Mercy, My Kung Fu Queen!

Mira is ten and has a nine-year-old boy to straighten out. He has been sent up the mountain to live at the temple where she was raised, and he arrives used to money and to a house where nobody says no to him. The temple has no television and no air conditioning. Mira grew up there with her master, an orphan taken in and taught the Taoist discipline, and she runs the boy's days the way she was taught to run her own. He calls her a demon and loses every argument. His mother arranged all this. On a trip down the mountain to sell herbs, Mira had stepped in to stop a wrong being done, and the boy's mother, who is rich and whose son nobody had managed to control, saw it and hired her to teach him. Back at the temple the boy decides to get even and starts a war of pranks. She wins those too. Somewhere in the losing he begins to change. He notices that she is good at things, drops some of his habits without meaning to, and starts to treat people with some care and to help when help is needed. Mira, who has never had a family or a friend her own age, finds out what both feel like. The arrangement was only ever meant to last a while, and at some point he is supposed to go back down the mountain.