Early Lessons in the Classical Language, Chapter 3
A teacher he liked
He didn’t play hooky every day. There was one teacher at school he didn’t want to miss and, No, not the busty Mrs. Grazer, who the non-whoremongering boys jacked off over, but the class on Chinese history by the young Mr. Albert Bean, one of the first American graduate students to study in Taiwan.
Mr. Bean was frequently unshaven, and met the letter of the law at TAS by wearing a white shirt and tie, but the shirt was as dirty as the sin he looked like he just managed to extricate himself from, and the tie was scrunched to the left, twisted and filthy. He seemed to be perpetually hungover, and his scruffy shoes would appear with a token smear of polish, but only on one, not the other. If Jack Kerouac had been a China scholar, he would look like a handsome version of the Mr. Bean he saw in 1958. Unlike almost everyone else at Taipei American School, Mr. Bean was not associated with the US military. In short, he impressed the holy hell out of him. He had an instant man-crush on Mr. Bean, and pronounced him “cool.” This admiration spilled over to his subject matter, Chinese culture. In retrospect he suspected that the dishevelment that marked his appearance in the classroom was due to studying Chinese literature all night and not to drinking and whoring, like he imagined. And decades later he found his scholarly writings to be precise, well-written, and modest. He would have found it insufferably cool if he had run into Mr. Bean in a whorehouse on Yanping North Road, say, or at the Circle Restaurants1 after midnight enjoying a wee-hour snack with a working girl’s hand on each leg. He never did, but he always kept an eye out.
Nevertheless, at least once a week, he would turn right instead of left at the intersection near Frank’s house on Linch’i Street, and peddle away from school and American adult authority toward cigarettes, booze, prostitutes, snooker, and immersion into the raw linguistic cacophony of the whorehouses near Yanping North Road. It was a great feeling riding along, the wind in his hair, knowing he was headed to a good place instead of a bad one. Yes, Sir. Whores for a buck, whores for two dollars, five-dollar all-night specials, bottles of gaoliang liquor for a quarter, ten-cent smokes, pedicab to a whorehouse for thirty cents...down payments only, but how would he know?
建成圓環 Jiànchéng Yuánhuán, Taipei’s “circle restaurants” of the ’50s and ’60s where denizens of the night ate their late night meals, a group of makeshift restaurants that were nocturnally located on a large traffic circle between Nanjing West Road and Chongqing North Road and partially cleared away in the daytime.