After a time, she gave up trying.
She had plenty of time, and so she wrote letters to fill it. She wrote to her family back in Marietta and she wrote to Louisa, and she wrote long dispatches to the various churches that were sponsoring the mission. She tried to include everything—not only the charming and the exotic aspects of the place but the mundane and the dirty and the terrible things, too. There was plenty of the latter. Wretches dressed in rags, some with horrible disfigurements, begging for food. The opium fiends who lay prone along the city walls. The poor tottering women with their bound feet; Mrs. Riddell had explained that the bones were hopelessly deformed early in life, so that a woman never had hope of walking normally ever after. And of course they heard stories of natural disasters: droughts and floods and earthquakes and landslides. They heard of famine that had dug so deep into certain corners of the empire that people’s children disappeared—kidnapped and eaten by starving neighbors.
Addie put all of this into her letters. An honest understanding of the place ensured that their mission would continue to draw support, and she therefore gave an account of nearly every action she and Owen performed, nearly every strange circumstance they encountered.
She left out only one. On their journey upriver, when they were headed to T’ai-yüan from T’ien-chin, they had been stopped by a band of thieves demanding payment. They’d been warned by Mr. Douglas and others during their stay in T’ien-chin that such ransoms were common in China, and nothing much to worry about. Even so, seeing the men waiting onshore as if they’d known they were coming, Addie had been so frightened she’d felt her arms go numb. It was too easy to imagine the thieves leaping from the shore onto the boat and holding knives at their throats.
Their captain spoke with the men. After a moment, he gestured to Owen to come over, and Owen had squeezed Addie’s hand and then quickly stepped forward. She’d listened to the gurgle of water a few feet away, the idle scrape of one of the boatmen’s poles over the rocks. Then, deep inside, she felt a flutter. It was too early to feel her child move, but that’s what it was. She wouldn’t have the sensation again for another two months, but right then she felt her child turning, swimming through her blood in a panic, and her hand moved to her stomach before she could think. One of the men saw her. He turned his head sharply and shouted and the others turned, too. Addie shook her head rapidly and put up her hands to show them she had no weapon or anything else to hide.
A long moment passed, and then the leader of the group, the one in front, turned back to Owen. He spoke a few words in what seemed an almost kind voice, and Owen went to get some money from one of their bags; they’d stowed their valuables in different places, so it couldn’t all be stolen at once. He dropped a few coins in the Chinese man’s hand, but he shook his head, so Owen went back and got more. After he’d given them a satisfactory ransom, the men stepped back and waved them on their way.
As soon as they were moving, Addie’s whole body started shaking, and she wasn’t able to stop for an hour or more. Owen held her and spoke reassuring words that meant nothing, less than nothing. She’d seen that the dangers in this place would not overlook them.
Now several months had passed, and every time Addie felt her child turning inside her, the cold finger of fear brushed her neck. They had escaped the incident unscathed, she told herself. But she’d be glad when that particular reminder was gone.
On Christmas Eve, they gathered at the Riddells’ house before the service and sang Christmas carols: “Away in a Manger” and “Good King Wenceslas.” Only the two families had gathered together, with walnut cake and pudding to make it feel festive and to remind them of home. They had no tree with candles on it, however, no smell of pine and wax and flame. The service would begin in an hour, and then the Chinese would come. In the meantime, they were gathered in one of the rooms off the main courtyard, and the music filled the space so that they seemed like a choir. When they got to “Silent Night,” Addie found that she was crying. It was not homesickness, but something to do with the sky she could see through the window facing onto the courtyard; it was opening up above them, dark and glittering with handfuls of stars strewn like sugar.
She did not feel afraid. When they lay down at night, Owen placed a hand on her stomach and together they thanked God for the child inside. Addie felt as never before an ability to give herself over to God’s grace. There was nothing she could do to determine how the birth would go, and rather than making her nervous or afraid, it made her calm. She was in His hands.
Perhaps it was this that made her weep. Not fear or sadness, but simple awe. Julia Riddell, sitting next to her, saw her crying and did not ask what was the matter, but put her hand over Addie’s. She was not a person Addie could ever imagine in tears; she might have been trying to stifle her crying, in fact. Would she be like that at the birth, perhaps stuffing a rag in Addie’s mouth to keep her from shouting? What Addie wouldn’t give to have one of her sisters with her instead—Flora, who had already gone through it herself, or Louisa, who would understand, regardless. But she would have only Mrs. Riddell as a companion, and for that she knew she should be grateful.
And whatever else one could say about Julia Riddell, she was a beautiful singer. She used her voice now to distract the others’ attention from Addie’s tears, throwing herself into it, taking up the melody in a clear and delicate voice that stood out from the rest.
After “Silent Night,” even the children fell quiet and stood still, waiting for direction. Edward, the Riddells’ eldest, darted his eyes around the room as if he expected the adults to be angry if he made a sound. Mr. Riddell suggested that they save their voices for the service. “It’s always the favorite part,” he told them. “The Chinese love to hear our English songs, though you’ll barely hear them chime in.”
“Don’t they ever sing in Chinese?”
“It doesn’t translate well,” Mrs. Riddell said. “When you hear what passes for singing here, you’ll know what I mean. Shrieking songs that are out of tune and seem to come from the nose. My husband likes them. I can’t see how.”
“It’s an acquired taste. I suppose I like the history of it.”
Mrs. Riddell shook her head.
“I suspect that’s how the Chinese have kept their dynasties going so long,” Mr. Riddell went on. “No marauders could stand the sound.”
“Is it really that terrible?” Owen asked. “It makes me want to hear a sample. Have the church put on a sort of recital, maybe.”
Mr. Riddell, who was reaching into a box on the side table to take out the promised cigars, shook his head. “We’ll do better than that. Next time there’s a performance, I’ll take you two to see it. Mrs. Riddell will have to stay home alone because the children will want to go, too. They have outrageous costumes.”
“They do puppets,” said the youngest boy, Charles. “They hold them behind a screen at night with lights, and you can’t see the people holding the strings.”
Mr. Riddell clipped the end off one of the cigars and handed it to Owen. “He’s talking about the shadow puppet shows. They put them on down near the market sometimes.”
“When you have your baby,” Charles said to Addie, “we’ll take him to see it.”
She laughed, startled that the Riddell boy had so easily decided the gender. That the baby she was carrying was a boy, Addie had no doubt; she had been certain since the beginning. In those first days, when the idea of being pregnant was slowly making itself known, there had kept flashing into her mind an image of Owen with a little boy balanced on his shoulders, and she knew it was a premonition. But she did not count on others having the same intuition. “Do you think he’ll like it?” she asked.
“Yes, because they have fights with swords and everything.”
“And if it’s a girl?” Owen asked.
The boy made a face. “I guess she can watch, too.”
In the last two months of her pregnancy, Addie turned in earnest to learning Chinese. Her brain was
operating differently than it had before, though she couldn’t quite say how. She was unable to do multiple tasks at once or to keep more than one thought in her head at a time, but the one task or thought to which she did devote herself received a sort of clarity and intensity of focus that she’d never previously possessed. It was as if her mind had been reduced to a narrow channel, one that ended with a light shining on a solitary object.
She stopped cleaning so vigorously. It was not really important, after all, to keep every surface gleaming, and it was impossible anyway. This was the first of her capitulations to life in China, and she felt a sort of thrill the first morning she didn’t go through all the rooms with a dust cloth in hand, surveying the pall of gray that settled on the furniture overnight. Instead, she just sat at the table eating a steamed bun and a boiled egg, and when Wei-p’eng came in to take the dishes away, she said “Tsao,” which meant “Good morning.” It shouldn’t have been much of a triumph, but for the first time she listened to how she said it, and then how he said it in return, and thought that she heard the difference. He left to go about his work, and she continued to sit at the table repeating the word again and again, trying to match the intonation. It started low and rose up a little, so that it sounded two notes; it was like a little song. “Tsao,” she said to the window, to the table, to the cup of tea grown cool and oily before her. She let the syllable dip and rise, as she thought Wei-p’eng had. It was not quite the same, but closer.
“It’s a remarkably difficult language,” Mrs. Riddell had said when Addie and Owen joined them for dinner one day early on in their friendship, “but concentrated study will do the trick. I don’t claim to be fluent. Mr. Riddell, however, spent four hours a day learning it for the first eighteen months we were here.”
“There were some days I did less,” he said, smiling, as he glanced up from the cooked greens he was spooning onto his plate. It was odd, Addie thought, that here was the only other household besides theirs in a fifty-mile radius that had silverware. She was comforted by the sight of the familiar forks and knives; it still felt alien to see a table set with chopsticks and thin ceramic bowls. Mr. Riddell went on, “I wouldn’t call myself fluent, either, but my wife underestimates her own abilities.”
Mrs. Riddell shook her head firmly. “I can talk clearly enough about Scripture, but I don’t claim to be capable of conversation on a wide range of topics.”
“It would be easier,” Addie ventured, “if God had seen fit to make English the common language all over the world.”
Mr. Riddell laughed, but his wife gave only a tight smile as she looked at Addie, as if to say that joking was not a mode of conversation she chose to engage in, herself.
“Do you use a tutor?” Owen asked.
“One comes twice a week to help the boys,” she answered, “but really, I believe they pick up as much simply from hearing the servants speaking to one another. Children are sponges that way. Now, Edward,” she said, turning to her son, “say something for Mr. and Mrs. Bell.”
Edward, who had stuffed a large piece of potato in his mouth, chewed quickly and swallowed. “What should I say?”
“Say, ‘Jesus Christ is Lord.’”
“Jesus Christ is Lord,” he said in English.
“If it were that simple,” Owen said, laughing, “I think I could manage it even now.”
“No, but I urge you both to start studying as much as possible,” Mr. Riddell said. “Nothing can be accomplished with the Chinese until you’re able to reach them on their level.”
His wife nodded her agreement. “And you, Mrs. Bell,” she said, looking across the table at Addie, “you must not make any excuses for yourself. It is easy—all too easy—to let household matters take up a large portion of your attention. You must remind yourself that you’re here on a double commission: as both a wife and a missionary.”
And which is more important? Addie wanted to ask, but she only smiled and replied that she would be sure to take their advice. “Owen and I will both start studying in a more regular way,” she vowed.
But she hadn’t gotten around to fulfilling that promise. In fact, she’d learned to say almost nothing in the months since they arrived in Lu-cho Fu. The thought of all those days ticking by, one after the other, and nothing to show for it but a bigger stomach, was embarrassing. Now she was going to make sure that she did something about it.
And so, instead of getting up from the breakfast table to follow Wei-p’eng with instructions to mop the bedrooms or wipe down the furniture in the front sitting room, she stayed seated at the table and made plans for studying. It would be strenuous but satisfying work. From day to day she would be able to see the improvement. Before long she would be able to ask Li K’ang what his favorite game had been as a child, ask Wei-p’eng whether there was a girl he had his eye on to marry. And of course she would be able to talk to them about God, and in that way make them Christians and save their souls. They had not yet been converted, and it worried her to think that these two young men who spent each day under her roof were as ignorant of the punishment that awaited them after they died as all the other people in Lu-cho Fu. It was overwhelming to think of all the heathens in even this one small corner of China that they had not yet approached. And of course it usually took more than one conversation to bring about a conversion; sometimes, Mr. Douglas had said back in T’ien-chin, it could be years before people opened their hearts to the Word. You just had to keep at it, however; you had to whittle down their resistance. That was their business here, after all; they had not come to China except with the purpose of doing some real good.
A plan formed in her mind and quickly hardened: she would study three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, with a two-hour break in the middle to eat dinner and rest her brain. All she needed were her dictionary and a pen and paper to begin.
That first morning, Addie picked up her plate and teacup and walked back to the rear courtyard, where Li K’ang was busy washing cabbage in a pan that sat on the floor. He looked up in surprise when she came through the doorway and immediately stood to take her dishes. Normally, she left them on the table and he came to clear them away himself.
She handed them over and then, pointing at the cabbage, sifted through the handful of phrases she knew, searching for a way to ask, “How do you say that?” She widened her eyes and made her arms into a gesture of wonder, palms upward, like she was carrying a book flat in either hand. The cook glanced from her hands to the cabbage, and back to her. He cocked his head to one side.
“What I want to say is, ‘How do you call that?’”
He spoke a few words of Chinese, and they faced each other without understanding. So she pointed helplessly again, and he walked over and picked up one of the leaves. Coming back to where she stood, he tore it down the middle for her to see the stiff white spine.
Cabbage. Leaf. White. Green. She couldn’t say any of these words. Simple vocabulary shorn of grammar and context, but it didn’t matter; it was so far beyond her comprehension that it might as well have been the Iliad she was trying to recite. What about tomatoes? What about peas? The peas are coming in, which must mean that spring has come at last. How long would it be before she could put sentences together, before she could express an idea like this, brimming with different states of being, with a leap that makes a vegetable into a symbol of something greater? Her situation suddenly seemed unimaginably constraining, as if she had been locked alone in a cage and only just noticed. Could you even be said to feel something if you weren’t able to express it? Now, with no one around who spoke English, was she simply an object taking up space in the house, something the servants bumped into and tried to avoid?
She would have to start somewhere. Taking the torn leaf from Li K’ang’s palm, she held it between thumb and forefinger and waved it like a flag. “What do you call this?” she asked loudly. “What’s the word for ‘cabbage’?”
He said something in response. The word she was looking for was
probably tucked into his speech, but where? Addie sighed and dropped the leaf back into his palm. She closed his hand around it and left the kitchen.
Owen was out with their church deacon, Mr. Yang, but she went into the study and examined his desk. There was a pad of paper, a squat bottle of ink, and a brush—cleaned, but still damp, the tip carefully sculpted to a point, and the brush hung by a ribbon on a small rack that sat at the back of the desk. Off to the side was a copy of the Chinese prayer book; the shipment from T’ien-chin had finally arrived. A box holding the others sat on a stool by the wall. They had already distributed over half to those who came to the services and to strangers in town, but there were dozens remaining, a visible reminder of the insufficiency of their accomplishments. Owen carried a few prayer books with him whenever he went out, and gave them away to those he thought might look at the texts. It was a calculation that included not only a certain look of openness in the person, but the ability to read, which was, they had already learned, not at all widespread. Without that ability, you could count on the book being burned for fuel.
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