by Hock G Tjoa
“How is your Russian?” Penelope asked in a tone of mock severity.
Wang smiled as he asked her in a scolding tone, “How is your Mandarin?”
They both laughed, and then stood to go to dinner down the corridor. As they walked out of the room, he leaned toward her and said, “Perhaps we should start lessons in Arabic.”
“Or Persian,” she replied with a laugh.
EPILOGUE
The couple entered the apartment in that special area of the city set apart for high-ranking officials. Spymaster Wang nodded as Shu gestured toward the TV before she turned it on to catch the latest news. They were both addicted to news of the world.
“Come see this,” said Shu.
Onscreen was a video report of the evacuation of the Pashtun Jirga. The voiceover explained with excitement, “Breaking news! This is the end of the Pashtuns! They have tried to force the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan to carve space out of the territory of both nations that would then become a homeland for the Pashtuns. But as we can now see, they have started to disperse.
“They relented after receiving an ultimatum giving them twenty-four hours to do so or face a blanket attack of drones all over southern Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. Every known tribal camp would suffer.
“Meanwhile, there remains confusion over whether these drone attacks have already begun. Sometime yesterday afternoon, a drone struck a village in the foothills of Waziristan. We have no confirmation whether this was a test, a signal, a warning shot, or an accident. But we do know that it was only a small projectile, possibly what is sometimes called a scout drone.
“It struck the house of an elderly cleric named Mullah Hamid. A villager told us that at the hour the drone struck, the Mullah was probably alone as it was his custom to send his wives, children, and servants out, so he could take his afternoon nap in peace.”
“Brother Wang,” the woman said.
“Yes?”
“There is too much excitement in the world. I think it is time for us to go to bed.”
“Ah, heavy breathing,” said Wang with his eyebrows raised.
“You are so romantic!” Shu said punching affectionately at his shoulder.
“Perhaps, I just lack imagination,” said the contrite Spymaster.
“Well, I don’t,” said his wife.
EXCERPT FROM The Ninja and the Diplomat, vol.2 of The Chinese Spymaster
CHAPTER 1
Sunday in Macau
“Room service.”
Kim, the North Korean arms dealer, looked across the ample rosewood and silk chairs in the living room of his suite to his bodyguard and motioned with his head for him to get the door.
“We did not order anything.”
“Compliments of Viktor.”
The arms dealer hesitated then nodded. His bodyguard opened the door cautiously and waved a metal detecting wand over the man as he wheeled in a polished wooden cart laden with fruit. A basket of fresh local lychees, grown in carefully chosen orchards within two hundred miles of Macau, sat beside cut-up mangoes from the Philippines on ice; a plate of custard tarts in fluffy pastry shells; truffles exquisitely crafted by the hotel’s own chocolatier; the plum and marzipan crumble that was the establishment’s signature dessert, and the customary bottle of champagne in an ice bucket, Veuve Clicquot Yellow Brut. Viktor knew that to really impress Kim he should have ordered the Cave Privee but there was a limit to his expense account.
“You really should try the egg tarts. They are better than what you get in Hong Kong,” purred a heavily accented voice from outside the door. Viktor entered and made himself at home. He gestured for the champagne and took a glass asserting, “No tampering in any of this, I assure you.”
He breathed in deeply, looked around the room with discrimination and nodded approvingly. The light floral scent in the room came from real flowers, the aroma of chocolate and butter arose from the truffles, and the furnishings announced not the blatant affluence of shirts newly taken out of their wrappings or cars just driven off the show room floor but the well-maintained and self-assured comfort of a high-end but reserved resort.
The man from room service was a local, so Kim and his bodyguards could assume he was not from Viktor’s “inner circle.” However, Viktor notoriously used gangs of local organized crime. He snatched a knife from the cart and attacked the bodyguard. Even though there was a crazed look in his eyes, suggesting he was under the influence of some drug, he wielded the knife with skill. It was, however, as if a lucky beginner was fighting a hardened professional. The guard had to dodge three or four times before blocking a knife thrust with the metal detector and striking the attacker’s throat. The attacker arched backwards while slashing at the outstretched arm. The guard spun to avoid the knife and caught the attacker by the wrist. He swung the man effortlessly into a wall against which he crashed and lay crumpled.
As the attacker slumped to the floor, another man moved silently into the doorway. “Was that too easy?” he asked as he raised his silenced Glock 19, the compact version of the. He shot at the bodyguard, who sprang at the same instant to relative safety behind the furniture in the living room.
Kim wasted no time in firing his 9 mm Beretta which he favored over the Glock because of its heft. He did not miss, not even when a second gunman rushed into the room.
“Your marksmanship has improved greatly,” remarked Viktor as he casually drew his own weapon, “but there are three more of us and we have something--”
There was a short pause as guns clattered and curses were muttered. A door had opened near the staircase down the hall.
A shrill whistle blew.
“Stop! Police. Drop your weapons.”
The arrival of the police surprised everyone inside and outside the suite of rooms at the quietly stylish hotel that had served as Kim’s base of operations. Even so, he maintained his usual calm facade as Viktor and his crew cursed. The police brought with them the odor of officious authority that blended well with the whiff of sulfur and cordite.
Within a few minutes, all the attackers and those attacked were taken, separately, into custody.
Contents
EXCERPT FROM THE BATTLE OF CHIBI
Long ago, along a stretch of a river deep and wide but far away from the consciousness or imagination of anyone outside All under Heaven (China), a battle was fought that determined the unity of the empire for the next four hundred years. It was there along the Yangzi that Liu Bei, the Loyalist, and Zhou Yu, commander in chief of Wu, the kingdom established by the most successful of the Chinese warlords, defeated Cao Cao, the Usurper. In defeating Cao’s huge army and armada, Bei and Yu established Shu and Wu as powers together with Cao’s Wei that would divide China into the Three Kingdoms.
The south bank of that stretch of river was called Chibi, Red Cliffs, and that name was given to the battle. Cao was forced to flee northwards back to his base; he regrouped his forces and, by virtue of holding the last Han Emperor hostage and of having the largest body of men in arms, remained the “First Man” of China, but he was never again able to threaten South China.
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms asserts in its very first chapter the Chinese view of history—not as a linear progression from primitive to developed (first-world status), but as an alternation between the unity of the Chinese Empire and political chaos, “disunity.” It was a major achievement of Zhuge Liang to persuade his contemporaries that China could exist as a triangular balance of power—Loyalists, Usurpers and Wu/Jiangdong. Thus, after four hundred years of imperial unity under the Han dynasty, China came to be ruled by the Three Kingdoms. These kingdoms lasted only eighty years that with the three centuries that followed (before the establishment of a unified China by the Sui and Tang dynasties) became known as the Age of Fragmentation.
The Romance and hence this work is not merely about the military actions or political considerations of that era, but also about values. Perhaps the most crucial question was the implication for l
oyal subjects when Fate appears to have determined that a dynasty should end. (By the Ming dynasty, this was codified and thus resolved, but the Romance reflects the uncertain tension before such a resolution.) For many intellectuals, this conflict prompted a desire for the “contemplative life,” reflecting perhaps an escapist yearning, perhaps the quietist aspect of Daoist thought. This preference is mixed with a sense of fatalism. Zhuge Liang is unafraid when he is in Wu/Jiangdong because the end of his life has been decreed by Fate--but he also planned meticulously for his final escape from Wu on board a boat that he orders a month in advance.
To tell of his many stratagems is to learn that, for Liang, not everything has been written in the Book of Fate or if it had, there was still the possibility that with enough effort and the right angle of vision, one might change the course of Fate. Liang’s vision was to see China neither as an empire nor in chaos, as enunciated in the opening paragraph of the Romance; he believed that it could be ruled by three kingdoms and for a while he was successful. Perhaps he dared to think that this would enable him and “All under Heaven” to escape “Fate.” To achieve this, however, he “coughed up his life’s blood.”
Part of the price to pay was a continued battle of wits between Liang and Zhou Yu of Jiangdong. This battle was itself a continuation of the vendetta between the two regions since Sun Jian, the patriarch of Jiangdong, was confronted by Liu Biao, Bei’s kinsman and protector while he ruled Jingzhou; all retold in this volume. After Biao’s death, the dispute became one over territory—Jingzhou, which the Wu kingdom of Jiangdong regarded as an extension of its realm. The vendetta did not end with the death of Zhou Yu although this retelling of the Romance does, closing with Yu’s funeral at which Liang mourns with a moving eulogy
From the Back Cover of the Battle of Chibi
"Fascinating insight into a whole new world of thought."
Hasan S. Padamsee, Professor of Physics, Cornell, NY.
"Lively and entertaining translation of a Chinese classic that deserves a wide audience."
Beryl S. Slocum, Salve Regina University, RI.
"Excellent translation, faithful to the spirit of the Romance as I recall from reading it many times (in Korean)."
Seung-il Shin, formerly Professor of Genetics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, NY.
"Opens new vistas of fascinating history and thought."
Susan Wilson, Sierra College Library, CA.
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Contents
EXCERPT FROM Agamemnon Must Die
PROLOGUE: IPHIGENIA
(Before the ships sail for Troy)
For three weeks this ominous summer in Greece, the winds have gusted and moaned, the seas have roiled, and the skies have remained dark, baleful, and gloomy. It was this doom-laden murkiness that unsettled and unmanned those gathered to sail their thousand ships. Thus, uncertain of his hold over the many half-hearted chieftains who had brought their men and ships on this quest, Agamemnon chose to offer up his lithesome daughter—bright-eyed, dark haired, and merry as the whistling larks of the air, Iphigenia—as the human sacrifice demanded by the gods. He had not expected any other chief to volunteer a virgin daughter when the oracle had made known the mind of the gods. With supplies running as low as the morale of the men, he ordered his daughter, bound and gagged, to be brought before him and he himself performed the sacrifice.
A wild shriek pierced the gloom. Her mother’s cry, such a sound of love, loss, and anguish as had never before been heard, pierced the heart of every man there as Iphigenia bled quickly to her death. The shriek, the cry, now became a low moan as Clytemnestra threw herself beside the lifeless body of her child, who could have looked forward to years of play and young love, and (thought the queen, her mother) the many delicious decisions and rueful revisions she would now never make or unmake. This thought ignited the queen’s anger and her moan shaped itself into a growl and then to a full-throated, guttural howl.
It seemed as if the sound reached through her loins into the depths of the earth to commune with Persephone, another doomed victim of male willfulness, and then ascended to reverberate in her womb. It resonated in the belly that bore her firstborn and in her chest to which she had clutched her baby to suckle with her milk-heavy breasts. From earth through mother, the wail rose to the skies without a quiver. It was utterly without hope, achingly and piercingly full of frustration and fury.
Agamemnon’s lust stirred at the sight of Clytemnestra’s breasts beneath her loose robe, but then embarrassed, he ordered the fleet to set sail immediately.
The mother’s caterwaul continued. She howled in grief and longing for the life that was now gone. She raged against her husband’s implacable drive to lead the Greeks against the Trojans, she stormed in anger, anguish, and resentful futility until she was the only one left on the beach in Aulis, whence the fleet sailed for Troy.
At the ritual slaughter of her daughter, the storm clouds had instantly dispersed and Clytemnestra now walked back to the encampment where her husband and his troops had gathered in the typically brilliant sunshine of a summer day in Greece. She would not forgive or forget this moment. The salty tang of the spray from the waves refreshed her even as they smelled like the tears now drying from her cheeks. No one of the remnant left looked at her as she slouched her grim way to join them for the journey back to Mycenae. One elder, Aristides, more sympathetic than the others, roused himself to face her.
“My lady.”
“Yes, councilor.”
“Mourn your daughter on the journey to Mycenae, for when we arrive, you must rule.”
From the Author of Agamemnon Must Die
Towards the end of the 13th century B.C., the "mother of all wars" in the millennium, the Trojan War, is over. After ten years, Agamemnon of Mycenae who had led the Greeks on that epic battle, has returned. All his people want is for their lives to return to normal.
But the gods have unfinished items on their agenda.
In the middle of the 5th century B. C., Aeschylus wrote the Oresteia, a trilogy of plays, to give meaning to these memories. It was required reading for all classics major, but I didn't "get it" despite wrestling with a dozen or so translations.
This therefore is my retelling.
An early reader commented:
Agamemnon Must Die is a superbly-written retelling of the tale. The author combines verse with narrative in an effective way for 21st Century audiences.
Piper Templeton, author of Rain Clouds and Waterfalls.
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Contents
THE AUTHOR
Hock G. Tjoa was born in Singapore to Chinese parents. He studied history at Brandeis and Harvard, and taught European history and Asian political thought at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur.
He has published George Henry Lewes, a Victorian Mind, "The social and political ideas of Tan Cheng Lock" (in Melaka: The Transformation of a Malay Capital), and various articles in the Newsletter of the China History Forum. He is married and lives with his family in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California.
In 2010, he published The Battle of Chibi, selections translated from "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms" (one of four traditional Chinese classics). In 2011, he adapted Lao She's "Tea House," Mandarin original dated 1953, publishing it as Heaven is High and the Emperor Far Away, a Play. Both are part of his goal to contribute to a wider and greater understanding of China and Asia.
Hock published Agamemnon Must Die, a retelling of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, in 2014 and The Ninja and the Diplomat, volume 2 of The Chinese Spymaster, in 2015.
The Author’s blog is
hockgtjoa.blogspot.com
His Amazon Author’s page is
http://www.amazon.com/Hock-Guan-Tjoa/e/B001HPMVZY/
His Goodreads Author Profile is
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4537067.Hock_G_Tjoa
He tweets very occasionally and can be reached via Twitter
@hgtjoa
His e
mail address is [email protected]
Contents
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[JP1]Two what?
[JP2] Small, old what?
