Chapter Five. the White Man Pays Respects #2
“Don’t worry,” Genevieve said. “I’ve arranged everything.”
The picture Genevieve had chosen for the altar was of her mother as a teenager.
It put a dark feeling in the pit of Adeline’s stomach: Her mother in the shape of a girl, sitting behind a Singer machine surrounded by cloth scraps.
Her hair was braided down two shoulders like Adeline’s had been last night.
She was round-faced with a dimple in one cheek.
She looked nothing like herself and nothing like Adeline, except in the eyes.
“That’s where you met,” Adeline said, watching Genevieve arrange it on the stand.
She toyed with the burlap patch one of the Sons had given her to pin to the right sleeve of her dress, marking her as the daughter of the deceased.
The edges were fraying. She rubbed a finger against it, fraying it more.
“Even when we were girls I could see how much she loved making dresses. She even went to a dressmaking school—Hooi Chin, I think. I haven’t seen her excited like that in a while.
” Genevieve smiled slightly, and Adeline felt familiar jealousy.
Genevieve was functionally her mother’s only other family.
Living with her, Adeline had recognized some of her mother’s gestures in the other woman, realized her mother must have learned it from her.
How else did a woman from gang-ridden Chinatown come to run a store that informed the tastes of wealthy wives and Western expats?
Genevieve’s society, Genevieve’s connections, borrowing the way Genevieve carried herself.
She thought of the night she’d seen them huddled over her mother’s fire.
What had Genevieve gotten in return, for all of that?
Unconscious of her scrutiny, Genevieve looked over Adeline’s shoulder.
“Oh, they’re early.”
Adeline turned and stiffened. Tian had shown up, dressed in a white button-down tucked into black cotton pants.
She was accompanied by a statuesque Butterfly in a dark brown skirt who was probably a little older, with her long hair loose over her white blouse.
Tian introduced her as Christina, Red Butterfly’s tattooist.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Christina offered in a surprisingly full voice. She hooked her handbag on her arm to extend her hand. “I’m sorry about your mother. We’re here early to help.”
“We don’t need help.” Adeline had somehow forgotten that the Butterflies were likely to show up, even though Genevieve said the parlor itself was run by a businessman who had old ties to the kongsi, and could thus exercise discretion. She didn’t intend to cede ground at her own mother’s funeral.
Neatly diverting the situation, Tian headed Christina off to circle the coffin. From the sudden tension, it was clear that Tian had been dreading it.
Adeline hadn’t yet been able to bring herself to look into the casket.
She didn’t know which was worse: her memory of her mother in the fire, or her imagination, from having looked up the procedures of how bodies were preserved.
Every drop of blood siphoned and replaced with chemicals, eyes glued shut, jaw sewn into place, organs punctured and drained—then the cosmetics, the art of making a dead person look merely asleep, and the powder-white skin look more alive.
Lipstick and eye tints chosen, their hair brushed, their stiff limbs dressed in something pretty.
Adeline realized she was studying the Butterflies’ reactions, trying to absorb them into herself.
She wanted them to be horrified, to break down; she wanted them to do nothing at all, to prove that her mother, to them, was no one.
Christina’s eyes merely fluttered briefly shut, but Tian looked away fully so Adeline could only see the back of her head, slanted toward the floor.
Tian was still the only person she’d told about witnessing her mother’s death.
As far as the police and the Hwangs knew, she’d returned home when the firemen had already removed the body and quenched the flames.
She was in shock, but had witnessed nothing worse than a burnt building.
Adeline hadn’t seen a reason to correct their assumptions.
At the altar, Christina lit the joss sticks with a brush of her nail to the powdery tip, while Tian first summoned a flame like a matchstick, the way Adeline did.
They were surrounded by the altar food: meats of duck, chicken, and roast pig, cockles and clams, rice and a hard-boiled egg, fruits upon fruits, tea and wine, her mother’s favorite chicken feet and pickled vegetables.
“Are we expecting visitors?” Genevieve asked the Butterflies, when they had returned.
“Maybe,” Christina said, worrying her bottom lip. “The news got out more than we would like.”
Adeline had only ever heard visitors said like that to mean one thing. “Ghosts?”
Tian sighed and hauled Adeline off by the arm, seating her bodily at one of the tables.
“Sit,” she said, when Adeline tried to get up.
She dragged out the next chair with her foot and sat so she was boxing Adeline in with her knees.
Adeline glanced down and noticed Tian’s knuckles were bruised.
Tian’s hand flexed as though in response.
“Word has gotten out that your mother is dead. This has caused us some problems. But for you—it’s traditional that tang ki ko attend the funeral of another.
Most of the young upstarts don’t care for that tradition anymore.
Once we all needed this network and its rules to survive.
Now half of them are just boys using the power of gods to throw their weight around, but…
” Tian waved her hand. “There are still those who will follow the customs. That means—”
“They’ll be coming here.”
“Yes. Do not talk to them or go up to them, and for gods’ sake, don’t accuse them of killing your mother.”
Adeline thought she detected a joke, there. “Just you,” she said, picking at the tablecloth.
Tian snorted. Out of nowhere, she produced a deck of playing cards. “You play blackjack?”
Adeline didn’t, but it was easy enough to learn.
What was more interesting about games was studying the other person.
Their tells, their willingness to take risks, their willingness to trust. Tian took risks and was a careful truster, and she was a good liar.
Christina, who joined them for a little bit before heading off to help buy lunch, was a little less of all three.
Playing caught Adeline’s attention in a way it hadn’t been caught for a while, and she had almost forgotten about visitors until a man and his wife entered the room.
The wife, to Adeline’s shock, was the fussy Fan Tai Tai, who seemed to appear as if from an unpleasant dream.
More unpleasant, however, was her husband.
He was slick-haired and built like a brawler, evident even under the loose gray shirt.
He was tan in the face, and in what remaining skin was visible.
The rest—neck, forearms, hands dressed with heavy rings—was covered in interlocking white tattoos that seemed to gleam like dull metal.
He extended his white envelope to the Butterfly at the greeting table, who took it slowly even as she looked around in their direction.
Tian rose from her chair. The noise attracted the man’s attention; he smiled almost imperceptibly, swept the room with a glance, and then turned toward the coffin. Tian curled her fists on the tablecloth, watching his every move.
“Who is that?” Adeline asked.
“Fan Ge to his followers. The White Man of Chinatown, in the stories. He’s the leader of Three Steel.”
If young upstarts were discarding funeral traditions, then Fan Ge was of the old ways.
He was about her mother’s age; war child, long-time conduit, had a family.
Even in appearance, not a hot-blooded young man seeking fights and petty crimes.
Traditional—perhaps traditional enough, or arrogant enough, to visit the coffin of someone he had killed.
Meanwhile, Adeline could only think of her mother pausing when Adeline mentioned Fan Tai Tai’s visit, asking did she see you?
Had Mrs. Fan ever guessed the shop assistant she was bossing around was Madam Butterfly’s daughter?
Had Adeline ever looked familiar? Or had her mother been thanking the gods all along that they looked nothing alike?
The White Man made his way to the altar and bowed to Adeline’s mother with perfect form.
It set Adeline’s teeth on edge. She didn’t know this man, but tension was rolling off Tian in waves, and it was difficult not to absorb it.
Fan Ge bowed once more, and then once again, the incense looking like it could snap at any time between his metal-run fingers.
Once the joss stick was set down, Fan Ge came straight toward them. Tian lifted her chin. Her knuckles were nearly white, and Adeline had the urge to cover them. It seemed like a weakness.
Maybe her thoughts made it through, because as he stopped at the other end of their table Tian abruptly stuck her hands in her pockets, straightening her shoulders. “Fan Ge.”
He picked a melon seed off their table and crushed its shell, shaking out the flat nut inside. “Where’s your big sister?”
“Busy.”
“Preparing for ascension? Strange, how I’m hearing stories of Butterflies with fire, and yet it seems you still have no conduit.”
“Perhaps our god is harder than yours to get rid of,” Tian said, with forced blandness.
“Like a cockroach,” Fan Ge agreed. “Or perhaps your god has never respected the proper way of things.”
Tian said nothing. He bit another melon seed, then seemed done with them. His eyes flickered dismissively over Adeline as he turned, however, and something revelatory and cruel glanced across his expression.