Meteor Garden -2001- Guide

She was walking home from the night market, a sticky red lychee popsicle melting down her wrist. She took a shortcut through the old Shilin district, past the abandoned housing development that everyone said was haunted. Locals called it the Meteor Garden—not because of stars, but because in the early 80s, a small meteorite had supposedly cratered there, and the developer, hoping to cash in on the miracle, built a series of modernist concrete pavilions around the impact site. The project went bankrupt during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Now, the pavilions stood like broken teeth, their flat roofs sprouting ferns, their empty window frames gaping at the sky. A rusty gate, perpetually unlocked, led to a maze of cracked plazas, drained fountains, and one central rotunda with a domed ceiling painted with a faded, chipped mural of the zodiac.

She didn’t know where she was going until she got there. The Meteor Garden. The rusty gate. The rotunda.

It started, as these things often do, with a popsicle. meteor garden -2001-

Si whipped around. His eyes were red, his face a mask of fury and humiliation. “Who’s there?” he snarled.

That afternoon, she didn’t go to the Meteor Garden. Instead, she went to the Dao Ming Group headquarters, a glass-and-steel obelisk that scraped the Taipei sky. She walked past the security guards (they assumed she was a lost student), took the elevator to the 44th floor, and walked into the office of Dao Ming Feng. She was walking home from the night market,

Then he ruined it. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said, his old arrogance slithering back into his voice. “About… this.”

And that, Shancai thought, was enough. For now. The project went bankrupt during the 1997 Asian

Shancai should have been terrified. She was. Her hands shook as she read the note for the fifth time. But beneath the terror, a hot, stupid coal of anger began to glow. She thought of Si, crying over a broken cello. She thought of his mother, who had never once asked him what he wanted. She thought of her own father, who worked eighteen hours a day and still smiled when he handed her a warm baozi.