“The Living Shadow” (part four)

More of the original Shadow serial! Time to go scam some Chinese mobsters and hope that they're not going to go maximum racist. The story avoided doing the Yellow Peril thing so far, by making it clear that there was always crime in the country and that immigrant and native gangs are competing for marks. On the other hand though, there have been soooome eyebrow-raising turns of phrase pertaining to the Triad, and while I did interpret the black limo driver as intentionally playing into a stereotype to evade Harry's questions I'm not sure that the author meant it that way.

Either way though, this story hasn't been impressing me in general. That might change, but I'm becoming less optimistic about that as I get deeper in. Well, let's see.

8: The Tea Shop of Wang Too​

Wait...wasn't his name Wang Foo, with an F? Typo, or is the tea shop actually owned by a different Wang?

Harry is riding the cab as it takes a looping, circuitous route to the tea shop. Just to make sure it was the right cab, he asks the driver to go to a different destination, and he makes no course adjustments. Either this is the right cab, or Harry's about to be robbed. There are several paragraphs of recap, which might be important for people picking up after however many weeks or months since the last issue but don't do anything for me. Also, it notes that the cab driver's face is hidden by his coat collar, even when Harry faces him to pay the fake bill at the end. That's one heck of a coat collar. Anyway, he gets out in front of a three story building, the ground floor of which is the tea shop.

Harry goes in, and navigates through a maze of stacked tea boxes until he reaches the door to the back room. Which I guess he's been told he needs to reach. It's locked, but when he tries to open it the cashier comes up to him and asks - with an embarrassing funetik Chinese accent - if there's someone he wants to see. He names Wang Fu, and refuses to accept the assertion that he's not here right now. It's only when Harry tells the guy that he came all the way from California to meet Wang Fu that he acquiesces and opens a sliding panel near the top of the door to confer with another person behind it for a few minutes. They could be speaking any Chinese dialect for all we can tell, since Vincent wouldn't know any from the others. Eventually, the door opens from the other side, and a "Mongol" behind it motions for Harry to enter.

"Mongol" just meant "Asian" back then. The reasons for this are not entirely clear to me, but it was a thing.

Anyway, big muscular Chinese dude behind the door tells him in more fluent English to follow him, and then leads him upstairs to a much cleaner and more lavishly decorated room than the relative squalor of the first floor. All blinged out, classic organized crime-style conspicuous consumption, with Chinese flair. Wang Fu (or Wang Too, as it may be...) is an old man with thick glasses, watching the newcomers impassively from behind his desk. Harry shows him the disc. Wang stands up and bows. Harry bows back. Wang goes over to a secret compartment hidden behind one of his tacky decorations, where he gets out a large paper-wrapped backage and a small teakwood box. As he does so, his shadow momentarily lengthens in a weird way, which...implies that the Shadow is here, sneaking around outside the windows or something? I don't know, maybe. Anyway, he puts the two containers on his desk, and then asks Harry to open the little box.

It's locked, though, and when Wang tells him to use the key that he has Harry notes that the keyhole is conspicuously shaped for a normal key rather than the weird coin-thing.

Wang asks him why he doesn't have the key. Harry tells him that he was just given the token, that's the only "key" he was given.

Wang says that after the last delivery, he advised big boss Wu Sun in San Francisco to send the next courier with an extra layer of authentication. Maybe because he was getting worried about how goddamned many local New York gangs had started sniffing around his operations. Anyway, Wu Sun had replied that this was an entirely reasonable measure and that they would be adopting it henceforth, and it really isn't like him to forget a thing like that.

Also, Harry "wonders" at Wang Fu's perfect English. Because apparently he's never met a Chinese American who's ditched the accent before. I guess that makes sense for a rural midwesterner who hasn't spent that long in New York yet, especially back when things weren't quite as integrated as they are now, but the way it's written makes me feel like it's at least as much of an author bias as a character one.

Harry insists that he was given nothing besides the disc, and Wang makes the hand sign that brings the security guards out from behind the curtains. Two big triad thugs grab Harry and tackle him to the floor, taking care to restrain all four limbs. End chapter.


Once again, dull, unengaging prose that spends way too much time on irrelevant details. There were more words describing Wang's stupid office decorations than there were conveying the dialogue and Harry's thought process combined. This story is really not doing much to get me attached to the protagonist, or to particularly want to see the criminals foiled.

Speaking of the criminals, it seems like them adding the key to the equation barely helps at all, really? If someone intercepted their courier, they'd probably take everything he had on him, so just giving him two trinkets instead of one makes little difference. If they're really dead-set on using outsiders for this task, a better added authentication layer would be adding one-time code phrases or numbers. It would make a hell of a lot more sense, and the flow of the chapter would be unaffected.

Well, let's do another one. See if the Shadow really is here and about to bail Harry out, or if he'll get reprieved some other way. Or if he'll just fucking die. Killing Harry off and moving on to another new Shadow Ltd. recruit for our protagonist would hardly mean anything, with how bland Harry's POV has been.

9. The Room of Doom​

Going by the name, they're going to try and torture information out of Harry instead of just shooting him then and there. Makes sense, I suppose, since they probably assume he's working for a rival gang (and...if so, they're not wrong exactly). That buys him at least a little time to be rescued, assuming the Shadow isn't already here as that one shadow-related anomaly might have been meant to imply.

Anyway, if the Shadow is here then he's taking his sweet time to intervene, because Harry Vincent spends a full hour on the floor of Wang Fu's office, bound and gagged, while Wang does some extensive letter-writing at his desk. When he finishes with that, Wang summons the guards back in (by ringing a gong. Of course) and the three of them drag Harry into another room. A room in which they're joined by the cashier from the front room, so either he just finished his shift or they're actually closing the store for this. And...I think this passage banishes any lingering hopes I might have had about this story avoiding the Yellow Peril mindset:

“Wang Foo pointed a birdlike claw toward the prostrate captive helpless on the floor. Without further ado, the two yellow giants lifted Vincent, and carried him to the door. Wang Foo opened it for them.

In the hallway, as though by secret understanding, they were joined by the Chinaman who had first met Vincent in the shop and who had guided him to Wang Foo’s apartment. He it was who took the lead, jangling a ring of large, brass keys. The two with Vincent for burden, followed. Wang Foo brought up the rear.

The party proceeded up a steep, side stairway which Vincent had not observed upon his arrival. The Celestial with the keys unlocked door after door for them. There were many doors, and the unlocking of each was made a little ceremony.”

Like, the description of the Chinese and their surroundings had been getting more eye-rolling for a while, but "yellow giants" who make a ritual out of opening every single door in their workplace is where my charity runs out.

So, they bring him into a little cell-like room where they restrain him in this guillotine-like contraption. There's a blade that'll come down and behead him when a certain string is pulled on. And...that string...HAHAHAHA OH MY FUCKING GOD.

Okay. They spend like half a chapter describing this bullshit, so I'm not completely sure I have it straight, but here's my understanding of it. The guillotine contraption is released by a string that leads out of this torture room and to a lever in Wang's office. Each room contains an identical hourglass, which will both be flipped over at the exact same moment when Wang gives an auditory signal. The guards will take turns watching Harry for the literal hour it takes for the sand in both glasses to run out, to make sure they stay sharp. The purpose of the synchronized hourglasses is so that Harry can watch the final 3,600 seconds of his life tick away with perfect precision, and a loud alarm clock wouldn't be complicated enough.

Obviously, the purpose of this is to intensify Harry's fear of death as he watches the sand run out so that he'll crack before then and tell them everything.

Or at least, I *thought* that was the purpose, but apparently I was wrong. They are, surprisingly enough, not the least bit curious about who Harry is working for and how he learned so much about their organization, as negligent as that sounds. The actual reason for them setting all this up is, to paraphrase only very slightly, "for the lolz."

No information motive at all. They're just bored or some shit.

-_-

I know Fu Manchu is the most (in)famous example, but where did this notion of Chinese criminals using these insanely overcomplicated, pseudo-archaic death traps first come from? It's a weirdly common part of the Yellow Peril myth cycle, and I'm honestly perplexed as to how that happened. I know it became a general purpose cheesy supervillain trope later in the twentieth century with James Bond etc, but to begin with it was specifically something that got projected onto the Chinese.

Anyway, it spends a page or two describing Harry struggling to get free before the time runs out, and somehow manages to make it monotonous and repetitive. There's ONE interesting passage describing how Harry realizes he's found a new appreciation for life since his attempted suicide a few days ago, with each grain of falling sand now seeming incredibly precious to him, but that passage is over almost as soon as it's started. Just a few minutes before the time is up, there's another guard change, which the one previously on duty seems surprised and disgruntled by but acquiesces after an argument in Chinese. Once he's gone, the new guard waits until he's sure the coast is clear and then releases Harry from the machine with just a second to spare, the blade falling so close that Harry can feel its wake as it wizzes by them.

I guess the Shadow has a mole in the organization. Or managed to insert a Chinese-speaking agent just now as an emergency last minute measure. Or the Shadow himself happens to be fluent in whichever Chinese dialect this syndicate uses and he replaced the guard in disguise himself. One of those things. Anyway, end chapter.


This story is lame.