One afternoon in early autumn, Tao Chi’en’s assistant came to him with an address on a piece of paper and a message to come as soon as possible. He attended his last patient of the day, and left. The wooden, two-story building decorated with dragons and paper lanterns was in the heart of Chinatown. One look was enough to tell him that this was a brothel. On either side of the door were small barred windows where he could see the faces of young girls calling to him in Cantonese: “Come in and do what you will with pretty Chinese girl.” And for the benefit of white visitors and sailors of all races they repeated in indecipherable English, “Two bittie lookie, four bittee feelee, six bittee doee,” as they exposed pitiful little breasts and tempted passersby with obscene gestures which, coming from those children, were a tragic pantomime. Tao Chi’en had seen them many times; he walked down that street every day and the mewing of the “singsong” girls pursued him, reminding him of his sister. What had happened to her? She would be twenty-three now, in the unlikely case that she was still alive, he thought. The poorest among the poor prostitutes began very early and rarely lived to be eighteen; by twenty, if they’d had the bad fortune to survive, they were ancient. The memory of that missing sister kept him from going to Chinese whorehouses; if he was maddened with desire, he sought out women of other races. The door was opened by a sinister-looking old woman with dyed black hair and eyebrows drawn with charcoal pencil, who greeted him in Cantonese. Once it was established that they belonged to the same tong, he was led inside. All the length of an evil-smelling corridor he saw the girls’ cubicles; some were chained by an ankle to the bed. In the darkness of the hall he met two men adjusting their trousers as they left. The woman led him through a labyrinth of passages and stairways that covered an entire block before they descended rickety stairs into darkness. She indicated that Tao Chi’en should wait, and for a time that seemed interminable he waited in the blackness of that hole, listening to the muted noises of the nearby street. He heard a faint screech and something brushed his ankle; he kicked out and thought he had hit the creature, maybe a rat. The old woman returned with a candle and guided him through more twisting passageways until they came to a padlocked door. She took a key from a pocket and struggled with the lock until it opened. She held the candle high, lighting a windowless room in which the only piece of furniture was a board pallet a few inches above the ground. A wave of fetid odors struck them in the face and they had to cover nose and mouth in order to go in. On that platform were a small, cramped body, an empty bowl, and a burned-out oil lamp.
“Check her,” the crone ordered.
Tao Chi’en turned the body over to find that it was already stiff. It was a child of about thirteen, with two circles of rouge on her checks and scars on her arms and legs. Her only clothing was a thin blouse. It was obvious she was nothing but bones, but she had not died of hunger or illness.
“Poison,” he determined without hesitation.
“You don’t say.” The woman laughed as if she had heard something very funny.
Tao Chi’en had to sign a paper stating that the death was due to natural causes. The old woman stepped out into the corridor, banged a small gong twice, and a man promptly appeared, stuffed the body in a bag, slung it over his shoulder, and bore it off without a word as the procuress placed twenty dollars in the hands of the zhong yi. Then she led him through new labyrinths and left him finally before a door. It was to a different street, and it took Tao Chi’en a long time to find his way back to where he lived.
The next day he returned to the same address. Again there were the girls with rouged faces and crazed eyes, calling out in two languages. Ten years ago, in Canton, he had begun his practice of medicine with prostitutes; he had used them as rented flesh and to practice with his master’s gold acupuncture needles, but he had never paused to think about their souls. He thought of them as one of the universe’s misfortunes, yet another of the errors of creation, beings who suffered ignominy to pay for offenses in former lives and improve their karma. He felt sorry for them, but it never occurred to him that their fate might be modified. They awaited disaster in their cribs, exactly as a chicken in its coop in the market: that was their destiny. That was the anarchy of the world. He had walked down that street a hundred times without focusing on those small windows, on those faces behind the bars or the beckoning hands. He had some vague notion that they were slaves, but in China more or less all women were slaves; the most fortunate served fathers, husbands, or lovers, others, employers for whom they labored from dawn to dusk, and many were like these girls. That morning, however, he did not see them with the same indifference because something in him had changed.
He had not tried to sleep the night before. After he left the brothel he had gone to a public bath where he soaked for a long time to rid himself of the dark energy of his sick patients and the deep repulsion oppressing him. When he got to his office he sent his assistant home and brewed jasmine tea to purify himself. He had not eaten in many hours, but it was not the moment for food. He took off his clothes, lighted incense and a candle, knelt with his forehead to the ground, and said a prayer for the soul of the dead girl. Then he sat in meditation for hours, in total immobility, until he was able to isolate himself from the noise of the street and the odors of the restaurant and sink into the void and silence of his own spirit. He did not know how long he sat, absorbed, calling, calling Lin, until finally the delicate ghost heard him in the mysterious reaches she inhabited and slowly found her way, moving toward him with the lightness of a sigh, first nearly imperceptible but gradually more substantial, until he clearly felt her presence. He did not see Lin inside the room but, rather, in his bosom, in the very core of his tranquil heart. Tao Chi’en did not open his eyes, or move. For hours he sat in the same posture, separated from his body, floating in a luminous space in perfect communication with Lin. At dawn, once both were sure they would not lose one another again, Lin softly said good-bye. Then the acupuncture master had come, smiling and ironic as he had been in his best days, before he was beat down by the delirium of senility, and stayed with Tao, keeping him company and answering his questions until the sun rose, the neighborhood awoke, and he heard the discreet taps of his assistant at the door. Tao Chi’en got up, refreshed and renewed, as if after a peaceful sleep, dressed, and went to open the door.
“Close the office. I will not attend patients today, I have other things to do,” he announced to his assistant.
The investigations of that day changed the course of Tao Chi’en’s destiny. The girls behind the bars had come from China, picked up in the street or sold by their own fathers with the promise that they were going to the Golden Mountain to be married. Brokers selected the strongest and cheapest among them, not the most beautiful, unless it was a matter of a special order by wealthy clients who acquired them as concubines. Ah Toy, the clever woman who had invented the spectacle of the voyeuristic holes in the wall, had become the city’s major importer of young flesh. For her chain of establishments she bought girls at the age of puberty because they were easy to tame and, after all, none lasted very long anyway. She was becoming famous and very rich; her coffers were overflowing and she had bought a palace in China where she planned to retire in her old age. She prided herself on being the Oriental madam with the best connections not only among Chinese but also influential Americans. She trained her girls to gather information, and so learned the personal secrets, political deals, and weaknesses of men who had power. If bribery failed, she had recourse to blackmail. No one dared defy her because everyone from the governor down lived in a glass house. Shipments of slaves came through the docks of San Francisco with no legal tie-ups and in full light of day. Ah Toy, however, was not the only trafficker; that vice was one of the most profitable and secure business dealings in California, as golden as the mines. Expenses were minimal, the girls were cheap, and they were transported in the holds of ships in large padded crates. They lived for weeks without knowing where they were going, or why; they saw day
light only when they were given lessons in their calling. During the crossing the sailors made it their business to train them, and by the time they got off the ship in San Francisco they had lost the last trace of innocence. Some died of dysentery, cholera, or dehydration; others managed to jump overboard during the minutes they were taken up to the deck to be washed down with saltwater. The rest were trapped; they spoke no English, they did not know that new country, they had no one to turn to. The immigration agents took bribes, turned a blind eye to the girls’ obvious distress, and signed the false adoption or marriage papers without reading them. Newcomers were met at the dock by an old prostitute whose heart had turned to black stone. She herded them with a cane, like cattle, right through the center of the city, in plain view of anyone who wanted to look. The minute they crossed into Chinatown they disappeared forever in the subterranean labyrinth of dark rooms, false corridors, twisting stairs, hidden doors, and double walls where police never ventured because everything that happened there, they said, was the business of the Chinks, a yellow race of perverts with whom it was best not to meddle.
In an enormous below-street-level area ironically called “The Queen’s Room,” the girls confronted their fate. They were allowed one night’s rest; they were bathed, fed, and sometimes forced to drink a cup of liquor to quiet them a little. At the hour of the auction, they were taken naked into a room crowded with buyers of every conceivable ilk who felt them, checked their teeth, put their fingers anywhere they pleased, and finally made their offers. Some girls were sold to high-class bordellos or the harems of the rich; the strongest often ended up with factory owners, miners, or Chinese farmers, where they worked for the remainder of their brief existences. Most stayed in the cribs of Chinatown. Old whores taught them their duties; they learned to tell brass from gold, so they would not be cheated, to attract clients and please them without complaint, however humiliating or painful their demands. To give the transaction an air of legality, the girls signed a contract, which they couldn’t read, selling themselves for five years, but it was craftily calculated to ensure that they would never be free. For every day they were sick, two weeks were added to their time of service, and if they attempted to escape they were enslaved for life. They lived crammed into unventilated rooms divided by heavy curtains, laboring like galley slaves until they died. It was there Tao Chi’en went that morning, accompanied by the spirits of Lin and his acupuncture master. An adolescent scantily clad in a smock led him to a filthy straw mattress behind a curtain, held out her hand, and asked him to pay first. She took his six dollars, lay down on her back and spread her legs, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Her pupils were dull and she was breathing with difficulty; he realized she was drugged. He sat beside her, pulled down her smock, and tried to stroke her head, but she screamed and bared her teeth, ready to bite him. Tao Chi’en moved away; he spoke to her a long time in Cantonese, without touching her, observing recent bruises, until the litany of his voice calmed her. Finally she began to answer his questions, more with gestures than words, as if she had lost the use of language, and he learned some details of her captivity. She could not tell him how long she had been there because counting days was a futile exercise, although it could not have been long since she still remembered her family in China with heartrending precision.
When Tao Chi’en estimated that his time behind the curtain was used up, he left. The same old woman who had received him the night before was waiting at the door but she gave no sign of recognizing him. From there Tao went to ask questions in saloons, gambling halls, opium parlors, and then visited other physicians in the quarter, until little by little he fit together the pieces of that puzzle. When the little singsong girls were too sick to keep working, they were taken to the “hospital,” as they called the secret rooms he had seen the previous night, and left there with a cup of water, a little rice, and a lamp with oil enough for a few hours. The door was opened again a few days later when someone went in to be sure the girl was dead. If she was alive, she was killed; none ever saw sunlight again. Tao Chi’en had been called only because the usual zhong yi hadn’t been available.
The idea of helping the girls wasn’t his, he would tell Eliza nine months later, but Lin’s and the acupuncture master’s.
“California is a free state, Tao. Slavery is outlawed. Go to the American authorities.”
“Not everyone enjoys freedom. White people are blind and deaf, Eliza. Those girls are invisible, like the insane and beggars and dogs.”
“And the Chinese don’t care about them?”
“Some do, like me, but no one is willing to risk his life defying the criminal tongs. Most people believe that if things have been run that way for centuries in China, there is no reason to criticize what goes on here.”
“But that’s very cruel!”
“It isn’t cruelty. It’s just that human life is not valued in my country. There are many, many people, and there are always more children than the family can feed.”
“But in your mind those girls aren’t garbage, Tao . . .”
“No. Lin and you have taught me a lot about women.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I should have listened when you told me to come look for gold, you remember? If I were wealthy, I would buy them.”
“But you aren’t. Besides, all the gold in California wouldn’t be enough to buy every one of them. You have to stop the traffic.”
“That’s impossible, but I can save a few if you help me.”
Tao told Eliza that in recent months he had rescued eleven girls, but only two had survived. His formula was risky, and not very effective, but he couldn’t think of another way. He had offered to treat the girls without charge when they were sick or got pregnant if in exchange they would hand over the dying girls to him. He bribed the old whores to call him when it was time to send a singsong girl to the “hospital”; he and his assistant would go to the brothel, load the dying girl onto a stretcher, and take her away. “For experiments,” Tao Chi’en explained, although he was rarely questioned. The girl wasn’t worth anything anymore, and this doctor’s extravagant perversion saved the management the problem of getting rid of her. The transaction benefited both parties. Before taking the sick girl Tao Chi’en would hand them a death certificate and ask for the contract she had signed so there would be no claims. In nine instances, the girls were beyond help, and Tao’s role was simply to be with them in their last hours, but two had lived.
“What did you do with them?” asked Eliza.
“I have them in my room. They are still weak, and one seems half crazy, but they will get well. My assistant stayed to look after them while I came to find you.”
“I see.”
“I can’t keep them cooped up any longer.”
“Maybe we can send them back to their families in China.”
“No! They’ll go right back to being slaves. They can be saved in this country, I just don’t know how.”
“If the authorities won’t help you, good people will. We’ll go to the churches and the missionaries.”
“I don’t think Christians are going to care about these Chinese girls.”
“How little you trust the human heart, Tao!”
Eliza left her friend drinking tea with Joe Bonecrusher, wrapped up a loaf of freshly baked bread, and went to visit the blacksmith. She found James Morton at the anvil, sweating, naked from the waist up, wearing a leather apron and a kerchief tied around his forehead. The heat was unbearable and the place smelled of smoke and candescent metal. The forge was a large wood building with a dirt floor and a double door that was left open winter and summer during work hours. At the front was a large table for conducting business with customers, and behind it, the anvil. The instruments of Morton’s trade hung from walls and roof beams, tools and wrought iron fashioned by Morton. At the rear, a ladder gave access to a loft that served as a bedroom, protected from the customer’s eyes by an oilcloth curtain. The space below the loft was furni
shed with a tub for bathing and a table and two chairs; the only decorations were an American flag on the wall and three wildflowers in a vase on the table. Esther was ironing a mountain of clothes, her enormous belly bobbing and sweat pouring, but she was singing as she wielded the heavy irons. Love and pregnancy had made her beautiful, and peace lighted her like a halo. She took in washing, work as arduous as her husband’s with his anvil and hammer. Three times a week she loaded a cart with dirty clothes, went to the river, and spent a good part of the day on her knees, soaping and scrubbing. If the sun was shining she dried the clothes on the rocks, but often she had to bring everything back wet. Then came the chore of starching and ironing. James Morton had not been able to persuade her to stop that brutal work; she did not want the baby to be born where they were and was saving every cent to move their family to a house in town.
“Chile Boy!” she cried, and welcomed Eliza with a hug. “It’s been a long time since you came to visit.”
“How pretty you’re looking, Esther! I’ve really come to see James,” she said, handing her friend the bread.
The man put down his tools, mopped sweat with his kerchief, and led Eliza to the backyard, where Esther joined them with three glasses of lemonade. The afternoon was cool and the sky cloudy but there were no signs of winter. The breeze bore the scent of newly mown hay and damp earth.
Joaquín
In the winter of 1852, the residents of northern California ate peaches, apricots, grapes, sweet corn, watermelon, and cantaloupe while in New York, Washington, Boston, and other important American cities people resigned themselves to seasonal scarcities. Paulina’s ships brought from Chile the delights of the Southern Hemisphere’s summer, which arrived unblemished in their beds of blue ice. Her business was doing much better than her husband’s and brother-in-law’s gold, even though they no longer got three dollars for a peach or ten for a dozen eggs. The Chilean peasants the Rodríguez de Santa Cruz brothers had working at their placers had been nearly wiped out by Yanquis who had appropriated the fruit of months of work, hanged the overseers, horsewhipped and cut off the ears of several men, and run off the rest. That episode had been published in the newspapers, but the Santa Cruz family learned the hair-raising details from an eight-year-old boy, the son of one of the overseers, who had seen the white men torture and kill his father. Paulina’s ships also carried theater companies from London, opera from Milan, and musical theater from Madrid, companies that played for a short while in Valparaíso and then continued north. Tickets were sold months in advance, and on performance days San Francisco’s best society, in gala finery, attended theaters where they sat beside rustic miners in work clothes. Ships did not return empty: they carried American flour, and passengers cured of the fantasy of gold returning to Chile as poor as they had left.
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