He sat on the bed and read one letter after another. He’d read some so many times that he had memorized the passages.
The letters brought tears to his eyes.
One letter from his sister Mary, the oldest of his eleven siblings, described the walk down the hill and over the bridge and along the road with the high trees on both sides that led to the church the family attended.
He’d loved that walk each Sabbath. He missed his friends and family. He especially missed Mary. Since he was the oldest and she was the second, he was closer to her than the others. He compared her laugh to Patridge’s. Her’s sounded like chimes carried by the wind and was pleasant.
His mother had offered a daguerreotype of the family to take with him, but Robert had left it behind. He’d felt guilty every time he looked at it and lost sleep from imagining what thoughts must’ve lurked behind their eyes because of his behavior in Belfast.
It didn’t take long for Robert to discover that Hollister kept a concubine. He called her his wife, but they had never officially married. She stood about five-foot and had a triangular face with a wide forehead and a small chin.
“This is Me-ta-tae,” Hollister said, matter-of-fact, as if he were pointing out his hat or cane. He patted the top of her head as if she were a pet. “Don’t mind her. She lives in the consulate with me. She makes life easier by doing the cooking and cleaning. She washes our clothes too.”
Robert soon discovered the Christian ministers in Ningpo called her ‘Hollister’s whore’ when Hollister wasn’t around.
This kind of talk bothered Robert. He’d been raised to respect women, so he made it a point to treat Me-ta-tae with courtesy to make up for the cruel things some said of her.
The city of Ningpo had been built in the tenth century during the Tang Dynasty. The river protected it on one side, and it was encircled with medieval walls and a deep moat. There was a lake inside the walls with a canal leading through an open gate under the wall that allowed small boats in from the river.
When Hollister took Robert on the tour, he found the streets, houses, wood carved doorways and windows intricate—a hint of a culture he was eager to unwrap layer by layer.
“They live like rats,” Hollister said. “The cities were planned without logic. The streets are like a twisted maze. It’s easy to get lost.”
Robert didn’t find the city a rat warren. He found it fascinating.
Later, when he was alone, he explored the noisy business district along the main east-west street. It was a jumble of storefronts and noodle shops hung with glazed duck carcasses. Dry good shops, job printers, and bakeries were crowded together. Pharmacies sold roots and herbs, powdered deer antlers, withered frogs and snake glands. Each narrow alley was the center of a different industry—one creating things out of bamboo and another making lanterns. It was all packed into a ghetto about a mile and a half across.
A merchant from Shanghai, a friend of Hollister’s, came to visit, and he wasn’t alone. He arrived at the consulate with four Chinese concubines, and it was obvious he was proud of his acquisitions.
To his consternation, Robert found he was having trouble keeping his eyes off the girls. He didn’t care for their painted faces, but they had beautiful black lacquer hair and a delicate bone structure.
“Where did you meet them?” Robert asked.
The American was lanky with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs. He had huge ears and large green eyes. He looked ungainly like a scarecrow that had escaped from a cornfield. He reminded Robert of Ichabod Crane, a character from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving.
“I didn’t meet them,” the American replied. “Women are traded here like goods. If you want one, I’ll introduce you to the matchmaker. She specializes in getting women for foreigners. You can pick from Korean girls or girls from Siam or Vietnam. If you are willing to pay a premium, she claims she can get you a Han Chinese from a respectable family.
“My girls come from Kansu province in the east where the peasants sell their daughters to avoid starvation. All four were virgins when I paid for them. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Fascinating,” Robert said. His education of China was continuing quickly. The messenger boy in Hong Kong was only the primer.
“I’ll introduce you to the old hag, and she’ll hook you up. What you get depends on how much you are willing to pay. That way, you will have a girl to keep your bed warm. It gets cold here in winter.”
“Let me think on it,” he replied, wondering why everyone considered Chinese girls marvelous bed warmers. Was that all a woman was good for in China? If that was true, it was a horrible fate.
“No problem,” the American said. “Ningpo isn’t that far from Shanghai. When you are ready, make a trip back. Meanwhile save enough so you can buy a pair of lovebirds. That way you will have one sleeping on either side of you. If my girls don’t please me, they know I’ll send them back to Kansu and starvation.”
He was glad when the American turned toward Hollister. From the heat he felt spreading across his face, he must have been beet red to the tips of his ears. He wasn’t sure if he was disgusted or embarrassed.
When Robert mentioned that he wanted to employ a Chinese man to teach him Mandarin, Hollister said, “Don’t waste your money or time, Hart. They will cheat you and you’ll learn nothing. When I first arrived here, I hired one. He confused me. Just follow my example. I make do. Besides, it is their place to understand us. We don’t have to understand them.”
Robert disagreed and hired a teacher anyway. He made a point of not telling Hollister. The cost was seven yuan a month, about one British pound.
However, the teacher wasn’t that good. He didn’t have much patience, but he told Robert the reason the Chinese built cities the way they did.
When Robert first asked, the teacher looked over his glasses and studied his student’s face as if he were stupid. “The answer is simple,” the teacher said. “The streets are narrow and crooked to keep evil spirits out and confuse them when they get inside.”
This was Robert’s first lesson that the Chinese were superstitious.
“It would help,” his teacher said, “if you were to buy a concubine and study the language with her.”
Learning Mandarin turned into a lonely and tedious task. It didn’t help that his teacher snapped at him when he mispronounced words. He was also assigned to help the ship captains and European merchants do business with the local Chinese Maritime Customs House in Ningpo. This became a challenge as he hadn’t mastered a rudimentary knowledge of the language, but he had no choice. It was his job. He was determined to make the best of it and didn’t complain.
Somehow, he managed to translate between the English merchants and the Chinese officials, who spoke no English. It was as if he’d been tossed in the fire and had to avoid being burned. It didn’t take long to guess why the last interpreter must have quit.
Two weeks after arriving in Ningpo, a Chinese servant named Guan-jiah was assigned to him.
Guan-jiah told Robert he’d been born near the end of 1836, which according to the Chinese calendar was the year of the Monkey.
He spoke clumsy English but understood more. He was a bony, short man with a turned-up nose and eyes set far apart. He kept his skull shaved except for a tail of hair called a queue growing from the back of his head. He had long ear lobes, which he was proud of because they resembled Buddha’s ear lobes.
The Chinese believed this was a sign that a person was born to be kind-natured, and he was sometimes too agreeable. He demonstrated a deep desire for knowledge and proved to have an excellent memory.
“This servant of yours is an odd lot,” Hollister said in a low voice when Guan-jiah was doing chores outside, “but maybe that’s because he applied to become a servant inside the Forbidden City when he turned thirteen.”
“What do you mean?” Robert asked. “How does applying for a job make you odd?”
Guan-jiah was hard working and s
eemed honest. His behavior had not marked him as strange. His voice sounded like a girl’s, but what was strange about that? He was still young and hadn’t grown into his man’s voice yet.
Hollister smirked. “You have much to learn, Hart. You can’t apply for a job inside the Forbidden City unless you’re a eunuch.”
“No!” he said, shocked. How could Hollister say something so vicious? “Do you mean Guan-jiah had his testicles removed?” Robert did not want to believe it was true.
Hollister nodded. “He lost more than that. They chopped off his member too. He’s flat as a woman down there. He didn’t get the job, so he came home and learned English instead and started working as a servant for foreign merchants. This job is a move up for him—more pay.”
“Why would a man castrate himself to get a job? That’s madness!”
“Live here long enough and you’ll see many crazy things that make no sense. I have better things to do than talk about your servant. He is odd, because he chopped his member off before he turned thirteen. One thing to learn is that you should never trust the Chinese. What kind of person in his right mind would do something like that?”
Robert later learned that what Guan-jiah had done for his family was a sign of piety and respect for his elders. He’d sacrificed his manhood to help his family survive. When he failed to get the job in the Forbidden City, he’d gone to work for foreigners. What he was doing to help his grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts and siblings caused him to gain face for the sacrifice but lose face, because he worked for foreigners.
At first, he found this strange, but once he learned the true meaning behind piety and gaining or losing face, it was easier to accept. Guan-jiah was willing to sacrifice for his family. Robert respected that.
“Look, Master,” Guan-jiah said, before Robert’s first month in Ningpo ended, “if you want to go out and buy anything, I will help you save money. Tell me what it is you want and let me go to the shop and buy it for the Chinese price. If you try, they will charge you as much as ten times what I will pay.” He smiled a pleasant smile that reminded Robert of one lass he had seduced in Belfast.
Robert stared at Guan-jiah thinking that he wasn’t exactly a man but was closer to being like a woman without breasts. If Guan-jiah had let his hair grow long instead of shaving his head almost bald, he would have been cute.
The eunuch’s skin was smooth like a woman’s and his eyelashes appeared feminine. Robert found this thinking strange and made it a point to avoid his servant as much as possible for the next few days. Eventually, he forgot that for an instant he’d thought the young man oddly attractive.
He decided to test Guan-jiah to make sure he was honest. He went to the shop without telling his servant and found out what the asking price was for a foreigner. Then he sent Guan-jiah.
After the servant proved himself, he let the eunuch do the shopping. If Guan-jiah made a small profit for himself, that was acceptable.
As the years went by, Guan-jiah proved his loyalty and worth many times. He stayed with Robert to the end.
On rare occasions, when Hollister had someone in for dinner, usually one of the merchants such as the American that looked like Ichabod Crane, the visitor often arrived with a concubine.
This reminded Robert of the easy pleasures this alien land offered—thoughts that bothered him. It didn’t help that his Mandarin teacher suggested several times that a concubine would help him learn the language faster.
This triggered wild, erotic dreams where he had two or more of the delicate, dark-haired women in his bed. Having such dreams made him think he was about to lose control and left him feeling as if he were a carpet that had the dirt beat out of it in Ireland only to be walked on and soiled once in China.
He didn’t want others to see him as one who was into lasciviousness even in his youth’s worst agony. He wanted others to see him as a God loving man who worked hard by day and treated others with respect and courtesy.
However, his nature, as he understood later, wanted to believe in love like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet but without the tragedy. To old China hands, such as Captain Patridge, such thinking made Robert into an old-fashioned nut, or to the Chinese a cooked seed, meaning someone who lived in a fantasy world.
In time, his perspective underwent a gradual change. Eventually, when he saw a pair of love-ducks idling in the waterweeds in spring, he admired them for what they had.
On one snowy night, he saw by the light of the moon the reflection of a white mountain sandwiched between clouds making it look transparent, and he was moved almost to tears believing it was God’s way to show him love—nature was man’s best mentor, as the Chinese said. It just took a practiced eye to see it.
Robert often walked alone in the evenings along the muddy boat-trackers’ footpath beside the river. Western ships sat at anchor with lanterns glowing from aft windows.
Those lights floating above the water created a scene that was poetically beautiful—almost as if the world had turned into a setting full of quiet and passionate people and the boats into fairy tale castles.
Then at other times, he heard the pirates and the war junks in the river firing cannons at one another, and the violence shattered his tranquil mood.
Early in March 1855, Hollister moved from the consulate. “I built a thirty-eight-foot sloop for a price I could never get outside China,” he said, “so I’m going to live on it.”
Robert wondered what it was going to be like living alone in the consulate. Of course, he had Guan-jiah and Hollister during the days, but at night there was only silence. Robert grew up in a house full of people and even at college he had his fellow students as company.
“Have you christened your boat?” Robert asked.
“And waste a good bottle of wine.” Hollister laughed. “There’s no need for that. It’s called The Dawn. I will keep my sloop anchored in the river with the rest of them. It’s the only way to escape Ningpo—its stench, its smothering walls and prying eyes.”
It was the way Hollister said those last two words that caused Robert to suspect he knew what the missionaries were saying about him behind his back.
“He’s going to hell living with that whore.” Robert heard one pastor say.
“If he gives her up and asks Christ for forgiveness, he still has a chance for redemption,” another replied. “But nothing can save her. She’s doomed.”
“I disagree,” a third pastor said. “If she takes Christ into her life, she will be forgiven.”
Robert’s father was a pastor, so he wasn’t sure what he should think. He believed that Christ was not as judgmental as some of the ministers thought. After all, He’d said, ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone’ when he’d defended a woman accused of adultery.
Robert had trouble sleeping. During the long nights, every sound in the empty consulate woke him. Even the silence bothered him. He lay on his bed staring at the ceiling for hours. Noisy crickets would have been better than this.
At times, he saw things in the dark. When he got up to confront the phantoms, they evaporated. He wondered if he were going insane.
In desperation, he convinced Hollister to play chess with him in the early evenings and attempted to lead their conversations away from China and the topics the missionaries usually brought up. His goal was to keep Hollister there so the nights wouldn’t seem so long.
“Have you read any Dickens?” Robert asked one rainy night. “Oliver Twist is an interesting story about the workhouse and child labor and the recruitment of children as criminals. I was wondering what you think of the hypocrisy it reveals through Dickens’ sarcasm and dark humor?”
“Do you find it wrong that the children should be used as criminals?” Hollister asked in a challenging tone.
Robert didn’t understand why Hollister was so upset. “Isn’t it obvious?” he replied. “Children should be raised properly and be taught the virtues and the word of God. They shouldn’t be slaves risking their lives for th
e betterment of some rogue.”
“Well, I haven’t read Oliver Twist, but I believe it’s better to be working for thieves than driven to an honest death in the workhouse where you never get enough to eat. I should know. My mother died soon after my birth, and my father died when I was six. I spent several months in a workhouse before I found my auntie.”
“You were in the workhouse?” Robert replied, shocked. “You’re fortunate you had a loving aunt to rescue you from such a horror.”
“She didn’t rescue me. I escaped and found her. She was my father’s sister. Until I knocked on her door, I’d never seen her before. My father didn’t approve of her. He believed in God, and she didn’t. She was kind enough to take me in. After I finished my education, she arranged this position in the British consulate through an acquaintance. She was good to me—better than my father was. He taught me nothing but verses from the Bible and when I didn’t learn fast enough, I’d feel the back of his boney hand.”
Robert attempted getting the conversation back to books. “You should read Oliver Twist, but since you haven’t, what books have you read?”
Hollister snorted. “I read The North China Herald and the London Times when it comes in,” he replied. “I don’t have time for books. However, I do have time for a good game of cards or chess, and our games would be more entertaining if we wagered money. I’ll match you five yuan for each game.”
“Five!” Robert said. He’d never gambled before. “Let’s start with one yuan.” He was willing to risk that small amount. After all, he beat Hollister three out of four games.
After they started gambling, Hollister paid more attention to what he was doing, and he won half the games. Once money was involved, the conversation dried up but Hollister stayed later.
When he won, Hollister scraped the money off the table with a cackle of glee. “I’m going to take all your money,” he said. “That last move of yours was stupid. Now I’ve got you.”
Hollister had a few traits in common with one of Dickens’ other characters, Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge from the Christmas Carol. When he lost, he cast dark glances at Robert as if he were cheating. That made Robert feel uncomfortable, but it didn’t stop him from playing his best. Besides, he found the man’s disagreeable character better than being alone.
My Splendid Concubine Page 2