Pow!

the ground. Fan Zhaoxia shrieks and drops the child in her arms. Lan's men are stunned for a moment. Then they snap out of their stupor and rush to him, filling the air with shouts of ‘Boss Lan ! Boss Lan !’

POW! 18

    Lao Lan's aides pick him up—his hands are a bloody mess, his face black with soot. ‘My eyes ! Damn it, my eyes !’ he screams through his pain, ‘I can't see ! I can't see you now, Third Uncle !’ Third Uncle means a great deal to the lousy bastard, but why shouldn't he? Most members of the previous generation of Lans were shot, and the few who survived died during the difficult years that followed. Only this unworldly third uncle occupies an iconic spot in his mind. His aides place Lao Lan in the back seat of the Buick; Fan Zhaoxia squeezes into the front with the girl in her arms, and the car makes its unsteady way up to the highway, where, with a blast of its horn, it speeds off to the west and runs smack into a contingent of stilt-walkers who scatter in confusion. One of them barely makes it out of the way, only to have a stilt sink into the mud and topple him to the ground. Several of his fellow walkers hop across the asphalt to extricate him from his troubles. All this reminds me of a Mid-Autumn Festival a decade ago, when my little sister and I scooped up locusts that were sticking their tails into the road's hard surface to lay eggs. My mother was dead by then and my father had been arrested, which effectively orphaned my sister and me. We were on our way to South Mountain to look for mortar shells, with the white moon rising in the east and the red sun setting in the west—in other words, dusk. We were hungry and miserable. A breeze rustled the leaves of nearby crops and autumn insects chirped in the grass—all sounds of desolation. We pulled locusts off the road stretching their abdomens as far as they'd go, then scrounged together some dry kindling, built a fire and flung the misshapen locusts into the flames, where they curled up and gave off a special fragrance. Wise Monk, this was an evil deed, I know that. Eating an egg-laying female locust is the same as eating hundreds of them. But if we hadn't eaten them we'd have starved. This is a problem I've never been able to resolve. Wise Monk gives me a pointed look whose meaning escapes me. The West City stilt-walkers, all employees of a restaurant called Xiang Man Lou, wear white uniforms and chef's hats bearing the restaurant's name. Wise Monk, it's an establishment capable of offering a complete formal banquet, featuring both Chinese and Manchu delicacies. The executive chef, a disciple of Manchu palace chefs, is as skilful as you'd imagine him to be. But he's hot-tempered. A Hong Kong restaurant once tried to lure him away with a monthly salary of twenty thousand Hong Kong dollars, but failed. Japanese and Taiwanese tourists flock to the restaurant to sample its delicacies. These are the only occasions when he deigns to appear in the kitchen; the rest of the time he occupies a seat in the restaurant and drinks oolong tea from a small dark red teapot (all that tea has turned his teeth black). Well, the stilt-walkers are ill fated, for as soon as they leave the asphalt road their stilts stick in the grassy soil, and soon their formation is thrown into disarray. Their corresponding unit from East Town is a contingent of thirty or so marchers from the Lekoufu Sausage Factory, each of whom holds a red string attached to a big, red, sausage-shaped balloon. The pull of the balloons is strong enough to send the men up onto the balls of their feet, looking as if they could float into the blue sky at any minute.

    The first time I followed Mother's instructions to go to Lao Lan's house was a bright, sunny afternoon. Melting snow on the road, paved only that autumn, was turning into a dirty sludge; a pair of tyre tracks in the middle, left moments before by an automobile, exposed a bit of the black asphalt underneath. No villager was taxed for the road to be asphalted—Lao Lan had paid for it all, and it was a boon to the villagers who needed to reach the highway into town. That boosted Lao Lan's prestige to an all-time high, or, as they say, when the river floods, all boats rise.

    As I walked down the road, which Lao Lan had named Hanlin Avenue, after the famous academy of scholars, I watched water drip, like translucent pearls, from roof tiles facing the sun. The tattoo of dripping water, the cool, earthy aroma of the soil and the