Widow Liu often seemed torn between pride in the history of the Chinese and contempt for the weakness its government had displayed over the course of her lifetime. Foreign powers had come in and scooped up whole regions of the empire, had taken over ports, established banks and businesses and foreign concessions. Some of this business revolved around tea and opium, and this was where she had a personal concern. The widow and her family’s trading company had already been engaged in dealings with foreigners for years. As she explained to Addie, she’d been forced to learn from them. “The truth is that I don’t much like Americans or Europeans or anyone else, but you are here now and we must learn how to deal with you.” She shook her head and yawned. “Come, now, I have something for you.” And taking out a small purse, she passed it over to Addie.
She turned over the silk bag in her hand. “What’s this?”
“Money for you and your work—use it as you see fit. I would be careful about it, however, going home. There are more thieves in Chungking than there are grains of rice, and I wouldn’t trust you to handle such an encounter as you ought.”
“What exactly is the appropriate response to a robbery, Widow Liu?”
“It depends on the situation.”
This hardly seemed fair. Addie folded her arms and said, “Then why do you believe that I would handle it incorrectly?”
“Because,” the widow said calmly, “you have no sense of intuition, and neither do you have a true understanding of fear.”
“What gives you that idea?”
Widow Liu waved a hand over her face. “Child, it’s your entire expression that tells me.”
Addie opened her mouth to dispute her, but another visitor was announced and the widow dismissed her, as she often did, with a nod.
Picking her way down the stairs, Addie thought of the night when she had awoken with the creature on her chest and found herself unable to move. It was now distant enough that she could recognize it as a nightmare, but still she carried close the memory of the terror it had caused her. The widow was wrong: she did indeed understand fear. It was only that she knew that it wasn’t always accompanied by danger.
The reverse, it turned out, was also true. But it would be some time before she comprehended it.
In the autumn, less than two months after Addie and Poppy arrived in Chungking, an article had appeared in a British newspaper describing an attack on Christian converts in Shantung. The dead were all Chinese, natives of the town, and the attackers named were the Boxers. Addie recalled the men who had stopped her and Poppy on the boat near T’ien-chin. No foreigners were involved in this recent attack, and perhaps this was why none of the missionaries gave it a great deal of concern. It was the cost of doing mission work in such a wild land as this. Over the course of her years in China, Addie had periodically heard tales of violence committed against Chinese Christians and foreigners alike. Enmity, envy, resentment, or fear led to a murder in some small corner of the empire. The incident was enough to make one uneasy for a time, but the disquiet passed. These were inevitably local affairs, and the locales were never so close to home as to merit real panic.
But then a new report came to raise the alarm. In January, the papers reported the murder of an Anglican priest that had happened on New Year’s Eve. It had been snowing, the report said, and the priest had tried to run from his attackers. He’d slipped and been captured, and they’d chopped him to pieces. Once again, blame was laid on the Boxers. This latest attack had also taken place in Shantung, and reading about it, Addie felt a stab of fear in her chest. Shantung was east of Shansi, with a narrow strip of Chih-li Province between them. It was not very close to Lu-cho Fu, though it was the same general area. “I wouldn’t worry,” Widow Liu said when they discussed the news, “for your friends back in Shansi. Both the Empress Dowager and your foreign governments have condemned the acts. And besides, there is no leader of this group; they are a ragtag bunch. It’s local troublemaking, that’s all.” This was more information than the British paper had given, but it gave Addie little comfort. Poppy delivered more or less the same verdict: “It’s a grisly affair,” she said, “but there’s no use in us panicking.”
Addie wasn’t panicking. Rather, she felt haunted. She couldn’t stop imagining a white landscape with a group of men stealing over it, all sounds swallowed up by the swirling, drifting flakes. She saw the Reverend Brooks glancing up with horror at his attackers. She saw blood spilled on the snow.
A second report added details that the first had omitted: Reverend Brooks had had a ring put through his nose before being paraded through a nearby village like an animal. In this telling, his brief escape through the snow happened afterward, when he was naked and tired and had already been tortured. The Boxers threw his body in a ditch after they were done. It was retrieved later by another mission priest to be buried.
The murder of the British man was all the missionaries in Chungking could talk about. One got a foreboding sense from the reports, from the fact that the attackers weren’t bandits or robbers but members of an organization—a movement—with a violent name and a terrible cause. The Boxers hated Christians and they hated foreigners, which was all that the missionaries stood for, after all.
“What had that Brooks fellow done,” Mr. Wickford asked sadly over dinner one night, shaking his head, “but bring light to the dark? What have we any of us strived to do here but make better the lives of a miserable populace?”
“We’ve all had the best of intentions, I’m sure,” Poppy said with a firm nod. “This will all die down soon, just you watch.”
Later, after they had gone to bed, Addie asked Poppy how she could feel that confident. “What could possibly make you think this isn’t serious?” she asked. She recognized a petulant tone in her voice that belied her fear.
“Of course it’s serious. It’s only that I know how news spreads here—the Chinese are terrible propagators of exaggeration. The only ones worse for it are missionaries. Look,” she said, laying her hand on Addie’s arm in the dark, “we’re a long way off from all this. Who’s to know—it might all have passed over already, and we’re only keeping fear alive here because we don’t know any better.”
“But how do you know?” Addie asked again, her eyes open to the darkness. Pale light leaked in through a small window over the door and made vague shadows on the ceiling. She felt as if she were swimming, and Poppy’s hand on her arm was either pushing her down or trying to pull her up to the surface.
“I don’t, dear. But wouldn’t you rather think the best than the worst? We’re here now, anyway, and there’s nothing we can do, since travel would be particularly unwise at this time.”
We’re here now, anyway. This was the truth, as hard and plain as a fruit stone. And it was comforting, too. This was what Addie tried to ignore: that she felt glad to be far away, even while Owen and the boys were nearer to the danger. She worried for them, yes—she felt sick whenever she imagined Owen traveling alone near some village like the one where the Reverend Brooks had met his fate—and yet she could convince herself that this worry was out of proportion to the situation. Owen was not being led through their town like a donkey, to be jeered at and scorned; he was known there, they were all known there. Didn’t they have Li K’ang and Wei-p’eng to vouch for their goodness? And besides, Lu-cho Fu was two hundred miles or more from the place where the Anglican priest had been killed. That whole part of China was not accountable for a single murder, however ghastly and terrible.
The fact still remained: I’m here now, anyway. Not up north, where the thing had happened. Here. And she could feel relieved that she was safe.
Several weeks passed. Then one day when the weather was particularly cold and damp, as Addie sat shivering on her bench in the widow’s reception room, the Chinese woman suddenly asked if she were making any plans to return to the States. Addie thought she might have misunderstood. They had been speaking of the widow’s business; she wanted to send her middle son, she’d said, o
n an expedition into the mountains to the west, to a place where they had established business with the local tea growers. In such remote places, she said, it was necessary from time to time to send an envoy from civilization, for the people there were awed by everything that was foreign to them, “and more apt to abide by the terms we set.” The widow had paused, and it was then that she asked if Addie were planning on returning to the States. Addie had to ask her to repeat the question. “I wanted to know whether you are planning to return home,” she said.
“I have no such plans,” Addie replied, sitting up a little. “I hadn’t thought of going home.”
“Now, or ever?”
“Certainly not now. Perhaps not ever. I have no such plans,” she repeated.
The widow folded her hands in her lap. A moment later she unclasped them to smooth the wrinkles from her robe. “Few people enjoy revising their previous intentions.”
Addie said nothing, waiting for her to go on.
After a half minute of silence, Widow Liu cleared her throat. “You have said nothing to me about this business, and I am not sure whether the foreign news has carried it yet: the Empress Dowager has issued a statement with regards to the Boxers. She has taken back her previous condemnation of the group and put out what amounts to a letter of support. You understand what this signifies?”
Addie blinked at her, comprehension slow to follow.
“It is a warning,” Widow Liu went on. “Tsu Hsi almost certainly means to encourage further attacks on foreigners. In light of this news, it struck me that you may want to make plans to return home, where you will be well out of the path of danger. I can be of assistance, if you require it.”
Unlike most houses in Chungking, the widow’s house seemed to swallow all sound. Within its walls, you might feel that you were afloat upon the sea, that when you stepped outside, you would find in every direction a great nothingness, a wide swath of empty gray. Now, though no sound accompanied it, Addie felt the reverberations of many fists knocking on the doors, of a great many feet stampeding through the streets. And yet she felt calm as she asked Widow Liu if she really believed that the movement would spread to Chungking.
“Who’s to tell? We are a large empire, and the problems that afflict one area may not affect another at all. There is a drought in the north now; meanwhile, here in the south we are well watered. People grow angry when they are hungry. Only give them an enemy, and they will turn their anger in that direction.” The widow tipped her head to one side. “So they are angry in the north because of the weather, but in the south we have both rain and sun. In this way, you might feel comfortable remaining in Chungking. And yet I am not certain that the Boxers are no threat to you here. The T’ai-p’ing Heavenly Kingdom may have begun way down in Kuang-hsi, but within two years they had nearly captured Peking. In a decade and a half, they marched through nearly every corner of China. In that case, of course, the Christians were the aggressors; here it is the reverse. The lesson remains.”
The rebellion to which the widow referred had ended a quarter century before Addie’s arrival in China. She had never been clear as to why it was fought in the first place, but she knew that the missionaries universally renounced the insurrectionists, whose leader claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. These people were not real Christians; they were mystics, fanatics. And yet Addie felt that she would rather meet a T’ai-p’ing fanatic than she would a Boxer. “So the lesson is that a rebellion can spread farther than one expects?” she said. “However, if the Boxers should come down to Chungking, I think they would find a population that is more amenable to foreigners here than they are in the north. Look at our friendship, Widow Liu—yours and mine. I never spoke with anyone so freely in my previous mission, and I had been there a much longer time than I’ve been here.”
The widow smiled in the manner that was common to her. It was shrewd and ironic; rarely did it have much to do with real joy. “You cannot believe that I am typical of the population here,” she said, “or anywhere else. I am a rare treasure.” Her mouth turned down at one corner: this was closer to a real smile for her, Addie had learned over the course of their acquaintance. “While you are correct that you have made a friend in me, I cannot agree that all of Chungking might follow my example. Tell me, child, have you made any other friends here?”
Addie admitted that she hadn’t. “Still, the people seem more open than those I knew in Shansi. I would say that the”—she paused, searching for the word in Chinese—“the temperament here is warmer.”
“And yet even in our friendship—which I have acknowledged to be real—there is a certain expectation that one owes the other.”
Addie sat up in her chair. “Do you believe that I owe you, or is it the other way around?”
Widow Liu paused a moment before asking in an even tone what Addie thought she, the widow, gained from their relationship.
“Friendship, I suppose.” Addie blinked at the widow. “Isn’t that enough?”
“But what is friendship except an agreement that one will help the other whenever possible, whenever asked? And sometimes even when not asked at all?”
Addie thought of the money the widow had given her, which she had turned over to Mr. Wickford for use in the school. She considered for the first time that the widow’s donation was a debt to be repaid, but without any resentment of the implication of this form of friendship. The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. What could she say of any of her relationships that did not depend, in some measure, on one person helping the other? Perhaps one did not tally up favors; that might be taking it too far. But as she watched the widow, seated across from her in the dim light of her richly appointed visiting room, Addie wondered what she could possibly offer the Chinese woman in return for both the donation of money and the donation of time: Addie enjoyed her visits, perhaps much more than the widow did.
Widow Liu did not seem to require an answer to her previous question. “Of course, the very best situation is when one friend can help the other in a manner that helps herself at the same time. A double benefit—that is the very best outcome.”
“And have you thought of such a scheme?”
The widow shrugged. “I am always considering it. Let us see how the present situation unfolds.”
After returning from the widow’s house, Addie went into the library in the mission house to clear her mind. The best method, she’d discovered, was to fill it with words. She would sometimes pluck a volume at random from the shelves and read a few lines, a page or two, until she had pushed out every troubling thought. Today she found a book that bore the name of Evan Wickford as its author. It was called Prayers from the Middle Kingdom, and had been printed in the year 1893 by the Missionary Board’s press in Boston. Inside were many pages of poetry interspersed with short works of prose, the latter of which resembled the Dispatches one might find in a local newspaper back home. The poems had titles like “An Old Grandmother Counts Her Coins” and “Incense Smoke Hovering O’er the Heathen Temple.” The meter in the lines was unremitting, the rhymes landing as heavily as a stack of wood.
The poems were not very good, but still Addie found herself moved by the book. She recalled the conversation she and Poppy had once had with Mr. Wickford about the need for a published account of the Chinese missionary’s experience. Here he’d already written something of the kind and said nothing. Either it was modesty or a strange kind of hidden pride. Either way, he’d been motivated to filter his perceptions through art—and to go through the trouble of getting his art out into the world.
She stood paging through the book for a few minutes before seating herself at the table. She’d begun coming here every now and then to write letters addressed to Owen or Louisa or her parents that she later put straight into the stove in the kitchen. It was a sort of compulsion, she supposed: she wrote down the memories that visited her during the day and then deposited the paper in the flames. It helped with the feeling of anxiousness that had
been building in her over the past few months. The present situation only gave it direction.
Today she sat down without any paper or pen, only running her fingernail over the surface of the table, which was smooth and glossy. She had the urge to carve something into it—not her name, as children did, but a feeling, a word, a message whose permanence would be a testament to its truth. Yet when she searched her mind, it was such a jumble of impressions that she wasn’t sure what she would write, even if she had a knife in her hand right now.
Poppy found her still seated at the table when she returned from her own round of afternoon visits. She sat herself down in the opposite chair and put out her hands. “Addie,” she said, “what are you doing?”
Addie stretched her hands over the table and linked her fingers with Poppy’s but didn’t speak for some time. At last she said, “I visited Widow Liu today.”
“And how is the dear woman?”
“The same as ever. She had some news. The situation up north, Poppy—it’s grown rather grave. The widow told me that the Empress Dowager has changed her position with regards to the Boxers. She’s thrown her support behind them.”
“Yes, so I heard.”
Addie pulled her hands away. “You heard? Why didn’t you tell me? When did you hear it?”
“Yesterday, I suppose—yesterday or the day before. The papers have all reported it. I supposed that you had already learned of it from someone else.”
“From someone else—who would that be?”
“The widow, apparently.”
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