Short Story: The Po Show

Short Story: The Po Show

The story begins with a small Taiwanese man stood at the reception desk of a luxury apartment block in an affluent area of Taichung. He reaches into the man bag he has swung around his hips. He gestures to the security guard stood at front desk to take a look at its contents. The security guard gasps. He sees the gun.

‘Now hand over the money so I can pay my prostitute upstairs or I will have no other choice but to shoot you,’ the short Taiwanese man whispers.

‘Oh Fred, what have I told you about inviting hookers back without going to the cash machine?’ sighs the security guard.

‘I’m being serious this time,’ Fred points in his face. ‘I need 1000 Taiwanese dollars pronto.’

A young woman then enters reception and joins the two gentleman at the desk.

‘Come on, Frank, just lend the dude the cash so i can go home.’

Okay, so none of this actually happened. But it’s amazing the fun you can have when you have a security camera which watches over reception and connects to your widescreen TV. We can’t understand any of the game shows in Mandarin (completely fucked up and just plain weird) and we are too stingy to pay for satellite, so we keep our TV on the surveillance channel. It’s turned into our own soap opera – we’ve turned the people into our building into characters and when in reality, Fred has simply forgot his key and needs letting into his apartment, we’ve given Fred a voice over and he’s now a butch sex-maniac who is forever borrowing money from Frank the security guard to pay for his habit.

Unfortunately, we are not in the apartment of dreams I previously described. The man upstairs has a way of doing that – dangling complete happiness in front of you for a second and then snatching it away. I guess landlord no.1 has watched too much Sex in The City and just wasn’t ready for 3 boisterous Western chicks taking over his apartment. Therefore the dream died and we settled for Apartment no.2.

Apartment no.2 is still very luxurious and extremely cheap compared to Western prices. It came in second place for three reasons. A) it didn’t have a pool and B) The sofa smells a bit like pee and C) One of the bedrooms is made of glass. However, the place still does have its perks – we have a balcony. On an evening I just love to stand out there smoking listening to the music from the saxophone bar over the road. Plus, the person in the goldfish bowl pays less rent, which I think is only fair since coming in drunk and clumsily crashing into your bedroom wall just got a whole lot more dangerous.

It is I who has the great pleasure of living the life of a goldfish. I volunteered myself because in one respect I have taken after my father and try to save money at every opportunity. For example, Panjita and Canadi have nicknamed me the air-con Hitler. I just think that you can never have enough money that you can afford to pay for air. That’s just my opinion.

Anyway, the goldfish bowl or ‘the greenhouse’ as I like to call, doesn’t have air conditioning and the temperature is comparable to that of a sauna. This means that I want to be naked ALL THE TIME. And in a room with glass walls, this may cause a few problems. Not for me, I am completely comfortable with nudism. But perhaps for my Taiwanese neighbours this does give a misleading impression of the Western world. I wonder if, whilst we are in our living room watching the surveillance camera, our neighbours are watching the goldfish bowl waiting for the next viewing of the Po Show.

As you can already tell, life here is pretty random and moves along pretty quickly. I have a feeling each day is going to be spontaneous. Yesterday, in my ignorance, I tried to walk to work. My boss did warn me that it was ‘impossible’ and it ‘would take at least an hour’, but I thought to myself, ‘hey, what do you know, with your little Asian legs, it probably takes you an hour but I’m sure I can make it in twenty minutes. I looked at the map and it was one road. One teeny weeny road couldn’t defeat Po.

What I failed to realise that it’s a fucking long road. In the sweltering midday heat it is the road to hell. My boss was wrong. It didn’t take an hour, more like a lifetime, and I was defeated before I had even reached the end of it. I stumbled into the nearest building (a Toyota garage) a messy pile of sweat, my face as red as tomato ketchup and tried to ask directions for the nearest bus stop. The Toyota man stared at me blankly. I did my best bus impression but in hindsight I probably looked more like a steam train – all sweaty and making choo choo noises (why, I ask myself, why?). However, despite my lunatic charades, he may have understood, and he pointed me in the right direction of the bus stop.

Around ten minutes later I was receiving some peculiar stares from the locals waiting for bus 83 which travelled on the never-ending road to hell. I couldn’t understand what they were saying but I’m pretty sure it was something along the lines of ‘is that a mutant tomato?’

Luckily, and to my surprise, a blue car pulled up and the Toyota man winded down his window and waved at me to get in. I decided he was either going to rescue me or kill me, and I was willing to take that risk. If I was going to die, I thought kidnapped and murdered was a much more exciting way to go than death by dehydration. I hopped in and showed him my map.

Thanks to Toyota man, I arrived at my branch safely. We had the most basic of conversations, with more lunatic charades and a few words exchanged in both broken English and Mandarin. He handed me a card and asked me to call him. How this is ever going to work, I have no idea, but I’m considering it for the following reasons:

Okay, so according to Panjita this is a bad idea. Communication is the key to a relationship. How can you date someone who you can’t even talk to. But I would like to put it this way. How much of what comes out of a man’s mouth is either relevant or more importantly, true? I’m guessing 10 percent. So if this means I have to listen to 90 percent less bullshit, I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing.

Panjita also raised the significant point that Taiwanese men are not exactly...errm...attractive. Perhaps not. But as a Western woman, let’s look at my options here. My chances of pulling a decent Western man in Europe were relatively low. The population of Western men living in Asia isn’t exactly high. Then there’s the Asian women. They are beautiful, innocent and everywhere. They throw themselves at Western men left right and centre. If I’m going to sleep with a Western man here, I’m probably going to have to pay for it. And I’m even more of a Nazi when it comes to paying for sex (I would never do it) than I am when it comes to paying for cold air.

Today I’m catching the bus. Poor communication and just the randomness of Taiwan will probably lead to me a completely different destination to the one I intend to reach and therefore I am leaving 3 hours early. Therefore I have to leave shortly and so I can’t tell the story of how we came home to find 2 random people hanging out in our apartment (don’t worry, they eventually left after watching our TV, taking a shit in our toilet and worst of all, turning on the air-con). I’ll leave that one to your imagination...

Fred walks through the sliding glass doors to reception. He waves at Frank the security guard. This is a signal for, don’t disturb me, it’s going to be a busy evening. Frank shakes his head in disapproval.

Meanwhile, on the fourteenth floor, the Po show is just starting. Po can’t find anything to wear that isn’t covered in sweat and needs to try on about one hundred different outfits.

Fred settles down on his sofa and gets out the popcorn.