To All Appearances a Lady

by Marilyn Bowering

  At first he didn’t understand what had happened to him. There were numb patches on his skin, which remained numb no matter how hard he rubbed them. And there were white blotches and scaliness. There must be some mistake, he thought. It can’t have happened overnight. But there it was. He knew what he was up against; he had seen too many lepers in the streets of Tientsin not to know the disease for what it was when he met it.

  He took the steamer Princess Louise from Vancouver to Victoria with the other refugee workers. He slept in a tenement. He half starved, and floated on the crosscurrents of men without families for three more years. Adrift, fed on mussels and vegetable peelings and the garbage from restaurants. That is, he existed. Waiting, until his life should take a turn for better or worse.

  Until, in the year and month that India and Lam Fan arrived onboard Thermopylae, he was caught in a roundup and taken into custody.

  At the harbour, where the lepers waited for the steamer Alert to take them to D’Arcy Island and permanent exile, he had grabbed a knife, and as India had been told when she first met the lepers, he had attempted to cut his throat.

  But unlucky in all he tried, and by now growing weak, he lost his hold. A policeman, Sergeant Walker, seized his arm and saved his life.

  “But think!” my mother said as much with her eyes as with her voice, “if you had succeeded in your attempt at suicide, think what would have happened to me! A man saves your life against your will, and you, in turn, along with Sim Lee, are alive to rescue me!”

  Her eyes shone with the thought of it: how fate is a chain of cause and effect and we can’t see where it starts; how luck depends on timing as much as on anything else.

  Ng Chung stirred the dying fire with a stick. Perhaps he was asking, “Was it worth it?” Not saving her life, for he had shown no hesitancy at all when it came to that, but life itself.

  At what cost are we on this planet? How does it all add up? “I’m sorry,” my mother said. “I can’t undo the bad or do much good, but I want you to know I’m sorry.”

  Ng Chung resettled her. He tucked the blankets in beneath her chin. He blew on the fire and added more kindling.

  Then he told my mother to sleep, and he put out the light, and stepped outside to wait for the rain to stop and for the sky to show first light.

  It was the one thing he could count on.

  ELEVEN

  Tofino Village is situated at the northern end of Esowista Peninsula. In the village are stores and a post office, which is connected to the general telegraph system. There is a government wharf, one hundred and twenty feet in length and with a depth of nineteen feet along its L-shaped head. Diesel oil, gasoline and water may be procured from the oil wharves at the village. A local steamer calls regularly. There is a hospital.

  A motor life-boat is stationed at Tofino.

  BRITISH COLUMBIA PILOT, VOLUME I

  Dust and ashes,

  dust and ashes,

  was my fortune

  and my fame,

  dust and ashes

  was my fortune,

  when shifting sands

  revealed her name.

  I am singing—to the tune of “Found a Peanut,” a melody that once heard is never forgotten, even on one’s deathbed I should think—in rhythm with the Rose’s engine as it runs a little roughly through its cylinders. Lam Fan has covered her ears with her hands. She cries out, from time to time, against the monotony of the tune and lyrics. It is a strange kind of song, I suppose, for a fine summer’s morning, when shoals of fish are surface feeding, and a stray blue jay (resting between islands?) is clinging to a mainstay and giving me its greeting: a morning when every breath taken should be a hymn of praise to creation. Silvery waters, prisms of sunlight, burgeoning life, and so on.

  But dust and ashes are what remain to me of Ng Chung’s story, and I cannot get it out of my mind: for it seems a useless waste of a life to me, even though, as Fan has said, if nothing else, he and Sim Lee saved my mother from certain death.

  And shifting sands are set out right in front of me: for we are approaching the eastern half of Clayoquot Sound, where shoals and shallow bars make navigation a nightmare. Even for a sailor like myself, with years of experience on the coast.

  Nearby, for instance, off the southwest corner of Flores Island, called Raphael Point, a score of ships has gone down. The Lord Weston (although her final resting place is still a mystery), the Transport, and the Mololo, which was wrecked the same day that my pay went up to seventy-five dollars a year, which is why I particularly remember it. A red-letter day for young Robert Lam, who felt he’d balanced too long on the bottom rung as mess boy, deckhand, and coal passer, and who planned to work his way up from ordinary seaman to able seaman and then through the hierarchy of officers to captain. Although it could have been the end of the climb even then, and should have been, in fact, considering the small detail of which I was then ignorant, that no Chinese before me had made it onto the upper decks…. But I looked European enough, I guess, and although the navy would only take me on as a steward and wouldn’t count my sea time, the SilverLine thought more of my prospects and was willing to take a chance on a half-caste. For make no mistake about it, however I spelled my name later on, they knew as certainly as I did where I had come from; where I had lived and with whom; and all about my schooling. It was the school, indeed, I was eventually told, that had helped to shift the balance in favour of signing me. “No trace remains in Robert Louis Lam,” the principal had written, “of his Chinese father’s heathen origins.”

  But it was a long ladder to climb and a slow rise if ever there was one.

  Breakers, rocks, and reefs. We are giving the southern shore of Flores Island a wide-swinging berth. There are shoals offshore for a mile, stirring up steep, breaking seas. We proceed slowly, steering for Bartlett Island through water that is only forty feet deep: wooded Bartlett Island, one of the Whaler Islets, with its pale yellow sands; and all the islets are havens for seabirds—auklets, petrels, and guillemots—that pay us no attention, so secure are they on their nesting grounds.

  And so on south to the low and undulating western shores of Vargas Island, where, at Ahous Bay, the migrating grey whales are known to gather.

  —

  “I thought you said they’d be here, Fan.”

  “I said they might be, I said they often were; I didn’t promise,” she responds testily.

  We are both standing on the deck of the Rose gazing at the surface of the bay. No plumes of spray, no glistening, mottled bodies or echoes of resounding tail slaps, just the steel-blue, unmarked waters. The whales like to come here, to rub themselves on the sand of the bottom, and to browse amongst the kelp. But not today, apparently. The surf falls steadily along the beach. The tides make their predictable advance. Below the surface prey and predator work through their daily contests. Each diatom has its place, and the absence of the whales should make no difference. But it is sad, somehow, not to see them. It feels like I’ve lost some friends.

  “Come on, Fan,” I say to my mother’s adopted sister, “let’s go back the way we came. I think we took a wrong turning.”

  Retracing our course by voyaging round the northwest shore of Vargas Island, then into Cairnus Passage. With the high peaks of the Catface Range to the north; going as slowly as we can, for the currents flood in and out around the islands in various directions, and the sandbanks keep changing position, and so I must watch for the bottom. But I yawn, and my eyes keep straying to the perfect volcanic shape of Lone Cone on Meares Island ahead of us, as if it is a beacon. Although I should be watching for beacons and buoys in the path of the Rose instead….

  “Wake up, Robert Lam! Pay attention!” cries Fan.

  “I am awake. Stop shouting. I just closed my eyes for a second,” I answer.

  “Well, you can’t!” she says. “Snap out of it!”

  Open enough to make the south turn into Maurus Channel and around Elbow Bank where the north- and south-going tidal streams
meet. But closed, I’m afraid, as we putter along the western coast of Meares Island and into Father Charles Channel.

  —

  Seven years on D’Arcy Island. During which Ah Chee, Kong Ching Sing, and the poet, Nap Sing, died. Fathers, husbands, and sons they had been, as well as India’s friends. And which included a visit from the missionary steamer, Glad Tidings, with the Reverends Crosby and Winchester attending. “A most interesting service was held,” they reported upon their return. Years which, as well, saw four new arrivals.

  One, Alexander Sundy, a white man, had been one of the earliest settlers in Victoria, living latterly in Alert Bay. He was dead by June 1895, and the only reason he is remembered is that the other lepers refused to bury his body, and were only made to do so by the withholding of their supplies.

  There was also Ah Sam, and two other Chinese, unnamed. Ah Sam had been living near Kamloops in the interior of the province when he was discovered. He had been cutting wood, winter and summer, and getting along well enough with the aid of his companions. After someone reported him, he went away by himself to a place called Notch Hill, where he spent the spring of the year planting a garden. Still they came after him—men on horseback and carrying weapons.

  He was put into a boxcar and shipped by rail to Vancouver, a journey that lasted more than twelve hours, during which he was given no food or water.

  Constable McKenna, who picked him up at the station, transferred him to a large wooden box with a hole cut in the top of it, and placed the box on a cart, then drove to the dock of the Victoria steamer.

  On board that ship, sometime during the lonely journey across the strait to Vancouver Island, Ah Sam put his mouth to the breathing hole and cried out loudly, “Me very hungry!” How many times he called before he was heard, no one knows. But it was late in the day before he was finally fed and watered.

  McKenna, struggling with his fears, worried that he would contract the disease of leprosy himself—despite what had been learned in the rest of the world of its minimal degree of infectiousness—towed Ah Sam to D’Arcy Island from Victoria Harbour in a small boat tied behind the police launch.

  Ah Sam: with his hands roped behind his back, and his stomach sick, who arrived on D’Arcy Island without any food or clothing, and who was nearly dead—not from his disease, but from the coarseness of his treatment. And whom India, Ng Chung, and Sim Lee nursed back to a semblance of health.

  And Constable McKenna. Pursued by nightmares, travelling the whole way back to the city alone; and who sank the boat that had carried Ah Sam, then incinerated his clothing and washed his hair in alcohol; and who had seven long years ahead of him in which to dread the appearance of leprosy in himself. A policeman following instructions. Who could not be blamed. For it wasn’t his fault, it was the whole system.

  (“That’s an easy out if I ever heard one,” says Fan.

  “Don’t be so critical,” I say to her as I doze in the sunshine. “Everyone’s not perfect like you.”

  “What do you mean, Robert Lam?” she says, her feelings hurt. “I am only telling you that McKenna should have thought for himself. It wasn’t right to treat Ah Sam so cruelly.”

  I suppose she is right, I think to myself, considering what our leaders said at Nuremburg after the war…but I haven’t the energy to admit it.)

  The two other men, who, along with Ah Sam, Ng Chung, and Sim Lee, made up the lepers’ party, had been taken off a CPR ship while attempting to return to China. They were arrested and locked up in the Vancouver rail yard. Vancouver City Council, the Dominion governments the province, and the CPR all refused jurisdiction over them, so that the men stayed in the shack, with no heat and only salt pork and water to eat and drink, all winter. Lawyers argued, telegrams were sent, meetings were held. One man offered, if paid three hundred dollars, to dispose of the lepers, “no questions asked.” Another man, arriving at the shack with food and blankets, was driven off by the guard. And so the two lepers lived, in semidarkness, without exercise, and unable to let their families and friends know where they were. For, as always happened, any letters the men managed to write were taken away and burned.

  The question of whose responsibility it was, and who should pay, revolved through the courts. The city of Vancouver “refused to become a dumping ground”; the province said it was a Dominion quarantine matter, and the Dominion that it wasn’t. At last, the City of Victoria, under pressure from all of them, agreed to place the unwanted prisoners on D’Arcy Island.

  Only one letter was written on behalf of the suffering outcasts. A Mrs. Kerr, of Norwegian extraction, stated that, in her country, lepers were not isolated and were treated in hospitals and were set at liberty. Why could not the same be done in British Columbia? Not a single case of infection had resulted from these practises, she claimed, except for that of a laundress who had washed the lepers’ linen with an open wound on her hand. “The lepers sell knitting and weaving and woodcarving, the citizens of Norway buy these goods with no evil effects. Why not, at least,” she suggested, “send the Chinese lepers to the lazaretto at Tracadie in New Brunswick where lepers are cared for in humane conditions?”

  The answer was printed in the Victoria British Colonist. To do such a thing “would pollute the gentle Acadians whose hospitable forefathers caught the disease by rescuing shipwrecked sailors from the Levant who were cast upon the wild shores of the Bay Chaleur, and whose thoughts dwell day and night on the glories that will be theirs in the Other Land.” Et cetera.

  (“Wake up, Robert Lam, wake up!” cries Lam Fan, pinching my arms and my thighs. “Better boats than this have spent the day on the sands.”

  “Leave me alone, Fan, I’m having a little rest,” I murmur as the Rose steers herself at low speed south. “I’ll get up in a minute, I’m just tired, that’s all.”)

  —

  My mother, losing and gaining friends and companions on D’Arcy Island. Working, day after day, for the good of the community as a whole. Trying not to put the interests of one man ahead of the others, so that personal feelings would not intrude on the larger social picture; so that the job would get done. Yet feeling the pull of her friendships. The closeness that had developed between her and Ng Chung as they shared the stories of their lives, and worked together; the affection she felt for Sim Lee, who was like a father to her…attempting to find a place for herself in this context through intelligence and practical reasoning and the needs that they met; through thought-out action. Through conversation and musical evenings. My mother, who had done all that she could by the book, and yet had come to the end of her rope. For there were limits to what she could accomplish. She could not cure her friends of leprosy, for example, and this failure was breaking her heart. Moreover, who could she unburden herself to, with whom could she share her fears as well as her hopes?

  My mother, growing older, and believing that it was time to look after herself; for what hadn’t she given up? And what was there to show for it?

  And so she sat on the beach as the sun went down, and watched the dimming of the shore of Vancouver Island. “Restaurants,” she thought. “Churches, post offices, horses, and people.” It was un unused vocabulary, and she rolled it around, like foreign food, on her tongue.

  Sim Lee, who had been scuffing up and down the sand with his hands in his pockets, hiding his fingers, his worst disfigurement, stopped in front of her. She looked up at him: his face, bare of eyebrows and lashes, was almost expressionless, but she knew that there was no way he would let her drop the subject. The Japanese fishermen, who had anchored their boats offshore for the third day in a row, and who had sent ashore a dinghy full of fresh-caught fish for the lepers, and who had offered to take away letters and messages and—more to the point—had made India realize that she could leave the island if she wanted, for she had seen that they were upset by her predicament and would happily assist her, being more familiar with and less afraid of contagion than their European counterparts—were stringing up the lanterns with which th
ey marked their position.

  “You say,” said Sim Lee in a voice made rough by the progress of his malady, “that we may have been better off if you had not come here at all; but tell me, how could that have been? We suffer because of our lack of physical strength. What we have been able to do together could not have been done by ourselves. Surely, after all this time, I shouldn’t have to tell you that! It is a question we settled years ago: and, as I recall, you were on the opposite side of it!”

  “It was different then,” said India. “You don’t understand.” Sim Lee shook his head in bafflement.

  “Don’t bother to reason with her,” said Ng Chung, who was seated nearby, and whose hand rubbed back and forth nervously at the scar on his throat as if he still regretted that the knife had missed its target. “She doesn’t want to hear what we have to say, her mind is made up.”

  “It’s just common sense,” said my mother in exasperation, then stopped. For how to tell them the truth—that she had lost heart? That something was missing from her life, and that she had no more to give until she found it. “You would have been more independent,” she said at last weakly. “You would have tried to do for yourselves the things I have helped you with.” Ng Chung looked at her in amazement.

  “We were independent when you met us,” he said. He searched India’s face with his eyes. “What is it,” he asked softly, “what is it that is troubling you so badly? Please tell us.”

  Sim Lee kicked the embers of the beach fire, around which they were gathered, to life. The fire had slowly died down during the afternoon hours, and none of them had bothered to tend to it. The last rays of sunlight lit the undersides of the clouds above Mount Douglas. Then quickly faded.

  “I’ll find some kindling,” said India, getting to her feet. She walked a short distance away to gather up driftwood.