City of Tranquil Light

by Bo Caldwell

  We stood holding Hsiao Lao between us, facing a crowd that teemed with rage. “My friends,” I said, and a few men jeered in response, “this man deserves justice, whatever his crime. Let Hsiao Lao be taken to the magistrate to learn his punishment and his fate.”

  Someone called out that he should be killed, and I stood my ground. “Do you want his blood on your hands?” Silence. “Do you?” More silence. “Chung Hao and I will escort Hsiao Lao to the yamen. Accompany us if you must. This is the magistrate’s decision.”

  The group was suspicious; I had suddenly become a not-to-be-trusted foreigner again, and not the man they had treated as a friend for many years. But after some discussion they agreed. Two of the angriest men demanded that they accompany Chung Hao and me, and the four of us set out for the yamen, the crowd following us.

  Beaten and barely conscious, Hsiao Lao, like his son, was carried through the streets to the yamen. Once again the magistrate refused to make an immediate decision; he had Hsiao Lao sent to the jail, then ordered everyone to leave until he had settled on the bandit’s fate.

  Despite Hsiao Lao’s guilt, the cruel death that awaited him sickened me. When the magistrate had sent everyone away, I sent word to him that I urgently needed to speak with him, hoping that the fact that Katherine’s friendship with his wife and the fact that she had attended to his family many times over the years would cause him to honor my request.

  I waited for an hour then returned home, but the next afternoon a messenger from the yamen came to the compound, saying that the magistrate would see me. At the yamen, the guard escorted me across the main courtyard and into the magistrate’s residence, then through a maze of hallways to a rear chamber.

  The magistrate was seated at a low table, drinking tea, and he nodded to me when I entered. He seemed to be in a better humor than he had been the day before. I bowed and stated my business. “Magistrate, my heart is heavy. Hsiao Lao is guilty of great wrongs, but he does not deserve the torture that awaits him. No man does.”

  The magistrate said nothing.

  “You are an enlightened man, Magistrate. You rule the city of Kuang P’ing Ch’eng with justice and wisdom, and I know you must see that torture is most backward.”

  The magistrate remained silent. He appeared bored and I thought he was about to send me away.

  When a minute had passed and he still had not spoken, I said, “I suspect Hsiao Lao will die from his beating. If you do nothing, he will pass to the next life in a very short time, and his death will not be the result of your actions. It is wrong to cause any man, even a man like him, to endure great and unnecessary pain. Surely you see this.”

  When the magistrate still said nothing, I relinquished my ideas of what should happen to the bandit and the idea that I had any control over his fate. I surrendered him to God, and I whispered in English, “Your will be done.”

  The magistrate leaned forward, suddenly interested. “What did you say, mu shih?”

  I was drained and answered with the Mandarin translation of my prayer.

  I saw approval come over his face. “You are wise, mu shih,” he said, and I saw that he had misinterpreted my prayer; he thought I had been speaking to him. He nodded appreciatively at what he took to be my submissiveness and he began to laugh. “I know of your love of humanity. Unlike you, I believe Hsiao Lao deserves to endure great pain. But because of the respect you have shown me, I will honor your request. The people of this city have suffered a great deal at his hands, but we will delay his punishment one day. If he does not die by morning, he will endure the fate he has earned.” He looked at me. “You would like to see him?”

  I nodded.

  “You may go to him.” He motioned for his aide and whispered to him. “He will give you my seal and pass.”

  I left the magistrate and went quickly to the nearest eating house, where I purchased as much cooked food as I could pay for—noodles and vegetables in soup—then had the proprietor pack the steaming food in wooden buckets padded with a rough towel. At the jail, which was within the yamen walls, a guard led me into a dark and cramped wooden enclosure where perhaps thirty men crouched together on a brick floor behind wooden bars. The place was dank and horrible, the air foul, a home to nothing but misery and despair. I felt its hopelessness as soon as I entered.

  At first the men would not let themselves be seen, but after some minutes, a few of them began to move toward me from the darkness. I told them I had brought food and I asked them to hold their bowls out to me, and when they did I began to fill bowl after bowl. They were ravenous, and as I passed the bowls back into the darkness, the room grew quiet except for the noisy sounds of them eating, which was like the sound of mongrel dogs being fed. Some of the men were there for crimes they had committed, but many others had been imprisoned for far lesser reasons, such as being unable to pay their debts. One man, old and infirm, was an honest shopkeeper, now disgraced; he had been jailed because his son was a bandit. Another was jailed because his neighbor claimed he had talked of joining a bandit gang, while others were imprisoned for their opium use.

  As one man after another handed his bowl forward, I looked in vain for Hsiao Lao. When I did not find him, I asked the jailer, who laughed and said the famous bandit had warranted special treatment. The guard would take me to him when I was ready.

  When I had served all of the food except for the portion I saved for Hsiao Lao, I motioned to the guard, who led me farther back into the jail, down a crude hallway with almost no light at all. At the end of the passage was a wooden gate, which the guard unlocked with a huge iron key. He opened the gate then stood aside and said, “Here is your great bandit chief.”

  Behind the gate was a small enclosure that was like a wooden cage. I saw nothing there at first, but as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw a bent-over form in the corner. As I moved forward, I saw it was indeed Hsiao Lao, though so changed I am not sure how I recognized him. He cowered as I came near, and I said, “Hsiao Lao, it is mu shih.”

  He did not move. I knelt next to him and he turned toward me, and as my eyes adjusted and I was able to look at him, I was shocked by what I saw. Without meaning to I asked, “What have they done?”

  He looked far worse than he had when the magistrate’s guards had taken charge of him the day before; his face was bruised and bloody and raw, his eyes nearly swollen shut. He had been stripped of his gray scholar’s gown and the shoes he had worn and was now clothed only in a pair of ragged trousers. He shivered from the cold and shock and pain. He was filthy, his hair matted and caked with blood, and when I reached out to touch him, he shook violently and recoiled from me.

  “Hsiao Lao,” I said. “Do not be afraid. I will not hurt you.”

  He turned and squinted at me, and I saw recognition come into his face. I asked the guard for water, then asked again when he did not bring it, and when he finally did appear with a wooden bowl, I took the towel that had padded the bucket of food, wetted it, and began to wash Hsiao Lao. He pulled away from me at first, but I spoke to him softly and continued, cleaning some of the caked dirt from his face and head and his arms and legs as gently as I could. By the time I began to bathe his feet, the towel was as filthy as the bandit chief’s trousers, but I continued. I had brought ointment and bandages with me, and when I had washed him as best as I could, I began dressing his wounds, all the while trying to ignore the anger I felt at what he had endured.

  Hsiao Lao said nothing all this time, but he gradually stopped trembling. Finally he spoke, his voice hoarse. “You are my physician once again, mu shih. Only this time I am the captive.”

  “It would seem so,” I said.

  The bandit smiled slightly as he watched me pour vegetables and noodles into a bowl. I fed it to him in small bites, and when he had finished it, he lay back and seemed to be in less pain.

  I said, “I have asked that there be no torture.”

  He shook his head. “The magistrate will not agree to this,” he said matter-of-factly. “He
will want my punishment to exceed my crimes. As do I—for the crime of raising a shameful son.”

  “The magistrate has agreed to wait one day,” I said. I paused, trying to think how to phrase the rest of it, but Hsiao Lao did it for me.

  “I suspect my spirit will leave for the other side during the night.”

  “If God wills it.”

  “And perhaps I will meet your God.” He swallowed with difficulty and closed his eyes. “I believe He will judge me harshly, mu shih. But I am not afraid.”

  “You are His beloved son,” I answered, “and He is a Great Mystery, far beyond my knowing. He does not abandon what He has lovingly created, and what happens next is up to Him. I will pray for you.”

  Hsiao Lao looked at me. “Why would you pray for me, mu shih? I have read of your God in what you gave me and I have learned a good deal about Him. I have come to know that I am a sinful man, whereas you are a man of great faith. You have honored me by being my friend, and this mystifies me.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I think it likely that I had medicine that would have saved your firstborn so long ago. How is it that you do not think me your enemy? How can you wish me well?”

  In my mind, I saw the bandit chief’s boxes of loot so many years earlier, and the box from Parke-Davis. I remembered the pain in my heart when I saw it, and I felt it all again, fresh and hot. “Yes,” I said. “You did have the medicine. Had we had it, my daughter might have lived.”

  “Yet you do not despise me.”

  “No. I forgave you long ago. My God forgives me and asks that I forgive others in turn.”

  Hsiao Lao smiled weakly. “He is a foolish God, mu shih, to ask you to treat your enemies in this way. Your God does not behave in the way I would expect.”

  I laughed suddenly, for I had thought the same many times—how foolish God is with me, my sweet, spendthrift, profligate Lord, bestowing on me more gifts than I can number and certainly more than I deserve, believing in me more than makes sense, asking of me things I would not have thought myself capable of. “It may seem that way, Hsiao Lao. He is foolish in His giving and in His care for us. He has spoiled me throughout my life.”

  “I saw this same foolishness in you when I forced you to treat my men. I did not expect you to help them. I thought at first you might try to kill them, then I saw you were not devious enough. But as I watched I saw your kindness to them. I do not understand this.”

  “They were hurt and in pain. I have learned to do what God places in front of me, whatever that is.”

  “Were you not angry? They had stolen from you.”

  “As had you,” I said. “But I asked Him to help me not act on my anger, and to concentrate on the work at hand instead.”

  Hsiao Lao nodded. “This is an enlightened view, mu shih. Foolish but enlightened.”

  “My friend, do you not find that the foolish and the enlightened are often one and the same?”

  The bandit chief smiled slightly, then became so still that I thought he had lost consciousness from his beatings. Finally he opened his eyes. “Mu shih, since I met you, I have had moments when this God of yours has seemed very real to me, times when I have felt that Someone I cannot see is very near. He seems so now; I sense Him in this place with us, and while I should be consumed by fear, I am not. I cannot explain this.”

  I was caught by surprise both at Hsiao Lao’s admission and at the truth of it, for God did seem very present in that wretched cell. “He does not ask us to understand Him, only to trust Him.”

  “I find myself in a place I do not know. Certainty has always been my companion. But now I cannot say that I truly believe, nor can I say that what you teach is false.”

  “Faith is a gift,” I said. “All we can do is be open to it. The rest is up to the Giver of that gift. And it is never too late to receive it.”

  The bandit regarded me evenly and put his hand on my arm. “Goodbye, mu shih. You will not see me again.”

  I placed my hands on his head and blessed him. “You are God’s son,” I said, “His beloved son, and you are in His hands. I release you into His care.”

  Our compound was perhaps an hour’s walk from the city jail, but it seemed far longer that night. While I knew that Hsiao Lao was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people and for much suffering, I grieved for him, for I had come to love him.

  When I reached home, Katherine was waiting for me, and when she looked at me, she nodded as if she knew everything that had transpired. She embraced me and then motioned for me to sit down at the table, and she placed a bowl of steaming noodles in front of me. When I started to say I had no appetite, she picked up the chopsticks she had set out and handed them to me. “You won’t do others any good if you have no strength of your own,” she said. And so I ate.

  That night I dreamed I was riding in a cart on a freshly plowed field, crossing the furrows at right angles in a manner so violent I was nearly thrown from the bench of the cart. I knew that going across the furrows rather than through them made no sense and I didn’t know why the cart was going in this direction, but I could not turn it around. Then I realized that Katherine was trying to wake me and that it was our house that was shaking violently. We were in the midst of an earthquake. As I got out of bed, the room rocked and the tiles on the roof knocked loudly against each other and the window glass rattled, and for a moment I was irritated at how difficult it was going to be to replace it if it broke, not comprehending that we might have far more serious worries. One of the walls of our bedroom seemed to be at an odd angle and the floor shifted under my bare feet, but by the time Katherine and I had hurried downstairs and outside into the courtyard, the world was somehow still again, and everyone in our compound safe.

  In the early morning light when we were able to survey the damage, we found it was comparatively small. The compound’s buildings had been well built, and they were for the most part unharmed. A few dozen roof tiles were scattered around on the ground, and there were new cracks in many of the walls. Broken plates lay on the kitchen floor and broken bottles on the dispensary floor, but the buildings themselves were intact.

  When I went into the city later that morning the damage was more substantial: many of the mud walls that comprised the city’s houses had caved in, and dozens of homes had collapsed, so that it was even more a city of ruins than it had been the day before. The morning was beautiful and clear and eerily peaceful until tremors shook the earth and made roof tiles drop crazily to the ground. The streets were busy with people cleaning up and talking about how their fate compared to their neighbors’ and wanting to put forth their ideas on which gods had been angered and were therefore to blame for the wreckage.

  I had not planned on going to the jail and found myself walking in the direction of the yamen almost against my will and with a sense of dread. I was thinking I could ask to see the magistrate again and plead with him once more to let Hsiao Lao die in peace, and I was anxious about how I would do this.

  But when I turned toward the yamen’s entrance, my dread and anxiety turned to wonder, for where I had expected to see the imposing west wall of the jail, I saw nothing but rubble. The outer walls had come down, and with it the interior walls and supports, and although most of the yamen’s other buildings remained, the entire jail had collapsed. Men were using poles to push in what remained so that those nearby would not be injured, and in front of me were the jail’s ruins, a heap of broken stones and mud bricks and debris surrounding nothing but hazy dust in the bright afternoon sun. But no wall was needed, for the chaos of the trembling night had set the captives free.

  We felt tremors from the earthquake for three days afterward. Eventually we learned that the earthquake’s center had been far to the west, nearly to the Tibetan border, with catastrophic effects. Villages were destroyed, the topography permanently altered. Streams became lakes, mountains grew from plains, and the event came to be known as “the time when the mountains walked.”

  In Kuang
P’ing Ch’eng the debris was cleared, and over time the houses and jail were rebuilt. Only two bodies were found in the wreckage, neither of them Hsiao Lao’s; no one knew what had happened to him or to the other prisoners. They simply disappeared.

  But the earthquake and the prisoners were both soon forgotten, for on a cool morning in March of 1922, three months to the day after the earthquake, it started to rain, the first precipitation in nearly two years. People stood outside with their hands outstretched, their faces turned upward to the slate gray sky. Men hurried to put out every vessel they had to catch the rainwater while children played in the mud and mothers laughed. A week later it rained again, and ten days after that a third time, softening the earth enough to plant spring wheat, and the Psalmist’s words took root in my heart: He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass; as showers that water the earth.

  In that short time, life began to change. Men once again got to work selling whatever they could, from the clothes off their backs to bricks from the walls of their homes, but now it was with a purpose and a plan, for they used whatever cash they could come up with to buy what had become precious overnight: seeds. We began distributing seed grain sent by the Red Cross to increase the likelihood of an extensive sowing of spring wheat, and by May the landscape was transformed. We no longer lived in a desert; the fields were lined with long even rows of what looked at first like grass. A few weeks later we were surrounded by verdant fields graced with healthy young plants, glorious in the morning sun.

  Civil War

  1925–1928

  By 1925 the lawlessness and turmoil of the previous decade had grown into widespread civil war between south and north. The south was largely controlled by the Kuomintang party in Canton, which hoped to establish the new republic and unify the country under one central government. The north was in the hands of warlords, renegade military leaders who ruled the regions they controlled like small kingdoms. They punished trespassers, executed traitors, and grew rich by taxing their subjects and raiding their villages and towns.