Dreams of the Red Phoenix by Virginia Pye

maybe he wouldn’t have perished under the shifting ground.
    He pressed the other end of the chop against the back of his hand and was surprised to notice that the bright-red ink made not the Chinese characters for his father’s name but the image of a winged phoenix. His father’s chop bore that magical symbol, not a written name. Charles lifted his hand into the sunlight and felt a flicker of something—if not hope, then perhaps comfort— as the bird rose. He then let his hand drop again to his side and kept on to the servants’ quarters.
    In front of Han’s shack, he caught his breath. The simple woven bamboo screen that blocked the door remained in place, which struck Charles as odd, given that it was midday. He stepped around it, and when he knocked on the door, it swung open. The single room remained dim even in daylight, but Charles’s eyes adjusted, and he could see that no one was inside. No candles flickered in front of the modest altar to the family’s ancestors. The sepia-toned, faded photo of Han’s grandmother and grand father in their formal attire wasn’t there. The straw sleeping mats that Han and his father usually kept rolled in the corner were missing, too.
    Over in the small kitchen area, the storage shelf stood bare, the larder empty. The straw at the back of the cooking stove had been swept clean, and no logs remained stacked ready to be placed inside the oven. The hole where the wok usually sat above the flame was also empty, and the many straw baskets, tin bucket, and wooden water ladle that usually hung beside the stove were all gone, too. The only things left behind were the two ladder-back chairs Charles’s mother had given Cook. They remained against the wall, as unused as ever.
    Charles turned and left, shutting the door behind him. He strode down the alley, offering a tentative bow to several servants’ families, though he didn’t recognize most of the faces and they returned his greeting with blank stares. Charles wondered if the ones from deep in the countryside had ever seen a white boy be fore.
    As he approached Lian’s quarters, he noticed that the screen had been pulled back and clouds of smoke from the cook fire billowed out the door. Something was wrong with the chimney, he thought. If his father had been alive, he would have attended to it right away. Charles squeezed the cool marble chop in his pocket and remembered his father insisting on the importance of treating others as you wished them to treat you, no matter their station in life. Charles could recall him pressing the point in the pulpit but more often on the streets of the provincial Chi nese town, where Charles had stayed close to his side and held on tightly to his hand.
    Once, when Charles was seven, his father had bent down and given a coin to a legless beggar and instructed Charles to share one of his dried oatcakes with the man. Charles liked to carry an extra snack tucked in his pocket when they went on outings, but he did as he was told. He tossed the cake onto the ground before the beggar, then turned away from the gruesome sight of the man’s stumps. But his father yanked Charles back and in sisted that he pick up the oatcake and place it directly into the beggar’s filthy hand. In English, he said, We are not offering food to a dangerous mongrel, my boy, but to a fellow human being . Then his father stayed and had a conversation with the beggar as he stuffed the food into his toothless mouth.
    Only Caleb Carson, Charles had come to realize as he got old er, would inflict such an experience on a small child while wear ing a smile and repeating the Golden Rule. His knees felt weak as the realization swept over him again that the reliable, wise person of his father was no longer alive. Charles swallowed and tried to focus on the problem at hand. If his father wasn’t here, then he could at least summon up what he would think: something must be done