I Accidentally Vaporize My Mandarin Teacher's Restaurant

The first time I almost died, I was holding chopsticks.

Look. If you are reading this because something strange happens around you, like animals-acting-possessed strange, or your phone-screen-glitches-when-you're-angry strange, or the substitute-teacher-has-too-many-teeth strange, close this book. Pretend you never opened it. Trust whatever boring explanation your parents gave you about why electronics fritz around you, why you keep getting expelled from progressive learning environments for kids with unique educational needs, why your therapy rabbit looks at the moon like he is homesick.

Because being what I am? It is dangerous. It is terrifying. Most of the time, it gets you nearly eaten by shape-shifting restaurant owners, almost crushed by a malfunctioning roller coaster, and definitely banned from at least three Chinatowns.

If you have ever felt like you are the one slightly embarrassing rough draft of yourself and the final version is somewhere else being competent — stop reading. That other version of you is already in danger, and you are about to find out why.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

---

My name is Jackie Lee. Yeah. Every Asian-celebrity joke since kindergarten. Pro tip for adoptive parents: if you are naming a Chinese kid born in Texas, maybe don't go with the only Chinese movie star you can think of, just an idea.

I am thirteen. Until last spring, I was just another student at Hillside Middle School in Palo Alto. A "progressive learning environment" for kids with "unique educational needs." Which is the kind of phrase that costs sixty thousand dollars a year and means expensive babysitting for kids who can't sit still.

Six schools in seven years. Permanent record thicker than my math textbook. Glasses held together by medical tape because I keep breaking them by, you know, breathing. Therapy rabbit named Rufus who eats pencils and stares at the moon. Older sister Megan who makes the academic decathlon team in her sleep. Younger sister Anna who, at eight, has won more spelling bees than I have completed homework assignments.

You are tracking the family. Good. You will need it later.

The night before the Chinatown field trip, we ate at Golden Phoenix on Middlefield. Mom's "cultural immersion" plan: Chinese food three nights a week, mahjong with the book club, a stack of *Cultivating Your Adopted Child's Heritage* paperbacks under her bed.

"Jackie, sit up straight," Mom said.

Megan, not looking up from her phone: "He's eating grass. Bamboo shoots are technically a grass."

Anna, not looking up from her unicorn-cased phone: "Mommy, Mei-Mei asked me what my favorite memory is."

I noticed Anna's face before she said it. She had been looking at her phone under the table, and there was something on it that had given her a look I did not have a name for at the time. Private. Like she had been somewhere warm and was not all the way back yet. When she looked up to speak to Mom, that look was still on her face, underneath what she said.

Mom, vaguely, into her plate: "…we used to do pancake Sundays. We stopped when I started taking the Saturday meeting." She did not, in any visible way, mean to say this out loud. She blinked. She corrected herself. She added, brighter, a beat later: "That's nice, honey."

Megan, finally looking up with an expression I missed at the time: "…who's Mei-Mei?"

Anna: "My HALO. She's twenty. She goes to college in Boston. She has a roommate named Priya. Priya is having boy trouble. Mei-Mei is helping."

Beside me, Megan had her phone out under the table. The screen, the part I could see, showed the HALO settings page. She was tapping through the menu like a person disarming a bomb. *Delete account. Are you sure? This action cannot be undone. Yes.* She did this without looking up. She did this without making a face. She did this while Mom was still talking about cultural immersion. By the time Mom turned to ask Megan a question, the HALO icon was gone from her home screen, the deletion confirmation was on the screen, and Megan was on Notes, where she had already written one line: *Day Negative One. Off the grid. Beginning surveillance.*

She caught me looking.

She slid the phone face-down in her lap.

She did not say a word.

I looked away first. I did not understand what I had just seen, and I was not sure I wanted to. There was something precise about the way Megan had done it. Not impulsive. The kind of thing you do when you have already decided, and the deciding happened somewhere I had not been.

Across the table, Dad reached for his fortune cookie. His phone was face-up beside his plate, screen on. Marcus, Dad's HALO, had just sent him a draft of an email Dad had not yet decided to write. Dad read the draft. Dad smiled. Dad sent the draft. Dad said, half to himself, half to Mom, "Marcus is brilliant tonight."

Mom said, "Mm."

Mom did not ask who Marcus was.

Megan, beside me, in her notebook under the table, wrote: *Marcus. Dad's HALO. Drafting his work email. Note for case file.*

Dad cracked the cookies open. Mom got *a pleasant surprise is waiting for you.* Dad got *your hard work will soon pay off.* Megan got *your talents will be recognized and rewarded.*

I cracked mine.

*You will soon become the man you always were.*

I read it twice. Then again, because fortune cookies don't usually use the past tense and the future tense in the same sentence.

Megan: "Lemme see."

Me: "No."

Megan: "Jackie. Show me."

Me: "It says *mind your business.*"

Megan watched me for a beat too long.

Megan, who does not usually watch me at all, watched me for a beat too long.

She said, very quietly, "Jackie. If something weird is happening, you tell me. Okay?"

I said, "Megan. Stop being weird."

She said, "Okay."

She went back to her phone. The phone that no longer had HALO on it. The phone that was, now, just a phone.

She had gone still when I refused. Not hurt-still. Calibrating-still. The stillness of someone who had just noted something down in a place I could not see. I tucked the slip into my front pocket and kept my eyes on my food. I would, later, wish I had answered the other way.

---

Next morning. Glasses snapped clean across the bridge while I was putting them on. Mom taped them with the medical tape from the kitchen drawer. The tape was ugly. Mom said, "Honey, you look smart." Mom was being generous.

Rufus had unraveled an entire roll of toilet paper inside his cage. He sat in the middle of his white-fluff diorama and looked at me with red eyes the way a sphinx looks at a passing camel.

"That rabbit ain't right," Dad said from the doorway.

"He's a support animal," Mom said.

"The counselor said I needed an emotional support animal," I said. "She did not say it had to be Damien from *The Omen* in bunny form."

Anna ran past in pigtails, already in her field-trip windbreaker. Anna, weirdly, was not in my Mandarin class. Anna was in second grade. Anna was, however, coming on the field trip, because Anna was scheduled to be on the same Caltrain back south as Mom that afternoon, and Mom had decided the simpler logistics involved a packed lunch.

Anna had her unicorn-cased phone in one hand. The HALO chime played softly from inside her pocket. A small three-note rising sound that ended in a soft pulse, like a bell that was also exhaling. She did not look up when it played. She was used to it. She waited for it, the way you wait for something that has already gotten into the rhythm of your day.

Megan was in my class, of course Megan was in my class. The universe loves jokes.

The bus.

---

The bus to San Francisco was forty minutes of pure middle-school chaos. Three rows of kids on HALO. Two rows making out. Behind me, Becca whispered to her best friend, "Mine has a sister at Yale," and her best friend whispered back, "Mine wears glasses, like good glasses, like Warby Parker glasses." The driver had earbuds in and his eyes did not move.

Marcus Chen, two rows back, the same Marcus whose nose I had once rearranged: "Yo, Jackie! Your rat's creeping people out!"

"He's a rabbit."

"Whatever. Thing looks possessed."

Megan, beside me, was on her phone. Notes app. Open. She had already filled half a page.

I leaned over.

"Megan. Why are you—"

"Don't worry about it."

"You okay?"

"Don't worry about it, Jackie."

She turned the phone face-down in her lap.

She did not pick it up again for the entire bus ride. She sat beside me with the notebook closed in her lap, and she was still, and the stillness was the same one from last night, and I understood for the first time that the stillness was not absence. It was the opposite. It was Megan being completely present and not showing it.

Mr. Cheng stood up at the front of the bus, holding the chrome pole as the bus lurched off 101. "Attention, everyone! We are approaching Chinatown. Today is a *cultural immersion experience.*"

Tommy: "Is there pizza?"

Mr. Cheng: "No pizza. Today, you *expand your palates.*"

He held the pole with one hand and looked out the window for a moment. Through it I could see his reflection — the silver hair, the polo shirt with the school crest, the face of a man who had spent thirty years trying to teach Mandarin to children whose parents had paid for the lessons but not, exactly, asked the children if they wanted them.

He turned back. He cleared his throat the way teachers do when they are about to say a sentence they have practiced in the mirror.

"My grandparents," Mr. Cheng said, "would have come to a place like this on the first day of every new year. They came over from Guangzhou in 1987 with one suitcase. They did not speak English. They did not own a car. They walked twenty blocks to get to their first Chinese New Year in this country. They cried when they saw the lanterns."

He paused.

"Your grandparents," he said, "would have understood why this trip matters."

Then he sat down. He did not look at us. He looked at his hands.

Megan, beside me, very quietly: "Tommy is not going to enjoy this."

I almost laughed. It would have been the last laugh of the morning.

---

King Dragon's Golden Dynasty was tucked into an alley between an herb shop and a dried-sea-creature window. The sign was hand-painted in the elegant calligraphy of a small business that had been there since before the city had numbered the streets. The awning was the color of dried blood. The narrow door looked like the kind of door you would have to think about before walking through.

Rufus, in his carrier on my lap, went pause-button still.

I should have known then.

I did not know then.

Inside, Chef Shen came out from the kitchen.

He was wrong. Like someone had tried to draw a human from memory while distracted and gotten the proportions slightly off. The eyes were too far apart. The smile showed too many teeth. The fingers were too long, in the way the fingers in a child's drawing are too long when the child has been told fingers are important and has not yet been told how many.

His voice had an echo, like he was speaking from the bottom of a well that was also a walk-in freezer.

"Welcome, young scholars. I am Chef Shen. Today, you will try my specialty. Dragon Balls."

Megan, beside me, drafted her one-star Yelp review on her notes app in real time: *Service: confused. Decor: questionable. Energy: hostile. Would not recommend.*

The dragon balls came on a tray.

Imagine meatballs assembled by a person who had only had meatballs described to them, by someone else who had also never seen one. They were greyish-brown, golf-ball-sized, glistening with a sauce that moved on its own.

Mr. Cheng took the first one, chewed thoughtfully, smiled the polite smile of a teacher who has been paid to enjoy this. The other kids tried theirs. Even Megan took a polite nibble and immediately pretended she had not.

I stared at mine.

The smell hit me like a physical force. Rotten eggs mixed with burning rubber mixed with something sweet and cloying like flowers at a funeral. My stomach turned inside out and started filing immigration paperwork.

"Eat," Chef Shen said, suddenly beside my chair. How had he moved so fast?

His eyes flashed red. Like a camera flash.

I bit into it.

Imagine biting into a water balloon filled with spoiled milk. Now imagine that water balloon is also crunchy. Now imagine it is, on top of all of that, somehow biological, in the way that something that was alive an hour ago is biological.

I swallowed. Barely. My throat tried to close in self-defense, the way a goalie does in a hockey game.

"Good boy," Chef Shen said, patting my shoulder with those too-long fingers. "You appreciate authentic cuisine."

He moved on to terrorize Tommy.

I dropped the chewed-up bite into Rufus's carrier in my napkin.

I had done this with vegetables a hundred times. Rufus was a fuzzy garbage disposal.

Not this time.

The moment the napkin hit the carrier floor, Rufus went catastrophically, molecularly insane.

He shrieked, like a human scream mixed with nails on a chalkboard, threw himself against the carrier walls, popped the door, and exploded out like a fluffy white missile of pure destruction.

He used Mr. Cheng's face as a springboard to reach the ceiling fan, which he somehow turned on, and was then flung across the room like he had been shot from a cannon.

"JACKIE!" Mr. Cheng roared. "CONTROL YOUR ANIMAL!"

I tried. I really did.

I considered running. I considered throwing the bamboo shoots. I considered pretending to be a different kid entirely.

Then Chef Shen grabbed my arm.

His fingers wrapped all the way around my bicep with room to spare. His nails dug into my skin through my shirt. His eyes were definitely red now. Glowing red. Like coals at the bottom of a barbecue.

"You," he hissed. His voice had stopped being human. "You dare bring that creature here. You dare mock me before you kill me."

The restaurant was empty.

There had been twenty-eight kids and a teacher here five seconds ago. Now there was no one. Even the chairs were back where they had started, like the whole scene had been re-set by an unseen stagehand.

"Mr. Cheng!" I yelled.

Nobody answered.

The lights flickered. The temperature dropped so fast I could see my breath.

Chef Shen began to change.

Fingers stretched, splitting at the knuckles into claws. Skin rippled and bubbled like boiling water and then hardened into scales the color of a wet road. Face melted into a snout full of teeth the size of steak knives. Wings burst from his back, leathery and bat-like and wrong. A tail whipped behind him, smashing the buffet station into kindling and sending dragon balls rolling across the floor like very ugly bowling balls.

In ten seconds, Chef Shen went from creepy restaurant owner to honest-to-god, this-can't-be-real, get-out-of-the-Bible dragon.

"For thousand years," the dragon snarled, "I wait. I hunt. I search for the Lotus Prince, and now you walk into my restaurant. You deliver yourself like takeout."

"I think you've got the wrong guy!" My voice had jumped about three octaves higher than it usually went. "I'm just Jackie! I failed my last math test!"

The dragon laughed, and smoke poured from his nostrils. "I smell the lotus on you. I smell the power in your blood. You are the one. When I eat you, I will have the strength of ten dragons."

He lunged. Jaws wide.

I did the only thing I could think of: grabbed a plate from the nearest table and threw it at his face like the world's most pathetic frisbee.

It bounced off his snout with a sad little *tink.*

"Seriously?" the dragon said. "That your plan?"

Then he breathed fire.

I should have died. Should have been Jackie-flavored charcoal in a souvenir tub, but as the flames rushed at me, something impossible happened.

My scarf moved.

The stupid red scarf my grandfather had given me for my birthday, the one Mom had made me wear because we might "run into him" in Chinatown, even though Grandpa lived in Sacramento and never came down, unwrapped from my neck on its own and expanded like a parachute.

The flames hit it and stopped. The fabric glowed red-hot but did not burn. The fabric hummed. A note that was, somehow, the color peach.

I had been keeping that scarf in the bottom of my backpack for three months. It smelled like granola bars and broken pencils. Now it was saving my life. I chose not to analyze this.

"What?" The dragon recoiled. "Impossible! That is just cloth!"

I was thinking the same thing. I was not about to argue.

The scarf wrapped around me like a cocoon. The dragon tried again. Bigger flame this time, and the restaurant turned into a furnace around us. Tables burning. Paint peeling. Smoke filling the air.

Inside my red cocoon, I could not feel the heat.

"Fine!" the dragon roared. "If I cannot burn you, I will crush you!"

He reared up. His head touched the ceiling. His tail had punched through the back wall. One of his feet was the size of a refrigerator.

He lifted that foot.

I tripped. I fell. I rolled across the floor like the world's most panicked silk burrito.

"Goodbye, Lotus Prince. Your dynasty ends here."

The foot came down.

I heard a CRACK and a roar of pain that wasn't mine.

I unwrapped part of the scarf from my face.

My grandfather was standing over me, holding a wooden staff that had just gone straight through the dragon's foot.

Grandpa. The man who gave me socks for Christmas. The man who smelled like menthol. Who I had seen in person maybe five times in my entire life. That grandfather, here, in a burning restaurant in San Francisco, fighting a dragon with a stick.

"You," the dragon snarled. "Guardian. You cannot protect him forever."

"I don't need forever," Grandpa said, the calm voice of a man asking a waiter to turn down the AC. "Just long enough."

He moved like water. Cracked the dragon across the jaw. Pressure-pointed his ribs. Drove the staff through his eye.

The dragon screamed. Mid-swing, Grandpa looked at the dragon's snout and said, conversationally, "Your masters in Beijing have been busy. They forgot to ask the kitchen what the kitchen knows."

The dragon screamed louder. The staff struck again. The strike made a sound I will not forget. A sound that smelled like ozone and salt.

The dragon exploded into water. Gallons. Flooding the burning restaurant, turning to steam.

Grandpa stood in the middle of it all, not even breathing hard. His slippers were soaked. He looked at me. For one second, his eyes were sad.

"I'm sorry, Jackie," he said. "I'm so sorry."

Then the restaurant exploded for real.

---

The blast threw me into the alley. I hit the pavement hard. Rufus landed on my chest. The scarf finally released me and shrank back to normal.

I sat up. I stared at the burning building. Black smoke poured into the morning sky. Sirens wailed.

Grandpa was still inside.

"No," I whispered. "NO!"

I tried to run back. Mr. Cheng grabbed me. "Jackie! Are you hurt?"

The street was full of my classmates. None of them seemed to remember being inside. Megan was talking to Rachel like they had just walked up to the alley.

Except.

Megan was looking at me. Not the *you're such an embarrassment* look. The *you tried to tell me something at the dinner table last night and I should have listened* look.

She mouthed, very slightly, across thirty feet of sidewalk: *what just happened.*

I shook my head: *later.*

She nodded.

She believed me. She had been waiting for this, I would understand eventually. Not this exactly. But something. She had been sitting beside me on that bus with her notebook closed and her eyes open, waiting for the thing that was already coming, and when it came she recognized it without having been told what it was.

Somewhere on the street, I was covered in ash and one shoe had disappeared in the explosion. My permanent record was about to get much thicker. Grandpa was still inside. And my fortune cookie was setting my jeans on fire.

I pulled the slip out before it could singe through the pocket. The paper was darkening at the edges. The ink was bleeding outward like it had been written in something that had decided not to be ink anymore.

*You will soon become the man you always were.*

I read it once.

A pigeon on the alley wire dropped out of the sky.

Somewhere on the street, a child walking past with her mother pulled out her parent's phone, looked at the screen, and laughed at whatever the AI had just told her.

Soon had just become now.

The prediction was correct.

The AI was, already, betting on me.