To All Appearances a Lady
Page 42
—
My stepmother waving to me, as I stand on the shore of D’Arcy Island, as the Rose, caught by the current, bobs out into Hughes Passage. As tendrils of fog drift in to mix with the fire. As the clouds lower their blanket and cover her; as the fire reaches the gas tanks and a great wall of flame splashes to heaven a heartbeat before I hear the explosion.
There is a crown of black smoke in the shape of the cloud of the atom bomb. And then there is nothing.
—
Ng Chung had taken his blankets from his cot and rolled his belongings up in them. He waited with all he owned on the beach as the supply boat landed. Fresh bread, boxes of oranges, bags of wheat, pork and chicken, as well as new boots for all the men, were unloaded. But Ng Chung paid these improved provisions no attention.
He listened impassively as the doctor offered to amputate Ah Sam’s useless hand. He heard Ah Sam say, “It is getting better now. Please don’t cut it. If you cut it off, I cannot cook.”
He heard the Presbyterian Chinese missionary read the Gospel story, in St. Mark, of Christ healing the lepers, while one of the other exiles kept up a flow of questions: Had they remembered to bring the chicken wheat? Could they bring more chickens the next time? Was the sugar they’d brought the Chinese kind, or was it granulated?
A younger man, one of the recent arrivals, the new strong man on the island, rushed back and forth with boxes and cases and bags of supplies. When the missionary told him to sit down and listen, he cried, “I have no time to listen!” And then he cursed the uncle who had brought him out from China to Victoria, knowing he had leprosy. Had he remained in China, he said, he would never have been imprisoned on an island.
Ng Chung, my father, crouched at the water’s edge with his arms around his bundle. “See,” he said when the doctor came near to treat him, “the only knife I have is the knife of a dead man. I cannot get any other. Can a man use the knife of a dead man and expect to have luck?”
“He told of how he wanted to go to some other island,” says the report in the British Colonist, the one item I have saved from the papers on the Rose. “He would do anything, he said, if he could only be taken away to some small island and left there all alone. He would live in a cabin as small as the chicken house fronting his cabin, in anything, if he could only go to some other island.
“But, of course, his request was turned down.”
—
I follow the eastern shore of D’Arcy Island. I watch the ships and ferries sail through the strait. I wave at them, but they appear to take no notice.
I’m not sure what I’ll do when I reach the part of the island where my mother and father once lived. I suppose I’ll rest for awhile. My legs are shaking with tiredness, and the numbness in my face has returned.
Someone is bound to find me. I can always light a fire that will draw attention. There is nothing to fear on this island any longer, and mariners are curious persons. And I am a pilot; and if anyone does, I know the right signals to bring them.
Acknowledgements
To All Appearances A Lady is wholly fictional and is not intended to be a history, or a portrait of persons living or dead.
This book was written with the aid of a grant from the Canada Council. It also owes a great deal to the assistance of my family, friends, and colleagues. My gratitude first to Michael for his support during the inevitable moments of discouragement. Also to Capts. C.C. Wilson, Hill Wilson, and Rod Trail, all B.C. Coastal Pilots. Special thanks to Capt. Trail for his reading of the manuscript. Maywell Wickheim helped form my plan of the Rose; and Roxana Argast rocked the baby. Denise Bukowski was a friend and generous agent, and Ed Carson, my editor, thought like a poet when it mattered. I shall never forget his “silent edit.” I also owe a debt of thanks to my parents; and to Giselle Coffey, Liz and Colin Gorrie, Richard Marks, P.K. Page and Arthur Irwin, Constance Rooke, and Robin Skelton. The Maritime Museum of British Columbia was an important source, as was (and foremostly) the British Columbia Provincial Archives. My heartfelt thanks for the patience of the Archives librarians.
The poems in Chapter Nine are adapted from “A ‘Prison’ for Chinese Immigrants,” The Asianadian, Vol. 2, No. 4, Spring 1980 by David Chuenyan Lai. I found “Praise and Prayer,” by R.L. Stevenson, in Collected Poems, edited by Janet Adam Smith (Rupert Hart-Davis: London 1950). I have also quoted from the “Constitution, By-Laws and Rules of the Order of the Workingmen’s Protective Association,” (M’Millan & Son, Victoria 1898), and have drawn upon “The Lepers of D’Arcy Island,” by Ernest Hall and John Nelson (Dominion Medical Monthly, Vol. XI, No. 6, 1898). Other sources that should be mentioned are two unpublished M.A. theses: “The Human Geography of Southeastern Vancouver Island, 1842–1891,” by Patrick Donald Floyd, Dept. of Geography, University of Victoria, December 1969; and “The Context of Economic Change and Continuity In An Urban Overseas Chinese Community,” by Charles P. Sedgwick, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Victoria, April 1973. I used an anecdote found in “A Victorian Tapestry,” Sound Heritage, Vol. VII, No. 3, Provincial Archives, Victoria, 1978; and found In A Sea of Sterile Mountains, The Chinese in British Columbia, by James Morton (J.J. Douglas, Vancouver 1974), invaluable. Clippers for the Record, by Marny Matheson (Spectrum Publications: Melbourne 1984) added to my information on Thermopylae, as did Thermopylae and The Age of Clippers by John Crosse (Historian Publishers, Vancouver 1968). More information on sailing ships came from Life On The Ocean, by George Little (George Clark & Son: Aberdeen 1847); and Pacific Yachting’s Cruising Guide to the West Coast of Vancouver Island, by Don Watmough (Maclean Hunter Ltd.: Vancouver 1984) provided important detail. The Arrow War, An Anglo-Chinese Confusion 1856–1860, by Douglas Hurd (Collins, London 1967) gave me a great deal of background on that period in China.
The epigraph from Yeh Ming-chen can be found in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 6, 1941, pg. 37; that from Boethius is in The Consolation of Philosophy, translated by Richard Green (Bobbs-Merrill Co. Inc., 1962).