To All Appearances a Lady

by Marilyn Bowering

  “I am shaken by the effects of poison,” wrote the governor of the colony bitterly, expressing no thanks to heaven for his escape from death. “Every member of my family being at this moment suffering from this new attempt upon our lives.” So ungrateful was he for the heavy hand of the bakers that fifty-two of the workmen and underbakers of E. Sing were arrested and kept in a room fifteen feet square. Which allowed (just let me do the mathematics, Fan)—just over four square feet per person.

  So that they couldn’t sit down or lie down or move their limbs freely. So that they had ample opportunity to reflect together on their errors. So that some of them, later, died.

  Oh yes. There is one more thing, Fan reminds me (as if this is something I could possibly leave out). The owner of the bakery, Ah Lum, plus his wife and all of his children but one, fled to Macau. The child left behind, a little girl, forgotten or abandoned we do not know, was that very same child that the major, for reasons best known to himself, took into his home and called Lam Fan.

  —

  “I don’t understand, Fan,” I say. (We are in mid-channel between Alden Point and East Point. Boiling Reef is behind us, and we are about to alter course northwestward, into the Strait of Georgia.) “If your father’s name was Lum, why did the major call you Lam?”

  Fan looks at me oddly. “But you yourself do the very same thing.”

  “What on earth do you mean, Fan?” I say, then I understand and am embarrassed. I busy myself with the charts. We are skirting the boundary between the United States and Canada, and I take my time determining where on the border we are.

  “At the Pilot House,” she reminds me, since I haven’t said anything. “Remember what I saw in there? They spelled your name on the board as Lamb not Lam.”

  I put the charts down.

  “Well, the major thought Lam sounded better in English,” she continues, “just like you thought Lamb was even better. He said it would make life easier for me in Hong Kong, it would help the English forget about my father who had frightened them. Lum is too hard for them, too Chinese.”

  I digest this information uncomfortably.

  “Of course what counts,” I say, “is not the name but the person who bears it. Changing a name doesn’t change who you are.”

  “No,” Fan agrees, “but it changes what you can do.”

  A light slowly begins to dawn in my brain. “Is that what my mother did, Fan, give me her husband’s name, Robert Louis, to make my life easier? So that people wouldn’t know I had no father? Of course, she had something to hide as well. Like the fact that she wasn’t married when I was born. Like the fact that her lover was Chinese.

  “Maybe,” I add, after a self-sobering pause, “she didn’t know who my father was.”

  “Oh, my,” says Fan, giving me a withering look. “I didn’t know you sailors were so nice. Or are these the thoughts of a disappointed man, one crossed in love?” She is mocking me by repeating my earlier words, and I find I am not amused.

  “At least I’ve never been left,” I say, taking the offensive. My cruel words hit home. I think for a moment that she will cry.

  “My husband, Sing Yuen, believed it was his duty to go to war,” she says quietly. “He felt that if the Chinese did well for Canada, they would be recognized as soldiers, as heroes.”

  “Well that didn’t happen, did it.”

  “No, Robert Lam, it didn’t. But it isn’t because he didn’t try.” Fan regards me thoughtfully.

  I count to ten and look at the birds in the water, and identify them. There is a Brandt’s cormorant, a western gull, and a pigeon guillemot. We keep score, at the Pilot House, of how many species we see on each trip. It is something to take our minds off the boredom of making the same journeys, day after day, harbour to harbour, going nowhere but where we have often been before.

  —

  She was cooed over and stared at, then neglected and mistreated. In the overheated atmosphere of the pivotal year of 1857, she became a symbol. She stood for any number of contraries: Christian forgiveness, for example, or Chinese barbarianism. You could take your pick, according to your lights. Soon, however, for such is the nature of political events, as the news came in of the Indian Mutiny, and the possibility of a general uprising against the British in the East, and the great winds of change began to blow, the little leftover baker’s daughter faded into insignificance. Even the Friend of China and Hong Kong Gazette, which had printed editorials on what should be done with her, forgot she existed. She was still left behind, though, and friendless. For who in his right mind would want to be responsible for a reminder of rebellion and ingratitude and near death?

  Except the major. That champion of progress, of the underdog, of reform.

  For the reforming mind likes challenges. It conducts tests, it is experimental. And in this case, at least, the reforming mind was also compassionate, and had noticed what others had missed. That as well as a symbol, the child was a child. Who needed parents and guidance and love. Who needed a home. Perhaps it was the birth of his own daughter that had set the major thinking. Whereas his child would receive food, clothing, and an education as a matter of course, the baker’s daughter would be lucky to survive; and most likely would be sold and worked as a prostitute before she was twelve.

  The child’s life had come to a dividing point, and at this fork in the road stood the major.

  Lam Fan nods her head. So far so good. But what about the mother? What about the major’s wife?

  Since there is no mention in the papers of her, I have to ask. And although Fan looks grim and stays silent, it isn’t too difficult for me to guess the rest. For the major’s wife had a baby in her arms whom her husband had christened after a seditious country. She had a husband on her hands whom her countrymen thought was a traitor to established British principle: a man who had lost the respect of his contemporaries. And now he had brought, into her home, and expected her to care for as her own, a baker’s daughter, the child of a would-be murderer. For murder had been the intent if not the outcome: and between the two, in her mind, there was little distinction.

  Everyone, even in the nineteenth century, even a woman bound to a husband, has a breaking point. And for India’s mother, my grandmother, this was it. Out of the house on the Queen’s Road she went, away from the reformer and his inflexible reforming principles, out of British colonial life and into an Italian Catholic convent. Which was a giant step for her to take but a momentous one also for her babies. For who was to be their mother now? And how could they grow up without one? One orphan and one half an orphan: that was Lam Fan and my mother. For three-quarters of their parents had disappeared. And what about me? Was it like mother like daughter that made my mother leave me?

  “Poor, poor baby,” says Fan. And I’m not sure I couldn’t weep on her shoulder.

  —

  Night time. We are running up the Strait of Georgia, virtually mid-channel, with course set for Upwood Point on the south end of Texada Island. And rest stop planned for Blubber Bay on the north end. There is a dock there and little else: the ramshackle wooden houses common to the coast, and a few diehards remembering boom times while the forest takes back the land.

  We are climbing a chain of islands in whaling country. Mayne, Galiano, Valdes, Gabriola. And Ballenas Island, called “Islas de las Ballinas” by the Spanish—Island of Whales. And Hornby and Denman islands where whale bones litter the shores.

  Lam Fan stares with distaste into the cup of steaming tea that, without thinking, I have poured for her. Does a ghost eat and drink? I watch to see if she takes a sip. Do I cook for one or for two? I have put off getting my supper because I am uncertain. On a long trip like this, it is not an unimportant question. She puts the cup down without drinking, but I’m still uncertain of the answer.

  “I was told,” she says, “that a whale once towed a sailing whaler all around Texada Island. I also heard of two sisters who rowed a boat from the mainland to Van Anda followed by nine whales. There is ano
ther story, you know,” she says, “I was told this by a Klootchman, that whales like human women. Do you know about that, Robert Lam?” Fan gives me a sly look to see how I react. I know the story she means. I’ve heard it, too, from one of the Indian guides up the coast. It is a story about jealousy. In the end, a woman eats her lover’s privates. Of course this is an accident, but she does it just the same.

  The thump of the bow waves fills the next moments while I resist the impulse to respond. For who knows where this might lead? And I have other questions to ask my stepmother, more important than those about a whale’s loyalties.

  The major’s papers, for example. Essays on education, on water closets, on language. I have examined these leaden skies without hope. I need her to make them make sense.

  —

  Two female children, of different races, alone in a house with a middle-aged man. A runaway wife, housed in a convent. A predilection for impossible schemes. The colony had made its assessment. And the believer in education found the school doors shut against him. He tried every one of them, and at last he put the children in Miss Jane Baxter’s Diocesan Native Female School, which was meant for Chinese only. They stayed a few months, India helping the others with English, until the major realized that the Chinese girls, who were not allowed to speak their native tongue, and for whom there were few Christianized English-speaking Chinese men to marry, were ending up as mistresses for Europeans.

  The major brought Fan and India home.

  There was a succession of teachers and governesses in the Queen’s Road home, now belonging, in fact, to the major’s employers, Jardine Matheson. For the major had run up certain debts. For the fact is, he had lost heart for his former way of life, and was slipping.

  His wife, now a Catholic, wouldn’t see him. His employers kept him on out of indifference, and he was scorned by all society, forced back on his own and the children’s company. And the girls, those experiments in progress, were growing up half-wild, out at all hours in the streets, speaking both Chinese and English. For a believer in progress it was one thing; for a Victorian father, it was another. In brief, the major, too, found his breaking point, and the man who was not soft-brained to begin with took steps to alter that fact. In the Bombay Tavern and the Old House at Home for the most part.

  While the two young women learned their lessons. What Lam Fan learned was not what India learned. India yearned for rescue, and Fan for oblivion. So India kept a diary, and Lam Fan began to smoke opium.

  In amongst Lam Fan’s papers I have found two photographs. I have tacked them up in the wheelhouse on the bottom of the chart table, so that when the table is latched, I can see them. In the soft tipping light of the lantern, which hangs to my left illuminating the compass shelf, the faces age then recover their youth.

  The photograph of the major was taken not long before his death. He is wearing a tennis costume—white flannel trousers, white shirt with a high collar around which is tied a scarf. All the buttons of his single-breasted striped blazer are done up. It looks too tight for him, and his hands protrude out of the sleeves grotesquely. He holds a walking stick between his legs as he sits in a brocaded chair. It is clear that he has not seen a tennis court in years. He is a large man, but his flesh hangs loosely on his bones. His face is ugly, good-natured, and weak, with a large chin, spreading nose, and high forehead. He squints, and seems to blink, behind wire-rimmed spectacles.

  It is a face, I think (throttling the engine down another notch to meet the wake of a tanker, probably the Standard Service on its way south), for all its drinker’s traits (the veined nose and cheeks, the dull puffy eyes) that retains its innocence. As the lantern swings again I see my own face, smaller, flatter, less thoughtful and more cunning, peer out from behind his features. My grandfather.

  The day he died, India found an unfinished letter, addressed to the governor of the Hong Kong colony, on his bed table. It began, “The authorities, once again, have bungled the question of the water supply.” As if nothing had changed. As if he’d forgotten his failures. As if he, after the plague spots had patterned his body, after the buboes, in abscess, had burst in his groin and his armpits, after the pain that had blackened his face…as if, still, he had remained true to the call of the future, as the future left him behind. She had put a scented handkerchief to her face to disguise the smell of the sad poisoned flesh, leaned over him where he lay, and tucked the letter into his shirt next to his heart.

  In the other photograph, India and Fan are together. India stands behind a seated Lam Fan, resting her hand on Fan’s shoulder. Behind them is a pillar. Next to it is a summer bottle, the large stoppered glass encased in wicker in which the most perishable of the household goods were kept against the humidity: the biscuits, writing papers, and cigars. Fan looks as I knew her. Hers was the type of face that develops its look in infancy. It is a knowing face, never innocent, with exquisitely arched brows, finely drawn nose and lips, black hair groomed straight back and looped at the neck.

  And India, wearing the family expression of hope. Tall, slim, dressed in wool with a closely fitting bodice, high collar, tight sleeves. She is the image of practical womanhood. A spinster ready to brave the darkest of continents armed with nothing but her belief in herself. She is no beauty, not because she is not pretty. All the right parts are there: the full mouth, expressive eyes, abundant loosely arranged brown hair. But because beauty plays no part in her reality.

  At least not then. Not for the girl inside her. Who wants to get away. Who wants to be on her own.

  One last detail: on a stool visible in the portrait is a paper knife. It is the knife that Lam Fan used to open the letters that came for her, now and then, from an uncle who had emigrated to Canada. He alone of all the family had not forgotten the baker’s daughter. Who was not, after all, completely abandoned; for someone somewhere was thinking of her.

  And he, in his loneliness in a strange land, perhaps not knowing that his invitation would mean so much, suggested that if need should arise, Lam Fan could go and live with him in Victoria, in British Columbia, where he worked as a herbalist.

  In the 1850s it was to California, and then to the Cariboo gold fields; in the 1880s it was to build the railways that the Chinese went. There were, after all, a dozen reasons for leaving China, among which were poverty, unemployment, a destitute family to support, not to mention the ambition for a better life. But the main reason, the one that caused every potential immigrant to sit up late at night blinking in thought or tears or mere sleeplessness, was that there was no other choice.

  TWO

  The approach from southward to Desolation Sound may be made through Malaspina Strait, and thence by skirting the coast of the mainland northward of it; by way of Algerine Passage or Shearwater Passage, thence following the coast northward or through Baker Passage; all these routes are wide and deep.

  BRITISH COLUMBIA PILOT, VOLUME 1

  The procession started out. It halted, started again, then, finding its flow, jolted into the Queen’s Road, following the blinkered horse (owned by Jardine Matheson) pulling the bier (on loan from Jardine Matheson) on which the major’s casket rested. Into that solemn silence in which a funeral party moves. A silence packed thickly not with peace and resignation, but with questions.

  Questions, furies, ghosts. Running back and forth between the past and the present. Not just the electrical discharges of minds under stress, faced with the order of death, but something other: and it showed in the horse’s nervousness.

  The Baptist contingent went first, holding their Bibles in front of their chests like shields, the Bibles, coated with anti-cockroach varnish, reflecting the sun; then the merchants and their ladies, the civil servants and business colleagues and all the other Europeans who formed the community. So that it might have been the gleam of an army that was seen that day, winding its way from the house on the Queen’s Road to the Happy Valley cemetery. An exemplum of solidarity. For though not one of them in life, the major was given hi
s place among them at his death.

  Yet, despite the bravery of appearances, many maintained later, in the privacy of their homes, that they had walked that day with spirits. Not the common ones, often wakened by such occasions—the mothers, fathers, and other long dead relatives—but images of themselves. Dressed like them, like-mannered, walking quietly alongside. As if the damp, as the sun drew it forth from the cold earth in a mist, or disturbed nights and unexamined consciences, had resulted in mirage; or as if the future had come to visit.

  But like the planets and stars, luminous gases, drifting cold hydrogen, these ghosts stayed with them; walking and faltering, only to pull themselves to their feet and fall again, as if by repetition they might drive their lesson home.

  Even the bandsmen, blowing out march tunes, heard the phantom clank of musical instruments dropping from dead hands, and felt the sizzle of quicklime on their skins. And so the mourners met other mourners, procession after procession, mirroring their own, on the way to Happy Valley. And no voice interrupted that uneasy dark into which each individual felt himself plunged until after the coffin was placed in the ground.

  So it was that the funeral anticipated the deaths of hundreds. If one rat could find its way to the major’s doorstep in Wanchai, so could a million more. Climb the Peak, ride in sedan chairs, nest between the boards of the tramway cars. They could and did. It is a fact that few of the major’s countrymen long survived him.

  “Lucky that nothing like that happened at my funeral,” says Lam Fan.

  I have only just got onboard the Rose after casting off from the dock. Fan’s comment shocks me. “You were there?” I ask stupidly. And she laughs.