“Li-lin, what can I do? I need to go back, I need to save them, I can’t let them suffer in their chains another day . . . .”
“You did a terrible thing, Xu Shengdian; you had the power to set them free and did not use that power. But Peru emancipated its slaves years ago; they have been free for a long time.”
Another look of agony twists his face. “My wife,” he says. “Anjing. She was my friend, Li-lin. I liked her. And I, I . . .”
“You murdered her.”
“Yes, that’s what I did, I did that to her . . .”
“You murdered her.”
“I should not have done what I did . . .”
“You murdered her.”
“Yes. It’s true. There was a girl named Anjing, she shared my quarters and she was my friend, and I . . .”
“You murdered her.”
He takes a deep breath. “I murdered her. She was just a little girl, she trusted me, and I murdered her.”
Stars are flying all around us; they circle us now, a wheeling cyclone of stars. We float through clouds, our feet far above the ground. He says, “And what I tried to do to you, Li-lin . . .”
“Do not continue,” I tell him. “Any words of apology you speak will be for your benefit, not for mine. You are not forgiven.”
“What can I do, Li-lin?” He stares at me with a child’s desperation. “How can I make this right?”
“I am sorry,” I say, my voice husky with the winds of time, “I am sorry. Nothing you can do will make things right. You just needed to acknowledge your actions, is all. Or perhaps I needed to hear that from you. But your journey ends here. There is no reincarnation ahead of you, no condemnation to the Hells, no wandering as a ghost, no continued existence in any spiritual territory. It is decided. Witness the wonder of the universe, Xu Shengdian, and revel in it; I now return every particle of you to nature.”
With one hand bright with divine energies I wipe Xu Shengdian’s soul remnant from existence, erasing him and the Hells that would await him. It is a moment of solemnity, of finality; not I nor any other will ever see Xu Shengdian again. I am quiet for a minute, observing how a life could go so wrong.
When I am ready, I walk to my father. Sobbing, he is doubled over near a vision of myself in the shape of the White-Haired Demoness.
“You are forgiven,” I speak in the voice of his ancestors and mine, his lineage and mine. “I was there. I know how bravely you fought to save us.”
He keeps weeping, curling up like a beetle. His grief is immediate and all-consuming. His eyes are locked on his hallucination, the demoniac vision of me, and he says, “I failed you. I failed you, Daughter.”
I speak in the voice of gods and galaxies, but I do not know what to say. Ancestors and gods cannot speak to his pain. Of all the mouths and hearts in all the worlds and times, there is only one voice that could help him. I take one last divine breath before I release the ancient forces of gods and nature; they flee my human, all-too-mortal form.
Now, this now, was then; then is when this happened.
I stood in the lumberyard and felt cold and weary. The burn on my palm still throbbed with a deep numbness, cold but intense. My body heavy and tired, I faced my father. No longer inspirited, no longer speaking in a celestial manner, I needed to address him as only one person in the world could.
“What’s past is past, Father. You made choices and sometimes they were the wrong choices. You hurt me time and again, and then, when I risked so much to save you, you condemned me. You exiled me from your life and your world. Have you failed me? Yes, yes you have, but not in the way you think you did. You failed to perceive me. I am no monster. I am no demoness, and you would see that if you looked at me. I . . . I am angry, Father. I am angry at you. I cannot forgive you yet. I could forgive you, if you would do one thing for me.”
“Ordain you to the Sixth?”
“No,” I said. “Just observe what I do from now on, and learn who I am from my actions. You believe a woman’s strength is inherently demonic; I’m not asking you to change that belief, but I intend to become stronger. Give me the opportunity to show you who I am. Give me a chance to prove you wrong.”
He said nothing, but the apparition of me as a demoness faded. He rubbed a hand across his mouth, and, frowning, he said, “I hope you prove me wrong.”
I nodded. It was all I could ask for, for now. “We still need to kill the sapling.”
“It must be eradicated, as soon as possible,” my father said. “We have only minutes before it grows too strong. I do not have enough Thunder Magic built up to make another lightning bolt. Without the power of the Five Thunders, I don’t see how we can wipe it out.”
“There is a way,” I said.
My satchel remained where I’d left it, hours earlier, though in those hours I had crossed life and death and spoken in the eternal voice of stars. My legs felt heavy as I trod across the lumberyard and retrieved the sack. I untied its drawstring and withdrew the paper offerings I had commissioned earlier.
People saw what I held, and they gasped.
I raised the paper matches and the red paper tubes. Each tube had English letters on the side, spelling out “Giant Powder Company,” and a paper fuse at one end. I walked over to the tiny sapling-spirit growing at the edge of the lumberyard, where the ten thousand year tree was driving its roots into the spirit world’s ground. I buried the paper sticks of dynamite vertically, surrounding the sapling. The fuses of all the sticks joined into one single fuse which I placed just inches off the ground.
Then I burned the papers, allowing the artistic representations to be transformed by fire into real matches and real sticks of dynamite in the world of spirits.
“Li-lin, we only have a few minutes before the tree is unstoppable,” my father said, his tone urgent. “There’s no time for you to travel out of body to ignite that spirit-match and set those fuses burning. Any ritual to go out of body would take far too long.”
Near us the little new growth of the ancient tree grew in spurts. The senselessly raging primordial power grew, setting roots into the ground. I felt its anger, its hostility pulsing into the earth and air: polluting our world with the same brutal malice with which humans had polluted the plant.
I retrieved my little wooden flute and played a brief melody, then repeated it, four times.
A milky-white orb, perhaps three inches high, with tiny, humanoid arms and legs, came out of nowhere. He was not there; and then he was.
“Mr. Yanqiu,” I said, “I need you. Be my cannonball. Be the sword in my hand.”
The ghost of my father’s eyeball raised the spirit match in two tiny hands, holding it as a man might wield a spear. Armed with a wooden match as tall as he was, he approached the dynamite. He flipped the match in his hands, carrying it like an oar, and swung it against a small flat stone protruding from the soil.
Swung it again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
On the fifth swing, I heard the pfft of striking pitch and smelled the whiff of phosphor smoke. The matchflare illuminated the eyeball spirit, reflecting from his round and glossy surface. Nothing had ever looked as beautiful as Mr. Yanqiu in that moment. My guardian, my savior, the eyeball-man raised the lit match to the spirit-dynamite, and held it there until the fuse caught; then I scooped him up and fled for cover before the blast.
FORTY
It seemed right, somehow. It felt appropriate. I’d performed a sacred rite to heal the ravages of time and the bleeding wounds of the universe. After such an act, it only felt right to bomb a monster with dynamite.
I stood, brushed off the sawdust that the explosion had strewn all over me, and opened my good hand to see how Mr. Yanqiu had fared. His arms and legs were limp, his pupil waxing and waning, focused on nothing, dilating and contracting at random.
“Mr. Yanqiu!” I cried. “Are you all right?”
“Li-lin,” he said, “did I . . .” and then he trailed of
f. A chill went through me, an old ache of terror and loss: these had been the last words my husband ever said.
“Mr. Yanqiu?”
“Li-lin, did I . . .” he said again, but his pupil seemed to focus in on me at last. “Did I save you?”
“Yes, Mr. Yanqiu, you saved me,” I said. “You saved everyone. You are a mighty hero. You have always been thirty feet tall.”
Of this night, when people spoke of it at all, they spoke in whispers. Subtle codes and oblique references. Hushed undercurrents, implied meanings, carefully indirect statements. They might mention how the wind beat down, the shapes of rearing dragons in the thunderclouds, the harsh needlelike stars. It would become a night of quiet legend, of which everyone knew much and spoke little.
Somewhere in San Francisco, a man came home to find his favorite dinner on the table, still steaming hot, exactly as his wife used to prepare it before she died, and he began to weep. In gambling halls, everybody won at once, no matter what game they were playing; in some cases, two players won a game that could only have one winner, and fights broke out. An elderly man, in his dreams, found himself spry and alert, not needing the apparatus he relied upon to walk; and when he woke, he found his condition mildly improved. A young man dreamed his sick brother had miraculously recovered; when he woke, the brother’s health was unchanged, but he himself felt his hope refreshed. In Monterey, an old fisherman sent his trained cormorant out to hunt for fish, and the dark bird returned carrying a fish that had three eyes and a valuable gemstone in its mouth. In the back room of Hung Sing restaurant, a parrot hopped about in its iron cage and spoke words it had never heard, prophetic and terrible, but no one was there to hear, and the parrot itself understood nothing of the words it had squawked. On Jackson Street, carriage horses spooked and refused to draw their driver and his passengers across a bridge where, seconds later, lightning would strike. A man driven by opium addiction succumbed to sorrow with a borrowed pistol and a single shot through the head; but this was nothing out of the ordinary.
In a lumberyard in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a group of people climbed to their feet. Some were injured; all were worn out, and quietly victorious. Some were friends; some were strangers; some had been enemies yesterday and would be enemies tomorrow. But in that blasted lumberyard, we looked around, surveying each other. All of us would bear bruises and wounds from tonight; some would have scars, like the burn on the palm of my left hand; but all of us were proud of what we’d done here.
Bok Choy and Ginny crowded around their daughter, who cried and clung to them. Meimei, her face blank once again, held to my hip.
“Is it finished?” my father asked. “Xu Shengdian is dead, the ten thousand year tree has been eradicated . . . . Is it finished now?”
“Very nearly,” I said. “Boss, Ginny, take your daughter home and put her to bed. I need everyone else to come with me. There’s one more thing we need to do.”
A few minutes later, the Weis, my father, the faceless girl, and I went limping and scuffing and dragging our feet across Columbus, out of Chinatown into the Barbary Coast district. We clustered together in the outlandish territory, as I led them down strange San Francisco streets, past the loutish white men and their ribald, painted women, past noisy taverns where drunks loitered, stumbling and smoking cigars.
I led my ragtag group to a heap of trash. “We need to find something buried in this junkpile,” I said. “I need everyone to sort through it.”
“What are we looking for?”
“A toy,” I said. “A stuffed rabbit.”
That raised a few eyebrows; all of us wanted to wend to our homes, to sleep and feel soothed and find nourishment, to rub salve on our wounds. But after the events of this night, no one questioned me, and we dutifully went to work, digging through garbage.
A half hour later, all of us were covered in dirt and slick with grease, ashes, sawdust, and breadcrumbs, when Mrs. Wei held a soot-smudged lump of fur aloft and said, “Li-lin, is this it?”
It was. When Xu Shengdian inflicted the curse of the vampire tree on his young wife, it scared the soul out of her body; her spirit fled and took refuge in this object she carried wherever she went.
“Hello Anjing,” I said to the dirty stuffed rabbit. “You have nothing to be afraid of anymore. We’re going to take care of you.”
FORTY-ONE
Idreamed that night, of many things. Of my mother, safe at last. Of the burnt flesh on my left palm. In my dream, the puckered burn opened like a mouth and whispered to me. In the dream, I felt a sense that it was telling me something very important, imparting me with the secrets of the universe, but when I woke I could not recall what it had said. Salve and bandages covered my scarred left palm. I wished I could remember what the scar had told me in my dream.
At some point during my walk back to my quarters, Meimei had slipped away. This only troubled me for a moment, for I knew that she, like most beings of smoke and spirit, preferred night over day. Energies of yin flowed freely through the night, so she would be safe and vigorous if she avoided the human realm between dawn and dusk. We never said the words, but it was clear to us both, that she could seek me out whenever she wanted. As for me, I would burn paper offerings for her, to give her presents, send messages, and invite her to visit me whenever she chose.
I also thought of something she could do for fun. The next time I saw her, I’d suggest finding a public place in the late evening, when she’d be visible; she could stand with her back to the passersby, until someone noticed the incongruous child and decided to approach her. The concerned people would see her turn, slowly, toward them, and then with her blank face she could leap at them like a monster and make them scream. Spooking people on a prank was something I thought she might enjoy; I knew I would, and we were sisters, after all.
It was time, I decided, to start setting down some roots, time for new growth. So I went out through my boss’s sentries, bought myself a ceramic flowerpot and some soil, and returned to my quarters.
I piped a brief ditty on my koudi and repeated it. Mr. Yanqiu emerged from the shadows. We spoke for a while, about the battle that raged through the night, about the harm it had done, and about the healing.
“I only regret,” I said, “that I did not manage to cleanse the ten thousand year tree.”
“Li-lin, it caused so much suffering, and nearly destroyed everything around us.”
“Only because it was contaminated. It lived for millennia in a peaceful dreaming state; people made an elixir from it, and it healed their minds. When the tree came to wakefulness, it heard dead slaves crying out for vengeance. It never even understood what it was vengeful for; it only knew the suffering it had touched in those minds and wanted to inflict suffering in return.”
“You’re saying you wish you could have tried to heal it?”
“That’s right, Mr. Yanqiu.”
“Why is there a flowerpot on your windowsill?”
“I want to grow a potted plant.”
“Li-lin, what have you got in your pocket?”
“Nothing, Mr. Yanqiu.”
“That’s too bad, Li-lin,” he said. “That ancient plant once was benevolent. I like to think it could have been healed, if only someone was dedicated enough to nurture and care for it.”
I fingered the seed in my pocket. “I’d like to think so too, Mr. Yanqiu.”
“Tea?” he requested. We went down to the kitchens and I heated some water and poured him a cup. He stretched out in the warm water, saying, “Aahhhh.”
A week later, a gift arrived, from my father. A small statue of Guan Gong, fierce as ever, black-bearded, bushy-browed, in a martial posture, wielding a powerful polearm. But in this statue, the deity was wearing his red blindfold. The gift was my father’s memorial to the time I fought blind, and it made me smile; it would go on my altar.
A commotion of wings caught my attention. Seagulls stirred in the air, vibrant with their sharp, simple colors, their harsh squawking cries, blinking t
hree beady black eyes in each bird’s head. “Ahhh!” they called, “Xian Li-lin!”
“Hello my friends,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
“Come to warn you, ahhh!”
“Of course you have. What are you going to warn me about?”
“Death, Xian Li-lin! Death is coming, ahhh!”
I did not like the sound of that. “Can you tell me anything more specific?”
“Aaahh,” the gull voices cried. “Beware, death is coming, ahhh! Beware . . . Australia!”
I stared at the seagulls for a long moment. “Australia?”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Girl with Ghost Eyes and The Girl with No Face explore the lives of working-class Chinese American immigrants at the end of the nineteenth century. These were people whose values, aspirations, and systems of belief differed from the society outside Chinatown. In the books I use the fiction-writing tools called “world-building” to reconstruct what I can of historical, cultural, anthropological, and religious realities, and I do the best I can; but compromises must sometimes be made for the sake of telling a good story, so there are areas where I compressed, skewed, or blended cultural details to keep the story moving.
Cultures are not monoliths, and these thousands of people were individuals. For storytelling purposes, The Girl with Ghost Eyes and The Girl with No Face—the first two books of The Daoshi Chronicles—have condensed some of the extraordinary diversity of these people who came to America driven by dreams of a better life.
Language:
Most of the people in Chinatown came from the Sze Yup region of Canton, now known as Guangdong. Many others, whom the history books tend to neglect, came from other parts of China. Millions of people were displaced from their homes during the politically volatile century; millions fled the violence of the Taiping Uprising and the Dungan Revolt. Millions more left their home regions when year after year of bad crops created famine and economic failure. Still others fought in the Opium Wars and the first Sino-Japanese War and went in search of new opportunities at wars’ end. Li-lin and her father are refugees from rural China, and their native language is closer to what is now called Mandarin.
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