A Drop of Chinese Blood

by James Church

  “Dumplings? Why not go for noodles? You should try the noodle shop on Lanxiang Hutong.”

  “Is there one? I haven’t seen it. Must be new. What makes you think it’s any good?”

  “One never knows until one tries, nephew.”

  “All right. You can join me if you like.”

  My uncle walked into the office and put his carry-bag on his desk. “You still have a job?”

  I followed him in. “One of us has to earn money.”

  “You have your father’s gift for gab, like a saw with a broken tooth.”

  I knew where we were heading—more comparisons with defective tools. “Never mind that. If you want noodles, I’m leaving in five minutes. Or you can go to sleep. Your choice.”

  Five minutes later, my uncle was at the front door. I was half surprised to see him. Usually after a trip to Harbin, he retreats into his workshop and stays there for days. He never likes to be interrupted after being away. He insists it is important to have quiet and calm in order to bring everything back into harmony.

  “It’s nothing mystical,” he said when I told him he sounded like a religious zealot. “I’m not casting a spell or invoking spirits. It’s simply a matter of settling in again, getting acquainted. All of us.”

  By that he meant the tools and the lumber against the wall, the unfinished bookshelves, everything but the shellac. He viewed shellac as something purely functional, outside his circle. I asked once why this was so.

  He screwed up his face, as if summoning the spirits from the deep. “If you’ve ever worked with shellac, you’d know the answer,” he said. “It might do you some good, as a matter of fact, getting acquainted with shellac. You need to know something other than pushing paper and padding files.”

  5

  Noodles any time are a nonevent, but especially in the morning. As far as I am concerned, at that hour they are simply warm and filling. There is little else to be said for them, or around them for that matter. Soon after he moved in, my uncle made clear that conversation and noodles don’t mix, certainly not in a noodle shop like the one we were in, where the din of other people slurping and smacking their lips makes it hard to hear anything else. It surprised me when he broke his iron rule and spoke.

  “There’s something wrong with these.” He frowned into the bowl.

  “Mine are fine,” I said. I’d heard of a rat’s head sometimes bobbing among the noodles. Noodle shop owners don’t always care what goes in the pots in their kitchen as long as the cash register is working. I glanced nervously at his bowl.

  “Then what is this?” My uncle held up several noodles and let them dangle from his chopsticks. “They have dried ends.”

  I realized right away there was going to be a problem. My uncle has no use for imperfect noodles. He pushed back his chair with a loud clatter and stood. A few customers looked up from their morning meal, annoyed at the interruption.

  “It was your idea to come here.” I kept my voice low. “I was in favor of dumplings. Are you leaving?”

  “No, I’m going back to the kitchen.”

  “Don’t, don’t do that, uncle! They have large knives in kitchens, and they don’t like customers poking around. We have been getting a lot of in-kitchen violence calls from these little eating places.”

  “Then they shouldn’t serve garbage.”

  “Calm down. Let’s call over the owner and discuss this rationally.”

  My uncle had no patience with half measures. A dimmer switch was not his idea of a sensible invention. “The owner? The man’s a crook, one of many in this country. He’ll only defend his noodles. Look at them!” As he pointed at the offending pasta, his voice cracked with emotion. “They are indefensible.”

  “Uncle, sit down, will you? I’ll call him over. Maybe he’ll offer you another bowl.”

  My uncle laughed grimly. “Why would I want another bowl of noodles in this place? I’m going to tell the cook he’s an idiot.” By now he was shouting. A few of the customers had grounded their chopsticks and were grinning.

  “Lower your voice, would you? The whole place is looking at us. Calling the cook a name, what will that solve?”

  “The goal is not to solve anything. I am not interested in pouring oil on bad noodles. Whoever made these is an idiot. The sooner that is made crystal clear, the better.”

  “Uncle, listen to me just once, will you? I can’t have a scene here.” In fact, we had already crossed that particular threshold, but I still held out hope of containing the damage.

  “Why? You said you never heard of this place. Is this where you meet sources? Is the owner on your payroll? Do you take convicts here and execute them with a bowl of bad noodles?”

  “You know what I mean. If there is a scene, the newspapers will jump on it. MSS doesn’t like being in the news. Headquarters will be annoyed. I’ll get cited and have to write a long report. Please.”

  “So, this abomination”—again he gestured at his bowl—“is to be perpetuated. Insanity!”

  “What?”

  “I said, insanity.”

  “Let’s find another place if you feel so strongly.”

  “I’m not paying for this animal feed.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “And I forbid you to pay.”

  “I can’t just walk out.”

  “Since when can’t a security officer walk out of a restaurant without paying? What sort of bizarre social system have you created on the backs of the masses?”

  “Let’s not start a revolution over a few bad noodles, all right? We don’t need a scene.”

  “Ah, a scene! I nearly forgot. You’re worried about a scene. No wonder this country is about to come apart. It starts with bad noodles and escalates from there. I thought things were supposed to be different here. Streets paved in gold, everyone driving a Japanese car and sporting around in Italian underwear, that sort of thing.”

  “If you want to go, let’s go. Quietly.”

  At that moment, a thickset man walked in the front door, followed by three more men each incrementally thicker, and somewhat shorter, than the previous one. I knew there was going to be trouble. This sort of thuggish matryoshka never spells anything else. The manager knew it, too. He turned the color of the scum floating on top of the large aquarium near the door.

  “Nobody moves, nobody gets hurt,” said the first man through. He turned to the manager. “You’re late. It’s two months in a row. I told you what would happen if you were late again.” He had on a dirty brown suit that bagged at the heels. He also had a heavy Fujian accent. Extended kin of Mrs. Zhou’s, I thought to myself.

  The second man casually picked up a chair and smashed it against the aquarium. The tank fell to the floor; the fish inside scattered under the nearest tables.

  The baggy suit laughed. “That’s you next time.” He took the manager by the scruff of the neck and shoved him against the wall. “Next time, you and your fishies get ground into little pellets for pig food. Nice fat pigs.” He nodded to the trio behind him. “Go get the cook.”

  The three fell into line and disappeared into the kitchen. There was a crash of pots, dishes smashing onto the floor, then a howl of pain. One of the men emerged from the kitchen holding his left hand. It wasn’t attached to anything.

  “What happened to you?” the first man snapped.

  “He’s crazy. He cut off my hand with his fucking carving knife. What do I do now?”

  My uncle looked deeply into his noodles.

  “Put a towel on it or something.” The baggy suit looked away. “I hate blood. Where’s Wong?”

  “The cook threw boiling water in his face. He can’t see. I think he passed out.”

  The man put a dirty finger in the manager’s chest. “You’re dead, you get what I’m saying? You’re as good as dead, and this place is gone by morning. A grease fire is bad, and yours is going to be the worst.”

  There was another scream from the kitchen. The cook appeared at the door. He stared har
d at my uncle. “Someone got a complaint?”

  My uncle stared back. “I want to talk to you about your noodles sometime,” he said evenly, but more surprising to me, in Korean. “Meanwhile, if you need employment, let me know.”

  The manager used the moment to retreat behind his cash register. “We’re closed,” he shouted. “Everyone has to leave. Go away. You!” He pointed at the cook. “Go back where you came from. You people are nothing but trouble.” He turned to me. “Nothing but trouble from these people. Why do you let them pour across the border? Put up a fence or something. Take a look at those fish! Cost me plenty! Do you think I can serve fish that have been on the floor?” He paused, and I could tell he was thinking about it.

  I grabbed my uncle’s arm and hurried him through the kitchen. We went past the cook without eye contact, out the back door, down the steps, and were already on the street when the first police showed up in front of the noodle shop. “Keep walking,” I muttered to my uncle. “Nice and calm. Don’t turn around, and don’t look interested. Look dumb, if you can manage that.”

  Late that evening, as we sat in our library/office, I asked the obvious question. “How come you knew that cook in the noodle shop? How come you knew he spoke Korean?”

  “Who said I know him?” My uncle was reading a book on trees. “It says here that the red sparrow tree was so rare in the Southern Sung Dynasty that the emperor used the wood from it for a marriage bed and then had the bed disassembled to reuse the boards for the imperial throne. The last red sparrow tree in China was cut down by the Red Guards in 1967.” He put down the book. “Crazy bastards. Of course, without them, your mother wouldn’t have met your father. Which would have left me with nowhere to go when the weather got unsettled in Pyongyang. Who do I thank? The Sung emperor, or the Red Guards?”

  Since he’d arrived, my uncle rarely took the initiative in raising the situation in Pyongyang, and when he did, it was always indirectly. All he would say was that the weather there was “unsettled” and “unhealthy.” On rare occasions, he elaborated and said it was “stormy” or “peculiarly humid.”

  Given my access to reporting from across the river, I knew he was talking about the political state of play, not the sun or the rain, and he knew that I knew. For the past few years, we’d been paying for rumors about jockeying in the leadership, sudden disappearances of key people and then, just as suddenly, their reappearance. None of this information was from Handout, of course; luckily we had other sources, all of varying degrees of reliability depending on individual quirks. Much of it came down to money. Personally, I didn’t trust any of them very far. It seemed to me likely that several of them were working for my uncle’s old outfit in Pyongyang, the Ministry of People’s Security, or worse, its rival, the State Security Department, which ran many of the operations on my side of the river. Beijing kept emphasizing to me that it didn’t want the North Koreans to think they had free reign on Chinese territory, so Yanji Bureau was supposed to spend a lot of time and manpower keeping track of them. Some of the North’s operations we penetrated easily; some we sat back and watched; some we couldn’t locate but knew were under way from the odd transmission or the stray body in an alley.

  Beijing was modestly happy with my record of keeping Yanji as clean of North Korean operations as could be expected. The other bureaus in the northeast were told to send people a couple of times a year to learn from our technique. Li Bo-ting said it was no more complicated than swatting mosquitoes in August, but I never knew a mosquito that could handle a knife.

  According to my uncle, he left the North because he could not stay. That’s all he would say, but our sources had uncovered a little more. Three or four years ago, his former employer was put under investigation, reorganized, and purged as a result of apparently well-founded suspicions that its leadership was taking money (and possibly orders) from a foreign intelligence service. My uncle, who had retreated to a rural mountaintop to live after retirement, received a timely message from an anonymous friend—the best kind, he maintained—that his file was in the next batch to be examined, and that people with old scores to settle with him would likely use the opportunity to do exactly that.

  At that point, things were particularly bad for veterans of the People’s Security Ministry, especially those few like him who had personal experience with embarrassing events involving high-level personalities, information that no one wanted scattered around. He was a little safer living under my protection, but not much. His trips to Harbin were particularly worrisome to me. I didn’t think there would be any attempts targeting him while he was in Yanji, but I couldn’t keep him under lock and key. He knew enough to be careful, and he still knew how to watch his back. At home he affected a lazy image, but on the street, he was sharp and alert. I’d watched, as had Bo-ting, whom I sent out once in a while to tail him. Uncle O said he wasn’t in contact with anyone across the river, and from all I could gather, he was telling the truth. That’s what I thought until noodles suggested otherwise.

  He obviously wasn’t going to tell me what he knew about the cook, meaning I would have to find out on my own. Li Bo-ting could poke around; he would eventually come up with something. Meanwhile, I might have to pull in the cook and talk to him directly. Cooks cutting off other people’s hands, especially during business hours, could be a problem, though in this case I was willing to look the other way if I got some cooperation. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but I hadn’t bumped into anything ideal for a long time. It had reached the point that I probably wouldn’t recognize ideal if it jumped into my arms and kissed me on both cheeks.

  As my uncle read his book on red sparrow trees, I was totaling the week’s new harvest of household bills, matching them against our income. Even with the infusion of cash from Miss Du, the numbers were not coming out well. They rarely did, though the problem had deteriorated over the past six months. It was time for a serious conversation with my uncle, something I knew would be difficult and would almost certainly end badly. It meant being brisk in tone, plain in meaning, and relentless in pushing home the main point. The main point was simple enough: We would soon be without money. If I applied Miss Du’s advance to the pile of bills, it disappeared, a few raindrops sprinkled on the Gobi Desert. We would not just be low on funds; we would be completely without. We couldn’t keep up the current, widening gap between income and expenses. We were, in the language of the street, peeling our last potato.

  The opportunity to convey how close we were to the choice between robbing a branch of the Bank of China or eating once a month arose later the same evening. It was past midnight. We were both still in the library. I couldn’t sleep and was going through the receipts one more time, hoping to discover lifesaving errors in subtraction. Uncle O was at his desk, refining plans for yet another bookcase.

  “There are limits,” I said aloud. To my ears this sounded brisk. My uncle didn’t look up. “Limits,” I said the word again and held up a handful of bills. “If we spend, we have to earn. Spend”—I waved the bills in one hand—“and earn.” I held up the other hand, which was noticeably empty. I was pleased. This was the sort of clarity I’d hoped to convey.

  My uncle put down his pencil. “There is an ideal relationship between the number of shelves and the length of the whole, did you know that? Theoretically, you could build a bookshelf so small that it would need no shelves at all, if you only knew the right ratio.”

  I jumped in before he could continue. “No, actually you could not. Just as you could not build one so big it would need no shelves. And do you know why? Because in another month, you won’t be able to afford any lumber, none, not even a matchstick. We’ll have to start selling the bookshelves you’ve already built. We’ll have to take apart those unfinished ones—”

  “Like the emperor of the Southern Sung,” my uncle said neutrally.

  “—and use the parts to finish others to sell so we can get enough cash to buy food. You think I’m kidding?”

  “If things ar
e so dire, why can’t you take a little on the side, like everyone else in this sparkling land? You’re a policeman! People need favors!”

  “I don’t do that.”

  “You don’t? Why not? You haven’t lost your job, have you?”

  “No, not yet. Of course, when they come to arrest you, they’ll probably take me away as well. At that point, it’s a good bet my employment prospects will become shaky.”

  “Then don’t worry. No one is going to arrest me. It would be too much trouble. I don’t do well under arrest. I get cranky.”

  “That I have to see.”

  “Let’s be clear, your job is to keep me out of trouble. My job, or so your headquarters seems to calculate, is to soak up your excess energy. We’re supposed to balance each other. They’re pleased to imagine we’re even useful to them from time to time. Most ridiculous of all, they have convinced themselves that I keep you informed about what things are like over there.”

  “Ha! If only they knew.”

  My uncle stood up. “No one would buy a single one of these bookcases. No one understands them. They are not meant for the commercial market. If we have to live off the income from them, we’ll be dead of starvation in a week.”

  The phone rang, an ominous sound at that late hour. “If it’s for me,” my uncle said as he disappeared out the door, “I’m not here.”

  I picked up the phone.

  “You’re needed at the office,” a male voice said.

  “Who is this?”

  “Never mind who this is.”

  “Sorry, you hit the wrong buttons. We’re closed.”

  “No, you’re not. We’re sending a car. It’s black.”

  “I don’t ride in black cars, especially at this time of night.”

  “It’s not night, it’s morning. And for this, you make an exception.” The phone went dead. I dialed the office number.

  “What’s going on?” I looked at my watch. “All good children should be in their beds.”

  “A flying team flew in.” It was Lieutenant Li. His voice was guarded and a little on the nervous side. “That’s it, the sum total of my comment. See you soon.”