Book Joy: Jade City by Fonda Lee
Feb. 16th, 2020 03:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raven_cromwellA couple years back, I started hearing rumblings of the Green Bone Saga, and how it was making waves on the fantasy scene. Every year, there're a handful of releases that the handful of female--often queer and of color--sci-fi critics I most value really gravitate towards--not necessarily the releases that the publishers put the large marketing behind, mind you. In many cases, it's the precise opposite of that. Books that seem to develop a sort of community consensus: this's underappreciated and needs to be boosted. It's, delightfully, as close to fandom as you'll get within paid critics, who, at least within the sci-fi genre, predominantly started out as fans in the first place.
What I was hearing about Jade City was right up my alley: a diverse as fuck, queer-inclusive mobster saga, with all the grit and superpowers of your best comic books. That had women that were, shockingly, more than either redshirts or sextoys for the dudes who would inevitably populate the cast. I've loved both mobster sagas and westerns with a nigh unquenchable passion, and when the dynamics came together, they had the power to be explosive. (Anyone on my flist remember a 90's movie called Road to Perdition, about a father and son fleeing the retribution of the mob through a desolate landscape after the father--a mob hitman--decides to turn a little too straight for his bosses' comfort? Or the incomparable Deadwood, of HBO fame, which had the mob in the old west and! lesbians to boot.)
But it's impossible to be a fan of these genres, and to a lesser extent of superhero media, and not see the giant, vibrantly pink elephant of misogyny with some nice implicit racism hitching a ride on its back. So the idea of ladies kicking ass and taking names in a mashup of The Godfather and Hong Kong mob films, with a hefty helping of martial arts seemed immensely my jam.
Here's the synopsis, to give you an idea before I really start gushing:
Unfortunately, the first time, I bounced hard off this novel, and it's one of my biggest reading regrets of the last couple years. Part of it was that I was grappling to read while adjusting meds that already make reading a challenge and coming off a long reading drought, the world felt daunting. In many ways, I've been building up to Jade City for a long time now.
I started tentatively reading outside the western canon, which made elements like the naming conventions--family name before given etc. etc.--which'd felt incomprehensible slide into place. And I delved into longer books, which was a good thing cause City is over 19 hours on audio, and its sequel clocks in at well over 24.
But it wasn't till recently that the last two pieces dropped into place. I finally got round to starting Umbrella Academy, long after the long-sufferingtobermoriansass had shoved it at me and screamed for me to watch. (Mutuals, I admire every one of y'all's taste and will always. always get to your recs; I am just an easily distracted gadfly pls forgive.) This one started teaching me the cinematic language not only of superhero films, which I had some familiarity with already, but of their subversion, which's wonderfully layered, and I'm gonna do a lot more Academy meta later.
It also made me appreciate the way that simply smacking ladies into a saga that's been deeply male-dominated doesn't clear the bar. Umbrella goes out of its way to make its ladies nuanced, from what I've seen so far, and goes out of its way to grant them plot agency, instead of leaving them as reactive pieces. Not in a: we're slamming our feminist credentials into your head sort of way but in a: damn, this hasn't been done in nigh on any superhero film work before this must've taken a lot of going back to the drawing board and examining where they fell into tropes way. It made me especially appreciative of how careful Lee had to be to do the work while keeping the core of the mobster genre, and making the women as three-dimensional as the men.
(Anyone who loved fantasy as much as I do remembers the sword-and-sorcery of the 70's/80's, where about the best you could expect from women was Conan with breasts. And nobody wanted to talk about the effect that violence had on them.) Ayt Mada is your typical Conan character, but because the world is laced with sexism, we know it's not necessarily because she gets the biggest thrill out of hacking people up. She learned young: if she was gonna rule, she sure as shit better be more ruthless than any of the boys. And she's complemented by a cast of women as her opponents who're everything from spies to economic geniuses; these are women who don't have to fulfill anyone's idea of ~strong~ characters, and it lets 'em breathe and grow into complicated, vibrant people.
And thendelphi introduced me to fan-readings of the TF2 comics. I've always had such a fascination for comics--the way they combine art and words with such economy of skill that still packs a gut punch of a story. And that this window'd been closed to me because of not being able to enjoy the art was always just one of those: it really fucking lowkey sucks being blind. So getting this glimpse at TF2 fandom has been really profound, in a way I'm struggling to articulate, and that's making me draw out the pleasure like a really top shelf box of chocolate. It's a pleasure I'm especially glad to've had right up against Jade City. Because this book lives and breathes! economy of story. Brief lines of dialogue pack the narrative punch that most books give to narrative interiority. The character most introspective at the book's opening is also the character most adrift from the family and its life of brutally quick, decisive violence. As she becomes more and more embroiled in its machinations, her introspection dwindles, and it's one of the cleverest deep craft-level tricks the book pulls.
This book is such a fascinating blend of comics and film, too, in its description of superpowers. The matter-of-factness is all comics--these improbable things are just cornerstones of the world roll with it--as are the character portraits: all bold lines with a few essential brushstrokes, letting their actions and dialogue fill in the rest. And oh, the jump-cuts; in a chapter between povs. Or, if we're lucky, we'll stay in the same "head" all chapter but then by the next we'll be halfway across the city, following someone else, while our prior character's life hangs in the balance. And that's all cinema, ratcheting up the tension and making us viscerally aware we sure as fuck aint in Kansas and nobody's safe.
Audio narrators at their zenith are one-person plays, running such a spectrum of voices and vocal inflection they seem to be a hundred actors at once. Andrew Kishino is at his zenith; every voice not only distinct, but so perfectly calibrated, taking into account the tiniest details we're given to craft vocal master portraits of even the most incidental character. I've felt like I was in the theater for the last week, equally bedazzled by the audacity of Lee's project and, especially since, so far, she's successfully juggling and interweaving disparate elements to perfection, and Kishino's masterclass in character inhabitation. If you like the excerpts and have money to burn on audiobooks, I can't rec 'em highly enough.The two would-be jade thieves sweated in the kitchen of the Twice Lucky restaurant. The windows were open in the dining room, and the onset of evening brought a breeze off the waterfront to cool the diners, but in the kitchen, there were only the two ceiling fans that had been spinning all day to little effect. Summer had barely begun and already the city of Janloon was like a spent lover—sticky and fragrant.
Bero and Sampa were sixteen years old, and after three weeks of planning, they had decided that tonight would change their lives. Bero wore a waiter’s dark pants and a white shirt that clung uncomfortably to his back. His sallow face and chapped lips were stiff from holding in his thoughts. He carried a tray of dirty drink glasses over to the kitchen sink and set it down, then wiped his hands on a dish towel and leaned toward his coconspirator, who was rinsing dishes with the spray hose before stacking them in the drying racks.
“He’s alone now.” Bero kept his voice low.
Sampa glanced up. He was an Abukei teenager—copper-skinned with thick, wiry hair and slightly pudgy cheeks that gave him a faintly cherubic appearance. He blinked rapidly, then turned back to the sink. “I get off my shift in five minutes.”
“We gotta do it now, keke,” said Bero. “Hand it over.”
Sampa dried a hand on the front of his shirt and pulled a small paper envelope from his pocket. He slipped it quickly into Bero’s palm. Bero tucked his hand under his apron, picked up his empty tray, and walked out of the kitchen.
At the bar, he asked the bartender for rum with chili and lime on the rocks—Shon Judonrhu’s preferred drink. Bero carried the drink away, then put down his tray and bent over an empty table by the wall, his back to the dining room floor. As he pretended to wipe down the table with his towel, he emptied the contents of the paper packet into the glass. They fizzed quickly and dissolved in the amber liquid.
He straightened and made his way over to the bar table in the corner. Shon Ju was still sitting by himself, his bulk squeezed onto a small chair. Earlier in the evening, Maik Kehn had been at the table as well, but to Bero’s great relief, he’d left to rejoin his brother in a booth on the other side of the room. Bero set the glass down in front of Shon. “On the house, Shon-jen.”
Shon took the drink, nodding sleepily without looking up. He was a regular at the Twice Lucky and drank heavily. The bald spot in the center of his head was pink under the dining room lights. Bero’s eyes were drawn, irresistibly, farther down, to the three green studs in the man’s left ear.
He walked away before he could be caught staring. It was ridiculous that such a corpulent, aging drunk was a Green Bone. True, Shon had only a little jade on him, but unimpressive as he was, sooner or later someone would take it, along with his life perhaps. And why not me? Bero thought. Why not, indeed. He might only be a dockworker’s bastard who would never have a martial education at Wie Lon Temple School or Kaul Dushuron Academy, but at least he was Kekonese all the way through. He had guts and nerve; he had what it took to be somebody. Jade made you somebody.
He passed the Maik brothers sitting together in a booth with a third young man. Bero slowed a little, just to get a closer look at them. Maik Kehn and Maik Tar—now they were real Green Bones. Sinewy men, their fingers heavy with jade rings, fighting talon knives with jade-inlaid hilts strapped to their waists. They were dressed well: dark, collared shirts and tailored tan jackets, shiny black shoes, billed hats. The Maiks were well-known members of the No Peak clan, which controlled most of the neighborhoods on this side of the city. One of them glanced in Bero’s direction.
Bero turned away quickly, busying himself with clearing dishes. The last thing he wanted was for the Maik brothers to pay any attention to him tonight. He resisted the urge to reach down to check the small-caliber pistol tucked in the pocket of his pants and concealed by his apron. Patience. After tonight, he wouldn’t be in this waiter’s uniform anymore. He wouldn’t have to serve anyone anymore.
Back in the kitchen, Sampa had finished his shift for the evening and was signing out. He looked questioningly at Bero, who nodded that the deed was done. Sampa’s small, white upper teeth popped into view and crushed down on his lower lip. “You really think we can do this?” he whispered.
Bero brought his face near the other boy’s. “Stay cut, keke,” he hissed. “We’re already doing it. No turning back. You’ve got to do your part!”
“I know, keke, I know. I will.” Sampa gave him a hurt and sour look.
“Think of the money,” Bero suggested, and gave him a shove. “Now get going.”
Sampa cast a final nervous glance backward, then pushed out the kitchen door. Bero glared after him, wishing for the hundredth time that he didn’t need such a doughy and insipid partner. But there was no getting around it—only a full-blooded Abukei native, immune to jade, could palm a gem and walk out of a crowded restaurant without giving himself away.
It had taken some convincing to bring Sampa on board. Like many in his tribe, the boy gambled on the river, spending his weekends diving for jade runoff that escaped the mines far upstream. It was dangerous—when glutted with rainfall, the torrent carried away more than a few unfortunate divers, and even if you were lucky and found jade (Sampa had bragged that he’d once found a piece the size of a fist), you might get caught. Spend time in jail if you were lucky, time in the hospital if you weren’t.
It was a loser’s game, Bero had insisted to him. Why fish for raw jade just to sell it to the black market middlemen who carved it up and smuggled it off island, paying you only a fraction of what they sold it for later? A couple of clever, daring fellows like them—they could do better. If you were going to gamble for jade, Bero said, then gamble big. Aftermarket gems, cut and set—that was worth real money.
Bero returned to the dining room and busied himself clearing and setting tables, glancing at the clock every few minutes. He could ditch Sampa later, after he’d gotten what he needed.
“Shon Ju says there’s been trouble in the Armpit,” said Maik Kehn, leaning in to speak discreetly under the blanket of background noise. “A bunch of kids shaking down businesses.”
His younger brother, Maik Tar, reached across the table with his chopsticks to pluck at the plate of crispy squid balls. “What kind of kids are we talking about?”
“Low-level Fingers. Young toughs with no more than a piece or two of jade.”
The third man at the table wore an uncharacteristically pensive frown. “Even the littlest Fingers are clan soldiers. They take orders from their Fists, and Fists from their Horn.” The Armpit district had always been disputed territory, but directly threatening establishments affiliated with the No Peak clan was too bold to be the work of careless hoodlums. “It smells like someone’s pissing on us.”
The Maiks glanced at him, then at each other. “What’s going on, Hilo-jen?” asked Kehn. “You seem out of sorts tonight.”
“Do I?” Kaul Hiloshudon leaned against the wall in the booth and turned his glass of rapidly warming beer, idly wiping off the condensation. “Maybe it’s the heat.”
Kehn motioned to one of the waiters to refill their drinks. The pallid teenager kept his eyes down as he served them. He glanced up at Hilo for a second but didn’t seem to recognize him; few people who hadn’t met Kaul Hiloshudon in person expected him to look as young as he did. The Horn of the No Peak clan, second only in authority to his elder brother, often went initially unnoticed in public. Sometimes this galled Hilo; sometimes he found it useful.
“Another strange thing,” said Kehn when the waiter had left. “No one’s seen or heard from Three-Fingered Gee.”
“How’s it possible to lose track of Three-Fingered Gee?” Tar wondered. The black market jade carver was as recognizable for his girth as he was for his deformity.
“Maybe he got out of the business.”
Tar snickered. “Only one way anyone gets out of the jade business.”
A voice spoke up near Hilo’s ear. “Kaul-jen, how are you this evening? Is everything to your satisfaction tonight?” Mr. Une had appeared beside their table and was smiling the anxious, solicitous smile he always reserved for them.
“It’s all excellent, as usual,” Hilo said, arranging his face into the relaxed, lopsided smile that was his more typical expression.
The owner of the Twice Lucky clasped his kitchen-scarred hands together, nodding and smiling his humble thanks. Mr. Une was a man in his sixties, bald and well-padded, and a third-generation restaurateur. His grandfather had founded the venerable old establishment, and his father had kept it running all through the wartime years, and afterward. Like his predecessors, Mr. Une was a loyal Lantern Man in the No Peak clan. Every time Hilo was in, he came around personally to pay his respects. “Please let me know if there is anything else I can have brought out to you,” he insisted.
When the reassured Mr. Une had departed, Hilo grew serious again. “Ask around some more. Find out what happened to Gee.”
“Why do we care about Gee?” Kehn asked, not in an impertinent way, just curious. “Good riddance to him. One less carver sneaking our jade out to weaklings and foreigners."
“It bothers me, is all.” Hilo sat forward, helping himself to the last crispy squid ball. “Nothing good’s coming, when the dogs start disappearing from the streets.” If you wanna know what befalls our hapless and rather dastardly jade thieves or get more of the other characters, this's chapter 1 with links to three or four more to wet your appetites.
What I was hearing about Jade City was right up my alley: a diverse as fuck, queer-inclusive mobster saga, with all the grit and superpowers of your best comic books. That had women that were, shockingly, more than either redshirts or sextoys for the dudes who would inevitably populate the cast. I've loved both mobster sagas and westerns with a nigh unquenchable passion, and when the dynamics came together, they had the power to be explosive. (Anyone on my flist remember a 90's movie called Road to Perdition, about a father and son fleeing the retribution of the mob through a desolate landscape after the father--a mob hitman--decides to turn a little too straight for his bosses' comfort? Or the incomparable Deadwood, of HBO fame, which had the mob in the old west and! lesbians to boot.)
But it's impossible to be a fan of these genres, and to a lesser extent of superhero media, and not see the giant, vibrantly pink elephant of misogyny with some nice implicit racism hitching a ride on its back. So the idea of ladies kicking ass and taking names in a mashup of The Godfather and Hong Kong mob films, with a hefty helping of martial arts seemed immensely my jam.
Here's the synopsis, to give you an idea before I really start gushing:
Family is duty. Magic is power. Honor is everything.
Jade is the lifeblood of the island of Kekon. It has been mined, traded, stolen, and killed for — and for centuries, honorable Green Bone warriors like the Kaul family have used it to enhance their magical abilities and defend the island from foreign invasion.
Now, the war is over and a new generation of Kauls vies for control of Kekon’s bustling capital city. They care about nothing but protecting their own, cornering the jade market, and defending the districts under their protection. Ancient tradition has little place in this rapidly changing nation.
When a powerful new drug emerges that lets anyone — even foreigners — wield jade, the simmering tension between the Kauls and the rival Ayt family erupts into open violence. The outcome of this clan war will determine the fate of all Green Bones — from their grandest patriarch to the lowliest motorcycle runner on the streets — and of Kekon itself.
Unfortunately, the first time, I bounced hard off this novel, and it's one of my biggest reading regrets of the last couple years. Part of it was that I was grappling to read while adjusting meds that already make reading a challenge and coming off a long reading drought, the world felt daunting. In many ways, I've been building up to Jade City for a long time now.
I started tentatively reading outside the western canon, which made elements like the naming conventions--family name before given etc. etc.--which'd felt incomprehensible slide into place. And I delved into longer books, which was a good thing cause City is over 19 hours on audio, and its sequel clocks in at well over 24.
But it wasn't till recently that the last two pieces dropped into place. I finally got round to starting Umbrella Academy, long after the long-suffering
tobermoriansass had shoved it at me and screamed for me to watch. (Mutuals, I admire every one of y'all's taste and will always. always get to your recs; I am just an easily distracted gadfly pls forgive.) This one started teaching me the cinematic language not only of superhero films, which I had some familiarity with already, but of their subversion, which's wonderfully layered, and I'm gonna do a lot more Academy meta later.It also made me appreciate the way that simply smacking ladies into a saga that's been deeply male-dominated doesn't clear the bar. Umbrella goes out of its way to make its ladies nuanced, from what I've seen so far, and goes out of its way to grant them plot agency, instead of leaving them as reactive pieces. Not in a: we're slamming our feminist credentials into your head sort of way but in a: damn, this hasn't been done in nigh on any superhero film work before this must've taken a lot of going back to the drawing board and examining where they fell into tropes way. It made me especially appreciative of how careful Lee had to be to do the work while keeping the core of the mobster genre, and making the women as three-dimensional as the men.
(Anyone who loved fantasy as much as I do remembers the sword-and-sorcery of the 70's/80's, where about the best you could expect from women was Conan with breasts. And nobody wanted to talk about the effect that violence had on them.) Ayt Mada is your typical Conan character, but because the world is laced with sexism, we know it's not necessarily because she gets the biggest thrill out of hacking people up. She learned young: if she was gonna rule, she sure as shit better be more ruthless than any of the boys. And she's complemented by a cast of women as her opponents who're everything from spies to economic geniuses; these are women who don't have to fulfill anyone's idea of ~strong~ characters, and it lets 'em breathe and grow into complicated, vibrant people.
And then
delphi introduced me to fan-readings of the TF2 comics. I've always had such a fascination for comics--the way they combine art and words with such economy of skill that still packs a gut punch of a story. And that this window'd been closed to me because of not being able to enjoy the art was always just one of those: it really fucking lowkey sucks being blind. So getting this glimpse at TF2 fandom has been really profound, in a way I'm struggling to articulate, and that's making me draw out the pleasure like a really top shelf box of chocolate. It's a pleasure I'm especially glad to've had right up against Jade City. Because this book lives and breathes! economy of story. Brief lines of dialogue pack the narrative punch that most books give to narrative interiority. The character most introspective at the book's opening is also the character most adrift from the family and its life of brutally quick, decisive violence. As she becomes more and more embroiled in its machinations, her introspection dwindles, and it's one of the cleverest deep craft-level tricks the book pulls.This book is such a fascinating blend of comics and film, too, in its description of superpowers. The matter-of-factness is all comics--these improbable things are just cornerstones of the world roll with it--as are the character portraits: all bold lines with a few essential brushstrokes, letting their actions and dialogue fill in the rest. And oh, the jump-cuts; in a chapter between povs. Or, if we're lucky, we'll stay in the same "head" all chapter but then by the next we'll be halfway across the city, following someone else, while our prior character's life hangs in the balance. And that's all cinema, ratcheting up the tension and making us viscerally aware we sure as fuck aint in Kansas and nobody's safe.
Audio narrators at their zenith are one-person plays, running such a spectrum of voices and vocal inflection they seem to be a hundred actors at once. Andrew Kishino is at his zenith; every voice not only distinct, but so perfectly calibrated, taking into account the tiniest details we're given to craft vocal master portraits of even the most incidental character. I've felt like I was in the theater for the last week, equally bedazzled by the audacity of Lee's project and, especially since, so far, she's successfully juggling and interweaving disparate elements to perfection, and Kishino's masterclass in character inhabitation. If you like the excerpts and have money to burn on audiobooks, I can't rec 'em highly enough.The two would-be jade thieves sweated in the kitchen of the Twice Lucky restaurant. The windows were open in the dining room, and the onset of evening brought a breeze off the waterfront to cool the diners, but in the kitchen, there were only the two ceiling fans that had been spinning all day to little effect. Summer had barely begun and already the city of Janloon was like a spent lover—sticky and fragrant.
Bero and Sampa were sixteen years old, and after three weeks of planning, they had decided that tonight would change their lives. Bero wore a waiter’s dark pants and a white shirt that clung uncomfortably to his back. His sallow face and chapped lips were stiff from holding in his thoughts. He carried a tray of dirty drink glasses over to the kitchen sink and set it down, then wiped his hands on a dish towel and leaned toward his coconspirator, who was rinsing dishes with the spray hose before stacking them in the drying racks.
“He’s alone now.” Bero kept his voice low.
Sampa glanced up. He was an Abukei teenager—copper-skinned with thick, wiry hair and slightly pudgy cheeks that gave him a faintly cherubic appearance. He blinked rapidly, then turned back to the sink. “I get off my shift in five minutes.”
“We gotta do it now, keke,” said Bero. “Hand it over.”
Sampa dried a hand on the front of his shirt and pulled a small paper envelope from his pocket. He slipped it quickly into Bero’s palm. Bero tucked his hand under his apron, picked up his empty tray, and walked out of the kitchen.
At the bar, he asked the bartender for rum with chili and lime on the rocks—Shon Judonrhu’s preferred drink. Bero carried the drink away, then put down his tray and bent over an empty table by the wall, his back to the dining room floor. As he pretended to wipe down the table with his towel, he emptied the contents of the paper packet into the glass. They fizzed quickly and dissolved in the amber liquid.
He straightened and made his way over to the bar table in the corner. Shon Ju was still sitting by himself, his bulk squeezed onto a small chair. Earlier in the evening, Maik Kehn had been at the table as well, but to Bero’s great relief, he’d left to rejoin his brother in a booth on the other side of the room. Bero set the glass down in front of Shon. “On the house, Shon-jen.”
Shon took the drink, nodding sleepily without looking up. He was a regular at the Twice Lucky and drank heavily. The bald spot in the center of his head was pink under the dining room lights. Bero’s eyes were drawn, irresistibly, farther down, to the three green studs in the man’s left ear.
He walked away before he could be caught staring. It was ridiculous that such a corpulent, aging drunk was a Green Bone. True, Shon had only a little jade on him, but unimpressive as he was, sooner or later someone would take it, along with his life perhaps. And why not me? Bero thought. Why not, indeed. He might only be a dockworker’s bastard who would never have a martial education at Wie Lon Temple School or Kaul Dushuron Academy, but at least he was Kekonese all the way through. He had guts and nerve; he had what it took to be somebody. Jade made you somebody.
He passed the Maik brothers sitting together in a booth with a third young man. Bero slowed a little, just to get a closer look at them. Maik Kehn and Maik Tar—now they were real Green Bones. Sinewy men, their fingers heavy with jade rings, fighting talon knives with jade-inlaid hilts strapped to their waists. They were dressed well: dark, collared shirts and tailored tan jackets, shiny black shoes, billed hats. The Maiks were well-known members of the No Peak clan, which controlled most of the neighborhoods on this side of the city. One of them glanced in Bero’s direction.
Bero turned away quickly, busying himself with clearing dishes. The last thing he wanted was for the Maik brothers to pay any attention to him tonight. He resisted the urge to reach down to check the small-caliber pistol tucked in the pocket of his pants and concealed by his apron. Patience. After tonight, he wouldn’t be in this waiter’s uniform anymore. He wouldn’t have to serve anyone anymore.
Back in the kitchen, Sampa had finished his shift for the evening and was signing out. He looked questioningly at Bero, who nodded that the deed was done. Sampa’s small, white upper teeth popped into view and crushed down on his lower lip. “You really think we can do this?” he whispered.
Bero brought his face near the other boy’s. “Stay cut, keke,” he hissed. “We’re already doing it. No turning back. You’ve got to do your part!”
“I know, keke, I know. I will.” Sampa gave him a hurt and sour look.
“Think of the money,” Bero suggested, and gave him a shove. “Now get going.”
Sampa cast a final nervous glance backward, then pushed out the kitchen door. Bero glared after him, wishing for the hundredth time that he didn’t need such a doughy and insipid partner. But there was no getting around it—only a full-blooded Abukei native, immune to jade, could palm a gem and walk out of a crowded restaurant without giving himself away.
It had taken some convincing to bring Sampa on board. Like many in his tribe, the boy gambled on the river, spending his weekends diving for jade runoff that escaped the mines far upstream. It was dangerous—when glutted with rainfall, the torrent carried away more than a few unfortunate divers, and even if you were lucky and found jade (Sampa had bragged that he’d once found a piece the size of a fist), you might get caught. Spend time in jail if you were lucky, time in the hospital if you weren’t.
It was a loser’s game, Bero had insisted to him. Why fish for raw jade just to sell it to the black market middlemen who carved it up and smuggled it off island, paying you only a fraction of what they sold it for later? A couple of clever, daring fellows like them—they could do better. If you were going to gamble for jade, Bero said, then gamble big. Aftermarket gems, cut and set—that was worth real money.
Bero returned to the dining room and busied himself clearing and setting tables, glancing at the clock every few minutes. He could ditch Sampa later, after he’d gotten what he needed.
“Shon Ju says there’s been trouble in the Armpit,” said Maik Kehn, leaning in to speak discreetly under the blanket of background noise. “A bunch of kids shaking down businesses.”
His younger brother, Maik Tar, reached across the table with his chopsticks to pluck at the plate of crispy squid balls. “What kind of kids are we talking about?”
“Low-level Fingers. Young toughs with no more than a piece or two of jade.”
The third man at the table wore an uncharacteristically pensive frown. “Even the littlest Fingers are clan soldiers. They take orders from their Fists, and Fists from their Horn.” The Armpit district had always been disputed territory, but directly threatening establishments affiliated with the No Peak clan was too bold to be the work of careless hoodlums. “It smells like someone’s pissing on us.”
The Maiks glanced at him, then at each other. “What’s going on, Hilo-jen?” asked Kehn. “You seem out of sorts tonight.”
“Do I?” Kaul Hiloshudon leaned against the wall in the booth and turned his glass of rapidly warming beer, idly wiping off the condensation. “Maybe it’s the heat.”
Kehn motioned to one of the waiters to refill their drinks. The pallid teenager kept his eyes down as he served them. He glanced up at Hilo for a second but didn’t seem to recognize him; few people who hadn’t met Kaul Hiloshudon in person expected him to look as young as he did. The Horn of the No Peak clan, second only in authority to his elder brother, often went initially unnoticed in public. Sometimes this galled Hilo; sometimes he found it useful.
“Another strange thing,” said Kehn when the waiter had left. “No one’s seen or heard from Three-Fingered Gee.”
“How’s it possible to lose track of Three-Fingered Gee?” Tar wondered. The black market jade carver was as recognizable for his girth as he was for his deformity.
“Maybe he got out of the business.”
Tar snickered. “Only one way anyone gets out of the jade business.”
A voice spoke up near Hilo’s ear. “Kaul-jen, how are you this evening? Is everything to your satisfaction tonight?” Mr. Une had appeared beside their table and was smiling the anxious, solicitous smile he always reserved for them.
“It’s all excellent, as usual,” Hilo said, arranging his face into the relaxed, lopsided smile that was his more typical expression.
The owner of the Twice Lucky clasped his kitchen-scarred hands together, nodding and smiling his humble thanks. Mr. Une was a man in his sixties, bald and well-padded, and a third-generation restaurateur. His grandfather had founded the venerable old establishment, and his father had kept it running all through the wartime years, and afterward. Like his predecessors, Mr. Une was a loyal Lantern Man in the No Peak clan. Every time Hilo was in, he came around personally to pay his respects. “Please let me know if there is anything else I can have brought out to you,” he insisted.
When the reassured Mr. Une had departed, Hilo grew serious again. “Ask around some more. Find out what happened to Gee.”
“Why do we care about Gee?” Kehn asked, not in an impertinent way, just curious. “Good riddance to him. One less carver sneaking our jade out to weaklings and foreigners."
“It bothers me, is all.” Hilo sat forward, helping himself to the last crispy squid ball. “Nothing good’s coming, when the dogs start disappearing from the streets.” If you wanna know what befalls our hapless and rather dastardly jade thieves or get more of the other characters, this's chapter 1 with links to three or four more to wet your appetites.
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Date: 2020-02-18 07:14 am (UTC)I'm a really weird reader in that: while sure, there're certain things I absolutely adore on first reading, a ton! of what I've loved most I've either bounced off of entirely once or twice, or been vaguely hooked by the first of something, and then gotten really invested around book 2 etc. etc. So there's a running joke if I bounce off something that people can just put it on my top list of the decade. Made funnier by the fact that a lot! of the stuff most folk would put on their decade lists I bounced off of and never came back to. So yeah, feel you hard on the odd, eclectic reader thing. :)
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Date: 2020-02-19 02:35 am (UTC)For instance, I notice that I hardly ever bounce off a memoir. Even if I don't find it particularly well-written or revelatory, my brain in pretty much all moods can deal with engaging with another human being one on one through a book. I know why I'm there: to listen to that person talk about their life. In most cases, unless that person actively alienates me in a hurtful way or can't coherently express themselves, I'm interested enough to listen for a couple hundred pages.
My likelihood of bouncing then increases with fiction or other non-fiction, because I'm not only dealing with another human being and their thoughts and experiences but also with so many other things they're throwing at me now. More facts and characters, theses and themes, more layers of construction and artifice. There are more opportunities for me not to be sold on why I'm there.
I'll generally stick with weak mysteries over other genres, because the presence of a puzzle to solve at least partially answers that "why." But funnily enough, for all that science fiction and fantasy often get dismissed as not being as complex as non-genre fiction, it's their extra elements that make them a tougher read for me. Because not only do they include everything a contemporary/literary novel would, but they're also introducing a whole different world with new rules and elements. And when I get too many balls thrown at me - worldbuilding, prose, plot, characterization, relationships, theme - I think it's more likely that I'll get distracted thinking about one of them, either negatively or positively(!), and end up dropping some of the other balls in a way that leaves me disengaged from the story.
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Date: 2020-02-26 06:19 pm (UTC)http://blog.angryasianman.com/2020/02/all-and-none-of-those-places.html