Wings of Fire

by Jonathan Strahan

  Our family tradition also states that each member of the family may only tell one outsider about the dragon’s existence. If he chooses the right outsider, he will have a happy life; if he chooses unwisely, and the outsider turns out to be untrustworthy, then misfortune will dog both the revealer and his confidant.

  I wasn’t completely sure about Bob yet, and I didn’t want to blow my one opportunity. But that evening, as I supervised the ritual slicing of the dragon’s fin, my father dropped a bombshell.

  The dragon could not, of course, be seen all in one piece. There was, in the kitchen of the Rainbow Cafe, a hole in one wall, about nine feet in diameter. One coil of the dragon came through this wall and curved upward toward a similar opening in the ceiling. I did not know where the dragon ended or began. One assumed this was a tail section because it was so narrow. I had seen a dragon whole only in my dreams, or in pictures. Rumor had it that this dragon stretched all the way to Nonthaburi, his slender body twisting through ancient sewer pipes and under the foundations of century-old buildings. He was bound to my family by an ancient spell in a scroll that sat on the altar of the household gods, just above the cash register inside the restaurant proper. He was unimaginably old and unimaginably jaded, stunned rigid by three thousands years of human magic, his scales so lusterless that I had to buff them with furniture polish to give them some semblance of draconian majesty. He was, of course, still mortally wounded from the battle he had endured with multi-great-uncle; nevertheless, it takes them a long, long time to die, especially when held captive by a scroll such as the one we possessed.

  You could tell the dragon was still alive, though. Once in a very long while, he breathed. Or rather, a kind of rippling welled up him, and you could hear a distant wheeze, like an old house settling on its foundations. And of course, he regenerated. If it wasn’t for that, the restaurant would never have stayed in business all these years.

  The fin we harvested was a ventral fin and hung down over the main charcoal stove of the restaurant kitchen. It took some slicing to get it off. We had a new chef, Ah Quoc, just up from Penang, and he was having a lot of trouble. “You’d better heat up the carving knife some more,” I was telling him. “Make sure it’s red hot.”

  He stuck the knife back in the embers. Today, the dragon was remarkably sluggish; I had not detected a breath in hours; and the flesh was hard as stone. I wondered whether the event our family dreaded most, the dragon’s death, was finally going to come upon us.

  “Muoi, muoi,” he said, “the flesh just won’t give.”

  “Don’t call me muoi,” I said. “I’m not your little sister, I’m the boss’s daughter. In fact, don’t speak Chiuchow at all. English is a lot simpler.”

  “Okey-doke, Miss Janice. But Chinese or English, meat just no slice, la.”

  He was hacking away at the fin. The flesh was stony, recalcitrant. I didn’t want to use the spell of binding, but I had to. I ran into the restaurant—it was closed and there were only a few old men playing mah jongg—grabbed the scroll from the altar, stormed back into the kitchen and tapped the scaly skin, whispering the word of power that only members of our family can speak. I felt a shudder deep within the dragon’s bowels. I put my ear up to the clammy hide. I thought I could hear, from infinitely far away, the hollow clanging of the dragon’s heart, the glacial oozing of his blood through kilometer after kilometer of leaden veins and arteries. “Run, blood, run,” I shouted, and I started whipping him with the brittle paper.

  Aunt Ling-ling came scurrying in at that moment, a tiny creature in a widow’s dress, shouting, “You’ll rip the scroll, don’t hit so hard!”

  But then, indeed, the blood began to roar. “Now you can slice him,” I said to Ah Quoc. “Quickly. It has to soak in the marinade for at least twenty- four hours, and we’re running late as it is.”

  “Okay! Knife hot enough now, la.” Ah Quoc slashed through the whole fin in a single motion, like an imperial headsman. I could see now why my father had hired him to replace Ah Chen, who had become distracted, gone native—even gone so far as to march in the 1992 democracy riots—as if the politics of the Thais were any of our business.

  Aunt Ling-ling had the vat of marinade all ready. Ah Quoc sliced quickly and methodically, tossing the pieces of dragon’s fin into the bubbling liquid. With shark’s fin, you have to soak it in water for a long time to soften it up for eating. Bob Halliday had speculated about the nature of the marinade. He was right about the garlic and the chilies, but it would perhaps have been unwise to tell him about the sulphuric acid.

  It was at that point that my father came in. “The scroll, the scroll,” he said distractedly. Then he saw it and snatched it from me.

  “We’re safe for another week,” I said, following him out of the kitchen into the restaurant. Another of my aunts, the emaciated Jasmine, was counting a pile of money, doing calculations with an abacus and making entries into a leatherbound ledger.

  My father put the scroll back. Then he looked directly into my eyes—something he had done only once or twice in my adult life—and, scratching his beard, said, “I’ve found you a husband.”

  That was the bombshell.

  I didn’t feel it was my place to respond right away… in fact, I was so flustered by his announcement that I had absolutely nothing to say. In a way, I had been expecting it, of course, but for some reason… perhaps it was because of my time at Santa Cruz… it just hadn’t occurred to me that my father would be so… so… old-fashioned about it. I mean, my God, it was like being stuck in an Amy Tan novel or something.

  That’s how I ended up in Bob Halliday’s office at the Bangkok Post, sobbing my guts out without any regard for propriety or good manners. Bob, who is a natural empath, allowed me to yammer on and on; he sent a boy down to the market to fetch some steaming noodles wrapped in banana leaves and iced coffee in little PVC bags. I daresay I didn’t make too much sense. “My father’s living in the nineteenth century… or worse,” I said. “He should never have let me set foot outside the house… outside the restaurant. I mean, Santa Cruz, for God’s sake! Wait till I tell him I’m not even a virgin anymore. The price is going to plummet, he’s going to take a bath on whatever deal it is he’s drawn up. I’m so mad at him. And even though he did send me to America, he never let me so much as set foot in the Silom Complex, two miles from our house, without a chaperone. I’ve never had a life! Or rather, I’ve had two half-lives—half American coed, half Chinese dragon lady—I’m like two half-people that don’t make a whole. And this is Thailand, it’s not America and it’s not China. It’s the most alien landscape of them all.”

  Later, because I didn’t want to go home to face the grisly details of my impending marriage contract, I rode back to Bob’s apartment with him in a tuk-tuk. The motorized rickshaw darted skillfully through jammed streets and minuscule alleys and once again—as so often with Bob—I found myself in an area of Bangkok I had never seen before, a district overgrown with weeds and wild banana trees; the soi came to an abrupt end and there was a lone elephant, swaying back and forth, being hosed down by a country boy wearing nothing but a phakhomah. “You must be used to slumming by now,” Bob said, “with all the places I’ve taken you.”

  In his apartment, a grizzled cook served up a screamingly piquant kaeng khieu waan, and I must confess that though I usually can’t stand Thai food, the heat of this sweet green curry blew me away. We listened to Wagner. Bob has the most amazing collection of CDs known to man. He has twelve recordings of The Magic Flute, but only three of Wagner’s Ring cycle—three more than most people I know. “Just listen to that!” he said. I’m not a big fan of opera, but the kind of singing that issued from Bob’s stereo sounded hauntingly familiar… it had the hollow echo of a sound I’d heard that very afternoon, the low and distant pounding of the dragon’s heart.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Oh, it’s the scene where Siegfried slays the dragon,” Bob said. “You know, this is the Solti recording, where th
e dragon’s voice is electronically enhanced. I’m not sure I like it.”

  It sent chills down my spine.

  “Funny story,” Bob said. “For the original production, you know, in the 1860s… they had a special dragon built… in England… in little segments. They were supposed to ship the sections to Bayreuth for the premiere, but the neck was accidentally sent to Beirut instead. That dragon never did have a neck. Imagine those people in Beirut when they opened that crate! What do you do with a disembodied segment of dragon anyway?”

  “I could think of a few uses,” I said.

  “It sets me to thinking about dragon’s fin soup.”

  “No can divulge, la,” I said, laughing, in my best Singapore English.

  The dragon gave out a roar and fell, mortally wounded, in a spectacular orchestral climax. He crashed to the floor of the primeval forest. I had seen this scene once in the Fritz Lang silent film Siegfried, which we’d watched in our History of Cinema class at Santa Cruz. After the crash there came more singing.

  “This is the fun part, now,” Bob told me. “If you approach a dying dragon, it has to answer your questions… three questions usually… and it has to answer them truthfully.”

  “Even if he’s been dying for a thousand years?” I said.

  “Never thought of that, Janice,” said Bob. “You think the dragon’s truthseeing abilities might become a little clouded?”

  Despite my long and tearful outpouring in his office, Bob had not once mentioned the subject of my Damoclean doom. Perhaps he was about to raise it now; there was one of those long pregnant pauses that tend to portend portentousness. I wanted to put it off a little longer, so I asked him, “If you had access to a dragon… and the dragon were dying, and you came upon him in just the right circumstances… what would you ask him?”

  Bob laughed. “So many questions… so much I want to know… so many arcane truths that the cosmos hangs on!… I think I’d have a lot to ask. Why? You have a dragon for me?”

  I didn’t get back to Yaowaraj until very late that night. I had hoped that everyone would have gone to bed, but when I reached the restaurant (the family compound itself is reached through a back stairwell beyond the kitchen) I found my father still awake, sitting at the carving table, and Aunt Ling-ling and Aunt Jasmine stirring the vat of softening dragon’s fin. The sulphuric acid had now been emptied and replaced with a pungent brew of vinegar, ginseng, garlic, soy sauce, and the ejaculate of a young boy, obtainable in Patpong for about one hundred baht. The whole place stank, but I knew that it would whittle down to the subtlest, sweetest, bitterest, most nostalgic of aromas.

  My father said to me, “Perhaps you’re upset with me, Janice; I know it was a little sudden.”

  “Sudden!” I said. “Give me a break, Papa, this was more than sudden. You’re so old-fashioned suddenly… and you’re not even that old. Marrying me off like you’re cashing in your blue chip stocks or something.”

  “There’s a world-wide recession, in case you haven’t noticed. We need an infusion of cash. I don’t know how much longer the dragon will hold out. Look, this contract….” He pushed it across the table. It was in Chinese, of course, and full of flowery and legalistic terms. “He’s not the youngest I could have found, but his blood runs pure; he’s from the village.” The village being, of course, the village of my ancestors, on whose soil my family has not set foot in seven hundred years. “What do you mean, not the youngest, Papa?”

  “To be honest, he’s somewhat elderly. But that’s for the best, isn’t it? I mean, he’ll soon be past, as it were, the age of lovemaking…”

  “Papa, I’m not a virgin.”

  “Oh, not to worry, dear; I had a feeling something like that might happen over there in Californ’… we’ll send you to Tokyo for the operation. Their hymen implants are as good as new, I’m told.”

  My hymen was not the problem. This was probably not the time to tell my father that the deflowerer of my maidenhead had been a young, fast-talking, vigorous, muscular specimen of corn-fed Americana by the name of Linda Horovitz.

  “You don’t seem very excited, my dear.”

  “Well, what do you expect me to say?” I had never raised my voice to my father, and I really didn’t quite know how to do it.

  “Look, I’ve really worked very hard on this match, trying to find the least offensive person who could meet the minimum criteria for bailing us out of this financial mess—this one, he has a condominium in Vancouver, owns a computer franchise, would probably not demand of you, you know, too terribly degrading a sexual performance—”

  Sullenly, I looked at the floor.

  He stared at me for a long time. Then he said, “You’re in love, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  My father slammed his fists down on the table. “Those damned lascivious Thai men with their honeyed words and their backstabbing habits… it’s one of them, isn’t it? My only daughter… and my wife dead in her grave these twenty-two years… it kills me.”

  “And what if it had been a Thai man?” I said. “Don’t we have Thai passports? Don’t we have one of those fifteen-syllable Thai names which your grandfather purchased from the King? Aren’t we living on Thai soil, stewing up our birthright for Thai citizens to eat, depositing our hard-earned Thai thousand-baht bills in a Thai bank?”

  He slapped my face.

  He had never done that before. I was more stunned than hurt. I was not to feel the hurt until much later.

  “Let me tell you, for the four hundredth time, how your grandmother died,” he said, so softly I could hardly hear him above the bubbling of the dragon’s fin. “My father had come to Bangkok to fetch his new wife and bring her back to Californ’. It was his cousin, my uncle, who managed the Rainbow Cafe in those days. It was the 1920s and the city was cool and quiet and serenely beautiful. There were only a few motor-cars in the whole city; one of them, a Ford, belonged to Uncle Shenghua. My father was in love with the City of Angels Etc. and he loved your grandmother even before he set eyes on her. And he never went back to Californ’, but moved into this family compound, flouting the law that a woman should move into her husband’s home. Oh, he was so much in love! And he believed that here, in a land where men did not look so different from himself, there would be no prejudice—no bars with signs that said No Dogs Or Chinamen—no parts of town forbidden to him—no forced assimilation of an alien tongue. After all, hadn’t King Chulalongkorn himself taken Chinese concubines to ensure the cultural diversity of the highest ranks of the aristocracy?”

  My cheek still burned; I knew the story almost by heart; I hated my father for using his past to ruin my life. Angrily I looked at the floor, at the walls, at the taut curve of the dragon’s body as it hung cold, glittering and motionless.

  “But then, you see, there was the revolution, the coming of what they called democracy. No more the many ancient cultures of Siam existing side by side. The closing of the Chinese-language schools. Laws restricting those of ethnic Chinese descent from certain occupations… true, there were no concentration camps, but in some ways the Jews had it easier than we did… someone noticed. Now listen! You’re not listening!”

  “Yes, Papa,” I said, but in fact my mind was racing, trying to find a way out of this intolerable situation. My Chinese self calling out to my American self, though she was stranded in another country, and perhaps near death, like the dragon whose flesh sustained my family’s coffers.

  “1945,” my father said. “The war was over, and Chiang Kai-Shek was demanding that Siam be ceded to China. There was singing and dancing in the streets of Yaowaraj! Our civil rights were finally going to be restored to us… and the Thais were going to get their comeuppance! We marched with joy in our hearts… and then the soldiers came… and then we too had rifles in our hands… as though by magic. Uncle Shenghua’s car was smashed. They smeared the seats with shit and painted the windshield with the words ‘Go home, you slanty-eyed scum.’ Do you know why the restaurant wasn’t
torched? One of the soldiers was raping a woman against the doorway and his friends wanted to give him time to finish. The woman was your grandmother. It broke my father’s heart.”

  I had never had the nerve to say it before, but today I was so enraged that I spat it out, threw it in his face. “You don’t know that he was your father, Papa. Don’t think I haven’t done the math. You were born in 1946. So much for your obsession with racial purity.”

  He acted as though he hadn’t heard me, just went on with his preset lecture: “And that’s why I don’t want you to consort with any of them. They’re lazy, self-indulgent people who think only of sex. I just know that one of them’s got his tentacles wrapped around your heart.”

  “Papa, you’re consumed by this bullshit. You’re a slave to this ancient curse… just like the damn dragon.” Suddenly, dimly, I had begun to see a way out. “But it’s not a Thai I’m in love with. It’s an American.”

  “A white person!” he was screaming at the top of his lungs. My two aunts looked up from their stirring. “Is he at least rich?”

  “No. He’s a poor journalist.”

  “Some blond young thing batting his long eyelashes at you —”

  “Oh, no, he’s almost fifty. And he’s fat.” I was starting to enjoy this.

  “I forbid you to see him! It’s that man from the Post, isn’t it? That bloated thing who tricked me with his talk of music and literature into thinking him harmless. Was it he who violated you? I’ll have him killed, I swear.”