Read Burning Tigress for Free Online Page B

How—"
    He shook his head, clearly struggling with the words. "Not invading. Possessing. They believe you have possessed a Chinese person."
    "What?"
    "They think you have sucked out her brains. How else could you speak Chinese so well?"
    The horse was moving faster now, losing the worst of the crowd, but the shrieks still echoed in Charlotte's head. "They think I sucked out the brains of a Chinese person simply because I can speak Chinese well? That I am a white person who sucked out someone's brain?"
    "Yes!"
    She shook her head, dumbfounded. "But I learned Chinese with Joanna. From a tutor."
    "I know." His words sounded as if they grated his throat.
    "And they think—"
    "That you are a ghost. Miss Charlotte, please, will you please speak English?"
    "Oh!" She shifted languages. "But everyone knows I speak Chinese. I am practically famous for it."
    "At home, yes, but this is here." Here meant a bare mile or two east of where she lived. But they were in Chinese Shanghai, where no white person ever went. Or at least no white people who spoke Shanghai dialect.
    Charlotte pressed her lips together, annoyed with her own stupidity. And yet, her mind still struggled. "You mean, they don't care that you... that you..." Why was it more difficult to say in English? Her father whored. All his friends whored. But she could not say that aloud to Ken Jin in English. It would make it too real, somehow. "That you spend time with white women, but they're terrified I can speak Chinese?"
    They were past the commotion now, turning into a street clogged with carts of vegetables and women carrying upside-down chickens. Charlotte stared at one of the poor birds tied by its feet onto a looped line. This particular hen was one of about ten, all still alive, all piled on top of each other as an old woman rushed to market. The chicken didn't move, didn't even cluck, but hung silently upside down like one banana in a bunch, completely unaware that it was destined for the chopping block. Soon it would see stalls that held live scorpions next to a water bin of bulbous squid beneath hanging ducks interspersed with black eels. And in all this chaos, a single white woman speaking Chinese produced screaming horror?
    Charlotte sighed. The Chinese made no sense. She turned to Ken Jin. "So, how many white women must you lie with for it to be unusual?"
    He stared at her, his normally golden brown skin paling. He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out. Then the horse demanded his attention as it shied away from an unusually aggressive rickshaw runner.
    While Ken Jin fixed his gaze on the reins, Charlotte could not stop her thoughts from running in a stream from her mouth. For all that she told herself to stop, she simply could not halt the flow. In truth, she had been thinking about this for a long, long time now. It really did not seem fair that Ken Jin would spend so much time teaching her friends about certain forms of man-woman relations without sharing the experience with her. After all, he was her servant.
    "Would the Chinese be more shocked if you spent your evenings with Chinese women?" she asked. "You are most famous among white ladies, so I know you are unusual to us. But is it common for Chinese men to delight in...? To share company with...? Well, you know what I mean. Do you spend time with Chinese women as often as you do with Europeans? And, my goodness, why aren't you more tired? Of course, Sophie claimed you were indefatigable, but surely she must have exaggerated. You cannot have gone on for as long as she claimed. Unless that is typical for your race. So I want you to show me, too."
    She paused to take a breath, barely daring to look at him. But when she did, her breath left her in an embarrassed whoosh. He hadn't moved. His attention was firmly and completely absorbed with driving the cart through the clogged streets. Which meant, she supposed, that he hadn't heard her.
    "Ken Jin?" she said a little more forcefully. "I wish you to