by John Sayles
Slocum leaves Niles in the morgue. They’ve only had a few fatalities in the regiment so far, and unless the natives learn to shoot, disease will be the greatest enemy. If Burns succumbs Niles will be forced to write his first letter of condolence. He lifts the rubber sheet to view the dead soldier’s face. His skin is blue-gray, and they have tied a bandage from the top of his head under his chin to hold his jaw closed. Niles does not recognize the boy, not from his outfit, and wonders if his mates have begun the collection to send the body home. He has visited Paco, the most celebrated of the local mausoleums, viewed the circular wall of cement with niches for the deceased one atop the other, rentable for five-year residencies. Cracked skulls and jumbled bones of the evicted lay heaped in one area, while domesticated turkeys and a small, bristly pig patrolled the grounds. The dead rest here, but only if they can make the rent.
Niles does not plan on dying in the Philippines.
In Hongkong Mei lived in a house on the steep hill behind the Victoria Barracks. Madame Qing was in charge of the house and the first thing she did, before learning their names or giving them new clothes, was to have each new girl demonstrate how to use the water closet. The house was made of wood, with wooden floors and stairs leading to a second set of rooms with windows that looked over past the Victoria Barracks to the harbor. Mei had not eaten much on the road and was sick on the steamboat ride, so it was a long time sitting on the hole in one of the three water closets before she could shout to Madame Qing and show her what she had done.
“Pull the chain,” said Madame Qing, and they both watched. It seemed like a waste of both dung and water. “Now pull your pants down.”
Mei was afraid because Ma had always done everything in the household while she had worked in the field and soon they would discover how useless she was. She turned and pulled her pants down.
“What did I tell you the paper was for?”
There was white paper rolled up beside the hole, softer, but the same width as the paper on which she had written the characters Second Brother showed her, the paper she had hung as a banner outside their hut when Ma died.
“You are a stupid, dirty girl,” said Madame Qing. “Now show me how you clean yourself with the paper.”
Mei reached into the hole for water to wet herself and Madame Qing slapped her and said she had to do it only with the paper and then wash her hands in the basin with the slippery cake.
“You girls from the North are not worth the trouble,” said Madame Qing.
There were girls in the house who weren’t new, mostly Southerners, and three Dwarf Bandit girls, who woke up late in the day to look over Mei and the other arrivals. Mei couldn’t understand most of what they said but a lot of them pointed at her feet and laughed and that was more shameful than Madame Qing watching her clean herself.
When it began to get dark each of the new girls was given a ball of rice and then locked in a room with mattresses laid on the floor. Mei thought the rice was very sweet compared to millet and it made her feel a little sick. After the candles were put out they lay and listened to the music on the other side of the door, and to the laughing and men’s voices braying in another language Mei could not understand.
“These are wicked women who live here,” said one of the girls from the boat, who was from near Jinan. “They lie with yang gweizi, and we are going to be their servants.”
They were there nearly a week, Madame Qing teaching them more about cleaning themselves and not eating with their hands, until late one afternoon they were ordered to take all their clothes off and pile them in the middle of the room. A servant woman—all the servants in the house were older men and women—gathered the pile and carried it away and it was too late when Mei remembered that her half of Ma’s comb was still in her pants. Basins filled with a sharp-smelling liquid were brought in and they were told to wash their hair in it and then sit while the servants picked the bugs from their scalps. Their hair was dried after that, servants rubbing it with towels, and then the wicked girls came in with a trunkful of beautiful clothes and began to dress them up like dolls, chattering and laughing the whole time. The silk felt slippery against Mei’s skin and when the old girls began to powder and paint her face she understood, finally, that it didn’t matter if she could not cook or sew. It took a long time for the Southern girls to find a pair of slippers that would fit her feet.
The old girls went out then and Madame Qing came in to explain that Mr. Wu, who owned the house, was coming tonight to entertain some of his friends and that they were to do whatever they were told or they would certainly be beaten and possibly thrown into the harbor for the sharks to eat. The girl from near Jinan began to cry then and Madame Qing slapped her for making ugly tracks in the powder on her face.
“If they ask your name,” said Madame Qing, “you must tell them something beautiful.”
“I will be Jade Lily,” said one of the girls, quickly.
“I will be Morning Dew,” said another.
Mei thought of Poppy Blossom, but it only brought pictures of Baba smoking his pipe and Ma dying on the k’ang.
Mr. Wu was an older man with eyes that watched everything, and his friends were all very rough men from the South. The new girls were supposed to serve them rice wine and then sit with them and answer questions if they were asked. The man next to Mei, who had drawings inked into the skin on the backs of his hands, kept shouting the same words at her till she decided he was asking for her name and she said Ling-Ling.
The men stayed for three days. They made her drink wine and they used her and the other new girls whenever they wanted, sometimes taking them into another room and sometimes using them in front of all the others, who laughed and shouted things. Mei hurt everywhere they touched her but was not ashamed. They were doing these things to Ling-Ling, and that was only a dog after all.
When Mr. Wu and his friends finally left the old girls came back.
“Now you are our sisters,” they said. “We can teach you what we know.”
Some of the new girls were bleeding and some were still trembling and the girl from near Jinan, who had decided to call herself Silk Whisper, tried to drown herself in one of the water closets but there wasn’t enough water.
None of them were ever let out of the house. In the daytime, if they wanted, they could go out onto the balconies from the rooms on the second floor and look down past the barracks to Hongkong and the harbor. Even from that distance Ling-Ling could see that there were more people in Hongkong than she had imagined there were in the world. Mr. Wu’s friends had only been there to “break the soil” said the old girls, Ling-Ling’s new sisters, and most of the time the house was for entertaining yang gweizi, “officers and gentlemen” as Madame Qing called them. They had to learn to smile and be gracious and please the English men, and even learn some of their words.
Ling-Ling decided that it was not knowing that made her the most afraid. Not knowing what the Southern girls were saying, not knowing what Madame Qing was planning to do to them next, not knowing what was in the minds of the English foreign devils.
“Sister,” she said to one of the old girls who was called Radiant Star and had originally come from the North like herself, “I want you to teach me everything.”
Radiant Star taught her how to put a vinegar sponge up inside herself so she would not make half-human babies with the yang gweizi, taught her to sing some of the dirty songs the men liked and how to talk like South China people.
“You are like Fan-tail,” she told Ling-Ling when Ling-Ling would try her South China talk out. Fan-tail was Madame Qing’s parrot, who repeated phrases from all the languages spoken in the house. “Everything you hear you say it the same.”
She also began to learn English from one of the yang gweizi, a young man who was not an officer, not a soldier at all but some other kind of official sent to work in Hongkong. Nights that he came, two or three times a week, were easy for Ling-Ling because he always asked for her and paid extra to stay the
whole night and wore a rubber bag on his penis so she did not need the sponge, which sometimes got lost inside her. He would use her in one of the usual ways and then sit with her in the bed or out on the balcony if it was hot and want to talk. He already knew how to talk Southern, would joke with the sisters in that language, but wanted to learn to speak like North China people too. Ling-Ling was his “sleeping dictionary,” he said, and insisted that she learn how to say his name, which was Roderick Hardacre.
As good as Ling-Ling was with South China talk, this was almost impossible to do, her tongue unable to imitate the sounds. Fan-tail was much better at it, mastering “Well I’ll be buggered” after only a few visits from Roderick Hardacre. He would have her say his name again and again, correcting her patiently, and then ask her questions in South China talk while she answered in what he called Mandarin. After a while he would get tired of that and try to teach her things in English that weren’t his name.
This is how she discovered that the yang gweizi know nothing about the sky. They would stand on the balcony and Roderick Hardacre would point to the stars and make her try to see shapes of animals or people and tell her long stories about their adventures. When Ling-Ling began to understand the words she discovered that he was not talking about the Three Enclosures or the Azure Dragon or the White Tiger of the West or the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl but something completely different, either something he was inventing to mock her or strange beliefs of the yang gweizi. If it was overcast or too cold to step out he would teach her poems, having her repeat them line by line and then explain what they meant.
Roderick Hardacre was very red on his face and hands, almost crimson, and very white everywhere else when he took his clothes off.
“I am so relieved about your feet,” he said once. “The other girls, the mere thought of it—it puts one off.”
All the sisters were allowed to sleep till noon and their meals were prepared for them. The three Japanese girls were called karayuki-san, which they said meant “Miss Gone-to-China” and were the most obedient, never complaining if they were awakened to entertain an early visitor, never sticking their tongues out at Madame Qing when her back was turned. It was being inside all the time that bothered Ling-Ling the most, always a dog that loved the fields.
Some of the sisters smoked opium when Madame Qing allowed it on slow days and some drank too much when there were parties with men and some embroidered and Silk Whisper got into the kitchen even though it was supposed to be locked and cut her own throat and bled to death.
At New Year they celebrated inside the house and there was lots of food and they dressed in their best clothes and went out onto the balconies to watch the dragon come up the hill and waved to the young men hurling firecrackers. For an hour or two Ling-Ling was as happy as a dog can be, happy to be warm and well-fed and with her many sisters. That night Roderick Hardacre came with a friend, another young Englishman who was not a soldier, and had her stand before him.
“This is my linguist,” said Roderick Hardacre. “My Ling-linguist.”
“I fancy a bit of tongue,” said the friend, who was already drunk.
Ling-Ling was afraid they were both going to use her at the same time, which had happened with Mr. Wu’s friends.
“He thinks I’ve been telling tales,” said Roderick Hardacre. “You’re going to make a believer out of him.”
Other of the English men gathered around her then, Ling-Ling smelling the starch in their uniforms, the tobacco on their breath, and it made her face burn.
“You know what I’m after,” said Roderick Hardacre. “You know the one I want.”
Ling-Ling took a deep breath and said it to them, trying to make the sounds exactly the way Roderick Hardacre did when he taught it to her, not using his own voice but a different one, rougher—
Ship me somewheres east of Suez—
—she said—
Where the best is like the worst
Where there aint no Ten Commandments
An a man can raise a thirst
For the temple bells are callin’
An it’s there that I would be—
By the Old Moulmen Pagoda
Looking lazy at the sea
On the road to Mandalay
Where the Old Flotilla lay
With our sick beneath the awnings
When we went to Mandalay!
On the road to Mandalay
Where the flyin’ fishes play
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder
Outer China ’crost the Bay!
The yang gweizi smacked their hands together and cheered and the sisters in the room laughed and Fan-tail said that he would be buggered. Later Roderick Hardacre’s friend passed out from the wine and Roderick Hardacre took her upstairs to one of the rooms and used her like he always did but looked at her with his strange blue cat’s eyes the whole time. After that they wrapped themselves in blankets and stepped onto the balcony to see the fireworks explode over the harbor. At one point he watched her face for a long time and then shook his head.
“Life is bloody strange,” he said. “Bloody strange.”
Niles summons a carromata outside of the hospital, satchel held tight between his knees on the two-wheeled buggy while the little horse—a pony, really—navigates the streets of the Walled City. It is a low, somewhat somber metropolis, squarish stone edifices set in a grid between the ancient, moss-covered walls, everything low and heavily buttressed in deference to the frequent earthquakes, the barracks, post office, treasury, ayuntamiento, and customs dwarfed by the larger and grander church buildings, a fair representation of the relative stature accorded by the citizens to the still-present Archbishop and the erstwhile Governor General.
The Minnesotas are on provost today, showing no interest as he is trotted past, their orders to detain suspicious natives or the disarmed, loitering Spanish soldiers who seem to infest the city looking for a handout. Niles passes the Church of San Ignacio with its breathtaking woodwork inside and a covered walkway connecting it to the Jesuit-run Ateneo, the minions of Loyola within no doubt up to their habitual scheming. The private houses in the shadow of the cannon-bedecked parapets and bastions are impressive, two-story affairs with space for a carriage below, living quarters on the second floor, with balconies rimmed by elaborate wrought-iron hanging over the sidewalks and the red-painted galvanized-tin roofs that have mostly replaced the tile which becomes so hazardous when blown asunder by their incessant typhoon winds. The driver pauses to let an overloaded, pony-drawn tram pass, people crammed not only inside the car but hanging on to the front and rear platforms, the standees all smoking while one determined hausfrau plucks feathers from a live and understandably distressed chicken that she holds upside-down by its feet, tossing the feathers in the wake of the conveyance. When they have passed, the driver turns onto the broad Avenue Real. They pick up speed, weaving around elegant landaus and barouches and tottering calesas, past Chinamen waving switches to drive oxen hitched to wood-wheeled carts filled with furniture, avoiding the occasional bicycle enthusiast, the wheeling mania having arrived only recently on this island. A sentry snaps him a salute as they roll under the ornately decorated portico of the Parian Gate. The moat that lies beyond the thick earth-and-stone wall is a cold, scum-covered porridge, rampant with weeds and piled with refuse, from which there exudes an unholy stench. When the googoos cut off water to the Intramuros during the siege the Spaniards’ sanitary response was to collect their excrescence and hurl it over the parapets. No great wonder that the more well-to-do residents are offering fortunes for medicine.
They turn right and cross the Bridge of Spain, rafts of cocoanuts and slender bancas laden with fodder being poled upriver beneath them, the driver flipping a centavo to the tollkeeper and being rewarded with a box of matches in lieu of a return stub. Every Filipino man, woman, and child Niles has laid eyes on in the capital has the smoking habit, and the boys in his company have stocked up, buying packages of thirty cigarettes for
a pair of coppers. Niles prefers a cigar, and these are manufactured in the area as well, the Montecristos comparing not unfavorably with their Cuban counterparts. There is excellent rum available for those with valuables to trade, and a passable local moonshine the men call beeno. If only the females were more attractive.
Several classes of them are on display as Niles descends from the buggy at the base of the Escolta. It is a full hour before siesta, the mercantile street clogged with all the mongrel races produced here, freight vans bumping over the cobblestones while a mix of near-naked coolies, Spanish Peninsulars, and white-suited Filipino dandies compete for space. The Spanish ladies are in white muslin, carrying white parasols to match, pointed in their refusal to meet an American’s eye, while the wealthier Filipinas either ape this Western garb or sport pineapple-fiber gowns with exaggerated butterfly sleeves, their ebony hair slick with cocoanut oil and held in place with ivory combs, their upper bodies held elegantly straight as they shuffle along in the little heelless slippers they call chinelas. None of these ladies walk alone, of course, while the less fortunate native women often appear so, selling trifles or begging with filthy palms extended, barefoot women in long red skirts and white waists, often with their equally scruffy pickaninnies in tow. Niles steps around a trio of wizened crones squatting on the walk operating foot-pump Singer machines, gabbling with each other and expectorating without regard to passersby, their teeth dyed red from the concoction they chew. He takes a firm grip on the satchel, then plunges into the morass of humanity, reminding himself that he is a uniformed lieutenant of the victorious army.
The shops here are mostly operated by Spaniards, with the occasional Frenchman or Hindoo, shelves bursting with European goods arranged behind the only glass windows Niles has seen on the island or spilling out onto the walk in front of the stores, laid on the ground or displayed on mahogany tables and desks looted after the fall of the Dons, awnings overhead affording some shade on the east side of the street. A pair of native lotharios, resplendent in white and deep in conversation, approach in the opposite direction, each with a carved walking-stick in hand and straw boater tipped on the head. The recent hostilities seem not to have affected this strata of the local gentry, Niles resentfully aware of their lack of either gratitude or deference. He looks through them and strides down the center of the walk, the gesticulating niggers acknowledging his presence only in time to veer awkwardly to each side, the one stumbling off the curb into an unfortunate encounter with a hustling rickshaw artist that sends the dandy ass over teakettle onto the cobbles. Niles takes a few more steps, then very deliberately halts to unsheathe his camera and photograph a gang of bare-chested coolies transporting a medium-sized piano perched upon a pair of thick wooden poles.