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At the regional championship the other finalist is a girl maybe a metre high wearing more braids than Lan Fan thought physically possible and adorned with a massive pink sash in her hair that might actually weigh more than the girl herself. The symbol the slight pink girl has selected for herself—or the symbol that some well-meaning parent or coach picked out on the assumption that it would fit perfectly at a mixed martial art competition in which the girl has entered the category of karate—brings a smile to Lan Fan’s lips for the first time since the day opened and she and her grandfather discovered that the invitation hadn’t lied about the free food. A panda. A pink panda stitched into the back of the white gi in either a sardonic parody or a genuine emulation of pose from that obnoxious ubiquitous Karate Kid film.
The last time one of the eleven-year-old lemurs cohabiting Rush Valley Prep demanded she play the villain in his little game of oh-so-heroic make-believe, she did exactly as he asked and he ended up in the nurse’s office with two broken ribs and a black eye.
But as her grandfather always says, usually with his hand heavy on her shoulder and his fingers pressing just short of painfully on the seam between her collarbone and her neck: She must focus on the present. With said grandfather watching her with his usual closely guarded visage of sternness radiating, along with her best friend, Lan Fan bows to the bit of a girl. Assumes her stance. Initiates the first contact.
She ends up on the ground before ten seconds are up and the tiny girl in pink carries the golden victor’s trophy aloft as though she has won the title of Goddess-Empress of the Universe. And in a way, Lan Fan thinks as she poses numbly with the significantly smaller weight of the second-place statuette for the championship photo, the girl has.
Her grandfather says nothing to her on the drive back. Ling, having somehow stuffed more granola bars and packets of M&Ms candy into his pockets than existed the space, gingerly slides his hand across the expanse of the backseat. His palm squeak against the seats. Noise in the suffocating silence of shame. As he curls his fingers into her palm she lifts her chin to glance at him. With his head tilted to one side and that irrepressible grin quirking the corners of his mouth he makes her smile if not laugh quietly to herself. “Thank you,” she whispers in the Chinese of their childhood through the otherwise soundless atmosphere of heavy rain. “I needed that.”
When Lan Fan arrives home she stows the trophy into the cardboard box of dishonour. She peels out of her gi. The golden phoenix embroidered in the white glares at her disapprovingly while she folds the training uniform carefully and ceases touching that which she does not deserve to touch. Her grandfather makes dinner while she and Ling stretch themselves on the bed and talk about nothing. She arches her back, touches her toes contemplatively. Her grandfather would never raise a hand to strike her and yet the silence between them is somehow so much more painful than any physical strike could ever be.
“I failed,” she tells Ling, who shrugs and nestles more closely beside her. The mattress creaks.
“You’re being dumb and it was only one competition and you made semifinalist anyway. Finalist I mean.” He prods her in the stomach. “You’ll do better next time.”
She translates: “I’ll beat her next time.”
They tumble and play-fight until her grandfather calls them for the meal. She cleans her plate despite her utter lack of hunger, despite the bitter taste of humiliation accompanying every swallow, despite the thick constriction of her throat closing up until she can barely breathe. But tradition scrapes the final grains of rice and licks of fish from the round bowl of china.
At the regional tournament the following year Lan Fan places first, but the boy she fights struggles with a weak kick and she unbalances him easily, turning his strength against him. Frowning even as the victor’s trophy fills her palms with shimmering gold, she waits for the snapshot taken by the local newspaper photographer on the prowl for an easy story to fill some three-hundred-word column. Prior to the brilliance of the flash fading from her vision Lan Fan has snagged the attention of the announcer. Her fingers curl around his felt sleeve with such an intensity that the fabric tears slightly. He furrows his brow and stares. “Where was the girl from last year?” she says over the cheers of the crowd.
“Which girl? And congratulations on the victory.” Although his tone reads more polite than genuine, she feels the heat of the spark of pride glowing like a live coal in her chest.
“The girl. Chang. Her mascot was a panda, a pink one, and I lost to her in the finals last year.”
For a moment the announcer eyebrows squiggle in a strange pattern while his pupils flick to the upper rim of his eyes. Then he ruffles her hair, fondly, like she were his daughter and doesn’t have to resist the need to rip off his arm entirely, and chuckles. “Ah, May! Her family called. She’s sick; didn’t want to miss it at all, of course, knowing her, but that’s the way life is and ya just can’t fight it now can you?” With a melancholy sigh of false pity that nearly drives Lan Fan to knee him in the legs, he suddenly swings an arm around her shoulders to smile for the photographer.
“Perfect!” ze declares, strapping zir camera to zir belt. Lan Fan wrestles out of the announcer’s grip.
“She called you.” Mustering all of the fury a twelve-year-old can harness, she punches him in the stomach. “Give me her number.”
Shooting her a dirty look he mutters something about personal privacy and stalks off into the crowd. Ling raps her on the shoulder. “Fu’s looking for you.” He rolls on the balls of his feet. “He’s pretty worried. And angrier than the time we played hooky to check the snow.”
At her grandfather’s screams of What were you thinking? and Why did you just run off like that? and Are you trying to give me a heart attack Lan Fan? she bows her head, folds her legs, and kneels on salt for an hour, unmoving, immutable. Ling watches her from the kitchen counter, not quite frowning and not quite smiling, content for the moment to exist. And, to some extent, keep watch over her without triggering her grandfather’s wrath. Normally her grandfather’s actions reveal an incredibly patient man, but a twelve-year-old girl rushing off by herself in the stampede chaos of the after-tournament partying—a twelve-year-old girl who also happens to be his daughter—represents something of a tipping point. By the conclusion of the punishment her grandfather is bandaging the salt-cuts and applying a relieving salve to the sensitive skin of her knees. Lan Fan wobble-legs to her bedroom. The mattress creaks as she lies and her grandfather sits.
When he interrogates her, probing for her motivation, she reminds him of the girl who bested her the previous year. Her grandfather runs his fingers through his busy grey moustache. “Forget of her, Lan Fan. There is no need to take revenge on she who defeated you.” And in that he snips the ends of whatever conversation she wanted to have. “Good night, my precious granddaughter. I’m so proud of you. So proud.”
Apologising in his gentle movements and gossamer touch, he sits on the edge of her bed stroking her hair and weaving tales of mythology firebirds while she softly, softly falls into the peace of slumber.
After winning gold again Lan Fan drags the giant yellow phonebook down and glares at the three pages of Changs. She and Ling call through the first page until he declares that there must be a better way. The better way turns out to involve the computer and a site containing a virtual version of the same phonebook. Lan Fan observes Ling scroll through the listings for one with a thirteen-year-old daughter.
He perches backwards on the chair and folds his arms over the backrest. “Do you remember anything else about her?”
She juggles a pair of mandarin oranges in an abstract process of deciding whether or not to peel one or both. Ling’s pleading expression solves the issue. “Her first name. May.”
Sticky juice drips on the keyboard. “I got her address. Huh, her parents’ names aren’t listed, weird. But there’s only one May Chang in the city, I guess.”
“I suppose. Here, could you write it down?”
His messy handwriting scrawls her fate over the scrap of paper, the edge stained orange-yellow. “Did’ja want me to come with you?”
“I don’t want you to get in trouble.” Her eyes narrow at the address. “Besides, this part of town isn’t for a kid who can’t defend himself.”
“This part of town? You sound like my dad. Always going on and on about how the world is dangerous and that’s why I’m not to go off places by places and then he’s always up and running off on one of his business trips.” Ling tucks his knees up on the flat part of the chair. “Are you sure I can’t come with you? I’d rather be with you than at house.”
Lan Fan doesn’t want to tell him that his newest stepmother doesn’t play favourites or that his older half-siblings don’t pick on him for the same reason he can’t stand his younger ones or even that she wouldn’t love him by her side, because she hates lying and she hates lying especially to the people she loves and she hates lying especially to Ling. “I’m going by myself,” she says solemnly, packing herself a lunch for two just in case. “Don’t tell Grandfather where I’m going.”
“You’ve got a few hours before he gets back from shopping.” Ling rubs the back of his neck. “I’ll keep him distracted as long as I can anyway, but please come back, okay? It’s lonely as hell without you.” His subsequent smile is sheepish enough that she laughs. “Er, sorry.”
“Hell’s not that bad of a word, compared to what the new students in class say when they try to break a brick of cement with their bare hands after learning for all of a week.”
They both laugh at that while she shoulders the backpack and checks it twice for essentials. She slips her sneakers on at the door, bending down to tie the laces. Ling lingers by her side, a hand drifting by the strap looping under her arm. “Stay gold, Lan Fan.”
“Don’t fly too high, Ling.”
The dilapidated ‘this part of town’ smells of diesel and rubber. Tattered newspapers and gum wrappers line the sidewalks cracked apart with new spring growth of budding grass that pushes stalks up through the grey cement no matter the probability of its success. Amidst the superficial gloom Lan Fan senses a strange sort of peace, as if the weeds sprouting around the old cobblestones and the gnarled trees nonetheless sporting growing buds soon to open to reveal vibrant petals and golden-hued pollen have brought a calming touch to the dismal surroundings. In any case she finds herself more at ease here than in her own neighbourhood, perhaps because the children don’t tease her for daring to prefer martial arts to tentative make-up like the other girls in her grade or perhaps because there’s a certain incomparable thrill to sneaking out alone on a secret mission. She arrives at the door of an apartment, F-32. The hallway is open to the outside air, and the fading light of day shines the path to the door. Someone has drawn, no, stenciled a panda around the cold metal knob.
Knock.
A dark-skinned man opens the door and glares. Lan Fan has the distinct impression his features have frozen into into a fierce frown from years of pain and torment. Taking a single step backwards, she straightens her arms to her sides and bows at the waist. She rolls the English over in her mind, examining it from all sides for errors, before she can bring herself to open her mouth. Her gaze on the ground at his slippers, Lan Fan inhales, pauses, and speaks in a single breath: “Please accept my apologies for intruding, sir, but I have a question for May Chang if she lives here.”
The man blinks, deliberately, in her direction. He regards her in a manner that drives his unnamed anger through the crown of her head to spear her soul. After a minute he pushes the door inwards with a light flick of the wrist. “Come in. Leave your shoes and things at the door.”
She follows him inside. As her grandfather has taught, she observes. First impression: warm, cozy, tapestries and rugs to toss over attackers, fragile glass low table, cushions, mementoes on the mantle that she could throw in case, folded clothing on the futon. The packed living room leads directly over a counter to the kitchen, where a covered pot simmers and a variety of fruit from bananas to mandarin oranges. The sight of the latter elevates her eyebrows; the man calls May’s name. Wild running, a yell back of “Coming!” and suddenly the girl in pink, two years older and just as short as ever, materialises into existence in the hallway. Lan Fan stares. The girl stares.
A black and white cat with the monochrome markings of a panda winds around her leg. She tips her ears back and hisses at Lan Fan, who moves back.
“Who’re you?” asks May. Lan Fan sees the man tense instantly. Muscles coiled Limbs bent. Stance adjusted, if only slightly, but she notices. “No, no, it’s okay, Mr Scar. I know her; I’m just wondering what she’ll tell me.”
Lan Fan’s eyes widen at the question. Who is she, to May? Hesitantly she finds a response lurking on her tongue: “My name is Lan Fan. Two years ago, there was a regional tournament. For karate. And other martial arts. That year you beat me, fairly. That match changed my life” On the sink the pot boils; the man begins to remove it from the heat. She smells stirfry. The cat arches her back and licks May’s bare foot, prompting the girl to giggle. “I trained and practised for a year so that I could become good enough to match you. And then you . . . you never—never joined the tournament again.” She swallows, hard. May’s giggling fades, and abruptly Lan Fan wishes desperately for the power to turn back time even for a handful of seconds. “Are you sick, May?”
“Huh? Oh. I was sick then. But not physically.” May hums; somehow the sound resonates perfectly with the burbling of the steaming noodles the man mixes in with meat and vegetable. “If you wanna stay for dinner I could tell you.”
“I can’t.”
May’s hands dart to her hips. Surprisingly Lan Fan’s resolve dries up in the span of a single heartbeat. “You can and you are.”
She can and she does.
Resting with her back and shoulder blades supported by the yielding mattress amid a fortress of pillows and warmed by the stirfry in her belly, Lan Fan listens. She’s always been good at that.
May’s family didn’t start out poor. Been that way for a while. Just her and her mother: her father had been a Chinese businessman of sorts—her mother is was Japanese—and had had an extended affair with May’s mother, had offered to take the child under his wing when her mother revealed her pregnancy. Yet her mother, a doctor, a cardiosurgeon, of cutter-opener and rearranger and healer of hearts, declined. Per their earlier agreement her father left and May hopes he has good luck in life.
Two years ago her mother needed a cutter-opener and rearranger and healer of hearts herself. But the heart attack and the subsequent car crash killed her prior to the world being able to do anything. “I told you I was sick, Lan Fan, and I don’t lie. Though my sickness wasn’t the kind I could see a doctor for. Not that I ever wanted to see a doctor again.”
A friend of her mother’s, the man whom she calls affectionately as Mr Scar for the characteristic mark he received across his face years ago, took her in. The regional tournament locked her out from the running because of her address. Out of region, evidently, and there’s no such organised tournament where she lives now. “I wish I could practise more, you know? I really do. Mr Scar can fight well, but it’s not the same as fighting someone else who knows karate.”
Steadily the two girls turn their heads towards one another. Shy smiles. Bright eyes.
Xiao-Mei, the cat named after her panda markings, coughs up a hairball and the girls hear it as a gong.
Lan Fan loses, again. She lies on the floor until the point of her elbows and the back of her head ache while May works out the snarls in her tangled hair. Then Lan Fan sits up, her legs tucked underneath her, and touches her forehead to the floor.
“Teach me.”
May lowers the brush. “Eh?”
“Teach me how to fight. Shifu. Please.”
Xiao-Mei laps Lan Fan’s cheeks. Wetness at the corner of her mouth. She licks: salt. Sweat. The warmth spreading through her muscles post-fight. The taut pleasure-pain of her relaxing tendons, of her sinews coming undone like melting butter.
She missed this, the challenge, too much to admit it to herself much less to someone else.
A shadow passes over her. Her chin trembles as she tilts her neck up a fraction: May kneels over her, flattening her form against the floor. Their foreheads touch, level. “I’ll teach you the karate,” she whispers in a voice so low and thick and raw that she renders her core vulnerable, exposes her weakness in the exact manner that Lan Fan has been taught to never do so long as she lives, “if you teach me China. Chinese. I need both halves of my heritage to make the whole. Teach me.” Out of nowhere she kisses Lan Fan on the nose in a gesture that bewilders her, scrunches up her shoulders until her shoulder blades ring out with pain. “Sensei.”
Her grandfather beats her rear end to blood upon her return. For once he beats Ling as well, for lying to him and for covering for Lan Fan. When the screaming ends and both children lie rubbing their throbbing backsides, her grandfather informs Ling that he’ll have to spend nights back at his house again. At his mansion, her grandfather says, amongst the servants and frivolity: Ling and Lan Fan meet panicked gazes, because her grandfather may just be serious this time.
“Your father may entrust me to take care of you, considering the pandemonium constantly whirling at your mansion, but I cannot have you lying to me, either of you. Imagine if something had happened to you, Lan Fan.” The pain in his voice. That rawness, the vulnerability, the exposure of weakness that he told her, warned her, ordered her to never reveal. “What would I have done if the address was wrong or if the man had thought you a threat or if someone had stopped you on the street, a thirteen-year-old girl with a school backpack—God help me.”
He shuts the door. Lan Fan and Ling spend the time huddled together beneath the blankets, limbs tangled, bodies meshed, drawing heat and comfort from one another as she murmurs of what transpired with May.
During the year between her third martial arts tournament and her fourth Lan Fan teaches May the route to her house and back; whenever her grandfather pops out for more than half an hour Ling has the girl in pink on the phone. She teaches them both but mostly Lan Fan. She takes to Ling like a fish to water and Ling takes to her like water to a fish, and Lan Fan exhales a sigh of relief she didn’t know she’d been holding.
Sometime during the year May throws Lan Fan to the ground and Lan Fan looks up in defeat to watch May standing over her, panting, chest rising and falling to strain against her bindings, sweat clinging her bangs to her forehead in slick strands of darkness and dirt on her nose and grime on her face like warpaint for a battle between the gods staking their lives for the line between good and evil, and suddenly Lan Fan has an epiphany that races through her hot as fire and curls up in her chest in a glowing coal.
May Chang is beautiful.
May Chang is beautiful, and Lan Fan is in love with her.
With her grandfather and May and May’s adopted father and Ling watching from the stands she wins the tournament again. For her fourteenth birthday Lan Fan shyly asks her grandfather if she can invite over a friend. Eyebrows raised, he inquires as to from where said friend originates. “School,” says Lan Fan, “in-between the absurd kids I don’t like.”
May dresses in yellow and Lan Fan keeps her gaze fixed on the plates in front of her as if the girl across the table, six months older than her despite her smaller frame, does not exist. Her grandfather says nothing during the dinner or the play-fighting that goes on afterwards to Ling’s endless amusement, but just prior to May’s departure, her grandfather clasps her shoulders into his wrinkled hands. “Come around more often.”
Lan Fan screams into a pillow; Ling asks if he could try on her birthday dress.
By fifteen Lan Fan has bruises blooming across her hips, her knees, her elbows, her ribs, her newly minted body of legs and arms and gangliness that she doesn’t quite know what to do with. May transitions much more gracefully: Without losing her shortness, a fact that never irked her until Lan Fan quietly pointed out that she couldn’t reach her mouth whether on the tips of her toes or not, May graduates to shopping for B-cups at the end of her sophomore year. She drags Lan Fan with her the night prior to the martial arts tournament; they shift through the aisles of pretty-patterned bras intended for prepubescent girls in need of training wheels for an hour before Lan Fan begs her to give up. They lounge together outside of an ice cream shoppe licking cones—May loves chocolate; Lan Fan foregoes her usual lemon sherbert for a chance at May asking to taste hers—and May laughs at the drip of ice cream plopping from her nose and onto Xiao-Mei’s head, much to the cat’s distance. Lan Fan chuckles. Nervously. May glances at her curiously.
“Are you all right, Lan Fan?”
“F-fine.”
The ice cream cone breaks and gooey chocolate runs over her fingers. Returning with enough napkins to clean a state militia, May cleans her up in the bathroom. “Lan Fan, I have a wager for you.”
Lan Fan splashes water into her face, pretending the heat in her cheeks could be attributed to embarrassment at shattering the cone.
“If you win at the tournament tomorrow, Lan Fan . . .” In the mirror May winks. “I’ll kiss you.”
Lan Fan freezes. The splashed water wets the front of her clothing and by the time she’s grabbed enough papers towels to dry herself off, May is gone along with that damned cat of hers.
A few hours later Lan Fan screams into a pillow; Ling asks if he can take pictures.
At the regional championship the other finalist is a girl maybe a metre and a half high wearing more braids than Lan Fan thought physically possible and adorned with a massive pink sash in her hair that might actually weigh more than the girl herself. The symbol the slight pink girl has selected for herself—or the symbol that some well-meaning adopted parent or deceaed mother picked out on the assumption that it would fit perfectly at a mixed martial art competition in which the girl has entered the category of karate—brings a smile to Lan Fan’s lips for the first time since the day opened and she and her grandfather discovered that the invitation hadn’t lied about the free food. A panda. A pink panda stitched into the back of the white gi in either a sardonic parody or a genuine emulation of pose from that obnoxious ubiquitous Karate Kid film which is startlingly less ubiquitous than it was five years ago.
And abruptly the past and future collide in twisted tangles of what has been and what could be. The search. The meeting. The friendship. The epiphany. The kiss.
The kiss.
But as her grandfather always says, usually with his hand heavy on her shoulder and his fingers pressing just short of painfully on the seam between her collarbone and her neck: She must focus on the present. With said grandfather watching her with his usual closely guarded visage of sternness radiating, along with her best friend and the girl’s adopted father, Lan Fan bows to the bit of a girl. Assumes her stance. Initiates the first contact, as she should have done long ago.
She almost ends up on the ground before ten seconds are up. Then she sweeps the girl’s legs out from under her and out of nowhere it’s no longer a battle at all but a dance, a dance between two maybe-lovers, a dance between two not-girls and not-women who have yet to quite figure out how their bodies go together, and then Lan Fan hears the crowd screaming and she’s won and that’s stupid because you can’t ever win in a dance; you can only lose, when the dance ends and you have to separate. But the announcer shoves the golden victor’s trophy into her slack grip. It clatters to the floor. The noise punctuates Lan Fan’s shock.
The not-as-tiny-anymore girl in pink carries the golden victor’s trophy aloft as though she has won the title of Goddess-Empress of the Universe. And in a way, Lan Fan thinks as she grabs the girl’s shoulders to pull her in for a passionate kiss of mashed lips and sweat-salty tongues and who cares it’s a kiss Lan Fan and May are kissing they’re kissing and it’s sweet and perfect and May or the championship photo, the girl has.
They both have.
(Ling does take pictures. “Someday,” he says, waving the developed photographs to Lan Fan’s blush and May’s grin and her grandfather’s soft smile of approval, “you’ll show these off to your kids and they’ll wonder how you guys were ever not together.”)