Dragon Springs Road

by Janie Chang

  But I wasn’t fast enough. I barely made it up the steps. He caught me by one arm, and in one quick move, pinned me to the veranda floor. Before I could even cry out, he straddled me across the hips and held my arms down. I screamed for help, but there was no one but Ping Mei and what could she do?

  “Such an unexpected opportunity,” he murmured, almost tenderly. He put his hands around my throat. “There’s no one home. The street is empty. No one can hear you. And no one will see you when I take your body out in the car.”

  His hands tightened, the courtyard spun. Light drained from the world. Then there was a loud crack, the sound of wood, and suddenly the choke hold was gone.

  “Leave her be.” A raspy voice and Wan Baoyuan’s weight shifted, fell away from my body. My eyes refused to focus, but I could breathe again.

  “I know you.” His voice was a little unsteady. “You used to live here.”

  He had recognized Ping Mei, their former servant.

  My vision cleared to see Wan Baoyuan on the floor beside me, rubbing the back of his head. He was staring at Ping Mei as though I wasn’t there. Ping Mei held a wooden chair by one of its legs. She looked very small and frail. She could hardly lift the chair. She had barely injured him.

  His eyes never left her face as he stood up and yanked the chair out of her hands. It clattered to the ground and broke, the flimsy seat separating from the wooden legs. Then he grabbed her by the shoulders and scrutinized her intently. She didn’t resist.

  “You lived here,” he repeated. “In the Western Residence.”

  He flung her against the door frame of the playroom and she staggered, but remained upright. She didn’t make a sound until she saw me looking at her, the bewilderment that must’ve been plain in my eyes. Then she whimpered, a sharp keening sound, and covered her face with her hands. A face I couldn’t bear to look at. A face I never bothered to study, seeing only the scars, the disfigurement, the fallen cheeks.

  “You said you were one of the house servants,” I whispered.

  A snort of laughter from Wan Baoyuan. “My brother’s whore. To think I once fancied you. Look at you now.”

  “Did you live here in the Western Residence?” I whispered. The courtyard rotated in a slow and stomach-churning spin. The air turned heavy and viscous, harder to breathe. Only the force of my cry wrenched me up to my knees.

  “Are you my mother? Ping Mei, are you my mother?”

  “Your mother?” Wan Baoyuan stared at me, then looked again at Ping Mei, who had taken her hands away from her face. Her eyes were on me now, pleading. My mother’s eyes.

  The first rumblings of thunder rolled across the sky, and rain began falling on roof tiles, a harsh relentless drumming. This courtyard was the whole world, and the only living persons in it were Wan Baoyuan, me, and Ping Mei. Ping Mei. My mother.

  Suddenly, he dealt her a blow that knocked her to the ground.

  “Where’s my worthless brother now?” he said. His voice was very quiet and made the hairs on my neck stand up. She sat up, blood running down her chin.

  “Your worthless brother sold his wives and daughters to pay off his debts so that he could have his honor back,” she spat. “His honor. Then he was going to throw himself in the river. But he was so incompetent, who knows if he actually managed it.”

  He kicked her in the ribs, and my scream was as loud as hers. Her head banged against the door frame, and then she lay still, arms clutching her side. I lurched a few steps toward her, but Wan Baoyuan covered the distance between us in a single stride. He grasped my arm with one hand and turned my face to his with the other. My struggles were futile.

  “So you’re the little zazhong daughter!” he muttered as if to himself. “When the Yangs said you attended the mission school, I thought you came from the orphanage. Yes, I can see her features in you now. Why didn’t I notice before?”

  For the same reason I hadn’t noticed Ping Mei’s features. I’d never paid attention, never bothered getting past my disgust. A look came over Wan Baoyuan’s face, a look that was unmistakable. Desire. And something else, something cruel and bestial.

  “No,” I screamed. “Let me go!”

  I tried to twist away, but he was stronger. He pushed me down and pinned me to the wooden floorboards. I screamed and kicked, but his weight crushed down on my hips.

  “My brother forgot about everything, everyone except her,” he said, undoing his belt. “His duty, his family. He was completely infatuated. It was as though he’d been bewitched by a Fox. I wanted to kill her as much as I wanted to get into her bed.”

  Fox, where are you? I cried in my mind.

  There was another crash of thunder, but I thought I heard another, sharper sound, the squeal of the front gate. I screamed again, and he struck me across the face.

  “Scream all you want, I enjoy the sound.” He pulled off his necktie and looped it around my wrists. He tied my hands to a balustrade and leaned over me.

  “Your mother ruined our family. I may as well enjoy you before I kill you,” he said.

  I screamed again, turned my face away from him. Then the sound of footsteps hurrying, the crunch of gravel, and Wan Baoyuan’s weight lifted. I was still pinned beneath him, but he had straightened up to his knees.

  “Leave her alone, Wan,” Liu Sanmu’s voice. “She’s no threat.”

  “Threat? I’ve never thought of this little zazhong as a threat,” Wan Baoyuan said. “This is nothing to do with you, Liu. Walk away and forget about it. Little Jialing here is willing to forget.”

  “He wants to kill me!” I managed to choke out the words.

  “Get away from her, Wan. Now.”

  Wan Baoyuan stood up and nonchalantly buckled his belt. “You’re overreacting, Liu.”

  Then, faster than I could’ve believed possible, he leaped from the veranda and threw himself at Liu Sanmu. They rolled on the ground and struggled, but it was no contest. Wan had been in the army. He was trained to fight, to kill. He pinned Liu Sanmu to the ground as he had done with me, then held him down by the throat. Liu’s eyes began to close.

  I struggled, but my hands were tied to the balustrade.

  Then a small figure hobbled forward, holding a wooden club. No, a chair leg. Ping Mei struck down with all her strength, again and again, until Wan Baoyuan’s head was bloody. Trails of scarlet stained puddles of rain.

  Stop, said a familiar voice. That’s enough, Yinglien.

  My eyes closed in relief. The bonds at my wrists loosened and I sat up. Liu Sanmu was still on the ground, gasping, starting to move. Wan lay beside him, quite still. A perfectly ordinary-looking young woman in a perfectly ordinary cotton jacket and skirt looked down at me. Her hair was plaited, a single long pigtail down her back. Her golden-brown eyes glowed green.

  The courtyard was silent except for the steady beat of rain. It flicked away at leaves and stems. It strummed insistently on roof tiles. Rain shuttered out the rest of the world. My heart beat in time to the rain. I crouched on the steps, my face lifted to the cold drops.

  THEN THERE WAS no rain. I was in the Western Residence and it was springtime. The sky was a clear blue, shaken clean of clouds. There were only three of us.

  Me. Fox. And my mother.

  They sat on wicker chairs, side by side under the veranda, meek as children caught telling tales. They knew each other. Fox had known my mother all these years but never said anything. Not even when my mother reappeared as Ping Mei. Despite the soothing air of Fox’s dream courtyard, my heartbeat was as frantic as a moth beating its wings against a window. And I was angry.

  Take all the time you need, Fox said. Time does not go by in the real world while you’re in here.

  In Fox’s world, Ping Mei’s face was no longer scarred and deformed, but had I passed her in the street I never would’ve recognized this worn-out woman as the mother who had been so playful, so loving. Aged by suffering, she looked decades older than her years.

  “Why did you leave me?” The question I�
��d wanted to ask for years.

  “Noble Uncle was going to sell us to brothels,” she said. “Even his own daughters. And you. I didn’t want you growing up like that.”

  “Why didn’t you come back?” I said, starting to cry. “What if the Yangs had sold me to a brothel or bonded me to a factory? They could’ve sent me to an orphanage.”

  “Fox promised to look after you,” my mother said, “and she did.”

  She didn’t come to my side to try and comfort me. I would’ve shrunk away if she had.

  “I was going to come back, Ling-ling, truly I was. But then this happened.” She pointed at her face. “I was so ugly and you were so little. I didn’t want to frighten you.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me she was my mother?” I swung around to face Fox.

  “Because I asked her not to,” Ping Mei said. My mother. I couldn’t call her “Mother,” not yet. Not when I still thought of her as Ping Mei.

  “And where have you been, Fox?” I demanded. “It’s been weeks.”

  You know me. I get wanderlust. She patted her hair, looking nonchalant. Then she sighed. You were right, Jialing, what you said before I went away. It’s your life, your decisions. You’re not a child anymore. I should let you make your own decisions.

  “Then tell me everything,” I said. “No more lies from either of you.”

  THE MAN WE called Noble Uncle first saw my mother at a banquet in Hankow where she and two other singsong girls had been hired to play music and entertain guests.

  “I had no illusions about him,” my mother said, “even though he was infatuated enough to buy us both. I knew he’d sell us off the moment his infatuation faded.”

  She set up an altar at the back of the kitchen to appeal to any Fox spirits who might be in the area. Pleased by my mother’s gesture of respect, Fox decided to make an appearance and in doing so, became entangled in our lives.

  It was Fox who made sure Noble Uncle’s passion for my mother remained as fervent as the day he first met her, Fox who nudged his attention gently elsewhere to overlook my presence, Fox who made sure a precocious child was content to live a docile life within the walls of the Western Residence. Fox who made sure I didn’t think to question our strange existence.

  But in the end, even Fox wasn’t strong enough to overcome the mountain of debt facing Noble Uncle. He had sunk into such a state of despair the only thoughts he could hold in his mind were schemes for paying off his creditors.

  “He was in debt to the wrong sort of people and terrified for his life,” my mother said. “He would’ve sold his firstborn son, if he’d had one.”

  On that last day, she had stuffed her clothing into a sack, then wrapped the sack in a flowered cloth and carried it like a child. Sunk in despair, and with a nudge from Fox, Noble Uncle never noticed the ruse, and the other women didn’t give her away. They had resented my mother when she’d first arrived, but now they resented Noble Uncle more.

  By the time he discovered my mother’s deception, it was too late. They were in Shanghai, living in a cheap boardinghouse. A few days later, the Fong women were taken away, weeping and protesting. My mother he kept until last. He sobbed his farewells even as he took money from the madam who bought her. She had gone to a brothel, not an inn.

  “When I thought you were Ping Mei,” I said, “which of your stories was true?”

  “I’d been at the brothel less than a week when a drunken customer wanted more than he’d paid for,” she said. “When I refused, he held my face over a brazier until I fainted from the pain. And he did start a fire.”

  After that, she was put to work as a cleaner, a scarf tied over her face to hide her scarred features. Over the years, she lost her sweet lilting voice and could no longer entertain from behind a screen, singing and playing the liuqin to earn a bit of extra cash.

  “I have lumps growing inside,” she said, pointing a finger at her throat. “The doctor who came to the brothel every month said he could cure me, but I never had enough money. He was a fraud, anyway.”

  “How did you end up in a brothel in the first place?” I said. “What about my father?”

  She sighed. “I was a widow. A childless widow. My husband killed himself.”

  Even though she sold all her jewelry so that her husband could pay his debts, her mother-in-law blamed her when he committed suicide. My mother returned to her own family, but they didn’t want her either. She was the widow of a suicide, a bad luck token. They sold her to a brothel in the treaty port of Hankow.

  There she gained a regular customer, a British soldier. The brothel owner could see the man had become fond of my mother, so when she fell pregnant, my mother was allowed to have the baby. The soldier offered to buy us both. He was still negotiating with the brothel owner when he fell ill and died of typhoid fever.

  “When you were born, he gave me the gold coins,” she said. “He told me to hide them, keep them for you, in case of need.”

  “What was his name?” I asked.

  She hesitated and said carefully, “Toh-mahse. He was delighted with you, Jialing. He truly was. He didn’t even mind that you were only a girl.”

  Thomas. Whether this was a first or last name, I would never know.

  A year later, she met Master Fong. My mother hadn’t liked him very much, but she had no say in the matter. He was infatuated with her and paid the brothel owner an exorbitant amount for the both of us.

  “I told myself at least it got you out of the brothel,” she said. “I thought you could work for the Fongs when you were older. But as soon as we arrived at Dragon Springs Road, I knew that would never happen. Fong had no idea how to earn or save. His money was nearly gone. I felt sick. Cheated.”

  “What about that story about your husband being a soldier in the imperial army?” I asked.

  “That story belonged to the real Ping Mei,” she said. “She was the only servant who bothered speaking to me. She left a year before Master Fong sold the estate.”

  “When Mr. Shea found you,” I said, “why didn’t you say who you really were?”

  “I didn’t know who was looking for me,” she said. “It seemed safer.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “Then when I met you, I was so ashamed of what I’d become. When I learned you were attending the mission school, I made up my mind to say nothing. You were an educated girl, you had a future. You didn’t need to be burdened with a mother like me. It was enough for me to live here, close to you.”

  There were still questions. Hundreds of questions. But for now I only had one more, even though I couldn’t bear to speak his name.

  “Why did Wan Baoyuan say he once fancied you? What happened between you?”

  “I wanted the Fong women to like me,” my mother said, “I tried to befriend them. It was a mistake going over to visit the Central Residence because Wan Baoyuan saw me there. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen. I thought nothing of it.”

  Fox cleared her throat. It was my mistake. I tried to get the Fongs to like your mother. The women were so set against her there wasn’t even the smallest inclination I could influence. But in his adolescent way, Wan Baoyuan already desired her, and the small nudge I gave pushed him over the edge. He fought with his brother over her. That was one of the reasons Master Fong was so quick to give up his younger brother to their uncle in Manchuria.

  They sat together in silence, watching me.

  She had left me behind for a good reason. Of all the unhappy roads before her, my mother had chosen one that allowed me the possibility of a decent future. How many unwanted girls were abandoned every day in Shanghai, let alone China? She had left me in Fox’s care.

  Yet I couldn’t help feeling angry with her. And with Fox. For keeping all this from me.

  “You don’t need to acknowledge me as your mother,” my mother said, as though she could hear my thoughts. “No one needs to know. You’re angry with me, but if you can manage to believe I’ve always had your best interests at heart, it�
�s enough.”

  Enough for her, but I didn’t know if that would be enough for me. I couldn’t summon up love, didn’t know whether I could ever smooth away the prickles of resentment at the edges of my heart, didn’t know if I could find forgiveness.

  There was, however, duty. There was always duty. Duty to one’s parents.

  “I can’t stay in this dream world,” I said. “There’s a dead body in the courtyard.”

  LIU SANMU SAT up and staggered to the edge of the bamboo garden. He knelt by the still figure and turned it over. I could see blood matting the skull, dripping onto the paving stones, a red shine on the wet surface.

  He looked up at me. “Jialing, I think he’s dead.”

  Suddenly the horror of what might have happened overwhelmed me and a cry swelled up, waiting only for my lungs to gather enough breath to expel it. Before that could happen, Liu Sanmu was kneeling beside me. He held me in his arms, and the scream died into moans muffled against his chest, followed by heaving sobs. He held me tightly for a few more minutes.

  “Jialing, stop crying.” He held me by the shoulders and looked into my face. “Don’t worry, Jialing. I won’t let you come to harm. You killed him to save me.”

  If he had ever noticed Ping Mei, the memory was now bleached from his mind. It was the one thing I’d asked of Fox. As far as Liu Sanmu knew, I was the only person who could’ve killed Wan Baoyuan.

  “You’re the one who saved me,” I said. “You came just in time. Dajuin and Anjuin are both out.”

  “I wanted to ask Dajuin about going to Chapei again tomorrow,” he said. “I was at the other gate when I heard you scream. I just hope the rickshaw driver was too far up the road by then to hear. We can’t let anyone know about this, Jialing. We must get Wan’s body away from here before anyone comes home.”

  “But surely the police will realize it was an accident,” I said, struggling upright. “I was defending you. With your family’s reputation, the police will believe us.”

  “Listen to me carefully, Jialing,” he said. “We cannot let this go to the police. Unless we can make this look like a random murder, we’re both in danger.”