The Tiger's Apprentice

by Laurence Yep

Mr. Hu shook his head. “This is not the kind of sacrifice a friend can ask of another.”

  Now that her mind was made up, Mistral seemed almost buoyant. “To quote Tom, ‘I know the way.’ I’d like to see how either of you can stop me from going.” She nudged Monkey with her tail. “But it will be almost as dangerous for this furbag of a thief. Maybe he should stay here.”

  Monkey looked at the dragon with new respect, but he couldn’t resist teasing. “And let you hog all the glory?”

  Tom stirred on the stretcher. “Mr. Hu . . .” He propped himself up on an elbow. “The egg!”

  Mr. Hu took it from the pocket of his hanging coat and held it up so the light shone off the red petals of its disguise. “We have it.”

  The boy felt his chest. “The last thing I remember is the Watcher. It was so painful. How did we get here?”

  They told him everything that had happened, including the decision to retreat to the dragon kingdom. “You’ve got a little of the tiger in you now,” Monkey finished. “So better be careful when you go past a fish shop.”

  “You did that for me?” Wondering, Tom turned to Mr. Hu. He had thought only his grandmother would make that kind of sacrifice for him.

  Mr. Hu clasped the boy’s hand in his paw. “When your grandmother took me as her apprentice, she became like a parent to me. I can do no less for you.” Suddenly the tiger looked sad. “Even if you can’t wait to escape me.”

  Tom stared up at the tiger in amazement. “You still want me? But you ought to be glad I want to leave after what I cost you.”

  “I’ll try to be as patient with you as your grandmother was with me,” Mr. Hu said hopefully. “And as a Guardian, I will make my share of mistakes, so you must be as patient with me.” His head drooped suddenly, but Tom sprang quick as a tiger from the stretcher to catch the Guardian before he fell out of his chair.

  “Are you all right?” the boy asked, feeling how much the tiger was leaning on him for support. He now was as energetic as the tiger was exhausted.

  “Yes, I just need a little rest,” Mr. Hu said, barely able to lift his paw.

  “How are you, Tom?” Monkey asked. “You were pretty sick until she worked her magic.”

  Tom touched the scale on his cheek and found it wouldn’t come off. From the others’ descriptions, he was glad he had slept through his meeting with Nü Kua. “I feel like I could run around the block,” he said.

  “No wonder,” Mistral said, as pleased as any of them to see the boy so lively. “It’s all that tiger energy in a small human body.”

  Sidney, in the meantime, had been making himself at home by rummaging around in the refrigerator. “So what do you say, Tom? My partner and me’ll need all the help we can get.”

  Tom was sure Vatten had even deadlier creatures than the ones they had met, and he had gotten back the egg. So he was free to walk away. But even though he finally had his wish, he could feel how the tiger was leaning on him more and more. He couldn’t desert Mr. Hu when he was so weak—not after the tiger had proved how much he cared about Tom.

  “I still don’t know if I want to do this all my life,” Tom said thoughtfully, “but until the phoenix is safe from Vatten, I guess I should go.” Once he’d said that, he felt sure it was what his grandmother would have wanted him to do.

  “Hear that, Hu,” Monkey teased the tiger. “I think you’re on probation.”

  Mr. Hu chuckled. “An imperfect apprentice for an imperfect Guardian. But I suppose it’s to the dragon kingdom for all of us.”

  “But food first,” Sidney said, thrusting up a sausage like a sword.

  Monkey cleared his throat. “Say, Hu, you wouldn’t happen to have any of that ointment?”

  As weak as he was, the tiger could not resist teasing. “Even if it stinks?”

  Monkey slowly rotated an arm as if trying to work out the kinks. “Unlike that boat the dragon calls a snout, my pert nose is too tired to smell anything.”

  Mistral gave an embarrassed cough. “Now that the ape brought it up, I could use some of it too.”

  Mr. Hu savored his revenge. “My, how you’ve aged. You did say only old people use it.”

  The dragon coiled up her body so she could rub her spine. “My back’s bothering me, and you know what a problem that can be for a dragon.”

  “You’d need ointment by the gallon,” Monkey jeered.

  “Fortunately I bought it by the case,” Mr. Hu said, and directed them to a closet.

  Sidney emptied the contents of the refrigerator and cooked the food quickly. It made Tom feel sad and a little guilty to see how much trouble Mr. Hu had lifting a dumpling to his mouth now. Even so, the tiger refused his help. “I’m not an infant.”

  Tom hesitated. “Then why have you spilled soy sauce on your vest?”

  Mr. Hu looked down, annoyed. “I’ll have to soak that immediately or it will be ruined.”

  “I can do that,” Tom said.

  Mr. Hu hesitated and then nodded. “Fine. And you’ll find my spare vest in the second drawer from the top of the chest.”

  Tom picked up Mr. Hu’s chopsticks. “But first you’ll need some lunch.”

  The fur bristled around the tiger’s neck. “I can feed myself.”

  Mr. Hu didn’t scare the boy now. “You’ve got to keep up your strength,” Tom said.

  Monkey tossed a shrimp dumpling into his mouth. “Oh, do what he says, you old grump. You’re twice as touchy when you’re hungry.”

  “Humph,” the tiger huffed, “since when does the Guardian take orders from his apprentice?” But he motioned with a paw. “No, not the pork dumpling. The beef ball.”

  Tom dropped the rejected item and picked up the desired delicacy with a grin. “Open wide now.”

  Mr. Hu narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were enjoying ordering me around.”

  “Face it, Hu. You’re better at giving commands than taking them.” Mistral laughed.

  “Well, of course.” Mr. Hu’s frown turned to a smile. “But I guess I can learn temporarily.”

  “Teach an old tiger new tricks?” Tom asked with the beef ball poised before the tiger’s muzzle.

  “Miracles can happen,” Mr. Hu said, and stretched his jaws open, exposing sharp fangs.

  The sight didn’t intimidate Tom because he knew now the tiger would never hurt him. Dumping the food neatly into the Guardian’s mouth, he swung his chopsticks back toward the bowl. “So what would you like next?”

  “The fish ball, I think.” Mr. Hu pointed weakly with a claw. As Tom found the right item, the tiger added in a mumble, “And thank you.”

  “It’s the least an apprentice can do.” Tom grinned back.

  As Mr. Hu ate, Tom heard the big tiger begin his deep, rumbling purr. Standing next to him, Tom could almost feel the vibrations of the Guardian’s contentment.

  They were headed for dangerous times ahead, but he’d already gotten Mr. Hu to obey him, and that was a harder challenge than coming back from the dead. Maybe being an apprentice wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

  Afterword

  As a child, I read a good deal of fantasy, but it was Western fantasy, so I was always puzzled by the way dragons were portrayed as evil. In San Francisco’s Chinatown I learned that dragons were good creatures that brought the rain. I think that’s what first made me aware that I had a dual heritage as a Chinese American, and in time dragons came to symbolize that identity for me.

  However, there are other ways in which Chinese mythology differs from Western legends, including those about the phoenix. I was struck by the fact that the Chinese phoenix had the power to change bad creatures. I wondered if the reverse were true: if a phoenix would also have the power to change good creatures. That was the seed from which this book grew, though the Guardians who protect the phoenix are my own invention as are Kung Kung’s attempts to use it.

  I have also thought it was curious that the first rebel in the Chinese creation myths was the Minister
of Punishment, Kung Kung. I would have expected him to be the opposite: to maintain order and be the one who was most obedient to Heaven’s will. However, the myths state Kung Kung was far too strict and rebelled when he was told to be more tolerant.

  Many of the fantastical creatures come from legend or that ancient Chinese compendium of wonders, the Shan Hai Ching (ca. third century B.C.). Monkey, of course, is drawn from the many tales collected in The Journey to the West.

  An Excerpt from Dragonwings

  Read on for a peek at Laurence Yep’s Newbery Honor Book

  DRAGONWINGS

  Chapter 1

  The Land of the Demons

  (February–March, 1903)

  Ever since I can remember, I had wanted to know about the Land of the Golden Mountain, but my mother had never wanted to talk about it. All I knew was that a few months before I was born, my father had left our home in the Middle Kingdom, or China, as the white demons call it, and traveled over the sea to work in the demon land. There was plenty of money to be made among the demons, but it was also dangerous. My own grandfather had been lynched about thirty years before by a mob of white demons almost the moment he had set foot on their shores.

  Mother usually said she was too busy to answer my questions. It was a fact that she was overworked, for Grandmother was too old to help her with the heavy work, and she had to try to do both her own work and Father’s on our small farm. The rice had to be grown from seeds, and the seedlings transplanted to the paddies, and the paddies tended and harvested. Besides this, she always had to keep one eye on our very active pig to keep him from rooting in our small vegetable patch. She also had to watch our three chickens, who loved to wander away from our farm.

  Any time I brought up the subject of the Golden Mountain, Mother suddenly found something going wrong on our farm. Maybe some seedlings had not been planted into their underwater beds properly, or perhaps our pig was eating the wrong kind of garbage, or maybe one of our chickens was dirtying our doorway. She always had some good excuse for not talking about the Golden Mountain. I knew she was afraid of the place, because every chance we got, she would take me into the small temple in our village and we would pray for Father’s safety, though she would never tell me what she was afraid of. It was a small satisfaction to her that our prayers had worked so far. Mother was never stingy about burning incense for Father.

  I was curious about the Land of the Golden Mountain mainly because my father was there. I had, of course, never seen my father. And we could not go to live with him for two reasons. For one thing, the white demons would not let wives join their husbands on the Golden Mountain because they did not want us settling there permanently. And for another thing, our own clans discouraged wives from leaving because it would mean an end to the money the husbands sent home to their families—money which was then spent in the Middle Kingdom. The result was that the wives stayed in the villages, seeing their husbands every five years or so if they were lucky—though sometimes there were longer separations, as with Mother and Father.

  We had heavy debts to pay off, including the cost of Father’s ticket. And Mother and Grandmother had decided to invest the money Father sent to us in buying more land and livestock. At any rate, there was no money to spare for Father’s visit back home. But my mother never complained about the hard work or the loneliness. As she said, we were the people of the Tang, by which she meant we were a tough, hardy, patient race. (We did not call ourselves Chinese, but the people of the Tang, after that famous dynasty that had helped settle our area some eleven hundred years ago. It would be the same as if an English demon called himself a man of the Tudors, the dynasty of Henry VIII and of Elizabeth I—though demon names sound so drab compared to ours.)

  But sometimes Mother’s patience wore thin. It usually happened when we walked over to the small side room in the Temple, where classes were also held. Like many other people, Mother and Grandmother could neither read nor write; but for a small fee, the village schoolmaster would read one of Father’s weekly letters to us or write a letter at our dictation. In the evening after dinner, we would join the line of people who had a husband or brothers or sons overseas. There we would wait until it was our turn to go inside the Temple, and Mother would nervously turn the letter over and over again in her hands until Grandmother would tell her she was going to wear out the letter before we could read it.

  To tell the truth, I knew as little about my father as I knew about the Land of the Golden Mountain. But Mother made sure that I knew at least one important thing about him: He was a maker of the most marvelous kites. Everyone in the village said he was a master of his craft, and his kites were often treasured by their owners like family heirlooms. As soon as I was big enough to hold the string, Mother took me out to the hill near our village where we could fly one of Father’s kites. Just the two of us would go.

  But you won’t appreciate my father’s skill if you think flying a kite—any kind of a kite—is just putting a bunch of paper and sticks up into the air. I remember the first time we went to fly a kite. There was nothing like the thrill when my kite first leaped up out of Mother’s hands into the air. Then she showed me how to pull and tug and guide the kite into the winds. And when the winds caught the kite, it shot upward. She told me then how the string in my hand was like a leash and the kite was like a hound that I had sent hunting, to flush a sunbeam or a stray phoenix out of the clouds.

  But then she warned me that I had to stay alert, because sometimes the winds would try to tear the kite from my hand and I would have to hold on; or maybe the winds would try to drop my kite so it would smash to the ground. In that case, I would have to hurry up and reel in the slack and pull and steer the kite back into the winds until, just to get rid of the nuisance, the winds would take my kite where I wanted it to go.

  I failed miserably the first times I tried to fly the kite, but Mother would not let me give up; and eventually I got quick enough and strong enough and smart enough so that my kite would be flying far overhead—so far away that I would lose sight of the string I had attached to the kite, and the kite would seem to be some colored patch of rainbow that was following me about. And then Mother would say that she was sure the kite was flying so high that the Jade Emperor, the Lord of Heaven and Earth, could admire my kite from his palace window. That was what flying a kite was all about.

  And of course, Father’s kites were the most truly balanced and the strongest and yet the most beautiful. In fact, his kites practically flew themselves. At first Mother only let me use Father’s ordinary kites. He had made some special kites just before he left, when he knew my mother was pregnant; but Mother said I could not fly those kites until I was older and wiser—that is, when I turned eight. (The Tang people count the first nine months the mother carries the baby as the baby’s first year. By demon reckoning, I was only seven.) I can’t say who was prouder, my mother or I, when I finally managed to fly Father’s special kites.

  One was a sharply climbing swallow kite that was hard to get up, but there was nothing as fast as the swallow once it was up. The swallow swooped down with the slightest flick of the wrist or soared skyward with the tiniest jerk of the string. There was a large, long caterpillar kite, too, that took even longer to get up than the swallow, but once it was in the sky, it would stay forever, crawling back and forth over the clouds.

  But the best thing about flying any of the kites was what it did for Mother. She would throw off all her cares and become young again, running with me or taking a turn at flying the kite. She would chatter on about the things that she and Father used to do when they were young, for they had both grown up here. She taught me everything that Father had ever shown her about flying kites. She said that one of the first things he would want to see when he returned home for a visit was how well I could fly them. But even at these moments, Mother would never speak of the Golden Mountain.

  About the Author

  Photo credit Joanne Ryder

  LAURENCE YEP was bor
n in San Francisco in 1948. He sold his first story when he was 18, and though he has published over sixty books, he feels like he is still an apprentice learning his craft. He has a Ph.D. in English and has taught creative writing at UC Berkeley. He lives with his wife, Joanne Ryder, in Central California.

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  Books by Laurence Yep

  GOLDEN MOUNTAIN CHRONICLES

  The extraordinary intergenerational story of the Young family from Three Willows Village, Kwangtung province, China, and their lives in the Land of the Golden Mountain—America.

  The Serpent’s Children (1849)

  Mountain Light (1855)

  Dragon’s Gate (1867)

  A Newbery Honor Book

  The Traitor (1885)

  Dragonwings (1903)

  A Newbery Honor Book

  The Red Warrior (1939)

  Child of the Owl (1965)

  Sea Glass (1970)

  Thief of Hearts (1995)

  DRAGON OF THE LOST SEA FANTASIES

  Dragon of the Lost Sea

  Dragon Steel

  Dragon Cauldron

  Dragon War

  Sweetwater

  When the Circus Came to Town

  The Dragon Prince

  Dream Soul

  The Imp That Ate My Homework

  The Magic Paintbrush

  The Rainbow People

  The Star Fisher

  CHINATOWN MYSTERIES

  The Case of the Goblin Pearls

  The Case of the Lion Dance

  The Case of the Firecrackers

  EDITED BY LAURENCE YEP

  American Dragons:

  Twenty-Five Asian American Voices

  Copyright

  THE TIGER’S APPRENTICE. Copyright © 2003 by Laurence Yep. Prologue copyright © 2021 by Laurence Yep. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.