Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond (25 page)

The road of yellow brick now passed through a neighborhood full of the sort of places Dorothy had been told to avoid: dark houses with red lanterns hanging outside their walls, halls full of loud men shouting as they played cards and argued about money, pavilions with no signs except hanging banners painted with poppy flowers.

As the three turned a corner, they saw a door open up, and some people inside pushed a large man out. He fell facedown into a puddle in the street without moving, and the men inside the house closed and locked the door behind him.

Dorothy hurried over and tried to drag the fallen man out so he would not drown. But she could not move his frame.

“Help me!” she cried to her companions.

Scarecrow wasn’t much stronger than Dorothy, but the Tin Woodman easily lifted the large man out of the puddle and sat him down gently so that he leaned against the wall of the house he had been thrown out of.

“This is an opium den,” said the Tin Woodman. “He’s an addict, and there’s nothing we can do. They probably threw him out because he could no longer pay.”

“There must be something we can do for him,” said Dorothy.

The Tin Woodman considered. “Perhaps I’m too quick to dismiss him.” He hung his head. “If I had a real heart, I would be more compassionate.”

“Why don’t we get the opium out of him so that he’s clean?” said Scarecrow.

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” said the Tin Woodman. “If it were that easy, opium wouldn’t have claimed so many lives.”

“I don’t have much sense,” admitted Scarecrow. “That is why I come up with ideas like that.”

But Dorothy didn’t think it was such a foolish idea. She remembered Aunt En, who believed in the traditional ways, once telling her that ants belonged to the element of fire and were a good cure for any poison, which belonged to the element of wood. Uncle Heng had told her that this was an old wives’ tale, but in this Shanghai, where magic was alive, maybe it would work.

She took some sweet carrots out of her pocket and began to chew them into a paste. Then she spread the paste all over the bare arms and face of the unconscious man.

Soon, ants, enticed by the sweet smell of the carrots, crawled out of the cracks in the walls and began to bite the sleeping figure.

“I hope the poison from the opium will leave with the bites,” Dorothy said, her hands squeezed into tight fists.

The large man began to thrash and curse, and Dorothy and Scarecrow jumped back, frightened. But the Tin Woodman held the man down as he continued to scream and fight and the ants went on biting him. The Tin Man kept his eyes averted because he thought the expressions of pain on the man’s face would make him queasy, and he tried to keep his touch gentle so that the man did not suffer needlessly.

Eventually the ants had removed every bit of sweet carrot from the man’s body and left, and the large man sat up by himself, looking amazed at the three strangers around him.

“Thank you,” he said. “For the first time in a long while, I feel awake.”

“I was once a fighter, a member of the Boxer Rebellion. I was so fearless that they called me the Lion.

“We invoked the old magic of China, the power of the craggy mountains and misty air, the deep marshes and the clear streams. We called on the old temples, built before the coming of Christian missionaries and their contempt for all that we revered. We painted ourselves with words of power so that bullets could not harm us.

“We rose, a thousand voices shouting as one, to drive the foreigners out of China, so that our children could walk with their backs straight, so that their children would know that they belong to a free people, not a people addicted to opium and subservient to the will of others.

“And for a while, we believed we could win.

“Then came that battle outside the bounds of Shanghai. The foreigners shot at us with their guns and cannons while we rushed at them with our spears and swords.

“My friend fell to the left of me. My brother fell to the right of me. Why was the old magic not working? Was it too weak to stop steel and gunpowder, much as the junks were too weak to stop British gunboats?

“And my courage, the faith that had sustained me for so long, suddenly fled. And the next thing I knew, I fell too, even though I hadn’t been shot. I hid myself among the bodies of my fallen comrades and watched as the rest of the Boxers were killed.

“I survived as a coward, and since that day, I have sought refuge in the oblivion brought by opium.”

The Lion sat quietly, his wild mane of unkempt hair obscuring his downcast eyes.

“You have saved me from drowning to death in an opium dream, but I’d rather be dead. I have no courage.”

“Come with us to see the Great Oz,” Dorothy said. “He is a powerful magician, and he will give you courage.”

The Lion did not believe this, for he had seen how the old magic failed when he had been most in need. But Dorothy looked so earnest that he could not bear to disappoint her, and so he nodded and agreed to come.

The four companions walked on, as the golden bricks glistened in the moonlight in front of their feet.

For a while they walked along the Bund, next to the Huangpu River. Like its twin in the Veiled Shanghai that Dorothy came from, even at night, the placid, wide river of commerce was filled with cargo ships from around the world, their steam engines puffing and their copper bells clanging.

Dorothy was a little worried that the four of them would make an odd sight. But as they passed through the crowd promenading along the Bund—Portuguese dancing girls flouncing about in puffy skirts and heavy makeup; bare-armed and tattooed Malay sailors flashing black-stained teeth; American “flappers” puffing on cigarettes; well-dressed Russian noblemen and noblewomen taking a night stroll; European businessmen surrounded by Chinese mistresses and servants; a troupe of acrobats with a lion, a tiger, and a dancing bear surrounded by a cheering crowd—she realized that the four of them were far too drab to stand out.

A large, well-dressed man in a crisp new suit barreled down the Bund, and Dorothy couldn’t dodge out of the way quickly enough. His shoulder collided with her and almost
knocked her off her feet. He stopped to glare at her as she stumbled, his blue eyes icy cold.

“Watch where you’re going!” said Scarecrow.

The man looked from him to Dorothy, frowning as if he had seen something deeply distasteful.

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” Dorothy said. She didn’t think it was her fault at all, but she had always been taught to be polite.

The man looked at her contemptuously. “You think because you’ve learned a bit of English, you belong here? Think you’re free to corrupt our youth? Think you’re better than the other Chinese whores?”

Dorothy didn’t know how to answer this. Her heart pounded and her face felt hot. She backed up a few steps. The other pedestrians on the Bund kept their distance, though a few stopped to look at the confrontation.

“You need to learn some manners,” the man said. He raised his cane to strike Dorothy.

But a strong arm shot out from the side and grabbed the cane mid-swing. The Lion stepped in front of Dorothy, still holding the tip of the cane.

“You dare to strike at a European?” said the incredulous owner of the cane. He pulled at the cane, but the Lion’s hold was so solid that it might as well have been embedded in stone. “Let go now or else by the time the police are through with you, you won’t even be able to crawl back to your muddy village!”

The Lion flinched. But he continued to hold the cane, even though his arm trembled.

Dorothy looked around and saw a few more of the Panopticons rising high above the crowd. If Beini was right, the police would have already seen this and were probably on their way.

“It’s okay,” she whispered to the Lion. “Let go. We don’t want to be caught by the police before we get to see Oz.”

The Lion stared at the man with the cane as though his eyes were on fire. He began to twist his wrist, and the man yelped as the cane was finally pulled out of his hand. The Lion snapped it in half and tossed the pieces into the Huangpu River. The man stared in disbelief at the pieces of his cane arcing over the water.

The bobbing hats of the Shanghai Municipal Police could be seen in the distance.

“Run!” Scarecrow yelled.

The Tin Woodman hung by his hands from the levee, dangling his feet over the Huangpu River while the others clung to him so they could not be seen from the Bund. After they were sure the police were gone, they climbed back up.

“I wish I were brave,” the Lion said. “I should have punched him in the face. But I’m just a coward in hiding.”

“If you had done that,” Dorothy said, “then all of us would have been arrested. Sometimes just because you don’t fight doesn’t mean you aren’t brave.”

But the Lion wasn’t convinced.

They looked around at the splendid, gaudy, European-style buildings that lined the Bund and housed the foreign banks and trading houses whose names Dorothy knew well.

“That’s where the real power and magic of Shanghai lies,” the Lion said, his voice filled with equal measures of awe and contempt. “The wealth of China somehow flows always to those who do not care about the Chinese.”

Dorothy gazed up at the brightly lit windows in the pulsing heart of the city and imagined the power that flowed through the offices.

“I thought Oz was the most powerful magician in all of Shanghai,” said Scarecrow.

The Lion snorted and said nothing. But the Tin Woodman answered, “There are different kinds of power, and maybe Oz can give us what we want, even if he doesn’t own any steamships or have much money.”

They picked up the road of golden bricks again. It took a turn away from the river, and the four followed.