The Ninja and the Diplomat, page 5
part #2 of The Chinese Spymaster Series
“Yes,” he acknowledged, knowing that only one person had his number.
“Those devices must be delivered immediately and then the man from Taiwan must be dealt with. Can you do both? The man will be in place in four days, perhaps five.”
“I can attend to both errands,” affirmed the ninja although he thought delivering the eleven nuclear devices in four days would stretch their resources.
As if reading his thoughts, the man on the phone assured him, “Take whatever money you need to rent the trucks or planes necessary. Dealing with the man is not essential, but I want very much to give his master plenty to think about. I assume the cargo bound for the Philippines has already left.”
“Yes, on a very fast yacht. The owner is rich and greedy. He even had the proper documents for docking. They are forged, of course, but will smooth the landing and unloading in Manila.”
“Very well,” chuckled the voice on the phone. “Till we meet again.”
***
I still remember my seventh birthday. The beautiful lady said she had seen me earlier but it was on that birthday that I noticed her, taller than almost everybody at the orphanage. She had brought treats for us all. Later, I learned from the others that she had been coming once or twice a month to visit the smaller children. She had brought toys and then she got permission to give us treats. Once a month, everyone with a birthday could celebrate and she would bring cakes and sweets. On my birthday, she brought us boxes of different mochi. My favorite were those with red bean filling. I chewed them carefully in small bites and made each last so I could savor the sticky rice and the natural sweetness of the red beans in the paste.
I shared what I received with my roommate. Everyone called him Dummy because he could not speak and was never called on in school. He and I had shared the same tiny room, our beds though small almost touched each other, for as long as I could remember. He was bigger than me. I learned from the staff that he was two years older, and we had been brought there in the same week. The orphanage took us just after we learned to go to the bathroom by ourselves. I knew he could understand what everyone said even though he often pretended he was deaf as well. My earliest memories of him were of the nights during which he would cry himself to sleep. It was nearly a year before the crying stopped. The women who looked after us were not unkind but they always had so much to do, cooking and cleaning and all the other things. It was nearly a year later, almost my eighth birthday, before someone learned which month was Dummy’s birthday so he could receive his own mochi from the lady.
The first time I received my present, she pointed out the ones filled with coconut. I did not know what coconuts were, but she did not laugh at me. She explained that they grew all over islands in the South Sea and were a treat in Taiwan where she had grown up.
I thought she smelled nice but I did not tell her this because I was too shy. When I thought about it again later, I decided I would tell her on my next birthday. It would be my present to her and I could think about it for a whole year to get ready.
On my eighth birthday, she smiled as she gave me the box of mochi.
“Do you like the coconut filled ones?” she asked.
I admitted that I had gotten accustomed to the crunchy coconut and begun to like the exotic creamy taste. But I told her that I loved the red bean filling best.
“Me too,” she laughed. “But the coconut will always remind me of my old home. Japan is my home now.”
“I like the way you smell,” I told her.
She laughed a happy and embarrassed Japanese-style laugh and said, “That is a nice compliment. Women often wear special scents and what I wear is something that my husband gave me when we first met. It is called Shalimar and comes from a country far away called France.”
“Why doesn’t your husband come with you?” I asked.
“He is very busy,” she said, “We do not yet have any children.” She looked a little sad when she told me that. I was glad I told her she smelled nice.
Her visits were happy times for all of us. I noticed that she always had a kind word for all the children and that she also brought gifts for those who worked at the orphanage. This was a word I learned around that time. No one else said it with such kindness.
I soon noticed that the word was corrupted into a bad word, insulting and obscene, at the school where we met other, ‘normal,’ children. By my ninth birthday, I had been suspended from school because of it. I wasn’t the only one suspended but I had caused the trouble at the school and that resulted in many students being punished.
As she gave me the long awaited box of mochi she asked, “Can you tell me about the trouble at school?”
“There are six of us from the orphanage that go to the same class at school,” I told her. “The smartest student in the class had recently been recognized and she was from the orphanage. Some of the others at the school were angry about this. Ten of them, all boys and some older than we were, stopped us from leaving one day and started to pull the girl’s hair and spat on her. I told them to stop. That started the fighting.”
“Didn’t any of the adults do anything?” asked the Lady.
“The language teacher did,” I said. “He actually spoke up for us with the principal, but the parents of the boys later came together and complained.”
“So you were suspended,” she said.
“Yes, I replied. “I also heard that the teacher who defended us would be leaving the school at the end of the school year. Those of us who were suspended, the six of us, would be sent to a different school next year. One in a poorer neighborhood.”
I was afraid that the lady would stop coming to visit, but she continued. In fact, she told me that her husband might come to my tenth birthday. I was surprised to hear that, but on my tenth birthday, there he was. He was slightly taller than her; I wondered if I would grow to be as tall as him. He looked stern. That was the look I caught when I looked directly at him during the party festivities. For some reason, I did not look away but continued to look him in the eye until suddenly he smiled. It did not give me the joy that her smiles did, but it gave me confidence. I felt that if he approved, I could achieve big things. That year, the lady stopped giving me any mochi except those with red-bean filling.
The girl from the orphanage who had been in the fight at school killed herself in the third month at the new school. She had found her way to a bridge over some trains and jumped in front of one. Nobody at school or at the orphanage said anything. I felt that if anyone at school had said anything I would have fought that person to the death. That was what I told the lady, I feel that there would be no honor not to do so.
The lady cried.
“Have I said something bad?” I asked.
She shook her head and said, “I am crying because the girl killed herself. Maybe if I had shown her more love, she would not have done that.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
The beautiful lady said, “It is very important to show compassion to others so that they do not feel hopeless in this world.”
I found that difficult to understand.
One day at school, the language teacher from our old school showed up. He looked tired. They said he had a difficult time finding a school that would take him. I was happy to see him but we both pretended not to know each other. Then some weeks later, just after school, he spoke to me about the lady and her husband. He asked in a low voice, “Would you like to leave the orphanage to be with them?”
“Yes,” I said also in a low voice with my heart pounding.
“It must be done today and you must do it alone,” the teacher said. I nodded.” You must turn into the side street where the garbage containers stand, before reaching the orphanage, and get into a black car. Now I must go back to the school to make sure I am seen grading papers in a room the teachers share as their office.”
My heart pounded despite my determination to run away from that life. In the black car, I found the lady in very different clothes. She said it was her ‘disguise.’ In the years to come, I would learn the many meanings of the word. That night her husband explained they were taking me away even though they were not my real father and mother. I understood that. All the children at the orphanage hoped to be taken away but no one had ever come for any of us, until now.
The next ten years were the happiest of my life. We lived in small towns far north of Tokyo. The Yamato family claimed me as its own son (my father had ways to produce the required documents) and I was accepted into the local schools. When they finally decided on a place to live, they built a house, and my father let me help the builders. The local martial arts teachers taught me everything they could and my father brought home from the big city videos of Chinese and Korean as well as Japanese masters. I watched these over and over. My mother warned me never to outshine the other children or embarrass my teachers with moves I learned on my own and it became a game for me to conceal my abilities in contests.
For my twentieth birthday, we all went into the big city and my father led us into a small mochi factory. “I bought it last month,” he said. “You can have anything and everything in it.”
I remembered my mother’s lesson in modesty and took only what would fit in a medium sized box, mostly the cakes with red bean paste but also a few with coconut, and some with green bean paste.
“Take some of those with the black (sesame) seed paste,” urged the man in charge of the factory. “Those are our specialty.” They were indeed the best. I had to admit to myself they were better than those with red bean paste. Every year after that, the shop would deliver a box of red bean and black sesame mochi to my office.
My father asked me to help him in the big city and I was glad to have different people to work with. I was delighted to find my former language teacher working for my father in the same building. We were kept busy so I did not speak much with him. But I did not like some of the rough and loud men who were also there.
“These men are necessary for my business,” said father. “But it would be best not to discuss them or what they do in front of your mother.”
She never asked so I never knew what she thought. I noticed that she showed more sadness and spent more time visiting the local temple and others near our town. There never was a child born to them and I knew this grieved her. Often when I came back from the big city I would find her in pain. Father insisted several times that she go into the big city to visit special doctors. She died before my twenty-fifth birthday, just before I killed for the first time at my father’s request.
There had been others killed before by the rough and loud men. They preferred to use guns and knives and chains. One of them showed me a throwing knife and taught me how to use it. I never showed him what I learned to do with such a wonderful instrument, especially when I discovered the star-shaped ninja throwing knives. My father approved of my methods and would increasingly send me instead of his regular ‘soldiers.’ Fortunately for us, none of them were ambitious men.
“My own father and mother disowned me and threw me out of the family business when I married your mother,” my father explained. “As a matter of honor, I refused to compete against my family business. There was a vast empire, however, shared among many men called yakuza, the crime lords.”
I do not understand why he tried to do these things. To me those who would not accept my mother as she was did not deserve to breathe the same air as she. My father must have suspected me of these feelings but he never had cause to doubt my loyalty to him.
But I have sensed a growing distance between us since my mother died. I felt I should revere him as Master and have called him that. But he doesn’t approve and insists that I call him father as if nothing has changed in the last five or fifteen years. Nothing can change what I owe him, but only she made me feel like part of their family.
My father did things and made me help him in causing harm and ruining lives as well as businesses. He did not indulge in meaningless cruelty, like boys pulling the legs or wings off insects and small creatures. But he was pitiless. Often I was simply the messenger or agent to make contact with or deliveries to his businesses and his far-flung contacts with strange groups. They were dissidents or separatists in China, their supporters anywhere, and the Chinese pro-democracy groups, or Japanese overseas. I know he would not have done some of these things if Mother had been around.
Contents
CHAPTER 6
First Wednesday, Beijing
The dream was more vivid than ever.
The muffled roar of the dragons was very real, even though I had never heard them before and never believed in the existence of dragons. The roars were muffled in the dream, it was clear to me, because each dragon had its mouth firmly clamped on the other’s tail.
Diplomats are supposed to have visions and dream dreams. We are supposed to envision more or less friendly alliances or conquests. We routinely visualize a place for ourselves or our motherland on the world stage. I have indulged in these imaginary states. Often they were, frankly speaking, dull exercises in working out the logical implications of taking one view as opposed to another. Do we sell rice or gunpowder or not to such and such a nation?
Never have I had a vision or dream remotely like this. This was the stuff of fables, hallucinations, or nightmares: A red dragon and a white dragon, eating each other. They started at their respective tail and then simultaneously swallowed each other as depicted in comic books or fairy tales. Poof. I had never dreamed my visions would originate from cartoons or farcical comic books.
This dream started after Father's death two years ago, recurring every month or so since then. He died as a hero of the revolution, an authenticated veteran of the Long March. Before he was fourteen, he walked from Shandong to Jiangxi to join the First Army of the Chinese Communists. He never said how he found his way to the army headquarters with all the Nationalists and local warlords roaming the countryside. He did not like to talk about this but he must have looked like all the other lost or abandoned children.
Anyway, he found the army and volunteered. He dug latrines, emptied chamber pots, helped carry sedan chairs in which the leaders were transported, and delivered messages to the front lines. He killed his first opponent with a sharpened stick because ammunition was too scarce to be given out to messengers. The commanders noticed that and soon made him a regular soldier.
My father told me this story on several occasions: “Fifteen years after I left my home village, I marched with Mao into Beijing and the proclamation of the People’s Republic.” This was the only story he would tell willingly about his past and whenever he spoke of it I could feel the thrill of success, of a huge struggle to victory, and I could smell the fireworks, acrid and glorious. Nearly thirty years old by then, he delayed marrying further until the revolution was fully established all the way out to Tibet.
By then he could have had his pick of any general's daughter, my mother often told me. Instead, he went back to his home village near Shandong and found a family he knew, courted their youngest daughter who had been conceived towards the end of the war. My mother told me this proudly when father refused to discuss his past with his adolescent son.
Mother turned out to be Father's match in force of will even though she acknowledged his place as head of household. His brother followed the Nationalists, and she urged him not to associate with him or mention him in our house. He would corrupt our family name.
Father knew this and decided on the simple expedient of not telling her about our meeting with Older Uncle and my cousin. It was around the time China briefly invaded Vietnam a few years after it had driven the Americans out. Ostensibly, the invasion was to protect Cambodia, but in reality China’s action would show the Soviet Union it could not protect its ally, its client state, Vietnam. Father explained, “You must learn to distinguish between shadows and reality; after you finish university in China, we will send you to France like my old comrades Zhou and Deng.”
We met Older Uncle and my cousin in Bangkok, then beginning to show the deleterious effect of the decision by the Thais to close and build roads over the canals originally planned to cool the city. Our Thai hosts were particularly proud to show us the gold Buddha of Wat Traimit, the largest in the world made of solid gold and weighing five and a half tons, and the amazing Emerald Buddha of Wat Phra Keuw. This Buddha was much smaller than its golden counterpart but it and the temple were exquisite. Father huffed and puffed about meaningless idols; I knew nothing then about the power of symbols or of the devotion that could move men to create such costly and refined artifacts. Older Uncle spoke of the superior quality of the treasures of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan; I knew enough not to retort that practically all of their holdings had been looted from various museums and shrines on the mainland.
I wanted to visit the university and was invited to attend a seminar at which several visiting experts spoke about Social Justice. Afterwards, I was invited by the Thai students to have tea and snacks. They spoke freely, to my amazement, and openly made fun of a brilliant expert. “Too bad he could not explain his ideas,” they said. While another participant at the seminar had been very eloquent, they all laughed and said together, “But HE had nothing to say.” I learned that the Thais were most unusual in their candor and sense of humor.
Cousin Yu, who had been to Bangkok before, showed me around the sights and that evening we wandered some of the streets with food stalls. The boulevards in Bangkok, I discovered were as broad and long as those in Beijing. I had my first taste of charbroiled chicken eaten with a fantastic sauce conjured out of chilies, garlic, vinegar and sugar. There was more to the chicken too, but only much later did I learn of the magical properties of lemongrass.
