God's Chinese Son

by Jonathan Spence

  There is friendship among the foreigners, and sometimes music. A red-coated band from a visiting ship plays in the square, to the delight of the Westerners, but to the astonishment and tonal anguish of the listening Chinese.6 Or—a novelty first seen in 1835 at Canton—a steam-driven pleasure boat with band aboard takes parties down the river and into the beautiful, isle-filled sea.7 And out beyond the harbor one can scramble up the narrow track to the top of Lintin Mountain, aided by fifteen bearers, and picnic there on a large flat rock, laid with a repast of poultry, fish, pastry, ham, and wine, while again a band that accompanied the climbers plays. Replete and rested, one can, if one chooses, slide back down the hillside on one's bottom through the long dry grass.8

  Language might seem a problem, since in all of Canton and the foreign hongs there is no Chinese who can read or write in English or other European languages, and only a few Westerners who know enough Chi­nese to write with even partial elegance. This has not always been the case. In the 1810s and 1820s, when the East India Company was at its peak of power, there were a dozen or more young men from England studying Chinese in the Canton factories. They translated Chinese novels and plays, and even the Chinese legal code, so they could assess the equity of the government's rules more carefully. Though the local officials on occasion imprisoned Chinese for teaching their own language to foreign­ers, and even executed one, and Chinese teachers often had to shelter privately in their pupils' lodgings, the East India Company representatives fought back. By tenacity, they won the right to submit commercial docu­ments in Chinese translation, rather than in English, and to hire Chinese teachers, for study of classical texts as well as Cantonese colloquial dialect. And though the company directors never won official acknowledgment of their right to hire Chinese wood-carvers, they went ahead anyway and block printed an Anglo-Chinese dictionary using Chinese characters; in addition, they managed to accumulate a substantial library of four thou­sand books, many of them in Chinese, which they housed in their splen­didly appointed hong, with the company's senior physician doubling as the librarian.9

  With the termination by the British government in 1834 of the com­pany's monopoly of China trade, these glory days were over. Most of the language students and experts were reassigned to other countries; their finest teacher, Robert Morrison, died the same year; and the great library was scattered. Only three young men, who had been classified on the company's roster as "proficient" enough to receive an annual student's allowance, are left in Canton by 1836, and their main role is to be caretak­ers of the company's former buildings and oversee their closing down.10 Nor are there any established bookshops to be found in the foreigners' restricted zone of residence, for specific laws forbid the sale of Chinese books to foreigners, and even make it a crime to show them one of China's local histories or regional gazettes. Those who wish to search out books must walk some distance to the west, where two bookshops on a side street (a street with gates locked and barred at night) will break the law to the extent of selling novels, romances, and "marvellous stories" to the foreigners, and sometimes arrange for purchases of other titles from the larger stores within the city."

  But years of experience have led to the growth of a language shared by nearly all who live among the foreign hongs, a language known as "Can­ton Jargon" or "Pidgin English." This serves to keep the differing commu­nities in touch, by mixing words from Portuguese, Indian, English, and various Chinese dialects, and spelling them according to Chinese syntax, with r transformed to I, and b to p. "Pidgin" itself comes from the word "business," via its intermediate mispronunciation "pidginess"; gods are joss from Deos; and a religious service is thus a "joss pidgin." Sex is "lof- pidgin." Thieves become la-de-loons from ladrao, ships become juntas, mar­kets bazaars, lunch tiffin, a letter a chit, one who commands (mandar) a man-ta-le or mandarin, a document a chop, an urgent document chop-chop, one hundred thousand of anything a lac, a laborer a coolie, a conference a chin-chin, one's good acquaintance number one olo flen.12 Double ee is added after dental consonants, so want becomes wantee, catch catchee. Chi­nese shopkeepers have at hand little books of terms compiled locally as guides to business, guides in which the Chinese characters for a given object are also glossed below, with other characters suggesting—in Cantonese dialect—the way to say the English. Scales are rendered sze-kay-le-sze, January che-na-li-le, west wind wi-sze-wun, and one-two-three wun, too, te-le.13 Thus can the wealthy merchant Howqua, forewarned that a senior Chinese official is coming to demand a massive bribe, say with resignation to a young American trader "Man-ta-le sendee one piece chop. He come tomollo, wantee too-lac dollar," and everyone knows what he means.14

  Even though the city of Canton is closed to Westerners, Chinese life enfolds them in their little enclave. The riverbank is lined with boats of every size and shape, so that one can barely see the water. There are cargo boats from up-country, passenger craft, floating homes and floating brothels, drifting fortune-tellers, government patrol ships, barbers' boats, boats selling food, or toys, or clothes, or household notions.15 And mixed with these amid the din are the ferryboats that run from the jutting pier at Jackass Point across the river to Honam Island, with its tea plantations, ornamental gardens, and temples where the Westerners are—at inter­vals—permitted to take the air.16 There are eighty of these little ferry craft, each holding eight passengers, and charging a standard fee of two copper cents a passenger, or sixteen for the whole boat, if one wishes to travel alone. And there are the larger floating theater boats, where the actors rehearse their plays as they travel from location to location between engagements, and where opium is provided to all visitors with the ability to pay.17

  If the owners of such floating pleasure palaces by smile and gesture invite the foreigner aboard in hopes of financial gain, the same commercial motive is not present in all those one meets, and genuine hospitality or warmth is by no means lacking. The workers from a wheat-grinding mill, washing their bodies after a day of work, and munching their meal of rice and vegetables, welcome a visitor to view their eleven huge grinding wheels, and the oxen who drive them. A noisy group of carpenters and masons, gathering at sunset to eat and drink beneath an awning spread across an angle of the street for shade and shelter, beckon a passing West­erner to join them. Gangs of tough, barefoot or grass-sandaled, almost naked coolies, after waiting patiently for hours in the sun for casual work, squatting or standing amidst the stalls and markets, each with his bamboo pole with ropes dangling empty, still greet one cheerfully and show noth­ing but good will.18

  The foreigners know some of the Chinese they deal with by name, or at least by Western variants of their Chinese names. Among these are the hong merchants, thirteen in all, who have the formal monopoly on foreign trade, own the buildings in which the Westerners live, and filter all their petitions and complaints to the higher authorities, and whose own huge homes and warehouses flank the thirteen factories to west and east along the Pearl River: Howqua, Kingqua, Pwankhequa, and the rest. The offi­cial "linguists," five in 1836, who travel door to door with crucial messages, which they deliver in their hybrid Pidgin English—Atom, Atung, "Young Tom," Alantsei, and Aheen—are known to all.19

  Others have become known in their role as patients, carefully recorded in the registers of Dr. Parker's dispensary and hospital, opened in late 1835 on the second floor of number 7, Hog Lane, rented for $500 a year from Howqua. Atso, the rice merchant, the girl Akae, Matszeah, the scribe in the governor's office, Changshan, the soldier, Pang she, the seam­stress, 925 of them in all, just between November 4, 1835, and February 4, 1836, with cataracts, tumors, abscesses, deafness, partial paralysis, and a score of other woes.20

  At first glance, Hog Lane is an unlikely site for such benevolent work, but number 7 is at the north end of the narrow street, away from the river, near the busy Chinese thoroughfare that marks the northern boundary of the foreigners' domain. As Parker explains his choice, his "patients could come and go without annoying foreigners by passing thro
ugh their hongs, or excite the observation of natives by being seen to resort to a foreigner's house." Bamboo strips, numbered in Chinese and English, are issued by the porter downstairs to each patient who comes to seek treatment (some have been waiting outside all night), and they are received in turn on the upper floor, where Parker deals with all he can manage. Their ages range from six to seventy-eight, and there are women as well as men, and in large numbers, to his surprise: "Difficulty was anticipated in receiving females as house patients, it being regarded [as] illegal for a female to enter the foreign factories," as Parker put it, but with male relatives usually in attendance, to watch over them and prevent any whispers of impropriety, "the difficulty has proved more imaginary than real," and female patients number around one-third of the total.21

  Others, nameless to the observers, give a fuller sense of Chinese life. Two blind girls, nine years old at most, walk to the esplanade, holding on to each other and clutching their wooden begging bowls, laughing and chatting despite their rags, bare feet, and lice.22 A traveling librarian, banging his rattle, his current stock of popular novels packed into boxes dangling from a bamboo pole across his shoulder, evades the rules that apply to bookshops by walking from door to door in search of customers among the Chinese clerks and coolies. He shows his wares to foreign questioners, and tells them he has no complaints. The three hundred vol­umes he is carrying—small, light, paperbound—are but those remaining from over a thousand he currently has out on loan.23

  On the esplanade are rows of stands, whose owners—each with a dis­tinctive cry—sell fruit and cakes, sweets and soup, dogs, cats, and fowl, slabs of horsemeat with the hooves still attached and strings of dried duck tongues, shaped like awls and hard as iron to the touch.24 Others lure viewers to their peephole boxes, decorated brilliantly in red, or erect a tiny stage on which to mount their puppet shows. Old women sit on the ground, with needle and thread, to mend your clothes, or play a game of chance together, the prize a pair of shoes; a healer presses bamboo cups to men's naked backs, to draw the blood; tinkers at their stalls mend locks and pipes, drill broken glass and porcelain and mend the shards with finest wire, sharpen razors, fill cracks in metal pots. Bird fanciers squat in solemn circles, some with their precious birds in cages, others with birds perched on sticks, or cradled in their hands.25

  Three streets cut through the foreigners' businesses and residences, dividing them into four blocks of unequal width. All are densely packed with shops. Old China Street, the widest, is twelve feet broad, New China Street and Hog Lane a little less. The streets in general are so narrow that it's almost impossible to move, and one is jostled by the crowds, or bumped harshly by the coolies carrying palanquins with passengers, or massive loads.26 Buddhist nuns with shaven heads, Taoist and Buddhist priests, ratcatchers with a dozen or more of their captured prey dangling in rows from bamboo poles, fortune-tellers, itinerant doctors, money changers, sellers of the finest fighting crickets that have been collected from the hills outside the town—all join the throng.27 The shops that sell expensive goods the foreigners might like to buy have signs in Roman letters to render the owners' names and English descriptions of their trea­sures: carvings of ivory, turtle shell and mother-of-pearl, silks of all kinds, lacquer ware, and paintings of insects and fruits, or of famous battles, where red-coated Englishmen in cocked hats sit rigidly in rows under the relentless fire of Chinese guns. For every item purchased you must get the shopkeeper's chop or seal on your invoice, else it will be confiscated as you leave Canton.28

  One June evening in 1835, at the entrance to a side street leading to the more affluent Canton suburbs, a dead baby lies in a basket among the rubbish, its body doubled up and its head, slightly swollen, dangling over the basket's edge. So narrow is the way, at this spot, that a Westerner, returning from a stroll in the countryside, has to step over the basket, noticing the contents only when his foot is in midair. As he stares in shock and bewilderment at the baby's face, a group of Chinese bystanders gaze, in equal bewilderment, at him.29

  2 THE WORD

  The Reverend Edwin Stevens has been in Canton since October 1832. His sights are set on higher things, for in Yale College he was caught up in the great religious "awakening" that swirled through New England, was ordained a minister after study in the New Haven Theological Seminary, and accepted a post­ing to Canton as the chaplain of the American Seaman's Friend Society. Living in the American hong, he has followed a rigorous schedule of study, preaching, and tract distribution, commuting on Saturdays down the Pearl River on whatever foreign longboat can offer him a ride to the main anchorage for ocean vessels at Whampoa, and returning thence each Monday. When Stevens cannot find a foreign boat, he must hire the local Chinese boatmen to take him to his duties. It is four Spanish dollars for the twelve-mile passage, and about three and a half hours rowing and sailing time when against the tide, with mandatory checks at every cus­toms station. Even this short trip has its dangers. Foreign officers and sailors, traveling the same route, have been waylaid by Chinese ruffians, and robbed or held to ransom. Stevens sometimes finds it hard to persuade ship's captains to let him use their decks or cabins for his services, for some find him "austere and unsocial," since he shuns everything "vain or sportive," and devotes his energies to combating the evils of strong drink, visiting the sick and dying, and giving the dead a Christian burial.'

  The seamen to whom he preaches are often in desperate enough straits after long months at sea packed ten or more in cabins twenty feet long and half as wide, driven wild by the excitement of three days' shore leave granted after their long voyage from Philadelphia or from Liverpool. The Chinese compound the turmoil by selling to the thirsty sailors the local brand of drink they call "firewater," a blend of raw alcohol, tobacco juice, sugar, and arsenic, which causes, writes Stevens, "a degree of inebriety more ferocious than that occasioned by any other spirit." Inside Hog Lane, where the establishments that cater to the foreign seamen have their own alluring signs spelled out in Roman letters, "Old Jemmy Apoo," "Old Good Tom, old house," and "Young Tom, seller of wines of all kinds and prices,"2 this firewater can "destroy the reason and the senses" of its drink­ers, oftentimes leading the sailors from their initial euphoria into "riotous scenes of the greatest enormity." Despite the fact that the drunken sailors are often robbed and even stripped by Chinese toughs, and that the gov­ernment issues constant edicts against the sale of liquor to foreigners, the sailors always return for more, preferring the risks of Hog Lane to the more sheltered tea and coffee shop at number 19, New China Street, which worried Christian philanthropists have set up for them.3

  Other temptations abound. Those Westerners who like to chart such things believe there are eight thousand prostitutes or more in the Canton area. Some are unreachable behind the city walls, but many others can be found in the enclave of Honam Island that the sailors have affectionately named Portsmouth Point, where the coolies employed by foreigners also congregate. And every sailor or preacher rowing up the river has seen other women preening themselves on the decks of their "flower boats," small feet or large, red jackets or green, butterfly shoes and silver anklets, rising and falling at their pilings with the tides.4

  To add to the lures, small and nimble "wash boats," paddled by three or four women, dressed in the dark and faded trousers and jacket of the locals, but with brightly colored head scarves over their hair—a fashion garnered from the Portuguese—will pull alongside the foreign vessels as soon as they moor, offering a wealth of promise besides the laundry in their cheerful greetings: "Ah, you missee chiefee matee, how you dooa? I saavez you long tim, when you catchee Whampoa last tim."s The banter ought to lead no further, since nominally each foreign boat has two Chi­nese officials on board for the duration of its harbor stay, but such rules are laxly followed. Nominally, too, no liquor that might loosen the rules is ever brought on board, but sailors smuggle drink onto their ships in every way, from waterproof containers tied to their waists to entire ballast casks from their
longboats filled with firewater.6 No wonder the congre­gations are sometimes muted of a Sunday. "Preached this day in the Splen­did'," Stevens notes in his journal, "to an audience of some 80 or 100 hearers, from the text, 'Fools make a mock at sin.' I enjoyed considerable freedom and there was the best attention; but I saw no apparent conviction of sin, or sorrow for it." A week later, preaching to the officers and crew of the Otters Pool, with the Bible's soothing words "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest," Stevens finds that "no one seemed deeply affected."

  But Stevens accepts such apparent setbacks as part of a wider plan, as he tells his congregation in a Sunday sermon: "The word of the Lord has been thoroughly tried in all ways. It has been tried by history, and not found wanting. It has been tried by astronomy, by geology, by argument, and by ridicule. It has been tried during thousands of years by every man who pleased, in every way he chose; by all the learning which could be brought against it, by the conceited and the ignorant; by friends and foes, by him that believed and him that believed not. It has stood all trials."8