David Rotenberg - The Lake Ching murders

Fong nodded, “Madame Wu’s man.”

The politico took a wheezing breath and then removed the cigarette from his mouth.

Fong looked at the cigarettes. The Kents. “You were pretty lucky you didn’t get on that boat yourself, weren’t you?” The politico was about to protest but Fong cut him off. “You were the eighth Chinese man with a hotel room in Xian that night, weren’t you?”

The politico started to deny it but decided against it. He nodded.

Fong smiled.

The politico held out his right hand. “Deal, done?”

Fong stared at him.

The politico pushed his hand out farther. “The deal is done. I said it, so it is so.”

Fong reached out and grabbed the man by the collar.

The politico was remarkably calm. “Something else you wish to include in our bargain, Traitor Zhong?”

“Yes,” Fong spat out. For a moment he couldn’t make himself say the words. Then he vomited them out. “I want my fucking teeth fixed!”

The words came out loud. Too loud. And more embarrassing than Fong had anticipated. Too public. Too vain for a man about to be fifty.

“You’re staring, Fong,” Lily said. It was their first day back in Shanghai. They were on the Bund. A young man dressed in a shiny gold silk shirt, black pyjama pants and black cloth slippers was standing between the poles of a rickshaw on the other side of the six-lane road.

“What is that?” hissed Fong.

“You know very well what it is,” Lily replied carefully.

Fong was staring at a vision from the past. A hideous vision of a time of shame. A rickshaw? Now?

“What has happened here?”

“You’ve been away five years, Fong.”

“Human beings aren’t animals. Is this legal now?”

Fong’s father had read him Lao She’s classic story, Rickshaw Boy. He had curled into his father’s side and smelt his sour but pleasant odour. His father had beautiful hands. He read sweetly by the flickering candlelight. Fong had been only three or four but he already knew that his grandmother must have been out or his father wouldn’t have dared to “fill the boy’s head with a stack of nonsense.”

When his father finished the story of the boy who was little more than “a starving and crazy beast, who just wants to keep running,” he’d taken out a pamphlet. “This is what foreigners think of us, Fong.” He found a place in the pamphlet and read, “Rickshaw coolies live in dire poverty. Pay them liberally but not foolishly, for it is an idiosyncrasy of the coolie mind to mistake generosity for idiocy.” He looked at his son. “Do you understand, Fong?”

Fong had nodded. It was then he saw the small satchel behind the door.

His father got up. He wasn’t wearing his sleeping clothes. Fear began to take Fong. Something unnamed was in the room.

“Be brave, Fong,” his father had said as he picked up the satchel. “This,” he said pointing at the pamphlet about the rickshaws, “must stop. Don’t you agree?”

Fong had nodded although all he’d wanted to say was, “Where are you going, Papa?”

His father slung the satchel across his back then knelt by Fong. “Be strong. Peace can only come with justice.” His long tapered fingers touched Fong’s face; Fong smelled him one last time, and then he was gone.

Gone.

He became the shame of the family. The Communist.

Two years later, when the Red Army marched into Shanghai victorious, Fong climbed to the rooftops to find his father. Row upon row of soldiers marched by. But no one with beautiful hands appeared. No one who smelled like his father. No one to tell him “to be strong.” It was then, as the last of the soldiers passed, that Fong had discarded his childhood and decided to pursue justice; he joined the youth wing of the Party.

Lily tried to move Fong along the crowded sidewalk, but he pulled his arm from hers and darted across the busy street. Then he was screaming at the young rickshaw man while hundreds of dazed tourists gawked. Lily ran up to him and pulled him away.

“My father gave up his – my father . . .”

“Tell me, Fong.”

But he couldn’t. His past was his own. His shame. One fact would lead to another. Silence was a better alternative. Even Fu Tsong never knew his story. He had begun his life anew with Fu Tsong. He’d do it again with Lily.

Lily hung her head in disappointment and stared at the Pudong industrial region – all spanking new and proud across the Huangpo River. Then she looked at Fong. His new teeth helped a lot. She reached for his hand. “You don’t have to go to work today. It’s your first day back. They’ll understand that you have to get acclimatized.”

He allowed her to guide him by the hand.

He allowed her to lead him back to the rooms on the grounds of the Shanghai Theatre Academy, which had been returned to him.

He allowed her to undress him.

And they completed a dance that had begun long ago in the darkness of a forensic lab.

He sensed at the moment of his ejaculation that they had conceived a child.

His second – although no one except Fu Tsong and the butcher abortionist had ever seen the first.

As the sun rose the next morning Fong stared out the window. The courtyard still had the stupid statue. Drunken young actors still lounged on the tiny patch of grass.

Five years.

He looked at Lily. Her features were softer in sleep. Faraway.

They were having a baby together. Of that he was sure. What his relationship to her was he couldn’t name. She deserved better. She deserved to be loved.

“Everyone deserves to be loved.” He turned and Fu Tsong emerged from the washroom pinning up her hair. She was dressed for the final scene in Measure for Measure. One of her most famous performances. “I said, we all deserve to be loved,” Fu Tsong repeated.

“Is that why Isabella marries the Duke at the end of the play?”

“It was the way I played it.”

He nodded. The image of her taking the Duke’s hand was still fresh in his memory all these years later.

“Was that the justice she earned?”

“Justice isn’t earned Fong. It’s understood.” Then she was gone.

The raid on the Island of the Half-wits was carried out with military precision. The farmers were rounded up, Iman was publicly humbled, the population herded into boats to begin a long journey to disparate places west of the Wall. But not before each had been forced to give three large blood samples.

Jiajia was not accounted for. In a land of rocks it is hard to discern one from the next.

Once the islanders were safely on boats, the soldiers tore down the terrace walls, smashed the stone pathways and reduced to waste the entirety of what these people had laboured so hard for so long to build. They erased their history. Tore off the face of this place – and the fishermen on the coast watched and smiled at the possibilities that now presented themselves.

Madame Wu said nothing. The look on her face as the handcuffs snapped onto her wrists never varied. Only her hands betrayed her. They were red – angry like her mother’s after hours of pulling silkworm cocoons from boiling water.

Lily was there before him. Naked and sweet. She curled up on his lap and looked into his eyes. “We can’t live here, Fong.”

“I can’t live anywhere else, Lily.”

She nodded sadly and touched her belly then looked up at him.

He smiled.

She smiled back. “I finally got that roll of film developed.”

“What roll of film?”

“The one the specialist found in the Japanese guy’s camera.”

“By the runway?”

“Yes, Fong, by the runway.”

Lily waited and finally Fong asked, “So what’s on the film?”