Lilly felt her heart squeeze, and suddenly everything looked blurry through her eyes. She held her breath.
“There’s a lot of sorrow in your heart, Lilly, a lot of worry. Something is making you very, very sad.”
Lilly looked up at his kind and wrinkled face, the neat white hair, and she walked over to him. Mr. Kan opened his arms and Lilly buried her face in his shoulders as he hugged her, lightly, gently.
As she cried, Lilly told Mr. Kan about her day at school, about the other girls and their chant, about the kitchen table empty of mail from friends.
“I’ll teach you how to fight,” ?Teddy said when Lilly had finished her story. “If you punch them hard enough, they won’t bother you again.”
Lilly shook her head. Boys were simple, and fists could do the talking for them. The magic of words between girls was much more complicated.
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“There’s a lot of magic in the word gook,” Mr. Kan said after Lilly had wiped her tears and calmed down a little. Lilly looked up at him in surprise. She knew that the word was ugly and was afraid that he would be angry at hearing her say it, but Mr. Kan was not angry at all.
“Some people think that the word has a dark magic that can be used to slice into the hearts of the people of Asia and hurt them and those who would befriend them,” Mr. Kan said. “But they do not understand its true magic. Do you know where the word comes from?”
“No.”
“When American soldiers first went to Korea, they often heard the Korean soldiers say miguk. They thought the Koreans were saying ‘me, gook.’ But really they were talking about the Americans, and miguk means ‘America.’ The Korean word guk means ‘country.’ So when the American soldiers began calling the people of Asia ‘gooks,’ they didn’t understand that they were in a way really just speaking about themselves.”
“Oh,” Lilly said. She wasn’t sure how this information helped.
“I’ll show you a bit of magic that you can use to protect yourself.” Mr. Kan turned to Teddy. “Can I have that mirror that you use to tease the cats with?”
Teddy took out a small bit of glass from his pocket. It was broken from a larger mirror and the jagged edges had been wrapped in masking tape. Some Chinese characters had been written in ink on the masking tape.
“The Chinese have been using mirrors to ward off harm for millennia,” Mr. Kan said. “Don’t underestimate this little mirror. It has great magic in it. Next time, when the other girls tease you, bring out this mirror and shine it in their faces.”
Lilly took the mirror. She didn’t really believe what Mr. Kan was saying. He was kind and nice, but what he was saying sounded preposterous. Still, she needed a friend, and Mr. Kan and ?Teddy were the closest thing to friends she had on this side of the Pacific Ocean.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Miss Lilly.” Mr. Kan stood up and solemnly shook her hand. “When there is such a large gap of years between two friends, we Chinese call it wang nien chih chiao, a friendship that forgets the years. It’s destiny that brings us together. I hope you will always think of me and Teddy as your friends.”
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Lilly explained her muddy appearance by blaming it all on Ah Huang, the “stubborn water buffalo” that she eventually subdued with her Texan cowgirl skills. Of course Mom was angry, seeing Lilly’s ruined clothes. She gave Lilly a long lecture, and even Dad sighed and explained that her days of being a tomboy really needed to come to an end, now that she was a young lady. But on the whole, Lilly thought she had gotten off easy.
Lin Amah made Three-Cup Chicken, which was Dad’s favorite. The sweet smell of sesame oil, rice wine, and soy sauce filled the kitchen and living room, and Lin Amah smiled and nodded as Mr. and Mrs. Dyer praised the food. She wrapped the leftovers into two rice balls and put them in the lunch box for Lilly. Lilly was apprehensive about bringing Three-Cup Chicken to lunch, but she fingered the mirror in her pocket and thanked Lin Amah.
“Good night,” Lilly said to her parents, and went to her room.
In the hallway Lilly found a couple of sheets of paper lying on the floor. She picked them up and saw that they were filled with dense typescript:
have successfully sabotaged numerous factories, railroads, bridges, and other infrastructure. Agents have also assassinated several local ChiCom cadres. We have captured dozens of ChiCom individuals on these raids, and their interrogation yielded valuable intelligence concerning Red China’s internal conditions. The covert program has been conducted with plausible deniability, and so far no elements of the US press have questioned our denials of ChiCom accusations of American involvement. (It should be noted that even if US involvement is revealed, we can legally justify our intervention under the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty as the ROC’s sovereignty claims extend over all the territory of the PRC.)
Interrogations of ChiCom prisoners suggest that this program of harassment and terror, combined with the threat of an ROC invasion of the mainland, has pushed the ChiCom to further intensify internal repression and tighten domestic control. The ChiCom have increased military spending, and this likely has shifted scarce resources away from economic development and increased the suffering of the masses at a time when the PRC is experiencing great famines after the Great Leap Forward. As a result, there is a great deal of dissatisfaction with the regime.
President Kennedy has reoriented us toward a more confrontational stance with the ChiCom. I suggest that we weaken the PRC by all means short of all-out, general war. In addition to our continued support of ROC interdiction and harassment of PRC shipping and our support and direction of the insurgency in Tibet, we should increase our joint covert operations with the ROC in the PRC. I believe that by intensifying our covert operations against the ChiCom, we can force the ChiCom to curtail its support for North Viet Nam. In the best case, we may even provide the proverbial straw to break the camel’s back, and successfully induce a domestic popular revolt to support a ChiNat invasion force from Taiwan and Burma. The Generalissimo is quite eager.
Should the PRC be provoked into a general war with us, it will be necessary to use atomic weapons to ensure the credibility of American resolve to our allies. The President should be prepared to manage popular perception in America and to induce our allies to accept atomic warfare as the means to victory.
At the same time, there is no question that the ChiCom would step up their efforts to infiltrate Taiwan and establish a network of agents and sympathizers within Taiwan. ChiCom propaganda and psywar techniques are not as sophisticated as ours, but appear to have been effective (at least in the past), especially among the native Taiwanese, by exploiting conflicts between the native-born penshengjen and the Nationalist waishengjen.
The maintenance of ChiNat morale is vital to our hold on Taiwan, the most vital link in the chain of islands that form the bulwark of American thalassocracy in the Western Pacific and the perimeter defense of the Free World. We must assist the ROC in counterespionage efforts on the island. Current ROC policy suppresses sensitive issues such as the so-called 228 Incident to avoid giving the ChiCom an opportunity to exploit penshengjen resentment, and we should give this policy our full support. We should also give all possible assistance to root out, suppress, and punish ChiCom agents, sympathizers, and other
They seemed to belong to Dad from work. Lilly stumbled over the many words that she didn’t know, and finally stopped at “thalassocracy,” whatever that meant. She quietly put the papers back down on the ground. Suzie Randling and tomorrow’s lunch were far more pressing and worrisome to Lilly than whatever was typed on those sheets.
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