Once we’re at RoboTaco, Sun insists on treating us with a crisp hundred-dollar bill. He’s a lean, watchful type with flat cheekbones and no depth at all to his eye sockets. I guess he’s in his late twenties, maybe early thirties. We let people cut in front of us while he spends a minute holding the laminated menu about six inches from his face.
“Maybe it better you do for me,” he eventually concludes, handing the menu back to Andre.
Once we’re situated at a booth in the corner, I ask Sun Jianshui why he’s been following me.
“Following you?” Sun says.
“I saw you yesterday at the shaved ice shop by Chateau Happiness. And again today, on campus, when I was talking to that cop.”
Sun looks down at the table and smiles. “Old Li talk about you sometimes. He say you love to play basketball, that you clever and you have good eyes, like me. You see, we work close together. His enemies are my enemies. So I must behave very careful. I wait until I can find you alone. Sorry”—he nods to Andre—“but since Old Li die, I am like”—he wrinkles his nose, searching for the word—“jiànbudào de.”
“Invisible,” I say. “Are you saying that you know who killed my father?”
Over the course of the next hour, Sun tells us his story in the janky English he says Dad taught him: hard to follow at times but pretty impressive for someone who claims to have just arrived in the English-speaking world for the first time in his life. He tells us that he worked for Dad—“Old Li”—as his personal assistant and general gofer. That Dad and three other men formed a brotherhood in Beijing more than thirty years ago, and that the brothers did a lot more than run restaurants.
“Mr. Ai, Mr. Ouyang, Mr. Zhao, and Old Li,” he recites their names. They were teenagers when they met, basically street kids. In the uncertain years following Mao’s demise, they carved out a niche in the gray market, wrangling permits for street stalls and running discreet errands for officials. Then, when China opened up in the 1980s, the brothers scored big by bringing Western goods in through Hong Kong. Microwaves, handbags, cordless phones—China’s nouveau riche scrambled to pay inflated prices for the limited supply.
“Are you saying they were smugglers?” Andre asks.
Sun looks at me.
“Zŏusī—smuggling,” I translate.
“Ah, smug-ling?” Sun tilts his head to the side as he considers. “Yes. It is smuggling. But it is not, you know, pirate ship, middle of night, dadadadada”—pantomiming a tommy gun. “More look like normal ship, but pay bribe, cash money, easy time through the, uh, hǎiguān.”
“Customs.”
“Customs, yes. And in the end, customer is government official. So.” He sticks his palms out like the scales of justice, weighing them up and down as if to say, Who am I to judge? He’s a good storyteller despite the language barrier, so affable and unassuming that it’s easy for me to nod along, even as my skin goes clammy, my heart sinks into my stomach, and I realize that Lang’s forensics guys must have been right.
When Dad started a family and decided to move to the United States, Sun tells us, his so-called brothers agreed to use the company to help him set up a restaurant business here. But not all of them were willing to let him make a clean break.
“China-America trade is number one big business,” Sun explains between tidy bites of the al pastor special. “Big big cake. For some of Old Li’s partners, whatever is not enough, they always wanting more. Two men, Mr. Ouyang and also Mr. Zhao”—he shakes his head, makes a disgusted face—“they are, you know, greedy, kě’è?” He looks at me.
“Kě’è? Despicable. De-spic-able.”
Sun nods gamely. “De-spic-able, yes. They think, why not eat some more cake? Mr. Ouyang and Mr. Zhao, they try to use Old Li to get into some American markets. Sometime Old Li say yes, and sometime he say no. And there is Mr. Ai, too, he take Old Li’s side in Beijing, argue for them to leave Old Li alone. Many years go like this, more and more fighting between the brothers, but not open fighting. Then Mr. Ouyang and Mr. Zhao have an idea to bring something dangerous to sell in the United States. Something they are calling ‘Ice,’ but I do not know exactly what is ‘Ice.’
“Old Li decide that Ice is very bad idea, terrible,” Sun says, scowling. “Mr. Ai and Old Li, they oppose Ice together, but Mr. Ouyang and Mr. Zhao insist. Now the fight is open. Old Li start to worry, what if his position is in danger? So he make a preparation.”
“So these men, Ouyang and Zhao, my father’s business partners, they—” I can’t speak the words aloud to finish the sentence.
Sun nods intently, says this is probably what happened, but he doesn’t know for sure. Maybe they conspired to kill Dad, or maybe one of them acted alone. Either way, it’s a tragedy, he says. They used to be the closest of friends. He looks at me, and his eyes show pain and sincerity. He switches to a formal Chinese.
“Lǐ Xiǎozhōu, nǐ fùqīn bù yīnggāi yǐ zhèzhŏng fāngshì líshì—Your father should not have died like this, Li Xiaozhou.”
His words sound muddled, reaching me through a thick buffer, finding me somewhere deep beneath the surface of consciousness. My palms are slick, and more sweat beads out of my underarms and the back of my neck. I look away from Sun, look around the restaurant, look down at the Guisados Sampler that remains untouched on the plate in front of me.
“Hey, Victor, hey.” Andre slides a plastic cup toward me. “Wanna drink some water?”
I shake my head, blink a few times. “And what about you?” I ask Sun, trying to speak in a normal voice. “Who are you exactly? How long have you been working for my father?”
“Basically, long as I remember. I live on the streets when your father hire me. After that, I live in his office. You see, a kid can be useful for, ah, ‘smuggling’? Sending messages, delivering packages. And also, the kid is a mask, everybody trust man with a kid. Then, when I grow up, Old Li find other ways for me to help him.”
A slight smile drifts across Sun’s face. “Old Li, you know, he had a warm heart. He see me like his family, the only family I have.”
I want to say, so what does that make us? Sun’s story is beyond the realm of anything I’d considered, even after finding the gun. And yet I somehow sense that every word of it is true because his gestures, his mannerisms, even his halting English—it all reminds me of Dad.
“If you knew him so well,” I ask him, “then what kind of pets does he have?”
“Easy,” says Sun. “Old Li always love tropical fish.”
I manage to say, “Can you guys give me a minute?”
Outside I breathe in heaves, one hand against the brick wall of the building. I feel people coming in and out of the restaurant, glancing at me and quickly looking away. I wish we had a real winter right now, with some frigid weather that would cool the bonfire in my brain, but it’s still balmy, and the last traces of daylight silhouette the low, wide campus buildings on the western horizon.
A day ago I lived in a different reality, one in which Dad got killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but now I’ve learned that he knew what was coming. That he practically allowed his own murder without informing me, that he had a whole life he never told me about. How could I be so clueless? My father, my sole parent for so long, the person who taught me more than anyone—he had hidden so much about himself. And Sun—who was this mild-mannered shadow who appeared out of nowhere? Who’d known Dad longer than I’ve been alive? How come he knows all about me, and I’ve never heard a word about him?
My stomach lurches; I taste bile in my mouth. The pain is crushing up into my lungs, spreading through my veins, coiling around my spine. But I know that inside of it, between my heart and my stomach, is this stone about the size of an egg but denser, harder, smoother. “Nǐ hàipà de shíkè, nǐ bù zhīdào zěnme jìxù de shíkè, zhuāzhù zhè ge shítóu—When you doubt yourself, when you don’t know how to go on, grab hold of that stone,” Dad said to me, holding a quivering fist between our faces, and so I always have, when my lungs are burning, when my body begs me to stop. And now again, as I scrape my knuckles back and forth against the coarse brick wall just to feel something, the stone is my anchor in the storm. It steadies my breath, quiets my mind until there is space between my thoughts, enough space for my sight to swivel inward: Do I have more? Do I have enough? The answer is always yes. The stone reminds me of who I am. And who made me this way.