Jun watched from the shadows as his father faced down the masked man, both of them with broadswords drawn, poised for battle. “This is where it ends.” Li Hon shifted forward, his face set in ferocious determination. “Tonight, I restore my honor by ending your life.”
“Scoundrel, you have no honor to restore.” The man in the white mask rushed forward with a shout and a vicious diagonal slash of his blade. Jun’s father met the attack head-on, and their weapons came together with a ringing metallic clang. The two men grunted with furious effort as they each tried to gain the advantage. Their blades separated and met again in a blur of silver. Swift strikes were deflected by skillful parries, thrusts and cuts dodged and countered. Watching in silence, the heavy breathing of the combatants was the only sound Jun could hear.
He’s still got the moves, Jun noted, watching his father’s confident attacks and swift defense. Li Hon’s masked opponent was at least fifteen years younger than him, but Jun held no doubt that his father’s martial skills were superior.
Li Hon feinted an obvious, simple attack. When his enemy raised his weapon in defense, he snapped a kick into the man’s abdomen, doubling him over, then kneed him hard in the chest, dropping him to his hands and knees. With a shout of triumphant rage, Jun’s father brought his sword swinging down toward the masked man’s neck.
Jun stifled a yawn of boredom.
He knew what would happen next: Before the fatal blow could descend, the masked man spun on the ground, his legs lashing out with a whirling double spin kick that crashed into Jun’s father behind the knees, upending him and sending him sprawling to the ground. He lost his grip on the sword, and it flew up into the air. With perfectly timed reflexes, the masked man sprang to his feet and seized the broadsword. He leveled the blade against Jun’s father’s throat.
Li Hon raised his hands in surrender. “You win, Ghostface,” he wheezed in bitter defeat.
The victor tore off his white mask with a dramatic flourish. “Ghostface was merely a name to strike fear in the hearts of criminals. It was I, Shang, the mayor of the town, all along!”
Applause erupted as the woman on the other side of the stage rushed tearfully into the hero’s arms. “We shall never be apart again,” she declared. The audience cheered as the two of them kissed passionately, and the silk curtains came down on the scene.
Standing by the doors at the back of the opera house, Jun let out a long sigh. His father could handily beat the other actor if this were a real fight, but his father never fought for real anymore. Instead, Li Hon choreographed all the fight scenes for the Cheon Opera Company, which was known throughout West Longhan for its elaborate costumes and sets and dramatic, action-filled stage productions. When Li Hon did perform onstage, he only ever played supporting roles and villains. Sometimes he would don the main actor’s costume to perform the more difficult or dangerous stunts if the lead was unable to, but Jun’s father was never the hero. He never won a fight onstage. And the stage was the only place he fought anymore.
As an usher and security guard at the opera house, Jun watched his father lose every day. And he hated it. He scanned the crowd, hoping he might have to eject a drunken audience member to distract himself from embarrassment. No such luck.
When the curtains rose again, the previous set had been replaced with a plain black backdrop. A blindfolded man sat on a stool on one side of the stage. Across from him stood a young woman in a flowing blue-green silk dress with long sleeves that trailed to the floor. A hush fell over the excited crowd. The blind flutist Chang and his daughter traveled all around West Longhan and only came into the city of Cheon a few times each year, but their infrequent performances were always talked about. This wasn’t part of the regular show, and everyone knew they were in for a special treat.
Chang lifted the flute to his lips and began to play. An audible sigh of appreciation escaped the spectators as the first evocative notes filled the air and Ren, the flutist’s daughter, began to dance. The wordless story that unfolded onstage was one that everyone was familiar with yet was timeless in its significance. As Ren spun and leapt with flawless precision, her feet soundless on the wooden stage, the backdrop changed, switched out by clever stagehands and illuminated by expert lighting. The blue of ocean waters rose behind the performers; vibrant green evoked grass and trees erupting in growth; shadows resolved into the silhouettes of animals and people. This was Longhan’s oldest legend: Dragon breathing the world into being.
Chang’s music soared in a poignant crescendo as Ren sent her long, weighted sleeves twirling through the air in time with her movements, each balanced pose and athletic leap drawing impressed gasps from the audience. From within the maelstrom of bright spinning silk, the flutist’s daughter drew out two wide ribbons of pale yellow gossamer that rose up into the air, twisting in white light, pulled from overhead by thin threads invisible to the audience. She danced the part of Dragon’s consort, the Lady of Many Hands, ethereally graceful, her face perfectly composed in a mysterious, benevolent smile as she brought the Scrolls of Heaven and Earth down to guide humankind.
The last strains of music faded into silence and Ren dipped into a low bow. The opera house erupted in thunderous applause as the curtains came down for the last time that evening. Many in the audience dabbed tears from their eyes.
Jun found himself clearing a lump from his throat. Ren had played the part of the beautiful goddess perfectly. Dragon was all powerful, but the Lady of Many Hands was compassionate. The last thing Jun’s mother had said to him, as she knelt at the crossroads and took his face in her hands, had been “Be good to your father, Jun. Pray to the Blessed Consort and she’ll listen. She’ll bring us together again.”
He wanted to believe her. He’d prayed for intervention that day and many days after, yet never received it. Even the Lady of Many Hands couldn’t turn back time, couldn’t undo a life-altering mistake once it was made. The last thing his mother had ever told him was a lie.
After ten years, childhood memories and a deep, familiar ache, as if from a permanent injury, were all Jun had left of his mother and his twin brother, Sai. That early part of his life felt unreal, like a different life altogether.
Jun held the door open for the chattering theatergoers as they filed out of the opera house in merchant’s robes and scholar’s hats, snapping open ivory-boned fans and fanning themselves as they stepped into waiting sedan chairs. When the doors closed behind the last of them, Jun went down the aisle and behind the stage, navigating the narrow backstage corridor to his father’s dressing room. Li Hon had taken off and hung up his costume and was washing off his stage makeup in a copper basin. In a plain tunic, linen pants, and sandals, his hair loosened from its stiff topknot, Jun’s father bent over the wash basin and coughed badly, a deep, wet sound. He seemed nothing like the posturing antagonist in the play.
“Baba,” Jun said. “You ought to see a doctor.”
“I’m fine, it’s just a lingering cold,” his father said, not turning around as he dried his face on a washcloth. “We should save money for what’s important.”
That was what Jun’s father had always said over the years, back when their plan was to save enough money to pay the right officials and guards to smuggle Jun’s mother and brother over from the East—a plan long since abandoned. But the frugal habit persisted, even when the goal was now little more than an impossible dream.
“If it’s about the money, you should ask for a raise,” Jun told his father. “Or a starring role.” In the hallway outside, Jun could hear the lead actor who’d played Ghostface chatting and laughing with what sounded like a trio of female admirers.
“The goose with the longest neck is the first to be chopped,” Jun’s father reminded him with a grumble. Standing out was what had gotten them exiled in the first place. Li Hon sat down on a stool and began to sort and clean the prop weapons lying in a stack on the ground. The dressing room was cramped and drafty; the one window didn’t close properly, and because the room doubled as a storage closet, there was barely enough space for the two of them to move around between the racks of costumes and trunks of stage equipment. Jun’s father had had the same dressing room for as long as he’d been working at the opera house.
If only he’d demand more for himself, Jun thought. Or retire. His father wasn’t even old, but the weak illumination from the single oil lantern hanging overhead carved shadows into his face and made him seem aged beyond his years. It was impossible not to wonder, as Jun sometimes did, how much happier and healthier he might’ve been had things been different.
“I’m going to be home late,” Jun said. “There’s extra sparring practice tonight.”
Jun’s father pursed his lips and continued wiping the old, dulled stage swords with a cloth and placing them in a wooden trunk. “Who is Master Song sending to the Guardian’s Tournament this year?” Li Hon asked the question casually, but Jun noticed the apprehensive slowing of his father’s hands.
“He’s planning to send Yin Yue.” Jun fought not to grimace.
Li Hon’s shoulders came down imperceptibly and his movements became brisk again. “Good choice. That young man is talented. He stands a good chance.”
“He’s no better than I am,” Jun said heatedly.
“Jun.” His father looked up at him with the familiar tight expression that preceded a lecture. “I know you like to fight, but if you focus on your studies, you can make a living using your brain instead of abusing your body the way I do. I’ve let you continue to train with Master Song because it’s a good outlet for your overabundant energy, but I want you to make a better life for yourself.”
Li Hon was adamant that his son study to take the imperial exams in two years. If he did reasonably well, he could hope to get an entry-level civil service job, perhaps work his way up to becoming a minor official or local administrator—stable, respectable jobs that didn’t involve martial arts, which, Jun’s father suggested, he should confine to a side pursuit.
Jun shuffled his feet sullenly but didn’t answer. They’d had this argument so many times that it was pointless to have it again. When the two of them had first arrived in the West with barely anything but the clothes on their back, Jun’s father hadn’t let him train in martial arts at all. It was a terrible irony that they were now in a country where the fighting arts were not only allowed but celebrated, yet Jun’s father refused to teach him.
Those first two years in a new country, unmoored and adrift, separated from Jun’s mother and brother and all they’d ever known, had been miserable. Jun remembered mostly long stretches of dull loneliness punctuated by emotional meltdowns. His father was often silent, withdrawn, and depressed. Despite the fact that they were poor, Li Hon used their meager funds to send Jun to school, hoping he would settle down and make friends. Instead, the children there bullied him mercilessly for his Eastern accent, and he was constantly in trouble for fighting.
Every time Jun came home bruised and sullen, his father would show him letters from his mother, saying that she was living in Yujing, that Sai was showing great promise in his training as an Aspect, and that she missed them and couldn’t wait until they could be together again. “Your brother is being a good student back home,” Jun’s father would lecture pleadingly, brandishing the paper in front of Jun. “You need to work hard and pay attention to your teachers and not get in trouble. You want your mama to be proud when you see her again, don’t you?”
Jun did want that very much. He tried, with occasional success, to obey his father, to ignore the bullies at school, to not complain about being hungry or his shoes being too small, and to think of when they would finally go home and he could eat all he wanted of his mother’s cooking and talk to Sai about everything, the way they could only do with each other and no one else. It seemed worth any hardship to make sure that day would come.
Then, disaster. Political tensions between East and West Longhan escalated and the Snake Wall closed, practically overnight, shutting down the border. Both countries withdrew their ambassadors and banned commerce and travel. Letters from Jun’s mother arrived months late, and when they did arrive, sections were blacked out by censors. Jun’s father suspected that their reply letters weren’t reaching her either. They certainly weren’t being delivered to Sai, who was ensconced in the Sun Pagoda, training to become an agent of the Council of Virtue.
At first, Jun and his father believed the restrictions would be temporary. After all, East and West Longhan shared a long history and culture; their people were the common descendants of Dragon. Surely the diplomatic crisis would be resolved. Li Hon stashed away every spare coin he made from working each day from dawn to dusk as a laborer, until Jun’s mother insisted in writing that they not live in poverty for the small chance of smuggling her across the border. She explained that Sai was committed to his Aspect training and would not leave the East. And Jun was in a country where he could do what he most loved and make a better life for himself. It was for the best that they all stay where they were for now. The Snake Wall would one day reopen, she assured them optimistically, but until then, she urged them to live their lives to the fullest.
That was the last letter they received.
Heartbroken, but acceding to his wife’s wishes, Jun’s father dusted off his martial arts training and landed a job as a stuntman at the opera company. Their income and conditions improved; they went from living in a single drafty room in the poorest part of Cheon to a small home with its own cooking area and outhouse. The Snake Wall remained closed. As the years went by, Jun lost his accent and any real hope of ever reuniting with his mother and the twin he’d been separated from so long ago. But looking at the distant expression on the face of the man hunched in the chair before him, he knew the same could not be said for his father.
He didn’t want to argue, though. Not tonight, of all nights, when he had another fight on his mind. Maybe you don’t want a starring role anymore, Baba. But I do.
He turned to leave.
“Jun,” his father called after him wearily, “don’t be out too late.”