I like long plane trips because they restrict your freedom. All your choices of potential actions melt away, and all that’s left is time—time to work through the backlog of thoughts and anxieties crowding your mind until nothing’s left, and you just tilt your head back and gaze in blissful boredom out at the world floating past. The flight from LAX to Beijing is about twelve hours, which gives me plenty of time to ponder how Jules, Andre, and Coach Vaughn will react to the notes I left for each of them; how long it will take Lang to find out that I’ve left the country; whether or not I’m a complete fucking idiot; and so on. There isn’t anything I can do about any of it on this plane, which is a relief. Actions were taken by a younger Victor, and will soon be taken by an older Victor, but in the air, all this Victor can do is sit here thinking stuff over and eating pretzels.
Sun’s story of greed and conspiracy had barely dented the trance I’d been walking around in since Dad’s death, but his precise burst of violence at the restaurant woke me up like a glass of ice water to the face. Nothing about his personality led me to expect him to knock out an armed security guard with brutal economy. But then I realized that I’d appraised him through the same biased glasses that our society has leveled at Chinese-Americans from Michael Chang to Jeremy Lin: he’s small, he’s polite, so he’s probably not a badass. It was the sort of superficial judgment that I had to defy every time I stepped on the basketball court.
Dad had never minded being misjudged in this way. He probably saw it as an advantage: a benign disguise that helped him conceal his backdoor dealings, past and present. But now that I had an idea of what was going on, I wouldn’t be satisfied with skating along the surface anymore. I couldn’t send Sun back to China and go back to basketball practice like nothing had happened, knowing my world only through a glass, darkly. Ice: the frozen form of the source of all life, a shelf in the Antarctic, a volatile commodity, a smuggling operation that had cost Dad his life. Glass: both a liquid and a solid, two opposed ideas at the same time. Perfectly hard, ostensibly clear, yet it can be stained, soiled, distorted. And one good scratch could destroy its integrity; one well-thrown Bible could shatter the barrier between two realms, previously compartmentalized.
I attempted to reconstruct Dad’s letter a few times on the plane, tried to organize my thoughts around all the new information. Dad had started a new life by leaving China and opening the restaurants, but Zhao and Ouyang insisted that he help them from his position in the States. When he fought back against their plan to import ketamine, they sent Rou Qiangjun to take over the U.S. operations. And Dad, like the clever crook I guess he always was, had anticipated all of it with a contingency plan: Sun would come collect me from San Dimas, and the two of us would travel to Beijing to shut down Happy Year for good.
But was Rou the killer, or just the replacement? And what about that first break-in at the restaurant that he mentioned—was that just a disgruntled employee making a cash grab? Then there were Aron Ancona and the lawyer, Peng—I have no idea where they fit in. When I think back to my brief, testy phone conversation with Ancona, my jaw clenches until my crowned molar starts aching. I’m sick of people patronizing me and hiding behind lies. Maybe Dad didn’t have much of a choice. But I’m not going with Sun just because Dad wanted me to. I took Jules’s advice, thought about it rationally, made my own decision. I need some answers to the questions that are pinching my brain like clothespins.
And then a moment comes when we fly over a break in the sea of marshmallow fluff and I glimpse the vastness of the Pacific Ocean toiling away below, the biggest damn thing on the planet, and it strikes me how absurd it is for me to be hurtling over it in a metal tube—when did traversing an ocean become such a casual thing?—and even though I haven’t felt like breathing in a week, I wonder whether the hard part is just beginning.
Speaking with Sun so much over the past few days, my Mandarin has gotten a lot smoother. My tones have always been good, but now I don’t have to focus on them—I can just talk like I’m talking, without expending so much energy listening to myself to ensure all the dips, sings, and chops are in the right places. It’s whenever a rising second tone follows a scooping third tone, like in the words for “originally” or “American dollar,” that I get tripped up the most, often mispronouncing the two syllables in one of the more common double-rising patterns for two second tones in a row, or two third tones, or a second tone followed by a third tone. A third tone to second tone word is like an unbroken two-syllable journey from the bottom of my voice to the top: běnlái, měiyuán. Then there are the ringing, level first tones and the sharp, dropping fourth tones—I mix those up sometimes, too, especially when I’m speaking quickly. In order to get it all right, I have to remember to talk at my own speed instead of trying to match the rapid-fire pace of native speakers.
I’m keeping all that in mind as I stand in line to pass through immigration, ready to break out the answers that Sun drilled into me, but the poky, bored-looking guy in the booth doesn’t even glance up at me as he stamps my passport.
“Kàn zhèli—Look here,” he says, tapping a little camera with his index finger. I look there, he clicks his mouse, and there I go into the system.
“Next.”
We step into the immense main concourse, the strange light of Beijing streaming through endless rows of plateglass windows. The air is a dense gray, hanging around too closely to be clouds, the sun low and crimson, an unfamiliar star lent an insidious tint by the exhaust pipes of five million cars, the smokestacks of ten thousand factories, the dust storms blowing in from the Gobi Desert. The airport is a fortress of organization and filtered air; the city stretches beyond it, ocean-like in its scale, a place to conquer or vanish.
“The air has gotten a little better,” I say, dumbly.
“Yes, it has,” Sun says without glancing up from his phone. Sun has grown more tight-lipped and serious now that we’ve arrived in Beijing, probably nervous about popping up on Ouyang or Zhao’s radar. As soon as we passed customs, he slipped into the bathroom to change into his disguise: gray drawstring joggers, a smart yellow messenger jacket, and a trucker hat pulled low over his eyes. He blends in well with the hordes of suave millennial Chinese. When we came to visit as a family more than a decade ago, this massive terminal hadn’t been built yet. The old one was filled with novice travelers listing around in a daze, squinting at signage, lugging giant plaid duffel bags made of cheap vinyl. Now the air is slightly clearer and the yuppies have cleaned up nicely. Their suitcases have four wheels; their sunglasses say Givenchy; they order without glancing at the menu at Burger King, at Yoshinoya, at Jackie Chan’s Cafe.
Sun leads me out into the frigid afternoon and over to a black German luxury sedan with tinted windows and a tall guy leaning his hips against the passenger door. The guy looks around my age. He is muscly, with a shaved head and a big jaw, and he seems to be smiling at his cigarette until he looks up and sees us coming.
“Motherfucker! Fucking shit!” he exclaims, beaming, in a thick Beijing accent. “So you brought us Old Li’s son, huh? Fuck! You look pretty fucking Chinese for a mixed-blood kid.”
He kind of hugs me and punches me in the stomach at the same time.
“My name is Ye, but everyone calls me ‘Biceps,’” he says, flexing his arms to make sure I understand why.
“Uh, hi,” I say, but he’s already dancing around Sun and slapping the top of his head.
“The cat is back! You are so motherfucked! I shouldn’t even be here,” he says, laughing.
“I knew you’d do whatever I said,” Sun says, ducking his head and gamely fending Biceps off with a push to the chest. “Can you take us to see Old Ai?”
“Of course. Where else could I take you? Oh man, he’s going to be steamed. Don’t get me in any more trouble, okay?” says Biceps.
“I thought Ai was on our side,” I hiss to Sun as we put our bags in the trunk.
He purses his lips and nods thoughtfully. “He will be when he sees you.”
We sit in the back of the car, which is immaculate except for several empty cans of Chinese Red Bull on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Biceps navigates the airport expressway with manic enthusiasm, swiping through traffic, slamming on the pedals, and keeping me awake by compelling me to hang on to the grab handle. I am vaguely reminded of the time Eli rented a Camaro for a day and we put two hundred miles on it without leaving Los Angeles County. But these Beijing drivers put L.A.’s best daredevils to shame. Throughout the journey, Biceps uses his horn to express a variety of sentiments, from “Here I fucking come!” and “Fucking thank you!” to “I hope your children are born without assholes, you cow twat!,” which he occasionally supplements with verbal versions for extra emphasis. In between these interjections, he catches Sun up on a number of topics that are difficult for me to follow because of his accent and vocabulary.
The gist is that the national soccer team once again fucking humiliated itself in a loss to fucking Iran; he has a new favorite karaoke spot with sānpéi girls from Anhui Province who are way hotter than the sānpéi girls from Henan Province at his old favorite karaoke spot; he personally witnessed an actual fucking Ferrari explode at the Thirty Seconds Club; various people are extremely fucking angry for all sorts of reasons; et cetera. I divide my attention between his spirited monologue and the forest of bland office and apartment towers that float deep into the sooty haze in every direction, the farthest mere ghosts of the nearest. The toxic particulate matter suspended in the air intercepts the yellow of the sun’s light, casting everything bluer, lending the endless concrete—roads, bridges, walking bridges over roads, tunnels—a purplish tint. And in this lavender surreality, people are compacted into not tiny spaces but enormous ones, hulking edifices built to accommodate thousands. Godzilla might go to Tokyo for a light dinner, but he’d hit Beijing for the Thanksgiving buffet.
As I listen to Biceps’s casual patter about the seedy side of Beijing, my worries about everyone back in San Dimas fade into mental background noise, and I recall that I have a purpose here, a goal to accomplish. Ai, Feder Fekhlachev, and Dad’s killers are lurking somewhere in this sea of smoggy concrete, and it is up to me to persuade, bribe, and expose them, respectively. Sitting in the back of the sedan reminds me of a long bus ride to an away game, the giddy calm before the storm—except this time, the action will have consequences beyond next week’s Coaches Poll.
“What’s a sānpéi girl?” I whisper to Sun when Biceps takes a break from talking to light a fresh cigarette.
“Sānpéi is three ‘withs.’ Girls who work in clubs. They will drink with you, sing with you, and dance with you.”
“And that’s it?”
“Sometimes,” he says.
Up front, Biceps cackles. Apparently, he has excellent hearing.
“Old Ouyang controls several bars and karaoke salons in the Finance Street area,” Sun says. “He has the sānpéi girls there selling ketamine.”
Biceps clucks in disgust. “Those motherfucking bitches are hitting up every single customer for one hundred yuan per line! That’s why I can’t go there anymore. The sluts get all disappointed if you don’t want to score drugs from them and then lie there staring at the ceiling.”
“So what’s the Thirty Seconds Club?” I ask louder.
“Street racing on the ring roads,” Biceps says. “Rich brats who like losing their money. They race their Ferraris against the mechanic kids and their homemade Japanese rice rockets.”
“And they lose?”
“Usually. The rich kids aren’t afraid to lose the money, but they’re afraid of losing their pathetic lives, so they don’t dare drive all-out. The mechanics don’t value their pathetic lives, and they don’t even have the money.” He cackles again.
“So what happens if the mechanics lose and can’t pay?”
“Oh, usually they’ll just set up some bullshit installment plan and everyone saves face. But sometimes some silly cunt is so high and puffed up that he demands the cash, and then someone has to send him home, know what I mean?” Biceps cracks his knuckles, which are enormous, and frowns. His mood seems to be down-cycling as we get deeper into the city. “It just increases the appeal for those bored fuckheads,” he mutters.
He grows increasingly subdued as we traverse the Third and Second Ring Roads and enter the narrow, winding hutongs in the heart of old Beijing. His driving slows and gentles as well, and I have almost dozed off, my head lolling back against the headrest, when we come to a stop.
“You go on in,” he says. “I’m going to stay out here and take a nap. Don’t want to watch Old Ai break your heads.” He manages a final guffaw.
Sun pats him on the neck and hops out with his usual contained grace. He doesn’t seem worried about getting his head broken. I go around to the trunk, but he waves me off.
“He’ll bring the suitcases later. First, we say hello and have tea.”
The entrance to Ai’s hutong compound is a plain iron door in the long cinder-block wall that runs along the alleyway. Sun presses an intercom buzzer, and after a minute, a low and sweet female voice answers. Sun mutters something unintelligible, and the door beeps open more smoothly than I might have expected. We step into an outdoor perimeter space, basically a path around another wall, with weeds pushing up through the cobblestones. Across this path stands a big set of wooden double doors, painted red and studded with thimble-shaped mounds painted gold. These doors are unlocked, and we push through them into what is without question the sickest, most pimped-out dwelling I have ever laid eyes on.