This short story is a work of fiction, not a blog post.

A boring dinner party in Taipei. I am one of a handful of expats there, a disparate group of people linked only by their common fate of being in Taiwan, and not all of them because they really want to. There is always a busy flow of coming and going of foreigners here, which leads to a strange acceleration in social interactions. Like dogs, we sniff each other out at parties and school functions. Expat life is a transient existence, so we move quickly from shy awareness and polite recognition to becoming fast friends – until our time is up, and we move away, never to speak again.

It can be awkward, because people suddenly disappear without a trace, just like in a police state. Innocent questions such as "Where is Bob?" are answered with a single word uttered with finality, like: "Singapore", or "Seoul", or the slightly more ominous "Home", the last one implying that Bob could not hack it out East. These relocations are often staggered, ripping families during the transition period when Bob is already breaking in his new desk half a world away while his long-suffering wife is still stuck with the kids in Taipei on Facebook all day, trying to offload the furniture, the expensive espresso machine, and the cat, to an unsuspecting new arrival. Consequently, there is a lively market for high-quality second-hand goods in Taipei. You never have to worry about that bargain Ikea chest of drawers; it is guaranteed to be almost new. Just make sure the previous owners have not "accidentally" locked the cat in it.

At the party, our Taiwanese host proudly mixes a social cocktail: an eclectic mixture of upper-middle class Taiwanese friends, with a handful of foreigners sprinkled in for flavor and contrast. We stand around in a rough circle in the spacious penthouse living room of a high rise in the entirely artificial district of Neihu. With long-stemmed wine glasses in hand, we peer out through the panoramic windows at half a dozen identical towers blocking our view of the moonlit river. The conversation is like a volleyball game, with everyone working hard to keep the platitudes in the air: "Yes, it - is - hot this summer." "Yes, real mayonnaise must be hard to find." "And: "Well, I guess that Stinky Tofu does smell like deep-fried vomit." When the conversation is about to grind to an uncomfortable halt, the popping gunshot of a cork signals relief and, after a refill, we pick up where we left off.

I drift over to the large windows with their false promise of a grand view but am rewarded with a graveyard of nondescript luxury high rises, so unpromising they could be anywhere in the world. I don't like this part of Taipei.

I try to catch a glimpse of the old Neihu, once a charming, quaint grandmother of a village, now a sleepy suburb largely ignored by Taipei's rapidly expanding subway system. All I can see from the seventeenth floor is unremarkable office buildings and cookie-cutter high-rises. This is the "good" part of town, built with old semiconductor money and new industriousness to the strict aesthetic standards of European kitsch and Japanese minimalism. Marbled lobbies, designed to impress with their uniformed doormen and opulent displays of newfound art, deliver the promise of rich life: gilded elevators, fresh flowers in expensive vases and a grand piano in the hall that is never played, all clearly indicating that good taste has found a home here.

As I peer unashamedly into the slices of lives stacked in neat floors across from me – the opposite building being a little too close for my Western comfort - I see nothing but perfect Ikea showrooms. The only exception is a messy apartment where a very old couple sits on a massive Chesterfield of peeling brown leather, staring at the largest flatscreen TV I have ever seen, all bathed in the unnatural blueish glare of the bare fluorescent ceiling lights. A sprawling ancient Chinese altar with lacquered wood and red and gold trim occupies the entire back wall of the room, as if to say: "Well, ancestors have to live somewhere. Why not here?"

The conversation behind me murmurs on about school fees and car leases. This party could use a boost, I decide. Staring out the window in mock surprise I exclaim loudly: "Oh my god! Those lesbians! They have no shame!"

Like passengers on a sinking ship spotting a rescue vessel, the party rushes over to the window so fast that I am afraid the whole building might capsize. Embarrassed general laughter ensues but there is also some well-hidden disappointment. The curse of the talking circle is broken, and shards of individual conversations start to float around the room, free to roam at last.

I meet a stranger and potentially new best friend called Greg, an American. His lobster-red face indicates he is new here, still unaware that the midday summer sun in Taiwan can fry the delicate, milky-white urban complexion into a blotchy peeling façade within minutes. In the loud voice so common to insecure Americans away from home, Greg tells me, and everyone else who cares to listen, that he has found the perfect apartment for an unbelievably low price. Ears perk up and guests move a little closer. A new foreigner who thinks he has found a perfect bargain? This is going to be good.

There are virtually no bargains in Taiwan. You get exactly what you pay for. Everything here has exactly the price it needs to have, which is both frustrating and strangely reassuring. Taiwanese society is the end product of eight thousand years of mercantile reasoning and endless bargaining. While my ancestors in Europe were growling over whether to go through the trouble of starting a fire this year or just eat raw rabbit, the Chinese were already having discussions on how to calculate compound interest while drinking tea out of porcelain cups. If something is suspiciously cheap in Taiwan, there is always a good reason for it, especially when it comes to real estate.

I speak from experience. My first rental apartment in Taipei had a magnificent view, high ceilings and two bathrooms with full baths, for an absurdly low price. The young couple who had come up with me in the elevator were whispering heatedly in a corner, obviously debating a haggling strategy. I seized the moment and signed the lease on the spot. The next day when I entered my new home, I realized what they had been whispering about: the apartment had no kitchen.

Back at the party, Greg had found his audience. Americans, he assured them, are born negotiators. Most of his own country, he pointed out without any sense of irony or self-awareness, had been obtained in smart deals with clueless French, outwitted Spanish, desperate Mexicans or gullible Native Americans. As a member of the conquering tribe, he was born with a bargaining chip on his shoulder.

He explained how, with the help of his translation app, he had immediately strongarmed the real estate agent into all kinds of concessions: lower rent, free parking, one month deposit only. He dramatically acted out a feinted dash for the door: "Or I'll walk away - right now - ". Under the persuasive power of so much sunburned American bluster, the agent had immediately given in, and they signed the contract right there on the floor of the empty living room. "A grand penthouse," said Greg proudly, "what you people call a - xiongzhai."

Ding! A wine glass dropped on the floor. All the Taiwanese in the room fell silent and stared at the American in horror. I felt a gleeful rush of schadenfreude. I knew what was coming next, because a - xiongzhai - does not mean "penthouse". It means a haunted house.

Of all the fears and superstitions in Taiwan, ghosts are the undisputed number one. Never put your chopsticks upright in the rice; they look like grave markers and ghosts will not like it when they are summoned to the party too early. Avoid the number four, whose character sounds the same as the word for "death". This is highly inconvenient and has many awkward implications. You would not get very far in life without using the number "four", so people make do, but the elevator in many older buildings in Taiwan still skip the fourth floor, going instead from three to a confusing five.

Ghosts and spirits are never far. Even in the crowded urban landscape, tiny temples for the gods and deities are dotted across the city like fleas on a dog, unapologetically taking up space, knowing they are unassailable. You can tear down or relocate the brick and timber of a temple or haunted building, but you cannot relocate the stubborn spirits, who apparently refuse to budge. Like twilight squatters of prime real estate, ghosts cannot easily be persuaded to move out.

Not just temples: ghosts are well at home in a home as well. In traditional households, even small living rooms are dominated by bulky shrines for the more benign spirits of ancestors. Honoring them is so important that there is even a national holiday for tomb sweeping, where families go out together with brooms and soap to clean the graves of their dead relatives. The younger generation, perhaps more worldly and skeptical, still sweep along with Mom and Dad, hedging their bets. What if ghosts are real after all?

This abundance of caution and deference is not just out of respect: ghosts that are unhappy about being disturbed become restless and start to wander about, haunting the living innocents.

Few things are worse than a restless ghost, especially one that has been ripped from its mortal coil before its time by an act of violence. These ghosts refuse to leave their place of demise and turn it into a - xiongzhai - literally - an "ominous" house, another red dot of spiritual dominance overlaying the city map.

There are degrees of ghostiness. A house where a natural death occurred is tainted but salvageable. A bit of incense, toss out the stained mattress and you're fine. People die at home all the time. The Taiwanese, pragmatic as always when it comes to real estate, have an informal ranking system for this. Peaceful natural death? That's fine. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome? Lamentable, of course but mostly OK.  Apparently, there have been very few sightings of infant spirits and usually ghosts appear from age five and up. Death by suicide? That is a bad one, but murder is the worst. Sometimes, it is better to tear down the haunted house where the murder was committed and clean the rubble pile of any lingering spirits before building something new. Even then, there is no guarantee that the spirit will not return.

A haunted house is a real-world problem. You cannot live in it without risking a plague of inexplicable afflictions and misfortunes: divorce, financial distress, impotence, ringworm and strange markings on the furniture. Priests for hire can perform a cleansing for you. They will try to chase the ghost away with burning sage or lure them towards the exit with strategically placed cookies and bottles of soda (Taiwanese ghosts have a sweet tooth, apparently), but where exactly an evicted ghost is supposed to move into is a question that I have never received a satisfactory answer to. Just like their real-life cockroach -and-rat exterminating counterparts, spirit removers are expensive, and the results are mixed. Ghosts are not easily dislodged from their homes. The ghoul wants what the ghoul wants.

A house with a history of murder or suicide is impossible to rent out or sell. Hiding this uncomfortable truth from a prospective buyer is a crime so heinous it has its own code in Taiwanese law, and owners and real estate agents are obliged to reveal any lugubrious history, on the penalty of jail time. There was a haunted house in my street that had the dubious honor of being tainted by the trifecta of a double murder, followed by a suicide (in that order, of course). It stood vacant for years because even contractors refused to demolish it. After years of expensive ritual purges, it was reluctantly torn down to make room for a parking garage. Ghosts, apparently, find no joy in living in cars, so all was fine in the end.

Back at the party, Greg was not the least alarmed by the frozen horror on the faces of his Taiwanese audience. Surely, he claimed, none of you liberal, enlightened still people still believed in ghosts? Our gracious host reassured him we were all secular, modern people here; ghosts were more of an older-generation thing. Greg pressed the issue and asked if anyone wanted to attend his housewarming party next Friday. People suddenly became preoccupied with refilling their glasses, picking olives out of their canapés or staring out the window, looking for the wayward lesbians. The temperature in the room had dropped noticeably.

Greg reassured us. He had done his homework. According to his iron-clad logic, his penthouse was not haunted. The apartment had belonged to a B-list actress whose career, after a brief period of fame, had taken a precipitous nosedive and petered out. Broke and destitute, she had climbed the stairs to the rooftop where, after a brief moment of contemplation and a dramatic wave to the audience below, she took a swan dive into the gardens below.

The actress had never really lived in the apartment, said Greg. She had spent most of her time with her mother in the flat right below, one floor down. It was in her mother's flat, one floor beneath him, that the actress, after lying in bed for several weeks contemplating her misfortunes, had finally run out of tears and patience and planned her stage exit.

With a stunning inability to read the room, Greg laid out his logical arguments one by one to his horrified audience, counting on his fingers. One: surely, the mother's apartment below his was where the actress made her fateful decision. Two: the edge of the roof, one floor above him, was where she technically committed the act that ended her life. Her actual demise, where the ghost supposedly left her body, was in the garden on the first floor where, according to Greg, you could still see her outline imprinted in the flowerbeds. His apartment, meanwhile, while caught between the drama on the floors below and above him, must be as clean as a whistle.

Greg's gruesome anecdote had killed what was left of the party. The conversation slumped and people moved away from the window, as if the star's fateful jump could be contagious. Our hostess discreetly started to fill the dishwasher. Parting guests waved goodbye to Greg from a safe distance, as if his imminent misfortune was contagious as well.

Yet I had become strangely invested in his story. Greg had a point, after all. Why would the spirit leave the body to return to the apartment? And how? Do ghosts take the elevator, or do they climb the stairs? Do they just float up through the concrete floor slabs, seeping straight through the bodies of the occupants, leaving nothing but a cold chill that runs down the spine? Tugging at this thread will soon reveal a host of other persistent questions. Where do the ghosts actually live inside the apartment? Under the bed, in the chest of drawers, or behind the wallpaper? What do ghosts do all day when the occupants of the house are out to work and there is no haunting to be done? Watch TV? Hang out on Ghostbook?

Greg, fortified by the last dregs of the bottle of whiskey he had brought and finished himself, saw a new best friend in me: "Look at us", he confided, pulling me away from the Taiwanese crowd. "We both don't belong here. We got common sense". He was right about not belonging here, but common sense? I am a true child of the age of reason. Growing up in an enlightened working-class socialist family in Amsterdam in the '70s, I was raised with a healthy disdain for religion or superstition. No Moses, Jesus, spirits, or divining rods for us, but a firm belief in an orderly, deterministic universe that was just waiting to be unraveled by scientists. But here I was, sharing the same unease as my Taiwanese host, hedging my bets. What if - just if - ghosts are real after all?

Greg and I concluded the evening by exchanging business cards, which is the best way to tell someone you have the intention of never seeing them again. Once outside and walking by myself along the river in search of a taxi that would take me away from this dead city with its muted black office towers, I wondered what it would be like to live with a ghost. It is easy to make fun of the Taiwanese bourgeois, with their overreaching love for Empire architecture and Italian wines, but all of them also have a broom in their closet. Once a year, they go out and clean the graves of their ancestors, sweeping themselves a little closer to their past with each stroke of the broom, and a little closer to their own inevitable demise as well, completing the cycle. My own deceased family members in Holland had all been burned, their powdery ashes perfunctorily returned to the soil with a minimum of ceremony, no annual sweeping required. Living with the spirits of your ancestors requires a bulky altar in your house that takes up precious living space, but on the other hand, it is also like having a non-messy roommate for life, always someone there when you get home. Maybe I am not as cynical as I purport to be, but secretly envious of a world that has a continuum of ghosts. Maybe I would like to hedge my own bets as well.

Needless to say Greg had made himself an instant pariah that night, shunned like a leper by both the enlightened Taiwanese community and, increasingly also by the few foreigners he had managed to attach himself to in his first weeks in Taiwan. His boisterous nature and his blatant insensitivity to what he termed the "local heebie-jeebie" culture soon grew into the tiresome lament of an ill-fitting foreigner, and he drifted off-radar, presumed relocated or sent home.

But Greg did resurface in my life one more time. A few months later, I bumped into him coming out of a local watering hole for expats known for its cheap Buffalo wings and easy Taiwanese dates, which are girls that have what the locals call "Banana Fever". His complexion had taken on the ruddy, coppery shine endowed upon Western people by alcohol and too much midday sunshine. He gave me a damp hug.

 This would be the Summer of Greg, he declared loudly. He had taken up an additional tempting offer from the same real estate agent, this time for a weekend beachfront cabin on Taiwan's rugged North Coast. It was right on the beach, had free parking and only cost a handful of, as he termed it, "beads and trinkets". The previous owner had been dragged out to sea by the undertow while surfing and had drowned, together with his dog, about five miles downstream. Far enough, stated Greg confidently, to make the trip back too much trouble for even the most persistent ghost, canine, human or otherwise. As far as he was concerned, the house was clean. Would I like to come over for a beer, salsa and a dip in the waves this weekend? I thought about what it would be like knocking back beers in the lawn chair of a recently deceased surfer dude, with his dead dog by my feet. "Absolutely," I said and gave him one of my business cards.

We all observed Greg from a safe distance during his last seven months in Taiwan, with the lugubrious fascination of people who are watching someone who does not know he has a giant black spider on his shoulder. His sunburn turned into a persistent tropical eczema, his job was cancelled, and his younger Taiwanese girlfriend left him for the night manager of the Love Motel he used to take her after lunch on slow weekday afternoons. Greg, as we say in Taiwan, went Home.

I saw his couch for sale on Facebook but decided not to risk any ghostly contamination - what if they live inside the upholstery? I did purchase his espresso machine, though. It was a calculated risk: a touch of burning sage, some incense, and it will be as good as new.