Con Long by Paul Cooper (Appeared in the January 2010 Issue) It was like a miracle. Huffing, hissing, black-coal eyes. A Dragon. The summer was hot and languid. In the air, swollen bluebottles circled clumsily, colliding with windows. Vines snaked up telegraph wires, peppers hanging from them like jewels. Everywhere, boundaries were bursting; tapioca fences straining, bamboo ploughing up the soft earth like gunfire. Bao-Long watched with fear and no little wonder as the steam train drew up to the platform, childhood memories flooding back to him. In his village there had always been a dragon. The men of the village came together each year, all quarrels forgotten, and danced beneath the bamboo framework and the tapered, coloured paper. After Bao’s sixteenth birthday, he too had danced beneath the costume; at thirty, he had been given the honour of being the dragon’s head. He had bobbed and nodded to the little children of the village as they clapped their hands in the light of the torches and the stars, and a dan nguyet—a moon lute—had sung in the darkness. Now, after all these years, he was seeing a dragon in the flesh. It was everything he had always imagined it to be: sleek and black— for he had never really believed the colours that the women had painted theirs—hissing and screaming, faster than the wind. The wheels were a surprise, though. He would have to tell the villagers about that. Now he saw why so many people had started dressing like the foreigners; wearing those starched suits and bowler hats; talking about news from places he had never heard of, with exotic, outlandish names, and throwing paper money at each other like monkeys. He had never understood it before, but the foreigners had harnessed dragons, the way he used to harness yellow cattle and mountain buffalo to his plough. How could anyone turn down such power? His village, his stilted hut, was a world away from bowler hats, from paper money. He had known only the rice fields all his life, trousers rolled up to his knees, toes curling in the silty mud. He had a farmer’s hands, brown arms as wrinkled as ox hide, and his conical non-la sat on his head as though it were a part of him. He was getting old, though, and now an irritating twinge in his knee meant that his working day ended long before the sun had set. The dragon drew to a halt with one last tired hiss at the other end of the station. Bao was thankful that it had not stopped closer to him, for the thunder of its wheels had sent needles of fear darting up his spine as it passed, blowing hot air in his face as it went. In his sudden fear, the apprehension about his meeting was forgotten. So too were the questions he had been asking himself since leaving the village that morning: How many years had it been since he last saw his son? Why had he never written home? That one letter, less than a week ago, had been so unexpected; Bao was caught off guard, stunned. The past had ambushed him. Steam rose from the tracks, and a whistle blew somewhere. All along the length of the train, doors burst open, clattering, and a noisy throng poured from the carriages. The small station, which had been almost empty moments earlier, was suddenly like a harvest-time marketplace, except that everyone wore those same foreign suits and hats. Bao felt out of place in his cloth shirt and baggy trousers, his wide non-la so very different to the velvet bowlers of the foreigners. But they were no foreigners. They were all viet, dark and slim, wiry black hair and rich brown eyes. “Nguroi viet wearing foreigner clothes…” Bao thought to himself, and shook his head a little. Then, among the hundreds, one of the bowler hats was speaking to him, offering his hand, smiling. Bao focused slowly, his eyes not what they used to be, and he saw, in that man’s face, his own. “Father!” the man said, in perfect dialect. “It’s so good to see you again.” Then, in English, which Bao did not understand, “How do you do?” “Son!” Bao burst out, his milky eyes filling with tears. “My son, it’s been so long!” And he took the bowler-hatted man in his arms. He smelt of something beautiful but artificial. Not the way he used to smell. “It’s good to be home,” said the boy who was now a man, who had ridden home on the back of a dragon. He took off his bowler hat, revealing the messy hair he had inherited from his father. “I hope they will let me be the head this year.”
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