The Page 69 Test: "The Dead Can't Make a Living"

Friday, April 10, 2026

"The Dead Can't Make a Living"

Ed Lin is a journalist by training and an all-around stand-up kinda guy. He’s the author of the Taipei Night Market series: Ghost Month, Incensed, 99 Ways to Die, and

Death Doesn’t Forget as well as five other novels. Lin, who is of Chinese and Taiwanese descent, is the first author to win three Asian American Literary Awards. He lives in New York with his wife, actress Cindy Cheung, and son.

Lin applied the Page 69 Test to The Dead Can't Make a Living, the fifth title in the Taipei Night Market series, and reported the following:

Page 69 in The Dead Can't Make a Living is shocking, and truly lives up to the book's title. The heart of the book is solving the murder of a migrant worker, an Overseas Filipino Worker. Narrator and protagonist Jing-nan finds the body of Juan Ramos, an OFW, in the Shilin Night Market. Juan's family comes to the night market to thank Jing-nan for contacting the authorities so quickly, and they ask to see where Jing-nan found Juan.

Juan's mother Rosario, brother Paolo, and sister Eliza are somber, but soon they can't contain their anger at how they are being treated. Juan's company, a food factory, offered the family compensation of six months' salary—less than $6,000 now—and said they were lucky to get that since it wasn't proven Juan died on the premises of the factory. Representatives of the Taiwanese government, meanwhile, encouraged Juan's family to leave with his body as soon as possible. Taiwan and the Philippines (both in fiction and in life) recently had a fishing dispute, and Taiwan is anxious not to have another flashpoint with its neighbor.

What happens is what always happens to Jing-nan. He wants to help people in need, and thinks it won't be too much trouble for him. Of course he's wrong on that point, and before long he ends up biting far more than he can chew. Jing-nan finds himself working undercover in the food factory looking for Paolo, who has disappeared there while trying to find answers about Juan. Cut off from everyone he knows and trusts, Jing-nan is exposed to the same systemic exploitation experienced many of Taiwan's migrant workers. The only man who can help him is his roommate—a man the factory bosses want Jing-nan to help them put in prison for trying to organize.

What's really different about The Dead Can't Make a Living, the fifth book in the Taipei Night Market series, is that Jing-nan has a hand in making awful, ultraprocessed "foods" rather than his amazing night-market concoctions. What hasn't changed is that he continues to be confronted by life's absurdities, and tries to endure it all with a sense of humor.