Li Ang - The Lost Garden

Stunned, Yinghong asked without thinking:

“What do you mean, printing money?”

“Printing ten-dollar and hundred-dollar bills. The New Taiwan dollars. These, every single sheet is money, pretty, nice-smelling New Taiwan dollars. This is terrible! Every single one of the bills has grown wings and flown away from me. Half of my property is gone, all gone.”

Despite continued signals from Father, this time Kozo could not hold back.

“The denomination hasn’t been printed yet, but this is authentic paper used to print the new NT. Do you know how much trouble I had to go through to get this much paper? I didn’t dare leave the stack at my house, and that’s why I asked your Otosan to store it for me. Oh, this is awful, just awful. Such misery.”

He continued yelling and screaming till he saw the frightened look on her face; then he slowly calmed down and adopted a lighthearted tone:

“The Young Miss is a fine representative of a wealthy, established family, with her uncommon style and flair. A painting by you is worth one, even two thousand NT. These paintings here are enough to buy a whole row of Lucheng houses and their storefronts. Young Miss is a fine artist.”

Knowing that nothing could be changed, Kozo tried to make the best of a bad situation.

“Oh well,” he said with a slight laugh, “what’s done is done, so it’s all right. But I wonder which family will be wealthy enough to gain you as daughter-in-law. See how you used up enough money to build Lotus Garden just by painting it.”

After the initial outburst, Kozo let it pass, though he did take the remaining paper with him. Yinghong, of course, received a bit of scolding and punishment, but Father focused on not taking other people’s property when you know it does not belong to you, and did not believe that she’d ruined Kozo’s dream of becoming rich overnight.

“Kozo is crazy. He thinks about getting rich every day, and now he’s going to print money. It’s not that simple.”

Later she overheard Father talking to Mother:

“All this government knows what to do is arrest and kill people; they are more ruthless than the Japanese. There are government spies everywhere. Do you think they would let anyone print fake money? If Kozo keeps this up, sooner or later something bad will happen to him.”

Mother continued in a worried tone:

“Yes, indeed. Printing money is only part of it. Just look how he parades his smuggled items all the time. I’m afraid he’s going to get into trouble.” She paused and then added, “Could we get involved somehow?”

“We’ve experienced the worst already. What are we afraid of now?” Father snorted.

“It’s that not simple. Printing money is interfering with the country’s finances. It disrupts the social order and endangers national security. If the government takes it seriously, it could be really bad.” Mother sounded anxious.

Father was quiet for a long time.

After graduating from junior high, Yinghong was preoccupied with her senior high school entrance exam. By that time, all the newly planted flame trees in Lotus Garden were blooming, and Kozo stopping showing up. She could not avoid a vague concern that he must have gotten into trouble.

Gone, also, was the old soldier from the Mainland whom the local Taiwanese called Old Taro, a man who had kept a lackluster watch over Lotus Garden. His place was taken by a shrewd-looking middle-aged Mainlander and a young Taiwanese man. The two of them kept a tight watch at the entrance to Lotus Garden. Father spent virtually every day inside, and even Mother, who had business to take care of, rarely went out. Yinghong was repeatedly told to come home directly from school.

The watch lasted about three months. Then one day, Mudan opened the gate early in the morning and saw that Old Taro was sitting on one of the granite steps, his reappearance as sudden as his earlier disappearance.

It would be years before Yinghong finally and truly understood what Kozo had done, and even then it was difficult to imagine someone like Kozo, a pantywaist, according to Mudan, being involved in that kind of business, particularly since he was so gutless that a loud noise made him jump out of his chair and thump his chest with his dainty fingers.

But from the bits and pieces revealed by Mudan, Yinghong learned that Kozo had come from a wealthy family in Gongzhailiao, in the countryside outside Lucheng. He’d gone to school, but several acres of family land had been seized by the government after the implementation of the Land to the Tillers policy. Since he was no good at working the remaining plot of land, he had to find another way to make a living.

She stopped painting for such a long time that she gradually forgot her dream of becoming a painter, either because she had cost Kozo millions of NT with her painting or because she had to prepare for exams.

Now that Kozo no longer came to Lotus Garden to show Father the latest cameras and photography equipment, Father had to once again visit the store in Taichung. As he was always looking for something to do, it occurred to him to buy a car, since he had to make the trip so often.

At the time there was only one automobile in Lucheng, a black sedan belonging to the town head. If members of wealthy families who had worked away from Lucheng over the years bought a car, they naturally kept it for use in the city, occasionally driving it back on home visits; hence the town head’s “Black Hood” was the only car Lucheng residents saw on a daily basis.

Rumor had it that the town head had colluded with the KMT government when it relocated to Taiwan, which was how he could suddenly transform himself from a local hooligan into a rich man overnight and become the local representative before serving as the town head. With such a background in an old town with lost glory, he had earned no respect from the locals. Now that he had bought the Japanese “Black Hood”, it was pretty much settled that no self-respecting Lucheng family would follow his example and buy a second one. The established families were in the habit of competing with one another on who was better at “saving” money. With the motto that a single coin should be tied at four corners so it would not be spent too easily, they all believed that wasting money on superfluous objects was an act of the nouveau riche.

“Lucheng has one major thoroughfare, Zhongzheng Road. It doesn’t take long to walk from one end to the other. Buying a car is truly the behavior of someone doomed to squander away the family fortune,” people said.

Hence all eyes were on Father when he bought his car, particularly because he did not buy a Black Hood, one familiar to everyone in town. Instead, he bought a German car called a “Mercedes Benz,” unheard of by anyone.

Finding “Mercedes Benz” too hard to say, the locals shortened it to Benz, which sounded more like Mens when pronounced in Japanese.

The “Mens” was sold to Father by a consul who was returning home after serving his term in Taiwan. A uniformed chauffeur drove the car to Lucheng, drawing the attention of people along the way, forming a human wall that was said to be the equal of a parade of the deities. The crowd forced the chauffeur to slow down, and he arrived in Lotus Garden with some local ragamuffins’ hands on the car. They told Father they’d helped push it to his house, to which he responded with a pleasant smile and some tips.

The 1953 Mercedes came in a cobalt blue, made before car designers had begun to worry about the wind factor, so it did not have an aerodynamic body. Instead, the car was all angles, with a rounded tail that was smooth and well textured, while the platinum logo on the hood displayed an extraordinarily luxurious elegance.

The consul’s chauffer stayed on at Lotus Garden for more than two weeks, helping Father get reacquainted with driving a car. During those days, she often saw Father, accompanied by the driver, leave early in the morning to hone his driving skills, not returning till dusk. Unable to resist her request, he agreed to let her be his first passenger, but he also insisted that the chauffer do the driving. He wanted to wait, once the driver had left, to practice on his own for ten days or so before he’d let Yinghong and her mother ride with him.