The Glint of the Luopan

Chapter 1

PROLOGUE

The moon hung low between the second and third big strut of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was as though the bridge itself was an ancient device intended to measure the moon's cycle. Strange music hung in the air, sitar riffs with a subtle jazz beat. I felt something warm on my ear and shuddered, pulling my cardigan tighter, and moving away from the railing, first walking, then falling into a light trot. In front of me, big, gothic-style arches rose into the sky. The night was astonishingly warm, but despite that, I clenched my cardigan with both hands.

Suddenly, I noticed something ahead of me glistening in the night sky. I started to run towards it like one would run towards the light at the end of a tunnel. As I came closer, I noticed that it was the moon drowning in the river. The music had stopped. The moon slightly rose out of the water, becoming translucent so that the rippled, watery surface behind it became visible. I felt a warmth in my pocket and pulled out the Luopan, my Chinese compass. A few signs on it lit up, starting from the inner circle and slowly moving outwards: first a direction in the middle, then a trigram, then one of the heavenly stems. The needle flickered and jerked, then lingered on the spot, slightly trembling as if controlled by some mysterious undercurrent.

Something urged me to move towards the moon hovering above the sea. Water was sloshing around my feet, mellow and warm. Then, suddenly, I lost balance and was twirled around...

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Lijie Fang's Diary

New York

1.11.2018

Lai Fang, I'm writing these pages mainly because of you. I want you to know a little bit about me and my past when I'm gone. I've grown up in Shibati, the old inner nucleus of Chongqing where all the smog of the outskirts gathers and runs down the house walls like toxic sweat. My parents were fruit sellers, dragging their carts onto the streets of Chongqing at dawn. Unfortunately, they specialized in big fruit like pineapple and watermelons which meant that if one watermelon was rotten, the whole day was wasted. Mother would grind her teeth, holding her breath when she made the first cut in the morning. If she still had to exert some force to cut through the flesh, that was usually a good sign. If the knife cut through the melon as easily as through a dense cloud, mother knew there would only be rice for dinner the next day.

I was assigned the task of helping my mother carry the cart up the stone steps that led from Shibati to the main city. As soon as mother set up her food stall, I ran back to my quarter. I was afraid of the big city, the huge skyscrapers that started to emerge around the small historical core back in the 70s. Living in Shibati was like living in a small, refreshing, secluded oasis. If you didn't pay attention and took a wrong turn, though, civilization blared in your face.

While my parents were at work, I stayed with my grandmother, an established citizen of Shibati and a passionate art collector. By 'art collector', however, I mean that she collected the debris from the streets – mostly left behind by tourists – picked out the things that possessed a certain aesthetic quality for her, and sold the rest to recycling companies.

My grandmother was frowned upon and s as much as possible – as much as you can hide a house with brightly colored windows and door frames and pink wooden flamingoes in the garden –, but I adored her. She taught me that wonder lies at the heart of everything in the world. She didn't have a single Jiao in the bank, and yet she was the richest person I had ever known.