Behind the Mask

“NEW HERO OF MELBOURNE” the Times announces—tales of a man stopping runaway airships and helping people burned by wayward pipes. He sounds magical: flying from airship to anchor and onto roofs, unscathed.

There is a little more information to be gleaned from a single page Chinese broadsheet. It’s pasted up in teahouses and slipped under the doors of certain homes. They call their hero the Jade Sword for the green band on both arms and the character one old auntie swears she saw.

Mok-Seung isn’t so sure of the name. She pushes the paper aside and allows it to wrinkle on the floor where Auntie Hong will frown at it later. She rises to her feet and sinks into the opening form of the Tai Gik—imagines the knife, or the wheel.

How useful can a jade sword be? It would shatter upon impact. She prefers fast sword or jade spirit. Sturdier, stronger names. Names of which one can be proud.

Mok-Seung watches a young boy ride on one of the new augmented bicycles, which are so popular in this place. He cruises past the window, his feet still but for the occasional push, steam billowing from the pipes at the back. She longs for such a vehicle, fast as a horse but much more useful, and far less likely to bite her.

“I wager I could ride a bike,” Mok-Seung says, hinting. Auntie Hong shakes her head.

Mok-Seung latches on. “Have you—” she starts, but Auntie Hong shakes her head again.

Mok-Seung could try suggesting that Auntie let her go outside, but she knows her own schedule perfectly well and knows Auntie Hong is firm, like bamboo. Resisting the urge to sigh dramatically, MokSeung picks up her brush and tries again to focus, to get the flow of the ink and the shape of the characters right.

Outside, the sounds of the augmented bicycle fade into the street noise and the sound of birds at dusk. She thinks she hears the cry of a kookaburra in the distance, and she frowns that it would laugh at her.

Jade Sword’s form is fast and expert. There are rumors of Jade Sword carrying children to safety, Jade Sword stopping robbers in their tracks, Jade Sword rescuing the crew of an airship as it tangled on one of the new skyscrapers in Melbourne.

The Times reports him as a hero; it draws sketches of him tall and lean and white, with a full brown beard and a long, gwailo face. The Times declares he is there to assist the civilized people of Melbourne; from the Chinese, they mean, and from the Indigenous, those not yet sickened or stolen or pushed away.

In the teahouses, the huaren know a practitioner of wushu when they see one; they claim Jade Sword as one of their own, and they are proud.

Mok-Seung trails behind Mama as they step from the tram onto the cobblestones. The stones are rough beneath her feet, and as she glances down alleys and keeps her eyes peeled for augmented bicycles and other new technologies, she falls farther and farther behind. Mama snaps when she notices, and Mok-Seung has to hurry to catch up.

She’s grateful they’re so far away from home, that her feet are her own, and she can dart as she sees fit, despite Mama’s frown.

“Be calm of face, little flower,” Mama says. “You will give yourself away.”

Mok-Seung sits by the window, a book in her lap. She’s reading The Art of War, a highly suitable text for a young woman growing up in a foreign land. Though she understands its benefit, she finds her mind drifting, and the book, newly printed for use outside the Middle Kingdom’s wide borders, drops from her hand.

She contemplates the shape of the land she’s on instead, contemplates the Australians who own the building and the rumors of sandstorms in the desert; if the gwailo can be so wrong about the Chinese in their midst, she wonders, surely they are all wrong about those who have come before.

She starts drafting a bike on the corner of a page, pauses when she realizes she’s going to need a closer look if she’s going to have any ideas.

“Mok-Seung,” Auntie Hong says, and Mok-Seung looks up to meet her eyes with a guilty look.

“I’m reading!” Mok-Seung says, and holds The Art of War up as evidence. Auntie Hong nods.

“You will find that book very useful in the years to come,” Auntie says, hinting toward things they don’t talk about, “but for now, perhaps it is time for a break, and a different kind of training.”

Mok-Seung allows herself to hope, follows Auntie Hong into the courtyard, and squints into the setting sun.

As Mama selects the tea for expected guests, Mok-Seung stands beside her. Yong Taitai likes an Oolong, but Ye Taitai prefers something more pungent, something you would never dream of serving an Australian guest. Mama’s hand hovers over a Pu-er, six months old, from a bush back home, as she says, “Auntie Hong tells me you seem restless. Is something wrong?”

Mok-Seung presses her lips together. She knows this is her chance. “Melbourne is very interesting,” she says. “I thought if I had one of the new bikes, it would be easier to explore.”

“Ah,” Mama says. “The technology could be better. What you have will do you adequately.” She wraps her hand around a tin and continues talking, doesn’t notice the face Mok-Seung pulls and quickly hides. “This Pu-er will go well, I think, but Can Sin-Man is always the most unknown of us.”

“Can Sin-Man is coming?” Mok-Seung doesn’t know why Mama continues their association; Can Sin-Man is austere and serious, uninterested in what Australia has to offer, and always asks Mok-Seung detailed questions about her studies and her forms. She’s sure Can Sin-Man would never approve of the new bikes.

There’s a knock at the door, and Mok-Seung pulls a different face: she greets Yong Taitai with a smile.

The eucalyptus is old, and it takes her weight with ease. Mok-Seung crosses into its branches, and after carefully closing her window and peering through the branches onto the street below, she scales its trunk to the top and onto the roof, disappearing into the dark.

Clad in loose ku, her traditional pants, with a green band across her brow, she runs over the rooftops lining Little Bourke; she stretches herself to leap out over Exhibition Street and keeps running. MokSeung nearly misses a couple of jumps, but she’s getting better, and she makes it across town without too many mishaps.

From atop the roof, she sights one of the new augmented bikes leaning against a terraced house. She jumps down to the road and drops to the ground inside the house’s high front gate. The generators beside the house are working overtime, pressing steam into the sky, so the house is still awake. She hopes they won’t notice that she longs for this contraption, sleeker than the new steam carriages with their gears and the constant need for fire, ceaseless in comparison with horses, which plod and clop through the streets. This one has red and white streamers tied to the handlebars and around the pipes. She wonders if, perhaps, that’s less than wise, but she wraps the streamers around her hand and admires them all the same.

Mok-Seung sits on the bike, imagines cycling it through Little Bourke, imagines its potential when coupled with the airship technology.

She blinks, suddenly awash in bright light. “Get off!” she hears. “Jeremy, there’s a Chinese on your bike!” She looks up in confusion, and the woman at the door screams. Mok-Seung reaches for the fence, balances on its pointiest peak as she reaches for the balcony of the townhouse, and then pulls herself onto the roof. She feels a scratch against her ankle, but doesn’t pause as she starts to run.

She sprints across the roofs, hears a clatter as she jumps onto the English-style tiles. She curses them for their difference and keeps running, her footsteps not as light as she might hope. She sees the curve of an airship rising to her left and turns suddenly, making a leap like the photo captured by the local newspapers.

The skin of the balloon is too smooth beneath her hand, and she loses her grip. She scrabbles for purchase but it’s to no avail—she loses her hold and starts to free fall off the side of the airship, bounces on its edge, and brushes past the edge of another roof. Mok-Seung continues to plummet and panics, looking for anything to break her fall, when she is stopped, suddenly, a hand grasped fast around her wrist. She looks up and meets bright brown eyes and an unrelenting stare under a green band. The real Jade Sword!

“Pay attention,” says the familiar voice, not unkindly. “You need to know where to throw your weight.” She flicks her wrist and the figure releases her, letting her drop painfully the final few feet to the ground. Mok-Seung pauses, her hand resting on an augmented bicycle; she lets herself breathe for a moment, the shame of being caught out curling in her gut. She admires the lean build and smooth pipes of the bicycle. One day she’ll have one.

A shout behind her spurs her back into action. Ahead, “Yong’s Chinese Laundry” is monogrammed in red above a brick building. She speeds up, darts through the red door, past the uncle at the counter and into the steam of the pressing room. The auntie emits a yell, “Out, out!” as another clasps her heart. “Jade Sword!” the second auntie yells, in what Mok-Seung hopes is awe and pride, even though she’s not who they think she is.

“Sorry,” she says as she trips over a steamer. “Sorry, sorry.” She bows to each auntie as she passes them and heads straight for the back window she knows opens onto a narrow laneway. At the last auntie, she pauses. “Lou Yap,” she says. “Your pau at festival last week was the greatest I have ever eaten.”

As she climbs through the back window, there is silence in the usually chatty laundry, broken only by the hiss of the press. She peers back through as the front door clangs open. Suddenly, the laundry swings back into action, and a number of large trolleys are completely accidentally wheeled into position between the door and the window. Lou Yap waves cheerily, and Mok-Seung ducks out of sight, running down the alley.

She leaps up onto a roof, delightfully low placed. She puts some distance between herself and her pursuers, until all she can hear is the city settling down.

Mok-Seung pulls the ribbon down from across her forehead and sweeps her hair away from her eyes. She smooths the fabric of her top and begins to unwrap it from her body. She hisses as she pulls it away from her arm. There is a gash across her skin, and a similar slash through her shirt. She grimaces, wonders if her embroidery skills are strong enough to hide such a mark.

She washes the blood from her arm and winces at the sting. The door swings open; Auntie Hong gasps. “You are not Jade Sword!” she declares, unsurprised, after looking around for anyone who might overhear. She closes the door.

Mok-Seung nods her head. “I’m not,” she agrees. As she sits through Auntie Hong’s admonitions and ministrations, she wonders if the real Jade Sword would have been caught out by her old Ayi.

(Auntie Hong already knows the real Jade Sword’s identity, because the real Jade Sword isn’t stupid enough to hide from her old friend. But if the real Jade Sword hasn’t told Mok-Seung that—well, it’s good for Mok-Seung to have to wait. Patience is a virtue she’s always lacked.)

The Chinese broadsheet reads “JADE SWORD FALLS OFF ROOF.” The Times reads “CHINESE BICYCLE THIEF THWARTED.”

Mok-Seung begins to read the papers—not only the Chinese broadsheets but the local English-language ones, too, and the papers brought down from Sydney and across from the gold fields. She engages in gossip on the streets and pokes her head into every restaurant, every sporting club, every place that doesn’t have a sign over the door banning her entry.

She looks for anything she can find, but she isn’t quite sure what she’s after. She finds breaths of shapes in the desert: wagons that run using sand, not horses; white deaths that find no retaliation, left with nothing but dust and the land; riots and thefts and gold and fire; and she wonders, why they have come to this place.

She hopes there’s something for them to learn all this way from home. She fears that there is not.

“NEW HEROES FOR A NEW TIME” declares the Times, beside a picture of the Mayor of Bendigo and a tall, strapping white man with a firm grip. The article text includes details: a tragic accident by one white worker and the completely reasonable retaliation resulting in native deaths and Chinese deaths, and maybe some other deaths; and they had not disrupted mining any further.

“PERMISSION TO TRANSPORT BODIES HOME FOR BURIAL RESTRICTED BY AUTHORITIES” reads the Chinese broadsheet.

She sneaks out into the night, careful of running into Auntie Hong, careful of her shiny, dark hair reflecting in the moonlight.

It’s a warm night, and she sweats beneath her layers. An Australian summer is nothing like the summers of her childhood, but she struggles all the same.

She eyes the steam rising from generators and is careful to weave around them as she leaps from roof to roof, across to the edge of town and back again, watching for traces of the Jade Sword, of some hero, of the desert of which she hears and reads but has never seen.

In the distance, she hears a half-choked scream. She cocks her head, then takes off without pause and leaps fast, with surety, mindful of the advice of the Jade Sword.

She lands—her left foot light on the cobblestones, her right heavy on the hand of a large man. She shifts all her weight onto her left; she kicks, her right foot pointed.

Mok-Seung lifts the girl and her purse off the ground. Her arms are just strong enough. She really should increase her training, she thinks, as she pants and increases speed, dragging the girl with her.

“MINERS TERRORIZED BY COLORED VIGILANTES!” says the Times, followed by mention of a slow in production and meetings broken up in migrant camps.

The Chinese broadsheet is no less excited. “JADE SWORD SAVES TWO MINERS; MAY BE WORKING WITH LOCALS.” She wonders how the Jade Sword travels between Melbourne and Bendigo, what secrets are being harbored out beyond the city.

Mok-Seung sits at her table, The Art of War pushed as far away as her arm can push it. She’s stuck on Pian Ten, unsure how to move forward. She has her atlas before her instead, mapping the route from Melbourne to the gold fields of Bendigo. She considers how one fortifies such a town in such terrain. She looks for more available information on inhabitants and history and threats. Mok-Seung considers the indigenous population and the possibility of their ghosts and spirits and bunyips, and hopes she’s making the right leaps.

She knows she’s making excuses, but she tells herself it is a useful real-world application of her studies, and no tactician could disapprove.

It’s with relief that she hears the sounds of the front bell heralding the arrival of some visitor. In the absence of Baba and Mama, she must set aside her studies and greet the guest.

Can Sin-Man is short and firm, plainly dressed as if she were a monk or a scholar. Although Mok-Seung thought such people kept themselves to the mainland, she wonders if perhaps Can Sin-Man might be both monk and scholar, here in this place.

Can Sin-Man bows and takes the proffered seat facing the door with a contented smile. She directs a sharper smile to Auntie Hong, who hovers by the door with a smug grin on her face.

“Mok-Seung mui mui,” Can Sin-Man says after inquiring after her parents, after the business. “I have brought you a present.”

Mok-Seung is confused by this gesture from Can Sin-Man, friendly and well-known by name but ultimately still a stranger. Confused, that is, until she unwraps the red fabric to find green fabric within: a ribbon with the character for jade embroidered on it. “Oh,” MokSeung says, with a start. “This isn’t mine.”

Mok-Seung looks up, meets Can Sin-Man’s eyes. She glances back at the empty door where Auntie Hong was—and from which she has silently disappeared.

Can Sin-Man smiles and picks up The Art of War from where MokSeung dropped it on the table. “Pian Eight is my favorite,” she says, turning the pages. “I have read it many times, though it feels unusual to read it now, in this place.” She reads aloud, “If, on the other hand, in the midst of difficulties we are always ready to seize an advantage, we may extricate ourselves from misfortune.”

Mok-Seung thinks upon the words, familiar from frequent encounters but sounding so new from Can Sin-Man’s presence. Can Sin-Man smiles welcomingly as she returns the book to the table.

“It is time for this old Jade Sword to take an apprentice. You know some of the old styles, but you’re adapting to these new ones. I think you will flourish with me. And your encounter with the airship tells me that you need a teacher.” Her hand rests lightly on her tea cup, and Mok-Seung hastily reaches for the pot.

“You’re mistaken,” she replies mildly. “I have a teacher.” Can SinMan touches her finger to Mok-Seung’s wrist, and for a moment, Mok-Seung thinks Can Sin-Man is taking her pulse, but she shakes the thought and leans forward to pour.

“Auntie Hong has taught you all she knows.” She pauses significantly, brings her tea to her mouth and sips politely, carefully. “I know, because she was my teacher before she retired. But there is more for you to learn.”

Mok-Seung will not be pressed, not even in the face of Auntie Hong’s silent disappearance and Can Sin-Man’s knowing smile, and she refills Can Sin-Man’s teacup in lieu of an answer.

They speak a little longer, but here it is, the point Can Sin-Man has come here to make. She is blunt, as is their way, elder to youth: Mok-Seung is adaptable and keen, and Can Sin-Man wants to impart and, unusually, wants to learn, too. Mok-Seung thinks of the hints of the desert, of the Jade Sword’s technique, of giving meaning to their presence here in this place.

Can Sin-Man soon takes her leave, gathering her skirts around her as if she always wears them and is never leaping across the roofs and bounding lightly between rising airships. She stops at the door.

“We are in a different country,” she says, “and there are always new advances to make. What kind of warrior would you be if you were to stop here, where you are? There is no room for us here if we cannot adapt.”

Can Sin-Man’s words—and her smile—sit with Mok-Seung through the fading afternoon, twisting around the shadow already in her heart, until Lou Kong comes to light the lamps, and Auntie Hong tells her she will be late for dinner.

The summer rains fall and bring with them a sudden chill and the smell of petrichor, staining the cobblestones red as they mix with the dust blown in with the wagons.

Mok-Seung climbs out of her window and scales the eucalyptus up onto the roof. She keeps climbing higher, until she can climb no further. If she had the skills, she could scale the side of the Darrods building and keep on going, but she knows Can Sin-Man is right. She can go no further.

She sits above Melbourne, watches a night officer ride past testing his new augmented bicycle, watches airships floating high as points of light that dull into shadows as the sun rises over the city.

Mok-Seung rests her hand on the brush, its bristles long and clean. She imagines it as an extension of her body. Imagines a fountain pen in her hand instead. Imagines a paint brush. Imagines using her finger. “I should pay Sin-Man cheche a visit,” she says. “I enjoyed her company.”

Auntie Hong hums. “I’m sure she would appreciate it. Your Mama always enjoyed her visits.”

Beside Mok-Seung sits The Art of War, a note in Pian Ten. “If you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt; if you know Heaven and know Earth, you may make your victory complete.” She knows nothing about her terrain and the situation she is in, and she knows very little about herself.

She pauses her brush; when has Mama ever visited Sin-Man cheche? She turns to ask Auntie Hong, but her Ayi’s grin is beatific, and she merely pushes Mok-Seung back to her work.

And so she writes, focusing on the brush strokes, breathing slowly as the sun fades to red.

Stephanie Lai is a Chinese-Australian writer and occasional translator. She has published long meandering thinkpieces in Peril Magazine, the Toast, the Lifted Brow and Overland. Of recent, her short fiction has appeared in the Review of Australian Fiction, Cranky Ladies of History, and the In Your Face Anthology. Despite loathing time travel, her defense of Dr Who companion Perpugilliam Brown can be found in Companion Piece (2015). She is an amateur infrastructure nerd and a professional climate change adaptation educator (she’s helping you survive our oncoming climate change dystopia). You can find her on twitter @yiduiqie, at stephanielai.net, or talking about pop culture and drop bears at no-award.net.

The Fall of the Jade Sword