I found Yan kneeling in the main hall, near the place where my father had killed her mother five years ago. She wore her hair up in a bun, in the style of a young woman who had had her jijili, the ceremony that meant she was no longer a girl.
We’d been meeting every Qingming, every Chongyang, every Yulan, every New Year’s, occasions when families were supposed to be together.
“I brought you this,” I said, and handed her the steamed chicken.
“Thank you.” And she carefully tore off a leg and bit into it daintily. Yan had explained to me that the hulijing chose to live near human villages because they liked to have human things in their lives: conversation, beautiful clothes, poetry and stories, and, occasionally, the love of a worthy, kind man.
But the hulijing remained hunters who felt most free in their fox form. After what happened to her mother, Yan stayed away from chicken coops, but she still missed their taste.
“How’s hunting?” I asked.
“Not so great,” she said. “There are few Hundred-Year Salamanders and Six-Toed Rabbits. I can’t ever seem to get enough to eat.” She bit off another piece of chicken, chewed, and swallowed. “I’m having trouble transforming too.”
“It’s hard for you to keep this shape?”
“No.” She put the rest of the chicken on the ground and whispered a prayer to her mother.
“I mean it’s getting harder for me to return to my true form,” she continued, “to hunt. Some nights I can’t do it at all. How’s hunting for you?”
“Not so great either. There don’t seem to be as many snake spirits or angry ghosts as a few years ago. Even hauntings by suicides with unfinished business are down. And we haven’t had a proper jumping corpse in months. Father is worried about money.”
We also hadn’t had to deal with a hulijing in years. Maybe Yan had warned them all away. Truth be told, I was relieved. I didn’t relish the prospect of having to tell my father that he was wrong about something. He was already very irritable, anxious that he was losing the respect of the villagers now that his knowledge and skill didn’t seem to be needed as much.
“Ever think that maybe the jumping corpses are also misunderstood?” she asked. “Like me and my mother?”
She laughed as she saw my face. “Just kidding!”
It was strange, what Yan and I shared. She wasn’t exactly a friend. More like someone who you couldn’t help being drawn to because you shared the knowledge of how the world didn’t work the way you had been told.
She looked at the chicken bits she had left for her mother. “I think magic is being drained out of this land.”
I had suspected that something was wrong, but didn’t want to voice my suspicion out loud, which would make it real.
“What do you think is causing it?”
Instead of answering, Yan perked up her ears and listened intently. Then she got up, grabbed my hand, and pulled until we were behind the buddha in the main hall.
“Wha—”
She held up her finger against my lips. So close to her, I finally noticed her scent. It was like her mother’s, floral and sweet, but also bright, like blankets dried in the sun. I felt my face grow warm.
A moment later, I heard a group of men making their way into the temple. Slowly, I inched my head out from behind the buddha so I could see.
It was a hot day, and the men were seeking some shade from the noon sun. Two men set down a cane sedan chair, and the passenger who stepped off was a foreigner, with curly yellow hair and pale skin. Other men in the group carried tripods, levels, bronze tubes, and open trunks full of strange equipment.
“Most Honored Mister Thompson.” A man dressed like a mandarin came up to the foreigner. The way he kept on bowing and smiling and bouncing his head up and down reminded me of a kicked dog begging for favors. “Please have a rest and drink some cold tea. It is hard for the men to be working on the day when they’re supposed to visit the graves of their families, and they need to take a little time to pray lest they anger the gods and spirits. But I promise we’ll work hard afterwards and finish the survey on time.”
“The trouble with you Chinese is your endless superstition,” the foreigner said. He had a strange accent, but I could understand him just fine. “Remember, the Hong Kong-Tientsin Railroad is a priority for Great Britain. If I don’t get as far as Botou Village by sunset, I’ll be docking all of your wages.”
I had heard rumors that the Manchu Emperor had lost a war and been forced to give up all kinds of concessions, one of which involved paying to help the foreigners build a road of iron. But it had all seemed so fantastical that I didn’t pay much attention.
The mandarin nodded enthusiastically. “Most Honored Mister Thompson is right in every way. But might I trouble your gracious ear with a suggestion?”
The weary Englishman waved impatiently.
“Some of the local villagers are worried about the proposed path of the railroad. You see, they think the tracks that have already been laid are blocking off veins of qi in the earth. It’s bad feng shui.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It is kind of like how a man breathes,” the mandarin said, huffing a few times to make sure the Englishman understood. “The land has channels along rivers, hills, ancient roads that carry the energy of qi. It’s what gives the villages prosperity and maintains the rare animals and local spirits and household gods. Could you consider shifting the line of the tracks a little, to follow the feng shui masters’ suggestions?”
Thompson rolled his eyes. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve yet heard. You want me to deviate from the most efficient path for our railroad because you think your idols would be angry?”
The mandarin looked pained. “Well, in the places where the tracks have already been laid, many bad things are happening: people losing money, animals dying, household gods not responding to prayers. The Buddhist and Daoist monks all agree that it’s the railroad.”
Thompson strode over to the buddha and looked at it appraisingly. I ducked back behind the statue and squeezed Yan’s hand. We held our breaths, hoping that we wouldn’t be discovered.
“Does this one still have any power?” Thompson asked.
“The temple hasn’t been able to maintain a contingent of monks for many years,” the mandarin said. “But this buddha is still well respected. I hear villagers say that prayers to him are often answered.”
Then I heard a loud crash and a collective gasp from the men in the main hall.
“I’ve just broken the hands off of this god of yours with my cane,” Thompson said. “As you can see, I have not been struck by lightning or suffered any other calamity. Indeed, now we know that it is only an idol made of mud stuffed with straw and covered in cheap paint. This is why you people lost the war to Britain. You worship statues of mud when you should be thinking about building roads from iron and weapons from steel.”
There was no more talk about changing the path of the railroad.
After the men were gone, Yan and I stepped out from behind the statue. We gazed at the broken hands of the buddha for a while.
“The world’s changing,” Yan said. “Hong Kong, iron roads, foreigners with wires that carry speech and machines that belch smoke. More and more, storytellers in the teahouses speak of these wonders. I think that’s why the old magic is leaving. A more powerful kind of magic has come.”
She kept her voice unemotional and cool, like a placid pool of water in autumn, but her words rang true. I thought about my father’s attempts to keep up a cheerful mien as fewer and fewer customers came to us. I wondered if the time I spent learning the chants and the sword dance moves were wasted.