Huh?” She let go of the sausage and rubbed her eyes.
“Seng Seng isn’t in his bed.”
“Maybe Lin Lin took him.”

I didn’t like the idea of Lin Lin “taking” the baby. I shoved my feet into plastic house slippers, almost tripping on them, and pushed open the bedroom door. The living room was empty. Someone had left the TV on last night, mute, flickering. Dust flew uncannily in rays of sunlight peeking through unevenly drawn curtains.

I knocked on the maid’s door, then, met with no answer, banged.
“Open up, Lin Lin, is Seng Seng in there?”

I opened the door with more force than necessary, thinking it would be locked from the inside. Lin Lin’s room was messy and impersonal: the bed unmade, towels lying around, the trashcan overflowing, but there were no photos or underwear or anything that indicated even the gender of its resident.

I headed for my study, next to Lin Lin’s room, and reached into the secret panel in the top right drawer, which yielded some objects. There used to be a few thousand NT in the drawer since we were going to pay the cable company and gas people—that was gone. My IDs and bankbooks were there, but where was my wife’s ID? And Seng Seng’s American passport and birth certificate?
I felt sick as I remembered that we had no identification of any sort from Lin Lin because she wasn’t legally hired. All we knew was her name, which could have been fake. She might not even be Vietnamese. She could be Thai, Filipino, Malaysian, even Taiwanese—there was no way for us to know. How would we find her, and our son, the American?

Mine
Serena lifted up her favorite sweater, which bore on its left, where the heart would have been, a pink wound. She reached deep into the washing machine and fished out the culprit, her husband’s red washcloth, and threw it against the wall, where it splattered and then fell to the tiled floor, immediately creating a puddle.

Serena sat down on the cold tile floor, tears streaming down her cheeks. It wasn’t just the sweater and washcloth—it was his affair. The ruined sweater was a glaring symbol of his excessive overtime at the hospital, the mysterious late-night calls, and his overall lack of interest in her. She sensed something was going on, and for months she had been waiting for him to slip up, to break down out of guilt and confess, to come home with the clichéd lipstick-on-the-collar. But he was discreet, and she, too prideful to breathe a word.

Her parents had brought her up like a princess, and princesses lived happily ever after, didn’t they? As a young girl she went to a private music school, played the piano and flute, wore pretty dresses and jewelry made of 24k gold and real diamonds. Her petite bourgeoisie Taiwanese family groomed her to become the perfect trophy wife. Many eligible bachelors and their families were interested in Serena, a plump-cheeked, curly-haired musician who looked like a porcelain doll. She could have become Mrs. Ding, daughter-in-law of Powers Media Group, or Mrs. May, future owner of the pharmaceutical empire, Bioway. Ultimately she chose Mike Sei, a young doctor interning at Fu Da Hospital. She gave him her sweetest, dimpled smile on their first date because she knew her parents liked him the best.

The wedding banquet was an explosion of red; an elaborate twelve-course meal and only the best champagne and XO reddened the cheeks of over 200 guests all evening. Serena, in true princess fashion, changed outfits five times, since traditionally, the wedding banquet was a fashion show for a Taiwanese bride. Entire gown rental businesses depended on this tradition for business revenue. Serena got the fanciest gown package. Her first dress was an ethereal, western-style ball gown with white feathers and Swarovski crystals. Next in line was a sultry, purple silk dress that showed off her curves, followed by a pink cocktail dress, and a gold gown covered with dazzling sequins. The bridal secretary, an expert beautician and MAC makeup artist, tamed her curls and did her makeup differently with each change of outfit. The finale was a traditional red Chinese chi pao. It was so tight Serena could hardly breathe while she stood at the exit handing out red wedding sweets to departing guests.

But she was happy because she saw how happy her parents were. She’d watched their faces all night, and there was something more than joy in their faces. Something resembling relief, as if a weight had been lifted off their shoulders because their little girl was going to live happily ever after and they could stop worrying.



The phone rang, interrupting Serena’s fond recollection of her banquet.

“Is Mrs. Sei there?” a woman asked.

“This is she. Who’s calling?”

“I am your husband’s girlfriend.”

For a few seconds Serena forgot to breathe.

“I have a business proposal for you,” the woman continued.

“Excuse me?” Serena considered hanging up the phone, but the woman continued talking.

“Five million NT. Tax-free. You can live on the interest alone for the rest of your life, or buy yourself a nice apartment. If you divorce your husband, the money is all yours,” the woman said in a business-like tone filled with confidence.

“Are you crazy? Who are you? You can’t just call people’s houses like this, I have no idea who you are. You have the wrong number. I’m going to hang up—”

“Fine, I’ll prove it to you. Your husband’s name is Mike Sei. He has two moles on his left butt cheek, and a big birthmark on his right thigh. His favorite position is doggy style, and—”

Serena hung up. Her mother and father would be disappointed—no, devastated, if she got divorced. Her successful marriage to a doctor had been paramount evidence to them that they raised her right. Serena glared at the large wedding picture in the living room. In it she had been made-up and photoshopped to look flawless, thinner, and taller. In the picture both she and Mike smiled with the daft happiness of newlyweds. Serena wanted to tell every smiling bride in the world that it was all an illusion, a lie, that marriages don’t last, or at least the love doesn’t, even if the marriage survives.

The phone rang again. She let the answering machine pick it up.

“Hi, this is Mike, I’ll be at the hospital all night, there’s a last minute operation and no other physician couldn’t do it, so I have to step in. Don’t wait up. Bye.”

Tears spilled from her eyes. Exactly of what nature was this “operation” of his? But what could she do, ambush him at the hospital? What would be the point of that?

Serena walked back to the washing machine and moved the load into the dryer, separating out jeans and shirts to hang up on the balcony later. She clutched in her chest her sad, lavender sweater. She identified with the poor, ruined thing now and could not bring herself to throw it away.



Serena spent the night tossing and turning, between nightmares. In one dream, flames were devouring everything in her apartment with her in it. Everything went dark and hot as the fire engulfed her. In another dream, she was at a charity event where her husband was being auctioned off. The auctioneer rattled off numbers quickly, like a fast-speaking commercial spokesperson. Attractive women, some younger than her, some older, raised their paddles and continuously outbid Serena, until she realized that she could not afford to keep her husband. The bidding went as high as five million.



The next morning, when Serena woke up, Mike was still not home. She took a shower and went to school. She didn’t teach until three in the afternoon, but she did not want to run into Mike. She had a lot of student workbooks to grade, anyways. At noon, she and Ms. Lai, a home economics teacher, went downstairs to buy bentos from the cafeteria. They ate across from each other at their desks in the shared teacher’s office, a giant rectangular space which housed over 80 desks, one for each instructor.

“You look tired,” Ms. Lai said.

“Yeah, I couldn’t sleep last night.” Serena rubbed her temples.

“It’s been so cold these few days, I’m having trouble sleeping, too. My circulation is very bad, and my feet are always freezing, even if I wear socks,” Ms. Lai said. “It’s lucky that you have a husband to warm your bed.”

Ms. Lai blushed a little when she talked about husbands and beds, but Serena frowned. She was about to say something when she heard her name.

“Teacher Sei? You have a visitor,” an elderly math teacher called from across the room.

Serena put her chopsticks down in her barely-touched bento and pushed back her chair.

At the door stood an attractive woman in a delicate, silk chiffon dress, sparkling necklace of diamonds around her neck. She looked oddly familiar, but Serena could not place her. The math teacher self-consciously touched his bald spot in front of such an attractive visitor.

“Hello.” Serena extended one hand towards the woman.

The woman shook her hand with a claw-like grasp, scraping Serena’s palm with her jeweled, acrylic-tipped nails, and said in a raspy voice, “Can we talk somewhere more private? It’s about my son.”

“Sure,” Serena said, “If you don’t mind, we can sit on the benches by the basketball court.”

“I have a better idea. Let me treat you to lunch. Do you have class later today?”

“Not until three. But—”

“Please. It’s for my son. It’s important, and I need your professional advice,” the woman said.

Serena thought it very odd that the mother of a student would need her advice, of all the teachers at the school. As a music teacher she hardly spent any individual time with students, unless they were in the school band and needed extra help. Maybe this was band-related. Or about applying to music school. There was something about the woman’s demeanor that intrigued Serena. She nodded.



At a cozy western-style restaurant on Fushing South Road, Serena sipped black tea with lemon while the student’s mother ordered sizzling steak meal specials for both of them, complete with soup, salad, and dessert.

“So what is it you wanted to talk about? And your son’s name is?” Serena asked.

“To be frank with you, Mrs. Sei, my son isn’t born yet,” the woman said.

“Pardon?”

“I am pregnant. It’s a boy. I wanted to talk to you today about him,” the woman said.

“Why me?” Serena asked. It occurred to her that the woman might be insane.

“Because you are married to my son’s father,” the woman said with a smile showing all of her pearly teeth.

“What?”

Serena pushed her chair back and was about to stand up, but the woman reached across the table, put her hand over Serena’s, and pressed the tips of her acrylic nails into the back of Serena’s hand.

“There’s no need to make a scene. You are already here. I’m not toying with you, or trying to make things difficult,” she said.

“Let go of my hand,” Serena hissed.

“Have you seen the variety show, Beautiful Lady?” the woman asked.

That was why the woman looked so familiar—she was on TV! She was Jenna Lee, the host of a small-time variety show about makeup and fashion. How did her husband meet someone in the entertainment industry, someone who so ostentatiously wore tacky jewels all over her nails and neck? And she was pregnant? Serena sank back into her seat, the world spinning around her.

“I guess you recognize me now. So you see, if you make a scene, it will be all over the news. I’m pretty sure the guy at the table over there is paparazzi. Please stay and eat. Listen to my business proposal. I come to you with sincerity.”

“What do you want from me?” Serena asked through her teeth.

“I told you over the phone. I would like to offer you five million NT in cash, in exchange for you to divorce your husband. That’s over a hundred and eighty thousand US dollars. You could buy real estate in America and live there if you want to. I can even arrange for someone to help you get a green card. What do you make as a music teacher at a middle school? Thirty-thousand NT a year? I think five million is a very good deal for you.”

“My husband is not for sale.”

“I am really doing this for all of our sakes. I want my son to grow up with a father. I don’t mind if the media jumps all over me for being an unwed mother, but the child is innocent. I don’t want people to call him a bastard or look down on him.”

Serena looked away.

“Think about it,” Jenna continued. “You don’t have anything to lose and have everything to gain by accepting my offer. You aren’t tied down with a child, so you can still marry someone else. Maybe have a child of your own.”

A waitress arrived with two bowls of creamy corn chowder and ornately plated fresh salads that looked like volcanoes exploding with alfalfa sprouts. The green leaves of the sprouts, shaped like hearts, laughed in Serena’s face. Her appetite for both men and food had gone. The issue of not having children had always been a thorn in her side. It was no secret her husband’s parents thought there was something wrong with her, because she had been married for five years and had not yet reproduced. And now, to have a trashy entertainer with loads of cash rub it in her face…

Meanwhile, Jenna Lee picked up her salad and dumped it into her soup, scraping the plate with her nails. She swirled her salad and soup mixture together and spooned a mound of the mixture into her bright red mouth. Serena felt disgusted by the way the woman ate. Who puts salad into soup?

“I’m so hungry, I hope you don’t mind if I dig in. I’m eating for two.” Jenna spoke with her mouth full.

Serena thought to herself that Jenna Lee, ex-model though she was, looked like a cow, literally, with those green sprouts coming out of her mouth.

“I am leaving now. The answer is still no.” Serena stood.

“Think about it. Between a divorce settlement and the five million, you’d be the richest middle school music teacher ever! Why live the way you do when you can be rich and free?”

Serena picked up her purse and walked out.



When she got home that night, Mike was cooking dumplings in the kitchen. He’d forgotten to turn on the exhaust fan and the kitchen was filled with steam and the smell of boiled pork and starch.

“I came home early,” he said. “I am making dinner.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I take it she spoke to you.” Mike stirred the dumplings.

“I can’t believe you have the nerve to stand there and ask me about it.” She pictured for a moment dumping the entire pot of scalding liquid and dumplings all over her cheating husband.

“I really didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“How did you meet her?”

“There was a benefit event for the hospital. She made a large donation and was honored as a VIP guest. The chief of medicine sent me to the banquet in his place to accept her check, take a picture, and say thank you on the hospital’s behalf,” he said.

“And?”

“That’s how we met, that’s all.”

“How long has it been? When did you find out she was pregnant?” Serena closed her eyes since she could no longer look at him.

“Since last December, but she only just told me she was pregnant. I was surprised.”

When Serena finally looked at Mike, she saw in his eyes and the wavering corners of his mouth that he was actually happy that woman was pregnant, and she hated him for it. She knew he wanted a child, but to have one from a mistress was going too far.

“How could you do this to me?” she asked, trembling. “For five years, I’ve made your meals, cleaned your house, done your laundry, shared your bed, waited for you to come home at night. And you run off with a cheap entertainer?”

“She said she would offer you enough money to make it worth your...while. She is very wealthy. And of course, I would give you a very generous alimony and share of assets in the divorce, on top of whatever she offers you.”

“Don’t you mention divorce to me!” Serena cried. “Or money! Nobody, nothing around here, is for sale!”

“Please consider it, Serena.”

Serena entered the master bedroom and slammed the door.



During the next few days, Jenna Lee’s photo was all over the tabloids and entertainment news. She had gone public about her pregnancy and leaked Mike’s name and the hospital he worked at. Jenna even told reporters about the five million NT offer she made to Serena, except she embellished the story from her own point of view. The newspapers portrayed Mrs. Sei as a crazy shrew who pushed her husband into the arms of another, more loving and now expecting, woman. Reporters swarmed like wasps: at Mike’s hospital, outside Serena’s school. The principal temporarily excused her from her teaching duties to keep the scandal and paparazzi as far away from the school as possible. The phone rang incessantly; reporters wanted Mr. or Mrs. Sei to make a statement or do an exclusive interview. Finally, the answering machine, beeping miserably, rejected all calls: “Sorry, the message box is full.”

Even while hiding at home, Serena could not turn on the TV without hearing about Jenna Lee.

“Eighty-five percent of our viewers online say that the wife is a fool for not taking the money. Let’s see what viewers in the streets of Taipei say,” a female reporter was saying.

“Men are pigs. She should take her five million and move on,” a young woman said before smiling and making a victory pose with two fingers for the camera.

“There is a child involved. Children must always be considered first. The wife should think about the innocent child.” This middle-aged male interviewee spoke emphatically, gesticulating with both hands.

Serena turned off the television and dashed the remote control onto the hardwood floor. It cracked open and spewed out two AA batteries. He is my husband, she thought to herself, mine. Nobody can make me divorce him, and nobody can make me let him go. She found a stick of lipstick from her purse and took it to the wedding picture in the living room. Wo De, MINE, she wrote, in two large red characters, onto the glass. She went to other picture frames displayed around the house, and scribbled over each of them, wo de, wo de, wo de. Then she moved on to the walls.

The Dog Who Cried “Ah Wei”

News always traveled fast when something unusual happened in Taipei. In a small but popular pet store outside the Tung Hwa Nightmarket, a brown and white Jack Russell Terrier puppy, only a few weeks old, became an instant celebrity.
Instead of whimpering, crying, howling, or yipping in a regular fashion like all the other pups in the store or the rest of its brown and white litter, this puppy screamed, “Ah Wei!” loudly at passersby from its cage. Sometimes it was just “Ah, ow, ow,” but quite consistently it screamed clearly both syllables, “Ah Wei,” dragging the “Wei” sound long as if it were calling for a person named Ah Wei.
Ah Wei was a common nickname for someone with the character “Wei” in his name, so there were Ah Weis everywhere.

“I bet someone named Ah Wei will buy the dog,” the owner said to his daughter.

An attractive young news reporter came to interview the owner of the pet store and capture footage of the puppy for a human interest segment in the local news.

“Ah Wei, your dog is looking for you!” the reporter spoke into the camera while squatting, as gracefully, as she could, beside the dog cage.

A little brown and white terrier moved around its cage frantically, belting out, “Ah, ow, Ah Wei!”

Public response to the brief video was so enthusiastic that soon the clip “Ah Wei, your dog is looking for you!” went viral on the internet, and the national news rebroadcast the same footage of, “Ah Wei’s puppy,” in the six o’clock news right before the weather forecast.

Most of the viewers in Taiwan merely found Ah Wei’s puppy amusing, but one man named Ah Wei heard the puppy’s desperate, plaintive voice in the middle of eating his red-cooked pork dinner bento, and choked on his food. That puppy sounded exactly like Shasha, his unstable and needy ex-girlfriend. Shasha had threatened so many times to kill herself that by the time nobody believed her anymore, she actually did it. Ah Wei choked so hard that tears came to his eyes as he doubled over and coughed up pieces of rice and ground pork.
It didn’t make any sense, and Ah Wei did not like to be superstitious, but he had the feeling that that specific puppy was his ex-girlfriend. Shasha, reincarnated into a nervous puppy, how appropriate. In theory it was less scary than Shasha becoming a vengeful, suicide ghost. As a real person Shasha had been scary enough, throwing fits, screeching like a crazy person through her messy curtain of waist-length hair. And he could not deny that he felt responsible for her death. Pretty much everybody who knew her did—everyone who had told themselves, when she sent out her last pleas for help, or threats of suicide, that she would never really do it.

“If you don’t come I’m going to slit my wrists right here in the bathtub. I’m going to take the elevator to the top floor and jump right off the balcony,” Shasha said in her last telephone conversation with Ah Wei.

“Please don’t call me like this anymore. I am at work. Do you want me to lose my job? Stop making trouble for me,” Ah Wei said, and hung up.

The next day one of Shasha’s few girlfriends called Ah Wei with the news: Shasha was found dead in a pool of murky red water in the cracked bathtub of her one-bedroom apartment, with a suicide note. The friend did not see what the note said.

“The police took it, and they want to ask you questions,” she said.

“What questions? She didn’t accuse me of anything, did she? I…I don’t know what to say, it’s not that I didn’t care for her, she was just so…” Ah Wei could not finish his sentence.

“Anyways, she is dead, so there’s no need to talk about her like that. I gave your number to the police, and you should be expecting a call from them soon.” The friend hung up.

After the call, Ah Wei paced his living room, flicking the television from news channel to news channel all evening. Shasha’s death was not in the Taiwan Society News. No calls, either.

The next day he called in sick at work and monitored the news channels like an obsessive-compulsive, but still, no reports of suicides, and again his phone was silent. Finally, when he was in the middle of a meeting at work the third day, a local number flashed on the screen of his cellphone.

“I have to get this.” He apologized to his colleagues and left the conference room, where the company was holding their quarterly meeting.

“This is the Taipei City police,” a polite male voice said. “Is this Mr. Cheng Shon Wei?”

“Yes, it is,” Ah Wei said, trying to steady his voice.

“Would you mind coming by the station today or tomorrow? We want to get a statement from you regarding Miss Tsai Shasha.”

“Alright,” Ah Wei said.

“What would be a good time for you? We are open at seven in the morning,” the man said.

“I can stop by tomorrow at seven,” Ah Wei said.

The next day, he stood outside the police station. Some old people passed by during their morning walks, vigorously swinging their hands to get their heart rates up. A stray dog wandered by, avoiding eye contact. There were people inside the office but a man did not come to unlock the door until 7:08 AM.

“I am here for a statement, Officer, sir.” Ah Wei wondered whether to salute or bow, but when the officer gave him a blank look, he added, “It’s about Tsai Shasha.”

“Who’s that?”

“She killed herself.”

“Ah, the bathtub suicide. Have a seat here,” the officer said, pointing at a blue plastic chair. “I’ll get my colleague who’s working on this.”

Ah Wei waited for half an hour before another officer told him to follow him to a desk with a computer. The interrogation, if one could call it that, lasted three hours. Not because there were lots of questions, because they were few and simple, such as where do you live, what do you do, what was your relationship to the deceased, has she ever displayed inclinations towards suicide (yes) and why didn’t you do anything about it (I don’t know I’m so sorry), but the police officer was the slowest typist Ah Wei ever saw in his life. The poor man could not find the phonetic symbols he needed on the keyboard and scanned the entire keyboard slowly with his eyes looking for each consonant or vowel and then phonetic accent before doing it all over again for the next character. After the lengthy ordeal, the officer found “control” and “p” and looked pleased as the printer behind him spat out a one page statement.

“Pleased read this over and sign at the bottom, where it says signature and stamp,” the officer said. “Please use this ink pad to print your thumbprint beside your name.”

Ah Wei accepted the statement along with the ink pad. He wondered who else had stamped his or her thumb on this pad before him.

“While you do that, I’ll go get something to show you. The chief was debating whether we should show it to you, but it might shed some light on the motive,” the man said, and walked into another office.

Another half hour later, he emerged pinching between three fingers a clear plastic bag containing a note. It was Shasha’s suicide note.

It said, in her always surprisingly neat handwriting, Ah Wei, See you in the next lifetime. I will find you..

“I…Shasha liked to be dramatic, like when she threatened to kill herself so many times,” Ah Wei whispered.

“Well, she didn’t just threaten, she did it.”



Then Ah Wei saw the dog in the news. If he said this to other people, they would probably think he was crazy, but he believed this dog was Shasha, and she had indeed “found” him. He should have felt frightened and haunted and moved out of the country, but instead, he began to miss Shasha. Should he go and buy the dog? How could he, an average, dime-a-dozen engineer in a Taiwanese computer software company, convince a pet shop owner to sell him the famous Ah Wei dog?

The next day was Saturday, so Ah Wei, dressed in his newest jeans and a nice shirt, headed for the pet store near the nightmarket. It was not yet noon when he got off the bus at the entrance of the market; the morning market venders were mostly gone or packing up their last guavas and tomatoes into a truck or plastic crate tied to the back of a motorcycle. The clothing and shoe stores still had their metal gates locked.

Ah Wei bought a cup of soy bean milk from a smiling old woman at a breakfast stand and walked towards the pet store. It looked exactly the way it did on television: a neon dog bone and neon text beneath it promised, Happy Pets.

Somehow he had expected a crowd there—cameras, film crew, a queue of people waiting to see the Ah Wei dog. But there was nobody outside the store, and the inside of the store looked quiet, too, without a customer in sight. Ah Wei wasn’t sure if it was open, but when he pushed the door a bell rang pleasantly, inviting him in. Before him was a long rack stocked with leashes, toys, treats, dog clothes, bells, collars, cat litter, treats, and other pet items. Along either side of the wall and in the window were kittens and puppies in cages, most of them sleeping. A young girl of about high school age sat behind the counter, a textbook open before her, pink highlighter in hand.

“Welcome,” she said, looking up from her book.

“Hi,” Ah Wei said. “Do you still have the dog that talks?”

“Yes.” The girl walked out from behind the counter with a smile. “He’s quite the celebrity.”

She led Ah Wei to one of the cages, where the famous puppy was sleeping, one ear flopped away from his face. The price tag on the cage read $40,000 NT, not unreasonable for a purebred puppy in Taiwan.

“I’m surprised you haven’t sold him yet,” Ah Wei said.

“You know, I am, too,” the girl admitted. “We’ve had so many people come in here who all want to see this puppy, and some of them did buy a dog or a cat, but nobody bought this one.”

“Is there something wrong with it?” Ah Wei frowned.

“Oh, no, no, not at all. My dad was saying, people will watch a video or come to our store to look at the dog in person, just to see if it really cries Ah Wei and to tell their friends that they saw the Ah Wei dog, but when it comes down to it, nobody actually wants a dog that screams Ah Wei, even if that person’s name is Ah Wei.”

“My name is Ah Wei.”

“Really?” the girl said. “Then do you want to buy this puppy? Maybe it’s fate!”

“Maybe it is.”

It seemed unnecessary to share Shasha’s story now.

“I can open his cage so you can play with him,” the girl said.

While they were talking the little terrier woke up and moved towards them, whimpering and panting. The girl lifted a latch and grabbed the puppy under its front legs.

“This nice man’s name is Ah Wei, do you want to say Ah Wei to him?” the girl asked the dog.

It struggled in her arms to get closer to Ah Wei, sniffing eagerly. The girl handed the puppy over and it immediately settled in his arms and licked his face and neck.

“He likes you!” the girl said. “Maybe he is destined to be your dog.”

“Maybe,” Ah Wei said, knowing he could not let go of it now.



Half an hour later, laden with a Jack Russell Terrier puppy (complete with pedigree papers) in a brand new kennel, two bags of necessities including bowls, puppy food, leash, collar, dog treats, and other odds and ends, Ah Wei hailed a taxi. The dog whimpered and cried all the way home, but did not say “Ah Wei.”

At night, Ah Wei put the puppy in its kennel and went to his bedroom. The terrier slumped down and whimpered.

“You can’t sleep in the bedroom until you’re potty-trained,” Ah Wei said, and went to his room.

In the middle of the night, Ah Wei woke up with his backside covered in sweat. In his dream, the wet and bloody ghost of Shasha was screaming his name, over and over again as it floated closer and closer to him. He woke up just as the ghost reached for his neck with red talons, and realized that in real life the puppy was screaming his name. He went to the living room and saw the dog scrambling around inside the kennel, crying “Ah Wei! Ah Wei!”

He moved the dog to the living room, as far as possible, but it grew even more frantic, ramming its little body against the cage, making it rattle noisily against tile, all the while screaming, “Ah Wei!” Ah Wei sighed and moved the kennel into his bedroom.

“It’s okay, Shasha,” he said. “You found me. You don’t have to haunt me anymore.”

The pup slumped down and grunted a few times.

After that night, Ah Wei never had another nightmare about Shasha, dead or alive.

He gave the terrier an unremarkable name, Chocolate, after the brown patterns on its body and ears, and he grew up to be a quiet but energetic dog. Ah Wei could not teach him to fetch, sit, lie down, or do any tricks, however many dog books he read and treats he bribed him with. Clickers, rewards, being a pack leader, none of it worked. Chocolate had only one trick: in the middle of the night, or when upset and looking for his owner, he ran around and cried, “Ah, ow, ow, Ah Wei!”

Old Kio
As the day grew dim one could see the shadow of a hunched little old man reaching into the public trash bin, picking through garbage. PE plastic bottles were still worth 1 NT per bottle, very profitable when added up, and he also tied heavy loads of cardboard boxes and large bundles of newspapers and sold them to the recycling center, which paid cash according to weight.
Old Kio, now in his late seventies, had been picking through garbage ever since he was forced to retire at the maximum retirement age of sixty-five as a Taipei City Street Cleaner. People who saw him almost every day nicknamed him Old Kio because kio meant “picking up” in Taiwanese. He walked along the streets in the Sinyi neighborhood searching in garbage cans for recyclable items every day. Ever since he turned in his bright orange Taipei City Street Cleaner’s uniform jacket over ten years ago, this had been his job.

Smelling of sour refuse, dragging a cartload of recyclables, Old Kio unlocked his gate, left his cart in the patio, and unlocked the front door of his one story house. His wife was frying salmon in a pan; he could smell it half a block away. He heard voices in the kitchen. Kitty, his daughter, must have come for a visit.

“Dad, you’re home?” Kitty emerged from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. She had short, permed hair that matched her mother’s and a loud voice, also like her mother.

“Yes. Where is Ronnie?” he asked.

Kitty never brought Ronnie here, because she didn’t want her son to see that his grandfather was a trash collector. Old Kio had seen him as a baby and toddler a few times, but after a particularly bad fight several years ago, Kitty swore she’d never let him see his grandson again.

“Ronnie’s with his dad. They went to McDonald’s because he did well in the second grade monthly exam.”

“Very good, very good,” Old Kio said. “He will do well in life because he is clever. He can be like his father and have a high paying management job in a bank.”

“Talk, talk, talk,” Old Kio’s wife muttered. “Come help me move these dishes to the table and we can eat dinner.”

“Right away, Mom.” Kitty was in a hurry to walk away from her father, who reeked of rank, unidentifiable odors.

During the meal, Kitty continued to wrinkle her nose in her father’s direction.

“Dad, I’ve told you so many times, stop picking through the garbage! It’s so embarrassing to us children because people think that we do not give you money, and that you are poor. We got you this whole house and can afford to keep you in a comfortable lifestyle. Why do you have to do this to your family and yourself?”

“I am not old and useless, I can still work to earn my keep.”

“Ronnie was crying the other day because his classmates laughed at him because his grandfather kio bun so, picks trash off the streets! I had to tell him that they made it up, that his grandfather is a very respectable man and does not do that.”

“What is so shameful about gathering recycling? Were you embarrassed of me when I swept the streets? I brought all of you up, my work fed you. And now you think you are all so much better?”

The discussions were always the same, without conclusion or compromise. Old Kio continued to pick through the trash bins in the Sinyi neighborhood, and Kitty went home in a bad mood. She knew what the neighbors whispered; they said she was an ungrateful and mean daughter to make her father support himself. In reality, she had given him plenty of money over the years, but it all went into his savings account. He never spent the money she gave him, using only the few bills and change he earned collecting recycle items. If only other people knew how stubborn her father was.



In another part of Taipei, Ronnie had been planning for some time to take the bus to see the old man who picked up trash. After his classmates made fun of him yet again this morning, he slipped out of the school gates during naptime and waited at a nearby bus stop for a bus that went to Sinyi Developments. He wore his blue and white school uniform, with a red backpack strapped to his shoulders.

“Can you tell me when we are at Sinyi Developments?” Ronnie asked the bus driver.

“Okay, boy. Sit behind me and I’ll call you when it’s your stop. Aren’t you supposed to be in school right now, though?”

“The … the teacher said I ould go,” Ronnie lied, afraid that the bus driver would drive him back to Jian An Elementary School. “I have to do something very important,” he added, trying to look believable.

“Very well,” said the bus driver, stepping on the gas pedal.

The driver spat into a white plastic cup beside his steering wheel as he made a sharp right turn that nearly threw Ronnie off his feet. The boy grabbed the metal pole behind the driver and slipped into a seat in the first row. He gripped the sides of his seat as the bus bumped and halted through the city.

“Sinyi Developments,” the driver finally called.

Ronnie scrambled to his feet and hurried down the big steps. The bus pulled away as soon as he hopped off. A motorcycle nearly ran him over as it rushed between the just-closing bus doors and the sidewalk.

“Be careful!” hollered the motorcyclist as Ronnie ran off, his heart thumping.

Ronnie spotted the old trash man immediately. He does not look like my mother, Ronnie thought, maybe my classmates made it all up, like Mama said. Ronnie watched the old man for a long time. Old Kio saw him and smiled.

“Why aren’t you in school, little boy?” he asked.

Ignoring the question, the boy asked in a squeaky voice, “Are you really my grandpa?”

All the features in Old Kio’s wrinkled face widened. “Ronnie? Are you Ronnie? Kitty’s boy?”
Ronnie nodded.
“Oh my heavens, the last time I saw you you were just a toddler!” Old Kio exclaimed. “Look at you, such a big boy now!”
“Why do you pick up trash, Grandpa? My friends say that our family is so poor that you have to pick other people’s trash and take it home.”

“Well, if they talk like that they are not your friends. There is nothing wrong with collecting recyclables, tell your little classmates that. In fact, would you like to work with me today? It’s a lot of fun.”

Ronnie’s face brightened at the word “fun”.

“So, are we ready?” the old man asked, holding up a pair of tongs and snapping them like a crab’s claws.

“Sure, Grandpa!”

The old man and the little boy walked along Sinyi street side by side, the boy holding a metal tong and the old man using his bare hands. They collected twelve 500 c.c. plastic bottles, a large stack of paper and cardboard, and half a plastic bin of metal cans, which Old Kio taught Ronnie to flatten by jumping up and down on them.

At four o’clock, Old Kio brought Ronnie to another bus stop nearby where he could take the 235 bus home.

“Your building is Guting Station, remember to get off there,” the old man said.

“Why can’t I stay and see you change that into money?” Ronnie asked, pointing at the plastic bottles, metal cans, and paper he had helped his grandfather collect.

“You have to go home or your mother will worry that you didn’t come home from school,” Old Kio explained. “It's late. It's time.”

Ronnie pouted but followed his grandfather to the bus stop.

“Can I come again?” the boy asked.

“I am always here for you,” said his grandfather. “So, are we ready? There goes the 235 bus, run along now.”

“Bye, Grandpa!”



At home, a distraught Kitty opened the door for Ronnie.

“What happened, Mama?” Ronnie was sure that his mother had found out that he cut class that afternoon, but he decided to act innocent, just in case.

“It’s your grandfather.”

“Grandfather?” Ronnie blinked.

“The one that picks up trash! He died in a dumpster, collapsed and fell into a disgusting pile of other people’s garbage!” Kitty cried.

“What are you talking about, Mama, I just saw him today and he was fine.”

“Don’t lie, Ronnie, you did not see your grandfather. You don’t even remember what he looks like. You were in school when he died.”

“I saw him, I saw him,” Ronnie said, his voice breaking with exasperation. “He is not dead. Next week I will go collect recycles with him again, he said so, he wouldn’t lie to me.”

Kitty knelt before her son and tilted his chin so they were looking into each other’s faces.

“Tell Mama the truth. Why are you saying that you saw your grandfather?”

“My ... teacher let me take the bus to see him. It was very important.”

“What?”

“I had to see if it was true that my grandfather picks up trash.”

“You ... my poor child.” Kitty sobbed.

“Don’t cry, Mom, it was fun. Grandfather is great. There’s nothing wrong with collecting recycling, it’s good for the environment, and you make money. I want to be just like grandfather one day!”

“You stupid, stupid child. Your grandfather is dead. You are not going to pick up trash. Your grandfather is dead...” Kitty put her arms around her son and drew him close.

“He is not, he is not!” yelled Ronnie, breaking away. “Grandpa is alive, he is just working late. I’ll show you, I’ll take the bus to find him and bring him home to show you. You just don’t like him, that’s why you say he died. He said he missed me and wanted to see me more often. I like Grandpa more, I want to go live with him. I’ll run away from home!”

“Ronnie!” Kitty called.

He ran out the front door. They lived on the sixteenth floor, however, so after he left the apartment he had to wait for the elevator. When Ronnie saw his mother approaching, he struggled to open the door of the fire exit staircase. The door was too heavy for him and Kitty grabbed him by both his arms, under the armpits.

Ronnie kicked and screamed. “Get away from me! You are a liar, you told me I did not have a grandpa, and now that I saw him you say he is dead! You are a bad person! I’m running away from home, stay away from me!”

Kitty, with tears of shame burning her face, tried to pull Ronnie back into the apartment. She had always cared a great deal what other people thought of her, what they said behind her back. She did not want the neighbors to hear her son screaming such things, making a scene.

“Shhhh. Shhh,” she said. “It’s okay, let’s go home. We will go see Grandfather together,” she said softly.

“You’re lying,” Ronnie said, glaring at his mother through his tears. He broke free from her grasp.

“No, I’m telling you the truth,” Kitty said. “I won’t lie to you again. Your grandfather did pick trash. And that’s perfectly okay. Come back home, we’ll clean you up, and then we can go see grandfather together, okay?”

Just as Kitty said this the elevator arrived with a ding.

Ronnie bit his lips, looking at the opening elevator doors, then back at his mother. For a few seconds everything stopped—the elevator, Ronnie, his mother with her arms outstretched. Then the elevator doors closed, Ronnie wiped his face with the back of his hand, and Kitty led him by the other hand back home.



As the little boy sat in the bathtub melting a piece of soap between his palms, he felt excited. Grandpa was his favorite adult in the whole world. Now that he had found Grandpa, everything would be different. He wouldn’t care anymore if the kids at school made fun of him.

Kitty sat in the master bedroom fixing her makeup. At the morgue she just called, funeral home workers had already embalmed her father and were probably rubbing powder onto her his face. Kitty did not know if it was the right thing to do, to bring the boy to see his grandfather’s corpse. But somehow it felt right. People always said closure was good. If a dead body wasn’t closure, what was?

Kitty had difficulty zipping up her black dress in the back; she wished her husband were here. But he was in Malaysia right now for business and she did not want to bother him. She always suspected he was just as ashamed of her father as she was, though he never said so. She ran mousse through her curly hair and evened out the lipstick on her lips with her ring finger.

“Are you done washing yourself, Ronnie?” she called in the direction of the bathroom.

“Yes, Mommy!”

She picked up a large, white towel which was sitting next to her son’s little, formal suit on the bed.

“What did your Grandfather say to you?” Kitty asked, humoring her son by going along with his fantasy of having met the old man.

“He said there is nothing wrong with his job,” Ronnie said, “and he told me not to neglect my studies.”

Kitty frowned. These, and the other statements he had made didn’t seem like phrases that Ronnie could make up by himself—somebody must have said these things to him.

“Next week I will help him with the recycling again.” Ronnie beamed.

“Really?”

Kitty found that she had no words for her son. She had questions, but not questions she could ask him right now. Did he skip school? Was he going to skip school next week? She didn’t want to antagonize him—he was such a sensitive boy. Was he lying? Had he seen a ghost?

As Kitty helped her son button his shirt, pull on the stiff tuxedo jacket and suit pants, and smooth out his hair, she felt an involuntary shudder taking hold of her body. Ronnie was looking into the mirror, at himself, and at her reflection. She saw an expression in her son’s face that she used to see on her father’s face. A kind of smirk, lips curled in a way she thought only her father could curl them. Her son had either inherited or learned the expression, all of a sudden. Kitty felt herself turn cold. She moved away from her child.

“So, are we ready?” Ronnie asked.

These were the exact words that Kitty’s father used to say to Kitty when she was younger, when they were about to go out—on a picnic, to school, to a seafood restaurant as a special treat, into a taxi, onto a Taipei City Bus.

“Yes, my dear,” Kitty replied, trying hard to control her voice so that it didn’t quiver.

With a corner of her sleeve she wiped her eyes. Kitty regretted everything. The harsh words to her father, how she avoided him for all these years, acted ashamed, hid Ronnie from him—she saw now that she had been a terrible daughter all along. Even more so since her father had been a good father. She clasped Ronnie close to her and squeezed him until he resisted and squirmed out of her arms.

“Don’t, Mama. I haven’t forgiven you yet.” He pouted.

Kitty withdrew her hands and covered her face with them. There had been a rift between herself and her father, too, early on, just like this. One day, without specific cause, her heart simply set, grew hardened against her father, until now. She hoped that Ronnie had not reached that point, and never would.

Now Available on Amazon.com!
Do you have a cat friend in your life? Maybe one with "black cat energy" who comes and goes as it pleases? 
When Zoe was 11 we started a story about our cat friend, Magic, and at 12, Zoe has now published her first children's book. Magic. is now available in hard copy print (English only) and ebook (bilingual Chinese + English) on Amazon.
Magic is a real cat. He hangs out with us and the neighbors (who named him). While friendly, Magic definitely knows what he wants or doesn't want. Like a man with commitmentphobia, he will come into your house but you have to leave the door open or he will freak out. Once he followed me through the garage door into the house looking for Zoe while she was at school, didn't find her, and ten minutes later I figured he was gone already and went to close the garage door. A black blob dashed across the living room, scrambling for the exit. Not sure what kind of childhood trauma he has, but this cat will never become a house cat. He does love Zoe and my dad, though.
Zoe & Magic
Magic & my dad. Note the open sliding door.
Please support Zoe and Magic's first book! Reviews are much appreciated! Zoe hopes people will buy her book and is super psyched there're 4 reviews on Goodreads.

Buy Zoe's book here:
Magic. ebook (Chinese + English)
Magic. hard copy print book (English)

It may be interesting to look at the Hofstede Cultural Dimensions and see if your family's culture comes from a more collectivistic (displaying concern for others) or individualistic (focusing on concern for self) background.


I wasn't excited to see that Taiwan was on the far collectivist side, but can't say that I'm surprised. It does explain a couple of things in my life.

In every workplace (and family), there are differing opinions and potential for conflict. The Thomas–Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument describes conflict management styles ranging from competing, collaborating, compromising, to avoiding and accommodating. The more assertive one is, they are more likely to compete, and the more cooperative and less assertive one is, they tend towards accommodating.

Studies also show, unsurprisingly, that women prioritize relationships over agenda and are more likely to be cooperative, whereas men prioritize their agenda over relationships (Steen & Shinkai, 2020).

The Dutch Test for Conflict Handling minces fewer words and uses more direct terms of Forcing, Problem Solving, Avoiding, and Yielding, highlighting that those who "force" others display the most concern for self versus concern for others, whereas those who have more concern for others over themselves, tend to "yield."



What is the biggest issue here? When there is a mismatch, often culturally, personality-wise, or even gender-based, between assertiveness and cooperativeness or concern for self v. concern for others. How can we compromise or problem solve in these situations? Or do we? Once again, this may happen at work or at home, and unfortunately, America is a country where the squeaky wheel gets the WD40 all day and all night, and those who have the most concern for themselves rather than others (even their own family or children), who force others, often get their way, or at least assume they always will.

References:

Sinskey, J. L., Chang, J. M., Shibata, G. S., Infosino, A. J., & Rouine-Rapp, K. (2019). Applying onflict management strategies to the pediatric operating room. Anesthesia & Analgesia, 129(4), 1109–1117.

Steen, A., & Shinkai, K. (2020). Understanding individual and gender differences in conflict resolution: A critical leadership skill. International Journal of Women’s Dermatology.

According to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, patients with diabetes account for one in three hospitalizations in California, and according to Merced Sunstar, the percentage is even higher at nearly 36% in Merced County. Diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in Merced County, with a death rate of 29%, higher than both state (20.7%) and national (21.3%) death rates, according to the Merced County Department of Public Health.Diabetes is an endocrine disorder that involves high blood sugar levels related to damaged pancreas cells or insulin resistance (insulin allows body cells to make use of sugar). Long-term, uncontrolled high blood sugar causes damage to small blood vessels in nerves and end organs such as eyes and kidneys, leading to diabetic complications of blindness, kidney disease, and nerve damage, and is often related to serious infections and the need for amputations.Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Halloween, and apparently 4th of July are all sweets-heavy holidays that often send waves of diabetic patients to the hospital with extemely high blood sugars high enough to change their mental status and potentially endanger their lives. Diabetic ketoacidosis patients can arrive at the emergency room in states ranging from drowsy, happy-drunk, mean-drunk, confused, violent, to nonresponsive. For some patients, this is their first diagnosis of diabetes.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that men and women over the age of 35 with risk factors such as high blood presssure or high body mass index (overweight) receive blood sugar testing for early diagnosis and treatment of diabetes. Well-managed diabetes does not have to drastically affect one's quality of life, though it is admittedly a hassle to poke one's fingers to check blood sugar and administer insulin with syringes 3-4 times a day. Some type II diabetics may be able to manage their blood sugar through oral medication, dietary changes and physical activity, but monitoring blood sugar is always a good way to protect oneself from ending up in the hospital or experiencing serious complications such as blindness, kidney failure or amputation.

High sugar levels can damage blood vessels just like high blood pressure can, and because blood vessels are everywhere in our bodies, feeding our brains to our toes, we need them to be healthy and not damaged in ways that may lead to a stroke, heart attack, or pulmonary embolism (blood clot in the lungs). 
So even if you feel fine, go to your primary for checkups that include checking fasting blood sugar (not eating breakfast until your blood is drawn) to make sure you get the care you need and don't end up happy-drunk, mean-drunk or comatose at our emergency department after too many fourth of July cookies or Halloween candies!