Foul Lady Fortune

A city reborn is a city traumatized.

It remembers its past, every second that it took to get to this point. It sees the former version of itself and knows that it has changed, its boots no longer fitting, its hats no longer comfortable. The streets trace how they used to sprawl. No matter how it is paved over and reorganized, memories and echoes do not fade away that easily.

Trauma doesn’t have to lead to destruction. Trauma can be the guiding point into something better, something stronger. Maybe a street should forget the sounds it used to make if the causes were factory cogs and devastating conditions.

But that matter is a coin toss, blowing either way. Dependent on the wind direction and how volatile the elements are feeling that year. Change is no easy thing. When a valley has run water down the same course for dynasty after dynasty, a momentary drought won’t change its route. When water returns, it will still flow along the same rivulet carved into the ground.

This new Shanghai doesn’t look that different. Still the same lights, still the same neon, still the same ships sailing into the Bund and hauling their products in, bringing people and people and more people. Put an ear to its heart, though, and you might hear the strain begin.

Put a killer on its streets, and even without really listening, the conversations start to change.

“We have been luxuriating in mess for too long. We have put up with the foreigners for too long, have let them debauch us thoroughly. We need better leadership. Maybe then the streets wouldn’t be brewing criminals.”

A heavy clunk of a beer bottle. A sneer at the lips. Two elderly civilians hover by a bar table, sharing a bowl of peanuts. They have seen so much. Witnessed centuries between them.

“I don’t want to do this again. You force me to spit at you that you are misguided and then you do not listen—”

“What is misguided? Unity? Standing together, all of Asia, mighty as a combined power against Europe?”

“There is no such thing as an Asia combined. We are different peoples. Different histories, different cultures. You are trying to believe in a mirage that Japan is feeding out.”

“What is wrong with that?”

“You don’t fight European imperialism with more imperialism!”

A table behind the bar snickers. They are overhearing the debate, but they do not nudge their nose into it. This whole city has been doing the same routine for some time now: at dinner tables among parents and children, around school desks when the teachers bring it up, even between lovers when their heads are resting breathless on their pillows, gazing at one another under the glowing moon.

The first elderly man huffs. His beer sloshes, spilling onto the sticky floor. He doesn’t like being told off. Once he latched on to the idea of incoming saviors with faces like theirs, it was too easy for him to sweep everything else under the rug. Isn’t this what they have been waiting for? Liberation from Western rule?

“You know what your problem is?” he asks his friend. “You have your eye on the small details rather than the big picture.”

“What is the big picture?” his friend returns. He cracks open a peanut. “The trouble has been with the Western foreigners for some time, but are you naive enough to think they alone carry the problem?”

“Yes—”

The first man isn’t given the opportunity to finish his answer.

“No. The problem is everywhere. The problem is any empire that thinks it can swallow others into its rule. Europe was given the playground first, and it has hogged it. With power, it could be us too. We are not exempt.”

Another harrumph. “So we should have power. Let us take power.”

It is here that the conversation finally breaks up. His friend walks away from the bar counter, too fed up to continue. The first man continues eating peanuts. The first man doesn’t notice a soulless set of eyes following his friend out into the night.

“Walk away, then,” he mutters under his breath. “It won’t stop the new order from arising.”

The door slams closed. Outside the bar, the other elderly man turns around wearily, peering to see who has followed him out, his eyes weak in the hazy dark. They stand on a smaller street, an offshoot of the central entertainment district. There is no one in their immediate vicinity. Only a tree, waving with the wind. Only the moon, hanging low in the sky, ready to duck back under the horizon again.

“Hello,” the elderly man says. “I don’t suppose you have a cigarette?”

He doesn’t think to flinch when his companion reaches into their jacket pocket.

He is too late when it is a syringe that comes out instead.