Eyes wide, I stood and brushed myself off. “Little monster,” I said under my breath.
“I heard that,” he replied.
*
Mr. Yanqiu’s tiny legs made him walk slowly, so I lifted him to my shoulder and let him ride. I turned where he said I needed to turn, followed where he told me to go. Lefts and rights, we walked through a fog between life and death, tracing mystic steps along the spirit side of Chinatown.
“We’re getting closer,” I said. “I can feel it.”
“Of course we are,” he said.
Through a thin sheet of mist I saw Father’s temple. Its wood and brick were almost the same vivid colors I remembered, hardly dampened by any of the spirit world’s ash-and-gold moonlight. I started walking toward the temple.
“Not there,” Mr. Yanqiu said. “That isn’t where we are going.”
I turned to him, puzzled. “But that’s where I left myself. My body.”
“Turn right,” he said. “Two blocks down, on Dupont.”
I did as he said, stepping through the afternoon crowds, until we arrived outside Dr. Wei’s infirmary. Dr. Wei was Father’s friend; they often smoked cigars and played fantan together, all the while arguing. Dr. Wei incorporated American medicine into his practice, and supported the young Emperor’s reforms. Father argued that the old ways are best, that the Empress Dowager knew best, and that China should remain as it had always been.
Outside the infirmary door was a string of talismans painted on cloth. They were Father’s talismans, as strong as they come, to keep out spirits and diseases, but a new talisman had been added. A talisman I’d never seen before.
My name was written on it, in ghostscript, surrounded by a drawing of a door. I gazed at it, amazed.
My father had posted a talisman that granted me passage through his magical barriers.
Father had always been so distant, so powerful. I was stunned that he’d gone to such an effort for me.
I was so grateful that tears almost came to my eyes. Father had made a talisman for me, just for me, so I could come find him here. It was unlike him to be so considerate. A rush of emotion swept through me, all of it confused. And yet I still didn’t understand why my father wanted me to enter here, the infirmary, and not our home.
I turned my head to face the eyeball spirit. “Is he injured?”
The eye looked away, saying nothing. It felt to me as though he was protecting me from knowledge that might cause me pain. His gesture reminded me somehow of the look on my father’s face when he’s hiding something. When Father looks away, blinking too fast, I can always tell that he’s lying.
I stopped and thought for a moment about the eyeball on my shoulder. It was a strange monster, one of the yaoguai, and it had no relation to the social order. Something was wrong. My father would never summon a yaoguai into Chinatown. And how was it that Mr. Yanqiu was able to navigate the passage between the world of spirits and the world of men? He had no kind of red string to guide him.
There was something I was missing. Without something like a red string, the spirit on my shoulder shouldn’t have been able to find his way across the realms. Not unless he was anchored somehow, tethered, as though he was part of a living body.
I thought for a moment about the human body, the amazing dynamism of it all: the way vital energy flows along meridians, rising from the Bubbling Springs on the soles to the Upper Cinnabar Field in the skull, giving life to the spirit of each organ, the spirit of each limb, the spirit of each …
And then I had a sinking feeling. It felt like a piece of glass had fallen from the top of a building, fallen slowly and in infinite quiet, and shattered to a hundred pieces at the bottom.
“You,” I said to the eyeball spirit riding on my shoulder. “I know what you are.”
He looked at me, curious. “What am I, Li-lin?”
I couldn’t speak. I felt words choke in my throat. “You’re his eye,” I managed to squeeze out. “You’re the spirit of my father’s eye.”
Mr. Yanqiu leaned back quietly.
“But it makes no sense,” I continued. “In order to send you to me in the spirit world, Father would need to … he would need to …”
I couldn’t bring myself to say the words out loud. He would need to gouge out one of his own eyes.
The eyeball nodded. “He’s recovering in the infirmary now. You’re unconscious in the cot next to his.”
“Why would he do something like that?”
“He could tell your red string had been broken. You needed a guide to bring you back to the lands of the living. He sent me.”
“No,” I said, “no. It makes no sense. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t do that. Not for me.”
The spirit of his eye looked at me sharply. “But he did.”
Mr. Yanqiu was the spirit of my father’s eye, but he had been without conscious thought until Father’s spell. He didn’t know Father as I did. My father wouldn’t do this for me. There must have been some other reason, something I didn’t grasp yet.
I lowered my head and walked to the infirmary’s front door. The string of cloth talismans formed a barrier, and I felt it push against me, a sensation like a gathering wind. There was no going forward against the force of the barrier. But then the talisman with my name on it opened a path for me. It felt like a tree had been interposed between me and the wind; I heard the roar of it go on to each side of me.
I moved past the barrier, and Mr. Yanqiu dropped off my shoulder with a yelp. I turned to see him flopped face-first on the ground behind me, pushing himself up. “How undignified,” he said.
“You can’t make it past the talismans.”
“Obviously not,” he said, brushing off dust from the street with his tiny hands. He had the injured look of a man whose pride had been wounded. My father’s spell had locked him out, excluded him. Treated him like any other strange monster.
I looked at the eyeball spirit, concerned. “Listen, Mr. Yanqiu. I’m going inside to join spirit with body. I’ll probably be in there for a few hours, to talk with Father and Dr. Wei. Do you think you’ll be safe out here until I can come back?”
The eye gave me a shrewd look. “You won’t come back,” he said. “Once you’re back in your body you won’t even be able to see me.”
I blinked at that. “You don’t know,” I said. “You don’t know that I have yin eyes, do you?”
“Yin eyes? That means you can see spirits?”
“Yes.”
With a tiny white hand he scratched his chin, or, where his chin would be if he had a face. “Am I a yin eye?”
“Hm,” I said, stalling. “You are … that is, Father does not have yin eyes. But now you are a spirit, and maybe it depends which eye you were. I do not know whether you are yin.”
“Harrumph,” he said.
“Do you think you will be safe?” I repeated.
“I can take care of myself,” he said, with a scowl in his voice.
I walked to the door. My body would be resting inside the infirmary, unconscious, and my father would be there too. Missing an eye, recuperating under his friend’s care.
The door opened, and one of Dr. Wei’s apprentices rushed out, his braided queue shaking behind him. I saw the door closing behind him, and darted through while it was still open.
The infirmary was active. Dr. Wei, his wife, and three other apprentices were there, tending the needs of a few sick people. Like so many other good things, the infirmary was paid for by Mr. Wong; it was open to anyone who paid dues to the Ansheng tong. The English-language papers liked to portray the tongs as crime syndicates. But were it not for Mr. Wong’s philanthropy, sick people would go untreated, corpses would go unburied, immigrants would find no place to work or live, and ghosts would go unexorcised.
I found my body resting in a cot on the second floor of Dr. Wei’s infirmary. I approached my body as if it were a different person entirely. Her lips were parted, and I could hear her breath dragging in and out. Without hun,
the higher soul, the body’s breath would be shallow; it would generate less and less qi, or lifeforce.
I had gone out of body before, but never for so long. My body looked so young. So innocent. The face I saw was almost a child’s, untouched by evil, and not the face of the brokenhearted widow. My mouth seemed limp, my cheeks sallow in the infirmary’s lamplight. Bare of my usual expressions, silly or caustic, my moon-shaped face looked bland as tofu. Stretched out on the cot, my body seemed small and fragile.
However, the best weapons often seem small and fragile. And I hadn’t forgotten about Mr. Liu. I knew my skin would be marked where he had cut me, and I was going to use every weapon at my disposal to make him suffer. I was going to teach him that Rocket’s wife is no one to be trifled with. He would pay for cutting my skin. He would pay for costing Father his eye.
I glanced to the next cot over, where Father was sleeping. The entire right side of his face was wrapped in bandages, and bandages covered much of his scalp. Graying hair poked out from between the bandages. Under a trimmed, gray-white mustache, the edges of his mouth were turned down, as if in a disapproving frown. Father was so sleekly built that he seemed to leave almost no impression at all on the cot.
He had never struck me as small before, and yet here he was, resting, wounded. He gave a soft whimper in his sleep. He was in pain. If I knew my father, he had refused to take opium for his pain.
He was in pain, and I hated it. He was suffering for me, because I had fallen into a trap. If I had waited for him, asked permission like an obedient daughter, he would not be suffering now. But I had thought I could make my own decision, and now my father would pay the price for my transgression. My father was half-blind, and it was my fault.
Why had he done it? Why had he sacrificed his eye for me? Conflicting emotions surged through me. I was tempted to feel cherished, but that couldn’t be right. There had to be more to it. I was missing something. And I would have no way to learn what it was until he awoke.
The loss of my father’s eye was one more debt I owed him, one more debt I could never repay. But there was something I could do.
I was going to find the man responsible for this, and I was going to crush him.
7
I took it slow. Moving back into my body, the twelve pulses would grow quicker, the breath would grow deeper. I relaxed into myself again, feeling the cords of my spirit realign with muscles and sinews.
It was a wonderful feeling, a homecoming. My senses woke up and nearly overwhelmed me. The smell of plywood and straw came to me, the smell of fish oil burning in the lamps, and the aromas were so strong, so full.
I came back into my body. I felt heavy. The weight of my body felt insurmountable, like a mountain pressing me down. But then I felt stronger than I realized, strong enough to move my body’s weight. My pulses throbbed inside me, and I felt qi circulating along my meridians. The world came in through my closed eyelids like the slow warmth of sunlight. I hadn’t realized how much I loved being alive. It was wonderful to breathe air again, rather than echoes.
I opened my eyes, blinked a few times as I adjusted to the light of the lamps in the room. Dr. Wei’s infirmary was a series of square rooms full of cots. Everything was bright, everything stood out with a depth I had begun to forget. My eyes felt dry, and the smoke from the burning lamps made the sensation worse, but I was glad to be back. So glad.
Glad, and hungry. While I was unconscious at the infirmary, they probably poured medicinal broth down my throat, but now I was starving. I wanted food. A meal began to form in my mind. Pork and fish and spinach. Maybe fried in peanut oil, with a five-fragrance powder. The thought of food made my mouth begin to water, and I sat up in the cot.
Someone gasped. Mrs. Wei was standing in the doorway, covering her mouth with one hand. Before I could say anything, she turned and ran out, probably to get her husband, the doctor. Her large bamboo earrings shook beneath the tight knots of her hair as I watched her speed away from the room.
Mrs. Wei was a strange one. When I was a little girl, growing up without a mother in a town where just about everyone was a man, I had always wanted a chance to know Mrs. Wei better. Father had kept me apart from her, and I never knew why.
Dr. Wei came into the room, wearing a white jacket as if he were an American doctor, his spectacles high on his nose. He was a man of two worlds; his medical kit carried syringes, stethoscopes, and respirators alongside acupuncture needles, moxa sticks, and fire cups. “Li-lin,” he said, taking a seat on a stool at the edge of my cot, “are you all right?”
I nodded and spoke. “Yes,” I said. Or tried to say. My throat was so dry that the word came out as some kind of inhuman hiss. I cleared my throat before speaking again. “And Father? How is he?”
Dr. Wei pursed his lips. He took off his spectacles. He wiped the lenses clean on a piece of cloth, and said, “He’s lost an eye, Li-lin. He’ll be half-blind for the rest of his life.” The doctor gave me a moment to let that sink in. “He carried you here, then he went outside. One of my apprentices found him a few minutes later. He was sprawled out on my front step, holding a knife. Apparently he burned a paper talisman and then he cut out his eye.”
I listened to him and let the words register. Father burned a talisman first, I should have realized that. The talisman would have specific instructions written on it, commanding his eye’s spirit to follow those specific duties. I needed to ask Mr. Yanqiu what those duties were.
“Why would he do such a thing, Li-lin? Why would he cut out his eye?”
I shook my head. “He sent the spirit of his eye to help me,” I said.
Dr. Wei laughed, a dry chuckle I had heard often when he thought Father was making a silly argument. He saw my expression and went quiet. “You can’t be serious.”
I lifted my chin and said nothing. Dr. Wei stared at me. “But Zhengying wouldn’t do such a thing, Li-lin, not for you.”
“I know,” I said, looking down. Dr. Wei was one of a half dozen people who called my father by his personal name. He knew my father well.
“When he brought you to the infirmary,” Dr. Wei said, shifting on the stool, “someone had cut you. I applied phenol to your wounds. But those wounds were some sort of spell. Someone carved a spell into you. Who would do such a hideous thing? And why?”
“A man named Mr. Liu,” I said. “I think Tom Wong may have helped him.”
Dr. Wei gave a short, disbelieving chuckle. “Mr. Wong’s son is a sworn brother of the Ansheng tong, Li-lin. He would never lift a hand to strike at your father’s family. Who is this Mr. Liu?”
“I am not certain, Dr. Wei. I think he’s a Daoshi. Mr. Liu is about Father’s age, and he’s missing his right arm. Does he sound familiar to you?”
The doctor tsked. “Too many men in Chinatown missing an arm or a leg,” he said.
I sighed and looked away. He was right. Some men lost limbs working the gold mines during the rush, others building the railroads. I looked back at the doctor. “I think Mr. Liu is somebody new, Dr. Wei. I think he came to San Francisco recently.”
He looked thoughtful for a moment. “The American officials wouldn’t admit a laborer who was missing an arm, not after the Chinese Exclusion Act.”
I followed his line of thought. “So if Mr. Liu came here recently, he’d have to be classified as a merchant.”
Dr. Wei gave me a meaningful look over his spectacles. There could only be two ways a man with one arm had gotten classified as a merchant: either he already owned a successful business in San Francisco before he even arrived, or someone had bribed the immigration officials on his behalf.
That was how I got in, after all. The Exclusion Act made it so that Chinese females could only come to America if they were the family of a merchant. Mr. Wong had found American officials who were willing to classify my father as a merchant, in exchange for a large fee.
“But the only people in Chinatown who have that kind of influence,” I thought aloud, “are the Six Companies and
the Ansheng tong.”
“You’re forgetting the Xie Liang tong, Li-lin.”
I blinked at him. “The Xie Liang tong? They’re nothing but a joke. They’re ruffians and clowns.”
Dr. Wei shook his head. “Is that what your father has been telling you? The Xie Liang tong has been gaining in power every week.”
This was news to me. Mr. Wong’s group, the Ansheng tong—Mr. Wong’s group, that Father and I worked for—was the only power worth reckoning with among the criminals. Father always told me that the Xie Liang tong was a group of arrogant upstarts. Their leader was a prancing fool who wore American clothes and chose a ridiculous name for himself.
I looked over at my father, asleep on the cot. He looked small, and weak, and alone. I thought about Mr. Wong and the Ansheng tong. Their power was old, and perhaps it was fading; perhaps the old ways, the ways of the Triads, could not thrive in this new world. Maybe it took a dangerous idiot in an American suit to prosper in a world where telegraphs send messages across the world and cable cars speed through town, propelled by steam so intense it was as powerful as hundreds of horses.
“Dr. Wei, did my father talk to you about anyone else? Was there anyone else he was frightened of, or suspicious about?”
He pursed his lips, in a moment of quiet thought. “I’m not sure he’d like me telling you this, Li-lin,” he said, pushing his spectacles higher on his nose, “but yes. It happened few months ago. At the Laba Festival, there was a man there. He was a Buddhist monk, but for some reason, Zhengying seemed horrified to see him. I have never seen him so afraid, Li-lin. He was shaking, and he wouldn’t tell me why.”
“A Buddhist monk? Why would Father be afraid of a baldie?”
He gave a half-laugh. “I really don’t know. What’s stranger is, I met this man later, on my own. He seemed almost dainty, the way he went out of his way not to hurt anything.”
“Do you know his name?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “He goes by the name Shuai Hu.”
“This man, Shuai Hu, he stays with the baldies at the monastery on Washington?”