“I’ll take it out before you go home. Your skin won’t heal for a few more days, but most of the poison in your blood should be gone with the medicine Ah Yan put on the bandage, and the acupuncture should have taken out the rest. Just get the bandage changed to a clean one tomorrow and you shouldn’t even have a scar when this is over.”
Lily wanted to thank him, but she suddenly felt shy. Talking with Logan was strange. He was unlike anyone she had ever met. One moment he was killing a man with his bare hands, and the next he was holding her ankle as gently as she would a kitten. One moment he was singing songs that seemed as old as the earth itself, and the next he was laughing with her over a game played with watermelon and lotus seeds. He was interesting but also more than a little scary.
“I like playing with the black seeds,” Logan said as he placed another seed on the grid, capturing a block of Lily’s seeds. He picked them up and popped the handful of lotus seeds into his mouth. “Lotus seeds are much better to eat.”
Lily laughed. How could she be scared of an old man who talked with his mouth full?
“Logan, that story about the poisoned arrow and the doctor scraping your bones, that didn’t really happen to you, did it?”
Logan tilted his head and looked at Lily thoughtfully. Slowly, he chewed the lotus seeds in his mouth, swallowed, and grinned. “That happened to Guan Yu, the Chinese God of War.”
“I knew it! You’re just like my father’s friends, always telling me tall tales just because I’m a child.”
Logan laughed his deep, booming laugh. “Not all stories are made up.”
Lily had never heard of the Chinese God of War, and she was sure that her father hadn’t either. It was now twilight, and the sounds and the smell of the loud and oily cooking of the Chinamen filled the garden.
“I should go home,” Lily said, even though she desperately wanted to try some of the food that she was smelling and hear more about Guan Yu. “Can I come and visit you tomorrow, and you can tell me more stories about Guan Yu?”
Logan stroked his beard with his hand. His face was serious. “It would be an honor.” ?Then his face broke into a smile. “Even though I’ll have to eat all the seeds myself now.”
The God of War
Before Guan Yu became a god, he was just a boy.
Actually, before that, he was almost just a ghost. His mother carried him in her belly for twelve months, and still he refused to be born. The midwife gave her some herbs and then told her husband to hold her down while she kicked and screamed. The baby finally came out and didn’t breathe. Its face was bright red. Either from choking or too much barbaric blood in the father, the midwife thought.
“It would have been a huge baby,” the midwife whispered to the father. The mother was asleep. “Too big to have a long life, anyway.” She began to wrap up the body with what would have been his swaddling clothes. “Did you have a name picked out?”
“No.”
“Just as well. You don’t want to give the demons a name to hang on to on his way down below.”
The baby let out an earsplitting cry. The midwife almost dropped him.
“He’s too big to have a long life,” the midwife insisted as she unwrapped the body, a little peeved that the baby dared to defy her authority on these matters. “And that face. So red!”
“Then I’ll call him Chang Sheng, Long Life.”
The dry summer sun and the dusty spring winds of Shanxi carved lines and sprinkled salt into the chapped, ruddy faces of the Chinese who tried to make a living here in the heart of northern China. When the barbarians climbed over the Great Wall and rode down from the north on their raids on the backs of their towering steeds, it was these men who took up their hoes and melted their plows to fight them to the death. It was these women who fought alongside the men with their kitchen knives, and, when they failed, ended up as the slaves and then the wives of the barbarians, learning their language and bearing their children, until the barbarians began to think of themselves as Chinese, and they, in turn, fought against the next wave of barbarians.
While weak men and delicate women who were afraid to die fled south so that they could row around on their flower boats and sing their drunken verses, those who stayed behind, matching the music of their lives to the rhythm of the howling rage of the desert, grew tall with the barbaric blood mixed into their veins and became full of pride at their life of toil.
“This is why,” Chang Sheng’s father said to him, “the Qin and Han Emperors all came out of the Great Northwest, our land. From us come the generals and the poets, the ministers and the scholars of the Empire. We are the only ones who value pride.”
In addition to helping his father in the fields, it was Chang Sheng’s job to gather the firewood and kindling for the kitchen. Chang Sheng’s favorite time of the day was the hour or so before the sun set. That was when he took the rusty ax and the even rustier machete from behind the kitchen door and climbed the mountain behind the village.
Crack, the ax split the rotting trunk of a tree. Zang, the blade swung through the dry grass. It was hard work, but Chang Sheng pretended that he was a great hero cutting down his enemies like weeds.
Back home, dinner was stir-fried bitter melon and pickled cabbage to go with scallions dipped in soy sauce and wrapped in flat sorghum pancakes. Sometimes, when his father was in a particular good mood, Chang Sheng would even get a sip of plum wine, sweet on the tip of the tongue, burning hot down the throat. His face grew to an even darker shade of red.
“There you are, little one,” his father said, smiling as Chang Sheng’s eyes teared up from the alcohol burn while his hand reached out for another sip. “Sweet, sour, bitter, hot, and salty, all the flavors in balance.”
Chang Sheng grew up to be a tall boy. His mother was forever sewing new robes for him as he outgrew the old ones. The drought that had already lasted five years showed no signs of letting up, and even though the men labored harder than ever in the fields, the harvest seemed to grew smaller year after year. There was no money to send him to school, so his father took up the task of teaching him.
History was his favorite subject, but there was always something sad in his father’s eyes when they discussed history. Chang Sheng learned to not ask too many questions. Instead, he spent more time reading the history books. Then, when he was out gathering firewood, he acted out the great battles with his ax and machete against the endless hordes of the barbaric woods.
“You like to fight?” his father asked him one day.
He nodded.
“I’ll teach you to play wei qi, then.”
? ? ?
“Did Chang Sheng’s father use lotus seeds and watermelon seeds too?”
“No, he used real stones.”
“I prefer your way of playing wei qi. Using seeds is more fun.”
“I think so too. And I like eating too much. Now, where was I?”
? ? ?
Within a day Chang Sheng was able to win one game out of three against his father. In a week he was losing only one out of five. In a month he was winning every game even when he gave his father the advantage of a five-stone handicap.
Wei qi was even better than plum wine. There was sweetness in the simplicity of the rules, bitterness in defeat, and burning-hot joy in victory. The patterns made by the stones were meant to be chewed over, savored.
While out walking, he got lost staring at the patterns made by black streaks of mud thrown up by passing oxcarts against the whitewashed house walls. Instead of chopping firewood, he carved the nineteen-by-nineteen playing grid into the floor of the kitchen with his ax. During dinner, Chang Sheng forgot to eat while he laid out formations on the table with grains of wild rice and black watermelon seeds. His mother wanted to scold him.
“Let him alone,” his father said. “That boy has the makings of a great general.”
“Maybe he does,” his mother said. “But your family hasn’t been in the Emperor’s service for generations. What is he going to be a general of? A flock of geese?”
“He’s still the son of queens and poets, generals and ministers,” his father insisted.