Free Stealing Time by Leslie Glass Page A

might kill the product of her husband's betrayal, but with a certain sympathy for a grown child who might wish to kill its parent.

CHAPTER 9
S ai Yuan Woo and her husband, Ja Fa Woo, knew that the cycles of heaven affect the cycles of earth, and that imbalances in nature were the cause of all evils that damage and destroy human life. She had known her double-stupid daughter was taking the wrong step the day April decided to become a policeman. And she'd been right about the poor outcome. April had been burned in a fire, crushed nearly to death, thrown out of a window and fallen ten floors (at least), and lived to be promoted. This only child of hers was worse than a cat. When April was growing up, they'd expected her to make them rich, have a top job in a bank like Stan Chan, the boy who used to like her in third grade, or own a dozen restaurants all over the city like Emily, who married the Soong boy, or run an import company like Arthur Feng's daughter, Connie. That Feng girl had been the least promising of them all, Sai repeated often with bitter satisfaction. Connie had been big and fat, and much slower than April in school. Two years older and in the same class; no one had any hopes for her. But look at her now. Feng's parents couldn't stop talking about her. Connie Feng had red hair now and drove a Mercedes. She bought her parents a much bigger house than the Woos', and now the Fengs were telling everyone about the important Hong Kong businessman who wanted to marry her.
The Woos thought the least their daughter could do was marry someone rich enough to support them, have children, and be happy. Instead she was a policeman. Bad was having a policeman for a daughter. Beyond bad was betraying the entire Han people, whose history stretched back thousands of years. Sai knew very well her daughter was lying about where she was when she wasn't on duty. They knew she was doing monkey business with someone who smelled too sweet to be a man.
Ja Fa wanted to admonish and scold her out of her foolishness, but Sai knew that scolding had no effect on this bad seed. Something stronger than talk was needed to save her daughter. They went into consultation with Chinese experts, one in Chinatown and one in New Jersey, to find out what intervention would work. The question Sai wanted answered was how April had become vulnerable to possession by a foreigner.
A highly regarded young man in Chinatown, recently arrived from China with much knowledge and hair sticking straight up about three inches from the top of his head, charged them a hundred dollars to tell them about the energy flow in the spring cycle. Spring was the cycle they happened to be in at the moment, and this young homeopathic doctor was certain that energy flow was the cause of April's excessive heat.
In very lofty terms he explained how the heart is the root of life, the seat of both intelligence and the shen —spirit. The heart's element is fire, he told them. It is called the taiyang of the yang and is considered yang. He explained that the lungs were the root of the body's qi, and the storage place of po —courage. Sai listened intently, trying to make sense of it. Po was yang and yang was masculine. Masculine was assertive. Sai believed April definitely had too much of that. She nodded. Her husband smoked a cigarette and worried about the cost.
"Po," Sai said. Too much boldness, courage.
But the young doctor shook his head. He was not interested in po. He told Sai, because her husband had stopped listening, that only the wisest of wise men could diagnose someone who was not present, and he should be charging her more. This brought Ja Fa out of his smoky reverie.
"Already too much," he protested.
When the clever doctor realized no more money was forthcoming, he made a quick diagnosis. He said that in spite of the extremely reasonable fee and the absent patient, he was certain that April's trouble derived from the liver.
"The liver?" Sai frowned. Hadn't he said it was