Yanluo
Wang, a former soldier from the People's Liberation Army,
learned about guns before being discharged for mental instability. If he had such a weapon, he could fulfill the
demands of the Boxer rebel ghosts that appeared nightly in his dreams. The foreign
devils who once poisoned his country with opium are back in China, this time with
fast-food restaurants, blue jeans, and western music. The foreigners are destroying
all that is precious about his country with their cheap materialism. The Boxer ghosts
want Yanluo Wang to do what they did a hundred years ago, kill these barbarians.
Peter Stockton does not
know Yanluo Wang or anyone else in China when he arrives in that country to
teach at an international school. He knows little about Chinese culture and no
Mandarin, but after surviving a school shooting in the United States, he wants
to work somewhere less infested with firearms.
During the first week of
school, Peter hears explosive sounds like gunfire in the street outside his
classroom, and panic absorbs him. A German student assures him that it was only
fireworks.
"The Chinese like fireworks and set them
off for any occasion," the student says with a smile. "Wait until the
lunar New Year. It will sound like a war zone around here."
The headmaster of the school
is also from the states. He orders the faculty to conduct active shooter drills,
which the international students find exasperating.
"There
are no guns in China!" A frustrated Dutch girl exclaims as
she and her classmates crouched under their desks. " Only the police and
army have them."
Although Chinese
nationals are not allowed to attend international schools, many of Peter's students
are Han Chinese with passports from other countries. Peter is not sure how all
this works, but he suspects that it involves bribes.
Other kids are native to
the countries of their passports. Two mischievous sophomores who tried to trick
him by trading places on the first week of school are Jordanian. The Dutch girl
who sexes up her uniform by rolling up her skirt and undoing her blouse's top
buttons is a Netherlands citizen. The German boy is from Hamburg.
Their lives are different
from most children. They are accustomed to international travel and speak at
least two languages. But they are still in that universe of teenagers, with their
sports, their music, and their secret crushes and first loves.
Yanluo Wang strikes not with
a gun but with two kitchen knives from the restaurant where he used them for chopping
food. They are identical, made of stainless steel with black handles. He selects
Peter Stockton's classroom because it is close to
the street. With a chef's knife in each hand, he kicks open the classroom door,
charges at Peter, plunging one blade into the foreigner's shoulder and slashing
Peter's face with the other.
Yanluo
Wang
turns towards the frightened youngsters, blood dripping from his weapon. He yells
in Mandarin at the Chinese students to get out.
They all scramble for the door, but when the two Jordanian sophomores try
to follow, YanluoWang stabs both. A knife for each child. They collapsed on the
floor, bleeding to death. The assailant goes
to the German boy, openly weeping and pleading for his life in German, and slits
his throat. Yanluo
Wang stabs the Dutch girl multiple times and then runs out of the room into
the headmaster, who grabs both of his wrists and, with other educators' help, wrestles
the bloody knives away from the deranged attacker.
#
It is a sunny spring morning.
Prison guards take Yanluo Wang by van to an open
field where armed soldiers stand at ease awaiting his arrival. A nearby McDonald's
fills the air with the aroma of hamburgers and French fries. It is where the
soldiers will go for lunch once they complete their gruesome task. As the
guards pull Yanluo Wang out of the truck and bring him to the spot where he will
die, the soldiers form a line in front of him and wait for the final commands.
Unblindfolded, Yanluo
Wang looks at the guns with envy. The last thought to cross his mind before he
joins the ghosts of the Boxer rebellion was how much more he could have done with
such a weapon.