Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  “You remember. He and Minister Tai gave lecture here last spring.”

  “Mm.” She came out to meet him. “Supper’s not ready yet. You’re early. Tuan. The comedian?”

  “Tuan is a good man.” He held up an envelope with an official-looking seal.

  Hope recalled Paul’s protective stance toward this Minister Tuan, how she had loved him for it. Now, it seemed, his solicitousness was to be rewarded. While traveling in Europe, Tuan had heard of the earthquake—and of Paul’s marriage. He was sending five hundred dollars from his own purse because, as his note explained, Paul’s membership in the rebel party had cost him the support of officials of Hupei who would ordinarily have been obliged to support a scholar from their district in such an emergency.

  “I don’t believe this,” she said. “Why should he want to help us?”

  Paul flopped down on the divan and said grimly, “He has put himself at risk to warn me.”

  “Warn you?”

  “He hopes I will take this money and stop my writing.”

  “Surely that’s not a condition for accepting it?”

  Paul’s expression softened. “Don’t worry. I am a rebel but not a fool. I know we need this money.” He gave a terse laugh. “Everyone knows.”

  Hope sat beside him, thinking out loud. “You could write and thank him, assure him somehow that you won’t—I know! Treat it as a wedding gift. Nothing more or less. That would implicitly let Tuan know that we’ll respect his wishes to the extent of keeping the money confidential, but your work will go on as before.”

  She could all but hear the gears of his brain turning in the silence that followed, each passing second strengthening her conviction that the suggestion she had made was good. Finally he turned, placed a hand on her knee, and asked with the barest glimmer of a smile, “How can my American wife have such a Chinese mind?”

  6

  Midway through January came one of those glimmering, blustery, yet unseasonably mild winter mornings when the mere act of pushing back the drapes is an electric experience. Sweet and bright, the sun played hide and seek among rolled satin clouds. The air, when Hope lifted the window, was so fresh that each breath made her lungs sizzle.

  As usual, Paul had been up and out before daybreak. For the past month the wires had sizzled with reports of famine and rice riots in China’s coastal provinces, and of the Ch’ing’s brutal suppression of these riots—without providing the people relief from their starvation. Paul pounced on these reports, for starvation and riots made excellent fuel for revolution. Several secret societies had already mounted revolts, and though they had been suppressed, public support for the rebels had never been stronger. As Hope understood it, Paul’s task, through his editorials, was to excite interest and financial support from Chinese societies in America for more revolts. However, this was not as simple as it sounded. Paul had explained to her that Chinatown was a cauldron of factions with varying positions for or against Imperial rule. Paul’s group, the Hung-men Society, were the most democratic and Western in their thinking, while their arch-adversary, the Royal Preservation Party, supported the continuation of Imperial rule through constitutional monarchy. The two groups had long competed for donations and political support and watched each other covertly, and though no blood had been shed between them, sabotage had been common—vandalism of news offices, spies in the triad meetings, heckling and threatening of audiences at some of Sun Yat-sen’s early appearances in 1904. Before the Quake, Paul’s editorial staff spent more energy fending off the Royalists than they did criticizing the Manchus. But the devastation and rebuilding of Chinatown had forced a truce between the factions, and the news from China now seemed to be dealing the Royalists a natural death. All of this cheered Paul no end, and he went forth each dawn with an eager set to his jaw, hands impatiently fumbling with his tie and buttons as the door fell closed behind him.

  Ordinarily Hope kissed her husband goodbye, dressed leisurely, tidied the house, and walked over to Shattuck to do the day’s marketing before her afternoon lessons. If there was time, she would write in her journal or draw up a leaflet or poster for Mary Jane’s latest trade union or suffrage project. Or she would work on her “Revolutionist” articles, which she was proceeding to write in secret. Today, however, the two students she was scheduled to tutor were both in quarantine with measles—mild cases, thank goodness—and this left a tantalizing stretch of free time.

  What could be more natural, she thought defiantly, than to visit her husband’s office and meet his colleagues? Nevertheless, the idea was intimidating. Mother Wayland warned her even before she left Kansas that white slavers would pounce on any girl foolish enough to walk alone in Chinatown. Hope had gone once anyway, with a group of classmates early on, and although that pre-Quake Chinatown was a compressed, otherworldly place, at turns gaudy as a carnival or bleak as the worst Dickensian slum, no ill had befallen her. Then last May she had returned again with Mary Jane and Antonia Laws. San Francisco was a seething mass of rubble and dust, with only the husks of buildings and vacant lots where reconstruction had not yet begun. The women visited the old site of Donaldina Cameron’s Mission Home and found nothing but charred bricks and mortar. Then, they proceeded downhill to the blocks that had been Chinatown. Mary Jane had said, “However different you believe your husband to be, you cannot afford to ignore this place, these people, for they belong to him more than you do.” To which Hope threw back, “I know that, and I will embrace them, just see if I don’t!” But her resolve had faltered before the swarms of black, bent figures carrying lumber, mixing mortar, hoisting shovels and picks. No wagons, no mules, no muscle-bound giants assisted these slight, straining men. Neither sanctioned nor aided by the town fathers, they were, in fact, racing against Mayor Ruef’s campaign to relocate the Chinese outside city limits. Paul predicted his people would triumph, and Hope that day was convinced he must be right. But she also was repelled by her own embarrassment at having invaded this tableau as a tourist. “I feel like a man who has stumbled into a birthing room,” she said as they watched an elderly man a fraction of her size breaking rocks with his bare hands. So the intervening months passed, and she had not returned, even though Paul made the crossing every day.

  She threw off her wrapper, dressed quickly in her black worsted suit, did her hair in a low bun, Chinese style, and pulled down her brown felt fedora. Dark gloves, walking boots. Incognito. But this time she was no tourist. She had a destination and a right to it.

  Hope was wound so tightly into these thoughts that she walked smack into the postman at the gate. A bulky, florid man, he thrust the mail into her hands, and huffed on down the street before she could apologize. She glanced down and saw, on top of the stack, the envelope for which she had been waiting. She tore it open and read in a state of high anxiety, then shoved the rest of the mail into the box, and set off for the Key trolley at a near trot.

  She knew that Paul’s office was located at 717 Grant Street in the Freemasons’ headquarters. What she had not foreseen was that few of the buildings in this new Chinatown bore any numbers, and on fewer still were the numbers painted in Arabic numerals. She located a restaurant at 684 Grant, and a bazaar at 739, but the addresses in between were impossible to calculate, and most of the ground floors were occupied by fishmongers, grocers, restaurants, laundries, or banks, sometimes two or three to a storefront. Paul must work up one of these dark, unmarked stairwells, she decided, but she could not remember the ideographs for Ta T’ung Jih Pao or Chih Kung T’ang, the Freemasons’ Chinese name. Finally she stopped and bought some almonds from one of the street vendors. Though he would not make eye contact, he would accept her money, and she was heartened when he named the price in halting English.

  “Ta T’ung Jih Pao tsai nar?” she asked.

  The young man, whose brushlike hair gave him a rather electrified appearance to begin with, turned a violent shade of purple, and Hope feared her mangled pronunciation had asked him something unspeakable. A nearby
door swung open and a man wearing a brown serge suit and matching Homburg emerged, the picture of cosmopolitan elegance. Hope felt sure he spoke English.

  “Excuse me,” she called, “but could you direct me to the offices of Ta T’ung Jih Pao—the Chinese Free Press?”

  His broad lips parted. “I’ve just come from there. Top floor.”

  She clapped her hands with relief. “Thank you so much. I don’t know what possessed me to think I could find it alone.”

  The man, rather stumpy in build but with bold, wide-set eyes, was so clearly Westernized that Hope nearly gave him her hand, yet such a gesture in this place could be cause for scandal. Already they were drawing scores of curious, if covert, stares.

  “You are Mrs. Liang, I think.” He tipped his hat and bent from the waist, taking her startled silence as assent. “I am William Tan. Your husband and I were schoolmates in Hupei. Now I am his counterpart in New York. I am honored to meet you at last.”

  Hope had never imagined Paul mentioning her to his friends. It both pleased and unnerved her to think what he might say to a dandy like William Tan. “How do you do?” she said.

  “I do very well.” He lifted his left eyebrow. “I am only disappointed that I must leave this afternoon—I am on my way back east, and my train leaves at five. If not, it would be my pleasure to entertain you. Perhaps another time.”

  She nodded stiffly. “Perhaps.” He continued to stare at her. “If you’ll excuse me, then …”

  “Yes, of course, Madame Liang. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Tan.” Hope stepped past him and escaped into the doorway. William Tan reminded her of Collis Chesterton, but she was at the third-floor landing before she realized why. It was that both men made her feel obligated to simultaneously thank and escape them.

  The stairwell was steep, thick with the smells of new lumber and cement, and there was no railing, little light. By the time she reached the fifth and last floor she was panting. Fortunately there was only one door. At her tap it flew open, and a young boy wearing a peaked cap and suspendered knickers staggered out under a shoulderload of papers. He gaped at Hope, stepped without looking and teetered on the top step. With visions of him plunging headlong she grabbed him by the shoulders. You’d have thought the wicked witch had snatched him, the way he shot down the stairs.

  Hope steeled herself and stepped inside. She was in a printing office—she could hear the press and feel its vibration in the raw pine floor—but all she could see were two slanted banks that stretched from the door some forty feet to the opposite wall. Halfway down this aisle, a man in a blue coolie jacket and navy beret stood beneath a dangling lightbulb, plucking at the left embankment. He wore yellow Turkish slippers with upturned toes and had not noticed Hope.

  She let the door fall closed behind her. The man’s hands worked the laddered wall like chickens pecking for grain, and Hope felt a despairing pang as she realized that these embankments were, in fact, type cases to hold the thousands of characters needed to print Paul’s newspaper. How had any brain the capacity to store, much less process, such a code?

  “Ni hao.” The man in the beret was coming toward her.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m looking for Liang Po-yu.”

  “Ah, shih, shih” He nodded and hurried off down the aisle, leaving her to follow or not. She followed, but slowly. Through a break between the cases she could see tables laid with print racks half filled with type and, beyond, a machine spitting large white tongues of paper. Three young men stood feeding and emptying the machine, two dressed in western denims, the third in journeyman’s garb, with a queue. Hope had stopped to watch them when Paul’s voice breathed in her ear.

  She jumped, then started laughing. His face, however, was stern. “What is wrong?”

  “Nothing! You startled me.”

  He glanced to the typesetter, who nodded and went back to work.

  “I wanted to surprise you.” Hope began, but soon the words were tumbling over each other. “I didn’t expect you to be so hard to find. Fortunately, I ran into William Tan downstairs. How well he speaks English! Hardly a trace of accent. Oh! Now I remember, you’ve told me about him, haven’t you? He runs Sun’s paper in New York? I wish I’d remembered that when we were talking, he made me nervous, somehow—”

  “Hope,” he interrupted. “Why are you here?”

  “I thought—” But the light struck his glasses so she could not see his eyes. He was in shirtsleeves, his fingers pinched around a reed brush with wet black bristles.

  “I wanted to see where you work,” she said.

  He pulled off his glasses, and his eyes narrowed. Suddenly it dawned on her. What but disaster would bring his American wife to this place?

  “I was curious,” she said. “That’s all.”

  He chewed his lip, frowning, then beckoned her to follow him.

  “Paul, if it’s too much trouble—” But the look he tossed over his shoulder told her she should have thought of that before coming.

  Paul ushered her into a small office the size of their bedroom. Light from the brilliant day outside drizzled through clerestory windows. A slab of oak held up by sawhorses formed Paul’s desk. His chair—the only one in the room—was massive, more oak, but so battered it must have been scavenged. Piles of old newspapers and books filled the corners. Across his desk were strewn pages of his hieroglyphic scrawl, the palm-sized slate in which he mixed his ink, like a pool of liquid tar, and his onyx seal with the carved lion head.

  Paul shut the door.

  Her shoulders went back at the disapproval in his face. “Paul, I’m sorry I barged in like this. I wanted to see—”

  “What you think you will find here!”

  “You! I wanted to see you.”

  He placed his glasses and brush on the desk, went around and sat down so that Hope was standing before him like a petitioner. “Why?”

  “I wanted to see where you work, this part of your life.” Why was it so hard to explain herself?

  “You do not trust me.”

  She nearly threw herself into his lap. “No, no! Oh, Paul, that’s not it at all.” She began to laugh, squeezed his hand. “Such a thought never entered my mind.”

  He seemed to relax finally, smiling a little abashedly, then gave her his chair. He perched on the corner of the desk.

  “I told you. I woke up this morning feeling—well, left out. Not in the way you were thinking. You would never take another woman, I know that, and I’m really not the jealous sort. But this—” thumping his desk, his papers “—your work is a mistress, too, in a way. It takes you away from me.”

  He started to interrupt, but she shushed him. “No, hear me out. I would never interfere with your work, Paul, but I thought if I came here, I wouldn’t feel so disconnected. At least I would know where you go when you leave me.”

  He squinted at her. “Your place is in my heart. My home. Is this not enough?”

  “Not when so much of your time is spent away from me.”

  “You want me to stay home more.”

  “No! Nor do I mean to invade your office. But to be able to envision you here when you are gone from me—this helps.”

  His face softened. She could almost feel the thought coalescing. This is another of Hope’s ways of expressing her love. I must be tolerant.

  “Hope, they are waiting for my copy to print the final pages. I am late with it now.”

  She said, “We are going to have a child.”

  “A—” His voice stalled as she caught and held his gaze.

  “A baby.”

  He took a deep breath, pulling his shoulders to his ears, then dropped them and, laughing, cupped Hope’s face between his hands. “You cannot wait until I come home?”

  She smiled sheepishly. “Do you blame me?”

  “No, but—” The door opened and one of the junior editors barked out a question, ignoring Hope’s presence. Paul answered, and the young man went out.

  Paul said, “You brin
g good news, Hope, but I must work. Tonight I bring a special tea, make our baby strong.”

  “Our baby.” She rose reluctantly, then remembered. “There’s more good news.” She drew the envelope out of her skirt and waved it in front of his nose. “The Independent will pay us ten dollars for your story about the Taipings!”

  In his methodical way, Paul took the letter, shook it out, and read through word by word before his face revealed any reaction. Hope’s excitement drained as she waited.

  “This letter is addressed to Hope Newfield,” he said, replacing the paper in its envelope and handing it back.

  “Yes. I thought a pen name best. In case of… well, repercussions.”

  “We talked about this.”

  “You said nobody would be interested. But they are, Paul. See, all I must do is sign this and they’ll send the check and, did you read, they want more stories. They’ll publish them as a series.”

  But his face had darkened. “I do not even know what you have written.”

  “I wrote only what you told me!”

  Another boy appeared at the door, but Paul snapped him away. “How can I believe you when we say one thing, you do another?”

  “We need the money, Paul. Five hundred dollars won’t last long with a child coming, and I won’t be able to continue tutoring, but I can continue writing—” Her voice broke. “I don’t understand why you’re not pleased about this.”

  “You want too much.”

  “Is it too much to want to share your passion?”

  “When one acts in secret, this is not sharing.”

  Hope’s face started to burn. She could see from the set of Paul’s mouth that it was useless to argue, and she knew from the stony weight on her heart that she had already gone too far. Yet she had only the faintest notion how or why, what rules had been violated, what borders transgressed.

  “No more secrets, then,” she said suddenly. “You read everything before I send it.”

  He sighed and shook his head.

  May 12, 1907