City of Tranquil Light

by Bo Caldwell

  After breakfast we boarded a Chinese junk that would take us fifty miles west on Soochow Creek, and that night we slept crammed together on the center deck of the junk, our luggage stacked around us and beneath us and a mat of oiled bamboo above us. The next evening we reached Yun Liang Ho, the Grand Canal, which stretched from Tientsin in the north to Hangchow in the south, linking the country’s two largest rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow River, and many smaller canals. There Edward hired a houseboat to carry us one hundred miles north to the city of Yung Nien Ch’eng—City in Pursuit of Happiness—in Shantung province.

  The houseboat would be our home for the next few weeks. Sixty feet long and fifteen feet wide, it had a flat bottom and an unpainted hull made of heavy timber finished with tung oil. It sat low in the water, its deck only four feet above the water’s surface, with the mast behind the cockpit, where the crew cooked their meals. The six boatmen would eat and sleep on the deck of the wide prow, while the captain, Wen Yeh, and his fifteen-year-old son, Liang, shared the rear of the boat. In the middle were the two small rooms that made up the passenger quarters. Katherine, Agnes, and Ruth shared one room, and Edward, Jacob, and I the other. There was also a small common area with a table and chairs and a makeshift stove made from a square kerosene tin, where Edward would prepare our meals.

  Edward supplied blankets and thick cotton quilts for our mattresses, and as we settled into our temporary home I eyed my surroundings with suspicion, for even with our luggage stowed in the hold beneath the floorboards, the provisions we had brought were everywhere: sacks of potatoes and rice, boxes of wood and charcoal, crates of medical supplies, the chairs Edward had bought in Seattle. I had always been clumsy and was certain I would trip over everything.

  We slept on board that night and were awakened early the next morning by a great deal of shouting and running and what sounded like the squawking of a rooster. When we came on deck we found Wen Yeh standing at the front of the boat holding a cock he had just killed, sprinkling its blood on the prow as a way to appease the spirits and ensure a safe voyage. Edward told him that our God was watching over us and that it was unnecessary to appease any spirits, but Wen Yeh was unconvinced. The canal was a dangerous place, he said, plagued by evil spirits and bandits, and threatening for the more immediate reason that none of the boatmen could swim.

  The morning was cold and breezy; the crew hoisted the sail and began to row, singing to the wind. Because there was no way to heat the cabins, being inside wasn’t much warmer than being outside, so after a breakfast of rice porridge and tea, I sat in the open prow of the boat, studying and looking out at my strange new surroundings. Most of the other boats on the canal were long narrow sampans, which were made of three planks, and wupans, made of five planks, all of them with bamboo roofs over their middle sections. Large eyes were painted on both sides of their bows, for it was believed that, without eyes, boats could not see ahead. Children ran and played on their decks; laundry hung from the awnings. There were also other houseboats, like ours, and junks with square white sails and hulls of red and blue and orange.

  On the canal embankment, mules loaded down with large wicker baskets full of vegetables plodded to the nearest market town. Men balanced huge baskets hung from carrying poles stretched across their shoulders, and women walked with swaddled babies strapped on their backs. Beyond the embankment were fields of winter wheat broken up by clusters of earthen houses with black tile roofs.

  When his father didn’t need him, Liang sat with me and helped me with my vocabulary. I would point to something and ask what it was—Na shih shen-mo?—and Liang would give its Chinese name: sky, water, land, foot, hand, head, eye, mouth, rice. At the end of the day, our houseboat and the other boats on the canal anchored for the evening, for no one traveled at night. The boatmen lowered the sail and three of them crossed the wide plank of wood that stretched to the embankment and pulled the boat toward them with bamboo ropes. In the prow of the boat, Wen Yeh beat a huge brass gong to frighten away evil spirits for the night, for they were said to be afraid of noise.

  November 11, 1906

  Today is my birthday—I am twenty-two years old—a fact I’ve kept secret because I don’t want a fuss. We are traveling north on the Grand Canal and everything feels wet: my clothes, shoes, bedding, books, hair, skin. I haven’t seen the sun since we left Shanghai, and I sleep on a bed of folded mildewed quilts.

  None of this bothers me. It’s my impatience that nags at me, for I long to be useful. I’ve been of some assistance to Ruth Ehren, whom I misjudged. She’s not morose; she’s in pain, suffering from an abscessed tooth, for which I’ve given her hot compresses. But I can’t help the people here until I know at least some of the language, so that is my task for now: learning to unlock this daunting secret code. I spend much of my time bent over C. W. Mateer’s Kuan hua lei pien—Mandarin lessons—but my advancement is slow. Edward said as much this morning. “Some find the language easier than others,” was his comment as he looked over my exercises. True enough: after studying the language for more than a month, I can do what the others could after only two weeks: write thirty characters, read sixty, and say a few words and sentences and be (mostly) understood. My astigmatism hinders my reading and is partly to blame for my frustration; the characters swim like ink stains and my eyes ache from the unfamiliar strain of reading up and down. To relieve my eyestrain Edward has suggested that for now I concentrate more on the spoken language than on the written. I like this advice—how wise people seem when they give us the counsel we want! I consider it permission to eavesdrop on the boatmen whenever I have the chance, and when I understand even a word or two, I am elated.

  When there is a little wind, the boat moves slowly up the canal and our journey is pleasant enough. But when the air is still, the men do the work and pull the boat themselves. All six of them—everyone except Wen Yeh and his son—cross to the embankment and put on harnesses that are attached to the boat with ropes made of hundreds of feet of braided bamboo, bamboo because it’s not absorbent and doesn’t become heavy when wet. Then, their harnesses in place, the boatmen begin trudging up the embankment, pulling the boat behind them, sometimes so far ahead of us that we lose sight of them, as Wen Yeh steers and Liang pushes the boat away from the shore with an iron-tipped pole.

  The boatmen’s labor is excruciating to watch. The burden of pulling the boat makes them stoop over so low that their hands brush the ground as they walk. Their slow chant is a moan, and they work without stopping for rest or food; in the waist of their trousers they keep hunks of dark bread that they chew on throughout the afternoon, not stopping until evening, when they tie up the boat.

  Seeing this yesterday was shocking. After breakfast Edward told us to leave the boat and cross to the embankment, why we didn’t know—until the boatmen began their exhausting work and we understood that we’d disembarked to lighten their load. I hated the sight of the men so burdened and did not see how we could travel this way in good conscience, but when I caught up with Edward on the towpath and asked if there wasn’t a more humane way to travel, he looked at me sharply. “You’ve been in China for less than a week and you’re already overhauling the economy and modes of transportation?” My expression must have registered the sting of his words, for he softened. “Katherine, there are practices in this country that you will dislike, I assure you. But some of these we must accept as they are. We are here to offer the people the gift of faith, not remake their way of life, even when the change seems necessary and right. It’s a question of choosing your battles. Remember that we’re guests, and uninvited ones at that.” He watched the trackers ahead of us for a moment. “We do what we can. Today that means getting off the boat and walking.”

  As it turns out, watching the trackers pull the boat is not the worst part of it; that comes at the end of the day when we reboard the boat and I see the toll the work takes on them. Their feet are raw from the rocks on the towpath and their hands are chapped and blistered. If they wa
sh, they do so in the dirty canal water and then dry themselves on their cotton trousers, which are understandably filthy; it’s as though their hands and feet become infected right before my eyes. They limp when they walk, their eyes are red and irritated from what I am certain is trachoma, and they have terrible hacking coughs from who knows what.

  As the boat’s captain does not acknowledge me, I asked Edward to see if I may help his men, but Wen Yeh refuses. I also asked Edward why Wen Yeh did not use younger men for such hard physical labor; I guessed the boatmen to be forty years old or more. Edward laughed grimly. “Subtract twenty,” he said. I said, “Excuse me?” and he nodded toward the boatmen. “The hardness of these people’s lives makes them look far older than they are. That’s my rule of thumb for guessing someone’s age here: subtract twenty years from how old they look.”

  When we had been traveling for eight days, Wen Yeh told Edward that there were rumors of bandits along the part of the canal we were approaching, and that we needed someone to keep watch at night while the captain and the other boatmen slept. Edward asked me to do this, which I took as a compliment and evidence of the high esteem in which he held me until I overheard him speaking to Jacob. “Will’s going to keep watch,” he said, and I felt a warm surge of pride. “He’s the youngest—he can spare a night’s sleep better than we can,” he added, and they laughed.

  That night after dinner I took my place at the boat’s helm, wrapped in my wool blanket and wearing socks as mittens. The water lapped the sides of the boat and I heard the boatmen talking on the prow; later I heard them snoring. The air was wet and heavy and the trees along the embankment were menacing in the darkness. Alone in the night, listening and watching for what or whom I did not know and worrying over what I would do if we came upon them or they upon us, I began to question my call. I felt I had been foolish and proud to have thought I was meant for the mission field; staying home with my family and working in the church I had grown up in seemed the choice I should have made. My doubts led to regret and worry, and I was soon miserable. The only sort of prayer was one of anger: I knew I wasn’t right for this. Why did You bring me here?

  My complaining eventually led to an uneasy sleep, and I awoke when the night sky had its first wash of gray. I was miserable; my anger was gone, replaced by a sick feeling of shame at my untrustworthiness. I had just enough time to try to look like someone who had been awake all night before the boatmen awoke and got to work.

  Later that day Edward asked me to accompany him to the nearest market. He was our cook, preparing simple meals that usually consisted of boiled potatoes with a few vegetables and sometimes a little fried pork or boiled fish. Every few days he disembarked and bought fresh fruits and vegetables, which he then boiled and peeled thoroughly, for the only fertilizer used was night soil—human waste—and parasites and amoebic dysentery were common.

  I accepted his invitation eagerly, for I was keen to see as much of this new country as I could. In the area of China we were passing through, the population was so dense that we were never far from a village or town, and therefore a market. Towns usually held markets every five days, and each town was known by the days of the lunar month on which its markets were held. A town that had its market on the first day would then have it five days later, on the sixth, and again on the eleventh, and so on, and was called a One-Six town. A town with a market on the second day and the seventh was a Two-Seven town, and so on. The people were accustomed to walking long distances to buy their food, so nearly every village had a market within reach every day of the month.

  As Edward and I began making our way through the village’s crowded streets, I had to work to stay with him, for the sights and sounds were nearly overwhelming. Men loaded down with firewood and huge bamboo baskets of vegetables labored under their heavy burdens while food vendors sold roasted chestnuts and boiled noodles. The stalls were filled with more goods than I’d ever seen in one place before—eggs and fruits and vegetables, steamed bread, chickens and pieces of meat hanging from hooks, black cloth shoes and skullcaps, medicinal roots and iron kettles. Many of the villagers had never seen a foreigner before, and as we passed they stopped and stared and pointed at us, yang-kuei-tze, the foreign devils.

  Edward bought what we would need for the next few days, and we started back to the houseboat. A group from the market followed us out of the village and as we made our way through the fields more people joined them, so that by the time we reached the canal several dozen people were following us. I saw from Edward’s expression that he was uneasy, and when we reached the boat Wen Yeh was pacing on the deck; the next village on the canal was known to be a bandit stronghold, and he wanted to get a safe distance past it before dark. But when Wen Yeh caught sight of the crowd, his expression changed from impatience to alarm. He motioned for us to hurry across the plank and called to Liang, who was standing on the embankment waiting to untie the boat, to come on board.

  A few men started yelling and others joined in. As I was crossing the wooden plank, Edward was in front of me and Liang was behind me. Someone threw a rock, which hit the plank near my feet with a loud thud, startling me and making me jump. I ran the last few feet across the plank, and as I stepped onto the boat I heard Liang stumble behind me, and I realized that my running must have caused him to lose his balance. I heard him cry out, and when I turned I saw he’d fallen into the canal.

  Liang couldn’t swim; none of the boatmen could. I pulled off my Chinese gown, jumped into the water, and began to move toward him; though he was only a few yards away, he was sinking. When I reached him I grasped his thick black hair and pulled his head to the surface, then grabbed hold of him with one arm and looked around for help. There were men in small boats nearby, but none moved toward us. Struggling, I pulled Liang back toward the houseboat as he fought against me in his panic. When we reached the plank I felt rocks below my feet, where Liang had landed in the water. Edward leaned down and grabbed my hand, and I pulled Liang closer, and lifted him partly out of the water for Edward to haul him up.

  I leaned against the wooden plank, my chest heaving as I tried to catch my breath. I looked to my left and found that the group that had followed us was still there, watching, only now they no longer looked hostile; they were laughing. I had no idea what had amused them; it was as if I were in a play I didn’t understand. I hoisted myself out of the water and onto the plank and went aboard the boat. The boatmen quickly pulled up the plank and Wen Yeh poled away from the embankment.

  Liang was sitting on the deck of the prow, coughing and trying to catch his breath. Katherine knelt at his feet, and I saw a bright red gash on his ankle. I went below to shed my wet clothes, frantic to get warm. My hands trembled so badly that undressing and dressing seemed to take hours, and as I worked at peeling my wet clothes off and pulling the dry clothes on, I asked myself angrily what had possessed me to come to this place. Pride, I thought ruefully; you have too high an opinion of yourself. But there was nothing to be done about that just then, and aside from being plucked from that boat and that continent, I had only one goal: to get warm. I put on nearly every piece of dry clothing I owned, then pulled the rough wool blanket from my cotton mattress and wrapped it tightly around me. Because I thought I was responsible for Liang’s fall and I was certain I would be greeted with anger and blame, my second goal was to not have to see anyone for the rest of the night. But I was weak from hunger and desperate for something to eat, so I took a deep breath and went up to the deck, still clutching the blanket.

  The sun had set. After making it a little farther up the canal, Wen Yeh had steered the boat to the embankment and the boatmen were tying up for the night. The air was knife-cold; in the darkening sky, handfuls of bright stars seemed to have been flung around a white shaving of moon. When I stepped onto the deck, Wen Yeh approached me and I readied myself for his anger. But instead he stood before me in silence, then knelt and bowed low, resting his head on the deck, and I heard the sound of weeping. I did not move; I h
ad no idea what to do. Finally he began speaking in hushed Mandarin. When he finished, I looked at Edward, waiting for him to translate.

  “He says Liang is yours now,” Edward said. “These people believe that if you save someone’s life, that person belongs to you, and you must take care of him the rest of his life. That’s why no one else tried to help—partly because they couldn’t swim but also because no one wanted another mouth to feed. They thought you were foolish to save him.”

  For a moment, I could only stare at Edward; nothing made sense. “But I didn’t do anything.”

  Edward nodded toward Wen Yeh. “To him you did. He’s certain that he’s lost his son.”

  “I would never take his son from him.”

  Edward nodded at Wen Yeh. “Tell him that.”

  I took a deep breath. “Wen Yeh,” I said, “please get up. You owe me nothing.”

  Edward translated, and Wen Yeh raised his head and met my eyes. Then he slowly stood, still bowing as he did so, and embraced me.

  Liang was sitting on the deck drinking tea, a white bandage on his ankle. He too hugged a blanket tightly around him, and when he saw me he laughed weakly and pointed, first at me, then at himself.