His father was finally asleep.
Jun lay awake, listening to the long, soft snores from across the room and unable to calm down enough to drift off himself. After sprinting all the way home from the training hall in a red haze of furious disappointment, he’d bashed the wooden training dummy until his forearms were swollen and his knuckles bleeding; then he’d thrown himself into bed and lain motionless, feigning sleep when his father had finally walked into the house.
Jun’s father had stood over him for several minutes, looking down at his son as if debating whether to wake him to talk about what had transpired back in the school. Instead, he’d sighed sadly and gone to bed himself.
Tomorrow, Jun knew his father would try to explain. “When I was a young man, I devoted myself to martial arts, and where did that get us? I wish someone had encouraged me to use my time more wisely.” The son ought to learn from his father’s mistakes. Jun would thank him in the long run. And so on and so on.
Jun ground his teeth at the thought of having to sit through the lecture.
“The boy was born under Dragon’s star,” Jun’s teachers used to say.
For seven weeks every two years, the Red Star, also called Dragon’s Eye, shone at its highest point in the sky. Children born during this time were said to be especially energetic, passionate, and driven. Usually, these were seen as positive qualities. But Jun’s first teachers in Cheon had pointed out these traits to his father with disapproval and exasperation.
“He gets into fights, he’s impulsive and defiant, doesn’t sit still, doesn’t follow directions. He turns every stick he finds into a sword, whittles the end of his calligraphy brushes into pointed darts, and cuts up his ink blocks to use as slingshot projectiles.”
“He’s going through a difficult time,” Li Hon had explained apologetically, trying to soften his Eastern accent, wringing his callused hands before the schoolmaster after his son had been administered five strokes with the thin rod for the third time in a week. “Being separated from his mother and brother is hard on him.”
Sai had always been the calmer twin, the one their parents expected to keep the boys out of trouble. Without him, Jun was like a runaway cart with missing wheels, careening down a hill.
The schoolmaster had been sympathetic but firm in his declaration. “The boy needs an outlet for his energy. Martial arts training would be good for him.”
Li Hon wouldn’t hear of it. At that time, he was determined to return to the East and prove to the Aspects that he’d forsaken his past activities and was ready to be reunited with the rest of his family as a good citizen. “Martial arts is not the way,” he insisted.
Even after the Snake Wall closed and they could no longer go home, Li Hon resisted, perhaps out of stubborn principle. Jun had begged his father constantly. He argued that if Sai was learning martial arts back home, why shouldn’t he? When his father remained unmoved, Jun began sneaking off to secretly train with the older boys. One day, he followed a boy named Yin Yue who everyone said was the best fighter in the neighborhood and found himself standing in the entryway of the Iron Core school.
Master Song had taken one look at the longing in his eyes and waved him onto the practice floor without a word, accepting him as if he’d been there all along.
After that, his father finally gave in on certain conditions: Jun could train so long as he kept up with his studies and caused no more trouble for his teachers or other students. “And when you’re eighteen, you’ll take the entry-level imperial exams.” If he didn’t agree to these stipulations, there would be no more training.
Jun rolled over, kicking off his blanket. The night was warm and stuffy, and the small house felt claustrophobic. It didn’t use to feel that way. It had seemed empty with only two people.
As little boys, he and Sai used to sleep next to each other on the same mat. For a while after settling in Cheon, Jun would wake up in the mornings and reach over automatically to shove Sai awake, only to find himself alone. During the day, he would start talking, expecting his brother to answer, because Sai was always right behind him—until the deafening silence or the bewildered stares of scornful classmates shut him up. He would fall asleep at night hugging a rolled-up blanket to his chest, desperately missing his mother’s comforting embrace, and whispering all his thoughts and feelings as if Sai could still hear him. Sometimes he swore he could hear his brother’s voice in his head, answering him from across thousands of li.
In place of an imaginary friend, Jun had an absent twin.
He hid his tears of loneliness from his father. He didn’t feel entitled to complain about their situation when it was his fault they had been exiled in the first place. At times, Jun caught his father looking at him with such a forlorn expression that he knew his very presence was a reminder to Li Hon of the wife and other son he’d been forced to leave.
Once, when Jun was burning with a childhood fever, he’d woken half-delirious in the middle of the night to see his father sitting beside him, wringing out a cold cloth. “Mei,” Li Hon wept, whispering the name of Jun’s mother as his tears dripped into the water basin. “I don’t know what to do. He needs his mother. I don’t know how to make things right.”
He’s too soft, Jun thought now, still angry as he tossed and turned in bed. Li Hon was skilled in the fighting arts, but he had too peaceable a soul. In his situation, some men might become angry or spiteful. Exiled for training in martial arts, they would defiantly embrace it all the more. Separated from family by the closure of the Snake Wall, they might rail hatefully against unjust rulers, take to unlawful behavior, or sink into depression.
Jun’s father was sad but accepting of their fate. No matter the hardships they endured, he went through each day with humble doggedness. He didn’t fall into gambling or drink, he didn’t take another wife, and he never beat Jun, even at times when Jun knew he probably deserved it. He was a kinder father than he needed to be toward the boy whose foolishness had ruined their family.
That doesn’t mean all his decisions are right. Jun sometimes still imagined he was talking to Sai, even when he was talking to himself. An old habit that he didn’t think would ever completely go away. What our baba wanted was to bring us back together and now that he’s given up trying, he doesn’t have other dreams. But you do, don’t you, Sai? I bet you moved on long ago.
The twin in Jun’s head didn’t always answer, but he listened.
Li Hon stirred and broke into a coughing fit. Jun winced as he listened to the racking sounds, which worsened at nighttime and sometimes woke him up as well. Sometimes, he felt like everything wrong in their lives was his fault because it all went back to That Day.
Jun often thought about the moment his father had knelt before the two Aspects. He was old enough now to realize that it hadn’t been fear or cowardice that had made him kneel, but a need to protect his family. That one decision had been costly. It had changed Li Hon’s relationship to his art. All the years of training, all his skills with fists and weapons—they had come to nothing. He’d set them aside because in that moment, fighting hadn’t been worth the risk of losing those he loved.
The coughing eased and stopped, faded back into the pattern of sleep.
“I don’t know how to make things right,” Li Hon had lamented years ago.
Jun stared at the ceiling, fists clenched. But I do.
Martial arts had been Li Hon’s downfall. But this was the West, not the East. Here, a talent for fighting was rewarded beyond measure, not scorned and suppressed. Jun could reverse their sad trajectory, write a better story for himself and his father. Jun’s one great mistake, his lasting shame, could be turned around. He didn’t think he’d ever fill the yearning hole left by That Day, but unlike his father, he had youth and ambition, and if he made good on them, then it meant their exile, with all its grief and difficulty, contained some larger meaning after all.
I can be someone without you, he said to Sai. Someone great.
Sai’s voice answered with what felt like a brotherly dare. Prove it.
Careful not to make a sound, Jun got to his feet and looked down at his sleeping father, the hump of his shoulder rising and falling in the dark. Don’t you see, Baba? One of us can still be a fighter.
He turned away, treading silently for the door.