Home Remedies Page 4

The crowded scene reminds me of waiting at the ferry docks when I was a little boy, before my father had any money. Our region was very hilly and in order to get any kind of shopping done, we took ferries to reach the nearest shops. The rickety boats were always so overcrowded and flimsy that they would regularly tip over into the river, spilling both young and old into the river’s green waters. What I remember most were those brief moments of ecstasy, when the small, overloaded boat gave in and the waters were met with high-pitched screams. And we’d all swim to shore, resigned to and amused by our rotten luck. Everybody would then simply get on another boat dripping with water, letting our wet clothes dry in the breeze.

  Brass Donkey’s now-banned song is playing loudly in my head. It’s actually pretty good, a protest song hiding behind a disco beat. “We have passion, but do not know why. What are we fighting for? Where is our direction? Do you want to be an individual? Or a grain of sand.”

  White Tiger of the West

  There’s a saying that goes “When you’re young you shouldn’t read Journey to the West, and when you’re old it’s best to tuck away Romance of the Three Kingdoms.” In the autumn of your life, you wouldn’t want to be plagued by the worries and regrets of five lifetimes. For those delicate adolescent days, the fabled feats of Journey would make you too dreamy; you would think yourself reckless, more powerful than you really are. You’d ride your bicycle into the sky and hop like the Monkey King through peach-shaped clouds and into another more magical universe.

  Years later, Grandmaster Tu would say Journey was the explanation for the six-inch-long scar across his chest. He had jumped confidently, lanky arms outstretched, off the ledge of a two-story wall onto a great tree branch that tore through him.

  Presently, he no longer feels the need to defend his unrivaled control of qi, nor does he question his supernatural powers of perception. His youthful complexion is glowing; his lotus pose is in perfect harmony with the sun and the moon; and if he wants to, he can cure any diseases you might have. As a fully realized spiritual qigong grandmaster, he is no longer beguiled by fantasies meant for foolish teenagers. There is nothing about his being a higher-level immortal that he himself questions. But to prove it to the nonbelievers, the skeptics, and the uninformed, he chooses to eat glass.

  In the province of Heilongjiang, in a town north of Harbin and just east of Qiqihar, lived a boy named Tutu. As a child he was short and sickly, with skin the color of peeling eucalyptus bark. Most of his youth was spent in a forgotten industrial city covered in hard sooty snow and it appeared that Tutu was on his way to becoming just another knitted cap on a dreary snowy street.

  His father was a coal miner, a thin, muscular man who looked permanently charred. He returned home twice a year, and each time he would ask his son how old he was, as if he hoped the boy would perhaps magically skip a year or two without his knowing.

  In trying to make himself more interesting to his father, Tutu yearned to be good at sports. He did not excel at badminton because he was too short or at soccer since he was too slow. And volleyball? Not with hands that small. Classmates and teachers had no problem not noticing him either, and thus with his ordinary face and mediocre grades, he was permanently assigned to the second-to-last row in every class.

  And so the calendar moved on and Tutu inched his way toward manhood, quiet and visibly disappointed with his meager lot. In an effort to cheer him up, his well-meaning mother, Cai Xia, regularly read him newspaper articles she thought he would find encouraging.

  “Look,” she said. “Here’s a photo of a girl around your age with no arms, playing the piano with her feet! Her feet! It says she has to hold her chopsticks with her toes!”

  His mother had lived a difficult life, full of compromise and fear. She was grateful for a modest apartment and a job ripping tickets at the zoo. She had no great expectations for her son, only that his life be composed of a bit more joy, a bit less hardship than her own.

  Tutu only stared intensely at the photo of the grinning, piano-playing armless girl. He stared and ate sunflower seeds, cursing his luck for having hands to eat them with.

  Then a few days before his eighteenth birthday, Tutu happened to come upon a mass of people huddled together in the downtown cluster of shops. It might have been a demonstration for a local contortionist, a comedian, or perhaps a salesman selling knives that resharpen themselves. But on this afternoon there was only a scrawny boy onstage. The boy must have been even younger than he was, shorter and less handsome, and yet he held the audience captive.

  “Ten years ago, I was struck with polio,” the boy yelled. “The doctors said I would never walk again!”

  “But look at him standing!” a man in the crowd yelled back.

  “I taught myself how to heal, how to stand up, walk, even run. I learned how to do the impossible through the strength and wisdom of Qilun Gong!”

  “It can’t be!” the crowd replied.

  “Hear my story!” the boy said as his assistants handed out pamphlets. “I can teach you to cleanse your body of its ailments. Join me, and you can improve everything you are!”

  Tutu felt as if the boy were looking straight into his eyes.

  “They said I’d never walk again!”

  The crowd applauded and cheered.

  “And yet with the teachings of the Qilun, here I stand!” The boy posed like a movie hero. He jumped up and down, and the crowd roared with applause.

  As the throng gushed toward the stage to grab the brochures, Tutu hung back, watching his strong legs in the shadow on the ground. He turned around and began to run. He ran past the glass bottle factory, the soap factory, and the steaming tofu snack stalls. He ran past his elementary school, past students jumping rope, old men playing chess, and women scrubbing laundry on rocks. He ran as if he were being chased all the way back to his apartment, because he couldn’t wait another minute. He ran up the stairs, through the front door, and into the bathroom. There he slammed the door and stared at his flat, pimpled face in the mirror.

  There were many selves that belonged to him, existing simultaneously. There was a self he knew he was, a self he wished he was, and a self he was going to be. All of these possible Tutus presented themselves to him and he realized he could choose beyond them all. A rebirth. Like the boy who told people that he shouldn’t be able to walk. Or the mother who lifted a two-ton truck off her child with her bare hands. The ordinary bespectacled clerk who dared ask a goddess from the heavens for a kiss. And the general who led his troops bravely into certain death. These myths and legends always began with an uninspiring nobody—in other words, somebody just like him.

  Tutu could be an ordinary boy. He could get a job at the local factory and be like one of those men who walk out of the doors each night with a small bottle of liquor knocking against his chest pocket. But as he looked at himself, his face grew hot with what he knew must be the earth’s energy. A vision appeared before him, brilliant and clear. Tutu was going to master qigong, too, but he wasn’t going to do it as a follower. Something amazing had to happen for that. Something incredible had to come true.

  If Cai Xia were still alive today, she might not even be able to recognize her son, Grandmaster Tu. His appearance, with his smooth skin and thick caterpillar-shaped eyebrows, is one of cultivated tranquility. His unextraordinary face, suspended above a lotus, has been printed on hundreds of laminated posters. His followers say that Grandmaster Tu is the perfect balance of the fox and weasel spirits and is so completely engulfed in qi that his body’s vital energy could be described as equal to that of a large flame.

  Grandmaster Tu invented the White Tiger Gong. Legend has it that he can walk through walls and see in pitch darkness. He looks young because he only ages one year for every ten human years because the blood of the white tiger runs through his veins. He came up with these legends himself, so that his devoted followers could spread them by word of mouth.

 
Thanks to Qilun Gong, there will never be a shortage of qigong masters in China. Ordinary citizens—taxi drivers, noodle pullers, and schoolteachers—who lead hordes of elderly followers along riverbeds in public parks hoping to achieve inner peace and physical harmony. But Grandmaster Tu’s ambition was far greater than the devotion of the old and feeble. He set his sights on conquering Chinese diaspora of North America.

  Thirty thousand donated and borrowed yuan was paid to a travel agency to secure a tourist visa and aid him in this endeavor. Before he arrived, he placed a full-page advertisement in the most reputable Chinese-language newspaper, China Daily. In the brochures he planned to hand out to his potential followers, he detailed the first time he fully realized his extraordinary powers. Five years ago, when he was just eighteen, Grandmaster Tu wrestled and killed a five-hundred-pound white tiger with his bare hands. A newspaper clipping with the headline read “Boy accidentally locked inside the tiger’s enclosure is found alive! Tiger dead.”

  But as Grandmaster Tu liked to say, the beginning is not the most important or interesting part of the story. Just exactly how he accessed his powers, superhuman strength, perceptions, and stamina is too intricate to explain. What it comes down to is this: He was one with the qi; he had it grasped within himself, like a fist around a snake’s neck. If he accepted you as his pupil, he would teach you the way. And if you needed convincing, the Great Spiritual United States Los Angeles Qigong Conference with Grandmaster Tu was coming up in a public arena on Main Street, Alhambra, at 7 p.m. Free admission.

  Of course, as with any life story of an extraordinary man, there was a woman. And in this case, she was still only a little girl.

  If you happened to have visited Disneyland in the late nineties, you might have seen a crowd of eight to fifteen middle-aged Chinese businessmen dressed in dark suits following a small and serious Chinese girl with a big forehead and small feet and wearing a backpack.

  That little girl was named Mary.

  Housed in the employee apartment of a Super 8 motel, Mary was one-third of the Cherry Sky Travel Agency. Technically both of her parents were full-time employees of Super 8 Monterey Park, but they were also industrious new immigrants, so they ran a travel agency part-time. They were taking advantage of the import-export boom of the early nineties and catering to “research” tour groups.

  When Mary’s mom wasn’t manning the front desk, visa paperwork and planning itineraries were her responsibilities. Mary’s dad drove the agency van while also taking care of any physical labor the motel required, from declogging the toilets to ejecting unwanted guests. Mary considered herself an unofficial Cherry Sky part-timer when she wasn’t attending fourth grade. She worked weekends.

  Mary’s job was simple. Armed with half-priced children’s season passes, she guided Chinese tour groups through every theme park from Universal Studios to SeaWorld. This entailed strategic marching to the five “emblematic” spots where the tourists could take photos. She corralled them to the side when they created roadblocks, translated “How much is that?” and replied to concerns for the average American waistline or the warmth of a certain American baby not wearing a hat on a windy day. She directed the guests to bathrooms and memorized the shops with the biggest selection of souvenirs.

  The customers politely offered her parents compliments about Mary: “This girl is going to be a great leader! It’s amazing how mature and clever she is!”

  “Aiya! This chubster? Not likely. She’s no good at math!” her mom would say.

  “Aiya! No such thing! Thank you for being so understanding about our makeshift half-squirt guide!” her dad would chime in.

  Mary was a pudgy, pigeon-toed child with disproportionally large teeth, and her parents liked to bring that up, too, for laughs. She was told they all needed to make sacrifices. That’s why Mary still wore the same sweat suits she brought with her from China with cartoon dogs and nonsensical English phrases on them. She used the same old blue backpack that had to be rolled on plastic wheels, so she could be heard coming down the corridors of her school long before she turned the corner.

  Therefore, regardless of how clever she was with clients, she was just another F.O.B. from China in elementary school.

  It had been a typical Wednesday. It was hours since the last bell and the elementary-school parking lot was nearly empty. Mary sat alone on the curb, squinting down the street for her dad’s car, which was late as usual.

  When she opened the door, she was surprised to find a young man wearing a black martial-arts outfit sitting in the backseat. He sat with his palms flat against his legs and gave off a pleasant woody smell.

  “Ni Ni”—her dad called her by her Chinese name from the front seat—“say hi to Uncle Tu. He is our newest guest. This is our only daughter.”

  “Nice to meet you, Uncle Tu,” she responded.

  “Uncle Tu is a qigong master—no, wait, I mean grandmaster,” continued her dad, winking at her in the rearview mirror, “which means he has special powers.”

  Tutu didn’t notice the snide comment because his mind was in another world. He had been trying to put himself at ease through breathing exercises after seeing the embarrassingly small space rented for his conference. It was just an empty office, not enough room for a large crowd. Plus it was located next door to an orthodontist’s office and the sounds of screaming children leaked through the walls.

  When he finally turned to glance at the little girl, he saw that she was quietly studying him. So he spoke to her. “Ni Ni, how do you like being ten?”

  “How did you know how old I was?” Her eyes were wide with astonishment.

  “I can just tell. It’s one of my gifts.”

  “What else? Can you tell me another thing?” she asked. “With one of your other gifts?”

  “I can tell you’re part girl, part tiger,” he replied calmly. “You have a girl’s body but a tiger’s soul.” And he leaned his head over the armrest and said, “You’re powerful and you are angry like the tiger within you.”

  “Oh, ha ha! Wow! That’s unlikely because if there’s one thing about Ni Ni, it’s that she’s the most tinghua, obedient,” piped up her father. “No tiger here! Go on, tell Uncle Tu!”

  “I have another question for you,” Tutu said without waiting for Mary to react. “What is a good English name for me? I have one. It’s…it’s Jieon?”

  “John?” Mary asked.

  “Yes, that one. Jieon. I don’t like it. It sounds like ‘sauce’ in Chinese. Can you think of another one for me?”

  Los Angeles, City of Angels, where dreams come true. Chinese immigrants occupy another Los Angeles, and unfortunately, that’s where this story is set. In the nineties, the terrified locals of Alhambra had long since fled, taking everything with them except the Denny’s. Sizzler became Liu’s Dumpling House, Pizza Hut became Taiwanese Beef Jerky Hut, and Mongolian Hot Pot bore the distinctive architectural flourish of Taco Bell.

  The new children learned their perfect English from television. They wore shocked expressions and cheap clothes and measured popularity by the model of their parents’ cars. Mary tried to make friends with the American-born girls, who were all beauties in her mind, based on the fact that they had better clothes. She spent a lot of her energy learning the ways in which they wore their hair, what music they listened to, which Friends character they claimed was their favorite.

  There were so many unanswered questions banging around in her mind. Like how come her dad cursed every customer behind their back but was afraid to even ask them a question? Or when would they move out of the motel and into a real apartment? Would she ever see her old friends from kindergarten in China again, or were they to be forgotten? On top of these worries, there was food in the school cafeteria she didn’t know how to eat and Jehovah’s Witnesses she wasn’t allowed to open the door for. Not to mention the Girl Scouts, who zealously sold expensive cookies.

  After
meeting Grandmaster Tu, Mary began to realize that maybe she was angry. Why did she have to sleep so early on Friday nights? She hated not being able to watch cartoons on Saturdays. She hated having to translate every stupid thing anyone wanted to say. She heard herself growling in class and began to feel as if she were prowling the halls of her elementary school. The day after meeting the grandmaster, while waiting for her dad to pick her up, Mary smashed the plastic wheels of her backpack on the curb.

  Unlike other clients, Tutu didn’t want his picture taken in front of amusement park signs, nor did he want to take a bus to Las Vegas. He wasn’t even interested in going to strip clubs. Instead, he practiced qigong on the lawn of the motel, moving invisible boulders, holding streams between his arms.

  Mary pretended to play with LEGOs on a picnic bench while she watched him.

  Like magic, he suddenly appeared by her side. “What are you building?”

  “An animal hospital. This is where the horses would lie down, and here is where the pigs get surgery and X-rays.”

  It wasn’t actually an animal hospital, but she felt the need to impress him. In the presence of a man with special powers, she was very self-conscious about whether or not ten-year-olds could still play with LEGOs.

  “Why don’t you try to use all the pieces to build a tower?” he asked, touching the hard pieces between his fingers.

  “That’s…that’s boring, just one tower. Why would I do that?”

  “Don’t you want to see how high you can get it to go? Can you touch the roof? How long do you think before you could touch the cloud?”

  “Can you touch the cloud?” She gave him an expectant look.

  “I can do whatever I want to,” he replied. “Because I am not afraid of anything.”

  She raised her head toward the sky. “Can you teach me how not to be afraid of anything, too?”

  “Depends on how open you are to learning.” He smiled and put his hand on top of her head, where it felt hot, genuinely hot, against her hair. “I’ve already begun teaching you. Are you paying attention?” he said. By the time her head felt the normal temperature again, she realized he had gone back to his position and resumed meditating.