The Ninja's Blade Page 3

  “Fine, you big chicken, I’ll go in first.”

  I lifted the racing bike up the steps and opened the door to the sizzling aroma of garlic, ginger, and scallions. My stomach rumbled. As hungry as I’d been, I had only finished one of Aleisha’s empanadas and none of Paco’s tamales. I looked forward to whatever Baba might be cooking. But before I could peek down the aisle of woks, a dart-like object flew through the air. I fanned a protective hand in front of my face as a bamboo skewer pierced the sack of rice on the shelf behind my head. Across the kitchen, Lee Chang scowled.

  DeAndre gasped. “Damn, girl, you nearly lost an eye on that one.”

  Not even close. But I wasn’t going to take my eyes off Uncle to explain my anticipatory defensive maneuver to DeAndre. The kid worshipped my dad and was terrified of our cook; I thought it only fair to keep him in awe of me.

  Uncle—who wasn’t my uncle at all—shouted in Mandarin about greasy sticks, stupid boys, and foolhardy girls, then grumbled something else in his native Shanghainese. He grabbed another bamboo skewer and wove together the flaps of the duck’s cavity from belly to tail. The rest of his grumblings were buried beneath the noise of the industrial cooking fans as he fastened a triangular poultry hook over the neck and under the wings of his bird and carried it to a pot for scalding.

  Baba had discovered Lee Chang in a Shanghai eatery, roasting ducks outside in a huge stone oven. He had been impressed with Lee’s careful ministrations as he rotated each of the birds—snagging them from the oven hooks with a pole, dangling them over the flames, and re-hooking them with a quarter turn. Later that day, Baba returned for lunch. When he discovered that the same person had prepared his sizzling shrimp, Baba offered Lee a head cook position in his new restaurant, a place to live, and moving expenses to Los Angeles.

  I was only nine months old at the time, but Uncle swears I cooed with delight whenever he gave me a roasted duck leg to suck. Now he claimed I clucked like a chicken about nothing.

  After scalding the duck’s body and dousing it with sugar-water, Uncle hung the naked bird from a stainless-steel drying rack. Beside the rack, the rotisserie oven—a more sophisticated version of the stone oven back in Shanghai—rotated the birds over a wood burning fire at a hypnotic pace. When Uncle grabbed a hunk of pear wood to stoke the flames, I knew he was done with me.

  My father stood in the channel between the woks and a long prep table, loaded with continually replenished containers of fresh vegetables, meats, and spices. As Baba and his line cook, Bayani, plated their creations, the serving staff whisked away completed dishes and returned for the next. On the other side of the channel, running the length of the kitchen, was a trough that housed open-flame burners, dome-shaped wok stands, and canisters of oils, sauces, and broths. Water streamed from the faucets for cooking and rinsing. Drains sucked it away.

  Sweat glistened on Baba’s neck. His muscular arms were pink from the heat. Flames burst from the burner’s dome-shaped stand as he tilted his wok to dump the simmering broth into the trough. No wonder he was sweating, the flames were high enough to singe his arms. Did they remind him of his childhood when he and his siblings used to gather around a potbelly stove to ward off the freezing North Dakota winters? I’d ask him someday. Right now, I just watched him cook.

  He settled the wok on the dome, ladled in a new sauce, and dumped a strainer full of whatever he had just sautéed back in. Then he glanced over to where I waited with my bike. “You were out with the roosters this morning. The hooks were bare.”

  He was referring to the bike rack anchored to the wall of our staircase, the unspoken border between public and private domain. The only people who came up those stairs were escorted by Baba to his office-storeroom, a weekly occurrence, or by me to my apartment, which had never happened, not once in six years. Other than Baba, who had renovated the space for me and who popped into my apartment with acceptable frequency, I’d never had a visitor—not even Ma.

  Baba lifted the wok off the burner and poured the contents onto an oval platter. Eggplant and minced pork. My favorite. Although to be fair, any food hot off a wok would have jumped to favored status. What could I say? I liked to eat. Which, of course, was why Baba had been worried.

  “Got an appetite?” His voice sloped up at the end with hope.

  My stomach growled. “Actually, I do.”

  He nodded with relief and muttered loud enough for me to hear beneath the hum of the fans. “Well, that’s a blessing.” He gestured to the multi-tiered pot at the end of the cooking station. “There’s har gow, bao, and siu mai in the steamer. Or Uncle could chop some duck if you like.”

  Uncle with a cleaver? I didn’t think so.

  I gazed longingly at the platter disappearing through the swinging doors. “Do you have time for another plate of eggplant and pork?”

  “Oh, sure. Tend to your bike, then come back.”

  By the time I hung the Merida on the rack and returned to the kitchen, Baba was dumping sautéed eggplant into the strainer and rinsing his wok before beginning the sauce. My dinner would be ready in a flash. All I had to do was reach it without disrupting his kitchen staff.

  I darted between Brett, a Desert Storm veteran who was washing pots and plates with military precision, and Ling, a daughter of Hakka immigrants, who was rolling out dough for bao, dumplings and noodles at the back end of the prep table. Then I slipped into the channel behind the steamer, deep fryer, and woks.

  “Behind you, Bayani.”

  “Okay, Lily,” he said, his melodic voice pitched higher than mine. I enjoyed listening to him talk about life in the Philippines and often asked him to share stories just so I could bathe in his soothing tones. Not today. My belly was rumbling.

  Baba slid the eggplant and minced pork onto a plate. “You’ll want some rice with that, I betcha.”

  A server beat me to it, scooping a steaming ball of rice from the cooker and plopping it into a bowl. “Here you go, Lily.” He set it on the table, grabbed a platter of sweet and sour pork, added a serving spoon, and whisked it through the double doors.

  “So, what you been up to then?” Baba asked, as he ladled water into his wok and swished it around with a bamboo brush.

  I shrugged. “Visiting some friends.”

  “Uh-huh.” He dumped the dirty water in the trough and wiped the wok clean with the folded bar towel that doubled as a pot holder. “Old friends or new?”

  I stuffed eggplant into my mouth and shrugged.

  Until a month ago, Baba had been clueless about my work for Aleisha’s Refuge. All that had changed when he cornered me in his office and squeezed out the truth—or rather, lured me into his lair with his unbearably stoic silence. However I wanted to remember it, I had spilled the beans and told him what I really did for a living: not consulting for his friends on web design and social media, a side gig that paid for my rideshares and incidentals, but rescuing terrified women from dangerous men.

  I ate my rice. The less I said about today’s misadventures, the better.

  Baba continued as if I had answered. “Well, I’m glad you’re socializing. You’ve always been a friendly person.”

  He had to be teasing. Aside from his restaurant, Aleisha’s Refuge, Sensei, and our family, the only person I had socialized with since my sister’s rape and murder was Daniel Kwok. Baba better not be talking about him. I heard enough about Mister Perfect Chinese Son from Ma.

  “You had a lot of friends growing up,” Baba continued. “Might be time to reconnect. I’m sure they’d love to hear from you.”

  I ate another bite and tried to ignore the worry in his voice.

  “Your mother’s been up to her eyeballs in birthday plans, dontcha know. Bet she’d also appreciate a call.”

  I groaned. “Why is she planning such a big deal? She hates celebrating her birthday.”

  “This one’s a might bigger than most.”

  “Why? Because she’s turning fifty? I would have thought she
’d want to keep that a secret.”

  Baba chuckled as he ladled oil into the wok and tossed in two handfuls of head-on prawns.

  “Seriously, Baba. Why is she planning this party? Is it because Gung-Gung and Po-Po are coming? Because I don’t think they’re going to care. I mean, no one made a fuss about Rose’s birthday when we visited them in Hong Kong.”

  “Ah, come now, Dumpling. You’re making something out of nothing. Your sister was only six at the time.”

  “Yeah? Well it mattered to her.”

  Old feelings surged, threatening a whole new set of flashbacks. Lucky me.

  Baba slid the salt and pepper prawns onto a platter. Their beady black eyes stared at me with reproach. Why was I getting so upset over a neglected birthday? Rose had died seven years ago. Wherever she was—Heaven, as my North Dakota relatives believed, Nirvana, as Ma insisted, or reincarnated into another life, as Gung-Gung and Po-Po assumed—I was certain Rose didn’t harbor any hurt or resentment over her sixth birthday.

  Baba patted my arm. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  I gave his fingers a squeeze and attempted a smile. “I know, Baba.”

  By Norwegian tradition, I should have called him Papa or Farfar. But Baba had always insisted that Rose and I use the Chinese endearment in deference to Ma’s culture, instead of the Norwegian endearments he used with his own parents. He’d done it to appease Ma’s father.

  After getting her MBA from UCLA, Ma had been supposed to return to Hong Kong and work in Gung-Gung’s finance company. There, she was supposed to attract a good Hong Kong man with many brothers who would be willing to forsake his own family name for hers and carry on the Wong ancestral duties. She was supposed to make up for Po-Po’s failure to provide Gung-Gung with a son. Instead, Ma fell in love with a UC Davis agricultural student and got pregnant with me. That Baba had given his daughters the Wong surname instead of naming us Lily and Rose Knudsen did not assuage Gung-Gung’s wrath. He had no male descendant to perform ancestral worship, and until he did, his future ghost remained in jeopardy. Po-Po had failed him. Ma had failed him. And now that Rose was gone, the obligation fell entirely onto me.

  Baba kissed my hand. “Hey now, don’t pay me any mind. I’m just airing out the barn.”

  I shook my head. “I’m just having a bad day.”

  “Well that’s another thing entirely. Bad days don’t happen—”

  “They’re made,” I answered for him. “I know. And I made a good one.”

  He shrugged. “Wash it off and start again, why dontcha?” As if to make his point, he rinsed the oily water from the wok, set it back on the burner, and tossed in the next set of ingredients.

  If only I could wash away the theft I had inadvertently facilitated as easily as he had sloshed out the grease. But even if I could, that wouldn’t clean up the mess I had made of those innocent men.

  But were they really innocent?

  Even gangbangers would defend someone’s abuela, wouldn’t they? And if they did, would that one good deed make up for the horrors they inflicted every day? My mind flashed to that ugly house—the stench of semen and sweat, the accordion screen, the blood-stained bed. No amount of good deeds could make up for the evil the Varrio Norwalk 66 had done.

  “Did you hear me, Dumpling?”

  “Huh?”

  Baba shook his head and slid sautéed beef into the holding strainer. “Eat your food.”

  I picked through the eggplant with my chopsticks, searching for the perfect morsel, then gave up. I couldn’t eat with those awful images running through my mind. Instead, I conjured up Rose’s smiling face—a sweet little girl on her sixth birthday, surrounded by family, and near to bursting with anticipation. No cake. No presents. No party. Just well-wishes and a nice dinner. Her smiling face clouded with disappointment.

  Was that really how my Hong Kong relatives celebrated birthdays; or had Gung-Gung punished her for being a girl instead of his long-awaited grandson?

  The thought angered me. While I loved my grandfather, I didn’t always like him.

  Chapter Six

  I carried my supper to my apartment on the off-chance my appetite would return. Although with Ma, Rose, and Gung-Gung invading my already chaotic mind, that didn’t seem likely. Still, my apartment was my sanctuary. No matter what was happening in the outside world, I could always replenish my spirit within these walls.

  If only those walls could block out memories.

  A vision of Tran filled my mind—sad smile, arm raised, Sig Sauer pointing. An innocent woman crumpled on the ground, blood pooling around the green vines of her tattooed shoulders.

  This had to stop.

  How many times did I have to replay events before I accepted what had happened? We had saved lives that day. I deserved to be thanked, not tortured. Why couldn’t I get that through my thick skull?

  Because Ma was right: I was more hardheaded than Bestefar and Baba put together.

  I passed my bedroom and marched across the slightly raised mat of my private dojo, quelling my emotions beneath stomping feet. Tran was gone. My life and my city were better for it.

  The main living space of my apartment was on the other side of dojo, with a dining table on the left, couch and television in the center, kitchenette and office on the right. I stuck my plate of congealing eggplant in the mini-fridge, hit the switch on my electric tea kettle, and dropped a satchel of Dragonwell into my favorite cup—white blossoms on cobalt glaze. Ma had bought it for me during a business trip in Hong Kong.

  I cupped it in my hands. As always, it fit perfectly.

  I fired up the computer and checked my emails. The first five were from Ma, probably delegating a week’s worth of work in the two days before Gung-Gung and Po-Po’s arrival. She didn’t know what I did for a living. To Ma, I was a waste of potential: a UCLA dropout who ate free food, dressed like a boy, avoided romantic relationships, and rode mass transit. In short, I was a bum.

  How could my mother give me such a perfect gift and yet have so little understanding of me as a person?

  I opened the first email. And the second. And the third. Each one listed another request, as if the tasks had popped into her head at random. I knew better. Ma had sent each task in its own email to make sure I would take them all seriously and to provide digital evidence if I didn’t.

  Love you too, Ma.

  I closed them all without responding. She’d demand a progress update tomorrow night when Baba and I took her out to dinner to celebrate her actual birthday. Why engage earlier than necessary?

  The next email came from Daniel Kwok. Mister Perfect Chinese Son had been calling and emailing since I ghosted him for a second date. It wasn’t intentional. My head had been too full of horror and violence for social niceties.

  It still was.

  I left his message unopened and sipped my tea. Was Aleisha right? Was I suffering post-traumatic stress? Just the thought made me cringe. PTSD was for war veterans. I was a kunoichi, a female ninja trying to make up for my failure as a sister by becoming big sister to anyone who would have me.

  I set the teacup on my desk and went into my dojo. Since the twenty-by-twelve-foot space occupied the center of my apartment, I passed through it constantly, symbolically integrating my ninja training with my everyday life and reminding me of who I had become. Rather than bow before stepping on the mat, I knelt in the center and faced the wall between my office-kitchenette and the antique screen that hid my bed.

  All of the other walls of my apartment were painted a soothing pale grass-green except for this twelve-foot section, which I had painted an energizing vermillion. A wooden Shinto temple sat on the kamidana god shelf with green plants on either side; rice, salt, incense, and other offerings in the front; and a shimenawa rice-straw rope with dangling paper lightening bolts draped over the top to ward off evil and purify negative energy. And, most important to me, the small polished metal disk displayed inside—the shintai mirror tha
t reflected my inner self and help me discern the truth. All of this focused my attention and energized me for training and deep meditation.

  I touched my palms together and said a quick prayer of protection that Sensei had taught me, ending with “Shiken haramitsu daikomyo.” As was often the case in the Japanese language, the phrase was open to myriad poetic translations involving the sound of words, the perfection of transcendent wisdom, and the great, bright light of illumination. I preferred a more direct message—every moment held the potential for enlightenment.

  I rose and grabbed a rokushaku bo off the weapons rack, a standard six-foot oak staff that I’d sanded until silky-smooth. I had other staves that were shorter, longer, lighter, heavier, but I used this one most often. The heavy oak strengthened my arms and back, and its taller-than-me length required excellent technique.

  I returned to the center of the mat and stood in a natural stance with my feet apart and the bo hanging horizontally at my side. I lunged, slid the bo forward with a practiced one-handed thrust, and enjoyed the sanded smoothness of the wood as it passed through my easy grip. When it reached the end, I squeezed my hand to stop the slide and pointed the full length of the heavy staff in front of me as if it were as light as a rapier. Although, I was strong, the real reason I was able to suspend a six-foot solid oak staff with only one hand was because of the structural integrity of my stance and the perfect alignment of my wrist, elbow, shoulder, and hip. If I was even a centimeter off alignment, down it would go.

  I snapped back the bo, switched my feet, and re-gripped so the staff trailed behind me. From this Gedan no Kamae fighting posture, I commenced a freeform flow of Kukishinden Ryu Bojutsu techniques.

  My breathing calmed.

  My attention focused.

  My body became one with the tool.

  As the bo whirled, thrust, snapped, and slid, I lost myself in the simulated fight, imagining opponents all around me, attacking, defending, countering every move I made until what began as techniques evolved into spontaneous creation. Sweat poured. My heart rate accelerated. This was not a choreographed form like the ones I had practiced and competed with in Wushu. In my mind, this was a life and death fight. But on this night, the vanquished wouldn’t stay beaten. They rose from the dead like zombie warriors, slicing at me with swords and stabbing at me with spears. I cried out in frustration and swept my bo in a mad attempt to decapitate them all, then fell onto the mat in a defeated heap.