HAINAN DAO BOOK I
CHAPTER 09
Where I had arrived in just the one car, it had taken four to bring in my brother. He was already out of his and staring at the gates, by the time the other vehicles in his convoy pulled up and screeched to a stop behind him. Within the clouds of roiling dust, doors burst open, and men began streaming out of their rides, like a fresh catch of fish from a trawler's net.
Dylan whipped around and hollered at his crew. He pointed to his left and right. He barked out orders at a hundred words a second. Nodding, his team responded. They raced off to their assignments and began jotting down notes and snapping pictures of all the buildings in the community.
Dylan. My brother.
The man was an icon misplaced, a lesson in disparity. He stood out from the rest of us like a crane among chickens, as he always did. His clothing, his accessories all screamed the West. The West of the West, actually. From his Playboy sunglasses and Coco Chanel sun visor to the Sony Walkman still clipped to his belt.
“Dylan! Hey Dylan!” I let Biai slide to the ground beside me. I jogged over to where he was standing.
He turned around and recognized me. “Hey! Jimmy!” Reaching out, he clasped me by the shoulder. I winced and he finally registered the sling around my arm. His eyes widened. “What the hell happened to your arm?”
I shrugged. “I fell.”
“Really?”
Wei coughed behind me. I turned around and introduced him. The two men shook hands.
Dylan turned his attention back to me. “So, what happened?”
“Well,” Wei said, cutting in, “I told him, Fuwei, I said…”
“Dylan.” My brother smiled at Wei, but with just one side of his mouth. “Call me Dylan.”
Wei’s eyebrows flicked upward for a second. “Oh.” He reached up and scratched the back of his head. “Okay.”
“Well then…” Dylan began, as he started to turn back toward me.
“Oh, yeah!” said Wei. “Well, you see, Dylan, I was just going to say…”
Dylan spun around. He peered into the other man’s eyes, like he had just caught sight of a spotted giraffe, fully grown, hiding there behind one of Wei’s irises. “Yes?”
Wei blinked a few times. “Well…he…um…” He dropped his gaze. “…he fell.”
Dylan turned back to me, shaking his head a little. He measured me up and down. “So, how did you manage to fall so hard you broke your arm?”
I sighed. I gave him the short version. The one without the reason why I was so interested in the well in the first place. I told him I was fine now.
“Well, that’s good.” He smiled, nodding.
“Yes…!” I nodded back. I glanced at the men that had come with him. “Well, what about you? What are you doing here?”
He frowned, and then started to laugh. “What do you mean? I could ask you the same thing. What are you doing here?”
“Yes, but aren’t you supposed to be stuck in some high power business meeting back in Toronto?”
He shook his head. “No. Found out something more important.”
“Oh?”
He squinted his eyes in the brightening morning light. “I’ll tell you later.” His gaze wandered over the crowd that had gathered. “So, are you sure you’re all right? Do you need to get some rest or something?”
“No, I’m all right. Don’t worry about me.” I took a step back and sized him up. All sporty and spiffy in his shorts and runners. Hugo Boss, if I wasn’t mistaken. You could tell their shorts, because they were always so…long. I smiled at him. “You’re looking good. How have you been? I haven’t seen you since…actually, since we ran into each other in Mark’s office the other day.”
“Yeah. Hey, I’m sorry about that, by the way. I didn’t mean to run out so quick that time.”
“That’s all right. I’m sure you had your reasons. You’ve always been a very busy man.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Like dad, I guess.” He indicated the buildings that surrounded us. “Can you believe this?”
“You mean the village?”
He nodded again. “Can you imagine the money it cost him to rebuild all of this?”
One of his men approached and interrupted us. He whispered something into Dylan’s ear. My brother nodded. He indicated for the man to lead the way, and then began to follow him.
“Hey,” Dylan called to me over his shoulder, “you want to come along?”
I began making my way after them. “Where are we going?”
“Come on.”
I checked behind me, but Wei and Biai had already disappeared into the crowd. I shrugged and followed after my brother.
As we marched through the corridors, I could see Dylan’s men stalking out of the buildings, still scribbling away at their notepads. All of them, in turn, came up to him and showed him what they had found.
“What are you looking for?” I asked him.
“I’m just assessing the value of the place in general.” He turned and regarded the group of children still trailing after us. “Say, do you know where I could go and get a drink of water?”
I nodded. “This way.”
Dylan nodded and followed me, while his men stayed behind, continuing on with their work. The children though, did tag along behind us to as far as the doors to our building but stopped just outside them.
I led my brother back to my room. I poured him a drink from my water bottle. We sauntered over to the balcony and looked out. Down on ground level, the children were still gathered, though just milling about, doubtless waiting for us to come downstairs again.
“So, what are you doing here?” I asked him.
“Same thing you’re doing here.” He leaned out over the edge, resting his elbows on the railing.
“And what’s that?”
“You tell me.”
I frowned. “Look. I’m only here for a short vacation.” Slipping my arm out of the sling, I tested it, moving it around slowly. “What with Dad and everything, I thought I should at least come here and have a look at the place where he grew up.”
Dylan laughed. He turned around. “Don’t give me that. Vacation? Come on, you’re not fooling anyone. We both know why you’re here. Why we’re both here.”
I stopped stretching out my arm and turned to face him. I smiled and laughed a little. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Shaking his head, he crossed his arms in front of his chest and frowned at me.
I turned away and strode off toward a cupboard on the far wall. “You want something to eat? Are you hungry? I think I might have some crackers in here some place…”
“I wish you would stop that. It’s wearing a little thin.”
I stopped. I stood still.
Bringing the cupboard doors to a close, I snapped them tight. I turned around. “What?”
He glared at me.
“What?”
He looked away.
I stamped my way back and bore my gaze into him. “What is the matter with you? What is this thing that you keep going on about? Like I was here on a secret mission or something.”
He kept his eyes focused into the distance. Breezes swept across the landing below and climbed up to our balcony to ruffle his hair. It brought dust into my eyes. I blinked it away.
“I don’t know what you’re yapping about,” I said. “You’ve been talking strange ever since you got here. Must be something you ate.”
He turned back to me slowly. He regarded me with a tilted smile hanging off the corner of his mouth. “You’re here for the money too. And don’t say you’re not.”
“Money?” I frowned. “What money?”
“Jimmy, you can tell me the truth. It’s okay. I won’t think any less of you.”
I shook my head.
“In fact, I think it’s good that you’re here. I like it. It’s a good idea. I know you’ve always behaved as if money didn’t matter to you.” He shrugged. “Thinking back now, sometimes I even believed you. But I think you should make an exception in this case. This one is different. After all, it’s partly yours too.”
“What is? What is partly mine?”
He sighed. He set himself down on a three-legged stool by the side of the railing. “Okay. If you want to do it this way, fine. Let’s pretend neither one of us knows anything.”
I sat down on the floor next to him.
“Let’s start from the beginning,” he said. “First, you must know that Dad had always maintained a series of factories.”
I nodded. “Of course. Everyone knows that.”
“He also had other business ventures, stocks, land holdings.”
“I know. He did well for himself. He prospered. So?”
“So, it’s no secret how we lived when we were growing up. We never bought anything fancy or expensive. None of us went to private school. We never took any trips. Hell, we didn’t even have a car in the family for the first five years.”
“No one knew how to drive.”
He shook his head. “That’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
“The point is…!” He stopped himself. He rolled his eyes. “The point is, Dad made a lot of money. And I mean a lot of money.”
“Yeah?”
“But it never made it to us.”
“We were always comfortable. We were never poor.”
“No, but we could have been even more comfortable and we weren’t. The old man was practically bathing in it, and we saw nothing. Doesn’t that sound unfair to you?”
“First of all, we all got our inheritance, so it wasn’t really nothing. Second, what are you talking about? Fair? Where does fair come into it? It was his money, after all, he could do what he wanted with it. Besides, how do I even know what you’re saying is true…?”
He shook his head. “I’m not going to argue with you about that. I know I’m right.”
“But…”
“The old man was making oodles and oodles and oodles. Now. The question is, where is that money, Jimmy? Where did it go?”
“So, tell me. Where did it go?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “And that’s why I’m here. To find that out.”
I glanced around, at the village, at the renovations. “You think he spent it here, don’t you?”
He followed my gaze. He nodded. “Some of it. But it couldn’t possibly account for all of his savings. The Hong Kong dollar goes a long way here in this place. Even with the renovations to the old house, restorations and repairs, even if he gave free money to everyone in the village, it wouldn’t begin to count for a drop in the bucket. There has to be lots more. Somewhere.”
Someone knocked on the door. I went and opened it, and in rushed Wei with Tangshu close behind. The older man was short of breath but smiling. He trotted over to the balcony. Still breathing hard, he removed his hat and shook Dylan’s hand when I made the introductions.
“Well!” cried Tangshu in Putong. He flicked his eyes back and forth between the two of us. “This is indeed a great event in the village! Two sons of the lord Yixi among us!”
Dylan smiled and looked at me with a query on his brow. “Lord…?”
I waved him off. “Never mind.”
Tangshu began asking Dylan about the purpose of his visit, and what he might be able to do to help him. He said that if only he had known about it ahead of time, he could have come to pick him up at the airport, or even show him around town. It was the least he could do, since he was our paternal uncle, after all.
“Uncle?” asked Dylan.
“Yes,” said Tangshu. “You see, your father’s Yeye, your Taiye, was my father’s father!”
Dylan frowned. “Is that right?”
“Yes! So your father and I are brothers!” The old man wrapped an arm across Dylan’s shoulder and began leading him toward the door.
“What the hell is he talking about?” Dylan asked Wei in English, as he allowed himself to be herded along.
“Well, you see…” began Wei.
“So,” Tangshu cut in, “my mother is really your father’s auntie…!”
The three of them stepped over the threshold together and were gone.
Meanwhile, I had stayed where I was. I didn’t want to go with them. I didn’t follow them out the door, and for their part, they hadn’t even noticed. The last thing that I heard Tangshu say as their voices trailed off down the stairwell was, “There is someone I want you to meet…”
I shook my head and smiled. I knew Dylan, though. I wasn’t worried. He’ll take the news like a man.
After they left, I took some time to clean myself up and then rested a little, sitting up in my bed and reading from the novel that I had brought with me. I must have drifted off. When I woke, I saw that they still hadn’t returned. I felt hungry so I helped myself to some food from the kitchen downstairs, and only then did I check my watch and realized that I had slept through the entire afternoon. Shaking my head, I headed off for the well to get myself a drink of water. I strolled up to the filling station. I replenished my water bottle. After taking a long draft from it, I screwed the top back on and sat down on the wall that was the edge of the village well.
I glanced around. My eyebrows shot up as I realized something. For the first time in days, there wasn’t a crowd huddled all around me. I had come to the well all by myself and had drunk my fill in peace. No followers. No entourage.
Taking another swig from my bottle, I turned around again and figured out what had happened to my missing groupies.
I saw my brother coming back in the distance. Neither Tangshu nor Wei was there with him, but everyone else was. All the children in the village were waddling after him like newly hatched ducklings. As he wandered from one building to the next, with his visor in one hand and his Walkman in the other, the children stalked him like a horde of locusts and giggled and laughed at him as they went. One phrase was repeated over and over again in their muttering, ‘Dai ga sui, dai ga sui’.
I smiled. That one, I knew too. ‘Big butt’.
Dylan came up to the watering hole and bent his head beneath the faucet. He ran the water so it soaked his hair and ran down his neck. He shook out some of it, splashing me, and the children laughed. He began trudging his way back to the village.
I fell in step beside him. “So, did you find out what you needed to?”
He nodded. “I got enough to get me started.”
I glanced around. “Where are Wei and Tangshu?”
“They had a few preparations to make for this evening.”
I nodded. Sighing, I clasped my hands behind my back and peered deeply into my brother’s face, searching for a reaction. “Did they take you to meet the man?”
“Uh-huh.” He kept his squint on the path in the distance.
I frowned. “You don’t look a bit surprised.”
He shrugged. “I’m not.”
“You’re not?”
“No. I’m not.” He sighed. “First of all, I think I knew Dad enough to know that he was capable. Plus the fact that I had managed to find out a few things before I came.”
“Like what?”
“Like the fact that I already had an older brother through another marriage.”
I blew the hair out of my eyes. “So, that makes absolutely everyone then…”
He turned his gaze upon me. “You look a little peeved.”
I flared my eyes at him. “And you don’t.”
He smiled and slapped me on the back. “Come on! What’s the big deal? So the old man had another wife, another family, so what? Lots of people are like that now.”
“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “I don’t know what it is. I guess I’m just too old fashioned. Behind the times. And it certainly didn’t help to find out about it this way.” I told him how Tangshu had just marched me into the room.
“I see,” said Dylan. “Did he ask you too?”
“Did who ask me what?”
“Did Fuhwa ask you to stay and help out? On the Island?”
I shook my head. “Not in so many words. Why? Did he ask you?”
“Yes. He just did. He said his health is failing. He doesn’t know how long he’s going to last. He was hoping that someone who is in the family, someone that people can still look up to and listen to might come and oversee things.”
“So, what did you tell him?”
“No, of course!” He tossed his head back and laughed. “Can you imagine me, being stuck for any period of time on this ass backwardness of an Island?”
I frowned and nodded.
“What? Did you say yes?”
“Me? No! Of course not. He hasn’t even asked me yet, remember?” I shrugged. “Not to say that he would…”
“Oh, I have a feeling he will, though. I can just feel it.”
I shrugged again.
“Don’t tell me you’d actually consider it?”
My eyes widened. “No, no. I mean, why on Earth would I even think about something like that?”
“Right.”
“It’s not as if I had a good reason to stay. It’s not like I’m Dad or something.”
“Dad…” He shook his head absently. “Crazy old kook. Always had to have something brewing somewhere”
“Right.”
“Even after he’s dead, he’s still full of surprises.”
I snorted, shaking my head. “Yeah. But a whole village…!”
He dropped his gaze down to the ground. “And not just a village…”
I turned to him. “What? What do you mean?”
He smiled and kept his eyes in the dirt. “Nothing…”
“What?”
He turned his eyes up at me slowly, and I knew his mind was made up.
“No, Jimmy. Not yet. I want to be sure before I tell you.”
“Tell me now.”
“No.”
“Why?”
He smiled at me. “Damn.” He tossed his head back and laughed. “Look at you. Same old impatience. Just like Dad.”
I frowned.
“You know? You are quite a lot like him. Has anyone ever told you?”
I shrugged.
“Well, you are. But then again, so am I. I guess we’re all a little bit like him. Can’t help it, I suppose.”
Dylan headed off for his room. He called to me over his shoulder. “I’ll see you tonight with the mayor, right?”
I called out to him as he trudged away. “Mayor?”
***
I found Wei. He told me that we were supposed to go to dinner with the mayor tonight.
“I’m not going to no dinner tonight.” I crossed my arms.
“Please! You must go! It would not be proper…”
We argued. In the end, I told Wei it was all right, because Dylan would be there. Wei regarded me like I was wearing a hippo on my head. I told him to tell the mayor that I was sick.
“He will never believe me,” Wei said.
“Sure, he will. Just tell him.”
“He will want to come visit you.”
“No, he won’t.”
“But…”
“So what if he does? Just don’t let him.”
“But he will want to know why you will not see him.”
I rolled my eyes. “What is the problem? Dylan will go. It will be the same.”
He shook his head. “No, it will not. Dylan is the younger brother; you are the first-born. He should meet with you.”
“It will be the same thing.”
“No, it will not.”
“Don’t argue with me. And besides, I’ve made up my mind. I’m not going.”
He hung his head as he shook it. “Where will you be, then?”
“I am not going to tell you. If I do, you will come look for me. In fact, I don’t even know where I’ll be. I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
I felt a little sorry for Wei. I didn’t mean to be so hard on him. And I’m sure he meant well. It would have been a great honour for him to have sat beside me at that table.
I don’t know what it is, but I’ve always hated that sort of get-together. We have a saying for it, though I don’t know if there is an equivalent term in English. We call them, ‘political dinners’. I don’t like political dinners.
Wei huffed and spun around, heading for the door. “I don’t know what it is with you people.” He waved his hands in the air. “I will speak to your brother, and then he will speak to you. He will have to talk some sense into you.”
I watched him go.
As soon as I saw him leave, I sprinted out myself and hunted down the fellow I saw that night at the movie. Fuguang. Yes, that was his name. I told him that I wanted to see the sights on the Island.
“Now?” He scratched his head.
“Yes…”
“But what about…?”
“Come on!” I looped my arm over his shoulder and dragged him after me to the front gates. The door to Wei’s car was unlocked. We jumped in. Fishing around inside, we found the car keys hidden behind the driver side visor. I shoved them into the ignition, started the car and whipped out of there before anybody else could slow us down.