Reimagined Fu Sheng scene in Train Dreams. It goes pretty hard!

*Spoiler alert. It only makes sense if you’ve seen the movie. And this is not canon, just something sent over for fun.
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My friend messaged me and decided to reimagine the Fu Sheng scene in a different world. It was a retelling of Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams, reimagined so that Fu Sheng, the Chinese laborer accused of murder and pursued by a mob, is not a victim but a wandering master of baguazhang and northern Shaolin, a man who has fought before, but only when there was no other way.

In the summer of 1917, the Great Northern Railway was pushing a spur line through the Kootenai Valley, deep in northern Idaho. Hundreds of men worked the grade- Swedes, Irish, Italians, and a scattering of Chinese who had drifted north after the transcontinental was finished. Among them was Fu Sheng, quiet, slight, always wearing a faded indigo jacket even in the heat. No one knew much about him except that he could lift more ties than men twice his size and that he never drank or played cards.

When the foreman’s nephew- a drunk, loud boy from Spokane, was found dead behind the cook tent with his throat cut ear to ear, suspicion fell on the Chinese. The boy had been harassing Fu Sheng for days, calling him “John Chinaman,” flicking cigarettes at him, once even pissing on his bedroll. The sheriff was a week away. The men decided to handle it themselves.

They came for him at dusk, twenty or thirty of them, armed with pick handles, axes, and a couple of Colt revolvers. Fu Sheng was sitting on a log, eating rice from a tin cup as though nothing in the world concerned him. The first man to reach him swung a shovel. Fu Sheng did not stand. He simply leaned back, let the blade whistle past his face, and drove the heel of his hand into the man’s solar plexus. The shoveler dropped without a sound.

Then he rose.

What followed lasted less than a minute, yet the men who survived spoke of it for the rest of their lives in lowered voices. Fu Sheng moved like water circling a stone, like smoke in a draft. He never seemed to strike first, only to answer- yet every answer ended a man. A pick handle cracked against empty air; the wrist that held it was suddenly broken backward. A revolver barked, but the bullet found only pine needles because Fu Sheng was already inside the shooter’s reach, the gun spinning away into the dirt. One giant Swede charged with an axe raised high; Fu Sheng slipped past the blow, hooked the man’s ankle, and sent three hundred pounds of logger crashing into three of his friends.

They say the last man to swing at him was the camp cook, a fat Irishman who came in roaring with a cleaver. Fu Sheng caught the descending wrist, twisted once, and the cleaver buried itself in the cook’s own thigh. The man screamed and fell. Silence followed, broken only by the wind in the tamaracks and the low groaning of the wounded.

Fu Sheng stood among them, breathing slow and even, not a drop of blood on his clothes. He looked at the circle of broken bodies, then at the darkening sky.

“I did not kill the boy,” he said in careful English. “But I will not die for him.”

Train Dreams on Netflix: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29768334/