Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond

by Unknown

  “I stood still and stopped working, and before long my joints started to rust and fuse together, and soon I couldn’t move at all. The shipyard owners left me here for scrap, and if you hadn’t come along, I don’t know how much longer I’d have waited.”

  “Come along with us then,” Dorothy said. “We’re going to see the Great Oz, who can make any wish come true. He’ll get me home.”

  “He’ll give me some sense,” said Scarecrow.

  “You think he’ll give me a heart?” asked the Tin Woodman.

  “It’s worth a try,” said Dorothy.

  The road of yellow brick now passed through a neighborhood full of the sort of places Dorothy had been told to avoid: dark houses with red lanterns hanging outside their walls, halls full of loud men shouting as they played cards and argued about money, pavilions with no signs except hanging banners painted with poppy flowers.

  As the three turned a corner, they saw a door open up, and some people inside pushed a large man out. He fell facedown into a puddle in the street without moving, and the men inside the house closed and locked the door behind him.

  Dorothy hurried over and tried to drag the fallen man out so he would not drown. But she could not move his frame.

  “Help me!” she cried to her companions.

  Scarecrow wasn’t much stronger than Dorothy, but the Tin Woodman easily lifted the large man out of the puddle and sat him down gently so that he leaned against the wall of the house he had been thrown out of.

  “This is an opium den,” said the Tin Woodman. “He’s an addict, and there’s nothing we can do. They probably threw him out because he could no longer pay.”

  “There must be something we can do for him,” said Dorothy.

  The Tin Woodman considered. “Perhaps I’m too quick to dismiss him.” He hung his head. “If I had a real heart, I would be more compassionate.”

  “Why don’t we get the opium out of him so that he’s clean?” said Scarecrow.

  “I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” said the Tin Woodman. “If it were that easy, opium wouldn’t have claimed so many lives.”

  “I don’t have much sense,” admitted Scarecrow. “That is why I come up with ideas like that.”

  But Dorothy didn’t think it was such a foolish idea. She remembered Aunt En, who believed in the traditional ways, once telling her that ants belonged to the element of fire and were a good cure for any poison, which belonged to the element of wood. Uncle Heng had told her that this was an old wives’ tale, but in this Shanghai, where magic was alive, maybe it would work.

  She took some sweet carrots out of her pocket and began to chew them into a paste. Then she spread the paste all over the bare arms and face of the unconscious man.

  Soon, ants, enticed by the sweet smell of the carrots, crawled out of the cracks in the walls and began to bite the sleeping figure.

  “I hope the poison from the opium will leave with the bites,” Dorothy said, her hands squeezed into tight fists.

  The large man began to thrash and curse, and Dorothy and Scarecrow jumped back, frightened. But the Tin Woodman held the man down as he continued to scream and fight and the ants went on biting him. The Tin Man kept his eyes averted because he thought the expressions of pain on the man’s face would make him queasy, and he tried to keep his touch gentle so that the man did not suffer needlessly.

  Eventually the ants had removed every bit of sweet carrot from the man’s body and left, and the large man sat up by himself, looking amazed at the three strangers around him.

  “Thank you,” he said. “For the first time in a long while, I feel awake.”

  “I was once a fighter, a member of the Boxer Rebellion. I was so fearless that they called me the Lion.

  “We invoked the old magic of China, the power of the craggy mountains and misty air, the deep marshes and the clear streams. We called on the old temples, built before the coming of Christian missionaries and their contempt for all that we revered. We painted ourselves with words of power so that bullets could not harm us.

  “We rose, a thousand voices shouting as one, to drive the foreigners out of China, so that our children could walk with their backs straight, so that their children would know that they belong to a free people, not a people addicted to opium and subservient to the will of others.

  “And for a while, we believed we could win.

  “Then came that battle outside the bounds of Shanghai. The foreigners shot at us with their guns and cannons while we rushed at them with our spears and swords.

  “My friend fell to the left of me. My brother fell to the right of me. Why was the old magic not working? Was it too weak to stop steel and gunpowder, much as the junks were too weak to stop British gunboats?

  “And my courage, the faith that had sustained me for so long, suddenly fled. And the next thing I knew, I fell too, even though I hadn’t been shot. I hid myself among the bodies of my fallen comrades and watched as the rest of the Boxers were killed.

  “I survived as a coward, and since that day, I have sought refuge in the oblivion brought by opium.”

  The Lion sat quietly, his wild mane of unkempt hair obscuring his downcast eyes.

  “You have saved me from drowning to death in an opium dream, but I’d rather be dead. I have no courage.”

  “Come with us to see the Great Oz,” Dorothy said. “He is a powerful magician, and he will give you courage.”

  The Lion did not believe this, for he had seen how the old magic failed when he had been most in need. But Dorothy looked so earnest that he could not bear to disappoint her, and so he nodded and agreed to come.

  The four companions walked on, as the golden bricks glistened in the moonlight in front of their feet.

  For a while they walked along the Bund, next to the Huangpu River. Like its twin in the Veiled Shanghai that Dorothy came from, even at night, the placid, wide river of commerce was filled with cargo ships from around the world, their steam engines puffing and their copper bells clanging.

  Dorothy was a little worried that the four of them would make an odd sight. But as they passed through the crowd promenading along the Bund—Portuguese dancing girls flouncing about in puffy skirts and heavy makeup; bare-armed and tattooed Malay sailors flashing black-stained teeth; American “flappers” puffing on cigarettes; well-dressed Russian noblemen and noblewomen taking a night stroll; European businessmen surrounded by Chinese mistresses and servants; a troupe of acrobats with a lion, a tiger, and a dancing bear surrounded by a cheering crowd—she realized that the four of them were far too drab to stand out.

  A large, well-dressed man in a crisp new suit barreled down the Bund, and Dorothy couldn’t dodge out of the way quickly enough. His shoulder collided with her and almost knocked her off her feet. He stopped to glare at her as she stumbled, his blue eyes icy cold.

  “Watch where you’re going!” said Scarecrow.

  The man looked from him to Dorothy, frowning as if he had seen something deeply distasteful.

  “Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” Dorothy said. She didn’t think it was her fault at all, but she had always been taught to be polite.

  The man looked at her contemptuously. “You think because you’ve learned a bit of English, you belong here? Think you’re free to corrupt our youth? Think you’re better than the other Chinese whores?”

  Dorothy didn’t know how to answer this. Her heart pounded and her face felt hot. She backed up a few steps. The other pedestrians on the Bund kept their distance, though a few stopped to look at the confrontation.

  “You need to learn some manners,” the man said. He raised his cane to strike Dorothy.

  But a strong arm shot out from the side and grabbed the cane mid-swing. The Lion stepped in front of Dorothy, still holding the tip of the cane.

  “You dare to strike at a European?” said the incredulous owner of the cane. He pulled at the cane, but the Lion’s hold was so solid that it might as well have been embedded in stone. “Let go now or els
e by the time the police are through with you, you won’t even be able to crawl back to your muddy village!”

  The Lion flinched. But he continued to hold the cane, even though his arm trembled.

  Dorothy looked around and saw a few more of the Panopticons rising high above the crowd. If Beini was right, the police would have already seen this and were probably on their way.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered to the Lion. “Let go. We don’t want to be caught by the police before we get to see Oz.”

  The Lion stared at the man with the cane as though his eyes were on fire. He began to twist his wrist, and the man yelped as the cane was finally pulled out of his hand. The Lion snapped it in half and tossed the pieces into the Huangpu River. The man stared in disbelief at the pieces of his cane arcing over the water.

  The bobbing hats of the Shanghai Municipal Police could be seen in the distance.

  “Run!” Scarecrow yelled.

  The Tin Woodman hung by his hands from the levee, dangling his feet over the Huangpu River while the others clung to him so they could not be seen from the Bund. After they were sure the police were gone, they climbed back up.

  “I wish I were brave,” the Lion said. “I should have punched him in the face. But I’m just a coward in hiding.”

  “If you had done that,” Dorothy said, “then all of us would have been arrested. Sometimes just because you don’t fight doesn’t mean you aren’t brave.”

  But the Lion wasn’t convinced.

  They looked around at the splendid, gaudy, European-style buildings that lined the Bund and housed the foreign banks and trading houses whose names Dorothy knew well.

  “That’s where the real power and magic of Shanghai lies,” the Lion said, his voice filled with equal measures of awe and contempt. “The wealth of China somehow flows always to those who do not care about the Chinese.”

  Dorothy gazed up at the brightly lit windows in the pulsing heart of the city and imagined the power that flowed through the offices.

  “I thought Oz was the most powerful magician in all of Shanghai,” said Scarecrow.

  The Lion snorted and said nothing. But the Tin Woodman answered, “There are different kinds of power, and maybe Oz can give us what we want, even if he doesn’t own any steamships or have much money.”

  They picked up the road of golden bricks again. It took a turn away from the river, and the four followed.

  They came to a green park filled with freshly mown grass and trimmed hedgerows. In the middle of the park was a little two-story house with a green-tiled roof, green walls, and green shutters. The road of yellow bricks ended at the green door of the house.

  Dorothy pressed the doorbell, and a Chinese woman came to the door. She wore a green dress and scowled at the strange party.

  “We’re here to see Oz,” Dorothy said.

  The woman scrutinized them. “You’re not with a newspaper, are you?”

  “No,” Dorothy said.

  “Are you here for money?”

  “No. We’re here to ask for his help but not for money. We admire him because we heard how powerful he is.”

  The woman seemed doubtful, but at least her scowl relaxed. “Well, it might do him good to see some visitors who admire him. But you mustn’t tell him any news about what’s going on in the world outside these walls.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, for instance, don’t mention the Wicked Warlord of the West, or the Mechanical Cavalry of the Rising Sun. Don’t talk about the Treaty of Broken China Figurines or the Prison of a Hundred Young Flowers either. It would upset him.”

  Since Dorothy had no idea what any of these things were, she assured the woman that she had no plans to mention them.

  “You’re probably annoyed that we seem to be hiding everything from Oz, as though we are showing him the world through colored glasses and musical filters. But it’s not his fault that his magic didn’t work out the way he wanted it to.”

  Dorothy grew even more confused, but she nodded, just to move things along.

  “All right, come with me.”

  The room they were in was small and lit by a faint lamp. The walls were filled with framed photographs and newspaper articles.

  The woman left them and closed the door behind her.

  “Hey, I know this man,” said Scarecrow. He walked up to a few of the English articles on the wall. “This is Sun Yat-sen, the George Washington of China. He loves freedom almost as much as an American.”

  “It’s Nakayama Sho,” said the Tin Woodman. He looked at some of the Japanese articles framed on the wall. “I’d heard some of the officers at the Japanese company back in Manchuria speak of him. They think of him as almost an honorary Japanese.”

  “It’s Sun Rixin,” said the Lion. “He’s a Christian who did not believe in the old magic that the Boxers fought for. He’s almost a foreigner himself.”

  “This is President Sun,” said Dorothy. “I’ve seen his pictures in the textbooks. He’s the most famous revolutionary in China. He brought down the Last Manchu Emperor and was going to free China, but then he disappeared.”

  The four of them began to argue, each asserting that he or she was right about who the man in the pictures was.

  “I am all of these things and none of these things,” a thin and weak voice spoke from the dark.

  Gingerly, Dorothy walked over and pulled back a curtain. They saw an old man lying in bed, only his wizened face visible above the blanket.

  “How did you end up here?” asked Dorothy. “How did you become the Great Oz?”

  The Great Oz was sitting up, propped up by pillows. The four companions stood around the bed.

  “If I’m not mistaken,” said the Great Oz, “all of you came from the Veiled Shanghai, because you spoke of things I had done there.”

  Dorothy and her friends nodded.

  “In the world that you all came from, I was once known for my skill with words. I suppose some might say I was a magician, able to conjure up armies out of peasants, create revolutions with a few well-placed tracts.

  “For years, the Qing Court hounded me, and I was a man of many names and many disguises, and everyone had a different idea of who I was. Some saw me as the man to bring China into the modern world as a colonial base for Japan. Others saw me as an advocate of complete Westernization, abandoning China’s traditions. Yet others thought I was a nationalist, blinded by zeal to the problems of the common people. Still others thought I might be a Communist.

  “Yet through it all, I had only one wish: for China to be respected as an equal of the other nations of the world and not subjugated as the Sick Man of East Asia. I believed I could strengthen this anemic land with an injection of ideas I learned from the West and Japan.

  “When the Revolution succeeded in 1912, I thought my dreams would come true. Yet all that followed was more suffering for the people of China. The Great Powers did not live up to their ideals for the respect of the rights of all mankind, and they preferred China to be weak and divided, a carcass to feast upon. The Chinese warlords placed their own interests above those of the people and fought for spoils. I was too naive, and those I thought were my comrades betrayed the revolution until the man I once trusted the most drove me from China. In exile, I became a nobody.

  “And one morning, I woke up in this new Shanghai, this Shanghai through a dark mirror. Everyone told me that I was a great magician—that I could make things happen just by thinking and speaking. But I am not a magician at all, only a bad revolutionary. The man who betrayed me, the Wicked Warlord of the West, defeated me with his magic and made sure that my powerlessness was plain for all to see.

  “And so the few who still have faith in me allow me to hide in this house, and they hide the truth of the world from me, thinking that it would break my heart. I call myself the Great Oz as a joke, like Ozymandias, whose accomplishments were once thought so great and turned out to be so many mirages.”

  “So you’re not a magic
ian at all?” Dorothy asked.

  “No,” the Great Oz shook his head sadly. “I am just an old man living with dreams and memories.”

  “How will you get us home?” asked Dorothy. “Beini said that you could.”

  “How will you give me brains?” asked Scarecrow.

  “How will you give me a heart?” asked the Tin Woodman.

  “How will you give me courage?” asked the Lion. And he stood up menacingly over the frail figure of the Great Oz.

  “I cannot,” said the old man. “I’m sorry.”

  “You must,” said Dorothy. “I believe in you. You might not believe that you have any power, but back in the Veiled Shanghai, young students are marching in the streets shouting your words; workers and merchants are on strike for a future you promised; even the lowliest and meanest Chinese have faith that there is hope to your vision, and they do not care if you don’t believe in yourself.”

  A hint of the red blow of health came into the Great Oz’s sallow cheeks. “Is everything you said true? The people of Veiled Shanghai are united?”

  Dorothy nodded. “They’re risking everything to bring down the traitors in Peking.”

  “Then you must defeat the Wicked Warlord of the West,” the Great Oz said.

  “He’s behind the warlords imprisoning the students in Peking,” Dorothy realized. “He’s the greatest of the traitors they’re protesting against in the Veiled Shanghai. But how can I defeat him? I’m just a girl.”

  “Yet defeat him you must, or else none of us can wake from this dream.”

  And so the four companions began their trek toward Peking, the distant citadel of the Wicked Warlord of the West. It would be a journey of many days and many nights, but Dorothy, being young and determined, did not think that was a problem.

  The Wicked Warlord’s name was Yuan Shikai, and he was once the most trusted friend of the Great Oz.