The day had dawned clear, but with a shirring of mare’s tails in the east. A light sea breeze supported the gulls in my wake as I left my refuge at D’Arcy Island. I ran the Rose up to six knots and steered a course to take me a mile westward of Kellett Bluff and thence north-northwest to pass safely round Turn Point. I was humming to myself, watching for deadheads and possible whale spouts and keeping a weather eye on the solitary figure that had been my company since I’d put down the papers I’d been reading all night. The lawyer’s briefcase had dried out enough to let me examine some of its contents: the rest were airing below, pinned flat on my table with lead fishing weights.
Fan was standing at the stem, holding on to the forestay, balanced neatly to take the rise and fall of the bow, with her knot of black hair half undone and flying. She seemed to be enjoying herself, from what I could tell. The sea glittered silver in the sunlight, and a fine salt spray stippled the air. I could feel its sting through the open window of the wheelhouse. Mostly Fan gazed ahead (with what intention I could not tell), but she’d throw the occasional glance my way, as if to check that I was following where she would lead. Not that I had much choice. We were in it together (whatever it was) for the duration, so she’d said when I’d questioned her last night; for she’d appeared in the cabin shortly after midnight.
There were puzzles in the archive that I was reading my way through: names, places, dates, events. And I could not give it shape; I lacked the context. I was moving in regions I had never mapped, and I needed help.
I was sitting there, stiff with fatigue, my eyes smarting from the smoke of the kerosene light, reading the pages of diaries, letters, and crumbling newspapers over and over, when, all at once, I knew she was back. The lamp dimmed and brightened as if a porthole had been opened, and I could smell her smell, the spoor of joss and opium.
“Do not be discouraged, Robert Lam,” she said, touching the back of my neck with her cold fingers. “You start the work, and I will fill in the gaps.”
I shivered, but I did not draw away. I made my decision in that moment: there was little to lose by accepting her offer, and likely some loss in shutting her out. And I could do what I liked so long as I was alone; I need give explanations to no one. Although what justification I could have found for believing in my figment I do not know, for I had no rationale to offer.
“I’m ready to listen, Fan,” I said calmly, although my heart was beating loudly. My assent pleased her, and she assumed a more cheerful aspect, settling herself comfortably on the bunk above me. And so we began the story of my mother and father, which was Fan’s story also, step by step filling in the blanks. And if I did not yet have it all, at least I had the outlines of my map. And was drawing in the first continent.
—
India’s father, “Major” Thackery, my grandfather, died at their home in the Wanchai district of Hong Kong in January 1890. He was a man in advance of his time, and, as such, keeping true to form even at the end, he succumbed to the plague, although the epidemic itself didn’t arrive in the city for four more years. When it did come, it fulfilled the “irresistible logic” that the major had prophesied. That is, that an epidemic of this nature was inevitable unless there were strong and complete reforms of sanitation. Although by the time it was evident he was right, it was too late, and irresistible logic had to follow its course. No one recalled the major’s warnings, of course, except for his family, and he was not hailed posthumously as a hero, and in any case by that time there were other matters obscuring his record. Moreover, there were too many dead, and in a panic of whitewashing and disinfecting and mass burial, no one wanted a messenger, especially a ghost, pointing the finger and saying, “I told you so.”
The year in which he had arrived in the colony, 1845, was a year of optimism, just the right climate for the reforming Thackery. In the settlement, which was damp and swampy and overcrowded, Thackery launched his schemes for better housing, more drainage, and cleanliness. Not that this was his job, but he would turn his hand to anything, and change—for the better—was his passion. In 1846 Wong Nei Chong Valley was drained and a road constructed around it; Jardine Matheson and Co., the major’s employers, for whom he worked as a manager, subscribed a hospital overlooking Happy Valley; and the major penned a milestone report on cow sheds, pigsties, and stagnant pools. But as the years went by, and as fever and typhoid and cholera continued to overwhelm the colonists in recurring storms of pestilence, little more was done. Except for the construction of a few dustbins.
So it was that when a rat ran off a ship that had touched in at a plague spot on the coast, and, following a system of ineffable navigation, negotiated its way from the harbour past the Jardine Matheson warehouse, through the boat house, across the cricket ground, through the barrack kitchen, and up the Queen’s Road straight to the major’s doorstep, where its fleas, as if under instruction, bit the man who had written letters, drawn countless diagrams, and made speeches on this very subject…so it was that, as the unmistakable plague symptoms showed in the swollen glands of his armpits, the major found the justification for his life. “They should have listened to me,” he cried as he lay dying. “I was right. Tell them, children. They must be told!”
Not that anyone would have listened at this point. For it wasn’t just drainage, but agricultural machinery, education for girls, and the reconciliation of the Chinese religions and Christianity that made up the major’s reforming program. And the fact was that there were differences between himself and the other colonists. And the fact was that they had long since stopped paying attention to him.
Year after year the major’s schemes had accumulated in the files of the governor, and his drawings and writings poured before the public. Plan after plan, at first welcomed and discussed, for reasons inexplicable and political, fell away. So that, over time, even the enthusiasts abandoned him. For who could believe that so many ideas had anything in them, since they were never taken up.
And since, as we know, respect is the second vital element (after money) in keeping a man alive and sane, after some time in which the major’s opinion, once sought, was largely ignored, the critics’ and scoffers’ whispers may have acquired substance. They said that he had lost his sharp edge, that pipelines and water-supply systems and curricula for women were but the manifestations of a softened brain. That in the damp heat, of which the major himself had warned of the effects, he had become no more than a local irritant.
It wouldn’t be the first time that a good man had gone downhill in a difficult climate. I’ve seen it happen myself. In Indonesia, the Caribbean, in Africa. Disappointed men, or those crossed in love.
“What do you know about love?” asks Lam Fan loudly in my ear. I nearly drop the cup I’ve been holding, as, lost in my thoughts, I was letting the Rose steer herself while I poured tea from a flask. Fan had slipped up behind me in the wheelhouse, although I swear I’d had her in sight all the time. “Look out, Robert Lam!” she cries suddenly in alarm, and I grab the wheel and spin it to avoid a deadhead that has appeared from nowhere in our path. The deadhead submerges as we pass it.
“Don’t frighten me like that, Fan!” I say. My heart is thudding and I am shivering with cold sweat. If I am to believe my eyes, we have nearly struck a humpback whale, a species that has not been seen in numbers in the gulf region for some years. This must have been a baby, for it was no more than thirty feet long.
“Once there were plenty of those whales,” says Fan, who appears to take credit for the sighting. “It did not have so much oil as the sperm whale, and was therefore often left alone. Some whalers didn’t like to hunt it, since once one was killed, its mate would stay around until it, too, was taken. It was too easy to kill.”
“Doesn’t sound smart to me, Fan,” I say, trying to concentrate on my steering. For a pilot I am doing a poor job. Somehow I’ve misread the tide tables, and we are in slack water, which means that within a few minutes we will be fighting the current—just as we meet the tide rips at
Boundary Pass.
“They mate for life, Robert Lam,” says Fan, as if I hadn’t taken the point. “That is what you, a bachelor, cannot understand about your grandfather. When his wife left him he was a changed man. He couldn’t go on as he had been going. He was lost without her. She had steadied him. You men, especially, you bachelors, underestimate women.”
“His wife left him?” I say, ignoring her jibes.
“It was partly my fault,” she says, not without pride, as she stares un-seeingly into the distance, and the Rose steers east between the islands.
—
The year 1857 was a pivotal one. Well-established by then, still well-connected, the major fought against the legalization of opium in China, although his employers, Jardine Matheson, had more than twenty ships in the opium trade and were pushing to expand their market. Opium, went the argument, was the means by which the Europeans could open China up, for so far the Chinese had shown surprisingly little interest in European furniture or other goods. And the East India Company, which grew the drug on its plantations, had reorganized the whole of Indian agriculture and labour to supply the—so far—lagging demand. Not unexpectedly, despite his faithful service to the company and his unshakable belief in the inevitability of progress, the major, in his professional career, ceased to advance.
Of course he was right. History shows that the opium trade was wrong and led to nothing but sorrow. But the present offered no such comfort to a man on the way down, who could not ask the future to support him.
In this same year there was another occurrence of considerable import, at least to me. For this was the year in which my mother, India, was born, and named, to the distress of her parents’ acquaintances, after the Indian Mutiny, which Britain had barely survived and suppressed. The earth, once so solid, was trembling beneath the colonists’ feet. It was not a friendly act, they judged as they congratulated the major’s wife on the baby’s birth, to remind them of their danger. It was not the gesture of a patriot.
And if this weren’t enough to affix the seal of disapproval to the major’s house, his next act was. He acquired a second live-in child, another girl, a Chinese.
And shortly after this event the major’s wife left him.
This child, this cause of so much trouble who appeared out of nowhere in a landscape shifting, floundering in the internettings of politics, this object of charity…
“No, no, Robert Lam. You’ve got it wrong,” says Fan. “It wasn’t at all like that. There was much more to it.”
“All right, Fan,” I say testily, trying to catch a glimpse of East Point light. There is a darkening on the horizon, which could mean a squall. “Have it your way, it’s up to you to make me understand. You said so yourself. You told me that what happened was your fault.”
“Only partly, Robert Lam. The major did the rest by himself.”
At issue (I pause for a moment in case Fan plans to interrupt; but she has gone back to the bow to play lookout), at issue, I repeat, was the vast market of China to which the Europeans were trying to force an entrance. As this matter was pursued by the diplomats, it took on a humiliating shape. For gradually it became apparent to the European officials that the Chinese considered the Europeans to be inferiors. The Chinese had no intention of letting the Europeans come and go freely in their country, or of establishing equal relations. Europeans could not meet the Emperor; they could not go to Peking; they could go only to the five treaty ports to which they (through military intervention) had coerced limited access.
Here was the problem. Each side believed in itself. Each thought it was superior to the other. There was no reconciling these perceptions. Imagine the effect of this on the European mind at the height of Imperialism.
So when, in 1856, a British-registered lorcha, the Arrow, was boarded outside Canton by Chinese authorities searching for pirates, and these same authorities arrested the crew and lowered the British flag, it was natural for the British to expect apologies and reparations. Almost as natural to use the incident to compel the Chinese to let the British traders inside the Canton city walls—for up to now they and other European merchants had been confined in factories or warehouses outside.
It was an invitation to escalation. And here is where Yeh Mingchen, viceroy of Kwangsi and Kwangtung, the province of which Canton is the capital, comes in. For Yeh would not back down. He said it was the right of the people of China to say no to the Westerners if they wanted. “The chief consideration is the people,” wrote Yeh, a good Confucian. “It is said in the Book of History, ‘Heaven sees as my people see; Heaven hears as my people hear.’ Is this not an additional reason why I should be unable to constrain the people?”
Far from constraining them, Yeh encouraged their opposition, and, after some shelling of Canton city walls by the British navy, the foreign factories between the walls and the river were burned by the citizens of Canton to the ground.
For there is no law in Heaven that places one people above another (although my experiences at sea should have taught me differently: since there is no lower form of marine life than a boy apprentice, unless it is the colonial apprentice just starting out); and there are times indeed when an act of aggression is an act of self-defence; as when I sailed the North Atlantic for the first time and got in a fight with the captain.
“What’s this, Robert Lam?” says Fan, who has come in off the deck as raindrops begin to fall. “You never told me this before.”
“Never mind, Fan,” I say. “I was lucky to get out of it with my job. The captain said, ‘You, boy; you’ve got a black eye. The best thing we can do is to forget how you got it. You go and turn in.’ ”
“You always were lucky,” says Fan, losing interest as we both watch the squall miss us by a hundred yards. We are passing Monarch Head, and I take a fix on the Alden Point light.
Action and reaction. It’s not often that luck gets you out of a jam. For once a pattern starts it takes a miracle to put an end to it. And there was no such event to stop the chain that had begun at Canton. The pattern spread. In Hong Kong colony servants abandoned their masters. There were, in fact, about eighty thousand Chinese on the island, and Yeh Mingchen was in touch with the fishing villages on the Kowloon Peninsula. The colonists were outnumbered and surrounded. At night, near the harbour at Victoria or on the Queen’s Road (the Queen’s Road!), Europeans feared to tread. Even though it was the Chinese who were forbidden to appear after curfew.
It was during this turbulent time that my mother was conceived, for the major, like everyone else, stayed close to home. And with the servants gone he had to go to the morning markets himself. Where he saw, much to his disappointment, that the refuse buckets he had paid for out of his pocket, and caused to be placed in the streets near his house, were being used as lavatories.
“Heaven sees as my people see,” as the Viceroy said.
In January of 1857, that critical year, the Chinese government attempted a blockade of Hong Kong in hopes of starving the Europeans out. It didn’t work. It was far too late to close those doors that had been pried open between East and West—whatever Yeh thought. There were, of course, many sides to the issues, but they showed only two faces—European and Chinese. To a man with reforming principles this was unacceptable. The matter was too complex; there was good and bad on both sides. The Europeans had sanitation and voting on their side, but the Chinese were against the opium trade. The major stepped carefully down the middle. In an ideal of reconciliation, which appeared nowhere else but in his letters to the editor of the Friend of China and Hong Kong Gazette, the major set forth his opinions. But reconciliation brought him no friends, and he found that, along with the hatred of the colonists, he had this as well in common with Yeh Mingchen: a belief in imminent disaster. For it was obvious that no good would come of this confrontation, and that the Chinese would suffer the results of cause and effect.
What happened was this, as recorded little more than a year later in a soldier’s diary:
; “A heavy pall of smoke rose from the Summer Palace obscuring the light of the sun; it drifted over Peking and deposited an ominous layer of ashes in the streets of the city. The world around looked dark with shadow. When we entered the gardens they reminded one of those magic grounds described in fairy tales; we marched from them upon the nineteenth of October, leaving a drear waste of ruined nothings.”
—
Fan and I sit quietly, watching the empty ocean rise and fall. It is patterned, to the northwest, by rain, but the sky and sea make a blanket of otherwise unrelieved grey, which shuts us in. We can see the islands, Saturna and Patos, but they are no more than neutral frames for the flatness.
“How do you stand it, day after day?” asks Fan.
What can I answer? That I’m used to it? That I like it this way? That it isn’t as bad for me as for an ordinary seaman? “I wait for it to change, Fan,” I say. And she smiles.
—
In Hong Kong on the morning of January 15, 1857, the Europeans sat down to breakfast. They had endured one more of a hundred sleepless nights spent in fear of the assassin’s knife. As they drank tea and buttered their toast and covered it with jam, they basked in the security of broad daylight. For what could be safer than breakfast with the family on a rainy morning?
They ate the bread that was delivered each day from the E. Sing bakery on Pottinger Street, and, to a man, woman, and child, they vomited.
For while patrols had been watching for arsonists and for Chinese out late coming home from parties, the bakers of Pottinger Street, with the compliance, if not the direction, of the owner, Cheong Ma Lum, were stirring in an extra ingredient. But at this moment, when the fate of the entire British colony at Hong Kong was in their hands, they overdid it. There was so much arsenic in the bread that the poison had no chance to take effect. It was rejected, with vigour, by the European stomachs at once.
To All Appearances a Lady Page 4