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Sure as hell, that was worth knowing. All the same, Rance might have been happier not hearing it. He and Penny remained small fish in a tank full of sharks.
Peking was home. Liu Han hadn’t been sure, not when she first came back to the city, but it was. To her real astonishment, she even found herself glad to be eating noodles more often than rice.
“This is very strange,” she said to Liu Mei, using her chopsticks to grab a mouthful of buckwheat noodles from their bowl of broth and slurping them up. “Noodles felt like foreign food to me when I first came here.”
“They’re good.” Liu Mei took noodles for granted. Why not? She’d been eating them all her life.
Talking about noodles was safe. This little eatery wasn’t one where Party members gathered. The scrawny man at the next table might have been a Kuomintang operative. The fat fellow on the other side, the one who looked as if he’d bring in a good sum if rendered into grease, might have worked for the little scaly devils. That was, in fact, pretty likely. Men who worked for the scaly devils made enough to let them eat well.
“Hard times,” Liu Han said with a sigh.
Her daughter nodded. “But better days are coming. I’m sure of it.” Saying that was safe, too. All sides-even the little devils-thought their triumph meant better times ahead for China. Liu Han raised the bowl of noodles to her face and took another mouthful. She hoped that would cover the outrage she might show when thinking of what a triumph by the little scaly devils would mean.
They finished eating and got up to go. They’d already paid-this wasn’t the sort of place where the proprietor would trust people to leave money on the counter. As they went out onto the hutung- the alley-in front of the little food shop, Liu Han said, “We finally have enough tea in the city.”
“Do we?” Liu Mei said as men and women, all intent on their own affairs, hurried past. The hutung was in shadow; it was so narrow that the sun had to be at just the right angle to slide down into it. A man leading a donkey loaded with sacks of millet had people flattening themselves against the walls to either side to let him by. Liu Mei didn’t smile-she couldn’t-but her eyes brightened at what her mother said. “That’s good. It took us long enough.”
Before Liu Han could answer, a fly lit on the end of her nose. Looking at it cross-eyed, she fanned her hand in front of her face. The fly flew off. It was, of course, only one of thousands, millions, billions. They flourished in Peking as they did in peasant villages. Another would probably land on her somewhere in a minute.
She said, “Well, this is special tea, you know, not just the ordinary sort. It took a long time to pick the very best and bring it up from the south.”
“Too long.” Liu Mei was in one of those moods where she disapproved of everything. Liu Han understood that. Staying patient wasn’t easy, not when every day saw the little scaly devils sinking their claws ever deeper into the flesh of China. Liu Mei went on, “We’ll have to boil the fire up really hot.”
“Can’t make good tea any other way,” Liu Han agreed.
They came out of the alley onto Hsia Hsieh Chieh, Lower Slanting Street, in the western part of the Chinese City, not far from the Temple of Everlasting Spring. Bicycles, rickshaws, wagons, foot traffic, motorcars, buses, trucks-Lower Slanting Street was wide enough for all of them. Because it was, and because everyone used it, traffic moved at the speed of the slowest.
More often than not, that was an annoyance. The little scaly devils in a mechanized fighting vehicle must have thought so; they had to crawl along with everyone else. Scaly devils were impatient creatures. They hated having to wait. They ran their own lives so waiting was only rarely necessary. Moving along jammed Chinese streets, though, what choice did they have?
When Liu Han said that aloud, Liu Mei said, “They could just drive over people or start shooting. Who would stop them? Who could stop them? They are the imperialist occupiers. They can do as they please.”
“They can, yes, but they would touch off riots if they did,” Liu Han said. “They are, most of them, smart enough to know that. They don’t want us to get stirred up. They just want us to be good and to be quiet and to let them rule us and not to cause them any trouble. And so they’ll sit in traffic just as if they were people.”
“But they have the power to start running people over or to start shooting,” Liu Mei said. “They think they have the right to do those things, whether they choose to do them or not. There’s the evil: that they think they have the right.”
“Of course it is,” Liu Han agreed. “I don’t suppose people can do anything about having the little scaly devils here on Earth with us-it’s too late for that. But having them think they have the right to rule us-that’s a different business. We should be free. If they can’t see that, they need reeducating.” She smiled. “Maybe we could all sit down together over tea.”
No, her daughter couldn’t smile: one more score to lay at the feet of the little devils. But Liu Mei nodded and said, “I think that would be very good.”
The little scaly devils’ machine tried to slide into a space just ahead. But a man on an oxcart squeezed in first. He had to lash the ox to make it move fast enough to get ahead of the armored vehicle. As soon as he found himself in front of it, he set down the whip and let the ox amble along at its own plodding pace. That did infuriate the scaly devils. Their machine let out a loud, horrible hiss, as if to cry, Get out of the way! The man on the oxcart might have been deaf, for all the good that did them.
People-Liu Han among them-laughed and cheered. The fellow on the oxcart took off his broad straw hat and waved it, acknowledging the applause. If the little scaly devils understood that, it probably made them angrier than ever. Unless they chose to get violent, they could do nothing about it.
Then more laughter rose. It started a couple of blocks up Lower Slanting Street and quickly spread toward Liu Han and Liu Mei. Liu Han stood on tip-toe, but couldn’t see over the heads of the people around her. “What is it?” she asked her daughter, who was several inches taller.
Liu Mei said, “It’s a troop of devil-boys, cutting up capers and acting like fools.” Disapproval filled her voice. The young men and-sometimes-young women who imitated the little scaly devils and adopted their ways were anathema to the Communist Party. They learned the little devils’ language; they wore tight clothes decorated with markings that looked like body paint; some of them even shaved their heads so as to look more like the alien imperialists. There were such young people in the United States, too, but the United States was still free. Perhaps people there could afford the luxury of fascination with the scaly devils and their ways. China couldn’t.
But then Liu Mei gasped in surprise. “Oh!” she said. “These are not ordinary devil-boys.”
“What are they doing?” Liu Han asked irritably. “I still can’t see.” She stood on tiptoe again. It still didn’t help.
Annoying her further, all her daughter said was, “Wait a bit. They’re coming this way. You’ll be able to see for yourself in a minute.”
Luckily for Liu Mei, she was right. And, by the time Liu Han could see, shouts and cheers from the crowd had given her some idea of what was going on. Then, peering over her daughter’s shoulder and through a gap in the crowd in front of them, she did indeed see-and, like everyone around her, she started laughing and cheering herself.
Liu Mei had also been right in saying this was no ordinary troop of devil-boys. Instead of slavishly imitating the little scaly devils, they burlesqued them. They pretended to be a mixed group of males and females, all taking ginger and all mating frenetically.
“Throw water on them!” shouted one would-be wit near Liu Han.
“No! Give them more ginger!” someone else yelled. That got a bigger laugh.
And then Liu Han started shouting, too: “Tao Sheng-Ming! You come here this instant!”
One of the devil-boys looked up in surprise at hearing his name called. Liu Han waved to him. She wondered how well he could see her. She
also wondered whether he’d recognize her even if he could see her. They hadn’t met in more than three years, and she didn’t think he knew her name.
Whether he knew it or not, he hurried over when she called. And he did recognize her; she could see that in his eyes. Or maybe he just recognized Liu Mei, who, being much closer to his own age and much prettier, was likelier to have stuck in his mind. No-when he spoke, it was to Liu Han: “Hello, lady. I greet you.” The last three words were in the language of the Race.
“And I greet you,” she answered in the same tongue. Then she returned to Chinese: “I am glad to see you came through safe, after all the troubles Peking has seen since the last time we ran into each other.”
“I managed.” From his tone, he was used to managing such things. His grin was wry, amused, older than his years. “And I’m glad to see you’re all right, too, you and your pretty daughter.” Yes, he remembered Liu Mei, all right. He sent that grin her way.
She looked back as if he were something nasty she’d found on the sole of her shoe. That only made his grin wider, which annoyed Liu Mei and amused Liu Han. She asked the question that needed asking: “Did you ever go and visit Old Lin at Ma’s brocade shop?”
