Dragon Bones (35 page)

HULAN WAS BONE-TIRED, AND SHE WISHED SHE COULD JUST
order something simple from the kitchen, but she’d told Michael Quon she’d meet him for dinner. She peeled out of her sweaty clothes and climbed into the shower. She closed her eyes and let the hot water pound the knots in the back of her neck. Then she turned off the hot tap and let the cool water chill the veins that pulsed just under the surface of her skin at her wrists and at the crooks of her elbows. For the first time since she’d gotten here, she dried her hair with the complimentary blow dryer, then put on a little lipstick and a touch of mascara. She slipped into a simple sheath of pale pink silk and strapped on a pair of sandals.

She found Michael Quon waiting for her on the restaurant’s veranda. The red light from a hanging lantern shone on his hair. The air was hot and wet, but he managed to look utterly cool, utterly serene. Inside the dining room, the Site 518 group huddled together in their usual spot. They were deep into their meal, and bottles of Tsingtao beer rose like a model city in the middle of the table. A couple of the men waved, Angela gave a message-delivered thumbs-up, but that was it.

Michael and Hulan were seated at a table at the back of the room. A waitress gave them menus, but before Hulan could open hers, Michael began speaking to the young woman in Mandarin, asking what was fresh and what the chef would recommend this evening. He’d been here longer than Hulan and had picked up more of the intricacies of the Sichuan dialect than she had, but this wasn’t what surprised her. His Mandarin was quite good. His American English diluted some of the tones, but beneath that she heard something pure, as though he’d spoken Chinese as a child. Still, it wasn’t a Taiwanese accent or a northern accent, either of which she might have expected given his age and that he was an American citizen by birth.

He ordered lettuce soup, bitter melon sautéed with beef and black beans, cold soy sauce chicken, and some China pea greens with roasted garlic in chicken broth. It was not an exotic meal, but it sounded perfect after the day she’d had. The lettuce soup would be simple and rejuvenating, the bitter melon would cut through the dust and dirt of the day, the cold chicken would be refreshing and nourishing, and the pea greens—if straight from the vine, which the waitress promised they were—would be bright and new on the taste buds. The waitress picked up Hulan’s unopened menu and disappeared.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Michael said, switching back to English.

It had been a long time since someone else had ordered a meal for her in a restaurant, and she didn’t mind at all.

The waitress came back with a bottle of local chardonnay and an ice bucket. Michael made small talk with the young woman as she uncorked the bottle, poured a little for him to taste, then filled both wineglasses. The liquid that slipped down Hulan’s throat was crisp and lively. It was the coldest thing she’d experienced since leaving Beijing.

Michael’s seeming disappointment in her at the end of their walk had dissipated, and he effortlessly held up his end of the conversation. In fact, he agreeably answered questions even before she asked them, like how he’d come to be so fluent in Chinese. His parents had left Shanghai, he told her between spoonfuls of soup, and moved to San Francisco at the end of the war. His father had been an engineer, his mother a physician.

“My brothers and I ran around all over the place,” he recalled as the waitress brought their other dishes. “In the summers, we’d go to a theater that played kung fu movies back-to-back on Monday nights, when all the Chinese chefs were off. My favorites were
The One-Armed Boxer
and
Fist of Fury.
Have you seen them?”

“We didn’t have a lot of films here when I was young.”

“Then I’m going to have to take you one day, because these are seminal martial arts films.” He said this only half in jest. “My brothers and I had some wild times at those programs. There were all these old bachelor chefs, smoking cigarettes and sipping from pints tucked inside brown paper bags, and then all of us kids, screaming, throwing popcorn, and peeing in the aisles. Afterward the boys would square off. American superheroes like Superman and Batman against the One-Armed Boxer and Bruce Lee—staking out territory, righting wrongs, killing the bad guys, and getting into all kinds of stuff we shouldn’t have.”

“Like what?” Hulan asked, still visualizing little boys wreaking havoc on a movie theater.

“Driving Mrs. Chan, our Chinese-language teacher, crazy.” He brushed a shock of hair from his forehead. “We all grew up speaking Chinese at home, but our parents wanted us to be literate. So off to Chinese school we went. But we were bad! We pulled Mrs. Chan’s laundry off the line so many times that she couldn’t hang it outdoors anymore, which I have to say was a great blessing to all, because her underwear—girdles, I guess you’d have to call them—was scary.” He paused, then added, “Of course you couldn’t be part of the gang unless you peed on Mrs. Chan’s back door. Now, that took real courage.”

“I’m sensing a theme here….”

He lifted his glass and toasted the air. “To silly memories.”

“To bad boys is more like it,” she said, tapping his glass lightly.

She liked listening to him. His candor—which had seemed forward during her interview with him in the hotel lobby because no native-born Chinese man would ever have spoken to her, an inspector from the Ministry of Public Security, so directly—now lifted her spirits. Michael didn’t know anything about her and wasn’t asking questions either. He was harmlessly entertaining, and she imagined how he might relate this evening at some fashionable Bay Area event sometime in the future: a perfect meal with a surprisingly charming and worldly Ministry of Public Security inspector in a picturesque guesthouse on the north shore of the Yangzi during monsoon season.

“So how did you go from being a boy who literally left his mark on what sounds like every street corner in San Francisco to being here at the Panda Guesthouse?” Hulan asked.

“The short answer is I’m a stereotype,” he replied. “My parents expected me to get into a good school and I did. I went to Stanford and got my Ph.D. in math. After graduation I got a job at Hewlett-Packard. You can probably guess the rest. I founded my own company in the early nineties. I took VYRUSCAN public before the bubble burst, and I became a very, very rich man.”

Which seemed a very un-Chinese thing to say.

“In a sense that was only the beginning,” he went on. “When you’ve made a lot of money, you feel compelled to make more. I started a REIT to buy land and do development deals. I put up venture capital in start-ups and was very lucky. But making money’s just a game after a while, so what’s the point? I’m not married. I don’t have children. I’ve provided for my brothers, their children, and their future grandchildren, so who was I building it all for? Once I came to that realization, I retired fully from making money.”

“That still doesn’t explain how you ended up here.”

“When you’re forty-two, retired, and money’s no object, how do you spend your time? Toys? Sure, I got into that. I bought a Boxster. I bought a boat and put it down in Monterey Bay. Oh, and a house, of course. But all that
stuff
requires work. The boat gets barnacles, and the Porsche is temperamental. The house needs constant upkeep. I’ve got groundskeepers and maids and—I don’t know— people in and out of the place all the time. You laugh, but it’s true!”

Hulan was laughing, but she was also listening to the subtext. Michael Quon had been serious when he’d said he’d gotten “very, very rich.”

“Hobbies are the other thing people in my position are supposed to take up,” he continued. “I started buying contemporary art. After that I studied the Song Dynasty poets, even sat in on a couple of classes at Stanford. I give them enough money, so why not?”

He chatted, she listened. They ate and drank until they were full. When he finally set down his chopsticks, the waitress instantly appeared at his side and asked if they were done. He nodded, and she cleared the table. She returned again and asked if they wanted anything else.

“Please bring some watermelon,” Michael said in Mandarin. He regarded Hulan questioningly, then asked, “How about another bottle of wine? We don’t have to drink the whole thing, but it would be nice, don’t you think?”

When Hulan agreed, the waitress slipped away and brought back another icy bottle. She refilled their glasses, then stepped to her spot against the wall. Michael picked up where he’d left off.

“My mother always wanted me to connect to my roots, but it took the IPO for me to begin searching for my place in the world. The old family and district associations are still operational in San Francisco, but they tend to focus on old-timers—Cantonese speakers from the early days who want only a banquet at Chinese New Year. The Organization of Chinese Americans has done a great job lobbying in Washington, but where do you put someone like me?”

“The Committee of 100?” Hulan asked. I. M. Pei and Yo-Yo Ma had founded the group in 1989 after the crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Today it boasted 140 of the self-proclaimed most important Chinese Americans. Michael Quon should have been a member.

“They asked and I turned them down. What can I say? I think the Committee of 100 is too elitist, but I also wasn’t going to be comfortable at the annual family association banquet down in Chinatown with the pledge of allegiance, followed by ten courses, karaoke, and an appearance by Miss Chinatown, all for the big-ticket price of fifty dollars.”

“It can be hard to find your niche,” Hulan sympathized.

But Michael shrugged off the suggestion and hurried on. “What else have I done? Good deeds, naturally. But giving away money isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. You give a million dollars to a museum and they say, Well, considering Bill Gates’s gift, your donation isn’t enough to get your name on the wing, let alone the building.
That
would take ten million dollars. So what does that leave? Travel—”

“And women.”

“Yes, and women.” He laughed good-naturedly. “You can spend a lot of money on women.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“Not really.”

“So then for travel you came here?”

“Ummm….” He mused as he thought about it. “No, first I took a villa in the south of France. Then I played around in Paris. I took about six months where I just skied—Gstaad at Christmas, Aspen in the spring, then down to New Zealand for the first snow in June. But you can do stuff like that for only so long before you start looking for something else. When you’re rich beyond your wildest dreams, it’s harder than you might expect to find what will make you happy and occupy your mind.” He cocked his head and appraised her coolly. “But you know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You have money. You’ve just had it longer than I have.”

“How could you tell?”

“It’s something about the way you carry yourself.”

He took the bottle from the ice bucket. She realized that the others from the Site 518 team had left.

“It’s late,” she said.

“Yes,” he agreed, “but you still haven’t found out why or how I got here.”

He poured the wine into their glasses and eased back into his chair, wordlessly challenging her to leave.

“You are very
kan ye,
” she said.

“You think I like to brag and boast? I suppose so, but I prefer the less severe definition. I like to shoot the breeze.”

Which showed that his Chinese was not just fluent but highly nuanced as well.

“So how long do I have to wait until I hear why you’re here and why you’ve stayed?”

No flicker of victory crossed his features. No wonder he had done well in business.

“I’ve stayed because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be and nowhere else I have to be. As for your other question, I told you I took a class in Chinese poetry,” he said, smoothly transitioning back into his storytelling mode. “I kept with it even after the class was over. One night I read a poem by Meng Jiao called ‘The Sadness of the Gorges.’ It begins, ‘Above the gorges, one thread of sky.’ Later in the same poem, he wrote, ‘Trees lock their roots in rotted coffins and the twisted skeletons hang tilted upright.’ He was talking about the Qutang Gorge and the hanging coffins, though I didn’t know it then. But the haunting quality of the words made me want to look deeper at Meng Jiao, the Three Gorges, and especially the Ba, who’d hung those coffins up on the cliffs.”

He went on to talk about the poet, a disillusioned government official, who, twelve hundred years ago, had wandered through the beauty of these hills but had lived in brutal poverty. Meng had called the Ba, some of whom had still been around in those days, wild apes. Here was a man who lived so long ago writing about people who’d lived and walked this land so much longer before that. Michael’s interest had been piqued. The more he learned about the Ba and their subsequent disappearance, the more he wanted to know. Then, as he’d studied the mythology of the gorges, he’d been increasingly drawn to the character of Da Yu.

“I love to think of Yu combing these wild reaches and incorporating them into an empire that would one day become China. Besides,” he added, “Yu was a mathematician like myself. That amused me.”