He’s your uncle!”
There was a sense of urgency in her voice, as the pitch rose and grew increasingly shrill. Cold, shuddering blasts of air hit the nape of my neck. If I hadn’t shouted, she’d have throttled me. There was no way out, so, risking retaliation from one of the fierce sword-wielding soldiers, I cried out in a choked voice:
“Uncle—”
Every eye in the crowd was on me in an instant—the official witnesses, the soldiers, the beggars, though I’ve forgotten what the looks in those eyes were like. But not those of the prisoner; I’ll never forget the look in his eyes. His blood-encrusted head jerked upward as he opened his bloodshot eyes and looked straight at me; I fell backward as if I’d been struck by red-tipped arrows. The next thing I heard was the voice of the dark, fat official in charge:
“It’s time—”
Trumpets blared, and the soldiers pursed their lips to make mournful sounds as one of the executioners grabbed the prisoner’s queue and pulled his head forward to expose the scruff of his neck for the other man, who raised his sword, turned slightly to the right, then handsomely to the left, and—swish—the glinting blade arced downward, truncating a scream of tragic innocence. The man in front was already holding aloft the severed head. He and the other man now stood shoulder to shoulder, faced the witnessing official, and shouted in unison:
“May it please Your Excellency, the sentence has been carried out!”
The dark, fat official, who was still sitting astride his horse, waved his hand in the direction of the severed head, as if seeing off an old friend, then reined his horse around and clip-clopped away from the execution ground. Whoops of excitement burst from the crowd of onlookers, as the beggars boldly rushed up to the stand to await the moment when they could climb up and strip the man’s clothing off. Blood was still pumping from the corpse, which had pitched forward and was resting on the stump of its neck, conjuring up the image of an overturned liquor vat.
That was the moment everything became clear. The official witness to the execution was not my uncle, nor were the executioners or any of the soldiers. My uncle was the man whose head had just been lopped off.
That night I went looking for a willow tree with a low-hanging branch, and when I found it, I took the sash from around my waist, made a noose, tossed it over the branch, and stuck my head in. Dieh was dead, and so was Niang; and now my uncle, the only family member I had left, had just been beheaded. There wasn’t another soul in this world I could turn to. Ending my life now was the only answer. But at the very moment I was about to rub noses with King Yama of the Underworld, a huge hand grabbed me by the seat of my pants.
It was the man who had just beheaded my uncle.
He took me to a restaurant called The Casserole, where he ordered a plate of bean curd and fish heads. While I was eating—just me—he sat watching me. He didn’t even touch the tea the waiter had brought him. When I finished with a loud belch, he said:
“I was your uncle’s good friend, and if you are willing, you can be my apprentice.”
The impressive image he’d created earlier that day reappeared: standing tall and unmoving, then quickly turning slightly to the right, his right arm circling the air like a crescent moon, and swish—my uncle’s head was raised high in the air, accompanied by his scream of innocence . . . your grandmother’s voice sounded again in my ear, but now it was uncommonly gentle, and the sense of gratitude she felt was clear and sustaining.
“My dear son,” she said, “get down on your knees and kowtow to your shifu.”
I did that, and with tears in my eyes, though if you want to know the truth, my uncle’s death meant nothing to me. I was concerned only about myself. The cause of those hot tears was the realization that my daydream was about to come true. I wanted nothing more than to become a man who could lop off someone’s head without blinking. Those two men’s carriage and icy demeanor lit up my dreams.
Son, your dieh’s shifu was the man I’ve mentioned to you hundreds of times—Grandma Yu. He later told me that he had been sworn brothers with my jailer uncle, who