Chapter 1
“IS THATSherlock Holmes?” a customer asked.
Sandra Chen looked up from behind the cash register of her shop in Chinatown. She did not have a single Sherlock Holmes item in her store of tourist kitsch, but she did have her cousin’s son visiting, and the boy did like to draw his heroes.
“You’re so good,” the customer continued, looking at his sketchbook.
Eight-year-old Walter grinned with pleasure. “Sherlock is so smart,” he said. “He knows everything.”
“But why is he doing kung fu? Sherlock lived in England.”
Walter’s voice crept higher as he defended his idea. “Sherlock kneweverything.And this is a mash-up with Bruce Lee.”
The customer pursed her thin lips. “That’s wrong. Kung fu is Chinese, and Sherlock Holmes is English. If you combine the two, you look stupid.”
Walter’s eyes widened, but being a good Chinese boy, he didn’t argue with an elder. He held in his anger with a maturity far beyond his years… but he did clench his fingers around his colored pencils.
That gave Sandra a chance to intervene. “He looks like a boy with an imagination,” she said with a warm smile. Then she pointed at a different side of the store. “I have a scarf designed by a famous Chinese artist in Fujian. You can see his signature. It would look lovely on you. Come, come!”
It worked. She sold the irritating woman five of the mass-produced scarves at an exorbitant profit. She thought it a fitting end to the exchange until she looked back at her nephew. He’d put away his sketchbook and was staring angrily at a manga-style comic book. He wasn’t turning the pages but glaring at the art as if it had personally offended him.
They had gotten revenge on the customer, but obviously her nephew didn’t understand that.
Sandra pulled up a chair and sat beside Walter. “Do you know who my favorite superhero is?”
He rolled his eyes at the display of Bruce Lee paraphernalia.
“That’s a customer favorite, not mine.” She leaned forward. “I love the Monkey King.”
Walter wrinkled his nose. She’d taught him the Buddhist taleJourney to the West. He’d considered it a fairy tale, like the ones that told about the big bad wolf, or three bears and a nosy girl. To him, Monkey was simply a child’s tale that Disney hadn’t adapted yet.
He wasn’t old enough to know that the entities in the tale were real. She couldn’t teach him that now, but she could channel his talents in a better direction.
She picked up his sketchbook and opened it to a blank page. She wasn’t a good artist, but she could do the basics, so she started outlining Monkey with bold strokes. “Monkey was a demigod with amazing kung fu powers. There’s even a kind of kung fu called Monkey-style. Would you like to see?”
He nodded as she passed him back his sketchbook. Then she abruptly hopped up and moved about the store like a monkey. He laughed as he watched his middle-aged auntie prance, but gasped when she quickly punched, then kicked a stuffed animal display. This was powerful kung fu, and he was appropriately impressed.
Now that she had his attention, she could push for more. “What you know about Monkey?” she asked him.
Walter straightened in his seat as he recited what he knew. “Monkey was bad in heaven and imprisoned in a rock for five hundred years. Then he escaped, thanks to a monk, and they were given a quest to get sacred scrolls from India.” His eyes brightened. “On the way, Monkey killed ogres, bad kings, and fake immortals because he was great at kung fu and used a staff. Plus, sometimes he could fly on a cloud. In the end, he became a Buddha and everybody loved him.”
That was a very short summary of one of the great Chinese classics, and it was mostly right. The boy had missed the most important point, though—that the demigod energies of Monkey and his companions, Pigsy and Sand, were very real. They weren’t sitting with Buddha but were searching for a way to come back to Earth. They weren’t evil or good—she thought that came from their human hosts—they were very, very bored.
“Do you know what I like best about Monkey?”
“That he kicks bad guy ass like Bruce Lee!”
She tapped his nose. “That’s whatyoulike best. What I like is that he’s always getting it wrong.”
Her nephew scrunched up his nose. “But that’s dumb.”
“Maybe. But when he messes up, he always tries to fix it.”
“Auntie, you’re supposed to do it right the first time.”
She shrugged. “Maybe. But I never get it right the first time. Do you?”
He looked away, his cheeks colored in shame. Her heart twisted as she looked at him. He was the artist child in a family that excelled in science and math. Walter’s father was a doctor, his mother an accountant, and his two brothers seemed happy to live in the black-and-white world of engineering Lego cities and constructing robotic cars. She knew that would never work for Walter.
