Beijing Payback

by Daniel Nieh

  “Hey, Victor, hey.” Andre slides a plastic cup toward me. “Wanna drink some water?”

  I shake my head, blink a few times. “And what about you?” I ask Sun, trying to speak in a normal voice. “Who are you exactly? How long have you been working for my father?”

  “Basically, long as I remember. I live on the streets when your father hire me. After that, I live in his office. You see, a kid can be useful for, ah, ‘smuggling’? Sending messages, delivering packages. And also, the kid is a mask, everybody trust man with a kid. Then, when I grow up, Old Li find other ways for me to help him.”

  A slight smile drifts across Sun’s face. “Old Li, you know, he had a warm heart. He see me like his family, the only family I have.”

  I want to say, so what does that make us? Sun’s story is beyond the realm of anything I’d considered, even after finding the gun. And yet I somehow sense that every word of it is true because his gestures, his mannerisms, even his halting English—it all reminds me of Dad.

  “If you knew him so well,” I ask him, “then what kind of pets does he have?”

  “Easy,” says Sun. “Old Li always love tropical fish.”

  I manage to say, “Can you guys give me a minute?”

  Outside I breathe in heaves, one hand against the brick wall of the building. I feel people coming in and out of the restaurant, glancing at me and quickly looking away. I wish we had a real winter right now, with some frigid weather that would cool the bonfire in my brain, but it’s still balmy, and the last traces of daylight silhouette the low, wide campus buildings on the western horizon.

  A day ago I lived in a different reality, one in which Dad got killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but now I’ve learned that he knew what was coming. That he practically allowed his own murder without informing me, that he had a whole life he never told me about. How could I be so clueless? My father, my sole parent for so long, the person who taught me more than anyone—he had hidden so much about himself. And Sun—who was this mild-mannered shadow who appeared out of nowhere? Who’d known Dad longer than I’ve been alive? How come he knows all about me, and I’ve never heard a word about him?

  My stomach lurches; I taste bile in my mouth. The pain is crushing up into my lungs, spreading through my veins, coiling around my spine. But I know that inside of it, between my heart and my stomach, is this stone about the size of an egg but denser, harder, smoother. “Nǐ hàipà de shíkè, nǐ bù zhīdào zěnme jìxù de shíkè, zhuāzhù zhè ge shítóu—When you doubt yourself, when you don’t know how to go on, grab hold of that stone,” Dad said to me, holding a quivering fist between our faces, and so I always have, when my lungs are burning, when my body begs me to stop. And now again, as I scrape my knuckles back and forth against the coarse brick wall just to feel something, the stone is my anchor in the storm. It steadies my breath, quiets my mind until there is space between my thoughts, enough space for my sight to swivel inward: Do I have more? Do I have enough? The answer is always yes. The stone reminds me of who I am. And who made me this way.

  8

  What are you doing in here?”

  Jules pokes her head through the French doors into Dad’s office. I’m kneeling over a filing cabinet, flicking through health insurance handbooks, car maintenance records, tax returns.

  “Oh, hey,” I say. “There you are.”

  I tell her about Detective Lang and the yellow legal pads, leaving out the part about smart burglars and dumb burglars.

  “I told him I’d look around the office.” A second later, she’s still standing there, so I say, “You wanna help?”

  She gives a little shrug. “Sure.”

  “I haven’t searched any of those shelves.”

  Jules stands in front of the bookshelves for a while. “I hate being in here,” she says.

  “I’m not trying to think about it.”

  “Yeah. Aren’t you smart.” She starts pulling books off the shelf. “He’s got some weird stuff here. A Chinese-English edition of Les Misérables. Who knew that existed?”

  “Uh-huh.” I tap the flashlight app on my phone, hold it in my mouth, and crawl between the cabinet and the bookshelf.

  “Oh no. I found the dedicated shelf of shithead books. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The 48 Laws of Power. Oh my God, The Fountainhead. Really, Dad?”

  I crawl backward into the middle of the room and take the phone out of my mouth, wipe it on my shirt. “I liked The Fountainhead,” I say.

  Jules makes a pukey face.

  “That’s because you’re still unreconstructed, Victor.”

  I’m in his desk now, a huge, handsome chunk of blond wood with big deep drawers and a hutch that rises almost to the ceiling. Printer paper, binder clips, Japanese gel pens, little boxes of staples, everything in its right place. Dad was quite the neat freak. I find a yellow sticky note attached to the floor of one of his drawers: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

  I pass it to Jules. “Look at this.”

  “Hey! I sent that to him. F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was a couple of years ago, some snotty email I wrote him about wanting to go to design school. I was still at that branding company, playing grown-up and walking around in smart shoes all the time, but I really hated feeling like a corporate pawn. He was trying to persuade me to do an MBA program. I think he thought I’d meet a husband there.” A snort of indignation. Jules and Dad got along better after she left home for college—as long as the subject of conversation wasn’t her life decisions.

  “Anyway, he was saying, why do you want to make expensive clothes when you despise the people who buy them? He didn’t understand that it was about the creative challenge for me, wringing beauty out of materials like sheep fur and cowhide. So I sent him that quote.”

  A gloom falls over Jules as she stares at the little yellow square covered in Dad’s meticulous handwriting. Of course he’d given in eventually. Of course she’d written a brilliant application essay and earned admission to a selective design program in San Francisco. Of course he’d agreed to fork over tuition and living expenses for Daddy’s motherless little princess.

  “I didn’t realize he was taking notes,” she says.

  A few minutes pass in silence as I picture Dad, middle-aged and finally going gray, squinting at his monitor and recording Jules’s self-justifications onto a sticky note with one of his fine-tip Japanese gel pens. Then I see him thirty years younger, at the helm of a yacht, sneaking Marlboro Lights into Shanghai, or Ningbo, or wherever.

  “Do you feel like you knew him really well?” I ask her.

  She rolls the question around in her head. “We didn’t have a magical bond like how he would watch you play basketball and give you motivational speeches for like a zillion hours a day. Sometimes I got tired of watching the Dad Show. He had this old-fashioned idea of how he wanted everything to be, and that idea could be very inflexible.”

  “Uh-huh.” All gripes I’d heard a thousand times before.

  “But he was a fun guy, and he had a big heart. He was a pretty great dad in a lot of ways.” Her voice tightens up at the end.

  I close the last desk drawer. “I don’t think those yellow legal pads are in here.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Jules, what if you had a chance to speak with him before he died, and he asked you to do something sketchy for him. Would you do it?”

  “Does this have something to do with that gun?”

  “Just tell me. What would you do for him?”

  After a moment, Jules says, “I would consider his request very thoroughly. We had our share of disagreements, but I loved him a lot, and of course I’m not ungrateful for all that he did for us.”

  She searches my face, then cuts her eyes back to her cuticles. “Anyway, I don’t have anything else to do. He was right: I don’t give two fucks about fashion design.”

  Tha
t’s an awful lot of candor from Juliana, who is ordinarily too busy critiquing everyone else to admit that she herself has never fully committed to anybody or anything. I’ve been dreading her reaction to Sun’s story, but I also know that keeping it from her isn’t an option. So I tell her everything he told me: the four brothers, the company in China, the bridge Dad wouldn’t cross, and the price he paid. We sit there, on the floor of the room where he was stabbed to death, and I tell her that maybe it wasn’t some strung-out burglar who did the stabbing. Maybe it was his oldest friends—people he chose never to tell us about.

  We sit there quietly for a while and she looks at the floor, letting her hair shield her face from me as her shoulders tremble, until finally she tosses her head back and squints at me with wet eyes.

  “Do you think we can trust this person?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. I mean he evidently knew Dad well. If there were any resemblance, you’d think he’s our half brother. But he’s not family. He’s Dad’s employee. And he shows up with all this information we don’t have, all these instructions for us—”

  For a second I’m lost in thought, trying to picture Dad’s other life in China, another boy tagging along at his heels, soaking up his attention. Helping him commit crimes. And my ribs ache as I try to reconcile the love with the lies.

  “Victor?”

  “Yeah, sorry. You’ll have to meet him and see for yourself. Anyway, he has another iron monkey like the one Dad left me.”

  “But you got that monkey thing from the lawyer, right? What if it weren’t really from Dad?”

  “Well, shit, Jules. I don’t have all the answers.”

  We sit there in silence for a minute. Then Jules says, “So what does he want us to do?”

  I tell her the plan.

  There are still trophies on a shelf in my old bedroom, dusty trophies from grade school that commemorate my participation in various basketball teams and camps. Most of them are the kind of meaningless trophies that everyone gets—Victor was on the team! There’s even a “Most Improved Player” trophy, that dubious award handed out by coaches to the untalented gym rats who stay after practice to practice more. Because they’ve got nothing better to do.

  I hurled that cheap piece of gold-painted plastic into the garbage can in the kitchen after my disappointing sophomore season in high school. It wasn’t until my senior year, when I was making space for the only trophy I ever cared about—All-Conference Third Team—that I discovered that Dad had fished it out of the trash, sneaked into my room, and tucked it onto the shelf in the back.

  Jules used to have trophies, too. Debate Team, Model United Nations, and, of course, her big one for winning state in tennis. She also had a cello, a guitar, and a saxophone, each of which she’d stopped playing after a few years despite showing what her teachers tended to call “unusual promise.” But during her senior year of high school, she donated her instruments to charity and threw her trophies away, along with most of her clothes and everything on her walls. And to replace them, she used a thick black Sharpie to scrawl on her wall in block letters: NO DOCUMENT OF CIVILIZATION IS NOT ALSO A DOCUMENT OF BARBARISM.

  Two weeks later, she painted over the quotation. She threw out her bed, put her mattress on the floor, and painted every surface white. The only remaining decoration in her bedroom was an old photograph of Mom tacked to the inside of her closet door.

  I have a picture on my wall from the same roll of film, Mom and Dad together on the Great Wall at Mutianyu, toothy grins on their faces, their hair flying around in the breeze, their arms wrapped around each other. I’m staring at this photo at one in the morning, unable or unwilling to fall asleep, asking my dead parents what they want me to do. Mom, with her religion, and Dad, with his conviction, each had their ways of making the world simple: every decision a choice between right and wrong. But now their smiling faces are mysterious to me.

  I heave a sigh, locate my headphones, and flick off the light. All Sun wants for now is for Jules and me to have lunch at the original Happy Year restaurant and see if anything’s out of the ordinary. Jules agreed with me that we have no good reason to refuse to do that. Perhaps now is not the time to search for answers. Perhaps now is the time to sleep.

  I crawl into bed, cue up another Mandarin news podcast, and sink into my plush down pillow. I turn up the volume, drown out my imaginations of masked men prowling through the downstairs hallway. Of what it feels like to get stabbed in the chest. “Today’s main stories are: Hong Kong stocks decline after democracy protests turn violent. Premier Li Keqiang announces next phase of massive ‘One Belt, One Road’ infrastructure initiative. The Tibetan yak is upgraded from vulnerable to endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Please stay tuned for detailed reports.”

  Before long, I’m lost in my dreams of the past.

  * * *

  Dad leapt up into the driver’s seat of the Subaru and tossed two zippered bank bags—one red, one blue—into my lap. We were making the rounds of his restaurants, collecting cash to drop at the bank. It was a sunny August day in the San Gabriel Valley, pushing one hundred degrees, and the trees, the foothills, even the roads seemed thirsty. I was eleven years old, sitting up front next to Dad, tapping a rhythm against the seat with my heels.

  “Méiyŏu rén bú'ài chī zhōngcān—Nobody doesn’t love Chinese food,” Dad said with a grin, rolling up his sleeves, revealing the wide, jagged scar on the back on his right wrist. When I asked him about the scar years before, he told me he had sliced himself on the edge of an aluminum takeout container at the first Happy Year restaurant back in Beijing.

  But that’s not really what the scar looked like.

  “I’m a little tired of Chinese food.” Jules was sitting in the back with Mom, devising a plan of attack for back-to-school shopping. A couple of years ago, she never would have sassed Dad like that, but now that she was fourteen, it seemed impossible for anybody to do anything that she didn’t find annoying.

  Dad gave me a wink and reassured Jules that he’d shortly drop us at the mall on his way to the Happy Year branch in Rosemead.

  “I still don’t see why we had to do all this other stuff first,” Jules said.

  Dad flicked on his blinker and cautiously merged the Subaru onto Foothill Freeway. He reminded Jules that the current plan meant less driving during rush hour, less gas wasted. And what’s so bad about spending a few extra minutes in the car with her family? Maybe visiting Daddy’s restaurants was a good reminder of where the money came from for her nice back-to-school clothes.

  Jules didn’t say anything. She stared out her window with an irked look on her face. She had grown to vocally scorn the sun, the mall, the palm trees; she seemed to despise everything in the San Gabriel Valley except the botanical gardens at the Huntington Library, where she probably longed to be on that August day, reading Salinger in the shade of a gazebo instead of driving around with us.

  “Maybe after I pick you up from the mall, we can all go to Cold Stone,” Dad said. “Does that sound fun to you, jiějie?”

  Juliana sighed. She reminded Dad that she was not a little kid anymore and would not be bribed with sugar. Didn’t he know that stuff could give you diabetes?

  Dad laughed and said, “Okay, jiějie, whatever you say.” I could see that his neck muscles had tightened up, and so had his grip on the steering wheel. His knuckles were mottled white like the scar tissue on his wrist. Before our last stop, he and I had been eagerly debating whether Shaq would really leave the Lakers. I wanted to return to that topic, but I could tell that Jules had spoiled his good mood.

  “Now then, Juliana,” Mom said. “I think it’s fun being all together for a little while. Don’t forget that Daddy works very hard at his restaurants most evenings.”

  Then she coughed a few times. She’d been coughing into little white handkerchiefs all week. Something must be going around, she kept saying, even though none of the rest of us had gotten sick.

  “
Ice cream sounds great to me, bàba,” I said.

  That set Jules off. Maybe I had known that it would.

  “Hey, Fido,” she said, “when are you going to evolve from canine to human?”

  “When are you going to start taking Prozac?” I retorted.

  “Victor, that’s enough,” Mom said firmly.

  “Why do you always take her side?” I whined.

  Dad slammed his hand down the steering wheel. “Don’t talk back to your mother!” he shouted at me.

  For a moment, the only sound in the Subaru was the steady blow of the full-blast air-conditioning. I pulled my knees up in front of me and hugged them. And then, very slowly, very quietly, I began to cry. I knew I was too big to cry, and I tried as hard as I could to fight back my tears, but I couldn’t help it. The afternoon had been ruined, and there I was, crying in the car in front of my whole family, with no way to escape and nowhere to hide. I hunched my shoulders and tried to make myself as small and as quiet as possible.

  Jules reached up and touched my arm, but I jerked away from her and turned my body to face the window.

  “I’m sorry, dìdi,” she said. “I didn’t mean it. Really.”

  Then Mom started coughing into her handkerchief again. Her coughs were as harsh and dry as the parched southern faces of the foothills that loomed above us. Except then they were no longer dry, they sounded wet.

  And she said, “Oh, my goodness.”

  I heard Jules gasp.

  9

  The day after she found out she was terminal, the day after she came home from the clinic, went straight to the backyard without even looking at us, and lay on her back on the lawn for the whole afternoon, Mom taught me to cook my own breakfast. In the nine years since, I’d repeated the recipe with such consistency that Jules dubbed it “Eggs Victor.” This morning—Saturday, Lafayette Game Day, eleven days after Dad was stabbed to death in the next room—I modify it to serve one-and-a-half Victors:

  Start the toaster oven and put three eggs in a pot of water and cover it and set it on the stove. Set stove to medium.