Eggie, I Presume?

By Carrie Chang

From the Taipei alleyways to the Manhattan art galleries, Eggie Jones is a fierce lover of Chinese women who are always wearing rose-colored spectacles from heaven; as Clarissa chases him around the globe, and they share their life together with high EQ candor and spasmodic wit, he says that egg-rolls wont turn him on unless theres a girl to eat with them, creating a love affair to last a lifetime. Like an egg, white on the outside and yellow on the inside, Eggie is sunny-side up to be sure and longs to show his stuff in the realm of love and passion. True to its zany twists and turns, Eggie, I Presume? is an animated twist on race and politics, leaving you homesick for Taipei in a season of bok choy and brocade sentimentality. A must-read for anyone whos ever fallen in love, had bubble-tea upside down, or dreamt of the moon for longer than they should have. Incurable romantics will find this roller-coaster ride to be a sunken treasure in a deliriously clever hot pot, one in a million.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524550509

Carrie Chang

Carrie Chang was born in 1970, in Syracuse, New York. She attended Stanford University, UC-Berkeley and New York University, obtaining her B.A., and M.J. and M.F.A. in English and journalism and creative writing, respectively. She worked as an Asian American journalist in the arts/political field for almost a decade, creating her own magazine, “Monolid,” and lives as a writer/poet in the Bay Area. Her favorite pastimes include swimming and painting.

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Eggie, I Presume

Carrie Chang

Copyright © 2016 by Carrie Chang.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5245-5051-6

                eBook           978-1-5245-5050-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 10/07/2016

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(To my mother, who gave me the green light for fiction)

In a musty alleyway

of raycious cigarette nun cut-outs, of dizzy wild dogs currying favor up the many steps of painted doorways, are the de facto sunshine smiles of would-be monsters and soothing pedants who would be a tad egg-head mysterioso in the sharpie dark of the velveteen Taipei underground city; summer’s svelte arms, crude lingua, and the less-than-cynical asides of popular big street posters criticizing Big Brother antics of the 21st Century, the overseas outpouring of limeade remarks and baleful looks in the secret subway section of the new territory of the gods.

Monty Jones was no interior freak and carried a pumpkin head of an intellectual breather of jokes in his pocket-book sedan. He had worked and lived in Taipei proper for two years now, and spoke the tender dialect of taiyu with beautiful, warped fish-lips, warbling on the topic of everything from pinyin soap to African American toothpaste to mini-corgees dancing in the streets of the new Roma. There was in fact something absolutely humbug in his large western eyes, which went blinko every few seconds, and saw in the eye of a hurricane a thousand excuses not to go home and party in America’s borders. How he ate up the susurrus pink clouds and smog of Asia, inc., as if he were a white ether ghost inhaling words of frail lullabies in his sleep, mumbling phrases of numbing beauty. How society seemed like a pop-up anime postcard in hordy patches, the untapped energies of the flashing East, some beacon of hither and thither.

Monty Jones was not a seedy man, per se, and did strange things in the night, but never went to old houses of sad, disrespect, chum-chum, to party with the creepy whores and the loose dingbats of ill-weather. He was, like many western egg-heads, a cerebral celébre, a nerdie and a feelie who lived in the surly imagination of the pastel pages of his urban newspaper, seeing the plaid digitized streets as his home. Some singular sensation was his glam skeleton hotel, albeit cheap and tawdry, filled with yellow perfumed subway graffiti on the walls, and Hakka-like bellhops decked out in erway green who were caught smoking seasonal reefer at night. And playing taboo.

It was on those terrible, grief-stricken Sundays after wandering the city of Taipei that Monty would pet the weird, wicked yieh goh dogs on the tiny heads and bless them pontifically, warning them of the city’s baleful complex of greed and dirt, of lovely corruption eroding in the coffers of the hearts of these plastic men. I wandered lonely as a cloud, he sang to himself as he tapped the loose trick-bricks which were rusted cherry red; he was hurrying home to his roach-infested hotel, which cost a pretty rusted penny and made his heart quake.

Streams of electric-charged traffic trickled with a syrupy, silver glop with zippy cars of forte wheels and a witch-like procession of disbelievers who would curse and bless him as a most eccentric lao wai foreigner in their midst. Egg-head Monty, that’s what he was, one that was verily humpty-dumpty in his comportment, and always ordered the best beef-noodle soup followed by a post-depressive hangover. Slurp, to be sure.

Of course, Eggie, you have a most marvelous temperament! commented the waitress, Pei-Pei a quirky young Fukinese woman with two phoenix-colored nostrils who found the old white bogeyman to be a lovely eccentric, full of quips and quirks, starts and spurts, possessing some old style elevated language of rubric that was both quasi-pedantic and faintly off-cue. A dialect of true mystery.

Like the old, ratso, beige mottled carpet in the faded, old hotel room, his rambling poetry stunk really, of some plainclothes aesthetics and unusual rants that had been influenced by surreal images of floating confetti junk boats out at tumultuous sea of Hong Kong and Singapore. A disgruntled ex-pat, Monty had been writing poetry and painting and traveling in Asia for the last ten years, and done nothing but contemplate the waxy innards of the tapioca balls in his icy jellies, something which made the other foreigners depressed too.

There had been some petty gossip of his incurable obsession with the ladies of Taipei, his collection of anime comic books, and his tortured shade of love for the sunsets, where he wreaked havoc by quoting Dream of the Red Mansions, under the smog-infested stars, and laughing in karaoke bars, forever the dutiful, mysterious figure called Eggie who had a fetish for Asian women with florid toe-nails painted half-way to the sky.

An incurable romantic, he drank at the most obnoxious beer gardens all night, and waxed melancholy over a cold Tsingdao beer, dreaming of all the things he could carefully camouflage himself into this rapturous, sing-song isle, as if he could sing the nocturnal odes to serve as a cipher; it was that coarse rupture in his throat which he longed to give air too, to summon the gods like a Tu Fu or that Basho.

Lord knew that he couldn’t stand his white skin, which puckered rightly up like some funny synthetic won ton wrapper along his body in the faint blue light of the residue of mystic Aambaland of Buddha, where the tiny bird-like women squinted at him with a hint of incredulous confusion.

Eggie, I presume! Pei-Pei laughed, and giggled outrageously, pretending then to recognize him as one of the great artists of our time. She burdened herself a bit with some deeply cognizant understanding, and glared at him with stealth peacock eyes, dark sepia lashes turning bronze-red in the pools of shady crystalline, mocking him a bit for his non-stop pedantry. She imagined, to her sorrow, that she had seen the man in some raggedy magazine somewhere, holding forth on some nonsense about eastern mores, numerous hedonistic tribes, and all the egotistical claptrap that was in his head. He was a virtual superman of his own making, a real live white man disguised as a quasi-Chinese. Sheer genius, is what they called him. A boondoggle of a super-man, to be sure.

Could it have been mere serendipity, the case of her meeting him like this on a lonely Friday night at the famed Hotel Shanghai in the middle of the city, their locking limpid eyes over kung pao sour fish and fried snow peas in a dish? The man named Eggie had the very nerve to address her in formal mandarin, querying her now and then in willowy dialects hithero unknown to any lao wei she’d ever met before, making her stutter. There was something decidedly otherworldly about this Egg who was no Chicken.

She had served a hideous plethora of boiled white rice and tea, to many foreigners before, Eggs, she called them, white American and European counselors and intellectuals who had craved the cultcha to a degree of subterranean fetish, some being Easter Eggs, hard-boiled, over-easy, sunny-side up, and scrambled, to name a few salty types of men and women who were white on the outside and yellow on the inside.

They were indeed lost in the rambling blue ocean of perverts and pseudo-saints, in that cave of vermillion mist. It was the subterranean charm about Eggie that made him a fat, sunny-side creature of no little denouement in her heart, a drip-head that was by no means as subversive as his naughty bleached cohorts who filled the room, looking nervous. His wan, blue eyes which had a servile, magical glimmer to them floated hoveringly above his button nose, a button of a dastardly thing now presenting itself like an islet of neon frog-lace.

Little did she know how much Monty, the famous westerner longed to stay at the table all night and practice jilted mandarin with her, to test his verbal mettle with her native beauty, and speak with a quiddity of joy about how he liked this and that swampy bean congee soup or that stinky box tofu on the menu, and how he preferred the mosquito spit of ecstasy hot pot with a screaming fervor, etc.

Pei-Pei sneered wildly, and demanded that Eggie give her a precious sort of trinket-o. Why not? Wasn’t that the name of the game that made most of these safari Eggs the most wonderful doobingers of their time? She had, in her truss, a score of turtle vases, red paisley Hermes scarves, and other tiddly-wink games she had received from a score of fetishinis on the circuit; she looked at him with high expectations, as do provocateurs blush when they are presented a blue rose et al.

When all Mr. Eggie offered was a big unctuous sneeze, she shuddered and passed him a lovely cucumber sandwich, which glommed to his stomach with much ado and cheap idolatry, sending hurricanes and shivers down her spine. Surely, here was an old saintly badger which could speak of the sterling secrets of the stars, terrorize you