It's Saturday night and I'm having steak and a glass of red at LeBlanc, accompanied by Angie, full-time student and part-time bartender/hostess at Bar 9 in Zhongshan. Angie is Mongolian, and she's here with me because I reported seeing another Mongolian at LeBlanc, and she came here with me on the off chance that this Other Mongolian was around. Angie's shift at Bar 9 starts at 8, so we've budgeted two hours for wine and steak and Mongolian sightings before heading over there.
Sure enough, the Other Mongolian is working tonight, which doesn’t sound like it should be particularly thrilling, but it is, for both of us. I ask Angie how many Mongolians live here in Taipei, and she thinks there are maybe a few hundred. People are always looking for connection.
Soon, we’re in a cab, and Angie is changing and putting on makeup for her shift while I hold her earrings.
Working with her tonight will be Zoe, an art student with the same sort of employment arrangement. I’ve never seen her wear anything but black, and I even suggested that she dress up in bright colors for Halloween, which she thought was a hilarious idea. Nonetheless, when Halloween came around, she was dressed as a witch, all black, black makeup.
As the cab rolls along, we’re talking about Zoe, and Angie says, “I’ve never seen Zoe flirt with a man, or show interest to anyone in the bar.” The cab pulls onto Linsen North Road, and we get out about a block from the bar. “She’s definitely kind of a cool customer. I think she might have been depressed at some point,” I say. We’re standing on the corner now.
“I think everyone my age feels that, from time to time.”
“Really? Everyone? Do you yourself feel depressed right now?”
“Not ‘right now.’ It’s like sometimes you look in the mirror, and think, it would just be so much easier not to be alive.” I obviously look concerned. “But, no, not right now, tonight is fine.”
The area around Linsen North Road is a bit of a sleazy area, or more accurately an area that was previously sleazy, but which has cleaned itself up slightly over the years. More like “seedy” now. We’re a bit early, so Angie heads in for her shift, and I walk down to 7-11 to kill time before everything opens. I usually reach the bar on foot from Zhongshan Station, and, for the first few months or so, I'd be solicited for sex (“massage”) about a block from the bar by an 80-something guy who, for lack of a better description, looks like he'd been previously and recently… dead, in an unhygienic immoral sort of way.
I started with “no, thank you” and then graduated to “nope” and eventually to just walking by. After at least 20 times of being rejected, he stopped asking me, although he has some underlings, and it took a few more weeks for them to get the message. At one point, I went out of town for about two months, and when I came back, Previously Dead Guy had forgotten about me and the whole cycle started over again.
Bar 9 is not sleazy. Just slightly seedy, in a way that makes it feel welcoming. Like many bars in the area, it caters to Japanese businessmen traveling for work, and the staff receives a bonus if they learn Japanese and can pass a certain proficiency level on an exam like the JLPT. There’s also a healthy collection of regulars, of which I am one, and a regular customer can buy a bottle, which the staff will label and put away for you, and you can drink from it every time you come back.
If whiskey is the only thing you’re looking for, then Bar 9 is probably not your best choice, but they do have a small collection of nice whiskies curated by Joseph, the bar’s manager. I keep a bottle of the Kavalan Port Cask at all times, and share it with anyone who comes in and seems Whiskey Curious and doesn’t know what to order.
Bar 9 is definitely the place where I go to get a little tipsy, and if the staff is not paying attention to me, I pull out my phone and start texting my exes. And crushes, and, let's face it, anyone and everyone I've ever found attractive or even any kind of closeness with. It’s so embarrassing. Heart emoji? Survivable, could be platonic, right? “I want to have a baby with you heart emoji heart emoji heart emoji.” Just kill me. Where does that come from? I don’t want that, I really don’t.
Whiskey does not do much to prevent these texts from being formulated or sent, and it's also not a memory aid. So the Whiskey Life can involve some pretty unpleasant surprises the next morning when the previous night's text messages are reviewed. More than once, I've woken up and congratulated myself for not sending anything too mortifying, only to find upon further review that I had in fact sent a few.
I’ve shared my angst over this unfortunate habit with the Bar 9 staff, so they pay pretty close attention to me. Zoe, in particular, keeps watch on my phone and what I’m doing with it, literally looking over my shoulder as I’m typing and telling me to stop if I’m texting something I shouldn’t be. It’s an invasion of privacy, but I appreciate it.
A bottle of whiskey is about 700 ml, and a shot is about 35 ml, so that’s about 20 shots in a bottle. On a night when I am being closely supervised, which means that I am directing my attention not to my phone but to less embarrassing pursuits like drinking Kavalan and smoking mint cigarettes (which I don’t even like), the staff and I can get through a whole bottle in a single night. Not all the time, but sometimes. And given that they are ostensibly working, I think it’s safe to assume that I’m the one responsible for getting through most of it, not to mention other whiskies I might try before returning to my old faithful (I’m currently partial to the Kavalan Sherry Cask, or even a good American bourbon like Blanton’s).
It’s a lot, and I do worry sometimes that I may be an alcoholic. I mean, I might be. I’ve never passed out in the street or anything. I hold down a job. But I did send “fuck doll heart emoji” to Lisa (not her real name), and, as I mentioned, I occasionally don’t remember texts like these until the next day.
When I was a kid, I remember coming across a test on the back inside cover of a comic book, Are You an Alcoholic? Why this was in a kid’s comic book, I can’t say, and I can't remember exactly what questions were on the test (and I don't want to Google it or I'll start getting ads on Instagram and Twitter inquiring as to whether or not I have a problem, which will cause me to worry more about having a problem, which I know is one of the questions on the test). I can reconstruct a modern version pretty easily, and the results are not comforting. Are all of your friends bartenders? Uh huh. Do you drink daily? No, but only because I am sometimes prevented from it by obligations outside of my control. I’m a bit neurotic about this, and, as I mentioned, worrying about it is one of the signs you may have a problem. So, for the time being, I’ll assume I have some sort of problem. Whether the problem is addiction or the problem is chronic loneliness, I can’t say.
---
Miya was an immigrant from Yokohama, and he ran Bar Blue Bird, a Japanese-style cocktail bar near Zhongxiao Fuxing station, specializing in whiskey, and also in fruit-based cocktails of the kind you’d get at a place like Bar Mori in Ginza, Tokyo. It was a great bar, and Miya was a masterful bartender. As he’d deliver his drinks, he’d always say, “thank you for waiting,” even if he had taken less than 30 seconds to grab a bottle and pour a dram.
We arrived in Taiwan at about the same time, and I found Blue Bird shortly after it opened. Many nights were slow, and we'd sit in the bar, drink and talk about whiskey, and play board games like Othello. Never play a board game with someone whose job it is to sit in a bar all day. I simply couldn't beat him, although he was an extremely good sportsman about it, and always told me that I was on the cusp of a major breakthrough in my playing skills. “That was a brilliant move,” he’d say, “I am in real trouble now,” only to turn the tide a few moves later. One time, I managed to play him to a draw, and it felt like winning the world series.
We became friends, my first real friend as an immigrant to Taipei. Eventually, I’d learn that, although I never saw Miya take anything more than a sip of whiskey when he was on duty, he did hit it pretty hard on his day off. There was the time we went to the sushi bar, had a few bottles of sake, moved to an izakaya up the road with our sushi chefs after work, and Miya ended up passing out in the rain on the road. I was on antibiotics at the time and I missed the worst of it, but he told me the next day that he was found and resuscitated by some Taiwanese gentlemen, who took all the money out of his wallet but left him 500 bucks for a cab ride home. I didn’t go out with him every Monday, but we went out enough times for me to see that the Sushi Night Adventure was not a one-off occurrence.
At the end of last year, I went home for Christmas, and, when I returned to Taipei at the beginning of 2019, Bar Blue Bird was closed. This was odd. Even more odd, was a message left on the bar’s facebook page that said something to the effect of "I have to close the bar for a while. Apologies for the inconvenience." I sent a text message to Miya but it was left on read.
There was a night where the fire inspector came and cited him for not having the requisite amount of fire extinguishers. There was also an incident at another bar in the area where the liquor control board had found some bottles that hadn't been brought into Taiwan by way of official channels. Blue Bird certainly had some of those. But neither a fire code or customs violation seemed like enough to shut a bar down, so I started asking around to see if anyone knew anything about what was going on. No one did.
Until one night on a Wednesday in late January at this time, right before the Chinese New Year, I stopped in at Bar 9. I should mention that it was because of Blue Bird that the Whiskey Life at Bar 9 was introduced to me, since it was at Blue Bird that I met Siena, Bar 9’s owner. On this night, when I arrived in Zhongshan, Siena was there, and when she saw me, she sat next to me at the bar and put her hand on my shoulder.
"I'm afraid I have some terrible news.”
On a Tuesday just after Jan 1, Siena stopped by Blue Bird and found it closed, which she found odd but not unprecedented. The next evening, she went back, and the bar was still closed. Sensing something was wrong, she called the police. Miya was inside.
I stepped out back onto the street and began walking, struggling to compose myself. My friend was gone. Was it an accident, a medical emergency? I was fairly certain it couldn't have been suicide. I realized I didn’t want to know. Or, rather, I knew what I needed to know. I walked in a large circle around the neighborhood, my vision impaired by tears. I moved quickly, and everyone, even Previously Dead Guy, left me alone. After a long walk, past the bars named C’est La Vie, or Mariposa, or 9mm, I composed myself and returned to my seat.
"What a great man he was,” and we poured whiskey and we drank to him.
I grabbed a pencil from behind the bar, turned over the label on the bottle in front of me that the staff had attached to identify it, and wrote the name of a friend of mine from the US, along with her number. My emergency contact info. If anything happens to me, or if I don't come around and you can't find me, call this number. My friend is a doctor, she’s like family to me. And then I poured another whiskey for Siena, for Joseph, for myself, and we drank to our friend again.
--
In Da’an, there’s a bar named Kashoku that specializes in exotic, difficult to find whiskies. It’s a sort of “speakeasy,” so the first experience that most people have there is the feeling that they are in the wrong place. Then, Jeremy will come out and roll open the metal gate that is protecting an upstairs shop, and he’ll lead you downstairs to his collection of amaros, bitters, whiskies from the U.S. and Japan, and a huge collection of bottles from the Scotch Malt Whiskey Society.
These bottles are single cask, cask strength, and the identities of the distilleries from which they come have been obscured. The feeling of drinking from these bottles is what it must be like to visit a distillery in Scotland, to not know exactly where you are, and to draw from a cask and try what’s inside for the first time. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s mediocre, and sometimes it’s awful or harsh. And, yes, every now and then, it is sublime.
But the thing about those bottles is this: there are not very many of them, and when the whiskey in that bottle is gone, you can be pretty darn sure that it is gone from the world forever, and that you, and whoever you were with, were one of the few people ever to enjoy it. So enjoy every drop, and savor the moment when you drank it, the place you are sitting, and the people you are drinking with. That’s the essence of Whiskey Life.
Bar Blue Bird has reopened in the same location. Siena and some of the regulars own it now, and it has been renamed to Bar Miya. Some of Miya’s bottles remain, half full, ready to drink.
*For the Chinese version please check: 美國移民在台灣：我的「威士忌人生」
執行編輯：邱佑寧
核稿編輯：林欣蘋
