Cousin Lu taught me to play go when I was four years old and he was twice my age. The long hours of contemplating the checkered board were a torment, but the will to win kept me there.
Ten years later Lu was considered an exceptional player, so famous for his talents that the Emperor of independent Manchuria [2] received him at his court in the new capital.† He never thanked me for propelling him to this glory: I am his shadow, his secret, his best opponent.
At twenty, Lu is already an old man, and the hair that falls over his brow is white. He walks with his back hunched over and his hands crossed, taking small steps. A few pubescent hairs have appeared on his chin, a baby-beard on a centenarian.
A week ago I received a letter from him.
“I am coming for you, my little cousin. I have decided to talk to you about our future…”
The rest of the letter is an illegible confession: my painfully discreet cousin must have dipped his pen in very weak ink because his cursive ideograms are strung out between the watermarks like white storks flying in the mist. Endless and indecipherable, his letter written on a long sheet of rice paper undid me.
<a l:href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> Pu-Yi, the last Emperor of China. He abdicated when the Chinese Republic was created in 1912. In 1932, with Japanese help, he fled from Tian Jing, where he had been living under guard. In order to legalize their occupation of northern China since September 18, 1931, the Japanese then put him on the throne of Manchuria and proclaimed its independence in March 1932. †Xin Jing, the capital of independent Manchuria, which is now the town of Chang Chun.