Skeleton Women

by Mingmei Yip

  To sum up: your hands should be like magnets pulling a compass needle in all directions so as to cause total confusion.

  Then the manual took a philosophical turn:

  People like to be manipulated, although they may not know it. They need to be guided and told what to do. Most of us are not born leaders and are inclined to be lazy.

  That’s why everyone wants to believe in miracles. And who doesn’t hope for a little magic in their unsatisfactory, obligation-filled existence? That’s why people are so easily led by those who promise them magic, not just stage magicians but politicians, priests, monks, even gangster-heroes.

  Is there real magic in the world? Everyone looks for it, but in reality, “magic” is nothing other than the possession of a dazzling appearance, a clever mind, perfect timing, and infallible skill that has been developed with relentless practice!

  If you have these qualities, people will believe in your miracles. If you don’t have them, don’t bore your audience and humiliate yourself onstage. Stay home instead to play with your children or dogs.

  So magic is entertainment, but it is also poetry, myth, philosophy, even wisdom and an excellent way of life.

  Wow. So magic is philosophy and wisdom. And a magician is not much different from a spy, since both need to possess “a dazzling appearance, a clever mind, perfect timing, and infallible skill developed with relentless practice” !

  I smiled, thinking of my extreme skills of knife-throwing and contortion with which I had yet to stun the Shanghainese. So, when I performed, everyone would believe my knives had eyes, for they’d always go where they should, always just missing my assistant as they landed around her with soft thuds.

  That was the real reason I’d invited Shadow to perform with me. I wanted her to believe that my knives had eyes, yet later painfully learn that in fact they were sometimes nearsighted.

  Shadow was a master of manipulation, but so was I. In a perfect world we could be friends—even sisters, as Lung teased. We could share our insights, experiences, stunts, and schemes. But in this dusty world, it was more likely that one of us would end up destroying the other.

  I sipped more tea, absorbing what I had read. After that, I picked up the photographs of what had looked like her diary. The characters were much smaller than those in the instruction manual, so I guessed the latter must have been written by her teacher. I strained my eyes to read:

  To be Master Lung’s number one mistress has been my goal; unfortunately the place is already taken by Camilla. How to pluck her from Lung’s side? I’m sure that would be even more challenging than jumping off the Shanghai Customs House.

  The first time we met at Bright Moon, Camilla asked me about my training and my teacher. Smart as she is, she should’ve known better. Will I just tell anyone about my past? She certainly won’t. I never get anything from those lips except her singing, which everyone seems to think is so wonderful. Makes me wonder if her pretty little lips perform other naughty and dirty deeds. Maybe that’s why Lung fell for her.

  I’ll never tell her or anyone else about my past. Why should anybody know that my magician stepfather would only teach me his craft if I let him fondle my breasts and sometimes, when I could no longer resist, even have sex with him? At least he’s dead now, the cut-by-a-thousand-knives piece of dog-fucked corpse! If I ever visited his grave, I would spit, pee, and shit on it, so that his stinking, rotten cadaver would stink even more!

  Fortunately, before I killed him, I took all his notes and repertoires that he thought no one could find inside our house’s hollow wooden door. Ha-ha! He forgot how fine a magician I’d become under his coaching and molesting hands!

  Nobody in Shandong knows about what had happened. One day both of us simply disappeared from this province. I, to Shanghai, friendless, he, to his grave, childless. I will laugh if his ghost thinks I am a daughter who will someday make offerings at his grave.

  I never met my real father; I only learned from my mother that he was a half-breed—half foreign devil and half Chinese. That’s why I have this big-boned physique with high nose, deep-set eyes, muscular body, pale skin, and hair with some brown in it, so I have to dye it black. My mother said that no one should know about this, absolutely no one. For I would be spat upon and my life would be ruined even before it began. But I was ruined, anyway, by her new husband.

  I wanted so badly to be a magician that I let him touch my breasts when he taught me how to make rabbits disappear and reappear. Then when I let him touch me between my legs, he’d teach me how to make a house disappear. Eventually he’d touched my body everywhere and entered me more times than I want to remember. Finally, the day came when I had learned all that he had to teach about magic. But despite my numerous pleadings, he would never let me see his written manual.

  Then my mother died. Followed by him, with his blood on my hands.

  Actually, I didn’t exactly murder him, only let him fall to his death without lending a daughterly hand. As I deserved his magic, he deserved my callousness. It happened one morning as he practiced tightrope-walking two stories above ground, with me treading behind him. When he was approaching the finishing line, I made a wrong move. The rope wobbled, and he lost his balance. Could I have prevented his fall? I’m not sure. Maybe. But I didn’t, and then I never had to see his face again. Ever.

  Before anyone knew, I gathered up everything valuable in the house—cash, my mother’s jewelry, the gold chain from his neck, the watch from his wrist, the pen inside his pocket, and, most important, all the props that I could carry—and left for Shanghai. I changed my name to Shadow, so no one would know who I was or am. So if today I die, there won’t be anyone to cry, burn offerings, or kowtow to my portrait.

  There is no fairness in life. Look at Camilla. Yes, she’s beautiful, talented, hardworking, smart. But so are many other girls, including myself. Then how come only she is Lung’s number one mistress with an easy life, when mine is a constant struggle? If I want to be a huge success, I’ll have to steal Lung from her, not waste my nights with the cut-by-a-thousand-knives manager at Ciro Nightclub, nor the Shanghai Customs House’s dog-fucked tower guard.

  Camilla has her heavenly voice, but I have my magic. And I am particularly well-trained in stealing.

  My heart sank. My suspicions were correct. My guess had been right all along: Shadow hoped to take my place with Lung. Then I shook my head. My situation was not nearly as good as she thought, since most of the money I made did not go inside my pocket but Wang’s.

  So she was wrong. Actually life is quite fair—no one gets what they want.

  I continued to read:

  I was the only one who knew my stepfather’s background. He even kept it secret from my stupid mother.

  All magicians dream of living in big cities like Beijing or Shanghai, but we were stuck in the countryside in Shandong. This is because my stepfather’s father—that was my step-grandfather—had made his escape from the Empress Dowager’s palace. A talented magician and a handsome man, he was the Empress’s imperial illusionist and secret lover. But during one performance, he’d made disappear her most treasured pet parrot but failed to bring it back. The pet suffocated inside his long sleeve. He tried to fool the Empress with an identical one, but the trick was discovered; the real one had a large pearl stitched inside its feathers for good luck.

  Before the court had decided on the most appropriately horrific way to slowly execute him, he had already fled to Shangdong with his son. In this desolate western province, he changed his name and worked as a farmer. However, unwilling to let his imperial court magic silently die out, he secretly taught it to his son.

  I am sure many would be stunned if they knew my acts were originally for the entertainment of the Empress. But there are no more emperors; China is supposedly a republic. So I keep this to myself.

  As the Chinese say, “It takes one hero to recognize another.” After I finished reading Shadow’s diary, I really thought we were evenly matched. Time wou
ld tell which of us would come out ahead in our great game of magic, schemes, and manipulation.

  Our situation was like that of Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang, two of the greatest generals in Chinese history. Zhou Yu once lamented “Why was I born at the same time with Zhuge Liang?” Zhou believed that if it were not for Zhuge Liang, he would be able to conquer all under heaven.

  Now I asked myself a similar question: Why had fate thrust Shadow and me onto the same path? I thought Big Brother Wang asked himself the same question about his situation with Lung.

  But there was no time to lose. As the proverb states, “Kill your enemy before he has time to even make a fist.”

  The next morning, I picked up the Leisure News and opened it to Rainbow Chang’s column. I smiled; as I’d wished, she did write about our small party. Of course she didn’t know about the little incident after; otherwise I was sure she’d have made that her headline.

  A Stunning Private Show

  I must have done something good recently that I had the lucky karma to be invited by our Heavenly Songbird, Miss Camilla, to be her guest.

  Her home is beautiful, the food exquisite, and the wine divine. But the most amazing thing was the private show she put on for me and her other guest, the magician Shadow.

  Camilla threw knives with deadly accuracy while contorting her supple body. I kept rubbing my eyes; was this beautiful woman in front of me real or just a figment of my imagination? Shadow must have been asking herself, “I am a magician; how come I’ve never seen anything like this before?”

  The article went on to praise me and my stunts. Snobbish as she was, it was expected that Rainbow Chang would not write much about Shadow, who was still only a newcomer on the Shanghai scene. I had succeeded in getting the columnist to show that I, not Shadow—despite the fact that she was starting to get attention—was still the one on top and in control.

  In The Art of War, this strategy is called “superior positioning.” Always place yourself in an undefeatable position even before the battle begins. Then wait patiently for your enemy to fall into your trap.

  I hoped to get Rainbow to continue to make me more prominent in her columns than Shadow.

  PART THREE

  15

  Life as a Spy

  All this began not by any choice on my part but because powerful men considered me perfect material to be a spy—beautiful, smart, and, most important, an orphan. My plate was so empty that Big Brother Wang could put anything in it, and I would lap it up like a stray dog during a famine. Or so he thought. Yes, he had trained me to be the perfect spy, but had he considered that I could someday use the same training to fool him?

  Did I like being an informer? I really had no answer for that—it was the only life I knew, except of course, the one in the orphanage. As for my fame at the nightclub, it was not what it seemed but was just a cover-up for my true mission. However, in most ways my current existence was far better than life in the orphanage with all the other miserable, parentless, whining little people. At least I enjoyed beautiful clothes, designer handbags and shoes, and a luxury apartment with an amah and a driver.

  Other than these perks, there was nothing desirable in being Wang’s spy. I considered myself lucky, though, because my target was only a single gangster instead of a whole country. So I didn’t have to deal with politicians, high government officials, ministers, or the president. And I didn’t need to decipher codes, analyze data, or steal boring state secrets like military maps, battle strategies, designs of tanks, and the like. Nor did I have to sleep with officers to coax secrets out of them when their guard was down. However, though my mission was relatively less daunting and my training less complicated, it was still dangerous. Despite his seeming affection for me, I could not let myself forget that being close to Lung was like, as Chinese say, “walking beside a starving tiger,” or “a sheep being put inside a tiger’s mouth.”

  Any spy will have more than one name, one address, one disguise. Moreover, a spy must never cherish ideas such as love, money, fame, or comfort. To be distracted by such thoughts increases the risk of failure or, worse, being caught. For the same reason, neither should a spy develop a conscience. However, after a while I realized that having no conscience is, in fact, not something unique to a spy. Behind the heavy gates of ancient palaces, princes or princesses would not hesitate to kill their most loyal ministers, brothers, sisters, parents, or friends if these people were obstacles on their path to the throne. For the same reasons, queen mothers would poison their own sons. Compassion and kindness were talked about but seldom heeded.

  What a spy needs is the perseverance to complete a mission, the courage and cunning to get out of a dangerous situation, and absolute loyalty to the boss. As for the rest, nobody cares.

  That’s why spies are also called the “four nothingness”: no relatives, no friends, no identity, no morality. The advantages to being a “nothingness” is that no one can find out who you really are, and, having no attachments in the world, you will be unconstrained in your actions. If you’re caught and have no attachments to anyone, your secrets are unlikely to be revealed. Your enemy cannot threaten you by kidnapping or torturing your wife, husband, parents, children, not even your cat or dog.

  That’s why a spy is supposed to think of himself as a “dead” person, or, since alive and active, at least consider himself fatally diseased so he’ll be fearless under any threat or torture. However, in case the torture becomes humanly impossible to bear, there is also a way out. He can crunch the poison pill wedged between the teeth, choosing death over betrayal.

  A good spy might tell you nothing but lies, but he’ll never lie to his boss. An ideal spy is loyal, never questions his mission, will not hesitate to sacrifice his life, and will never reveal secrets under any circumstances. Therefore, any evidence a spy gives you, even under torture, will certainly be false.

  Unfortunately, the Chinese are rightly famous for their tortures. In my training I was warned about all of these, though I sometimes wondered if some were made up just to scare me so I’d be careful never to be captured alive. Once having heard about these, it is impossible to forget them. Sometimes I would close my eyes and see a list of them, like something from a torturer’s manual:

  Beating—by rod / chain / whip filled with nails.

  Grilling—to make a victim walk on burning coal until he drops.

  Finger-crushing—place fingers between wooden sticks connected by strings, then pull the strings to crush the fingers.

  Toe-hammering—smash all ten toes, one by one, with a hammer.

  Pressing victim down—under a huge vat as it is gradually filled with water or stones.

  Feeding victim excrement / urine—his own or that of others.

  Feeding victim hair—The victim’s hair is cut off and shredded into minuscule bits, then mixed with tea and poured into the victim’s mouth. The hairs will stick to his internal organs, and there is no way to get them out.

  Flower blooming in snow—Beating the victim in fallen snow so the torturer can appreciate the bright red blood spilling over a pristine white surface.

  Lighting the kerosene lamp—Pour kerosene into victim’s navel, then insert a wick and light it.

  Slaughter-the-pigs bench—The victim is tied down on a bench and a four-inch thick book placed on his chest; then the book is struck repeatedly with a heavy hammer. This will cause internal bleeding and crush internal organs, but there will be no external wounds. For this reason, it is a favorite with police.

  Flying a plane—The victim is on his feet and iron wire tied around his thumbs to lift him up onto tiptoe. When at last exhausted, he will lower his feet to the floor for support, causing the iron wires to tear away his two thumbs.

  Flesh-slicing—Slow carving of the victim’s flesh till he dies a lingering, painful death.

  Sometimes I doubt if anyone, no matter how excellent his training, could withstand any of these tortures. That’s why a spy will break any law or even kill a child
to avoid being discovered—because he knows what tortures await him. Since no one wants to end up crippled or hideously murdered, if you are a spy, you don’t, or try your best not to, make mistakes, period. Unfortunately, your enemy will probably adhere to the principle that, “It’s better to torture or kill a thousand innocent people than to let a single one who did wrong go free.”

  A spy must learn endurance. As a test, the trainee is sometimes confined inside a very small cell for days on end, with only a small slot opened to deliver a miserable meal and, on occasion, to collect the bucket of excrement. A two-way mirror on the wall is used by the boss to observe every move and how well he can withstand the pressures of claustrophobia, malnutrition, and isolation. Even when trained at the same time and place, spies are absolutely forbidden to make friends with one another, sometimes even forced to wear masks during gatherings. To prevent revealing their true identity, spies will adopt code names such as Lark, Eagle, Red Hat, Black Coffee, Watermelon, a number like H21, C15, or even titles of children’s songs such as Mama is the Best, My Little Sisters, Little Lamb Going Home, Mud Doll, Barking Dog, Ding-Dong.

  There is a lot more to spying than just lying and deceiving. Spies must study the language—especially idioms and slang—of their target country. There are all sorts of technical skills to learn, such as writing in code or with invisible ink, eavesdropping on telephones, and using a hidden camera small enough to be disguised as a lipstick case.

  I am sure that no one hearing me sing in a nightclub could imagine how cunning I had to be in order to survive. So I followed these teachings: