Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

Jan 04 2016

Recent stories

My usual shoe cobbler disappeared some time ago. He was an older fellow with bristly white hair, always smiling as he pounded people’s leather foot coverings back into shape at his stall in an alley off Nanyang Street. He’d been there for decades, as long as I could remember. I brought him hot drinks sometimes in the winter. But then I stopped frequenting the area as much due to an employment change, and the last time I went, he was gone. None of the neighboring shops knew anything about him. “He must have taken ill,” one said, shrugging.

So I went in search of another cobbler to patch up my old Nikes. I know what you’re thinking: Just buy another pair! But when I happen across a pair of comfy shoes, I like to make them last as long as possible, and I’ve found that even cheap sneakers can be made to last a bit longer with some glue and stitching. I recalled seeing a shoe shop next to the old Futai Mansion on Yanping, just south of the North Gate, so there I went. Sure enough, the older fellow was willing to take on the job. We talked about the area as he fixed my shoes, appropriately, on a foot pedal-driven machine.

“We used to live right up there,” he said, pointing towards the intersection of Zhongxiao West and Zhonghua roads. “Right by the railroad tracks.” I nodded. I remember those tracks, and the Chunghwa Market that had been built next to them. Both were gone by the early 1990’s.

“When I picked my lot in the army, I found I’d been sent to an outer island base,” he continued. “Back then, you couldn’t tell anyone you were being sent to one of those places, not even your family. When we set out from Taipei Train Station down south to catch a ship, as luck would have it, there was an accident on the road, and my train stopped right next to my house. I could look out the window and see my family going about their business, but I couldn’t call out to them., even though I wouldn’t see them again for years.” He shook his head at the memory, sighed, and then gave me my shoes. “That’ll be NT$300.”

As I was crossing the bridge on my way home, I spotted a cat prowling around the swan boat docks, looking over the edges into the water for fish. Its orange and white coat was conspicuous among the largely blue hulls, and its striped tail waved to and fro as it snatched perfect balance from thin air even as it leaped across the water in pursuit of a small bird it had no hope of catching. Some small children at the ticket stand on the shore shouted at it, beckoning with loud MEOWs, but it simply stared, shrugged, and moved onto more serious pursuits. We had been dismissed.

Further along the bridge, I took some photos of the makeshift ferries plying the still-muddy waters, carrying debris from the destruction of the lone house on the hillside. “They’re tearing it down because the Forestry Bureau doesn’t need it any more,” said the bridge guard, apparently worried that I was a spy. “It’s an illegal construction now.”

“And those illegal constructions?” I said, pointing to the row of far more accessible and actually dangerous buildings on the hillside just past the bridge, also on national land. The guard waved dismissively.

“Those aren’t our concern. We’re only concerned with national matters,” he said. I just stared, shrugged, and moved on.

posted by Poagao at 3:26 pm  

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