Beijing Payback

by Daniel Nieh

  Sun warned me to stay out of any fights unless he asked for help. His defense is deft and fluid, but he’s backing up, he’s barely fending off the blows, and he doesn’t make any attack of his own. As he retreats in a circle around the kitchen, he passes through a shaft of light from the dining room windows, and I see the perfect equanimity in his motions. He’s not struggling to evade Ponytail’s strikes—he’s studying them, picking up the rhythm and the tendencies. Then he catches a punch with a clawlike grip around the inside of Ponytail’s wrist. He wrenches the wrist open, turning Ponytail’s whole arm, shoulder, and chest upward, and Ponytail cries out in pain. With an explosive exhalation of breath, a shwuh! that comes directly from his diaphragm, Sun slams the edge of his right hand into the inside crease of Ponytail’s elbow.

  “Jesus Christ,” I say, as Happy Year’s new head of security crumples to the kitchen floor.

  Sun snatches the gun out of the sink and releases the magazine, which he slips into the pocket of his black jeans before tossing the rest of it under the saloon doors into the dining room. Ponytail is lying prone, breathing peacefully. Sun hops onto his back, pats him down, and retrieves a flip phone from his pocket. I’m still sitting on the floor, watching this guy handle this criminal shit like he’s making the same omelet for the millionth time.

  “Let’s go,” Sun says.

  I climb to my feet and give Ponytail a kick in the ribs, eliciting a shallow groan. “Did you kill Vincent Li?” I shout down at him. No response. I kick again, harder. And again. “Who killed Vincent Li, you shitbag?!” Tears soak into my stocking, making it harder to see.

  Sun grabs my arm, hisses into my face, “He’s not going to answer you.” He drags me out of the kitchen. As we run down the hallway, he snatches up his backpack from the floor in front of the office. He stops at the door, pokes his head out, and then runs out to the car. When Jules sees us coming, she starts the engine and reaches across the passenger seat to open the door for me.

  I sprint around the back of the car and jump in next to Jules. Sun swings into the back seat and pulls the stocking off his head.

  “Good,” he says to Jules, patting her headrest.

  I pull the damp stocking off my head and heave a couple of deep breaths, forcing myself back toward detachment, equilibrium. In a moment we are out on the street, back in real life, and it’s over.

  We come through the door and discover Andre dozing on the couch, waiting up for us like a giant mom. He stirs, rubs his face.

  “Success?” he asks.

  “Kind of, except Sun had to kung fu the crap out of some guy,” I say.

  “You kung fu’d the crap out of someone?” Andre drawls, raising his eyebrows, marking the vibe gap between his drowsy calm and me: thoughts racing, body aquiver with recent violence.

  “Yes,” Sun admits.

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell us you were a martial arts expert?” Jules demands. “Forget what Dad said for you to tell us. Was that part of your job? Beating people up?”

  Sun hesitates, then nods. “Little part,” he says.

  I turn to Andre. “Can we switch to Chinese?”

  Andre narrows his eyes. “Yeah. Sure. Cool with me. I was just about to turn in anyway.”

  “Good night, Andre,” Sun says, and Andre pats him on the head as he ambles to his bedroom.

  “First of all,” I say in Mandarin, “how’d you knock that guy out so easily?”

  Sun points to the inside of his elbow. “It’s the fifth point of the lung meridian,” he says, matter-of-fact, like I’m supposed to know what the fuck that means. “Qi pools there.”

  “So what happened to ‘delivering packages and sending messages’?” Jules asks, her eyes flashing. “What else have you left out? What is Ice, anyway?”

  “I really do not know about Ice,” he says, looking at the floor with a pained expression on his face. “You have to understand, my job is like this: I do what Old Li says. If he tells me to beat someone up, I beat someone up. If he tells me to tell you some things, then I tell you what he said to say. And he told me to take you with me and get some things from the restaurant, so that’s what I did.”

  Jules shoots me a frustrated look, and I can tell she’s also unsure of how to react to Sun’s words. Do we trust him? Can we blame him? Is this the real Sun, the real Dad that we’re learning about? Then Sun reaches into his backpack and pulls out a sheaf of paper held together with a binder clip, as well as the small lockbox that Jules and I saw sitting on the safe. My pulse pounds away as he uses his drill to break open the lockbox. There’s some cash inside, some receipts, a Chinese passport, and a dozen tiny Ziploc bags of white powder. Sun holds one up to the light, jiggles it a little, squints at it.

  “K-zǎi,” Sun says. “Ketamine.”

  “Ketamine?” I stick a finger into one of the bags: the powder is smoother than coke, not as floury. I’ve never heard of it before, but Jules, who has attended hipper parties, is ready with an explanation.

  “People call it Special K. It’s also used in hospitals for anesthesia. People say it’s like an out-of-body experience. You get totally destroyed, your life fades away, and it feels like you’re swimming around. Down the K-hole.”

  Sun nods. “It started in Hong Kong, but now people sniff it in nightclubs and karaoke rooms in all the big mainland cities. It helps people forget their problems and relax. But after a few years, it destroys your internal organs, starting with your bladder.”

  “If that’s what Ice is, I see why Dad wanted to stay out of it,” I say.

  “Rou Qiangjun flew into LAX on January twenty-second,” Jules mutters. She’s holding his passport open to the page with a U.S. visa pasted on it. “He was here a week before Dad died.”

  “It had to be him—he’s the killer!” I say. “What are we gonna do?”

  “Tell the cops, obviously,” Jules says.

  “Have you met the cops around here? They couldn’t solve a crossword puzzle,” I say.

  “So what, you’re gonna lace up your Nikes and don the mask of Zorro? Victor, have you lost your mind?”

  Sun clears his throat delicately. “Lying about when he arrived here does not make Rou the killer. But even if he is, he’s only a tool used by others. And if we go after him now, then Zhao and Ouyang will know what we are up to, and then it will be much harder to gather evidence against them.”

  “Wait, what are you saying?” Jules scowls at Sun. “You’re planning to go after Dad’s partners?”

  Sun tips his chin toward the sheaf of paper. “Not my plan,” he says. “He said you have to read this and then you will understand.”

  I pick up the document that Sun retrieved from the safe: a stack of white paper, printed in Mandarin and clipped to several sheets of yellow legal paper covered in Dad’s handwriting. I read the boldface characters printed in the middle of the first page: “Dài wŏ sǐ le, gěi wŏ de érzi—For my son, if I am dead.”

  14

  Xiaozhou, your mother always said to me that it would be a good idea to put these matters down on paper, first of all in order to express them and make sense of them. She said in this way perhaps I can face some of my demons. You know I am a worthless heathen, but in my moments of weakness, some of your mother’s Christian ideas can seem very persuasive, haha. In fact, I must write this letter now because some things are going to happen soon. I will no longer be able to hide the truth or hide from the truth. Please forgive the quality of my writing, as I did not receive an education like you and Lianying did. Also, I am writing in very simple Chinese because I know you only got a B+ in Business Chinese 202 last semester, haha.

  The inspiration for the home that I built for us in San Dimas came from the home I grew up in. My father was a wise, happy man, and also a man of culture, like I never had the chance to be. He was a scholar of the history of Peking opera, and he taught at a university in Beijing. He loved to write and sing. Mother was a former student of Father’s. They loved each other very much. These are the
grandparents whom you never met. Now they have been dead for many years.

  I also had an elder sister like you do. Her name was Ruyu: “like jade.” It was an inappropriate name for her because she was a tomboy, just like your elder sister used to be. It was also an unfortunate name for her for other reasons that I will write about later. But first, I will describe for you the times when we were a happy family.

  My earliest memories are of a quiet life in the hutongs of old Beijing, in the center of the city. Do you remember the hutongs from when we visited a few years ago? We lived in a courtyard-style home in a winding, cobbled alley. I was born five years after the Communists took over Beijing, but the politics of the time had not penetrated the hutongs. We had a simple life. Mother made us breakfasts of fried-dough fritters and warm soy milk. Father rode his bicycle to the university. Ruyu and I would walk to school together. In the afternoons, after school, we played in the streets with our classmates. We played war and shot at each other with sticks that we pretended were guns. Often the other kids made Ruyu and me be the “running-dog Japanese” in the war because they knew we had learned some Japanese words from Father, who had studied in Japan when he was a young man.

  It was not the most fun to have to be Japanese in the war games because after we lost (we always lost) our Communist liberators marched us through the hutongs with our hands on our heads. However, we got our revenge when it came to fighting crickets. Playing war was a fun game for little kids, but cricket fighting was the real action. Ruyu’s crickets almost never lost. Ruyu could sit still for a long time. She was very good at catching the fastest crickets. She taught me how to train them with a split piece of grass and feed them hot chilies to prepare them to fight.

  Ruyu won a lot of candy and allowance from the other kids because of her crickets. One time she even won a blue bicycle from Pan Weiguo, the son of the family who lived on the other side of the courtyard from us, but Father made her give it back. Ruyu was upset, and she did not talk to Father for some days. After dinner, when he would wash the dishes and sing Peking opera for us, she would go into the other room and read a book instead of sitting at the table and drinking chrysanthemum tea with Mother and me like usual. Her protest lasted for about a week. Then Father brought her a box of peanut candies and sang her a song of apology that he had written for her. It was a humorous song, and as he sang it we all laughed until we were crying. Ruyu had a strong sense of justice and fairness, but she also loved Father more than anyone else. I was independent and naughty, and I liked to spend time by myself. Perhaps that is why I survived and Ruyu did not.

  In the late fifties and early sixties there was already a lot of political turmoil. People who talked too much about politics or complained about the food rationing often ended up in trouble with the authorities. During the Socialist Education Movement, my second maternal uncle, a midlevel government official, was denounced as a reactionary and sent to the countryside to be reeducated. Mother was very close to her little brother, and she became a more reserved person after he was denounced. One time I saw her crying while reading a letter from him. I remembered my uncle for his excellent calligraphy, but the handwriting in the letter was uneven and ugly. I asked my mother to read the letter to me, but she refused.

  Father was good at staying out of trouble. He always attended Party functions and kept his nose clean. He taught the new Revolutionary operas in the same energetic way that he had previously taught The Peach Blossom Fan and Sword of the Cosmos. He always put the family first and never objected to saying what people wanted him to say. Due to his discretion and humility, our family remained unharmed until after Chairman Mao proclaimed the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966. At the time, I was ten years old.

  At first we managed to keep up with the political tide. All university classes were canceled, so Father would stay home and play with us during the day. On the night that we heard about the campaign to destroy the Four Olds (Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, Old Ideas), he took all his books of literature and put them into the stove one by one. Rather than get too upset about it, he sang an opera dirge as he did it and then stood up and brushed off his hands and told us that we must all adapt to the times. “Suí jī yìng biàn, suí yù ér ān,” he liked to say—“Adapt at every opportunity and be at peace with whatever you encounter.” Now you know where I learned the expression that I have repeated to you so many times.

  Father’s good attitude could only take him so far. One very hot day in the summer of 1966, a group of Red Guards came through the hutong looking for Counterrevolutionaries and Bad Elements. These bands of former university students ruled competing territories amid the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Really they were young people with nothing better to do. Most of them wore their school uniforms with red bands of cloth wrapped around their sleeves. Chairman Mao had given them a great deal of authority and confidence, so they paraded around and sometimes beat people up.

  When they came to our courtyard, they made our family and Pan Weiguo’s family stand in a line in the yard while they searched our rooms for signs of the Four Olds. Like most people, we only had good Revolutionary books and portraits of Chairman Mao on our shelves. They were about to leave for the next house when one young woman recognized my father.

  “That man is a university professor,” she shouted, pointing at Father. “He knows old operas, and he can speak Japanese!”

  The leader of the Red Guards pulled Father forward by his shirt and asked him whether he could speak Japanese.

  “It is true that I was a university professor, but I don’t really speak Japanese,” he said quietly, without looking up.

  Some of the Red Guards shouted that he was a liar, a Japanese collaborator, and a Counterrevolutionary, but the leader silenced them with a sharp movement of his hand. He was peering into my father’s face. He was a tall and handsome young man. After a few tense moments, he took my father by the arm.

  “Come with me,” he said. The other Red Guards grabbed Father and took him out of the courtyard, pushing and pulling. They called him a Bad Element and a Capitalist Counterrevolutionary. That day I learned from the handsome leader of the Red Guards that if you listen carefully you can often tell when people are lying. We did not hear anything about Father for five days.

  On the sixth day after the Red Guards took Father away, a teenage girl with a red band on her sleeve came to the courtyard and announced to us in quite formal terms that Father’s trial would take place the next morning in the sports field at the university where he used to teach.

  When we arrived at the sports field the next morning, there were many people there already. It was a hot and dusty morning. Father was fourth in the queue of defendants. The first three trials were difficult to watch. They followed a pattern: The defendants started out proud and defiant, but with the Party cadres, the Red Guards, and the crowd unified against them, they soon wilted and confessed. They hit themselves and pledged loyalty to the Party as the crowd hurled trash and verbal abuse at them. All three were sentenced to reeducation through labor.

  When it was Father’s turn, a Red Guard brought him in front of the university’s Anti-Rightist Revolutionary Committee and made him kneel in the dust. He looked thin. His face was streaked with dirt, and his head had been shaved. He had a bloody bruise on his temple. He stared at the ground.

  The Committee Head explained to Father that he had a black background and he was being charged with holding Counterrevolutionary and Bourgeois sentiments. Some former students of his, including the girl who had first accused him of speaking Japanese, came forward to “struggle” against him by denouncing him. They said how he had tainted their minds with his Bourgeois tastes. One young woman said that Father loved opera more than he loved Chairman Mao.

  Then Pan Weiguo’s father came forward and said they had lived in the courtyard with us for more than twenty years. He said it was true that Father had attended university in Japan. When the Committee Head asked him if he could ver
ify that Father was a Counterrevolutionary who held Bourgeois sentiments, Pan Weiguo’s father said yes in a quiet voice. The Committee Head asked him if he could speak up. Pan Weiguo’s father did not say anything. The Committee Head asked him again. Finally Pan Weiguo lifted his finger and pointed at Father’s face. He spoke in a loud, clear voice so nobody would misunderstand him: “Li Yujun, you are a Counterrevolutionary and a Capitalist, and I struggle against you.”

  The people in the crowd pointed at Father and shouted the same thing. The Committee Head made a show of quieting the crowd and giving Father a chance to defend himself, but he didn’t. He must have known it would be no use. He immediately confessed in a lifeless voice. Ruyu started to shout something, and Mother clapped a hand over her mouth and held my sister against her body in an iron grasp.

  I remember feeling like I was watching somebody else’s nightmare. Later, I learned that it was very unusual that Father had been detained by the Red Guards and brought back to his university. The relationship between the Red Guards and the Party officials who tried him was unofficial and ambiguous, and perhaps the Red Guards had been deliberately dispatched to collect Father for some other reason, some reason hidden in his Counterrevolutionary background.

  But whenever I asked Mother what that reason was, she simply shook her head and said that talking about the past was a waste of time.

  The Committee Head told Father that he was a Counterrevolutionary and he would be sent to a labor camp to be reeducated. He said that Father should be ashamed of polluting his family, his neighbors, and his country with his Bourgeois tastes. Father finally looked up.