Before the gates stood a vision of loveliness in a smoky blue changpao—none other than one Richard Ranasinghe, the European jeweler. Vincent knew intuitively this was not the same Richard who had point-blank refused to wear the outfit for Saul. This Richard’s curls were adorned with a diadem of gold and obsidian. He was garbed in slippers woven with gold and silver threads, a gold and jade dagger with coral inlaid in its hilt, and a magnificent robe upon which embroidered dragons and phoenixes danced. Behind him, the golden gates shone like a halo.
The fantastic beasts in Vincent’s train kneeled before Richard in reverence, one after another. Vincent almost followed suit, because it was just too plain who was in charge here: this all-too beautiful figure standing before the gates of Heaven. Really, he was frighteningly beautiful.
Vincent begged for Richard to open the gate, but his voice didn’t even register to his own ears. It was so quiet, or perhaps even silent, that it sounded like some vague shout off in the distance.
The changpao-clad man stood with arms together in classic Chinese fashion and cocked his head to the side a degree. He radiated divine magnificence. It was, Vincent realized, a gesture of confusion.
And that was when he heard his dreams shatter around him. There was no escaping the look in Richard’s eye. He had to face the facts: This divine, sinless being could not comprehend the feelings of a lowly sinner like Vincent. Richard could not understand the common man’s pettiness—why Vincent would beg Richard to hate him for his sin, not offer forgiveness and further funds. Vincent did not want to be forgiven. And yet, Richard did.
A divine being would never understand him, no more than the gates of Heaven would ever open for him. His vessel lost its steam, and his celestial companions melted away into the mist. He plunged into darkness—and that was when he woke up.
Vincent’s breathing was shallow as he sat upright. In the darkness of his bedroom, he grinned at the irony of it all. One of his final exams in elementary school had featured the “Li Sao” in the language arts section. He’d been tasked to describe the life of the poet. Just a basic memorization problem, really.
Qu Yuan had been a statesman who struggled with his role at the center of the political machine. It frustrated him that his good advice to the king was ignored in favor of the various petty dullards at court. Eventually, he was exiled to a land in the south, where, grieving the state’s descent into abysmal governance, he committed suicide by drowning himself. The end.
That was all Vincent had written on his test, but everyone knew the rest, even if it wasn’t relevant to examinations. Everyone knew the dragon boat story, and it went like this: To mourn the late statesman, the local fisherfolk set forth in dragon boats. They trawled up and down the water, producing a fierce noise to scatter the fish before they could nibble on the eminent poet and statesman’s body.
Turning away from legends and looking to contemporary sources instead, it was known that the story of the dragon boats preceded Qu Yuan’s watery demise. However, the dragon boat tradition retained an association with the historical figure among members of the Chinese cultural sphere. On the day of the festival, this group included Ms. Liu, one of Ranasinghe Jewelry’s patrons.
Vincent massaged his temples and relaxed as he remembered the clear, ringing tones of Richard’s recitation. The sound was like cold, silver rain falling from the heavens.
The “Li Sao” was, in a phrase, an escapist poem. Its narratorial statesman, frustrated that the world could not live up to his ideals, donned a mask of fantasy and escaped into the sky with creatures from myth and legend. Alas, even his dreams did not end as he had hoped. Even those who soared through the skies of fiction must eventually come down to reality, the poem claimed. Total escape, it said, was impossible—unless one were to completely free themselves from this mortal coil.
Many great cultural figures met a similar end. However, Vincent wasn’t too keen on dying, and he remembered thinking the same thing back when he was a child learning about the poem in school. Even when talking about people who had lived very, very long ago in the Spring and Autumn or Warring States periods, dying purely because they didn’t get their way had always seemed, well, a bit much to Vincent. He didn’t understand why no one tried putting some distance between themselves and the problem, maybe even acting like the problem wasn’t there anymore. Like his own grandfather, fleeing his homeland. Even if bad things happened, you could always never speak of your flight and find new pleasures in your newfound home. As Vincent’s father had been fond of saying, why try to have everything when you could be satisfied with half? In the end, that was what made a person happiest—accepting kismet. Being happy with one’s lot in life. Everything was best in moderation.
But if that were true, then why did these great cultural figures die? Why should they make such an inexplicable choice for themselves? It was as if living was the greatest torture of all.
Now that the fantastical visions of his dream and the silly childhood memories were gone, Vincent was left with nothing to mull over but the dragon boat race from earlier that day. Not the look on Richard’s face but the race itself. Vincent couldn’t get it out of his mind.
Forward. Just moving forward. Headlong to the point of simple foolishness. Eschewing all wasted motion. Striving onward to save the object of one’s respect from the unconquerable laws of the universe.
Was it, Vincent wondered, possible to live that way? Somewhere out there? Anywhere?
A knock at his door abruptly returned him to his senses. He knew immediately from the gentle rap who the knocker was.
He climbed down from his narrow loft bed and opened the door. Sure enough, it was Marian. The hallway light was off behind her, so she carried a flashlight. Turning on the lights always woke up Vincent’s father—or the master of the house, as she called him.
“You not doing okay, Vince?” she asked.
The live-in housekeeper, called a worker or gung jan in Cantonese, had grown up and lived alongside Vincent for many years. She had light brown skin and similarly brown, slightly curly hair. Marian was a cheerful sort, not one to fuss over details or stand on ceremony with Vincent, but she also never intruded on the family’s privacy more than was strictly necessary. Probably, he thought, to make it easier to live under the same roof.