"Who?"
"That's Fu Manchu," she said, tremulously.
This strange personage with the one leg pointed in the air was joined by a sinister-looking fellow togged in the leathery, apocalyptic costume and long hair and eye makeup of a rock star, who immediately grabbed a tourist seated a few rows from us and rubbed his bald head and patted down his pockets and threw his cigarettes and cell phone into the abyss, a vast hole from whence the hydraulic stage would rise.
"Yeah, yeah, and this guy looks like Michael Jackson," I whispered.
"No, you don't understand," said Jenny Lin with a shallow breath.
What was she talking about? I racked my brain for some point of reference. Meanwhile the show commenced: A martial-arts display at the Imperial Court, twin brother separated from sister, a storm at sea, a beach with crabs and starfish that come alive, a frozen mountaintop, rock slides, fire, fish, marauding archers and spearmen, a rainforest with freakish insects and giant slithering snakes, a battle in the sky that holds the fate for a peaceable kingdom ....
The odd fellow in the yellow robe and trapezoid shoes made another appearance at the end, and Jenny Lin shocked me from the trance-like state of awe and appreciation of beauty under which I had been watching most of the performance by puncturing my eardrum with her whisper. "That's him!"
It made sense to me now, and my brain was able to find the quote in the B-grade section of my memory, from a book called The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu:
"Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government—which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu Manchu ..."
Later that night, the story came tumbling from her as we sipped hot tea in an all-night noodle cafe on Spring Mountain Road. Her tears could have filled the teacups as she recalled the past.
Long ago, under British rule, Hong Kong was a mysterious place that held many secrets. Jenny Lin lived on a boat in the harbor with her parents and twin brother. Her father traded in herbs, providing only a modest existence, but he talked continually of one day becoming rich and moving the family to a house in Kowloon.
On a wind-swept day after Christian school let out, Jenny Lin returned to the boat to find her parents madly packing their belongings. Fu Manchu had stolen her father's life's work, the herbal recipe for a life-extension elixir, and he was sending goons to have them killed. They would be chopped into fish bait with butcher's knives, said her father.
Indeed, Fu Manchu's junks chased them across Victoria Harbour until they lost them in a squall. When the boat broke apart in the storm-tossed sea, the family washed ashore on the rocky beach of the Portuguese colony of Macau.
Now that he had nothing, her father, a proud man, thought it best to separate Jenny Lin from her twin brother and sent the children to America to work in the businesses of his uncles. Last she heard, her brother was wearing wading boots and working 14-hour days in a soybean processing plant in New York City, while she was employed in the dreadful process of kneading the shoulders and backs of knotty men in the massage parlors of Las Vegas' Chinatown. Eventually, her father made a fortune in seaweed but never sent for his son and daughter.
"Fu Manchu, that bastard," I grumbled, pouring another cup of tea. "He won't get away with this."