The Nine Fold Heaven. Mingmei Yip

special gratitude for the friends who have given me needed encouragement and support, especially Teryle Ciacica, Eugenia Oi Yan Yau, and her husband, Jose Santos.

      Dear Reader,

      This is a work of fiction, set in 1930s Shanghai and Hong Kong, a relatively lawless time. It was a time of extremes—from sybaritic luxury to abject poverty. I have tried to describe both extremes: the indulgences of the rich and the plight of the poor. Actually, for those at both levels life was full of dangers.

      The rich were often involved in corruption, but others were always trying to usurp their place, either by guile or by murder. Those without money were treated as expendable, particularly the many children abandoned to orphanages. Some passages in what follows are disturbing, but they are based on actual travelers’ observations. Unfortunately, similar conditions still exist in some parts of the world. But I also feel that conditions in the world will not improve unless we face them honestly.

      But there are always some who overcome even the worst of circumstances. I like to write about those women throughout history who overcame their misfortunes and, like the dragon, “soared to the nine fold heaven.”

      Pursue profit and advantage,

      Seize the moment

      This is the winning strategy.

      The way of war is the way of deception.

      —The Art of War, Sunzi (ca. 544–496 BC)

      Looking for you a thousand times in the dense crowd,

       I turn, and your face suddenly appears under the fading light.

      —“Lantern Festival,” Xin Qiji (1140–1207)

      PART ONE

      Prologue

      Three months ago, I was singing to loud applause in a Shanghai nightclub; a few days later, I became unexpectedly wealthy. But immediately I fled Shanghai in a fusillade of bullets to hide out in a run-down apartment in Hong Kong.

      In the British Crown Colony, my days were calm, but my nights were troubled—not by bullets but by dreams. When I slept, my baby kept disturbing me, either running on his chubby little feet or babbling to himself. But I had never met him in this life, my little treasure whom I had called Jinjin, meaning “Handsome Handsome.” In my mind he looked just like his father, Jinying, “Handsome Hero,” whom I had left behind in Shanghai and whose face rose up before me—bleeding, scared, abandoned.

      As I looked back over my life, though I had known only twenty Springs and Autumns, it seemed to stretch out endlessly behind me, filled with treachery and loss.

      I’d led a double life, but not by my choosing. I was the singer Camilla, known to Shanghai’s beautiful people as the Heavenly Songbird. But while admired by my fans for my freshness and innocence, I was secretly a spy assigned to send Shanghai’s number one gangster boss Master Lung to the Yellow Springs. For my real boss was Big Brother Wang, head of Shanghai’s Red Demons gang, who had “rescued” me from the Compassionate Grace Orphanage—but only to prepare me for this fatal mission.

      Orphaned when I was four years old, the word love had been torn out from the dictionary of my life. From my first days with Big Brother Wang, I was trained to charm others but to have no emotions myself, as befits a cold-blooded murderess, assigned to eliminate Wang’s arch enemy, Master Lung of the Flying Dragons gang.

      But despite all the effort put into my training, love had somehow tiptoed into my life. Whether this was heaven’s gift or punishment, I could not tell.

      It happened because of Lung Jinying, the son of the man I was to assassinate and the father of our little Jinjin. Now they had both vanished from my life. Was this heaven’s plan—to give me a taste of the sweetness of life, only to snatch it back? Or was it karma for something I’d done in a forgotten past life?

      Most of all, I was anxious to know the situation and whereabouts of my lover Jinying, and our son, Jinjin—if he was still in this life or already departed for the next. And, too, there was Master Lung’s bodyguard and my other lover Gao. He had taken a bullet for me and, after the shoot-out at Master Lung’s villa where I’d taken the gangster boss’s money, brought me to the ship that had carried me to safety in Hong Kong. Had he survived, or had he lost everything because of me?

      All these events in Shanghai were as in a past life. My twenty-year life now seemed unreal to me, like a movie. Was I about to leave the theater forever?

      But three months after I’d made my escape, I decided to go back to Shanghai to find out.

      In Shanghai, I was a multifaceted diamond glittering before my enthusiastic audiences, but now I felt like a street rat chased by people wielding sticks and knives.... I knew that I had stepped onto a path of no return. I now had not just one enemy, but two, and they were no ordinary enemies, but the two most notoriously relentless gangsters in lawless Shanghai.

      1

      My Fate on a Piece of Paper

      After I decided to go back to Shanghai where I’d run away from, planned to do something that I’d never done before: go to a Buddhist temple to pray for my safe trip to Shanghai and an equally safe one back. Although I was not a superstitious person, I needed to rest my mind and pacify my heart. After all, I was a fugitive from two gangs and a criminal in the eyes of the law.

      However, I knew well these matters would not be decided by my praying, no matter how sincere or urgent, but my dark karma—which so far was as bad as a rotten apple.

      The Pure Light Temple was remotely situated in Diamond Hill on the Kowloon peninsula. I chose this small temple so as to minimize my chance of being recognized. However, I doubted any monks or nuns read gossip news—even in the unlikely event that there would be any Shanghai gossip in Hong Kong newspapers.

      The tanned and wrinkled rickshaw puller abruptly stopped at a small gate, inside of which was a muddy path. “Miss, you have to walk fifteen minutes to go to the temple.”

      “Why can’t you just take me there?”

      He pointed a knotty finger to the scorching sun above. “Miss, the path is filled with holes. You want me to have a heat stroke, set my rickshaw on fire, and ruin my business so my family will starve?”

      There was no way to argue with this. “All right,” I said, paid him generously to soothe my guilt, then got off.

      Of course, I could have paid him a lot more to carry me. But I feared him thinking I was rich. Though I had enough money, I wasn’t sure I had enough good karma. That’s why I had come to the temple, to generate more.

      So I began a tortuous walk with the hot sun beating down on my head to keep me company. I passed stores selling all sorts of necessities such as dried plums, bags of sugar, salt, tinned biscuits, bottles of sauces: chili, black bean, XO, and more. Also on display were household utensils, such as thermos bottles, electric fans, and blankets. Interspersed were a clothing store, a shoe repair store, a barber shop, and a couple of street stalls selling such delicacies as pig’s ears and cow’s intestines in bubbling dark sauce, filling the air with pungent, yet appetizing, aromas. On benches, a few women were napping as small children dutifully fanned their mothers’, or grandmothers’, semi-exposed, protuberant bellies.

      Feeling wilted by the sun, I stepped into a small food store and paid a few cents for a soda. When I was handed the drink, the bottle was as warm as the overbearing sun.

      I protested to the vendor, a fortyish, droop-shouldered man. “It’s not cold.”

      “But you only paid three cents.”

      “So?”

      “One more cent”—he pointed to a refrigerator—“cold soda in here.”