Dragon Springs Road

by Janie Chang

  The foreign woman put a hand on Constable Shea’s shoulder, but he shook it off and stood up, his lips set in a grim line. His face was no longer pale but flushed with anger as he strode out the door. The older woman hurried after him.

  THE NEWSPAPERS PUBLISHED a photograph of Anna. Handbills in both English and Chinese appeared on the streets offering rewards for information. The police went into every house on Dragon Springs Road and questioned all the shopkeepers along Chung San Road. They even took the lids off wells and prodded their depths with a long pole.

  The Shanghai Municipal Police came to the house and questioned all the adults. They put little faith in my testimony. I couldn’t blame them. I was just a little girl, and my incoherent explanation made no sense. The newspapers played it up with speculations about a kidnapping gone wrong or gangs taking revenge on the Shanghai Municipal Police. The consensus seemed to be that Anna had wandered away from home and been abducted.

  Each day, Third Wife read out loud from the newspapers the latest stories about the missing foreign girl. There was nothing about a Door to the land of immortals. But days passed, and the police came no closer to solving the mystery of her disappearance.

  THEN THEY FOUND Anna’s body at Yung An Cemetery.

  A hired mourner at a funeral had ducked behind a tomb to relieve himself and gotten a fright. The police descended on the cemetery to search for clues.

  After this, a steady stream of foreign women came to visit the Eastern Residence, offering their sympathies to Mrs. Shea. The newspapers quoted her as saying all she wanted to do was go home and put this nightmare behind her. The British Women’s Club took up a collection and three months after Anna’s disappearance, Mrs. Shea sailed back to England.

  Stories about the investigation into Anna’s death became less frequent as other crises of greater consequence took over the headlines.

  Constable Shea stayed in Shanghai but moved away from Dragon Springs Road, leaving behind the rose-printed curtains. In the rubbish pile I found three envelopes of seeds and put them in my pocket. There were also some framed prints, but I kept just one. It was a picture I recognized from Anna’s stories: a girl sitting on a rock, half human, half fish, gazing out at the sea. I tucked it in my clothes drawer.

  Each time memories of Anna surfaced they carved a hollow in my chest, and bewilderment spun my thoughts. Hadn’t I seen her go through the Door? Why had her body been at the cemetery?

  I had so many questions for Fox, but I hadn’t seen her since the day Anna vanished. My last memory of that incident was of Fox in front of the Door. Fox, her silhouette against a narrowing wedge of light. Fox, howling to the skies.

  THEN ONE NIGHT I woke to the summons in my head and climbed out of my cot. I slipped out of Anjuin’s room, my cloth shoes making no sound on wood or stone. In the back garden, I hurried to the garden shed. Moonlight pierced through the hanging foliage and guided my way to the secret door. It opened silently, as it always did.

  In the Western Residence, Fox was in human shape, resting on the garden bench. She sat surrounded by a bright cloud of fireflies. They dipped and rose in a tentative bobbing dance, moving points of light that made the embroidery on her tunic sparkle as though spun from pearls. The night air was only just beginning to cool, and cicadas still droned in the trees, a monotonous hum punctuated by short clacks like the snap of dry wood.

  “Where is Anna? I saw her go through the Door, but did she really?” I asked Fox. “Or is she dead? They found her body.”

  She really went through the Door, Fox said. Her spirit is there in the land of immortals. The body is only a shell. Why the gods chose to discard hers at Yung An Cemetery is not for me to guess.

  “Then bring the Door back,” I pleaded. “I want to go to the land of immortals too.”

  Fox shook her head. I don’t control the Door. It’s the gods who decide. She paused. Not everyone can see the Door, Jialing, but you did. Perhaps one day when you’re ready, it will open for you.

  “But what made Anna more ready than me?” I said. “Her father would’ve come home and seen what happened. He would’ve stopped her mother.”

  Anna wanted to go, Fox said. The gods only open the Door for those who are truly deserving, truly ready to leave this world. I think Anna felt she had lost her mother’s love and so she lost hope in this world.

  “But I’m the one who lost my mother,” I said, “and the Door didn’t stay open for me.”

  You still hope your mother left you behind for a good reason, Fox said. You still hope to find her. Anna thought she had lost her mother’s love for all eternity.

  I broke off a stem of hydrangea and jabbed it into the ground beside Fox. “I miss Anna. She was my only friend.”

  You have Anjuin. Fox looked at me, her elegant nostrils twitching. Then she sighed. Human feelings make life so difficult. It’s so much easier not to love and even better not to trust.

  “I wish I were a Fox,” I said. “Then my life would be easier. Can you make me a Fox?”

  Such a small person, such big ideas, she said.

  And then the courtyard was empty but for the fireflies, flickering lights weaving through the shadowy green depths of the bamboo garden.

  A moment later I was no longer in the courtyard. There were leaves overhead and I was looking out through a tangle of shrubs, two black paws stretched in front of me. Were those my feet?

  Do you really want to know what it’s like to be a Fox? Her voice echoed in my head, amused. And I settled inside this memory, seeing what Fox wanted to show me. I was myself and I was also Fox.

  . . . I look out on fields frosted with dew, the sky hazy with moonlight dimmed by a wash of clouds. Overhead, the high-pitched chittering of bats as they swoop and dive in the air. I stand and stretch, and from the shrubbery come rustles of alarm, small creatures alert to my presence.

  The ditch I follow meanders along the perimeters of fields. I come to a path, overgrown and invisible to human eyes, but I can see where the dirt is trampled from years of being trod by human feet. At the end of the path is a large bamboo grove, the edges of a cottage just visible. The cottage has been deserted for many decades, but the bamboo has flourished, surrounding the farm yard and growing right up to the cottage. Morning glory vines smother the straw roof, closed buds of white waiting to bloom with the sunrise.

  There’s nothing left of the people who lived here, no furniture or utensils, just some bricks blackened from cooking fires. Buried in one corner are rags wrapped around the small bones of a baby girl, abandoned when the family fled. From poverty or war, who’s to know. Fox has been coming for years but has never seen her ghost. Such a tiny thing, no doubt her souls passed straight into the afterlife, but I offer a small prayer to the gods anyway.

  Outside, a scrabbling sound and the beat of wings. An owl rises up from the fields, its hoot of triumph rising over despairing squeaks, a field mouse caged in its claws. The sky turns from charcoal gray to indigo, and then a lighter blue as sunrise paints the undersides of clouds. Birds call out, cautiously at first, then with more assurance.

  I trot home, treading my way between brambles and undergrowth until I reach the back wall of the Western Residence, to the spot where fallen bricks leave a gap. No other foxes will come near while Fox’s scent marks these shrubs. Inside, I enter the den beneath the veranda, behind the white hydrangea shrubs . . .

  . . . and then I woke up in my cot, birdsong coming in through the window. From the other side of the room, Anjuin’s quiet, regular breathing. I held up my hands and they were just hands, palms and fingers of soft skin, the nails thin and flat, useless for the hunt. I was no longer a Fox.

  CHAPTER 6

  February 1910, Year of the Dog

  Dajuin placed another ad to find new tenants for the Eastern Residence. Because of Anna’s mysterious death, Master Yang was afraid there would be no takers.

  “From the outside looking in,” Dajuin said to his father, “this property is bound to look ill-fated,
even to foreigners. In time, though, people will forget. But it may take a while.”

  To the Yangs’ relief, a tenant materialized almost immediately. Miss Morris, the woman who had helped Constable Shea question me, came to view the Eastern Residence. She climbed down from a donkey cart, followed by a dozen young women, three of them foreign.

  “She said she knew it would be a suitable home because she’d already been here once before,” Dajuin reported. “She’s headmistress of that foreign mission school out by Yung An Cemetery. She’s been looking for a bigger residence so all the teachers can live in one place.”

  A few days before the New Year, Miss Morris and the schoolteachers moved in. Everyone on Dragon Springs Road found excuses to be outside that day. They gawked at the foreign women and remarked on the Chinese schoolteachers, some dressed in Western skirts and jackets, some in the new-style short tunics worn over ankle-length skirts. Some even had curled hair.

  By the afternoon, two donkey-cart drivers from Chung San Road had been hired to take the teachers to and from their school every day. The foreign headmistress, the servants reported, had bargained competently. All sides were pleased.

  THE NEW YEAR dawned and I was nine years old. Not actually nine, but since no one knew my date of birth Grandmother Yang simply decided to consider me a year older every New Year. I was now old enough and trusted enough to tag along beside Anjuin on New Year’s social calls to help carry baskets of small gifts. Flanked by First Wife and Third Wife, Grandmother Yang made her way along Dragon Springs Road, entering each home to pay respects to the womenfolk of the family.

  It’s a pleasant tradition, said Fox, appearing beside me. The families on this street have always been good neighbors. I’ll come with you to see the Shens.

  She wore servant’s garb, a padded long winter tunic that fell to her knees and trousers that narrowed at the ankles. Instead of a single modest braid however, her hair was piled elaborately on top of her head, the loops and twists held secure with jeweled hairpins. We crossed the threshold into the Shens’ courtyard. Fox glided along, silent and unnoticed, following as though part of Grandmother Yang’s entourage.

  Old Madame Shen and Grandmother Yang spent several minutes offering each other good wishes for the coming year. Fox made a circuit of the room, inspecting Madame Shen’s trinkets, the carved lacquer fruit dish, the potted orchids. She picked up a porcelain clock and gave it a shake.

  “Have you been to call on them?” Old Madame Shen asked.

  “Not yet,” said Grandmother Yang. “The foreign women only arrived a few days ago. I’ll go pay my respects when they’re more settled.”

  “Schoolteachers. They’ll be modern and overeducated,” Old Madame Shen remarked.

  “Would you like to take a look at them?” Grandmother Yang said. “Some of the teachers are out on the street watching fireworks.”

  Led by the two elderly matrons, an inquisitive and giggling group of women emerged from the Shens’ front gates to stare at the strangers.

  The new tenants were gathered outside the front gate of the Eastern Residence, all young women, three foreigners, the rest Chinese. Like everyone else, they pointed up as sparks burst across the sky and covered their ears to shriek with delight when rockets exploded in deafening bangs. But there weren’t any strings of red paper tubes hanging from the small gabled roof over the lintel of the Eastern Residence.

  “Jialing, go see Lao-er,” Grandmother Yang said, giving me a small push. “Tell him to give our new tenants a few strings of firecrackers to hang at the front gate. Lao-er can light them if their foreign religion forbids it.”

  “I’ll go too,” Anjuin said, and we ran across the road together, holding hands. Fox, once again in animal form, dashed ahead and vanished into the Western Residence.

  MRS. HAO QUICKLY MADE friends with the schoolteachers’ one and only servant. Maiyu was both housekeeper and washerwoman. The two women soon made a habit of sharing a half hour of gossip out by the front gate each day. I was as curious as anyone in Dragon Springs Road about the teachers who occupied the Eastern Residence and found myself sweeping the entrance area whenever the two women servants gathered there.

  Maiyu admitted her work wasn’t very taxing because the teachers had good habits. They kept their rooms tidy, washed their own clothes, and took turns making meals. Maiyu’s main chores were to wash the bedclothes and keep the common areas clean.

  “These foreign-educated women.” Maiyu sighed. “Nothing is ever clean enough. You’re not allowed to spit on the floors, and the floors must be swept every day. And the amount of water I have to boil! They want boiled water even for washing clothes.”

  “It’s because they’re unmarried,” Mrs. Hao said. “Once they’re busy with husbands and children and servants to manage, they won’t be so picky.”

  “They won’t find husbands now,” Maiyu said. “Instead of finding husbands, they went to college. The old headmistress is at least fifty and even the youngest is at least twenty-two.”

  THE SCHOOLTEACHERS CAME and went as they pleased. They walked with confident strides, shoulders thrown back, in pairs and in groups, untroubled voices in a mix of Chinese and English that echoed down Dragon Springs Road. Anjuin frequently joined me at the front gate in the morning to watch the teachers board the hired donkey carts.

  “How can they live unmarried, away from their families?” Anjuin said. She was fascinated by the schoolteachers, especially the Chinese ones. “Not even a brother or uncle to watch over them. Their families must be wealthy and very modern thinking.”

  Grandmother Yang finally went to call on Miss Morris. She had me collect six fresh eggs from the hens in the kitchen garden as a gift to the headmistress. She took Anjuin to the Eastern Residence with her. They returned with a square tin box of foreign biscuits, a gift from Miss Morris. Grandmother Yang had been very pleased with the foreign woman’s manners.

  “She’s a woman of good family,” she decared. “Nothing like our previous tenant. Well, Mrs. Shea was only the wife of a policeman.”

  She handed Kejuin a biscuit, which he downed in a single crunch. Then he reached into the tin for more. I stared at the box, so like the one my mother had used for her cosmetics. Kejuin mistook my interest in the box. He wolfed down another biscuit and grinned at me.

  “MOST OF THEM aren’t from wealthy families at all,” Anjuin said that night from her bed. “I spoke to one of the teachers. They converted to the foreign religion, and the mission sent them to college in Hangchow. And two of the teachers got scholarships to go to college in America.”

  “Do you want be a teacher too?” I sensed a yearning in her voice.

  A long silence. “There’s no point. I am to be married.”

  No matter how much she might long for a different destiny, Anjuin’s fate was unavoidable, as carefully stitched into her future as the threads First Wife pulled in and out of her heavy silk altar cloth.

  FOX SOMETIMES VANISHED for weeks. There was no pattern to her comings and goings; they varied with the weather or simply by her whims. Once, when she returned from a particularly long journey, she had to take human form and comfort me. I sat on her lap and cried until my sobs turned into hiccups and then into giggles as we laughed together over my uncontrollable spasms.

  “I thought you had gone away forever,” I said between hiccups. “You were away for so long. You never tell me before you leave, either.”

  It’s true, I lose track sometimes, she said, wiping my nose. I’ll pay more attention to the passage of days from now on.

  After that she always came to see me at night before setting off on her rambles, and I would know she was back when images from her travels took over my sleep. Invariably I forgot my own dreams almost as soon as my eyes opened, as though they’d been chased away by sunlight. But when Fox slid into my mind, the memories she shared of her travels stayed with me more vividly than the everyday routines of my small world. Because for a while I could be Fox, not an abandoned zazhong g
irl-child.

  . . . there are watchtowers dotting the skyline, one on every peak of the mountain ridge across the plains. The towers are connected by a wall wide enough for three horses to walk abreast. Thousand-year-old ghosts are trapped in those walls. I hear them call out to their loved ones, who have been dead for almost as long as they. The undergrowth rustles and I am at the foot of the wall, out in the open chasing rabbits over an expanse of scrubby grass, my body twisting and leaping. I understand that Fox is not hunting because of hunger but for the sheer joy of speeding beneath the moon, running between copses of broadleaf trees. I stalk my prey, our shadows merging into the moon shadow of that long wall of stone that runs across the ridge for miles and miles, as far as the eye can see. . . .

  . . . now I’m a thousand miles away from the wall, treading a mountain path shaded by the most ancient pines in China, their trunks gnarled and deformed by galls. Their tree spirits have departed. The decayed pine needles beneath my feet are soft and yielding. Their musty, resinous fragrance preserves the odor of other Creatures that have traveled this way. I sniff, detecting phoenix and tortoise, unicorn goat and poison-feather bird. But the scents are old, their details bleached away by age. There have been no other Creatures on this mountain for a hundred years. The pine trees on this mountain are so dense that what little sunlight finds its way in gets lost. I explore for days and the only creatures I meet are ordinary quails and ordinary monkeys. All ordinary . . .

  It felt like a form of schooling, Fox sharing her travels with me. I sensed a purpose behind them as well as a searching, a need, but she wouldn’t explain why she allowed me these experiences or why she made those journeys.

  WHEN FOX WAS away, it was hard not to think about Anna for I daydreamed about her mysterious and wonderful fate. That Anna was safe and undoubtedly happy in the land of immortals did nothing to soften the aching in my chest every time I thought of her. I envied her, imagining what would be possible had I been able to follow her through the Door.