Dragon Bones (Red Princess 3)

t gets barnacles, and the Porsche is temperamental. The house needs constant upkeep. I’ve got groundskeepers and maids and—I don’t know— people in and out of the place all the time. You laugh, but it’s true!”

Hulan was laughing, but she was also listening to the subtext. Michael Quon had been serious when he’d said he’d gotten “very, very rich.”

“Hobbies are the other thing people in my position are supposed to take up,” he continued. “I started buying contemporary art. After that I studied the Song Dynasty poets, even sat in on a couple of classes at Stanford. I give them enough money, so why not?”

He chatted, she listened. They ate and drank until they were full. When he finally set down his chopsticks, the waitress instantly appeared at his side and asked if they were done. He nodded, and she cleared the table. She returned again and asked if they wanted anything else.

“Please bring some watermelon,” Michael said in Mandarin. He regarded Hulan questioningly, then asked, “How about another bottle of wine? We don’t have to drink the whole thing, but it would be nice, don’t you think?”

When Hulan agreed, the waitress slipped away and brought back another icy bottle. She refilled their glasses, then stepped to her spot against the wall. Michael picked up where he’d left off.

“My mother always wanted me to connect to my roots, but it took the IPO for me to begin searching for my place in the world. The old family and district associations are still operational in San Francisco, but they tend to focus on old-timers—Cantonese speakers from the early days who want only a banquet at Chinese New Year. The Organization of Chinese Americans has done a great job lobbying in Washington, but where do you put someone like me?”

“The Committee of 100?” Hulan asked. I. M. Pei and Yo-Yo Ma had founded the group in 1989 after the crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Today it boasted 140 of the self-proclaimed most important Chinese Americans. Michael Quon should have been a member.

“They asked and I turned them down. What can I say? I think the Committee of 100 is too elitist, but I also wasn’t going to be comfortable at the annual family association banquet down in Chinatown with the pledge of allegiance, followed by ten courses, karaoke, and an appearance by Miss Chinatown, all for the big-ticket price of fifty dollars.”

“It can be hard to find your niche,” Hulan sympathized.

But Michael shrugged off the suggestion and hurried on. “What else have I done? Good deeds, naturally. But giving away money isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. You give a million dollars to a museum and they say, Well, considering Bill Gates’s gift, your donation isn’t enough to get your name on the wing, let alone the building. That would take ten million dollars. So what does that leave? Travel—”

“And women.”

“Yes, and women.” He laughed good-naturedly. “You can spend a lot of money on women.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“Not really.”

“So then for travel you came here?”

“Ummm….” He mused as he thought about it. “No, first I took a villa in the south of France. Then I played around in Paris. I took about six months where I just skied—Gstaad at Christmas, Aspen in the spring, then down to New Zealand for the first snow in June. But you can do stuff like that for only so long before you start looking for something else. When you’re rich beyond your wildest dreams, it’s harder than you might expect to find what will make you happy and occupy your mind.” He cocked his head and appraised her coolly. “But you know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You have money. You’ve just had it longer than I have.”

“How could you tell?”

“It’s something about the way you carry yourself.”

He took the bottle from the ice bucket. She realized that the others from the Site 518 team had left.

“It’s late,” she said.

“Yes,” he agreed, “but you still haven’t found out why or how I got here.”

He poured the wine into their glasses and eased back into his chair, wordlessly challenging her to leave.

“You are very kan ye,” she said.

“You think I like to brag and boast? I suppose so, but I prefer the less severe definition. I like to shoot the breeze.”

Which showed that his Chinese was not just fluent but highly nuanced as well.

“So how long do I have to wait until I hear why you’re here and why you’ve stayed?”

No flicker of victory crossed his features. No wonder he had done well in business.

“I’ve stayed because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be and nowhere else I have to be. As for your other question, I told you I took a class in Chinese poetry,” he said, smoothly transitioning back into his storytelling mode. “I kept with it even after the class was over. One night I read a poem by Meng Jiao called ‘The Sadness of the Gorges.’ It begins, ‘Above the gorges, one thread of sky.’ Later in the same poem, he wrote, ‘Trees lock their roots in rotted coffins and the twisted skeletons hang tilted upright.’ He was talking about the Qutang Gorge and the hanging coffins, though I didn’t know it then. But the haunting quality of the words made me want to look deeper at Meng Jiao, the Three Gorges, and especially the Ba, who’d hung those coffins up on the cliffs.”

He went on to talk about the poet, a disillusioned government official, who, twelve hundred years ago, had wandered through the beauty of these hills but had lived in brutal poverty. Meng had called the Ba, some of whom had still been around in those days, wild apes. Here was a man who lived so long ago writing about people who’d lived and walked this land so much longer before that. Michael’s interest had been piqued. The more he learned about the Ba and their subsequent disappearance, the more he wanted to know. Then, as he’d studied the mythology of the gorges, he’d been increasingly drawn to the character of Da Yu.