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  WHEN FOX IS A THOUSAND

  When Fox Is a Thousand

  Larissa Lai

  WHEN FOX IS A THOUSAND

  SECOND EDITION

  Copyright © 2004 by Larissa Lai

  first published in a different form by Press Gang Publishers in 1995

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means – graphic, electronic or mechanical – without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

  ARSENAL PULP PRESS

  #101-211 East Georgia St.

  Vancouver, BC

  Canada V6A 1Z6

  arsenalpulp.com

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for its publishing activities.

  Design by Solo

  Cover illustration by Myron Campbell

  Interior illustrations by Jaye Lyonns

  Printed and bound in Canada

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada

  Cataloguing in Publication

  Lai, Larissa, 1967–

  When fox is a thousand / Larissa Lai. – Newly edited rev. ed.

  ISBN I-55152-168-7

  EISBN 978-1-55152-339-2

  I. Title.

  PS8573.A3775W4 2004 C813'.54 C2004-902947-9

  for my mother, my father, my sister

  and for all the foxes

  I know we won’t meet again

  in the season of blossoms,

  And I won’t sit quietly by

  drunk in my chamber

  –YU HSUAN-CHI

  NINTH CENTURY, CHANG’AN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks especially to Monika Kin Gagnon and Shani Mootoo, who mid-wifed this book. For feedback on various drafts, many thanks to Karlyn Koh, Karen Tee, Kathy-Ann March, and A.J. Verdelle. For early encouragement, much gratitude to Anne Jew and Jim Wong-Chu. For valuable talks, I am indebted to Jamelie Hassan and the late Lloyd Wong. This book also benefitted from support and encouragement by writers and staff I met at Cottages at Hedgebrook in the spring of 1995, especially Gabrielle Idlet, Chizu Omori, Adriana Batista, Claudia May, Brenda Miller, Karen Hwa, Kathleen Saadat, Jennifer Rose, and Laura Wollberg. Much gratitude also to writers, activists, and organizers too numerous to name, who were involved in publications for which I worked while writing this novel – Kinesis: The Newpaper of the Vancouver Status of Women and Front Magazine.

  For a generous and thorough edit on the first draft, many thanks to Jennifer Glossop. I am also grateful to Robin Van Heck for a sharp and patient first edition copy edit. Many thanks to my first publishers Barbara Kuhne, Delia McCreary, Val Speidel, and Shamina Senaratne of Press Gang. I would like to acknowledge my writer sisters who published with that press, for their support of a worthy feminist endeavor.

  For this new edition, I am most grateful to the kind and clever folks at Arsenal Pulp Press for taking me on, and for generous editorial, design, and publicity support: Brian Lam, Blaine Kyllo, Robert Ballantyne, Trish Kelly, and Linda Field. I feel very honoured to be publishing with this house. Thank you to my hobbit friend Myron Campell for the beautiful cover art, and to Jaye Lyonns for the icons inside.

  A big thank-you to my family, Tyrone Lai, Yuen-Ting Lai, and Wendy Lai, for believing in me and cheering me on. They taught me to love research and fairytales.

  Thanks to the now-defunct Explorations Program of the Canada Council for the Arts, Multicultualism and Citizenship Canada, and the Astraea Foundation for funding this project in part.

  A note on transliteration: I have left the names of historical figures in the form in which I found them. I did not feel it necessary to standardize the names to one system. If anything, I felt a responsibility to leave them in the forms in which I first came across them, reflecting the history of their passage into twentieth-century North America and my own relationship to that history. For indeed, the history of transliteration also marks the history through which writers such as myself have to come to a place where we must access part of own own history through various specialists. This is not to say that there is anything such thing as “naturally acquired” knowledge of the past. Perhaps one can only say that the hodgepodge trail of these transliterations marks the disruptions in our (super)natural journey from past to present, from “there” to “here.” On a more practical note, leaving the names in the forms in which I found them will also make them easier to find should any of my English-speaking sisters and brothers wish to look them up.

  This novel takes place in three different times and places, denoted by:

  for the lifetime of the ageless Fox,

  for ninth-century China, and

  for contemporary Vancouver.

  PART 1

  How the Fox Came to Live Alone

  I come from an honest family of foxes. They were none too pleased about my forays into acts of transformation. When they found out about the scholars I visited on dark nights, haunting them in the forms of various women, they were appalled. They love me too much to disown me for a trait that has run in the family for generations, although it is seldom openly discussed. They said, “Don’t you know your actions reflect on us all? If you keep making these visitations, other fox families will talk about us. They will criticize us for not having raised you properly. It would be better if you chose a more respectable occupation, like fishing or stealing chickens.”

  They got even more upset when I started to counsel a housewife. She was lovely. Her flesh glowed like translucent jade. Her husband owned rice fields and horses. He owned vaults of silk and gold. His eyes were quick, his beard thick and warlike. He dressed in elegant blues and browns, aristocratic but not frivolous, and rode a muscular horse with a tendency to wildness. But he handled his wife the way he handled money – with cold, calculating fingers. She responded warmly to his looks. But to his cold hands, she responded the way one does to winter, drawing the blankets tighter and waiting for it to end. He decided there was something wrong with her. Hadn’t he, after all, treated her as though she were the most precious thing on earth?

  He asked her to buy him a concubine, as men often asked their wives in those days. She agreed readily, pleased with the possibility that, if she chose right, she could endear him further to her and at the same time escape that wifely duty that had become increasingly disagreeable. She chose a plump and giddy girl who did not mind the cold. He was delighted and forgot about his wife altogether. She did not realize until too late that without his affection, she would lose her authority over the servants. The house fell into disrepair. Only then did she discover that she needed him more than she thought. She could do nothing but put gold and jade in her hair and wait. She might as well have packed her bags and moved into the vaults.

  I moved in next door and began to offer advice. So what if the body I occupied was not my own? One must take human form to engage in human affairs. It was difficult. I had not come fully into my powers, and could maintain the form for only a few hours at a time.

  I instructed her not to bathe. I wrapped her perfect body in the flea-ridden hand-me-downs of a beggar. I set her to work on the soot-encrusted stove with a worn shoe brush. I smeared her face with fat and ashes, and taught her to sing a heart-rending tune. The concubine took pity and offered to help, but the housewife chased her away. She scoured the floors. She scrubbed the chamber pots until they
shone like the sun. The concubine came again to offer assistance, which my charge would have accepted had I not hissed at her from my hiding place outside the kitchen window. She grew thin and even the husband began to worry. He came and implored her to leave the work to the sturdier women of the house, but she chased him away crossly.

  At the end of a month, I took her to my own room and dressed her in emerald silk. Long sleeves cut in the latest fashion. On her dainty feet I slipped a pair of shoes I had embroidered with my own hands. In the morning when the roses smelled sweet, I sent her into her garden, where the husband and concubine leaned over a chessboard. The husband was enraptured. He asked her to join them, but she refused, saying she was tired, and hurried off to her room.

  The following day, I invited her over again. I draped her in a robe the colour of moving water. I gave her shoes made by my elder sister, who had a finer hand than I. At nightfall, when the scent of jasmine permeated the air, I guided her into the garden, where the husband and concubine sat drinking tea and composing couplets under the full moon. Again he approached her. She led him and the concubine to her chambers. In the hallway the concubine turned to her and raised a curious eyebrow. The housewife pushed them both into her room and locked the door behind them, whispering as she turned the key that she was tired and wished to be left alone. Then she went off to sleep in the concubine’s room.

  On the third day, she came to see me on her own. I wrapped her in a gown the colour of the sky before a storm. On her feet I placed shoes made by my younger sister, whose hand was so fine you could not discern the individual threads of her embroidery. I pushed her into the garden at midnight, when the scent of every jasmine flower and every sandalwood tree infused the senses, so that those who lingered there were made blind and deaf by the aroma. As a farewell gift, I taught her how kisses come not from the mouth, but from a well deep below the earth. The husband was smitten.

  Is it my fault she ran off with the concubine?

  Other foxes thought so, and chalked it up to the evil influence of the West, where personal whim comes before family pride and reputation. Westerners had been coming and going from the capital for hundreds of years. Their manner of dress had become fashionable among the students and courtesans. Their strange religions less so. Their horses – everyone wanted their horses, except, perhaps, us foxes.

  Other foxes chastise me for my unorthodox methods. But I don’t know why they should pretend to know so much about human affairs, since they don’t engage in them. Their scorn, on the other hand, I understand well enough.

  Human history books make no room for foxes. But talk to any gossip on the streets or any popcorn-munching movie-goer, and they will tell you that foxes of my disposition have been around since before the first dynasty.

  I got worse when we emigrated to the west coast of Canada. The whole extended family came for the opportunities, not knowing that migration fundamentally and permanently changes value systems. My penchant for nightly roamings ceased to be a mere quirk of character, but rather became an entire way of life. I like to fish, and I like to steal chickens. But I don’t do either anymore, except on those rare occasions when courtesy demands it.

  In due time, the foxes of my fox hole got used to what they called my unnatural behaviour. They did not mind what I did or where I went, although they would never do such things themselves. “But,” they said, “do you have to write about it?”

  When I wrote about the thrill that comes from animating the bodies of the dead, they swept their bushy tails in the dirt in disgust and said they didn’t want anything more to do with me.

  And that is how it happens that I live alone.

  In the year 1071, ten thousand men wearing chainmail and wielding crosses sacked the fabled city of Byzantium. They stole gold and rubies and paintings of people in their fields. They raped women. They burned houses. They took small children by the legs, whirled them around and smacked their heads into stone walls, shattering their tiny craniums like eggs. In a Greek Orthodox church, an English priest forced a local priest to show him where the religious relics were stored, threatening to torch the temple with its keepers inside. Trembling, the Byzantine holy man led his captor into a dark hallway and undid the lock on a heavy oak door. Inside were many shelves laden with all manner of strange and glittering things. There were pieces of the True Cross upon which Christ had been crucified, a brass case decorated with a gold crown and studded with jewels that contained the skull of St Philip the Apostle, and a silver case in the shape of an arm engraved with the ecstatic faces of saints. Inside were the remains of the left arm of St James. Greedily, the English priest stuffed the pockets of his frock until they bulged as though he were pregnant. He thanked the other priest, gave him a good blow to the side of the head, and hurried into the streets where his compatriots revelled, already drunk on holy wine.

  None of this mattered to Mercy Lee, except that she had to remember it for the upcoming midterm exam in Professor Frank’s Western Civ class. It was 1989, and she was sitting in a café at the Museum of History in Seattle, sipping a two-dollar cup of coffee and waiting for her friend Artemis Wong to come back from the gift shop. Well, perhaps it did matter but not to the extent of shaking the foundations of her faith. Absently, she opened the little designer purse that had cost her nearly half her monthly earnings from her job at a department store cosmetics counter. From it she took out a pencil-slim vial of gardenia cologne and sprayed her wrists. Artemis was taking forever.

  Artemis had been fascinated by the little jewelled cases that purportedly held pieces of the True Cross. She loved the box that was supposed to contain the skull of St Philip the Apostle. She had exclaimed so loudly over the case containing the arm of St James that Mercy had had to drag her away in embarrassment.

  “Can you imagine people keeping that kind of stuff for generations and generations?” Artemis had asked.

  “It’s morbid. Besides, they could easily be fakes. Come on. There are some gorgeous paintings in the next room.”

  By early afternoon, Mercy’s feet ached, not because of a feeble constitution but because those soft leather pumps that had been such a deal at Ingledew’s last week were pinching. She excused herself from the visit to the gift shop, saying she really needed a cup of coffee. She could have just said that her feet hurt, but she hated people who complained of every minor ailment and didn’t want to become one of them.

  Left to her own devices, Artemis relaxed. The weight of companionship lifted from her shoulders. Mercy was all right – not very interesting, but nice enough. Mostly they were close because they were in many of the same classes. There weren’t many Chinese in the Humanities as it was. There were even fewer studying Classical History. So they were close for now, and that was fine, although she suspected it wouldn’t last any longer than it took to complete a degree.

  She circled the outside of the building just for the lightness of the March air. In front of the double glass doors of the gift shop were twin maples whose leaves were just beginning to sprout. For a moment, she could have sworn someone was watching her from the branches of one of the trees. She ignored the crawling sensation beneath her skin, chalking it up to the change in temperature from the stuffy building to the cool outside. She pushed open the double doors and breezed inside.

  Whoever had produced this prodigious exhibit of Byzantine art had certainly spared no expense. She was greeted by two large stacks of glossy hardcover books with full-colour photographs of the most important pieces, a curator’s essay, and two substantial pieces by well-known historians. She briefly flipped through a copy before stepping into the main body of the shop where the other books on art and artifacts were interspersed with cases of jewellery and replicas of historical objects.

  She gazed into the glass cases with a longing she could not have later described, let alone explained.

  “Can I help you?” A young saleswoman approached her from behind.

  “May I look at that silver box?” She pointed to
a well-crafted little container less than three inches wide, encrusted with authentic-looking jewels of coloured glass.

  “A replica of one of the boxes said to contain pieces of the True Cross,” said the woman. “They’re very well made. Painstakingly copied from the real thing by a professional craftsman. I think his name is on the card there.”

  Once the glass lid was up, Artemis was quite overcome with what could be described only as greed. She pointed to three or four other boxes and asked to see those as well. The young woman took them out and set them on the counter. At that moment an elderly man leaning on a cane tapped the saleswoman on the shoulder and asked her to point out the coffee-table books on pop art. She walked a little way towards the twentieth-century section with him. While her back was turned, Artemis’s hand darted up onto the counter as if of its own accord, snatched one of the elegantly crafted little boxes, and dropped it into her coat pocket.

  “They’re all gorgeous,” she said to the saleswoman when she returned. “I’ll think about it. Can I look at something in there?” she said, pointing to a case farther down the wall. The woman quickly put the silver boxes away without counting them.

  In the next case, on a rosewood platform, stood the carved ivory figure of a woman, not six inches high. The hair had been exquisitely executed. It seemed to turn and billow in an imaginary breeze. It cost a hundred dollars. It was a genuine antique. Still, it didn’t make sense to spend so much money on something she didn’t need, particularly after her little heist. On the other hand, she already felt guilty about what she had done, although it was too late to change her mind. Five minutes later she was laying bills onto the oak counter and settling the carefully boxed figure into her bag.