The harnessed candle was made from beeswax and slender as my pinky finger, cupped in a cockpit the size and shape of an inverted thimble. Evening air chilled me. I lit a white phosphorus match, held it upside-down to build a stronger flame, then lit the candle wick.
Minutes passed, while I waited for the candle flame to warm the trapped air. The lantern skipped up a moment and then returned to land a moment later. It tried a second time, failed; a third time, failed.
The fourth time it left the ground it continued to float. Being the fourth was a bad omen, since the word four, si, sounds like the word for death, shi. In this case, I would not allow the inauspicious numerology to worry me. To invoke death, even numerologically, was appropriate here; this was a flight toward death, a quest to locate the soul of a ghost girl.
My little Kongming lantern rose in the night air and began moving down the road. I followed it, my feet tapping the boards beneath me.
Others around me noticed the lantern; their eyes caught sight and followed it, shining with sudden pleasure. For who does not love to see fireworks or Kongming lanterns in their passage through the air, a little bit of beauty made by human innovation to rival momentarily the sight of the moon or the stars? I followed after the lantern, letting it lead me toward the dead girl’s most awake soul segment.
My lantern drifted down Pacific Avenue, past a greengrocer arranging apricots and figs in wooden crates outside his shop. The grocer noticed the lantern and watched it float over his head with an innocent smile. It hung at the crossroads for a moment, where the air currents buffeted it from multiple directions, so it rotated slowly for a few moments, before it floated across Columbus Avenue.
Across Columbus, and out of Chinatown.
I cursed.
“What’s the matter, Li-lin?”
Sometimes I would forget Mr. Yanqiu, a near-constant presence, riding on my shoulder.
“The lantern has been blown out of Chinatown,” I said.
“Do you know a spell that will allow you to cross the boundary, Li-lin?”
“No spell is required, Mr. Yanqiu. It’s just that I don’t feel comfortable there. It’s unfamiliar, and I have trouble communicating.”
“How would that be any different, Li-lin?”
“What do you mean, Mr. Yanqiu?”
“You have trouble communicating in Chinatown too,” he said. I scowled, but he continued. “When you and your father speak, it’s like you’re both using the same words but they mean different things to the two of you.”
“The man is infuriating, Mr. Yanqiu.”
“He doesn’t trust you,” my father’s eye said.
“I know that. But a City God is being Invested without his knowledge or consent, which means the Celestial Offices have not given their permission . . . .”
“What does that mean, Li-lin?”
“I really don’t know,” I said. “Someone is being deified, in violation of the Heavens’ orders. Only the strongest ghosts can be Invested, which means powerful beings must be involved, and he won’t even let me help him.”
“All right, Li-lin,” Mr. Yanqiu said. “Why is it difficult to communicate outside Chinatown?”
“Speaking with the people outside Chinatown is like chickens trying to talk with ducks,” I said. “There are sounds in their language which have no equivalent in any Chinese tongue, so my lips haven’t had much practice pronouncing them. It’s frustrating, to be unable to say what I mean.”
“So you have difficulty speaking English. But you can understand when they speak, yes?”
“To some degree,” I said. “At the Mission School, church ladies taught us English from textbooks. And people—the ones who aren’t schoolmarms—simply don’t talk that way outside of classrooms. They use slang and idioms I don’t understand, they slur their speech, they speak quickly blending their words together, and I need to struggle to rearrange the sounds until they resemble the precise, proper, correct English I learned in my lessons.”
“The lantern is still going,” he said.
I hesitated toward it, standing at the edge of the boardwalk. I rued having to exit my familiar streets, to leave my world of comfortable faces and comprehensible words behind; but there was a dead girl, probably murdered by vile magic, whose soul had gone missing. I needed to find her. I stepped out onto the cobbles of Columbus Avenue, my hand resting on the rope dart in my pocket, and, one foot after the other, I set out and left my world behind.
Doors seemed to slam shut, windows to go dark. I needed only to walk one single block away from my familiar roads before I reached Montgomery, the street that marked the border of the area known as the Barbary Coast. The district’s nine square blocks were the region’s center for debauchery; white men of rough demeanors traveled long distances to come here, in order to drink potent liquors and dance to loud music late into the night, or to sample the pale female flesh for rent at the neighborhood’s bordellos. This was the district where robbers came to fence their stolen goods, killers laid low to evade capture, and rough men could be hired to beat up laborers who demanded a fair wage.
Here in the Barbary Coast, the inkblack night was not lit by a lovely chain of glowing red globes at every doorway, but by bright white gaslight emanating from lampposts at every corner. Instead of a steady dim light, each block in the maze of San Francisco streets outside my home had one blinding-bright blaze of gaslight, and the stretch between corners grew dark and frightening.
Every shadow seemed to hold menace. Jagged shapes jutted in the obscured streets. Foot traffic was less here, and less brisk; instead of men rushing to or from work, the pale denizens of the city who lurked in this neighborhood were lowlifes, bar-goers, brawlers, and street criminals. A horse-drawn carriage clattered past, its passengers comfortably concealed in a curtained compartment; this was how the wealthier San Franciscans preferred to travel across these sordid streets.
The pedestrians had leering mouths under big, bulbous noses. One rotund man lurched past, with an irregular gait and a round cap on his head, staring at me.
Twelve or fifteen feet in the air now, my sky lantern drifted down the street, like falling leaves swept in a wind.
Mr. Yanqiu said, “What are these weird creatures, Li-lin? Some kind of yaoguai?”
“They’re human, Mr. Yanqiu. Just different from me.”
“Well I don’t like it,” he said sourly. “They all look so strange.”
“There’s no denying that,” I said, watching a lanky, tall, foppish figure in a forest-green tweed suit stride past me, doffing his top hat.
“Isle ike york ight,” he said, and my mind whirred, translating his distorted words into the English of schoolbooks.
I started to say, “It’s not a kite,” but I didn’t actually want to have a conversation; I wanted to find a ghost girl and save her soul, without being distracted by irrelevant people. Using his incomprehension against him, I said, “No speakee Engrish.”
“ISLE IKE YORK IGHT,” he said.
Mr. Yanqiu said, “Li-lin, does he think saying the same words but louder will make you understand them?”
“No speakee,” I said again.
“Knee how,” he said, and my mind set to work arranging his words into English. Until I realized he was trying to greet me in Mandarin.
“Ni zai zheli hen aiyan,” I responded, “gankuai qu zuo yixie youyong de shiqing ba.” You are a nuisance, go away and make yourself useful.
The fop gaped but didn’t get the message. He frowned, looked silly, and said something florid. I didn’t need to fake bewilderment. I bowed politely with my hands together, and walked away.
“This place is bizarre,” Mr. Yanqiu said. “You’re sure that wasn’t a monster?”
“Not in the way you mean,” I said.
“Could I get a hat like that?” he said.
“You want a top hat, Mr. Yanqiu?”
“I think I would look very handsome with a top hat.”
“I did not know you wer
e so vain,” I said.
In silence we followed the Kongming lantern deeper into the strange land beyond my known world. Shadows seemed to surround us, sharp as knives, only to vanish when I stepped into a lamppost’s bright spear of steely light. White men staggered past me, many of them drunk or drinking, all of them tall and foreign. All of it felt like I was a little girl teetering through a dream, an unreality that could twist into nightmare at any moment.
Or perhaps this was what was truly real, and the blocks we’d carved out for ourselves were a dream, a fiction. Chinatown had never made any attempt to resemble our homeland; we abandoned our architecture, choosing to improvise shanties and build flophouses, we nailed boards together haphazardly, and, more recently, we piled bricks into straight and practical walls. Whatever it would take. We had chosen to eschew beauty in favor of pragmatics, and we sardined together because the rest of the city made us feel unwelcome.
I certainly felt that way now. Even the fop; he meant well, he was being friendly toward me, but he was just as much a part of the looming, outrageous, pale faces and the menaces of shadow, the frightening unknowns skittering down alleyways, unseen.
A white woman stood in a doorway, where light from behind shaped her into a silhouette. Face distorted into anger, she shouted words I did not understand, though their hostility translated across all languages.
She continued hurling abuses as I scuttled past, trying to cling to the shadows and make myself too small for anyone to notice.
The lantern led me through tight streets into a labyrinthine San Francisco, where I felt caged in. Streets were slick with rain, and alleys slid between buildings to widen into twisting, open corridors. I walked across railroad tracks and felt myself growing more and more afraid.
Then the candle sputtered in my sky lantern. It fizzled for a moment, and then it died. The lantern dropped earthwards, landing in a wet heap of garbage.
“Here?” I murmured. “Why here?”
“Do you have any theories, Li-lin?”
“Well,” I said, but then the earth shook. A rumbling grew, a huge tremor, and I instinctively covered my head to protect myself from falling objects in an earthquake.
The rumbling grew louder, thunderous in its intensity, and a high-pitched hoot accompanied it.
“What’s happening, Li-lin?” Mr. Yanqiu shrieked.
“I think,” I needed to shout in order to be heard above the din, “I think a locomotive is coming.”
SIX
Cable cars were a common enough sight, in Chinatown; every day I would hear them sliding along the track, the bell speeding or slowing in time to the motion of the car. At the terminus of each cable line, a tremendous, steam-powered machine dragged at each cable, its force—the strength of hundreds of horses—pulling the steel-wire cable along a perpetual loop. The cars themselves were big metal compartments; to make them move, their drivers would clamp them to the running cable, and when it came time to stop, the gripman, through sheer force of muscle, would release the clamp and close the brake.
Riding a cable car was an experience, to be sure, a clunking, clattering, yet somehow impressive journey, and though the trolleys went faster than I could walk, they didn’t go muchfaster.
Locomotives were another matter entirely. Where a cable car carried people in a little circuit, trains could take people all the way across the continent. It had taken an astounding amount of work to accomplish this extraordinary achievement. Thousands of laborers died building the Transcontinental Railroad, many of them Chinese.
Had the locomotive been what drew Xu Anjing here? Trains carried the glamor of the far away, a doorway to the possible. A train was an escape. It would chug you away from a ruined life over hundreds of clattering miles. Ride a train to find a new beginning.
Now, in the darkness of night in the Barbary Coast, a cloud billowed up, white dust and steam and laborious smoke; a fog hid the sight I knew was coming, and the thundering train shook the ground, rattling the tracks and sending the air swirling with barely-glowing mists. A bright white eye pierced the clouds, then the vapors parted to the daggering of an iron wedge low to the tracks, black and slatted; a cow catcher, I recalled; and then the tremendous body of the black metal beast surged through, slicing its way through fog like a ship at sea. It was not for nothing that men called trains “iron dragons.”
Large white English letters on the side of the engine spelled out SOUTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD. A thought flitted into my mind: there was no platform or station at this corner, so the train would not be stopping here.
It might also mean that my theory about Xu Anjing’s soul was false. Unless she ran and hurled herself upon a moving train. A stowaway.
The train’s cars clattered past, dragging its cargo of freight carriers into the night, their sides blazoned with letters spelling out the names of industries in English: SCHWEPPES SODA-WATER, GIANT POWDER COMPANY, SAN FRANCISCO & SAN JOAQUIN COAL COMPANY, and others.
At last the caboose clambered past, and I watched it wind darkly into the distance.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me that wasn’t a monster either,” Mr. Yanqiu said.
“It wasn’t.”
“I think you have a strange idea of what a monster is, Li-lin.”
“It’s easy to mistake the unfamiliar for the monstrous, Mr. Yanqiu.”
“A gigantic black metal creature that eats coal, belches up a fiery storm of smoke, sounds like an avalanche, shakes the ground like an earthquake, and screams like someone being murdered, and you think it isn’t a monster?”
“I think it’s beautiful. Like you, Mr. Yanqiu.”
He harrumphed.
I started walking once again, crossing the tracks and threading my way back toward Chinatown’s familiar ways.
Mr. Yanqiu settled down on my shoulder, seated now, leaning back on his hands. “What was written on the sides, Li-lin?”
“The names of industries,” I said. “The Coca-Cola Company, Anaconda Copper, the Giant Powder Company—”
“They sell powdered giants?” His voice was strained with awe.
“No, Mr. Yanqiu, they—”
“Or is it a powder that makes things grow huge?” he said. “Could you buy me some? Imagine me, thirty feet tall!”
I stopped walking. “You want to be a giant eyeball?”
“Well, obviously,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to be a giant ear, or a twenty-foot-tall nose, now would I?”
If I laughed, it would hurt his dignity, so I tried to look serious. I may not have concealed my amusement very well. Gaining my composure, I started to walk again and said, “The Giant Powder Company makes things like big firecrackers.”
“Really?” he said. “I love fireworks.”
“They make a different kind of firecrackers,” I said. “Miners and builders use their firecrackers to explode big rocks and demolish buildings.”
“That sounds amazing,” Mr. Yanqiu said. “Could you buy me some?”
“You want me to buy you some dynamite, Mr. Yanqiu?” I said. “May I ask why?”
“Because I’m not much of a help to you, and I want to help you more,” he said. “I’m supposed to save you; that’s the entire purpose of my life. I should be your cannonball, or the sword in your hand, but instead I spend most of my time trying not to fall off or get squished. I’d be so much more useful to you if I had the power to reduce boulders to rubble, or if I were thirty feet tall.”
“There’s more than one way to help people, Mr. Yanqiu. You wish you could be thirty feet tall, but I look forward to our quiet times, when I drink a cup of tea and you bathe in another; you save me, all the time, Mr. Yanqiu, from isolation and sorrow. My life makes more sense because it is witnessed, by you, even when you don’t approve. It is a privilege to have someone who listens to me.”
“Even when I chastise you for your recklessness?”
“Even then, Mr. Yanqiu.”
“The Kongming lantern did not lead us to her,” he said, “so whe
re should we go next?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I had nothing but questions. What had happened to Xu Anjing’s soul? Why had the sky lantern led me here, outside of Chinatown, to train tracks in a squalid shaded corner of San Francisco, where people came to dump their trash?
“Her soul exists, and has not crossed the gates of the afterlife,” I said. “Our next step is to try to find someone who has seen her. I think we’ll start by talking to birds.”
SEVEN
Imade my way back toward Chinatown, hugging the shadows, trying to stay out of sight. As night wore on, the denizens of the Barbary Coast grew drunker, more incoherent, and more sparse. Piano music wafted from a saloon doorway, the driving beat of a marching song, with a twist of plonk and a note of twang, amid the uproar of laughter, and a man’s voice was crooning in English. “There’s goin’ to be a meetin’ in that good ol’ town, where ya knowded everybody, and they all knowded you.”
The good ol’ town where I knew everyone was Chinatown, and I looked forward to returning.
The voice went on, “And you got a rabbit’ s foot, to keep away the hoodoo.”
A drunken audience chanted that line back, “you got a rabbit’s foot, to keep away the hoodoo.”
In my good ol’ town, a goat’s hoof, not a rabbit’s foot, would disperse unclean magical miasmas. “Hoodoo” was an interesting word. It referred to magic practiced by Negroes, but I did not know if it was a word Negroes themselves used, or a word stamped upon them by frightened outsiders. The fact that whitefolk sang about hoodoo suggested it was along the lines of the Toisanese term Gong Tau, a catchall phrase for the rituals and hexes of people we considered primitive; yet even the thought of those barbaric spells chilled me. Gong Tau was spoken of in whispers and ghost stories; I had been hearing tales about Gong Tau’s brutal curses since I was a girl, yet Father had assured me that most of the stories were false.
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