? ? ?
The cottage was tiny. Teddy opened the door and showed Lilly in while he went to take care of Ah Huang. Lilly found herself standing in the kitchen. Through a doorway she could see a larger room—the only other room in the cottage, really—lined with tatami mats. That was evidently where Teddy and Mr. Kan slept.
Mr. Kan showed her to a seat by the small table in the kitchen and gave her a cup of tea. He was cooking something on the stove, and it smelled delicious.
“If you like,” Mr. Kan said, “you are welcome to share some stew with us. Teddy likes it, and I think you would too. You’ll have a hard time finding Mongolian-style mutton stewed in Shantung-style milkfish soup anywhere else in the world, ha-ha.”
Lilly nodded. Her stomach growled as she breathed in the wonderful cooking fumes. She was feeling relaxed and comfortable.
“Thank you for the mirror. It worked.” Lilly took out the mirror and put it on the table. “What do the words on the tape mean?”
“It’s a quote from the Analects. Jesus said something that means exactly the same thing: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’?”
“Oh.” Lilly was disappointed. She was hoping that the words were some secret magical chant.
Mr. Kan seemed to know what Lilly was thinking about. “Magic words are often misunderstood. When those girls and you all thought ‘gook’ was a magic word, it held a kind of power. But it was an empty magic based on ignorance. Other words also hold magic and power, but they require reflection and thought.”
Lilly nodded, not sure she really understood.
“Can we do more literomancy?” she asked.
“Sure.” Mr. Kan put the lid on the pot and wiped his hands. He retrieved some paper, ink, and a brush. “What word would you like?”
“It would be more impressive if you can do it in English,” said Teddy as he came into the kitchen.
“Yes, can you do it in English?” Lilly clapped her hands.
“I can try.” Mr. Kan laughed. “This will be a first.” He handed the brush to Lilly.
Lilly slowly wrote out the first word that came into her head, a word she didn’t understand: thalassocracy.
Mr. Kan was surprised. “Oh, I don’t know that word. This is going to be difficult.” He frowned.
Lilly held her breath. Was the magic not going to work in English?
Mr. Kan shrugged. “Well, I’ll just have to give it a try. Let’s see . . . in the middle of the word is another word: ‘lass.’ That means you.” He tipped the end of the brush toward Lilly. “The lass has an o, a circle of rope, trailing after her, and that makes ‘lasso.’ Hmm, Lilly, do you want to grow up to be a cowgirl?”
Lilly nodded, smiling. “I was born in Texas. We are born knowing how to ride.”
“And what letters do we have left after ‘lasso’? We have ‘tha’-space-‘cracy.’ Hmm, if you rearrange them, you can spell ‘Cathay,’ with a c and an r left over. C is just a way to say ‘sea,’ and Cathay is an old name for China. But what is r?
“Ah, I’ve got it! The way you’ve written the r, it looks like a bird flying. So, Lilly, this means that you are the lass with a lasso who was destined to fly across the sea and come to China. Ha-ha! It was fate that we should be friends!”
Lilly clapped and laughed with joy and amazement.
Mr. Kan ladled out mutton and fish stew into two bowls for Teddy and Lilly. The stew was good, but very different from anything Lin Amah made. It was savory, smooth, laced with the sharp fresh scent of scallions. Mr. Kan watched the children eat and happily sipped his tea.
“You’ve found out a lot about me, Mr. Kan, but I don’t know much about you.”
“True. Why don’t you pick another word? We’ll see what the characters want you to know.”
Lilly thought about it. “How about the word for America? You lived there, didn’t you?”
Mr. Kan nodded. “Good choice.” He wrote with his brush.
“This is mei. It’s the character for ‘beauty,’ and America, Meikuo, is the Beautiful Country. See how it’s composed of two characters stacked on top of each other? The one on the top means ‘sheep.’ Can you see the horns of the ram sticking up? The one on the bottom means ‘great,’ and it’s shaped like a person standing up, legs and arms spread out, feeling like a big man.”
Mr. Kan stood up to demonstrate.
“The ancient Chinese were a simple people. If they had a great, big, fat sheep, that meant wealth, stability, comfort, and happiness. They thought that was a beautiful sight. And now, in my old age, I understand how they felt.” Lilly thought about mutton busting, and she understood too.
Mr. Kan sat down and closed his eyes as he continued.
“I come from a family of salt merchants in Shantung. We were considered wealthy. When I was a boy, people praised me for being clever and good with words, and my father hoped that I would do something great to glorify the Kan name. When I was old enough, he borrowed a large sum of money to send me to study in America. I chose to study law because I liked words and their power.”
Mr. Kan wrote another character on the paper. “Let’s see what I can tell you with more characters formed from ‘sheep.’?”
“The first time I had this stew, I was a law student in Boston. My friend and I, we shared a room together. We had no money, and every meal we ate nothing but bread and water. But this one time, our landlord, the owner of a restaurant in Chinatown, took pity on us. He gave us some rotting fish and mutton scraps that he was going to throw away. I knew how to make a good fish stew, and my friend, who was from Manchuria, knew how to make good Mongolian mutton.
“I thought, since the character for ‘savory’ is made from ‘fish’ and ‘lamb,’ maybe if we put our dishes together, it would taste pretty good. And it worked! I don’t think we’d ever been that happy. Literomancy is even useful for cooking.” Mr. Kan chuckled like a kid.
Then his face turned more serious.
“Later, in 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria, and my friend left America to defend his home. I heard that he became a Communist guerrilla to fight the Japanese, and the Japanese killed him a year later.”
Mr. Kan sipped his tea. His hands trembled.
“I was a coward. I had a job then and a comfortable life in America. I was safe, and I did not want to go to war. I made excuses, telling myself that I could do more to help if I waited for the war to be over.
“But Japan was not content with Manchuria. A few years later, it invaded the rest of China, and one day I woke up to find that my hometown had been captured, and I stopped getting any letters from my family. I waited and waited, trying to reassure myself that they had escaped south and that everything was all right. But eventually, a letter from my baby sister arrived, bringing with it the news that the Japanese army had killed everyone in our clan, including our parents, when the town fell. My sister was the only one who survived by playing dead. Because I dithered, I had let my parents die.
“I left for China. I asked to sign up for the army as soon as I stepped off the boat. The Nationalist officer couldn’t care less that I had gone to school in America. What China needed were men who could shoot, not men who knew how to read and write and could interpret the laws. I was given a gun and ten bullets, and told that if I wanted more bullets, I had to get them from the dead bodies.”
Mr. Kan wrote another character on the paper.
“Here’s another character also built from ‘sheep.’ It looks a lot like mei. I just changed the ‘great’ on the bottom a bit. Do you recognize it?”
Lilly thought back to the drawings from a day earlier. “That’s the character for ‘fire.’?”
Mr. Kan nodded. “You are a very smart girl.”
“So this is a character for roasting mutton over fire?”
“Yes. But when ‘fire’ is on the bottom of a character, usually we change its shape to show that it’s cooking at low heat. Like this.”
“Originally, roasted lamb was an offering to the gods, and this character, kao, came to mean lamb in general.”