A Case of Two Cities

yourself?”
     
    “No, not about myself.”
     
    “I see. For this character, xing by itself means travel or movement. Some trip must be involved, pleasant or not pleasant.”
     
    “You are absolutely right, Master Chen,” she said eagerly. “Can you tell me if it will be a smooth trip?”
     
    The question was made in the future tense, and his performance proved to be smoother than expected. She swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. His comment about travel was but a guess, though it would not have been too off the mark, with Xing’s flight out of China not too long ago. But apparently it hit home. The old woman’s response showed that she was concerned about a future trip. Since Xing was standing right there, she must be worried about somebody else, about Ming, her son left behind. That meant An’s assumption was correct—Ming was still in Shanghai.
     
    “Let’s move further. Judging from the left radical of the character, double person radical, it involves two. The right part of the character is unusual. For the top section, the horizontal stroke is yi, meaning one, and for the bottom section, it makes a partial character ding, meaning a boy. So you may be worried about your sons, or at least one of them.”
     
    “Master Chen, you are divine. Now you have to tell what will happen to my sons.”
     
    “Let me be frank with you, Madam. Ding with a horizontal stroke weighing above does not look so good, for ding may be associated with death or other tragedies, as in dingyou . . .”
     
    Now he was stretching it way out of proportion, especially the connotations of ding. But the practice was not without its ironic precedent, he realized. Ezra Pound, an imagist poet, had played the same trick by deconstructing a Chinese character into component ideograms—except that Pound had done so for poetry.
     
    “You have to help me, Master Chen. I will be grateful to you all my life.”
     
    “What I can tell you, madam, is from the character alone. Fortune or misfortune is self-sought. Human proposes, heaven disposes.” He paused significantly before going on. “But I may be able to read a little more out of it if you can tell me what you really want to know. For instance, the time and the direction of the movement you are concerned with.”
     
    “Yes, my little son has not come out yet,” she said hesitantly. Xing might have warned her about talking to strangers. “I don’t know when he can make it. Or whether he can make it.”
     
    “Now excuse me for saying so, but the horizontal stroke looks like a sword weighing over his head,” Chen said, pushing it as much as he could. “I am afraid he may be in some sort of danger.”
     
    “Oh you almighty Buddha, protect him. I know he’s in danger, Master Chen,” she said in a tearful voice. “Xing, come over here. I have met with a great master today. You have to write a character too.”
     
    “You have done an interesting job!” Xing said to Chen, moving up, producing a hundred-dollar bill, and tossing it on the table. “For candles and incenses.”
     
    “Illusion rises from your heart, sir. What is interesting to one may not be so to another. There is no door for fortune or misfortune. The world depends on your thought to be good or bad,” Chen said, switching on the mini recorder in his pants pocket as he dipped the brush pen lightly in the ink. Thanks to his voracious reading in his college years, those old phrases came to him naturally. “But if we can see something from a character you choose in correspondence to Way of the Heaven, it may help.”
     
    “Can you read such a lot from one single character, Master Chen?”
     
    “I do not claim that a character can tell you everything, but it can reveal a possible direction in which things might be going. Go ahead and write the character with the question in your mind. If you think my interpretation is neither here nor there, you can take back the candle and incense money.”
     
    “You may have something,” Xing said, looking him in the eyes. “You do not sound like a local Chinese?”
     
    “Who is a local Chinese in Los Angeles? But for the request by Master Illusionless, I would not have come over today.” Chen then added, improvising on a Tang poem, “ The Buddha Glory Temple / stands amidst the deep green, / the temple bell carrying / the evening far in a breeze. // A straw hat fastening / the setting sun, / I retreat alone into the blue, / distant mountains.”
     
    Xing