The Emperor

Gung-Gung calls me “princess,” like most grandpas do, like Grandpa does in English, holding things out to me from the Chinatown streets—you like this, Yok Mung? Nui nui, look, you want this? The Mahjong club on Kearny street stretch their lips wide to reveal checkerboard smiles—do you think they get more oxygen through the gaps, Gung Gung?—but the ladies moving like air hockey mallets lob tight throws of disapproval my way in a series of such rapid twitches and jerks that I think I hear their necks snapping with the effort. He shuffles down the street, leisurely examining shoddy oriental robes and murky rings of jade, humming nondescript fragments of melodies I think he made up or maybe he heard them in China; I’m too afraid to ask, too afraid of a, “What you want to know that for?” so I shuffle alongside him, close as I can to his side without holding his hand, because I can’t, because he’s fiddling with a toothpick in his mouth—the toothpick I grabbed from the dim sum place while the lady was screaming table numbers in Chinese, in Chinese, in Chinese again because her microphone was set to echo. The cloudy ring is held out for me to examine, milky white with dendritic patterns of brilliant green shooting throughout. You want this? I shake my head because Mom always told us not to accept everything Gung Gung offers—it makes you look greedy—and Gung Gung chuckles, fitting the ring back in its slot, bragging to the shopkeeper in English he barely understands that his nui nui knows bad jade when she sees it, after all, she is Tso Yok Mung. After all, she is the Jade Princess.

~ToriannaLamba