We had a meeting today, and that new young woman botched the report figures again during her presentation. The supervisor started tearing into everyone from the front, and I got caught in the blast down below. For more than a decade, about once every three days, I have muttered to myself, “I want to light charcoal; I want to hang myself.” I kept saying it until the hot-blooded young man I once was turned into the senior old cog the company cannot get rid of. Today, all I could do was quietly swallow another blood-pressure pill and sit there maintaining my vital signs.
After work, I thought of my wife at home, who saw all the red marks on my health-check report and now forces me to eat boiled meals every day, and I had absolutely no desire to go home so early. Exhausted, I drifted over near the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi by Taipei Main Station, planning to stuff myself with something high-calorie as retaliatory compensation for this goddamn day.
I walked into Lane 20, Gongyuan Road, close to the cram-school district. Back when I was studying, I ate around here to save money. Who would have thought that, after more than a decade of work, I would return in middle age, look at the same street, and find that the shabby poverty and helplessness of a bottom-rung corporate drone inside me felt exactly the same as when I was a student.
Bei Bei Che Lu Rou Fan is hidden in a narrow alley, in a storefront tiny as hell with just a few plain little tables and stools. People online call the setting “hipster” or “elegant.” That only makes me sneer. These days, install slightly brighter yellow lights and keep a place slightly tidier, and people will hype it as a hipster shop. It is simply an ordinary, welcoming little eatery. I heard even Yutaka Matsushige from the Japanese show Solitary Gourmet has eaten here, and sure enough, several foreign tourists beside me were taking photos on their phones because of its reputation.
I ordered and paid at the counter with a face that had given up on life. I got a bowl of braised pork rice. This place leans toward the fattier style, mostly pork skin. Doctors keep warning me about fatty liver these days, but that glossy minced pork over rice cooked firm rather than mushy tasted savory with a hint of sweetness and was ridiculously good with the rice. Just as I gulped down all that guilt-laden fat, I glanced at the uniformed student at the next table, calmly adding a braised egg to his bowl of rice.
Meanwhile, I had stared at the 15-dollar braised egg on the menu and skipped it just to save that pathetic bit of money.
Fuck. I have reached this age, earning a salary that is neither living nor dead, cleaning up after rookies at work, and even after clocking out I hesitate over a 15-dollar braised egg. I looked at the mushroom chicken soup I had ordered instead. Yes, the broth was light and sweet and the chicken was tender, but after wiping the sweat from my forehead, I suddenly realized it was a summer day pushing thirty-six degrees. As I sweated buckets from the hot soup, that whole mass of pent-up humiliation surged up inside me—if I had known, I should have spent the money for this hot soup on an iced hand-shaken drink.
What a wretched way to eat a meal. Even a student was more generous than me. At that thought, I might as well take this stuffed belly home and light the charcoal.
Fortunately, the braised pork rice here really suited my taste. I shoveled the rich but not cloying pork rice into my mouth as the aroma of fat burst out. Even if it were my last meal, at least I would be setting off on a full stomach.
The mutterings of a middle-aged corporate drone: for more than a decade, I have lacked the guts to quit and the courage to log out of life. Every day I say I want to light charcoal, yet after work I still quietly order braised pork rice without an egg. Cursing myself for stupidly ordering hot soup in sweltering weather, grieving over that 15 dollars, and dragging this body—covered in red health warnings and too stingy even for a braised egg—back to clock in tomorrow: that is the real thing.
