the young man an approving look. ‘He's got the mind of a thug,’ she says of Lao Lan. ‘So what?’ Lao Lan fires back with an angry glare. ‘Where do you think we'd be today if I didn't? A rebellion by the effete will fail, even after a decade. A rebellion by thugs succeeds with a single shot. What are you waiting for? Give me that when you're finished!’ he barks at the fellow loading the musket. The man hands it to him carefully with both hands. ‘Take Jiaojiao out of the way,’ Lao Lan says to Fan Zhaoxia, ‘and cover her ears. I don't want to damage her eardrums.’ ‘You're like a dog that can't stop eating shit,’ she grumbles as she backs away with the girl. The girl stretches out an arm and cries out shrilly: ‘Papa, I want to shoot too!’ Lao Lan takes aim at the ostriches. ‘You flat-feathered fiends, you ingrates,’ he mutters, ‘all I asked of you was to dance. Well, you can go report to the King of Hell!’ A fiery yellow ball explodes in front of him, followed by a deafening roar and a cloud of black smoke. As pieces of musket fly in all directions, the figure of Lao Lan stands transfixed for an instant before falling to the ground. Fan Zhaoxia shrieks and drops the child in her arms. Lan's men are stunned for a moment. Then they snap out of their stupor and rush to him, filling the air with shouts of ‘Boss Lan! Boss Lan!’
POW! 18
Lao Lan's aides pick him up—his hands are a bloody mess, his face black with soot. ‘My eyes! Damn it, my eyes!’ he screams through his pain, ‘I can't see! I can't see you now, Third Uncle!’ Third Uncle means a great deal to the lousy bastard, but why shouldn't he? Most members of the previous generation of Lans were shot, and the few who survived died during the difficult years that followed. Only this unworldly third uncle occupies an iconic spot in his mind. His aides place Lao Lan in the back seat of the Buick; Fan Zhaoxia squeezes into the front with the girl in her arms, and the car makes its unsteady way up to the highway, where, with a blast of its horn, it speeds off to the west and runs smack into a contingent of stilt-walkers who scatter in confusion. One of them barely makes it out of the way, only to have a stilt sink into the mud and topple him to the ground. Several of his fellow walkers hop across the asphalt to extricate him from his troubles. All this reminds me of a Mid-Autumn Festival a decade ago, when my little sister and I scooped up locusts that were sticking their tails into the road's hard surface to lay eggs. My mother was dead by then and my father had been arrested, which effectively orphaned my sister and me. We were on our way to South Mountain to look for mortar shells, with the white moon rising in the east and the red sun setting in the west—in other words, dusk. We were hungry and miserable. A breeze rustled the leaves of nearby crops and autumn insects chirped in the grass—all sounds of desolation. We pulled locusts off the road stretching their abdomens as far as they'd go, then scrounged together some dry kindling, built a fire and flung the misshapen locusts into the flames, where they curled up and gave off a special fragrance. Wise Monk, this was an evil deed, I know that. Eating an egg-laying female locust is the same as eating hundreds of them. But if we hadn't eaten them we'd have starved. This is a problem I've never been able to resolve. Wise Monk gives me a pointed look whose meaning escapes me. The West City stilt-walkers, all employees of a restaurant called Xiang Man Lou, wear white uniforms and chef's hats bearing the restaurant's name. Wise Monk, it's an establishment capable of offering a complete formal banquet, featuring both Chinese and Manchu delicacies. The executive chef, a disciple of Manchu palace chefs, is as skilful as you'd imagine him to be. But he's hot-tempered. A Hong Kong restaurant once tried to lure him away with a monthly salary of twenty thousand Hong Kong dollars, but failed. Japanese and Taiwanese tourists flock to the restaurant to sample its delicacies. These are the only occasions when he deigns to appear in