comment.
Nothing
seemed to quite please him. It was as though England was lacking some important
quality that he'd expected to find.
Close to
the summit of Central Hill, Yang took out a paper packet and extracted a pinch
of white powder, which he tossed into the air. A delivery boy pushing his
bicycle up the hill stopped to look while Yang repeated the gesture before
replacing the packet in an inner pocket.
Yang was
obviously amused by my perplexity, which seemed to cheer him no end. “In English,
you call it geomancy.”
I didn’t
call anything “geomancy” and doubted that was even an English word.
“We study
the movement of wind and water and the more subtle currents that affect human
life.”
“Oh, I
see,” I said.
Yang
smoothed his goatee with one hand. “It is a superstition. We Chinese are a very
superstitious people, after all.”
“I would
never suggest such a thing. As for subtle currents—well, I saw how you
stared down that hotel clerk.”
“Ah, you
think I have hypnotic skills?” He sounded amused. “All petty officials like to
show their power. I did not contest with the clerk. I gave him the freedom to
show he could use his power by denying me the room. Then, I allowed him to
consider the consequences of his actions. Like all petty officials, he preferred
to concede rather than be overruled by his superior later.”
I recalled
what Reg had said about the importance of not losing face. Perhaps it was not
an exclusively Chinese concern.
“We say ‘To
control a horse, you put it in a large field,’” said Yang.
“Is that a
saying of Confucius?”
Yang
laughed, a double bark. “Ha! Ha! It is a saying of the sage Lao-Tzu.”
I was
pleased that he was finally talking but stumped on how to carry on the
conversation. I ploughed on with the first thing that occurred to me. “I don’t
know much about Chinese philosophy. But you know what does interest me? The
Fists of Harmony, the Boxers. They can break a brick with one punch, using
mental energy. My friend saw one of them at a Chinese Circus. Bang, bang, bang,
bricks broken right in half, one after the other. I’d like to know how they do
that.”
Yang walked
on several paces in silence. “The Boxers,” he said at last. “The Boxers thought
their magic would protect them against the Westerners’ bullets. It failed. They
thoughts spirits would aid them. They did not. China is still paying
reparations for the Boxer Rebellion after thirty years. Four hundred million
pieces of silver.”
“I didn’t
mean—”
Yang’s
raised hand silenced me, the curved fingernail before my face. “It is more profitable
to study guns than magic Fists of Righteous Harmony.”
“I’m a
boxer myself,” I said, trying to explain. “I mean, a pugilist, you know.” I
mimed a boxing stance. “That’s the only reason I’m interested.”
“Indeed,”
he said.
It seemed I
had touched a raw nerve. To get away from the subject and to fill the silence,
again I seized on the first thing that came into my mind. “Sometimes bullets
don’t work, as a matter of fact.” I told him the story about the shooting
outside the pub and how Collins had emptied his pistol without any effect. It
was the most exciting thing that had happened recently, and people were still
talking about it. “Have you ever heard anything like it?”
“Hah. An
English ghost story” was all Yang would say.
We walked
on until the towers of the Crystal Palace came in sight, followed by the
majestic building itself. That did impress him and rightly so; there was
nothing like it in the world. But he seemed to appreciate the siting more than
the majestic structure itself.
We talked
little during the rest of the perambulation. We stopped at the bottom of Gypsy
Hill, and he asked about the grassy space. From somewhere in my memory, I
dredged up that it had been a plague pit, which seemed to satisfy him.
Writing it
down now, I see how few words Yang actually spoke. Yet I felt
Cherif Fortin, Lynn Sanders
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