She nodded. Not meeting my eyes, she untied her spirit bridge from the doorknob.
16
Evening had fallen by the time I left the infirmary. I thought about Mrs. Wei. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the people of Chinatown are not a single people. She might be alone like me, practicing a magic that had no place here, but there was a difference. She could stop being what she was. She could remove her bamboo earrings, but I could not remove my yin eyes.
My father’s eye was waiting for me on a staircase near the infirmary. I lifted him up onto my shoulder and then I started to walk the three blocks toward my home. While I was walking, I filled the little spirit in on all the things I’d learned.
“A Kulou-Yuanling,” he said. “That sounds bad.”
I nodded my agreement. “Tom Wong is making a show of power,” I said. “He considers Bok Choy a threat to the Ansheng tong, and he thinks his father hasn’t been strong enough to stop him. So he’s going to demonstrate a kind of power that has never been seen in Chinatown before. He’s been gathering corpses from the abandoned mines, and probably from other places too, and tomorrow night he and Liu Qiang will raise a Kulou-Yuanling.”
“But that would be madness,” Mr. Yanqiu said. “A monster like that could destroy half of Chinatown.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s what they want. They’ll aim the Kulou-Yuanling at the streets that belong to the Xie Liang tong, and it will demolish everything. Tom will aim it at the businesses that defected from the Ansheng tong to the Xie Liang. The Kulou-Yuanling will demolish buildings, devour men, and leave others destitute.
“There will be no Xie Liang tong anymore,” I continued. “Everyone will be clamoring to earn Tom’s favor. He thinks his father’s 438s will see the wisdom of his ways and they’ll make Mr. Wong step down. He thinks filial piety is an antiquated notion, just another of the old ways that must be changed.”
Somehow my father’s eye managed to give a sigh. “But there are people outside Chinatown, aren’t there? Lots of them. They won’t just sit back and tolerate some giant monster running loose in their city.”
“It will start a war,” I said, “and that’s exactly what Tom wants. The corpses will be stacked half a mile in the air.”
Mr. Yanqiu stroked a tiny hand along the place of his absent chin. “And he’s doing all this for power.”
“For power, and revenge,” I said. “I don’t think Tom has recovered from Rocket’s death any more than I have.”
“Yes,” the eyeball said, choosing his words with care. “Will you tell me about that?”
We had arrived outside my father’s temple. Mr. Yanqiu wouldn’t be able to enter. “Let me get you a cup of tea,” I said.
The eye looked at me with a gaze like iron. “I would love a cup of tea,” he said, “but when you get back, I would like it if you would tell me about what happened.”
I sighed. I didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want to think about it. But my husband’s death had started Tom Wong on this path, and I needed to understand Tom if I intended to fight him. “I will tell you, Mr. Yanqiu,” I said. “I promise.”
I went inside and began to prepare two cups of tea, one for me to drink, the other for the eyeball to soak in. I kept my emotions distant while the water heated. I didn’t want to feel the pain again. I didn’t want to talk about the day Rocket died, so I made my feelings go numb.
When the tea was ready, I brought it outside. I sat down on the front step and leaned my back against the brick wall. I pushed one of the cups over to Mr. Yanqiu, and he climbed inside, bathing with a contented look. “Are you ready to talk, Li-lin?” he asked me.
“It was just two years ago,” I began. “Rocket was the tallest man in Chinatown, and his martial arts were beyond compare. Even his magic was amazing, since my father had ordained him to the Seventh. He had never learned any English, which made him ‘a real man of China’ in my father’s eyes. He worked as my father’s assistant. Early every morning he and I would climb to the roof of my father’s temple and watch the sun come up. I was so happy. We were saving money to move to Berkeley, where Rocket was planning to open a Daoist temple of his own.”
I looked away. The silence was painful. As it stretched on, I found myself wishing I hadn’t started to tell the story. But I do not hide from monstrous things. “One day some white men came to Chinatown. They had worked at a boot factory, but the factory shut down and they all lost their jobs.”
“So they blamed the Chinese competition,” my father’s eye said, fitting the pieces together. “They must have come to Chinatown looking for trouble.”
I took a sip of my tea, and nodded. “They were harmless, really. They just knocked men’s hats off their heads, or pulled on men’s queues. They were bullies, stupid bullies, but that’s all they were. Tom Wong went to find some constables. And Rocket walked up to
the men.
“There was a hat lying on the boardwalk, where the men had knocked it off of someone’s head. I can still remember the look on my husband’s face. He was pretending to be a fool. He said, ‘Look, someone lost a hat!’ And then he bent down to pick up the hat, and he deliberately made his ass into a target. One of the men tried to kick him, but he stepped out of the way, as if by accident. The man fell. Still pretending he didn’t know what was going on, Rocket put the hat on his head. One of the men tried to knock it off, but Rocket moved out of the way, again making it look like an accident. Over and over, the men tried to knock the hat off my husband’s head, but Rocket remained just out of reach, bobbing and ducking and dodging. He never even tried to strike back. Dozens of men crowded around, watching. Rocket was playing. But the men were humiliated. The crowd was laughing at them.
“The men grew angry. They started throwing punches but they still couldn’t hit him.” I sipped more tea, and the memory of that day went on in my head, unfurling like a long prayer scroll. “One man tried to hit him but he bobbed to the side, and the man wound up punching his friend in the face. He broke his friend’s nose.
“The men were completely unprepared. Rocket was younger, stronger, faster, more agile, and better trained. They never stood a chance. Without even striking anyone, my husband wore them down and battered them. One of them pulled out a hunting knife and Rocket pinched his wrist and disarmed him.
“I loved him so much in that moment,” I said. “I was so proud of him. He defeated four bullies without ever resorting to violence. He stood there over the exhausted men, holding the hunting knife, and I thought he looked like a xiashi, a knight from the old stories.
“That was when Tom Wong returned with the constables. They took one look at the scene, a man with a big knife standing over four men who looked like they’d been thrashed, and the constables pulled out their pistols, and they started to shout at him to put down the knife, but they were shouting in English, and Rocket, he …”
“Had never learned English,” the eye finished for me.
I started to sob. I cried like I had so many times since that day. It felt like there would never be an end to all my weeping. My father’s eye spoke soothing words but they were incomprehensible to me.
I could not bring myself to tell the rest of the story. I remembered how Tom stood there shouting for the constables to stop, people were shouting at Rocket to put down the knife—but some were shouting in Guanhua and others in Yue and there were the dialects of Fujian and Wu, some with a Taishanese accent. Rocket stood there in the cacophony of shouting voices, comprehending nothing. Then thunder struck. The first bullet hit him in the shoulder, spinning him sideways. The second took him in the stomach.
The next thing I remembered, he was prone on the ground and I was holding his hand. Dr. Wei was on the other side of him, speaking slow and calm words that made no sense. Rocket looked in my eyes. There was a little blood around his lips, but he tried to smile. “Li-lin,” he said. “Did I …?” And then he spoke no more.
The constabulary was quick to issue a formal apology.
The constables who shot him came to his funeral, bringing flowers. Flowers have no part in our customs. We wailed and burned paper offerings at my husband’s grave, while the policemen stood there, awkward, with their arms full of flowers and their eyes full of regret.
The bullies came to speak with me later. They offered to do labor for me for free. They brought wood for the stove. They brought me chickens from their yards. I refused them, I refused everything, but I knew their remorse was genuine.
It was a cruel, ugly, stupid world that slaughtered my husband for no reason, and left me with no one I could hate for it.
With my husband gone, I stopped climbing to the roof to watch the sun rise. Part of me believed that dawn would never come again in a world where my husband was dead.
My father grieved as deeply as I did. He had loved Rocket like a son. My father grieved, Tom Wong grieved, and I grieved, but never did we grieve together.
Nothing made sense, nothing ever made sense since that day, and nothing would ever make sense again.
Nothing made sense but the Dao.
The Way, and its power. The perfect order that underlies the universe. I had studied the Dao all my life, because my father wanted me to study; but for the first time, I studied the Dao by my own choice. It was important for me to understand the interconnections between all things. The Dao brought harmony to the discord between yin and yang. The Dao made sense. It gave me something to believe in, and that was all that mattered.
I asked my father if I could take Rocket’s place as his assistant. He reluctantly agreed. I chose to carry on my husband’s mission as my own. I would become a protector, as a tribute to the man I loved.
Tom Wong grieved differently. I remembered seeing him now and then, in the months that followed. Maybe he felt guilty for bringing the constables. Maybe he blamed himself for having faith in the authorities. Tom seemed as lost as I was. He looked like his higher soul had been diminished. He lost weight, maybe twenty pounds. The color left his lips. I wanted to console him, or maybe I wanted him to console me, but somehow even talking with my husband’s pretty friend would have felt like a betrayal.
No one consoled me, and I immersed myself in the Dao. Now I realized Tom had found something different to believe in. He would never trust any authorities to protect him again. Instead he had come to believe in standing up to his enemies, gaining power at any cost, and proving that power to the world. After tomorrow night, all the people of Chinatown would tremble at his name. Soon enough the whole world would quake in fear. Tomorrow night, a Kulou-Yuanling was going to rise. An old terror would re-enter the world.
“Unless I stop it,” I said out loud, and it was then I realized I had stopped crying.
“Stop what?” Mr. Yanqiu asked.
“The ritual. That’s the weak point. If Liu Qiang manages to complete the ritual, then the Kulou-Yuanling will rise. It will kill everyone in its path. It will destroy everything. And no one will be able to fight it.”
“Stop the ritual, and you stop the monster,” the eye mused.
“That’s a plan,” I said.
“That’s not a plan,” the eye said, turning in the teacup to face me, “that’s an idiot telling a moron to do something stupid. You can’t fight them, Li-lin, and you know it. You don’t even know how many of the hatchetmen are following Tom Wong. And then there’s Liu Qiang! It would be dire enough if you had to fight a Daoshi of the Fifth Ordination, but he went and became a soulstealer and learned some yao shu and he can call upon evil spirits, and did I forget to mention something? Oh yes,” he said, “his arm is a great big snake monster! With three eyes!”
“You think I should let my father handle this.”
“Obviously.”
I scowled at Mr. Yanqiu. He was clearly my father’s eye. “Why haven’t I destroyed you yet?”
He shrugged. “I’m giving you good advice here, Li-lin.”
“You’re still trying to save me,” I said.
“It’s my nature.”
“You could find a hobby.”
“Saving you is my hobby. It’s like gambling—a reckless, self-destructive hobby that only a fool would pursue.”
I smiled, glad for a little levity. “Mr. Yanqiu, my father is resting in an infirmary bed. He was still recuperating from gouging out his eye when a big dog monster chewed him half to death. He shouldn’t even be standing up right now, let alone going off to fight.”
The eye appraised me from his cup. “So what do you think you should do?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, taking a sip of my tea. “I can find allies.”
“Mrs. Wei offered to teach you her magic.”
“I won’t be taking her offer,” I said. “First, her magic rituals involve shen-da, activities which harm the body.”
“Like gouging her arm?”
“Yes, like that, but if I were to perform shen-da, I’d also probably need to slit my tongue, pierce my cheeks with a spike, or beat myself with a barbed rod. I might need to burn my fingertips until they lose sensation, or roll naked over thorny branches.”
“I see,” Mr. Yanqiu said.
“With a bloodied tongue, my incantations would be weaker. With burned fingers, my shoujue gestures would be less precise. After beating myself or rolling in thorns, I would not fight as well.”
“That all makes sense,” the eyeball said. “But what if her magic would give you what you need to beat Liu Qiang?”
I smiled. “That brings me to my second point, Mr. Yanqiu. Her magic wouldn’t give me enough.”
“How do you know, Li-lin?”
“Mrs. Wei said as much. She offered to teach me her people’s magic, and she offered to help me find her people’s spirit servants. But she also told me the Daoshi defeated her people’s spells and killed their spirits.”
“I see,” Mr. Yanqiu said. “Asking for Mrs. Wei’s help would mean inflicting harm on yourself, and all you’d get in return would be spirits too weak to fight Daoshi.”
I nodded.
“So when you said you could find allies,” he said, “who did you have in mind?”
“I was thinking of Bok Choy.”
My father’s eye sputtered in the teacup. “Li-lin, if Bok Choy helps you, you’ll be cast out from the Ansheng tong. This whole side of town will be off-limits to you. Half the gangsters in town will raise their hatchets at the sight of you.”
I sighed and turned my head away. Not far from me a man was selling fireworks from a cart. Across the street a woman with bound feet was haggling with a butcher, while two small children waited behind her.
These were the people who lived in Chinatown. They crossed an ocean in pursuit of a dream. And I imagined them dead. I imagined their bodies crushed or torn to pieces by the Kulou-Yuanling. The image filled me with a nauseated feeling, a feeling of helplessness and horror. I made up my mind.
“I have to do something,” I said. “In the morning I’ll go to Xie Liang headquarters,” I told the spirit. “Tomorrow I’m going to talk with Bok Choy.”
The eye dipped underwater and somehow blew little bubbles. When he came up, he said, “Could you do me a favor?”
“What do you have in mind, Mr. Yanqiu?”
“Could you destroy me now? Please?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re going to destroy me sooner or later,” he said. “I’m a monster and it’s your duty. But my duty, my only duty, is to keep you safe. So I would greatly prefer it if you would destroy me now, so I don’t have to watch you get murdered by gangsters.”
I stared at him for a long moment, and then I began to laugh. With my thumb I dunked his head under the water. He bobbed back up with an undignified look on his eye.
“You don’t ever give me face,” he said.
“You haven’t got a face, Mr. Yanqiu.”
He harrumphed.
17
When the sun went down I stood on the steps to Father’s temple and called for Mao’er. He did not come. I went back inside a
nd came out with a flask of lamp oil. “Mao’er,” I called again. A pair of red lacquered lanterns hung outside the temple. I refreshed their oil and lit them. All down the street, other people had done the same. Passersby would walk between shadows, lit by the glow of lamps and lanterns.
I sat on the bottom step and poured my remaining lamp oil into a ceramic saucer. This time, when I called, a small orange shape came sauntering out of the shadows. Mao’er’s two tails were high. He carried himself with a deliberately casual air, as if he just happened to be walking nearby.
“Miao,” he said. He stretched himself on the boardwalk, his eyes focused on the saucer full of oil.
“Don’t be shy, Mao’er,” I said, pushing the saucer closer to him. “It’s for you.”
“Mine-mine?”
I nodded, but still he approached the oil warily, as though some other cat might leap out of the darkness and take his treat from him. He inched toward the saucer. When he reached it, he lowered his head and began lapping it up, with a kind of gusto.
After a few moments, he sat back, in a posture that seemed to be intent on reclaiming some of his dignity. “Dao girl fighty now?”
I looked at him. “I’ve seen you fight, Mao’er. You were like a whirlwind of claws and teeth. Those boys ran away, covered with bites and scratches.”
He preened. “Mao’er fighty!”
“You weren’t holding back when you fought them, were you?”
“Hrah!” he said, or something like it, a cat’s proud laugh. “Me be jungle cat, Dao girl, me be fierce. Hunty, fighty! No hold back.”
“So what you’re saying, Mao’er, is that you fought with all your might, against children, and only managed to give them some scratches?”
He glared at me, his posture shrinking from pride to sullenness. “Mao’er fighty,” he said. “Hunty, fighty.”
“Mao’er, I’m sure you are a mighty hunter, and I would not insult your prowess,” I said. “But I do not think you should join me in my fighty. I mean, my fight.”
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