Chapter Text
PART ONE: A WHOLE NEW WORLD
*1*
“Every day,” the woman says, “Baba fights a hungry ghost. That is what he goes down the mountain to do. And every day, he wins, because his love for you and your sister and me gives him the strength to triumph.”
The boy looks up. The sunlight gleams off of his Mama’s hair, and she looks worried as she watches the road that comes up the mountain. “Why does a hungry ghost chase Baba?”
“Oh, because before he met us, he was lonely, and invited it in. But he is no longer lonely.”
“Is he fighting it now? How do you fight with a ghost? Do you kick it?”
“No. It is much harder than kicking or punching. Baba goes to a quiet place and goes deep into his mind, and there he fights, and the only weapons he has are his heart and his soul. And they must both be very strong.”
“I’ll be strong someday.”
“In this way, you are already strong, because you have always had love. Baba did not always have it.”
“Why did no one love Baba?”
“I believe people did. But his heart was closed once. He couldn’t feel it.”
“What if I can’t feel it, Mama? What does it feel like?”
“Do you know the wonderful feeling you have when you sing to your sister? Or when you see that Baba is sad and you take his hand? Or when you ask me to tell you stories?”
“Yes.”
“That is what it feels like.”
“But those are things I do. How do I know if someone else loves me?”
“Because that person will accept your love and be glad of it. When someone you love loves you, it becomes part of you to give love back to that person. It is a beautiful creature that feeds on itself and grows greater with each taste. That is how Baba and I feel about you, and about each other, and about your sister. When you take Baba’s hand, you see how it makes his eyes soft. When I tell you stories, can’t you hear it in my voice? Even your sister, little as she is, reaches up to you when you sing, and puts her hand on your face and you love her all the more for doing it.” She smiles. “And there will be others. Because you already have great love in you, it will find the love that others long to give.”
Shaun didn’t hate the boy with the red hair. He’d hated people in his life—including the one he’d unleashed that hate on three months ago—and this wasn’t hate.
It was, however, extreme annoyance, coupled with a rising anger that it was taking all of his discipline to keep down. He’d even restrained himself when the boy shoved him across a wet floor, so that he’d run into the bank of sinks and actually fallen down. Weirdly enough, it was Ching-Lin who got him through that. He’d thought, If Ching-Lin saw his best student take a pratfall into the bathroom sink, it would mean twenty strikes on the back of the legs with a bamboo pole. And then, Well, if I can handle that without losing my head, I can handle this jackass without breaking his ribs or his skull. At least for a few more minutes until the bell rings.
The redhead had his fingers at the corners of his eyes, and kept lifting them up, sticking his teeth out over his bottom lip, and talking in the world’s dumbest fake accent. He dropped both the corners of his eyes and the accent and started in a rant that Shaun only caught about half of. He picked up “you people” and “learn fucking English before you come here” and “waste time stuttering.” And there was something about a friend in a “shithole school” because “you fucking”—and he used a slur that Shaun recognized immediately, despite never having heard it said out loud before—“have an in with the lottery people, don’t you? How’d you get in here if you can’t even put a fucking sentence together in less than a year? Mommy and Daddy go to that”—he used the slur again—“on the school board? They fix the lottery for you?” He jabbed his hand out and shoved Shaun into the sinks again. “Is that what it was? Did Daddy grease the skids for you?”
For just a moment—one that he would barely acknowledge later—the idea was bright in his head. Had he really gotten through immigration so easily on his own? Had he really gotten an excellent foster placement almost immediately because he was lucky? Had there been some manipulation in the school lottery? None of that was outside Dad’s wheelhouse.
But that couldn’t be real. If Dad knew he was here, there wouldn’t be a foster home or a school or citizenship in the works. There would have been a van on a side street, maybe a tranquilizer, and certainly a ride home on one of Dad’s jets. He wouldn’t be here listening to this idiot. He’d be back in his room and his training room, probably locked in, with no company except Dad telling him how disappointed he was and Ching-Lin putting him through grueling drills and—
The shove came from the side while he was distracted with this idea, and he slipped in the water again, scrambling for purchase. It wasn’t exactly a bad fall, and it put him in a good position to kick the redhead’s legs out from under him then slam his head into the floor. Again. And again. And again. It was the first thing he’d been taught about fighting other people, once he got the basic drills down. See the whole fight in your head, up until the end. Make the other person play your game. And since the redhead was an idiot who obviously didn’t know how to fight, it would be easy. Take out his legs, knock his head until he was dizzy and throw him into the hall outside the bathroom. If he kept fighting, immobilize him with a bone break. Since it was just a school fight, that would be enough. No need to take it any further. His legs itched to start it.
He ground his teeth together. No, he told himself. You are not Xu Shang-Chi anymore. That boy burned up in his rage, and left Shaun Hsu behind, and Shaun Hsu does not fight. Shaun Hsu is the boy who stayed behind the window no matter what he saw, because his mother told him to, not the one who walked into a massacre at his father’s side. Xu Shang-Chi is just the hungry ghost he has to fight against.
But his fist had already tightened, and his arm was drawing back.
“Oo,” the boy said. “Karate master destroy me now?”
Shaun blinked and lowered his fist. “No.”
“I knew it.”
“Just fuck off, okay? I’ll forget about this.”
“Well, isn’t it my lucky day?”
The bell rang and students came pouring out of classrooms. Shaun’s first lunch at his school was over. He hoped the redhead was not going to calculus (Shaun had tested out of Algebra 2 easily; Dad thought math drills were good for mental discipline), and in this, he was lucky. The boy turned left when he went out the door. Shaun’s class was to the right. He got up and headed for it, untucking his shirt to cover up the places that he’d gotten wet in the fall. He had a bruise on his head that he’d have to explain to his foster parents (and probably his social worker, Mr. Montoya), but it wasn’t bad, and he didn’t look disheveled enough to raise eyebrows. When he got to the classroom, the teacher, a young Black man wearing a red shirt and a bold patterned tie, gave him a suspicious once-over, but let it go.
He took a seat by the window and looked out at the row of connected houses across the street. There was a girl sitting in front of him, older than he was and very pretty. She tried to catch his eye, but he looked away. The world here seemed unnaturally full of girls, and he was not used to it.
He glanced through the textbook while the teacher gave the year’s syllabus, and did a few of the practice problems. The teacher never addressed him directly, so he was very surprised when, as class was letting out, he said, “Mr. Hsu, please stay a moment.”
Shaun went to the desk, wondering if he was going to be lectured about looking through the book during the lecture. He’d caught both just fine, and could repeat back most of the syllabus.
But that wasn’t it.
“Who hit you?”
“I…” He thought for a very brief moment of telling the truth, but getting branded as a snitch was not something he needed on his first day of school in America. “I slipped in the bathroom. The floor was wet.”
“That’s a load of bullshit, and we both know it. Was someone hassling you?”
Shaun looked up, then back down, and shook his head.
“Well, if you decide that maybe that wet floor needs a talking to, you come to me. I know a little something about it.”
Shaun nodded a thanks and went on to his next class, which was an English as a second language one. There were Spanish speakers and Chinese speakers (most Mandarin, but there were still Cantonese speakers hanging on), and he wasn’t sure how it would work. He was gratified that his English wasn’t the worst in the class. It wasn’t the best, either, but at least he was lost in the middle of the pack, which was exactly where he wanted to stay. He didn’t know why he had particularly stuck out to the redheaded boy. The school had to be almost half Asian, and he was far from the only recent immigrant. He was certainly not the first person the boy would have seen stumbling for a word in class.
On his way to his next class, history, he spotted the redheaded boy and a bunch of goons. Some of them were actually big enough to look… well, not really challenging, but they were at least not quite the lightweights that their buddy was. They pointed at him, and one of the others shouted, “Heard you had a good trip, Mr. Sulu!”
Shaun guessed this must be another insult, but he had no idea who Mr. Sulu was, so he didn’t really get it. He’d have to trawl the web for that one. It didn’t sound like any Chinese name he’d ever heard, anyway.
The history classroom was on the first floor, and there was no distracting view, unless there was someone obsessed with chain link fences and the prefab gray building across the street. There was a map on the wall, and, since he still had three minutes before class would start, he wandered over to it. He’d kept a map on his wall when he was little, marking all the places he meant to see. San Francisco hadn’t been on it; he wouldn’t have come here if it had been. He liked imagining all the places, and virtually drove around maps in his rare spare time.
This one wasn’t interactive, of course. It was a plain world map. Shaun’s eyes wandered to the familiar shape of China, looking for the place that had never been on any map, and which might even be hidden from satellite views. He wasn’t sure how this would be accomplished, but if it could be, Dad would have made sure it was so. It would be—he did the calculation—almost dawn tomorrow. The sky would still be dark, and the stars would be sharp knives in the sky.
“So anyway,” someone said behind him, a girl with a strident voice, “he says, ‘I’m going out with June now,’ and I’m like, ‘What, you’re going to skip January to May?’ and he says, ‘I mean, I’m breaking up with you,’ and I’m like, ‘Dude, I broke up with you like a week ago. Did you forget that little tantrum you threw?’”
“I still can’t believe your parents let you go out with someone.”
“Yeah, well, that’s why I dumped him. Mom found out and went completely nuclear. All we did was hold hands at the movies, but she acted like I’d eloped or something. I was bored anyway, though.”
Shaun looked around. The girl talking was much smaller than her voice, but she made up for it in colors. She was wearing bright yellow jeans, light blue canvas sneakers, and a purple top with a green heart on it. Topping off the look was a flat cap turned to one side. Apparently she’d realized that she’d forgotten a primary color, because it was bright red. The girl she was talking to had a short haircut and was wearing a cat-ear headband. Her friend seemed to have taken all the colors because she was all in black, with a white skull on her shirt. She noticed him looking, so he turned back to the map and directed his eyes to another corner, as if he was just randomly gazing at it.
The teacher came in and started the class. Shaun gathered his materials and took a seat most of the way in back, hoping the teacher wouldn’t call for him and make him struggle for words he didn’t know. Twice, the girl in black turned to look at him, and once, her friend did. She gave him a friendly wave, but after class, both of them were out the door before Shaun even had his book bag properly packed.
He took the bus back to his foster parents’ house—actually, an apartment above Jerry’s medical practice—and went in. They were both still at work, so he took the time to do his homework in math and start working through his reading assignments. It was easier to read English than to understand it spoken, and he thought he might not be much slower than anyone else at it. He was halfway through a chapter in his history book when Jerry came upstairs.
“Well?” he asked. “How was your first day of high school?”
“Mostly good,” Shaun said. “I only have a little homework left, and the teachers were nice.”
Jerry rolled his eyes. “Any friends?”
“I didn’t really talk to anyone like that.” He tapped the book with the eraser of his pencil. “I did make an enemy, though.” He turned on the light and pointed to the bruise on his head.
Jerry gave it a quick, professional glance and said, “Well, you’re not going to die from it, but who did this? It’s not all right.”
“I don’t know his name. White boy with red hair. And he just shoved me. I’m the one who fell.”
“After he shoved you. That’s not okay. What happened?”
Shaun explained about the lunchtime confrontation, and the English class before it when he’d been trapped on a word and wasted everyone’s time trying to figure it out. “That’s what he was mad at,” he said.
“Yeah, sure it was,” Jerry said.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. That was just his excuse to start in on you.”
“But why?”
“The school lottery encourages it. If one person gets in, another one doesn’t. You got in. It sounds like one of his friends didn’t. And there’s a… a lot of people think there are too many of us in the ‘good’ schools. That we’re gaming the system somehow. But that’s just an excuse, too. It boils down to plain, garden variety racism. Did you never run into it before?”
Since Shaun Hsu had been all over the world on his fictional trek running from the “Diamond Gang,” who had finally caught them in El Salvador and killed his mother, he figured that the right answer was, “Of course.” He nodded for Jerry and made up nonsense about not thinking it would exist here, but the truth was, he’d heard of such things, but he’d grown up in Dad’s compound, where the only non-Chinese who appeared were men who came just to bow to Dad, or leave him offerings like he was a living shrine. One thing could be said for the Ten Rings—everyone was equal, except Dad, who most of them considered a higher being. Shaun had grown up taking this for granted, and in fact, if anything, a bit of Dad’s aura had always seemed to be around him. He was more used to respectful, if clumsy, bows in his direction. Being shoved into the sinks and insulted was a new experience. He did not like it.
The next day was the same—kind teachers, for the most part, and interesting classes, but gangs of resentful kids roamed the halls and called random insults at people—though he did manage not to be shoved into anything. It continued to the bus stop. The two girls from his history class were riding the same bus, and this time, he waved back when the colorful girl (this time dressed in neon orange with yellow sneakers and a red belt) waved to him. He didn’t know either of their names, because the history teacher thought that roll calls were a waste of time, and just had everyone put their names on a sign-in sheet. Shaun would know the names on sight, but he had no idea who most of them belonged to. They went back to their gossiping without any further greeting.
His foster parents encouraged him to talk to someone other than teachers, so, when it was time for physical education, he tried to be friendly to his classmates the way the girl had been friendly on the bus. Not with a little wave, but with an attitude of, “Hey, glad I’m here, glad you’re here.” Not pushy, but open to being talked to.
It worked. A kid named Rey Alvarez started telling him about the soccer team at his old middle school (Shaun was grateful that Dad had made him learn different Englishes, so he recognized that Rey meant football), and how he wanted to try for varsity here. Shaun asked how this would be done—kicking a ball would be better than kicking a log—and by the end of class, several of them had joined and were planning to practice after school for the tryouts next week. When he called Bev to tell her he’d be late because he and some friends were going to practice together, she was thrilled, though she did admonish him not to take the bus after dark, and if it got that late, he was to call her for a ride.
Shaun had never actually played football, but he’d seen it on television a few times and knew the rules. And years of training had taught him to learn physical skills quickly, and adapt them. By the end of the practice session, the other boys thought he was a shoo-in for the team and they good-naturedly called him a show-off. Rey suggested that they meet on Saturday in the park across the street to practice more. “Yeah,” a kid named Tommy Wong said, grinning, “Shaun can play one side while the rest of us play the other.”
He laughed. It felt strange. It had been a long while since he’d just felt like laughing. He wasn’t totally sure he had a right to it, but it felt good and he wanted to laugh more. “Sure,” he said, trying out the easy way they spoke to each other, “but you know, you might want to bring back-up.”
They all laughed.
“Hey,” Tommy said, “are you headed to Chinatown? Didn’t I see you by the doctor’s office?”
“Yeah,” Shaun said. “I live with the Cheongs.”
“If we run we can catch the next bus.”
Shaun meant to, but remembered that he’d left his English homework in his locker, so he told Tommy to go ahead. There were plenty of buses left.
The school was mostly deserted, and it was somehow peaceful like this. The only artificial light was coming from under a bathroom door, and the sound of his footsteps echoed faintly. Late afternoon sunlight came through open classroom doors, giving everything a warm glow.
He got his homework out of his locker and tucked it neatly into the new school backpack, and was starting out when he felt suddenly that something was wrong. He’d been taught to trust this instinct. “It doesn’t come from psychic powers,” Dad had told him. “It’s because you have noticed something without knowing that you noticed it. Look for whatever your eye caught. Listen to whatever your ears heard.”
Why was the bathroom light on? Why was the door closed? They aired the bathroom out at night; Shaun had seen a custodian rushing to close it yesterday when someone had neglected to disengage whatever lodged it in place.
It was between him and the door he’d come through. They meant to jump him. If there was more than one of them, he might have to hurt them. He didn’t want to, but if he had to…
Mom’s voice came out of the past. He didn’t remember how the conversation had started, but he remembered her saying, “Shang-Chi, it is good to know how to fight when you need to, but it is better to know how to not get into a fight at all.”
The school wasn’t a small building. There were other exits. He could go up the stairs, go down a hall, head back down to use a different door.
Good. That’s Shaun Hsu thinking. Do it that way.
Unfortunately, what they were waiting for was the closing of his locker door, and as soon as it clanged shut, all four of them burst out of the bathroom. The redheaded boy actually had a baseball bat. They were with an older kid, a huge boy who looked like he played on an American football team. Shaun didn’t know the other two, but he’d seen them in the halls.
There would not be time to get to the foot of the stairs and run up, so he jumped, grabbed the metal rail and cartwheeled over it, and landed hard on the stairs because his backpack pulled him off balance. He didn't care. The three younger boys followed him, but he didn’t hear the heavy thud of the big boy’s feet. He ran down a narrow hallway, then through another. He was fast, and he lost the boys following him. He heard them run off a different hall, still thinking they were chasing him, and he went back to the stairs, this time going down them slowly and carefully, looking around for the last one.
It didn’t take long to find him. He stepped out of the bathroom again, blocking the way to the door.
Shaun could hear the other boys upstairs; he couldn’t retreat that way, either. The only other sound he heard was the giggling of a girl somewhere in another hallway, and the echo of someone’s jangling keys.
He turned and ran for the cafeteria at the end of the hall. There would be tables and chairs to use in a fight, and the other boy’s size would make him ungainly.
The boy’s heavy, pounding steps started down the hall, then they stopped and he yelled, “Hey, Gangnam Style!”
Maybe it was the pettiness of the taunt, maybe the stupidity, but Shang-Chi stopped running. “I’m not Korean, you idiot,” he said.
“Who are you calling an idiot?”
“Who else do you see?”
“You fucking little—” And he used the same slur the redhead had used, coming forward and raising his fist.
Resigned, Shaun started to set down his backpack. At the end of the hall, he heard two girls, one laughing. They were jangling the keys he’d heard before. He hoped he could at least forestall the fight until they’d left, but the bigger boy just came toward him slowly, savoring what he thought would be an easy win.
Just take the beating, he told himself. Take it as punishment for what you did. You’ve taken worse than this half-wit can dish out.
Then a blur of something glittery streaked in from the end of the hall, skidded up to them and looked the big boy straight in the eye. Shaun had just had time to recognize her as the colorfully dressed girl from his history class when she screamed, “On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair…”
The boy leaned back and said, “What the fu-“
And the girl grabbed Shaun by the wrist and ran for the door, dragging him along. His heavy backpack was swinging loose in his free hand, and he would tell himself (and the girl) later that he didn’t mean to swing it at the dazed-looking boy, who tripped several steps backward, then fell over his own shambling feet.
The girl dragged him out the front door, now laughing wildly, and yelled, “Soo, toss ‘em back!”
The other girl—apparently, Soo—tossed a ring of keys to her. “It’s that one,” Soo said, pointing to a car that was parallel parked just across from the door. “I already made the horn go.”
The colorful girl hit the unlock button as they ran. She and Soo were both on the left. Shaun was on the right. Soo slipped into the back seat. The girl jumped in behind the wheel as Shaun got into the passenger seat, and hit the locks as soon as the doors slammed. The front door opened and all four of Shaun’s pursuers came out of it, looking furious.
“Strap up!” the driver yelled, still laughing, but there was no time to get a seatbelt on before she turned the ignition and slammed down the accelerator. The tires squealed as she turned out of the school parking lot and onto the street. She gave a kind of wild whoop, and turned onto a side street circling around the park to the far side, where a set of bleachers hid a small parking area. She pulled into it, still laughing crazily, then threw her head back and tossed her hair, as if simple laughter was not enough to express her glee.
“Thank you,” Shaun said.
“He had it coming,” she answered.
Soo leaned forward from the back seat and said, “Yeah. I’m sure he was dreading the day that he’d be subjected to 1970s folk rock.”
“Well, who wouldn’t?” More laughing. “But that’s not what I mean. Whose car do you think this is?”
In the stunned silence, the driver turned her head to Shaun, and he noticed that she was a very pretty girl under the weird fashion choices. “I’m Katy Chen,” she said. “You got a name, or should I make one up?”