If

by Barbara Yien

If you are a successful Taiwanese businessman, you might install a glass floor in the living room and watch koi splash beneath your feet. You might shuffle to the bathroom on a drafty winter’s night and bless the heated, padded toilet seats. You might have feng-shui-optimized chandeliers.

If you are a successful Taiwanese businessman, you are probably an engineer. You scored so high on your entrance exams your parents forgave you for being ugly as a child. You grew handsome, you met a sassy tourism major from Kaohsiung, you lost your virginity to her at the Lakeshore Hotel, where there is no lake and there is no shore, but the complimentary buffet is top-notch.

If you are a successful Taiwanese businessman, you might not spend much time in Taiwan. You might sip XO on junkets to China, but not on China Airlines, which doesn’t fly there. Aside from Taiwanese, you speak Mandarin, Japanese, German, good English—enough to tell a dirty joke, enough to bark at your scrawny son, Our military is in trouble if they all look like you.

If you are a successful Taiwanese businessman, you might try to hide it so that the gangsters don’t come after you. You might drive a Toyota Corolla, but do up the interior real nice like a Benz. You might wear a diamond on the inside of your wedding ring.

If you are a successful Taiwanese businessman, you don’t let 900 ballistic missiles aimed at your beach home faze you. You harbor opinions re: whether the president staged his own assassination attempt, but mostly you keep these to yourself. You take pride in the fact that casino owners in Vegas have remodeled their lobbies specifically with you in mind.

If you are a successful Taiwanese businessman, you eat really well.

If you are a successful Taiwanese businessman, you will reach old age and die peacefully in your sleep. Your survivors will buy paper cell phones and paper cigars and burn them in your honor. Outside, the reeds will sway in a humid breeze, the breeze will carry a whiff of sugar cane, and you will be remembered, having lived a fortunate life, having tasted some measure of sweetness in this world.