by Henry Lien
This sensei is a fool.
During architecture class, he doesn’t teach us anything about actual architecture. Instead, he gives us little dexterity puzzles. He asks us to feel our teeth with our tongues and mold scale models of them out of clay. He gives us vision tests with optical illusions. He asks us strange ethical questions about whether we’d choose to save the last surviving copy of the Five Transcendental Classics or the last surviving bamboo seed under heaven. I don’t understand why the Conservatory of Architecture is considered one of the two greater conservatories, equal to the Conservatory of Wu Liu.
As soon as class is over, Suki and her girls race to the next class at the Conservatory of Music with our instructor, Sensei Madame Yao. Suki approaches her with another of my cakes of soap. As she starts to tell Sensei Madame Yao that I have a present for her, someone else skates up.
Doi. She swipes the cake of soap out of Suki’s hands.
“Sage and venerable Sensei Madame Yao,” says Doi. “I played a bad trick on our new friend from Shin. I sold her these cakes of soap when she arrived and told her that it’s Pearlian tradition to give them to our senseis at the start of term.” We’re all too surprised to speak.
Why is she helping me? We’re rivals.
Suddenly, I realize she’s not helping me. She’s only doing this because she hates Suki even more than she hates me. Doi is just using me to get back at Suki.
Sensei Madame Yao’s entire body begins to heave with anger. It is apparent that beneath her robe, she is muscled like a bull. She fumes at Doi from under bangs so severe and perfect that they look like they were cut following the edge of a bowl. “All that you students care about is wu liu, but do you think that because this is only music, you can turn my classroom into a riot? You students…” She assumes a half-crouching position. “… make me…” She looks as if she were about to start a speed race. “… so angry!”
She explodes out of her half crouch and skates furiously toward the gong at the far end of the classroom. At the last instant, she stamps and executes a perfect two-footed flying kick with her skates pointed at the gong. She crashes into it, sending it toppling over, and the hall thunders with a metallic bwong!
Sensei Madame Yao picks herself up from the pile. She points at Doi and says, “Go to the corner and stand on your hands. Stay there until I tell you.”
Doi tucks her length of waterfall hair down tightly into the back of her robe. Without a glance at any of us, she places her hands on the hard pearl and flips into a handstand.
Sensei Madame Yao straightens her back, clears her throat, and begins to sing a lecture to us in the exaggerated style of Meijing opera. The song is an instruction about how to sing clearly and how great Chiologists can hear blockage in a voice and thus can tell if what is coming from someone’s mouth is unwilling, and thus they can read human hearts and are greater than warriors of wu liu.
The lecture is somewhat interesting, but I’m watching Doi the whole time. After a quarter hour, her arms are trembling badly; the sweat is sprinkling from her brow to the pearl below.
Sensei Madame Yao finally finishes, and Suki and her entourage clap as hard as if they were trying to knock their hands off their wrists. Sensei looks at them and gives them a short nod and grunt.
I think she’s going to let Doi stand upright now, but no.
She brings out an orb formed of two halves carved of the pearl covered by a membrane of pearlsilk. She sings into the orb, clamps the two halves together, and pulls out the membrane from between the halves.
By this time, Doi’s arms are trembling as hard as if she were having a seizure. Her mouth is constricted into a circle as she tries to breathe deeply and stretch out her energy.
Sensei Madame Yao holds up the orb. She twists the two halves open. From within, the tinny sound of her singing comes out.
Doi’s arm buckles and she almost topples over, but she punches the pearl, forcing her arm straight and pushing herself back up to maintain the position. And still Sensei Madame Yao ignores her, while Suki and her entourage gleam. Hateful, vicious people!
At last, Doi topples down in a heap.
“Be quiet!” yells Suki. “You’re interrupting Sensei!”
Doi is on her knees with her legs splayed out to keep her balance, like a fat goose. Her face is so deep with color that it looks bruised. Her smoked spectacles have fallen off. Sensei Madame Yao looks at her and says, “Get up. Go sit.”
When at last this miserable class is over, I feel I should talk to Doi, but I’m not sure what to say. I’m not even sure if she was doing this for me.
When she sees me approaching, she scowls and skates away in a swirl of black robe.
She blames me for this.
So now I have made a second enemy without even trying.
And as much as Suki and Doi hate each other, I think they’re both starting to hate me more.
CHAPTER
SIX
That afternoon, I skate into one of the strangest buildings I have ever been in.
The outside is covered in words.
The inside is covered in birds.
The Hall of Literary Glory, where we shall have our first class at the Conservatory of Literature, is scrawled all over with the logograms for Silence! and Do Not Let the Birds Out! in loud, red writing.
Inside, Sensei Madame Phoenix sits behind a desk at the far end of a lofty atrium. The walls have branches sticking out of them on which sit a hundred or more green birds, the kind with the curved beaks that can talk. Most of them are resting quietly, some with their heads turned in sleep.
She keeps crossing her palms in front of her mouth. I guess that’s meant to tell us to be quiet. When the whole class has arrived in the hall, she holds up a great paper paddle with the words Do not overexcite the birds or they will swarm and might not be calmed down in time to perform the newspaper.
Suki unwraps a cake of soap and begins to whisper, “Honorable Sensei Madame—,” but the Sensei shoots her an angry stare and furiously waves another paper paddle on which is written the words Too Exciting!
Suki continues, “But, Sensei, you don’t—”
Sensei Madame Phoenix skates to Suki and slaps her on the top of the head with the paper paddle. We smother our giggles as a rustle passes through the birds.
Sensei Madame Phoenix gestures for us to take our seats at the desks arrayed in the hall. She hangs a great scroll from one of the branches sprouting from the wall. It gives us our assignment. We have to memorize an entire chapter from the Classic of Yellow Beans and then write it from memory. Since the chapter that Sensei Madame Phoenix chose for us is a table of figures recording grain tax collections from the Shinian imperial silos inventory records, half the class is soon nodding off to sleep.
Throughout the class, I think of poor Cricket going through the same thing with the cakes of soap that I forced him to take this morning. Ah, August Personage of Jade, please let the boys here in Pearl be less cruel than the girls!
After an hour has passed, the students are awakened by a horrible sound. The birds are screaming like a cyclone of howling ghosts. Sensei Madame Phoenix is skating in circles around the room with her arms in the air, and the birds are spiraling in the hall above us. “Iwi to me! It’s brushtime!” she cries. She skates straight out through the two sets of front doors, followed by Iwi, the leader of the flock, followed by a green, honking, screeching swarm.
I guess that we’re dismissed from literature class. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with the chapter we copied. I guess it was just to keep us busy for the hour.
As we follow Sensei outside, I can’t help but look for Doi. All I see is her back as she rushes out the doorway of the hall.
In the sky outside, the birds are weaving and looping. Below them, Sensei Madame Phoenix is skating in odd patterns across the campus, weaving with her hands in the air as if she were writing with them on the sky above her. Many students are watching the birds, as if reading something in their
flight path.
One bird in the lead files behind Sensei Madame Phoenix, and the rest of the flock follows. It responds sensitively to every one of her turns as she skates across the campus and even follows the nuances of her gestures with dips and rolls. It’s as if the lead bird were the tip of a great invisible brush held in Sensei Madame Phoenix’s hand and the other birds were a tail of ink trailing behind on the—Heavenly August Personage of Jade! That’s exactly what it is! Sensei Madame Phoenix is skating out a path for the birds to follow and writing logograms with them on the sky!
I have to look carefully to make out the words being formed by the birds. It’s a little hard to read because it’s written in that style of calligraphy that looks like blades of grass caressing each other.
I look around at the students skating by and see the girl with the mole on her chin.
“Hey, you. Girl.” She skates over, as eager as a puppy. “Are they writing something?”
“Oh, it’s just a sensational headline to try to get you to buy their newspaper. It always ends with ‘Buy Pearl Shining Sun News to get whole story!’”
“Sensei Madame Phoenix works for a newspaper?”
“No one ever got rich being a sensei. She just delivers the headlines. They do it with the birds from Pearl Famous because the whole city can see it from here.”
I pick out the logograms one by one.
“Empress. Dowager. Still. Refuses. To. Return. Mayor’s. Sons. While. Mayor. Calls. For. Resignation. Of. Chairman. Niu. Buy. Pearl. Shining. Sun. News. To. Get. Whole. Story.”
I freeze.
“The Chairman has sooo failed to keep the monkey pleased!” says a girl with a honking voice. “Do you think there’s going to be a war?” She sounds delighted.
“Don’t say that!” says the girl with the mole.
“So that’s why the Empress Dowager sent you here.” The crowd parts to reveal Suki skating slowly toward me. “You’re not really a skater. You’re a spy.”
I say, “So it must sting that you lost to someone who is ‘not really a skater.’”
“You saw the headline! It sounds like the Empress Dowager is holding those poor skaters, the mayor’s only sons, as hostages. That old imperialist snake wants the secret of the pearl.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I say. “The Empress Dowager has invited them to extend their stay because she’s a great admirer of wu liu.”
“They’ve been there since last year.”
“You don’t understand anything about how these things work. That’s why she sent my brother and me in exchange. As goodwill ambassadors to thank Pearl for letting her enjoy the company of her guests for longer.”
“That’s not why she sent you. Everyone, mark my words! This girl is a spy sent by the Empress Dowager to steal the secret of the pearl! And if they find out where it comes from, they’ll take it all. Just like they tried to take our bamboo during the Bamboo Invasion.”
The students begin to whisper. They’re all looking at me.
“They’ll take our city apart piece by piece to build their own city of the pearl. They don’t know how to make anything themselves. They only know how to steal. They’re Shinian, after all.” Suki smirks.
I don’t have time for this ludicrousness. I have to go find Cricket. I should never have made him bring those soaps to class. I start to skate away, but Suki whispers something at my back.
I should ignore her. But I can’t resist.
“Say it to my face,” I say.
She skates so near that I can smell the plum blossom–scented thread woven into her hairstyle today.
She says quietly so that only I can hear, “I said that it doesn’t have to be true. It just has to look like it’s true. That’ll be enough. And you know why?” She smiles and whispers slowly, “Because you’re not from here.”
I turn away and leave, but I’m unnerved.
Because she’s right. I’m not from here. And that makes all the difference.
I skate to the point on the Principal Island where rails connect it with the Conservatory of Music, the boys’ last class for the day. I wait for Cricket, but it seems as if all the boys are already gone.
“Peasprout,” I hear from behind me. Cricket comes out from where he’s been hiding behind a fountain in the form of a dolphin. In his hands he holds white crumbles. His robe is powdered with crushed soap.
“I’m sorry,” he begins. “Please don’t be angry with me. I know they were so expensive. But the boys—”
What a terrible day. Especially after such a glorious yesterday. I move toward him, and he winces as if I were going to yell at him. Am I really that hard on him?
I pull him into a tight embrace. He muffles his sobs in the front of my robe. Curse these Pearlians! This horrible place! Why did we ever come here?
“It’s not your fault,” I tell him. “Never let them make you believe that.” This makes him weep harder. My poor little Cricket.
“Now, enough,” I say. “Let’s go eat. The line at Eastern Heaven Dining Hall will be longer than the Great Wall of Men by now.”
“I can’t face them again so soon.”
“We can’t let them think they can shame us into hiding from them.”
“I’m not like you, Peasprout.”
What am I going to do? He’s cutting up the pearl with his skates.
“You go,” he says. “I’ll only pull you down. I don’t belong here.”
“That’s not true.” I rub his back and say to him softly, as if telling him a fable before bed, “Do you remember the story that Nun Hou told us once about the young Shinian courtesan who was skilled as a dancer?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You were really small.”
He casts his gaze down at the word small. I say, carefully, “They called the courtesan Little Pi Bao Gu, even though she was a grown woman. One day, she fled to the island of Pearl. She applied her knowledge of dance by blending kung fu with skating to create the deadliest martial art under heaven.”
He lifts his face toward me as this sinks in.
“All of wu liu comes from her,” I continue. “All of this that Pearlians claim as theirs was invented by a tiny young woman. Who came from Shin. Like you did.”
He blinks to squeeze back the tears.
I take his hand and say, “So you skate with me into that dining hall, and when we do so, you hold your head high. We’re not from here. But that doesn’t mean we don’t belong here. Don’t ever let anyone make you believe that. No one belongs here more than we do.”
CHAPTER
SEVEN
I’m in a nightmare.
“Small hong-fist double toe jump!”
That nightmare that every student knows.
“Yin-yang health-form triple-stamp double jump!”
The one where you are taking an examination on things that you’ve never studied.
“Monkey-fist triple-scissor heel backflip!”
And everyone can see your wrong answers.
Except it’s not a nightmare. It’s wu liu class.
“Thousand Cleaver Goddess Sliding Across a Placid Sea!” shouts Sensei Madame Liao.
As all the girls start doing this move, which I’ve never even heard of before, I’m realizing that the wu liu moves I learned in Shin only constitute a tiny fraction of what most of the students here already know. And Supreme Sensei Master Jio announced that we’ll be doing Lady Ming’s Hand-Mirror. My opponent and I will take turns copying each other’s moves back and forth in an ever-lengthening string of different moves, until one of us makes a mistake. I’m never going to learn all these moves in time. I bow to Sensei Madame Liao to request permission to visit the toilet.
I leave, go in a stall, and close the door.
It’s not just the idea of having to copy moves that I might never have seen before during a Motivation. It’s also the pressure that this training is putting on my skate blades. I run a finger along the edges to check for any damage. Luckily, the
re aren’t any nicks. I’m relieved to see the spring formed by the dragon tail curling up and under my heel is undamaged. I was worried with all those jumps. Sixty-three jumps this morning! Blades cost as much as three months’ rice. In Shin, we have to make the blades last a year. The rich students here at Pearl Famous never have to worry about such things and learned moves using dozens and dozens of steps each. They didn’t have to limit themselves to moves that emphasize gliding and their own center of gravity to propel them forward to conserve steps.
Suki said I won the first Motivation because I was lucky. And in a way, she was right. It didn’t involve combat, only racing on rails and leaping. Combat is what really eats up steps. And I could use whatever steps I wanted instead of having to copy moves that I’ve never seen before but that everyone else already knows how to do.
How can I face this Motivation? I don’t know if I can even face the rest of today’s class. Maybe if I sit in here long enough, class will end and they’ll all leave without me.
Stop it, Peasprout. I straighten up and collect my emotions. So it’s going to be difficult. That’s nothing new to me. I need to go back and show those Pearlians that Shinians don’t give up.
I reach into the box of paper wipes in the stall to wipe my nose. Instead of squares of white paper, there is a stack of something strangely shaped and colorful. I take one out.
Ten thousand years of stomach gas! It’s one of those paper dolls of me dressed like an assassin with the words Peony-Level Brightstar Chen Peasprout, the Stealthiest Skater in Shin! printed in gold logograms above my head, stamped with the imperial seal. Who put them here? It must have been Suki or one of her friends.
I snatch the papers dolls out of the box, claw them to tatters, and throw them all down the toilet.
As I watch the dolls disappear, I realize just how devious Suki’s stunt is. It’s not just the insult—it’s the implication. Stealthiest Skater in Shin. As stealthy as a spy. Just like Suki accused me of being in front of all the other girls.
