In mere minutes, it seems, the entire city has found out you’ve arrived. Everyone stops and turns their heads, eyes following you as you pass. I’m scared to stop walking, but within an hour we’re both starving, and when we pass a cart of fried, flaky lotus seed cakes sizzling in oil, we can’t help but stop. The hawker, upon seeing you, stuffs a bag with far more cakes than we could possibly eat but refuses to take our silver. I leave a few coins on his cart, but he runs after us. He won’t leave us alone until I let him return the coins to my palm.
“Please,” he says. He smells like sugar. His eyes look wet and red around the rims. “It’s the least I can do.”
A small crowd has gathered around us to watch. I suddenly feel sweaty. I don’t know what to do. Father instructed me not to seek special treatment, afraid that the crowds might think we were exploiting our position. Baffled, I glance at you.
“Thank you,” you tell the hawker, and keep walking.
I stuff my money pouch back in my pocket and follow.
The crowd stays with us and grows us as we make our way through the canals. You don’t seem to mind. You’re good at deflecting attention; you, who are so used to receiving it. You stare straight ahead as we walk, never baiting your audience, never giving your onlookers reason to jeer. You hold your back straight, chin forward, your expression pleasant and placid as if you haven’t noticed the crowd at all.
When someone shouts to ask if you’re scared—where did that voice come from? Who was it? I’ll kill them—you only blink, smile, and shake your head.
“Have one, jiejie.” You pass me a lotus seed cake. “They’re still warm.”
You were never an ordinary child.
Everyone on Ao Island knew you were special from the day you were born. You came out perfectly silent with a full head of thick black hair, breathing evenly, your lovely dark eyes roving disdainfully around the room as if you were disappointed in everyone else for making such a fuss. The midwife wouldn’t accept her full payment because you’d given her so little to do.
You were a slender and graceful toddler, and you only became more achingly elegant as you grew, limbs light and delicate as a bird’s. The rest of us have sun-browned skin the shade of coconuts, but yours gleams pale like porcelain, like moonlight. By the time you were three, your hair had grown down to your waist, and it stayed that way because Mama couldn’t bear to snip those thick, silky locks that braided so easily and never frizzed after it rained, like mine.
By the time you were ten, you were praised as the beauty of the village. Yet you never grew spoiled or proud. We never had to remind you to be humble. You possessed myriad virtues, and humility was one of them. You accepted our praise with grave gratitude, reacting no more than a mountain might to being called grand.
“She’s going to break hearts someday,” said all our neighbors, and our parents agreed.
Not only were you beautiful; you were astonishingly clever. You could recite Tang classics after hearing them only once. You could calculate sums faster than any of us before you turned nine. Mama and Baba hired a tutor to teach you classics and advanced arithmetic, subjects meant for young men attempting to become government officials, an expense that was never spared for me. When you excelled even at that, our parents began suggesting you might try to test into a university on the mainland, even though half of them still don’t accept women.
She’ll marry a prince. She’ll become the first woman court scholar. She’ll make our island famous. Everyone loved to fantasize about what you might do and become because the possibilities seemed so endless.
But you never spoke about your future at all.
“Jiejie?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think the Dragon is like?”
I can’t suppress a flinch.
You know the story of the dragon and the fisherman. You’ve heard infinite variations of it throughout your short life, from our parents, aunts, uncles, friends, and teachers. Everyone tells it differently, because everyone wants to believe something different.
There are only three constants. A dragon. A grotto. A fisherman.
You heard Baba’s version this morning before we left in our sampan. Once upon a time, there was a village dying of drought. The ground shriveled and cracked. The birds flew away and left the forests silent. The grain stores dwindled and disappeared. Facing imminent starvation, the villagers sent their priests to the Dragon Lord who ruled the waters from the grotto in the Nine Curves River and begged him for rain. They offered the Dragon many things—jade statuettes, piles of silver, intricately painted wall scrolls, flocks of chickens and herds of goats. All the valuables the village possessed. The Dragon was not satisfied. Desperate, the priests asked the Dragon to name his price.
“I am hungry,” said the Dragon.
“We will prepare you a great feast,” said the priests. “All our finest delicacies—”
“I am not hungry for animal flesh,” said the Dragon. “I crave a rarer meat. If you want rain, you will provide it.”
The priests stared at the Dragon in horror. “We cannot force our own to do this.”
“Then don’t,” said the Dragon. “My meal must come willingly. Fear spoils the taste. I will only accept a volunteer.”
The priests, after hours of squabbling, could not decide who should sacrifice their lives for the village. They drew lots, but the loser refused to go, claiming he was too old, that his flesh would be too dry and chewy. At last, an old fisherman, who had ferried the priests to the Dragon’s grotto and back, interrupted them and volunteered to go in their stead.
“I die, or my daughters die,” he said, when the priests expressed their amazement. “It is that simple.”
So the village was saved.
The priests told you a different version. Once upon a time, on a dying island, the starving village priests visited the Dragon Lord, who had until now blessed them with heavy rains, and asked him what was wrong.
“I grow weak,” said the Dragon. “I am old. My spirit withers, and I cannot rule this grotto any longer. One of you must take my place. You will have power over the rains, rivers, and oceans. But you must stay in this grotto, which is the source of my power. You may never leave.”
In this version, too, the fisherman volunteers, even though he has two young daughters whom he will miss dearly. A year after he enters the grotto, his wife brings their daughters to the cave to visit him. But by then the fisherman’s hair has receded; his teeth have lengthened and sharpened, and his skin has turned to glittering blue scales. The girls scream and run away at first sight. They never visit their father again.
The priests told you this version, I think, because they think it is kinder. I hate it.
I think for a long while, and then I tell you my version.
“I think the Dragon is lonely. I think he wants a friend. He does so much for us: warding away hurricanes, bringing us rain, calming the oceans. He deserves a companion.”
You mull this for a moment. “So he doesn’t eat the tributes?”
“Why would he? Down in the ocean, with all those fish and turtles and shrimp to catch? The Dragon can have shark fin soup whenever he wants. Why on earth would you want to eat humans?” I pinch your shoulder. “Who in their right mind would want to eat you, skinny?”