Read Online Fox Girl by Nora Okja Keller - Free Book Online

miguk and gomshi soldiers. “You can’t trust them,” Lobetto once hissed. “The Chinke are really bandits who smuggle opium in the linings of their raggedy clothes and pointed hats.”
    â€œYe, ye,” Chung Woo added, “and they eat the raw livers of their enemies.”
    Lobetto, who always seemed to have something in his mouth, spit his gum at my feet. “You can’t make eye contact with them,” he growled, “ ’cause you never can tell what they’re thinking. They might think you’re the enemy and slice you up.”
    When my mother led me past the first bakery with almond cookies, fried dough stuffed with black bean, sticky gau gee cake sprinkled with sesame, I knew we had entered Chinatown. I looked for the bandits and opium addicts. To my disappointment, the only remotely mysterious person I spotted was an old woman who wore silver and jade in Buddha-long earlobes. Baskets hooked over her arms, she tottered in and out of the shops that sold firecrackers and beads, dried roots and sugared fruits. Everyone else I saw along the streets and through the shop windows looked ordinary. Korean.
    Though my mother visited Chinatown often for ginseng, snake wine, and iris root to bolster what she called the softening of my father’s vigor, I could remember, dimly, visiting only once before.
    I remember reaching up to hold on to my father’s hand, skipping to match his pace, as we wandered past shop windows stocked with the fantastic: jars as tall as I was, filled with what looked like clusters of little white people, limbs entwined, suspended in amber; blood red pigs’ heads perched on pointed sticks, their mouths gaping open in silent laughter at some secret porcine joke; snakes hanging by their silvery tails, their fangs open and ready to swallow my eyeballs.
    My father and I had entered the store that seemed the most magical of all; its window was a vision from an enchanted forest. Strings of dried-mushroom stars danced across the top of the frame, and from behind a tangle of disembodied antlers that looked like a network of tree branches, a buck stared at me, transfixed. I stared back, and in his liquid eyes, I could also see myself. I knew then, in a moment more of looking, I would become the deer and the deer me.
    My father, having finished his business with the herbalist, pulled me away before the transformation could take place. We walked into one of the alleys and up a set of wood stairs that groaned at the weight of our steps. At the top, we pushed open a door decorated with a small painting of one of the little people I saw dancing in a jar of amber water. Tendrils of cigarette smoke spiced with the pungent smells of hot cinnamon and ginger wrapped around us, pulled at our legs like lost and tricky spirits as we waded toward an empty booth.
    My father ordered chat juk for me and a serving of fruits steeped in wine for himself. After tasting, then spitting out a potent slice of tangerine from my father’s bowl, I settled down to sip my sweet rice and pine nut porridge. Before I was through with my treat, a woman emerged from the mist, pulling a girl taller but skinnier than me behind her. The lady stopped by our table, but instead of sliding into the booth with us, she knelt before my father. My father nodded briskly at her bowed head, then pushed an envelope toward her. “This is all I can get right now,” he said.
    The little girl stared at me as I licked each bit of rice gruel off my spoon. Her eyes were black in the dim light of the tea-house. I stuck my tongue out at her, but she didn’t smile or frown. Mysterious, I thought, as I waited for those dark eyes to blink, mysterious as a Chinke.
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    My mother stopped at the shop with the deer in the window. Not as glamorous as I remembered, its coat was mangy and moth-eaten. And its eye—years older, I could see that it was only a glass marble, black and empty of life and magic. The