Pao Meifa

Pao Meifa is portrayed as a young woman with brown hair and blue eyes, still youthful by the time the story catches up with her.

Meifa carries years of bitterness toward the father she believes abandoned her, a resentment rooted in never understanding why he let her and her mother walk away. She is a devoted student of Feng-shui, well versed in its principles and eager to walk Jet through the discipline and its three chis. Beneath her composure runs real hurt, and she grows agitated the moment she senses Jet is withholding what he knows about her father. For all her faith in cosmic alignment, her choices spring from her own will rather than any reading, and in the end she proves capable of mercy, releasing her long-held anger once she finally comes face to face with him.

Meifa spends her earliest years, in the early 2060s, with both parents, and she briefly meets Jet Black in 2061 without being old enough to remember it. In 2064 her mother, unwilling to live with a husband who trusts Feng-shui more than people, leaves and takes the girl along. Never told the real reason, Meifa grows up nursing a grudge against the father who let them go.

By 2071 she visits his grave and finds Jet already there searching for the same man. She saves the detective when two gunmen open fire, and the pair escape onto a passing bus and down into a canal. Aboard the Bebop, Jet learns that Pao supposedly died in a transport accident bound for Jupiter, killed by a hyperspace fluctuation, yet the timing of a message Pao sent leaves room for doubt. Convinced her father might still be alive and that Jet's arrival lines up with an ideal Feng-shui reading, Meifa asks for his help and ties the whole mystery to a relic called the sunstone.

Combing the city together, she schools Jet in Feng-shui until they reach a mountaintop hotel she identifies as the Ahnzahn of her father's riddle. From its roof she reads the surrounding structures as the Blue Dragon, White Tiger, Snake and Tortoise, and Red Phoenix, then uses her Luopan compass to confirm their alignment and pinpoint the sunstone tucked inside a statue's mouth at the base. An ambush exposes their pursuers as agents of the Blue Snake syndicate, who had shadowed Pao and now trail Meifa in hopes she will lead them to him.

Back on the ship, the crew works out that the sunstone is a fragment of the moon shattered in the Astral Gate disaster, its debris holding tremendous energy that the sun can amplify. When Ein sets the stone near her compass and the needle whirls despite its magnet being gone, Meifa deduces that a twin stone must lie with her father, and she uses it to steer the Bebop after him. Along the way she confesses how distant the two of them always were and how much it stung that Pao reached out to Jet instead of her, pressing Jet until he reluctantly shares the full story and his belief that Pao stayed away to shield her from the syndicate.

Passing through the Astral Gate into hyperspace, the compass settles and a vortex opens onto Pao's failing ship. Rescue proves impossible, and with his oxygen nearly gone Pao explains that he contacted Jet only so he could see his daughter one last time. Jet cuts through his talk of destiny, insisting Meifa came by her own choice, and Pao accepts it and apologizes. Meifa tells her father that the years of hatred have finally lifted, and as the two make peace the vortex collapses and the signal dies, leaving Pao behind. Meifa then returns to Mars and to her ordinary life.