Now the season changed. And Ng Chung, piling wood in the stove, glancing now and then at my mother’s pale face, evoked a different scene. The many faces of the crowd became the single face of a girl riding towards his house in a red-papered chair. Along Tientsin streets, skirting the Pei-ho, crossing Tientsin squares. Past open windows and curtained doors, watched by onlookers and bystanders and waving children, followed by dogs. It did not matter that he had never seen her before, that the marriage had been arranged by relatives, for from the moment he lifted the crimson veil from her face he had loved her.
It was a tender, unquestioning love. A pupa emerging from its sleep in the chrysalis. A meeting of minds, of bodies and spirits, as sometimes happens to the very fortunate. They prayed to their ancestors. They sat down together, each on a scrap of the other’s clothing so that neither would dominate. They talked, and ate, and made long, passionate love. It made up for a lot, this marriage….
But here Ng Chung grew embarrassed, and his face turned red. He had loved. He had wanted my mother to know that: for love can surprise and make one forget. And nothing else matters. But love is private and makes its own net. And it was long, long ago….
And Fate had other lessons in its syllabus, and the world is a wheel that seldom stays upright. Knowing this, that for every up there is a down, for every love there is a loss (he glances at my mother as he says this: since the corollary is obvious, that for every loss there is love to come); he was not surprised at what happened next.
The weather changed. As to why—because of sunspots or gases or volcanic dust—was anyone’s guess: but instead of seasons with a succession of sun and rain, there was only dust. The cotton plants and wheat, peas, and beans shrivelled up. The people went to sleep thirsty and awakened thirsty. Dust whirled, blew, and gathered in heaps. And Ng Chung’s wife, who had given birth to their first child a few months earlier, lost her milk.
Their days were dry seas into which their lives emptied drop by drop. Their skins cracked, their lips were parched. The grass hummed as it dried under protest, as the fertile land was transformed into desert.
Villagers began to arrive in the city from the surrounding countryside. They camped on the banks of the dropping Pei-ho. They slaughtered their animals and sold their implements; they ate next year’s seed.
“We were told that grain would be sent on big ships from the south,” Ng Chung explained. “We watched for these ships day and night, but they did not come. All we could see was the clouds gather and dissolve without bringing rain.”
When skeletons had piled up in the streets, and carrion birds, wild dogs, and wolves roamed close to the houses, Ng Chung’s child died. They buried him in secret, for the city, it was rumoured, was full of cannibals.
“How long can this go on?” the people asked. “Is there no limit to our tragedy? What’s to become of us?”
The answer, if they had wanted one, was not long in coming. One night, as a plague of typhus swept through the shantytown along the river banks, there were six hundred deaths.
In the morning the butcher’s stalls in the marketplace opened. There was fresh meat where before there had been none. The flush-faced merchants went about their business as if in a dream; and in the air was the odour of overripeness. And the truth was that those children who had not died of disease were drowned by their mothers out of pity. And many of the carcasses in the butchers’ shops were pink and neat and clean.
The truth was that nothing went to waste; not even death. That those who were left were determined to stay alive. But by the time the grain arrived, from most of the hovels crumbling next to the Pei-ho there came a telling silence. During the famine, in the country at large, over five million people had died.
—
“I’m against suffering, Fan,” I say as I listen to Ng Chung’s story. “It shouldn’t be allowed.”
“Everyone’s against it,” she says. “Especially for themselves.” And she thumps her heels, as she sits on the capping with her legs hanging over, against the side of the Rose.
Night in Refuge Cove at the north of Clayoquot Sound. I can hear the tide grappling with the anchor chain. And the sound of fish feeding nearby. In my nostrils is still the sweet, bitter odour of the hot springs. The stars are like sprays of blossoms in the slightly misted sky. I identify the ones I know. The others stray—to my eye, formlessly—round these pivot points.
“I wonder, Fan,” I say after a minute, “if Ng Chung’s approach is the right one. I understand what he is doing, you’ve explained all that, but is it always best to see one’s life in context? Doesn’t that, in this case, rob my mother of the anger and pain that are rightfully hers?
“Or put it another way,” I say. “Do we have to lose all innocence? Do we need to know about every evil there is in the world?”
“What evils would you leave out?” asks Fan as her feet keep going thump, thump, thump. The noise seems to make no difference to the tree frogs, or to the owl I can hear hooting on the shore. Perhaps they’re used to drumming from the Indian village on the other side of the cove. I find it annoying.
“This boat has got to see us home, Fan,” I say irascibly. “For that, if for no other reason, I wish you’d stop.”
“Which evils?” Fan repeats. “Which would you leave out?” Catching my eye on her, she stills her feet. “Natural disasters? But they’re not anyone’s fault, and evil, of course, is a human event. How about the nuclear bomb, then? Or the deaths of all those millions of people in the concentration camps?”
“Don’t be silly, Fan. That’s not what I meant.”
“Isn’t it? Well,” she says dismissively, “I don’t think you know what you meant. I thought you’d learned your lesson about avoidance. Burying your head in the sand has brought you nothing but trouble.”
“Yes,” I say sadly. “I suppose you’re right. But isn’t it a little hard for India to take? All that on top of…all that,” I finish weakly.
Fan gives me a withering look. Her face, I note with surprise, reflects the sheen of the stars. Not like a mirror, but like scratched, polished, opaque glass.
“The doctor at Coal Harbour, the one who sat on the dock staring out at Japan, was right, I suppose,” I say. “We’ve run out of time in the world. We should stop having children. We should all just quit.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“No?”
“No, Robert Lam. But you must know what evil looks like and how to avoid it. You must make yourself step outside its trap.”
“But how, Fan, how!”
“You should think about consequences,” she says. “I say ‘think,’ and not ‘give up.’ ”
Silence. While contending tides and currents push and tug at my boat.
“Did you know,” says Fan, as the owl hoots again, and the night wind walks a delicate shiver up and down my arms, “that here in Clayoquot Sound, and in Nootka Sound to the north, the Indians fought for their land? These are the only places on the coast where this went on for any length of time.”
“I’ve heard something about it,” I say. “Everyone who sails in here knows a little because of the many ships that went down. Some of them are still hazards and are marked so on the charts. They sank some of the trading ships, didn’t they?”
“There was the schooner Kingfisher, for one,” she says. “Indian villages were shelled in reprisal, and many people killed. The Tonquin was another vessel the Indians burned. At Nootka there was the killing of the crew of the Boston, of course, and in Clayoquot, at the time your mother and I were girls, some traders were killed. The settlers who came here did so at the risk of their lives.”
“All right, Fan, I get the drift. The Indians fought to keep their land, so what about it?”
“They knew that the merchants and settlers meant the end of things for them. They knew they were fighting for their very right to existence.”
“I don’t see what good it did them. They lost it all in the end.”
“Yes,” she says,
nodding vigorously. “But they kept their self-respect. They did not forget, as so many Indians did, who they were and where they had come from.”
“What do you mean?”
“What you do from this point on is up to you, Robert Lam. There is nothing holding you back.”
A plate of light is showing above the mountains on the shoreline. Fan stifles a yawn. “Ng Chung had lost his mother and his remaining sister and also his child,” she says, going back to her story. “Yet he considered himself to be lucky. There was still himself and his wife left alive.
“You should do what he did, Robert Lam,” she says, blinking as the rim of light grows wider. “You should count them up.”
“What, Fan?” I ask, feeling as I often do, that her logic is beyond me.
“Your blessings, Robert Lam. Count them one by one.”
—
A call had gone out from the New World to the Old. Labourers were needed to build the cities, the roads and railroads, to work in the mines and to set up businesses. Ng Chung, having found no way to improve his prospects in the city he was born in, Tientsin, answered that summons.
The old ways were done with. It was a relief to put them behind him. Only, when he travelled to North America to build his future, his wife could not accompany him. For the labourers were not permitted to take their families with them: they had to go alone. For this was contract labour and there was no thought, indeed no intention, that the workers would stay in the New World and become New World citizens.
Moreover, in Ng Chung’s case, and this was cause for rejoicing, his wife was pregnant again.
A child! An emblem of hope! And what a miracle it is: sperm and egg uniting, implanting in the womb, and then the long climb towards birth. And the future. What the world has going for it…
(“I didn’t know you cared about children, Robert Lam,” says my stepmother as I start the Rose’s engine.
“Of course I do. Just because I haven’t any of my own doesn’t mean I’m ignorant about them,” I say as I ease the Rose’s nose towards the mouth of Refuge Cove. “There are many things I haven’t experienced about which I know something. God, for example. Or technocracy. Or cold baths in the morning.”
“I thought you were an atheist,” says Lam Fan shortly.
“Then you thought wrong, although I have to say it’s not my fault. That school you sent me to, the Chinese Christian School for Boys, did its job. I was taught to think as if I believed in Him, whether I did or not. It was in everything we read or talked about. I can’t get rid of it now,” I say. “It’s far too late for that.”)
Put-putting across the pastel waters in the early morning and heading down the western shores of Flores Island. With its rugged and broken coastline, and the brilliant green of its mountains rising steeply in the interior. A white-foam outline of an island, cut out and stuck against the transparent glass of the atmosphere…
—
Ng Chung, with one thing left to do before he went: to hold a proper funeral for the child they had buried in secret. His wife sewed a small red bag, and they filled it with tea and salt and candy, plus a piece of silver from his wife’s wedding earrings, so that the poor starved infant could buy its way past the spirit dogs that lived and hunted on the route to the afterlife.
Ng Chung, wearing loose trousers and sandals, a padded vest and cotton jacket, with a round blue cap on his head. His oval face like smooth, tanned leather, his back and legs well-muscled, young still, and for the most part unmarked. Although it was not easy to let go of a wife and a dead first child, nor to leave a child as yet unborn.
But still he went, travelling first to the south to the immigrant ship, which then set sail for San Francisco. Eighty days in the hold, with not enough to eat or drink.
—
And my mother listening to all this. While rain fell on the roof of her room like water from an upturned bucket. While time ran fast on its clock, and her thoughts went out beyond the hut in the forest to the rim of the island and beyond. To Vancouver Island, to the ache and the wish that had come together in her heart as a woman, as Ng Chung told the story of his life.
For he has had the family she never had. Not as a child or as an adult. The major didn’t seem to count. And there was no mother, not to speak of; and surely that was the glue that made it all work?
Motherless children. India, Lam Fan, and myself. And childless. Although for India, of course, only up to a point…
But it was a new beginning, and clearly worth it. Ng Chung found work first as a dishwasher, then as a cook. Although sand blew along Market Street, and the buildings went up overnight, there were Chinese restaurants and Chinese laundries everywhere you looked. Even a Chinese newspaper, with its office on Grant Avenue. And there were saloons and gambling houses, the usual city labyrinths.
He liked to climb up Telegraph Hill, where the streets, paved with grass, were too steep for horses to walk, and look down at the ocean. At the fishing boats criss-crossing the harbour, at the currents twisting and turning and returning—surely some of them would be—across the Pacific Ocean to the shores of his home.
It was a connection of sorts, more concrete than the simple letters his wife paid a scribe to write. It was here he went to think about the birth of his second child in his absence.
Another son. Whom he wanted to have an education, a better chance at a fulfilling life. And whom, as well as his wife, he desperately wanted to visit.
Which meant more work, and more money, although he was saving almost everything he made as it was. And so he went back down to his communal room in the Chinese hostel and packed his belongings, and, pushing a cart, made his way far away from that city of thousands to the emptier north.
It was a huge continent. Men moved up and down it on a conveyor belt of rumour: gold in California, gold in the Yukon, abandoned claims not worked out in the Cariboo. Men needed to carry supplies, to run grocery stores, to labour on roads and bridges and railways. Men paid to lay track and blast tunnels and dig.
And so he walked, mile after mile, week after week, over the snowbound mountain passes and into the rain forest: a six-week walk north to British Columbia.
—
The men lived in tents or in sod-roofed huts along the Fraser River. There were no hospitals, although there were dozens of accidents. There was never enough rice, and no meat or vegetables, and there were scores of deaths from black-leg scurvy.
Once the main lines were finished the men were laid off: some three thousand of them turned out of the tents and houses, and hiding like animals in caves by the river. Where they ate dead salmon and rotted abandoned stores. Men without work. Who starved and fell ill, and who were put in jail where their queues were cut off.
Men who were worthless.
But Ng Chung was lucky. He was hired on as one of a crew of twenty-five workers clearing land on the outskirts of Vancouver. It was densely forested land, thick with brush and full of promise. Land that now is bounded by Burrard Street and Stanley Park, from Coal Harbour to English Bay. It was land that made a profit of twenty-one thousand dollars for the contractor who knew the market and who knew what he could get the Chinese workers to take for their sweat.
They cut down trees and hauled stumps and burned scrub. At night, when the green mountains were muted in mist, and heavy, wet snow froze to the cedar trees, Ng Chung sat in the bunkhouse shanty. Where he lifted the edge of his damp straw mattress and counted his money. Soon there would be enough to buy a house for his wife and the baby, and to send the boy to school. Soon, very soon, in only another month or so he would have enough to go home.
But then, just as it always did—yes, he should have seen it coming—the wheel of his life gave another quick turn.
It was a long, hard winter. There was ice on top of the mud, and in the growing settlement of Vancouver, a few miles distant, there was much unemployment. Citizens, with no jobs and loud voices, painted crosses on the walks in front of Chinese businesses, and organized boy
cotts. And those who employed the Chinese immigrants were also singled out for punishment. With so little money to go around, few could take the chance of losing everything. And so the Chinese lost their jobs, and many Chinese businesses closed. It was a sad time in the life of the city. When sad men, most of them failed miners and farmers and storekeepers, with their dreams of riches spoiled, sought revenge where they could. Men who had grudges. Men with one outlook.
Someone said that a headless white child had been found in the Chinese dump, and the rumour went round and round until it was not one child, but dozens. Sacrifices, it was said, to the heathen rituals of worship. And if there are parallels that might be drawn, if Ng Chung thought of the death of the orphanage children and the pamphlets that led to the murder of missionaries in his home town, Tientsin, then he must have guessed what could happen.
In the last week of February 1887, speeches were made, mass meetings were held, and the rumours attained the status of truth through public utterance. Thus, when someone shouted from the back of the crowd, “We should burn them out!” the response was a roar from three hundred throats.
They burst forth from that meetinghouse like a stampede of cattle. They ran down the trail through the tarry wet night the full two miles to the Chinese camp. Leaping over chasms, careless of injury, they rushed up hills and skirted ravines until they came to the shacks where the labourers lived.
And pulled them down and set them alight. Food, bedding, clothing—it didn’t matter what it was, it was destroyed. While the Chinese workers hid in the snowbanks, or, like Ng Chung, stood up to their necks in the icy water of the inlet all that long night. Shivering, numb to the bone.
No one was killed—which was something. But some wellspring, some inner resource that had kept Ng Chung going had come to its end. The money he had saved was burned, and with it all hope of returning to his wife. A trap had sprung shut. There were no new beginnings, no more fresh starts.
With the first cracking of dawn in that cold, soaked sky on that shameful morning, while the last of the mob were still rioting in town, breaking windows and burning houses; while hundreds of men were still solving their problems, Ng Chung and the others came out of hiding. They gathered round the embers of their burned-out property, and they tried to get warm.
To All Appearances a Lady Page 30