Short Story: The Dog Who Cried Ah Wei
The Dog Who Cried “Ah Wei”
News always traveled fast when something unusual happened in Taipei. In a small but popular pet store outside the Tung Hwa Nightmarket, a brown and white Jack Russell Terrier puppy, only a few weeks old, became an instant celebrity.
Instead of whimpering, crying, howling, or yipping in a regular fashion like all the other pups in the store or the rest of its brown and white litter, this puppy screamed, “Ah Wei!” loudly at passersby from its cage. Sometimes it was just “Ah, ow, ow,” but quite consistently it screamed clearly both syllables, “Ah Wei,” dragging the “Wei” sound long as if it were calling for a person named Ah Wei.
Ah Wei was a common nickname for someone with the character “Wei” in his name, so there were Ah Weis everywhere.
“I bet someone named Ah Wei will buy the dog,” the owner said to his daughter.
An attractive young news reporter came to interview the owner of the pet store and capture footage of the puppy for a human interest segment in the local news.
“Ah Wei, your dog is looking for you!” the reporter spoke into the camera while squatting, as gracefully, as she could, beside the dog cage.
A little brown and white terrier moved around its cage frantically, belting out, “Ah, ow, Ah Wei!”
Public response to the brief video was so enthusiastic that soon the clip “Ah Wei, your dog is looking for you!” went viral on the internet, and the national news rebroadcast the same footage of, “Ah Wei’s puppy,” in the six o’clock news right before the weather forecast.
Most of the viewers in Taiwan merely found Ah Wei’s puppy amusing, but one man named Ah Wei heard the puppy’s desperate, plaintive voice in the middle of eating his red-cooked pork dinner bento, and choked on his food. That puppy sounded exactly like Shasha, his unstable and needy ex-girlfriend. Shasha had threatened so many times to kill herself that by the time nobody believed her anymore, she actually did it. Ah Wei choked so hard that tears came to his eyes as he doubled over and coughed up pieces of rice and ground pork.
It didn’t make any sense, and Ah Wei did not like to be superstitious, but he had the feeling that that specific puppy was his ex-girlfriend. Shasha, reincarnated into a nervous puppy, how appropriate. In theory it was less scary than Shasha becoming a vengeful, suicide ghost. As a real person Shasha had been scary enough, throwing fits, screeching like a crazy person through her messy curtain of waist-length hair. And he could not deny that he felt responsible for her death. Pretty much everybody who knew her did—everyone who had told themselves, when she sent out her last pleas for help, or threats of suicide, that she would never really do it.
“If you don’t come I’m going to slit my wrists right here in the bathtub. I’m going to take the elevator to the top floor and jump right off the balcony,” Shasha said in her last telephone conversation with Ah Wei.
“Please don’t call me like this anymore. I am at work. Do you want me to lose my job? Stop making trouble for me,” Ah Wei said, and hung up.
The next day one of Shasha’s few girlfriends called Ah Wei with the news: Shasha was found dead in a pool of murky red water in the cracked bathtub of her one-bedroom apartment, with a suicide note. The friend did not see what the note said.
“The police took it, and they want to ask you questions,” she said.
“What questions? She didn’t accuse me of anything, did she? I…I don’t know what to say, it’s not that I didn’t care for her, she was just so…” Ah Wei could not finish his sentence.
“Anyways, she is dead, so there’s no need to talk about her like that. I gave your number to the police, and you should be expecting a call from them soon.” The friend hung up.
After the call, Ah Wei paced his living room, flicking the television from news channel to news channel all evening. Shasha’s death was not in the Taiwan Society News. No calls, either.
The next day he called in sick at work and monitored the news channels like an obsessive-compulsive, but still, no reports of suicides, and again his phone was silent. Finally, when he was in the middle of a meeting at work the third day, a local number flashed on the screen of his cellphone.
“I have to get this.” He apologized to his colleagues and left the conference room, where the company was holding their quarterly meeting.
“This is the Taipei City police,” a polite male voice said. “Is this Mr. Cheng Shon Wei?”
“Yes, it is,” Ah Wei said, trying to steady his voice.
“Would you mind coming by the station today or tomorrow? We want to get a statement from you regarding Miss Tsai Shasha.”
“Alright,” Ah Wei said.
“What would be a good time for you? We are open at seven in the morning,” the man said.
“I can stop by tomorrow at seven,” Ah Wei said.
The next day, he stood outside the police station. Some old people passed by during their morning walks, vigorously swinging their hands to get their heart rates up. A stray dog wandered by, avoiding eye contact. There were people inside the office but a man did not come to unlock the door until 7:08 AM.
“I am here for a statement, Officer, sir.” Ah Wei wondered whether to salute or bow, but when the officer gave him a blank look, he added, “It’s about Tsai Shasha.”
“Who’s that?”
“She killed herself.”
“Ah, the bathtub suicide. Have a seat here,” the officer said, pointing at a blue plastic chair. “I’ll get my colleague who’s working on this.”
Ah Wei waited for half an hour before another officer told him to follow him to a desk with a computer. The interrogation, if one could call it that, lasted three hours. Not because there were lots of questions, because they were few and simple, such as where do you live, what do you do, what was your relationship to the deceased, has she ever displayed inclinations towards suicide (yes) and why didn’t you do anything about it (I don’t know I’m so sorry), but the police officer was the slowest typist Ah Wei ever saw in his life. The poor man could not find the phonetic symbols he needed on the keyboard and scanned the entire keyboard slowly with his eyes looking for each consonant or vowel and then phonetic accent before doing it all over again for the next character. After the lengthy ordeal, the officer found “control” and “p” and looked pleased as the printer behind him spat out a one page statement.
“Pleased read this over and sign at the bottom, where it says signature and stamp,” the officer said. “Please use this ink pad to print your thumbprint beside your name.”
Ah Wei accepted the statement along with the ink pad. He wondered who else had stamped his or her thumb on this pad before him.
“While you do that, I’ll go get something to show you. The chief was debating whether we should show it to you, but it might shed some light on the motive,” the man said, and walked into another office.
Another half hour later, he emerged pinching between three fingers a clear plastic bag containing a note. It was Shasha’s suicide note.
It said, in her always surprisingly neat handwriting, Ah Wei, See you in the next lifetime. I will find you..
“I…Shasha liked to be dramatic, like when she threatened to kill herself so many times,” Ah Wei whispered.
“Well, she didn’t just threaten, she did it.”
Then Ah Wei saw the dog in the news. If he said this to other people, they would probably think he was crazy, but he believed this dog was Shasha, and she had indeed “found” him. He should have felt frightened and haunted and moved out of the country, but instead, he began to miss Shasha. Should he go and buy the dog? How could he, an average, dime-a-dozen engineer in a Taiwanese computer software company, convince a pet shop owner to sell him the famous Ah Wei dog?
The next day was Saturday, so Ah Wei, dressed in his newest jeans and a nice shirt, headed for the pet store near the nightmarket. It was not yet noon when he got off the bus at the entrance of the market; the morning market venders were mostly gone or packing up their last guavas and tomatoes into a truck or plastic crate tied to the back of a motorcycle. The clothing and shoe stores still had their metal gates locked.
Ah Wei bought a cup of soy bean milk from a smiling old woman at a breakfast stand and walked towards the pet store. It looked exactly the way it did on television: a neon dog bone and neon text beneath it promised, Happy Pets.
Somehow he had expected a crowd there—cameras, film crew, a queue of people waiting to see the Ah Wei dog. But there was nobody outside the store, and the inside of the store looked quiet, too, without a customer in sight. Ah Wei wasn’t sure if it was open, but when he pushed the door a bell rang pleasantly, inviting him in. Before him was a long rack stocked with leashes, toys, treats, dog clothes, bells, collars, cat litter, treats, and other pet items. Along either side of the wall and in the window were kittens and puppies in cages, most of them sleeping. A young girl of about high school age sat behind the counter, a textbook open before her, pink highlighter in hand.
“Welcome,” she said, looking up from her book.
“Hi,” Ah Wei said. “Do you still have the dog that talks?”
“Yes.” The girl walked out from behind the counter with a smile. “He’s quite the celebrity.”
She led Ah Wei to one of the cages, where the famous puppy was sleeping, one ear flopped away from his face. The price tag on the cage read $40,000 NT, not unreasonable for a purebred puppy in Taiwan.
“I’m surprised you haven’t sold him yet,” Ah Wei said.
“You know, I am, too,” the girl admitted. “We’ve had so many people come in here who all want to see this puppy, and some of them did buy a dog or a cat, but nobody bought this one.”
“Is there something wrong with it?” Ah Wei frowned.
“Oh, no, no, not at all. My dad was saying, people will watch a video or come to our store to look at the dog in person, just to see if it really cries Ah Wei and to tell their friends that they saw the Ah Wei dog, but when it comes down to it, nobody actually wants a dog that screams Ah Wei, even if that person’s name is Ah Wei.”
“My name is Ah Wei.”
“Really?” the girl said. “Then do you want to buy this puppy? Maybe it’s fate!”
“Maybe it is.”
It seemed unnecessary to share Shasha’s story now.
“I can open his cage so you can play with him,” the girl said.
While they were talking the little terrier woke up and moved towards them, whimpering and panting. The girl lifted a latch and grabbed the puppy under its front legs.
“This nice man’s name is Ah Wei, do you want to say Ah Wei to him?” the girl asked the dog.
It struggled in her arms to get closer to Ah Wei, sniffing eagerly. The girl handed the puppy over and it immediately settled in his arms and licked his face and neck.
“He likes you!” the girl said. “Maybe he is destined to be your dog.”
“Maybe,” Ah Wei said, knowing he could not let go of it now.
Half an hour later, laden with a Jack Russell Terrier puppy (complete with pedigree papers) in a brand new kennel, two bags of necessities including bowls, puppy food, leash, collar, dog treats, and other odds and ends, Ah Wei hailed a taxi. The dog whimpered and cried all the way home, but did not say “Ah Wei.”
At night, Ah Wei put the puppy in its kennel and went to his bedroom. The terrier slumped down and whimpered.
“You can’t sleep in the bedroom until you’re potty-trained,” Ah Wei said, and went to his room.
In the middle of the night, Ah Wei woke up with his backside covered in sweat. In his dream, the wet and bloody ghost of Shasha was screaming his name, over and over again as it floated closer and closer to him. He woke up just as the ghost reached for his neck with red talons, and realized that in real life the puppy was screaming his name. He went to the living room and saw the dog scrambling around inside the kennel, crying “Ah Wei! Ah Wei!”
He moved the dog to the living room, as far as possible, but it grew even more frantic, ramming its little body against the cage, making it rattle noisily against tile, all the while screaming, “Ah Wei!” Ah Wei sighed and moved the kennel into his bedroom.
“It’s okay, Shasha,” he said. “You found me. You don’t have to haunt me anymore.”
The pup slumped down and grunted a few times.
After that night, Ah Wei never had another nightmare about Shasha, dead or alive.
He gave the terrier an unremarkable name, Chocolate, after the brown patterns on its body and ears, and he grew up to be a quiet but energetic dog. Ah Wei could not teach him to fetch, sit, lie down, or do any tricks, however many dog books he read and treats he bribed him with. Clickers, rewards, being a pack leader, none of it worked. Chocolate had only one trick: in the middle of the night, or when upset and looking for his owner, he ran around and cried, “Ah, ow, ow, Ah Wei!”
News always traveled fast when something unusual happened in Taipei. In a small but popular pet store outside the Tung Hwa Nightmarket, a brown and white Jack Russell Terrier puppy, only a few weeks old, became an instant celebrity.
Instead of whimpering, crying, howling, or yipping in a regular fashion like all the other pups in the store or the rest of its brown and white litter, this puppy screamed, “Ah Wei!” loudly at passersby from its cage. Sometimes it was just “Ah, ow, ow,” but quite consistently it screamed clearly both syllables, “Ah Wei,” dragging the “Wei” sound long as if it were calling for a person named Ah Wei.
Ah Wei was a common nickname for someone with the character “Wei” in his name, so there were Ah Weis everywhere.
“I bet someone named Ah Wei will buy the dog,” the owner said to his daughter.
An attractive young news reporter came to interview the owner of the pet store and capture footage of the puppy for a human interest segment in the local news.
“Ah Wei, your dog is looking for you!” the reporter spoke into the camera while squatting, as gracefully, as she could, beside the dog cage.
A little brown and white terrier moved around its cage frantically, belting out, “Ah, ow, Ah Wei!”
Public response to the brief video was so enthusiastic that soon the clip “Ah Wei, your dog is looking for you!” went viral on the internet, and the national news rebroadcast the same footage of, “Ah Wei’s puppy,” in the six o’clock news right before the weather forecast.
Most of the viewers in Taiwan merely found Ah Wei’s puppy amusing, but one man named Ah Wei heard the puppy’s desperate, plaintive voice in the middle of eating his red-cooked pork dinner bento, and choked on his food. That puppy sounded exactly like Shasha, his unstable and needy ex-girlfriend. Shasha had threatened so many times to kill herself that by the time nobody believed her anymore, she actually did it. Ah Wei choked so hard that tears came to his eyes as he doubled over and coughed up pieces of rice and ground pork.
It didn’t make any sense, and Ah Wei did not like to be superstitious, but he had the feeling that that specific puppy was his ex-girlfriend. Shasha, reincarnated into a nervous puppy, how appropriate. In theory it was less scary than Shasha becoming a vengeful, suicide ghost. As a real person Shasha had been scary enough, throwing fits, screeching like a crazy person through her messy curtain of waist-length hair. And he could not deny that he felt responsible for her death. Pretty much everybody who knew her did—everyone who had told themselves, when she sent out her last pleas for help, or threats of suicide, that she would never really do it.
“If you don’t come I’m going to slit my wrists right here in the bathtub. I’m going to take the elevator to the top floor and jump right off the balcony,” Shasha said in her last telephone conversation with Ah Wei.
“Please don’t call me like this anymore. I am at work. Do you want me to lose my job? Stop making trouble for me,” Ah Wei said, and hung up.
The next day one of Shasha’s few girlfriends called Ah Wei with the news: Shasha was found dead in a pool of murky red water in the cracked bathtub of her one-bedroom apartment, with a suicide note. The friend did not see what the note said.
“The police took it, and they want to ask you questions,” she said.
“What questions? She didn’t accuse me of anything, did she? I…I don’t know what to say, it’s not that I didn’t care for her, she was just so…” Ah Wei could not finish his sentence.
“Anyways, she is dead, so there’s no need to talk about her like that. I gave your number to the police, and you should be expecting a call from them soon.” The friend hung up.
After the call, Ah Wei paced his living room, flicking the television from news channel to news channel all evening. Shasha’s death was not in the Taiwan Society News. No calls, either.
The next day he called in sick at work and monitored the news channels like an obsessive-compulsive, but still, no reports of suicides, and again his phone was silent. Finally, when he was in the middle of a meeting at work the third day, a local number flashed on the screen of his cellphone.
“I have to get this.” He apologized to his colleagues and left the conference room, where the company was holding their quarterly meeting.
“This is the Taipei City police,” a polite male voice said. “Is this Mr. Cheng Shon Wei?”
“Yes, it is,” Ah Wei said, trying to steady his voice.
“Would you mind coming by the station today or tomorrow? We want to get a statement from you regarding Miss Tsai Shasha.”
“Alright,” Ah Wei said.
“What would be a good time for you? We are open at seven in the morning,” the man said.
“I can stop by tomorrow at seven,” Ah Wei said.
The next day, he stood outside the police station. Some old people passed by during their morning walks, vigorously swinging their hands to get their heart rates up. A stray dog wandered by, avoiding eye contact. There were people inside the office but a man did not come to unlock the door until 7:08 AM.
“I am here for a statement, Officer, sir.” Ah Wei wondered whether to salute or bow, but when the officer gave him a blank look, he added, “It’s about Tsai Shasha.”
“Who’s that?”
“She killed herself.”
“Ah, the bathtub suicide. Have a seat here,” the officer said, pointing at a blue plastic chair. “I’ll get my colleague who’s working on this.”
Ah Wei waited for half an hour before another officer told him to follow him to a desk with a computer. The interrogation, if one could call it that, lasted three hours. Not because there were lots of questions, because they were few and simple, such as where do you live, what do you do, what was your relationship to the deceased, has she ever displayed inclinations towards suicide (yes) and why didn’t you do anything about it (I don’t know I’m so sorry), but the police officer was the slowest typist Ah Wei ever saw in his life. The poor man could not find the phonetic symbols he needed on the keyboard and scanned the entire keyboard slowly with his eyes looking for each consonant or vowel and then phonetic accent before doing it all over again for the next character. After the lengthy ordeal, the officer found “control” and “p” and looked pleased as the printer behind him spat out a one page statement.
“Pleased read this over and sign at the bottom, where it says signature and stamp,” the officer said. “Please use this ink pad to print your thumbprint beside your name.”
Ah Wei accepted the statement along with the ink pad. He wondered who else had stamped his or her thumb on this pad before him.
“While you do that, I’ll go get something to show you. The chief was debating whether we should show it to you, but it might shed some light on the motive,” the man said, and walked into another office.
Another half hour later, he emerged pinching between three fingers a clear plastic bag containing a note. It was Shasha’s suicide note.
It said, in her always surprisingly neat handwriting, Ah Wei, See you in the next lifetime. I will find you..
“I…Shasha liked to be dramatic, like when she threatened to kill herself so many times,” Ah Wei whispered.
“Well, she didn’t just threaten, she did it.”
Then Ah Wei saw the dog in the news. If he said this to other people, they would probably think he was crazy, but he believed this dog was Shasha, and she had indeed “found” him. He should have felt frightened and haunted and moved out of the country, but instead, he began to miss Shasha. Should he go and buy the dog? How could he, an average, dime-a-dozen engineer in a Taiwanese computer software company, convince a pet shop owner to sell him the famous Ah Wei dog?
The next day was Saturday, so Ah Wei, dressed in his newest jeans and a nice shirt, headed for the pet store near the nightmarket. It was not yet noon when he got off the bus at the entrance of the market; the morning market venders were mostly gone or packing up their last guavas and tomatoes into a truck or plastic crate tied to the back of a motorcycle. The clothing and shoe stores still had their metal gates locked.
Ah Wei bought a cup of soy bean milk from a smiling old woman at a breakfast stand and walked towards the pet store. It looked exactly the way it did on television: a neon dog bone and neon text beneath it promised, Happy Pets.
Somehow he had expected a crowd there—cameras, film crew, a queue of people waiting to see the Ah Wei dog. But there was nobody outside the store, and the inside of the store looked quiet, too, without a customer in sight. Ah Wei wasn’t sure if it was open, but when he pushed the door a bell rang pleasantly, inviting him in. Before him was a long rack stocked with leashes, toys, treats, dog clothes, bells, collars, cat litter, treats, and other pet items. Along either side of the wall and in the window were kittens and puppies in cages, most of them sleeping. A young girl of about high school age sat behind the counter, a textbook open before her, pink highlighter in hand.
“Welcome,” she said, looking up from her book.
“Hi,” Ah Wei said. “Do you still have the dog that talks?”
“Yes.” The girl walked out from behind the counter with a smile. “He’s quite the celebrity.”
She led Ah Wei to one of the cages, where the famous puppy was sleeping, one ear flopped away from his face. The price tag on the cage read $40,000 NT, not unreasonable for a purebred puppy in Taiwan.
“I’m surprised you haven’t sold him yet,” Ah Wei said.
“You know, I am, too,” the girl admitted. “We’ve had so many people come in here who all want to see this puppy, and some of them did buy a dog or a cat, but nobody bought this one.”
“Is there something wrong with it?” Ah Wei frowned.
“Oh, no, no, not at all. My dad was saying, people will watch a video or come to our store to look at the dog in person, just to see if it really cries Ah Wei and to tell their friends that they saw the Ah Wei dog, but when it comes down to it, nobody actually wants a dog that screams Ah Wei, even if that person’s name is Ah Wei.”
“My name is Ah Wei.”
“Really?” the girl said. “Then do you want to buy this puppy? Maybe it’s fate!”
“Maybe it is.”
It seemed unnecessary to share Shasha’s story now.
“I can open his cage so you can play with him,” the girl said.
While they were talking the little terrier woke up and moved towards them, whimpering and panting. The girl lifted a latch and grabbed the puppy under its front legs.
“This nice man’s name is Ah Wei, do you want to say Ah Wei to him?” the girl asked the dog.
It struggled in her arms to get closer to Ah Wei, sniffing eagerly. The girl handed the puppy over and it immediately settled in his arms and licked his face and neck.
“He likes you!” the girl said. “Maybe he is destined to be your dog.”
“Maybe,” Ah Wei said, knowing he could not let go of it now.
Half an hour later, laden with a Jack Russell Terrier puppy (complete with pedigree papers) in a brand new kennel, two bags of necessities including bowls, puppy food, leash, collar, dog treats, and other odds and ends, Ah Wei hailed a taxi. The dog whimpered and cried all the way home, but did not say “Ah Wei.”
At night, Ah Wei put the puppy in its kennel and went to his bedroom. The terrier slumped down and whimpered.
“You can’t sleep in the bedroom until you’re potty-trained,” Ah Wei said, and went to his room.
In the middle of the night, Ah Wei woke up with his backside covered in sweat. In his dream, the wet and bloody ghost of Shasha was screaming his name, over and over again as it floated closer and closer to him. He woke up just as the ghost reached for his neck with red talons, and realized that in real life the puppy was screaming his name. He went to the living room and saw the dog scrambling around inside the kennel, crying “Ah Wei! Ah Wei!”
He moved the dog to the living room, as far as possible, but it grew even more frantic, ramming its little body against the cage, making it rattle noisily against tile, all the while screaming, “Ah Wei!” Ah Wei sighed and moved the kennel into his bedroom.
“It’s okay, Shasha,” he said. “You found me. You don’t have to haunt me anymore.”
The pup slumped down and grunted a few times.
After that night, Ah Wei never had another nightmare about Shasha, dead or alive.
He gave the terrier an unremarkable name, Chocolate, after the brown patterns on its body and ears, and he grew up to be a quiet but energetic dog. Ah Wei could not teach him to fetch, sit, lie down, or do any tricks, however many dog books he read and treats he bribed him with. Clickers, rewards, being a pack leader, none of it worked. Chocolate had only one trick: in the middle of the night, or when upset and looking for his owner, he ran around and cried, “Ah, ow, ow, Ah Wei!”
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