City of Tranquil Light

by Bo Caldwell

  He’s right. The people’s needs here are so great that two years of nursing training has indeed given me a good deal of experience, and there is much I can do, even with limited supplies. Each morning I find a few more patients waiting outside the kitchen door in the winter air, their faces drawn, the fear in their eyes showing how desperate they are. I am humbled by their trust; it must take a good deal of courage to accept help from someone considered hostile by so many. But there they stand, each morning a longer line of peasants and farmers and their timid children.

  The most common complaints—and all of these seem nearly epidemic—are malaria, jaundice, intestinal parasites, trachoma, and, in infants, lockjaw, but on any given day I see a dozen ailments in addition to these, some of which I can diagnose, some of which I can’t, and with these I just do my best. At night I search through the few medical books I have for diagnoses for what I’ve seen, neglecting my language study in the process, so that I remind myself of the mediocre student I was when I was younger. I can read medical texts for hours on end, but a page of my primer puts me to sleep.

  Which is one reason I’m behind. After two months’ study I am expected to be able to converse a fair amount and be understood with gestures, to know the Lord’s Prayer, and to have completed two dozen lessons in the primer. I can say the Lord’s Prayer start to finish, and because I am talking with patients I am making progress in the spoken language, and my conversation is passable. But it’s far from perfect; yesterday at market I thought I had asked for an orange, only to learn I’d asked for a saw. Next I said I wanted to buy a chicken and was told I’d requested a wife.

  It’s the written language that worries me. We are to take a comprehensive language exam when we have been in the field for six months, and I am significantly behind in my lessons, something I have hidden from Edward, who would not be pleased; he sees one’s progress in the language as a gauge of one’s seriousness about the work in general. But the people’s physical needs are too great, and at the end of the day when I am frantic to get to my medical books to see if the rashes and coughs and fevers I saw were what I thought they were, I push my homework aside with little trouble.

  When I had been in Ch’eng An Fu for three months, Edward asked me to go to Ta Ts’ai Chou, a city to the north. The city’s only missionary was an elderly Methodist minister who was going home on furlough and was not expected to return. I would move there with Mu Tseng Lee, an experienced Chinese preacher, and his wife. This was fine with me, and I was packed in less than an hour. I had only just unpacked, and I had few belongings anyway.

  In early February we arrived in Ta Ts’ai Chou, a name that meant City of Great Wealth for a place that was far from it. It was a good deal smaller than Ch’eng An Fu, home mostly to poor vendors and farmers. The vacated mission house consisted of a front room large enough for meetings, a bedroom behind the hall for the preacher and his wife, and a small room at the back of the house for me. I had no equipment for cooking, so the pastor and his wife shared their meals with me, usually millet gruel with a few boiled vegetables and steamed bread.

  I spent most of my time with Mu Tseng Lee, who was both devout and unorthodox. One afternoon a month after we arrived in Ta Ts’ai Chou, he asked me to accompany him on a visit to a sick friend. The day was mild for winter, and together we made our way through the midday crowds to the home of the sick man at the opposite end of town, where we found him lying underneath several quilts on the k’ang, a low, hollow brick bed connected to the stove so that the heat circulated through the platform. The earthen floor was swept clean, and on a wooden table was a shrine to the family’s ancestors. On another table sat a huge teakettle covered with a kind of blue quilted jacket.

  Mu Tseng Lee introduced me to the sick man and his family, a wife and two sons and their wives, all of whom watched us warily as they took turns sipping from the teakettle’s spout. Mu Tseng Lee sat on a small bench next to his friend, who held the pastor’s hand between his own and said something in hushed Mandarin. The pastor turned to me and translated. “He says we are kindness itself, and he prays we do not hurry away.”

  I nodded at the patient, and he smiled weakly.

  Mu Tseng Lee took his soft paper hymnbook from the large sleeve of his gown, turned to “What Can Wash Away My Sins? Nothing But the Blood of Jesus,” and began singing a Mandarin version of the hymn to his sick friend, though it was clear he knew the song by heart. Between the lines of the song the pastor also prayed over the sick man, all the while beating his friend on the head with the rolled-up hymnbook and using it to accentuate lines he particularly liked.

  I looked on, shocked but afraid to interrupt; perhaps this was his way of praying, I thought, or yet another Chinese custom I knew nothing about, for one of the few things I did know was how much I didn’t know. Mu Tseng Lee had told me that, according to Confucius, this realization was the beginning of wisdom. “ ‘To know what you know and know what you don’t know is the characteristic of one who knows.’ ”

  I said nothing, but sat there uncomfortably, as I silently prayed we weren’t doing any harm. Finally, after a few verses of the hymn and much enthusiastic and energetic prayer, Mu Tseng Lee stood to leave. His ailing friend took his hand again and spoke, and again the pastor translated. “My friend hopes that favorable winds may accompany us.”

  Once again I nodded, baffled. The patient did indeed seem somehow more comfortable. Or, I thought, perhaps he was just relieved that our visit was over.

  When we left the house, I asked Mu Tseng Lee the reason for his unusual method of prayer. He grunted. “That man, when he is well, turns from the right way. I thought I would beat the devil out of him.” I started to laugh, thinking it was a joke, but Mu Tseng Lee stopped walking and faced me. “You find evil humorous, my young friend?” I could only shake my head.

  From there the pastor planned to visit another friend. I felt I had witnessed enough prayer for the day, so after a short distance we parted ways and I continued on alone. A light wind carried the clean scent of wheat from the fields, and I headed toward South Gate so that I could leave the city and walk in the fields, something I enjoyed and did often, as it reminded me of home.

  The city was bustling, the streets crammed with people and carts and chickens and pigs. As I made my way toward South Gate, I found myself caught up in a mass of people all headed in that direction. I couldn’t have extracted myself if I’d wanted to; all I could do was keep moving forward, which I did without a fight, thinking I was going that way anyway, and there must be something to see.

  There was. Just outside the gate the group stopped and formed a half circle, in the center of which, ten yards in front of me, stood the magistrate and five armed soldiers. Three men knelt in front of the soldiers, their heads bowed with their necks stretched out, their hands tied behind them. They were naked from the waist up, and each of them repeated the same phrase: “Have mercy on me.”

  An old man next to me nodded toward the men and explained that they were begging the executioner not to cut their heads completely from their bodies. If the head remained connected to the body, even if only by a strip of skin, the condemned could be reincarnated. The victims’ relatives had spent a great deal of money to persuade the executioner to honor this request. When the old man finished speaking, he waited for me to respond; he seemed to expect me to be impressed. I nodded that I understood, and he returned his attention to the scene in front of us.

  I felt a strong sense of dread but there was nowhere to go; people were pressed in tightly on every side of me. Then it was too late: as the executioner stood next to the first man and stretched out his right arm, the onlookers murmured excitedly at the sight of the long knife and its wide blade and in three quick strikes the men’s heads were severed from their bodies.

  It was horrible. The victims’ heads fell to the ground and their bodies went limp. There was the quick red flow of blood, the shocked expressions on the dead men’s faces, their black queues lying in the dirt
. I wanted to run from the scene like a criminal, for I felt that being an onlooker to the slaughter implicated me. But I saw I was alone in these feelings. The magistrate had departed, the executioner was wiping the blood from his sword on his trousers, and people were chatting casually as they made their way back toward the city. The mood was as relaxed as if we had just watched a puppet show. A few people glanced at me, and I sensed them gauging my reaction. I saw no choice but to force composure on myself and return home.

  I became ill that night, feverish and coughing, gasping for air in my sleep, and in the morning I woke to find Mu Tseng Lee standing over me. I braced myself for his blows, thinking he was going to pray over me, but he only placed his hand gently on my wrist, feeling my pulse, then he asked to see my tongue. He nodded, and he said kindly, “My friend, you are sick from despair. This is how the heart speaks to us, through our illnesses.”

  I had no argument. My body ached, my chest was tight, my head throbbed. I had never felt so sick.

  Over the next few days my strength and appetite diminished, the fever and cough worsened, and the pastor grew worried, for what looked like a simple illness in that time and place could turn serious overnight. A cough could mean the common croup just as easily as a fatal case of diphtheria. I also felt sick in spirit and was home to a deep melancholy. The executions had stayed with me, and I did not see how I would ever feel comfortable in that place. I alternated between blaming my feelings on this backward society and blaming myself for failing to have the strength to tolerate it. I also missed home—my family, our farm, speaking German, sleeping in a bed, milk, bread, cheese, forks, clocks—and the longer I was gone the more intense my yearnings became. When I looked up at the night sky, it seemed impossible that my parents and siblings saw the same stars I did; I felt too far away to share the same heavens. Each evening when I went to bed I heard music from the flute played by someone in town, mournful, haunting melodies that were punctuated by the sharp clack of the wooden blocks the night watchman struck as he walked around the city wall. In the early dawn, I heard the sounds of animals dying and carcasses being beaten, for we lived near the slaughter man, who killed his pigs just before sunrise. I had hated the slaughter of animals on our farm, and the sounds of these dying animals tormented me.

  On the seventh day I was sick, Mu Tseng Lee sent word to Edward, who came to Ta Ts’ai Chou two days later. When he arrived he had only to look at me before murmuring the German word that had been in my mind for many days: “Heimweh,” he said. Homesick.

  I nodded, embarrassed but also relieved that he knew my secret, and I answered in our mother tongue, my voice hoarse from coughing, “Garrecht”—exactly right.

  Edward sighed. “It eases with time.”

  A few days later he took me back to Ch’eng An Fu, and while I felt like a failure, I was too sick to care much. Edward felt I was not well enough to stay in the room I’d occupied before, a small bedroom in the boys’ orphanage in the city. Instead I was given a storage room at the rear of the Geislers’ home, where under Naomi’s care I was able to recuperate from what she diagnosed as a persistent case of croup. I spent ten days wrapped tightly in a wool blanket, hot poultices on my neck and chest, potash tablets in my mouth, praying all the while that I could accept this country and its ways, for I knew I had to if I were to stay.

  April 2, 1907

  Three weeks ago Will Kiehn returned from Ta Ts’ai Chou. Now that he’s well, Edward has decided that he’ll remain in Ch’eng An Fu, so Will has moved from his sickroom back to the orphanage, where he is to oversee the thirty boys who live there and help Edward with the work of the mission.

  I am sure Will means well, but since his recovery he has been constantly underfoot. I catch him staring at me at odd times during the day and always at dinner, and when our eyes meet, his face reddens instantly. I am uncomfortable being the object of his—what—devotion? I have come to China not to be gazed at longingly by a farmer’s son but to give myself unreservedly to the work at hand. I sense such disquiet in him, and while I know it is not mine to speculate about, I do wonder if China is truly his calling.

  But at times I see there is more to him than first meets the eye, for what he may lack in perseverance he makes up for in goodness twofold. He is a sweet boy, kind and gentle. I say “boy” because even though I am only a year older, he seems several years my junior. I see him with the orphan boys, whom he clearly loves and treats not like charges but like younger brothers, jostling them as they walk together, teaching them to throw a baseball, teasing them. Edward is so much older than the boys that this is a new experience for them, and I see them soaking up Will’s easy affection like starved pups.

  He is also diligent. He has rejoined me in my sessions with Li Lao Shih and he breezes through our weekly language assignments, which are ordeals for me. We are to complete thirty lessons in the phrase book and twenty grammar and idiom lessons in the wretched primer, which asks us to translate odd English sentences into Mandarin and vice versa. (“The thieves made a hole in the wall.” “I have guessed his riddle.” “They shot him dead with an arrow.”) We are also to learn China’s geography and be able to converse with good pronunciation. This we learn through tone drills in which Li Lao Shih shouts a sentence to us and we shout it back to him. The first time we did this I thought our teacher must be somewhat deaf and that I was to shout everything at him. But after the lesson when I yelled, “Li Lao Shih, would you like some tea?” he quietly said that I should not trouble myself about tea, but perhaps I would find it pleasant to lower my voice. It was only then that I realized he’s not deaf at all; shouting lessons is just how they do things here. That was my lesson for the day: Don’t yell at your teacher except when practicing tones.

  Behind the Geislers’ home was a large open yard in which Edward planned to build a small school. One evening in April, a month after my return to Ch’eng An Fu, he said the time had come to begin building. I nodded eagerly at this, for I felt here at last was something I knew how to do. I had helped my father then and members of our small church at home raise a simple wooden structure many times, and I hinted to Edward that I was an expert at such endeavors, even implying that he was fortunate to have my help. He smiled wryly and said, “Good. I’ll rely on you.”

  I went to bed that night with the too-sweet feeling of unwarranted pride, and when I awoke the next morning I was confident and energetic. We would purchase the lumber we needed and get to work, I thought, and be building by noon. But at breakfast when I asked Edward where we would buy the lumber, he laughed.

  “We don’t buy lumber,” he said, “we buy trees.”

  I nodded; that was reasonable, something I should have thought of. Of course there weren’t lumberyards here; we would be cutting the trees down ourselves.

  Edward explained that because trees were not plentiful, it was necessary to use a ching-chi—an intermediary—to find a landowner amenable to selling the trees growing on his property. A week earlier the ching-chi had located a farmer near Kuang P’ing Ch’eng on whose land grew a small grove of elm trees, and after much bargaining, a fair price had been agreed upon.

  “So now we dig,” Edward said.

  “You mean cut.”

  He shook his head without looking up from his breakfast. “Dig. We don’t cut trees down; we dig them up.” Then he looked at me evenly for a moment. “You’re still thinking as though you were in America, Will, when you’re here on the other side of the earth.”

  I nodded, reminded yet again that I had much to learn.

  That morning after breakfast we set out for the field where the trees grew, carrying as many tools as we could: spades, picks, shovels, saws, and an ax. Because the trees grew at the edge of a family graveyard, men in the city were frightened of disturbing the spirits of the dead and therefore unwilling to uproot the trees. Instead, Edward had asked me to bring along four of the older orphan boys, who, I could see, were clinging tightly to my assurances that there were no evil spirits and th
at no harm would come to them.

  As we walked, people began following us, for our small procession had aroused their curiosity. By then I was used to being watched and followed; it would have been far stranger and even ominous had people ignored us. Someone asked where we were going, and someone else answered, “They are going to dig trees at Lan’s farm, near the grave mounds.” “How do they dig the trees on a graveyard?” the first man asked. “With them, it is no problem,” the second one answered. “When they get to the place, they all kneel and pray. After their prayer, the tree comes out of the ground by itself.” Edward laughed grimly and muttered, “Would that it were so.”

  When we arrived at the appointed spot, we found the trees next to two dozen graves marked by cone-shaped mounds of earth, an eerie sight in the middle of a wheat field. The people believed that the happiness of the dead depended on a suitable burial, and this site had been deemed an auspicious resting place, despite its being in the middle of a field, forcing the farmer to plow and plant around the graves year after year.

  The trees did not come out by the roots as the villager had predicted; rather, we dug them out, as Edward had said we would, hacking through root systems and throwing shovelful after shovelful of dirt to the side. It was grueling, tedious work; I did not think it would end. But eventually Edward told us to put down our tools. He, the boys, and I surrounded the tree, and with all our combined effort and might we pulled and pushed the tree from the earth.

  Then we started on the next one, and at the end of the day, when I did not see how we would have the strength to walk home, we gathered everything and took all of it with us—trunks, branches, twigs, sticks, roots, leaves. Everything would be used; what wasn’t suitable for building would be used to make farm tools, and what wasn’t used for tools would be burned as fuel in the kitchen. Some of it we carried in bundles on our backs, some on carts that Edward had hired.