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After her father and mother had left, Wu Chin-Mei made some tea for her brother and gave him a tea bun and rice. She reflected how badly her father had embarrassed her in front of a handsome young man in the grocery store by actually bargaining for the food they'd bought this morning when they'd arrived in Chinatown.
Saving a few yuan on tea buns and noodles!
She sat eight-year-old Lang down in front of the television with his food and then walked into the bedroom to change the sweat-stained sheets of their mother's bed.
Glancing at the mirror, she studied herself. She was pleased with what she saw: her long black hair, wide lips, deep eyes.
Several people had remarked that she looked like Lucy Liu, the actress, and Chin-Mei could see that was true. Well, she would look more like her after she lost a few pounds--and fixed her nose, of course. And these ridiculous clothes! A pale green workout suit . . . how disgusting. Clothes were important to Wu Chin-Mei. She and her girlfriends would raptly study the broadcasts of the fashion shows from Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore, the tall models swiveling their hips as they walked down the runway. Then the girls, thirteen and fourteen, would stage their own fashion shows, traipsing down a homemade runway then ducking behind screens to change.
One time, before the party cracked down on her father for opening his loud mouth, the family had gone with him to Xiamen, south of Fuzhou. This was a delightful town, a tourist draw, catering to many Taiwanese and Western travelers. At a tobacco shop where her father had gone to buy cigarettes Chin-Mei had been stunned to see more than thirty fashion magazines in the racks. She'd remained in the store for a half hour while her father did some business nearby and their mother took Lang to a park. She worked her way through all of them. Most were from the West but many were published in Beijing or in other cities in the Free Zones along the coast and showed the latest creations of Chinese designers, which were as stylish as anything produced in Milan or Paris.
The teenager had planned to study fashion in Beijing and become a famous designer herself--possibly after a year or two of modeling.
But now her father had ruined that.
She dropped onto the bed, grabbed the p
hony cloth of her cheap running suit and tugged at it in a fury, wanted to rip it to pieces.
What would she do with her life now?
Work in a factory, stitching together crappy clothes like this. Making two hundred yuan a month and giving it to her pathetic parents. Maybe that would be how she'd spend the rest of her life.
That would be her career in the fashion business. Slavery . . . She was--
A sharp knock on the door interrupted her thoughts.
Gasping in fright, she sat up fast, picturing the snakehead in the raft, a gun in his hand. The pop of the shots as he killed the drowning victims. She walked into the living room and turned the volume on the TV down. Lang looked up with a frown but she touched his lips to keep him silent.
A woman's voice called, "Mr. Wu? Are you there, Mr. Wu? I have a message from Mr. Chang."
Chang, she recalled, the man who had saved them from the hold of the ship and sailed the raft to shore. She liked him. She liked his son too, the one with the Western name William. He was sullen and lean and handsome. Cute but a risk: he was clearly triad bait.
"It's important," the woman said. "If you're there, open the door. Please. Mr. Chang said you're in danger. I worked with Mr. Mah. He's dead. You're in danger too. You need a new place to stay. I can help you find one. Can you hear me?"
Chin-Mei couldn't get the sound of the gun out of her mind. The terrible man, the Ghost, shooting at them. The explosion in the ship, the water.
Should she go with this woman? Chin-Mei debated.
"Please . . . " More pounding.
But then she heard her father's words ordering her to stay, not to open the door for anyone. And as angry as she was, as wrong as she thought her father was in so many ways, she couldn't disobey him.
She'd wait here silently and not let anyone in. When her parents returned she would give them the message.
The woman in the alleyway must've gone--there was no more knocking. Chin-Mei turned up the volume on the TV again and fixed a cup of tea for herself.
She sat for a few minutes, studying the outfits of the American actresses on a sitcom.
Then she heard the click of a key in the latch.
Her father was back already? She leapt up, wondering what had been wrong with their mother. Was she all right now? Did she have to stay in hospital?
Just as she got to the door and said "Father--" it opened fast and a small, swarthy man pushed inside, slammed the door behind him and pointed a pistol at her.
Chin-Mei screamed and tried to run to Lang but the man leapt forward and grabbed her around the waist. He flung her to the floor. He took her sobbing brother by the collar and dragged him across the room to the bathroom, pushed him inside. "Stay there, be quiet, brat," he snarled in bad English. He pulled the door shut.
The girl wrapped her arms around her chest and scrabbled away from him. She stared at the key. "How . . . where did you get that?" Afraid that he'd killed her parents and taken it from them.
