Shadow of the dragon, p.1
Shadow of the Dragon, page 1
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Epilogue
About the Author
Connect with HMH on Social Media
Copyright © 1993 by Sherry Garland
All rights reserved. Originally published in paperback by Harcourt, Inc., an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1993.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhbooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Garland, Sherry.
Shadow of the dragon/Sherry Garland.
p. cm.
Summary: High school sophomore Danny Vo tries to resolve the conflict between the values of his Vietnamese refugee family and his new American way of life.
[1. Vietnamese Americans—Fiction. 2. Refugees—Fiction. 3. Family life—Fiction. 4. Gangs—Fiction. 5. Interracial dating—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.G18415Sh 1993
[Fic]—dc20 93-17258
ISBN 978-0-15-273530-2 ISBN 978-0-15-273532-6 pb
eISBN 978-0-547-41683-0
v2.1119
For Karen Grove and Erin De Witt,
with many thanks
Prologue
Danny Vo saw the oak tree and shivered as if a winter wind had blown through the open car window. He and a new friend had stopped for the red light in front of the old Linda Vista Apartments where Danny once lived. The buildings were crumbly and sad looking, even worse than when all of the occupants were Vietnamese refugee families like Danny’s. Now another wave of refugees from another war lived there.
Danny would never have turned down this street himself, but he wasn’t driving, so he had no choice. He couldn’t tell his friend not to go down the street because of a creepy oak tree, a tree that neighborhood kids swore was haunted. So Danny sat in the passenger seat, trying not to look but unable to turn away from the dull green leaves and twisted trunk.
The oak tree had suffered over the past three years. One of its limbs was broken, probably by rowdy kids. And a hunk of bark had been skinned off, probably from the bumper of some drunk’s pickup after he’d missed his turnoff from the main street. It used to happen all the time when Danny lived there.
But the metal tray was still there, girdling the trunk about four feet off the ground. An old woman, stooped from too many years of working in the rice paddies of Vietnam, had just placed fresh mangoes and flowers and a bowl of rice on the tray. A whiff of sandalwood drifted through the car window from the stick of incense she had just lit.
Danny’s American friend was curious. He wanted to know what the old woman was doing and what the metal tray meant. Danny told him that somebody the old woman loved had been killed under that tree and that she was making sure the departed spirit had plenty to eat in the afterlife. What Danny didn’t tell his friend was that the shrine was also meant to appease the restless spirit lingering nearby to keep it from harming the living.
When Danny’s friend asked who got killed and how, Danny just shrugged and said “some teenager.” He pretended he didn’t know much about it. But he did know. The old woman in the baggy black pants and gray high-collared shirt was his grandmother, and Danny had known the dead teenager very well. It seemed like a lifetime ago, in another time and place, not a mere three years.
It was difficult to think about those days when his world circled around a blond-haired girl named Tiffany Marie and when he learned about love and about sacrifice.
As the red light changed, Danny let his breath out with a long sigh of relief. But the chill didn’t go away for the rest of the day.
Chapter One
Danny Vo jammed his hands into the pockets of his blue jeans, hoping no one from school would see him grocery shopping with his mother. But there was little chance of that. It was a late Saturday morning and only two weeks before what Americans called Chinese New Year, and what the Vietnamese called Tet. All the Asian shops clustered on Houston’s Bellaire Boulevard bustled with customers. Up and down the narrow aisles of Di-Ho Market, women and children, and an occasional man, bumped elbows as they bought food for the upcoming stream of New Year’s parties.
Old women in baggy black pants lingered over the fruit and flower stands selecting ripe persimmons, small round winter melons, or fresh-cut gladiolus for the family ancestral altars. Children laughed and dashed around tables spilling over with neatly packaged plastic boxes of candied ginger, dried mandarin orange peel with licorice root, sweetened lotus seeds, fried melon seeds, and sugar-coated strips of coconut dyed pink, yellow, and green.
Danny’s mother paused over the stacks of banh-chung and banh-giay. New Year’s cakes wrapped in banana leaves and neatly tied in square or round bundles. With determination, she turned her shopping cart away. She insisted on saving money by making those kinds of foods herself, even though it took a lot of work and time.
Danny glanced over the top of his short mother’s head. He didn’t want to be here. He had a hundred other things to do. There was going to Radio Shack with Calvin Pickney to buy some electronic parts for their joint science project. There was talking to Mr. Tilson about getting a job in his grocery store a block from Danny’s apartment. And then there was driving past Tiffany Marie Schultz’s house in hope of seeing her outside. There was always that.
Danny saw two Vietnamese girls from his high school. Quickly he turned and stooped down, pretending to examine the long, golden-green stalks of sugarcane under the vegetable bins. After the girls had passed by, he picked up a stalk and carried it like a kung fu staff toward his mother’s cart.
The only good thing about this shopping trip had been driving his father’s car. Danny needed all the practice he could get before taking his driver’s road test when he turned sixteen. Only he already was sixteen, according to his Vietnamese birthday. It was because of a mix-up on the legal immigration papers his parents signed when they arrived in America ten years ago that Danny was always counted as half a year younger than he really was. If his parents, fresh from Vietnam and unable to speak English, had better understood the INS officer, they would have explained that Vo Van Duong, who later changed his named to Danny, was born in the year of the Dragon. It was the luckiest symbol in the Vietnamese zodiac and almost guaranteed the child a life of success, if he applied his talents.
Danny’s parents had been confused by the American way of counting birthdays. It was the first of a very long series of misunderstandings that his parents fell prey to. But the American officials had been too busy processing dozens of refugees that day to worry about a few errors on birth records here and there.
Sometimes Danny hated his parents’ screwup. He would have had his permanent driver’s license right now, if it hadn’t been for their ignorance. Although he only had his beginner’s permit, he sometimes drove alone anyway, even though he wasn’t supposed to. He kept telling himself that he wasn’t really breaking the law, since he really was sixteen. And as soon as he got his license and a car, he could get a job. Although his parents wanted their oldest son to concentrate on school, even they had to admit that another wage earner in the family would bring them one step closer to their biggest dream—buying a house and someday owning their own business.
Danny followed his mother, rolling the sugarcane between his fingers. She steered her cart down an aisle spilling over with dozens of different kinds of rice noodles. The starchy smell of rice blended with the sharp, almost nauseating odor of dried cuttlefish and black mushrooms from the next aisle over. He watched her loading up neatly tied bundles of needle-thin bun noodles, wondering if his mother was the only one in the market who was buying food for an occasion other than New Year’s. It seemed unlikely.
“Má, you’ve already got a ton of noodles at the apartment. How many people arc coming to Sang Le’s homecoming party, anyway?”
“I want to be prepared,” she replied in Vietnamese that was slightly tinged with an American accent. “You never know who might show up. Your father and Uncle Dao have been telling everyone that your cousin Sang Le is finally getting out of the refugee camp. Everyone wants to welcome him to America. I must have enough food. Wc can’t let people think we are cheap.” She paused and pointed to a fifty-pound sack of rice. “Pick that up for me.”
Danny stuck the sugarcane into her cart, then hoisted the rice bag to his shoulder. He decided to carry it that way. At least now he wouldn’t look so wimpy to the two teenage girls watching him from behind a table littered with fruit baskets wrapped in red cellophane. Danny had seen the girls at his high school before and thought they must be sisters. They wore the same old-fashioned skirts and blouses and hairstyles—long, straight, with thick, blunt-cut bangs. They didn’t wear makeup and had flat chests. They definitely were not his type. They reminded him too much of ph otos he had seen of boat people or girls living in communist Vietnam today.
The sisters fit in fine here among the rice paper and mangoes and banana leaves, but in school Danny had heard Americans making fun of them behind their backs. The same thing had happened to him when he first entered the American schools. He hated to admit it now, but back then he pretended to be Chinese just so kids and even adults wouldn’t ask him about the war, or about being a Vietcong, or living in a grass hut, or accuse him of having dogmeat in his lunch box. He got tired of telling them that he wasn’t even born until after the war and that he had been too young to remember much about Vietnam. He learned very fast to dress and eat and talk like the American kids. Danny swore ten years ago that no one would ever have a reason to make fun of him again. And nobody could call him “uncool” now.
Danny wondered how long the sisters had been in Houston. They probably didn’t even realize they were out of step with the other girls at school, but he wasn’t going to be the one to tell them.
The shopping cart reached an impasse near the butcher’s counter where several children hovered near glass tanks filled with live fish and tubs of live crabs and snails. The kids were jabbing sticks into the crab bed and squealing each time a pair of pincers snapped at them.
When Danny’s mother reached an aisle with rows of colored tins of tea, she picked up one marked “fragrant jasmine.”
“Maybe I should have some nice tea for your cousin. I wonder if he prefers jasmine or lotus fragrance?”
“Má, Sang Le’s been in a Hong Kong refugee camp for the past two years. And before that he was a prisoner in a communist re-education compound. I think anything you serve will look like a feast to him. He’s probably not very choosy.”
Danny leaned against the shelf. He had not seen his cousin for ten years, when he was six and Sang Le was eight. Back then in Vietnam, his cousin had seemed as tall and straight as a bamboo shoot. But now Danny could not remember his cousin’s face or the sound of his voice. Like everything else about Vietnam, he had stored away the memory of his cousin on a back shelf in his brain.
“Don’t we need to be getting home pretty soon if I’m going to drive to the airport to get Sang Le?” Danny impatiently shifted the rice bag to the other shoulder.
The short woman glanced up at Danny with her large eyes. A layer of makeup could not completely hide the dark circles under them. Danny knew she had stayed up most of the night cooking fancy foods and preparing the apartment for the homecoming party. And all that after working eight hours at the seamstress factory where she sewed curtains, and then four more hours at her part-time job as a waitress on the late shift at an American restaurant. A wave of affection swept over Danny. He squeezed her shoulder with his free arm.
“You need to go home and rest before the guests start arriving,” he said gently.
Her full lips pouted a moment, then she waved a delicate hand tipped with long pink nails.
“Okay, okay,” she said with a thick accent. “You get drinks. I get one more thing. You alway hurry, hurry.” She shook her head.
With his free hand, Danny pushed the cart to the soft drink section and piled in some twelvepacks of Sprite, Coke, and a carton of canned soybean drinks for the little kids. The sack of rice slung over his shoulder was getting heavier by the minute, but he couldn’t put it down. It was a matter of honor. The two teenage girls had inched their way closer to him, stealing glances, whispering and giggling. When his eyes met the liquid dark eyes of the taller, prettier girl, he gave a crooked grin, trying not to grimace from the pain throbbing in his shoulder. The girl had a beautiful face, but she still wasn’t his type.
“Hurry up, Má,” Danny pleaded as he rejoined his mother by pots of miniature mandarin orange trees and buckets of gladiolus and chrysanthemums. She picked up an artificial tree covered with delicate yellow silk flowers dotted with dark gold centers.
“I think I’ll get this hoa mai tree for your grandmother. In Vietnam she always bought a fresh tree branch every Tet.”
“She won’t like it,” Danny said. “She’ll say it’s not alive; it’s not from Vietnam; it’s too cheap looking. You know how Bà is.”
Danny’s mother bought the hoa mai anyway, paying for it and all the groceries in cash. She looked at her wallet, empty except for a couple of twenty-dollar bills. She didn’t say anything, but Danny knew she was wondering how they would make their money stretch through the New Year’s season. They still had to buy presents for the children and have at least one more party. And now there was the added burden of his cousin Sang Le coming to live with them.
Danny tried to push the thoughts from his mind as he helped his mother carry groceries to the car. He plopped the sack of rice into the trunk of his Dad’s old Toyota and rubbed his shoulder. He noticed that the two teenage girls had come out behind him, snacking on what looked like a bag of dried, candied plums. Danny didn’t know why he kept looking at them. They were really too old-fashioned looking for his taste. They probably didn’t even speak English or go out on dates. He’d never seen them with American friends at school. Their mother probably had taught them to never look a boy in the eye, to keep their thoughts to themselves, and to never display affection or emotion in public, for that was a sure sign of rudeness or even worse, sexual aggression. At least that was what his grandmother was always trying to pound into the heads of his younger sisters.
Danny imagined the two girls were trying to work up the courage to speak to him, probably just to say “hello.” Why couldn’t they just walk up, wave, and say, “Hi, Danny, how ya doing?” like Tiffany always did? Why all the mystery?
After a few minutes the Toyota’s trunk was full of grocery bags. Danny had been lucky to find a parking spot so close to the store. Di-Ho shopping center was crowded every Saturday, but around the Lunar New Year, cars packed the lots. Danny had tried explaining to his American friends how important the New Year was to Vietnamese and Chinese people; that it was more important than Christmas. But he didn’t think they really understood any more than he could understand why some of them got so excited about football games.
As he closed the trunk, Danny glanced over his shoulder to see if the girls were still watching. He thought he might wave, or smile, or throw them a kiss, just for the heck of it. He didn’t think he was all that handsome, just sort of average in most ways. He wore his hair in a popular style and tried to dress in good clothes. He kept in good shape by running almost every day, playing tennis every chance he got, and lifting weights occasionally with Calvin. Girls were always telling him he had gorgeous eyes and a cute smile, so he guessed he was all right. Besides, girls like those two standing on the sidewalk were probably desperate for attention from any guy.
When Danny looked over the top of the car at the girls one more time, his eyebrows shot up. The girls were huddled together, their backs pressed against the brick wall near the old Chinese movie theater. Four Asian boys were leaning close, talking to them. The boys looked like older teenagers, though one might have been in his twenties. All four boys wore blue jeans and black leather jackets with golden silk emblems stitched on the backs—the expensive kind of jackets that Danny wished he could afford to buy.
Danny couldn’t imagine the shy girls carrying on a conversation with those guys. The boys must have just stepped out of Ho’s bida hall a few paces away. Bida was the Vietnamese word for billiards.
Two of the boys puffed on cigarettes. The smallest wore his straight hair pulled back in a short ponytail. He blew a stream of smoke into the face of the taller girl. She must have expressed her disgust, because suddenly the guy grabbed her arm and jerked her from the wall.
Danny froze.
“What’s wrong? Why you take so long?” his mother asked from the passenger seat. “Hurry up, hurry up! That’s what you tell me.”
“Just a second, Ma.”
Danny gently closed the door and cautiously worked his way through the parked cars toward the sidewalk. He was sure now that the girls didn’t know the four boys. Their eyes were wide with fear and the tall girl was crying. Danny stopped five feet away and cleared his throat.
“So, there you are,” he said in Vietnamese as he put his hands on his hips. “Come on, sisters. Mother is waiting.” He stepped closer, grabbed each girl’s arm, and pulled them from the wall. He smiled at the four boys and shrugged. “Sorry. Hope my sisters weren’t bothering you. Hey, nice jackets.” He noticed that the emblem on the back of each jacket was a golden cobra with blood-red eyes, its head raised off the ground, full-blown and poised to strike.
