An excerpt from Fireside No. 1:
Long ago, when you were just a baby, we went to the Moon.
Summer nights in Beijing were brutal: hot, muggy, the air thick as the puddles left on the road after a shower, covered in iridescent patches of gasoline. We felt like dumplings being steamed, slowly, inside the room we were renting.
There was nowhere to go. Outside, the sidewalk was filled with the droning of air conditioners from neighbors who had them and the cackling of TVs at full volume from neighbors who hadn’t. Add your crying to the mix, and it was enough to drive anyone crazy. I would carry you out on my shoulders, back in, and then out again, begging you to sleep.
One night, I returned home after another day of fruitless petitioning at the Palace of Mandarins, having gotten no closer to avenging your mother. You sensed my anger and despair and cried heartily in sympathy. The world seemed so oppressive and dark that I wanted to join you, join the sound and the fury that filled the mad world.
Then the Moon passed low overhead, ripe, golden, round, like a shaobing fresh out of the oven. And I tied you to my back with one of the scarves your mother left behind, and began to climb the pagoda tree by the side of the road that somehow survived all the construction and reconstruction, all the road-widening and demolition, all the pollution and apathy.
The climb was long and arduous. The Moon seemed close from the ground but it kept on receding as we progressed up the tree. We had to climb through clouds, through flocks of wild starlings and sparrows, through wind and rain that threatened to tear us from the tree, until finally, we were at the very tip of the tallest swaying branch, and then, just as the Moon passed right overhead, I reached up and hoisted us onto it.
It was wonderful on the Moon: cool air, clean skies, as quiet as a library. You stopped crying as soon as we landed, looking around with your eyes wide open like when we first got to Beijing and you saw all those cars for the first time.
The Moon people were beautiful and polite. The women wore dresses that flowed and shimmered like water, and the men walked in shoes that gleamed and shone like the paint on new cars. Everyone spoke like they were poets from the Tang Dynasty. In teahouses made of green jade and white nephrite, they drank tea brewed from dew and whispered and laughed at each other’s wit. They ate cakes flavored with sweet osmanthus, prepared by the goddess Chang’e herself. Even the walls felt cool to the touch, and you could see why they didn’t need anything as unrefined as air conditioning.
But they were also haughty. They didn’t want us to be there, poor peasants from the countryside. They thought we didn’t belong. We were loud and made the place dirty.
“Why don’t you go home?” they asked.
So we had to find ways to trick them.
#
SALLY RUSH SMILED, uneasily, at her client.
The Chinese man across the coffee shop table was in his forties: short and wiry frame, blue dress shirt wrinkled and faded from too many washes, shoes scuffed beyond hope. His unkempt hair was turning white in patches, and he didn’t bother shaving off the straggly wisps on his upper lips and chin. The coffee on the table remained black and untouched while he drank tea from a thermos. Wenchao Zhang looked like he had just gotten off the boat, but the way he appraised her was cool, calm, calculated.
Sally looked into his dark brown eyes and expressionless face — she didn’t want to sound racist, but — she found him inscrutable.
His daughter, a girl of about six, sat next to him. Sally smiled at her, and the child smiled back, her eyes wide open with curiosity. In contrast to the father’s impenetrable face, Sally thought she could read every thought that went through the girl’s head.
She held out her hand but Wenchao ignored it, continuing to scrutinize her.
Maybe he doesn’t know English well, she thought. She turned to the girl.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Sally. I’ll be helping you and your dad. I’m your lawyer.”
“Hello,” the girl said. And she blushed so that Sally knew she thought Sally was pretty. “You can call me Vinnie.”
Sally decided that the girl with the American name also had American eyes.
“How will you help?” Vinnie asked.
Sally considered this. “My job is to help people tell stories. If I do a good enough job, you win.”
Vinnie nodded, smiling.
Then the father spoke. “Did you read my story?” His accent was heavy, but she had no trouble understanding him. He spoke carefully and calmly, with no hint of desperation.
“Yes,” Sally said. His story had shocked her, outraged her, and she found herself slightly disappointed that he didn’t seem more, well, heroic, didn’t carry the signs of his suffering more visibly. She wanted to save him, this courageous little Chinese man who had given up so much for his faith, for freedom.
“You’re very brave,” she added.
“Have you done this much?” he asked.
“No.” She blushed.
Sally had been a good student in a great law school, and she picked Widmar Eaton Lafever & Tuck out of a dozen law firms — all of them offering her equally unbelievable salaries — because she liked the senior woman associate who had interviewed her and made Widmar sound so wonderful (except that the associate had already quit — “for personal reasons” — by the time Sally started in September, so maybe that wasn’t such a great way to pick a firm).
“Then how do you know my story will work?” he asked.
“I —” she was stuck. This wasn’t going at all the way she had envisioned it. “Your facts match the statutory definition of a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership …” Her voice trailed off. The legal phrases sounded abstract, inadequate to the task.
Actually being a lawyer, Sally found, was very different from being a law student. She had been so good at teasing apart hypothetical fact patterns, marshaling them into intricate legal arguments, bolstering them with high-minded principle and policy, and dressing them up in dazzling rhetorical flourishes, but she was completely unprepared for the realities of commercial litigation.
“Ah,” Wenchao said. And Sally understood his tone perfectly. “That is why you’re free.”
There were no neat fact patterns at Widmar Eaton. It was her job to assemble facts out of warehouses full of boxes of paper produced by corporations intent on drowning each other with legal bills. She found that she was utterly unqualified to do her job.
To train her and to make her feel better about her meaningless drudgery, the firm assigned her to pro bono asylum cases. She was supposed to practice on these refugees, who could not sue her firm for malpractice, until she learned enough so that she wouldn’t mess up on the firm’s real clients.
Sally was furious with herself. She was supposed to be confident, in charge, the one guiding him.
“Tell me about yourself.” His voice softened.
“Excuse me?”
“My dad likes stories,” Vinnie said.
“Tell me the story of how you became a lawyer,” Wenchao said. “So I can see how good you’ll be at helping me tell my story.”
To read the rest of “To the Moon,” subscribe or buy Issue No. 1.
Besides being a writer, Ken Liu is also a translator, programmer, and lawyer. His fiction has appeared in F&SF, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston. He and his wife are collaborating on their first novel. Find him online at kenliu.name or on Twitter @kyliu99.
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