Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond (28 page)

“You’ll be the new Head of the Peking Police,” said the Great Oz. “You have the gentlest heart of all, and the people should no longer be afraid of those entrusted to keep them safe.”

She looked around at her. Something felt different about the air, familiar and fresh at the same time. Did the sun seem brighter? The sound of the crowd happier?

She thought about the Lion and whether he was now content.

“You’ll be my General of the Army,” said the Great Oz. “There is none braver, for you have always been afraid, and yet you always knew that the right thing must be done.”

“Going somewhere, Miss?” asked a rickshaw runner, who pulled up to the curb outside the station.

“Yes,” Dorothy said. “But isn’t there a strike going on?”

“You haven’t heard? The government in Peking caved! They had to let the students go and fired the ministers responsible for the unequal treaties. Who’d ever thought that the government would be afraid of the people! We won! They’re celebrating all over Shanghai.”

Dorothy smiled, thinking about Scarecrow—no, Freddie.

“You have a lot of ideas that others think of as foolish,” said the Great Oz. “But sometimes those are the only ideas that will work.”

“I am an American, after all,” said Freddie, and grinned.

“You’ll be my Advisor. The Revolution is still a long way from success, and all of us comrades must continue to strive. Just as only America did not approve of the unequal treaty, you’re the only one who stood with us in our struggle. You have more sense than all the Western powers put together—they who only want to keep things as they are.”

“Kansu Road, please,” Dorothy said as she got into the rickshaw.

She took off her shoes and found the two
dayang
coins, engraved with Yuan Shikai’s head. Beini had been right. There was indeed some charm associated with these: they were enough for the fare home.

Author’s Note
: By the time of the May Fourth Movement, Yuan Shikai had already died. But his successors in the Beiyang Government in Peking were not very different from the Wicked Warlord himself. For more on the historical events fictionalized here, Joseph T. Chen’s
The May Fourth Movement in Shanghai
is a good introduction in English.

BY RACHEL SWIRSKY

W
ISH.

The letters are chipped from emerald. Serifs sparkle. They hover in midair like insects with faceted carapaces. Their shadows fall, rich and dark, over a haze of yellow, which as the view widens becomes distinguishable as part of a brick and then as part of a road, which itself becomes a winding yellow ribbon that crosses verdant farmland.

Ten contestants. One boon from the Wizard.

Whose wish will come true?

We all watch in our crystal globes. Blue-tinted ones sit on rough tables in Munchkin Country. Red-tinted ones float beside Quadlings. Green-tinted ones are held aloft in the lacquered fingernails of Emerald Citizens.

Convex glass distorts our view. We see wide, but we do not see deep.

After revealing the rich lands of Oz, the view soars upward until it shows nothing but sky. A silver swing drops down. It’s shaped like a crescent moon. Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, perches on it. She wears a drop-waisted, sleeveless gown. Sparkling white fabric falls in loose folds to just above her ankles.

Her voice is as sweet as honeydew.

“We’re down to our four finalists. They’ve worked together to make it down the road of yellow brick. They’ve almost made it to the Emerald City. What will happen next? Only one can win. Will it be Lion, Tin Man, Scarecrow, or Dorothy?”

She raises her finger to her lips, telling a secret to everyone watching.

“Remember, in Oz, wishes really do come true.”

Those of us who fancy ourselves members of the City’s intellectual elite gather in fashionable bathhouses to watch the show. This season, it is unthinkable not to wear hats during social gatherings, even when otherwise nude. This makes for awkward bathhouse situations. We hold ourselves stiffly, craning our necks to keep silk and felt dry.

Despite our collective ridiculousness, we still feel entitled to laugh at Glinda’s dramatic pronouncements, and at the overblown challenges she puts to the contestants.

“Bread and circuses,” we call it.

Some are of the opinion that it’s all propaganda. “The Wizard wants to rub everyone’s noses in how powerful he is,” they remark.

“Not possible,” others argue. “He’s not that stupid. He could grant all of those people’s wishes if he wanted to. He’s
losing public sympathy by the day.” Smugly they tap the sides of their noses. “Someone’s making this to show him up.”

The two camps argue back and forth. Periodically, wild passion overcomes someone’s good sense, and they gesticulate wildly, splashing everyone with emerald-hued water.

In the end we all agree on one thing: bread and circuses.

Effective bread and circuses, though. Everyone watches. Even us.

I keep quiet during the evenings at the bathhouse. I prefer to watch and listen. Few people know the name Kristol Kristoff, and I prefer it that way.

I’m a jeweler.

I have a loupe that I inherited from my great-grandfather. It magnifies everything by ten times.

Sometimes I find it frustrating to look at the mundane, unmagnified world. There are so many blemishes that one can’t see with the naked eye. It’s impractical to evaluate everything by what’s superficially visible. If I had my preference, the ubiquitous Emerald City glasses would come with jeweler’s loupes attached.

Working in the Emerald City, I perform most of my work on emeralds, which are actually a form of beryl green due to the intrusion of other minerals, usually chromium. Most emeralds are included—which means that they contain a relatively high proportion of other minerals—and also fragile. This makes them both motley and transitory.

The Emerald City is the same. Like any city, it’s composed of a variety of minerals. It contains inclusions of Munchkins, Gillikins, Winkies, and Quadlings. An emerald
would not be green without inclusions; a city would not be a city without immigrants.

An emerald will crack under high pressure. The Emerald City will do the same. Introduce a famine, ignite a fire, depose a leader. Stones or cities will shatter.

It’s happened before.

The show began with the image of a farmhouse whirling through a tornado. It crashed to the ground in an explosion of dirt and debris. Slowly the wind blew the detritus away, revealing what lay below.

Two skinny, old legs poked out from beneath the farmhouse. Two wrinkled, old feet wore two shiny silver slippers.

“Congratulations, Dorothy!” Glinda beamed. “You’ve killed the Wicked Witch of the East and won the first challenge!”

She removed the shoes from the corpse and presented them to the little girl.

“These silver slippers will give you an advantage in later elimination rounds,” Glinda said.

Smiling, Dorothy put on the shoes. She didn’t seem to care that they’d just been taken from a dead woman.