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stand, the one I run with the help of Dwayne and Frankie the Cat, the one I inherited from my parents.
    By the way, do you like the name? It’s the title of the first album of my favorite band, Joy Division. I used to be stupidly obsessed with the opaque lyrics, which drove me to learn English, and of course I was as fascinated as the rest of the world by the dramatic suicide of singer Ian Curtis just as the band was about to break big.
    I’m older now. Death isn’t as cool as it used to be.
    Unknown Pleasures used to be located one block north on Daxi, at the intersection with Dabei Road. But that area was recently declared an emergency route and all the merchants located there were evacuated. We moved to our present space, which is actually nicer and bigger, but I lost some friends, people I’d known since I was a kid, who took buyouts and decided to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
    Dancing Jenny, who used to run a clothing boutique, left the country altogether. I’d heard that she was now modeling BDSM gear in Tokyo. Kuilan and her husband left their hot pot business to start a full-fledged restaurant in Beijing. My family, Dancing Jenny, and Kuilan all worked together for nearly two decades and then, boom, we were all gone from that block.
    Yes, things have changed dramatically in the last two months since I became a minor national hero. That’s how it is in Taiwan, though. Nothing seems to change until it suddenly does.
    Now how did I become famous? Well, it’s a little embarrassing, but a guy I knew from high school tried to shoot me one night while I was working. Luckily I happened to be holding Da Pang , or “Fatty,” a big cast iron pot that had been a favorite of my grandfather. The pot deflected the bullet, the gun jammed, and my erstwhile acquaintance fled.
    It had made the news and all. I did a few interviews brandishing Little Fatty, retold the tale of how I could only see the gun and not the gunman, and of feeling the sting in my hands when the bullet ricocheted. Soon, keychain replicas of Little Fatty began to pop up all over the island. Unknown Pleasures’ traffic increased in a big way. People took selfies at our stand, more with Fatty, dent side out, than with me.
    Everything turned out all right. Well, my classmate later killed himself, so that was a bummer, but you know what? Every time we open for business and I reach up and touch Fatty on his dedicated trophy shelf, I am glad to be alive and overworked.
    I followed Dwayne as he teetered into Unknown Pleasures and disappeared into its tiny, staff-only restroom. That was one good thing about the new location. I sure don’t miss the communal restroom.
    Frankie the Cat stood behind the main grill, chatting with another elderly mainlander man. Both were born in China and were probably in their late seventies, although Frankie could pass for a man in his fifties. His hair was still thick, combed back and impossibly black. He had to be dyeing it, right?
    Frankie had joined the army when he was a gung-ho kid just entering his teens. He was an orphan who had washed up in Taiwan with the rest of the Nationalists, also known as the Kuomintang or KMT, after the Chinese civil war ended with their defeat in 1949. Later, he was a political prisoner of the KMT for more than a decade after his brother was mistakenly reported to be a Communist. Still, Frankie never showed any bitterness about his lot in life and took orders from a punk like me because my grandfather had hired him before I was even born.
    I regarded Frankie’s friend, who was greyer and thinner. He shared the same sad smile of someone whose life had been derailed. If this was a prison pal, was he a fellow political inmate or a legitimately hardened criminal?
    The two men also wore the same bandages on their forearms.
    Frankie’s wrappings were a few days old. “I had some old tattoos removed,” he’d said casually when I asked him if he was all