The KTV Night

Where exactly the journey began is hard to say: whether it was the moment I stepped off the plane and set foot in Macau for the first time, or if it had already started two days earlier when I left my office in Taipei for the last time. It was a late March day, a Friday: my last day of work. I’d spent the morning packing the last suitcases, filling boxes with two years’ worth of accumulated items from which I struggled to part. In the afternoon, I returned to the office for half an hour, enough time to grab a coffee and say goodbye to my colleagues. Our office was located on the eleventh floor of an unremarkable building in Neihu, Taipei’s tech district, which had blossomed with the IT industry boom of the 90s and early 2000s. My desk was a cubicle among many others, perhaps a bit messier than most.

“All the best” were the three words I heard most in that half hour. Every manager I met in the office corridors who I informed of my departure would say them. I felt an inexplicable, unexpected sense of guilt at leaving these people with whom I had shared that familiar, albeit alienating, space over the past twenty-four months. They were practically strangers to me, yet I knew their voices, their mannerisms, and even, at times, their secrets by heart. Take J., the sales manager who had shared his passion for motorcycle trips with me. Short and past his sixties, he was bald except for a streak of long, greying hair that he let grow right in the middle of his scalp, which he styled into a crest (it was undoubtedly one of the most eccentric hairstyles in the office, and not at all a typical choice for a Taiwanese man).

Always impeccably dressed, with a taste that was certainly flashy but never vulgar, he had a gentlemanly air, and all the mainland colleagues would gush over him whenever they were on a call with him. His office entrance was right next to my desk. His voice accompanied me from morning until evening: “你今天怎么这么漂亮啦” (“Why are you so pretty today?”), “欸？头发是不是有改变了” (“Hey? Did you change your hair?”), “你不爱我，你从不打给我” (“You don’t love me; you never call me”). I probably owe J. a good part of my spoken Chinese, and without a doubt, everything I know about Hokkien. He had the habit—or perhaps the merit—of never closing the door: his conversations with employees scattered across Asia could be heard from every corner of the office. But no one was really bothered; everyone eventually got used to it. He was also an avid golfer. Practically at retirement age, he had been hired as an external consultant by the company to avoid unemployment. He continued to do the same work he’d done for years, though at a slightly reduced salary. I often wondered what it would be like to see him together with his wife.

Then there were A. and B., who functioned together almost like parts of a single organism. One was the direct subordinate of the other, and they seemed to have found each other: if something akin to fraternal love exists between colleagues, that had to be the feeling between them. A. was, in a way, the result of a weighted average of what it means to be born in Taiwan. Chinese in culture and manners, Japanese in refinement and taste, he unmistakably revealed his Taiwanese nature as soon as he switched from Mandarin to Hokkien to tell a joke. An electronics engineer turned sales manager, he applied the principles of one profession to the other, without truly practicing either. He loved feasting and was a big eater of red meat, seafood, and sashimi, three foods he invariably accompanied with copious amounts of red wine.

Since he joined our team, we had gone out for lunch or dinner at least once a month. He introduced us to all sorts of delicacies, and I still remember the multi-course dinner he organized in our honour at the Continental Hotel (that dinner had been his true masterpiece). As if that wasn’t enough, A. could sing. He took vocal lessons and would sometimes amuse me with his Italian by singing an opera aria. Then, at the KTV, he would let loose, singing at the top of his lungs, red-faced from the alcohol. You could tell from the songs he meticulously ordered at the console that they offered a glimpse into his soul—that of a hopeless romantic. The songs he chose, which I didn’t know, were some of the saddest, most melancholy tunes I had ever heard. He didn’t hold back his emotions while singing; his performances evoked the original cathartic purpose of that peculiar form of entertainment. I remember watching his teary eyes, enchanted, unable to believe that this man, capable of evoking such pain and sweetness on an ordinary karaoke night, was the same person whose requests, on a similarly ordinary workday morning, I was constantly trying to escape.

B. was his boss and one of the most respected figures in the company. No one knew his exact age or even his precise origins. Corridor rumours, which I could never verify, claimed that he had one of the lowest employee numbers in the entire company, with just three or four digits, a testament to his venerable career. Other rumours said B. had never attended elementary school but had been home-schooled in a poor Malaysian village. Once, he shared a childhood memory with me, telling me how he used to study by oil lamp in the evening and how dark the jungle night was when he crossed the village to fetch water from the well. That same child was now about to end his career in an anonymous office on the eleventh floor of an unremarkable building in Taipei. Stories like these contributed to the legendary aura around his name.

The synergy between him and A. was an unrelenting source of constant new demands for those of us under them. Like two brothers amusing themselves by creating new games, A. and B. would spend entire days in the office discussing how to improve the service we provided the company. In an hour of work, they could produce dozens of ideas and discard just as many, while we employees desperately tried to keep up with their relentless brainstorming. Most of our days were spent attempting to make functional their abstract projects, even though they often turned out to be nonsensical and contradictory. Many of those projects were eventually abandoned halfway, never producing any tangible results. When I went to say goodbye on my last day, A. and B. were both busy in some meeting and didn’t have time for extended farewells. They gave me a firm handshake and a warm smile, which I interpreted as their thanks for my two years of work.

The last person I said goodbye to was C. She was part of our team, though her role wasn’t exactly clear. She was a woman in her forties, with an engineer husband and two school-age daughters. Extremely thin and fairly tall, she always wore short skirts that emphasized her long, slender legs, and every day she wore heels, whose unmistakable sound always announced her arrival. She was in the office every day except Friday. This was because, always taking care of her daughters, she could practically never go on vacation. She therefore preferred to take off every Friday, to extend her weekends and avoid the most tedious of all weekly meetings: the internal team meeting. This was the meeting where each of us had to summarize out loud the work completed during the previous week. Since C. rarely had work to report, such meetings were, for her, a humiliating waste of time.

C. had been included in the analytical team back when the pinnacle of information technology consisted of analysing a pivot table. She hadn’t kept up with developments over the next twenty years and now found herself being replaced by programs that did her same job in a fraction of the time and without needing a salary. She kept herself busy preparing presentation slides, organizing company events, and occasionally bringing up cases of wine that were left on the ground floor, to deliver them to B. and A.’s office.

C. and I had a special relationship. Often, especially on darker days, we would both find ourselves in the coffee room, taking a break and chatting while snacking. It was in those moments that I would confide the details of my personal life to her; she was the only person with whom I felt comfortable doing so. She listened with interest and, even more surprisingly, sometimes seemed to know the thread of my own thoughts better than I did, and she was able to describe the emotions I felt better than I could myself. Belonging to a generation older than mine and from a culture distant from my own, she often seemed more open and cosmopolitan than our younger, European colleagues. She gave the impression of having had a youth full of experiences and—perhaps the most astonishing fact to me—now seemed genuinely content with her modest job and, overall, happy with the overwhelming normalcy that now permeated every aspect of her life.

It was unexpectedly, on one of my last nights in Taipei, that I finally recognized in her the completeness of a wonderful human being. It was an evening we spent at the KTV with A. and B., after having dinner and toasting together in honour of my departure. It must be said that C. rarely attended our dinners: she was often not invited, and when she was, she politely declined. On one hand, her absence was justified by her maternal role, which required her to go home every day and take care of her two daughters. On the other, I believe, it was her humility that kept her from joining us: she recognized that her contribution to our work was nearly non-existent; she didn’t feel worthy, not even of a company-paid dinner.

But that evening was my last, and she made an exception. I remember clearly that we took a taxi together to go to the KTV. While we were stuck in Taipei’s traffic—the sun had already set, and the hordes of office workers were preparing to return to their modest homes—we chatted in the taxi, and she told me how she used to frequent nightclubs during her college days. “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but back then I knew how to have fun,” she told me with a friendly smile. “It’s not true that it doesn’t seem like it,” my knowing look replied. Shortly afterward, in the private room that A. had booked, we were ready to start the revelry. None of us had eaten, we were all hungry, and A. had already taken control of that phone, often placed near the console, from which one can call the waiter’s service to order food and alcohol. It didn’t take long before the table at the center of the room was laden with every delicacy, from breaded tofu to steamed dumplings, deep-fried shrimp with pineapple, and other treats that would quickly ease our hunger. We hurried to eat while waves of red wine, always poured by A., gracefully tumbled into our glasses.

For me, she was the true protagonist of the evening. Since we’d known her, none of us had ever heard her sing. That evening, though shyly, she agreed to take the microphone, encouraged by our cheers, and she ordered a few songs. They were songs from twenty years ago, songs from her youth.

Amid the noise and general cheer, my eyes welled up because never, in the countless nights I’d wasted in those dismal places, had I ever heard a voice so angelic.

-End of the first post in the Notes to a Chinese trip series.