My dying cousin called and said she wanted me to find her a husband. I am not a matchmaker or well-connected or even in a relationship myself. In fact, I have never been in a relationship except with my pet turtle when I was in sixth grade (don’t ask) and with the girl who kicked me in the balls the day she broke up with me. So I’m not being modest when I say my cousin is counting on the wrong man. But I understand why she chose me to help her, because for a while now, I’ve been telling people about my livestream, which I broadcast from my fabulously decked-out van as I drive around Taipei after my shift at Love Love Nursing Home. I have been stuck in this dead-end job for 10 years since I graduated with a useless theater degree (everyone from my grandmother to the acting teacher who cried at my graduation told me so), and this job with the old people and the dying people is killing me softly as I grow fat. One day, when I couldn’t be more depressed and sat on the bathroom floor for hours after spilling ramen all over my nurse scrubs, and even then no one at the nursing home looked for me until Mama Yu wetted her diaper, I decided that enough is enough and I have got to do something with my life. I pawned the jade turtle I inherited from my grandma (not the same turtle I had a relationship with) and bought this shitty old van and all this audio equipment from this guy who was always hanging out at the temple across from the nursing home selling shit he stole, and I started livestreaming my show Love Love Love Advice.

You see, if you want something, you have to pretend that you already have it. If you want to be someone, you have to act like you are already that someone. I got this idea from Tony Robbins, who was big in Taiwan for a while (anything big in Taiwan was only big for a while) and inspired all these imitators, but Tony is the real deal. The Americans. They are the real deal. The Taiwanese motivators, they don’t really believe in what they say. I mean, it’s hard to really believe when you have been cheated out of so many things so many times, our whole country has. Like the WHO membership, even when we beat the virus early and fast and came up with the idea of staging baseball stadiums with mannequins as game audiences. But the Americans? They never get cheated out of anything. They grab their dreams by the balls and squeeze the last bit of hope out of them like cane juice. Oh yeah.

So I listen to Tony on my way to Love Love Nursing Home and back, and when I clean from ward to ward, and during lunch eating instant ramen. Basically any time I can. And I believe. If I want to be a love expert loved by all women, then I must act and speak like I am already a love expert loved by all women. Every morning I put on my tiger shirt with a big tiger head printed on the front, the tiger’s mouth stretched into a grimace by my gut, and I roar at myself in the mirror. Then I climb into my van (note to self, reduce 50 kg so the seatbelt will close), position my phone on the dashboard mount, check the ring light, and go live while driving through Taipei’s traffic to give my viewers advice on how to find love.

Hence my cousin. She is dying from breast cancer that has gone everywhere in her body, and she believes that I actually have viewers, when so far my only regular viewer is the loan shark/thief, and only because he wants me to borrow money to “expand my platform.” Dying makes one credulous. You toss a straw to a drowning man, and he’ll grab it. I know this because of my job. If I were not basically a nice person, I could have made a lot of money scamming grandmas and grandpas.

“You’re early!” my aunt growls in the intercom when I ring the bell. She says it like my being early is both a crime and a gift…

(Continued…in upcoming short story collection “Someone Dies in Every Story”)