The Blue-Eyed Shan

by Becker, Stephen;

  His father had other plans for him. The boy was bright, personable, even handsome with that round face, that joyous youthful smile. He was, furthermore, of a generous and outgoing disposition, the result perhaps of affectionate coddling by his mother, the second and third wives, the ma-fu and a household staff of fourteen considered—so exalted were treasury officials—superior to independent shopkeepers. His father had learned much in the treasury—for example, that money was good, that foreigners were powerful, and that you won a man’s esteem, as you did the world’s, by admiring his or its expressions of humble altruism while facilitating his or its murders, rapes and thefts. The necessary shifts and contrivances required an education of manifold and complex aspects.

  Yang Yu-lin was consequently tutored by a motley faculty that slipped in and out of his life at confusing intervals: a seedy scholar who had failed the fifth-level Civil Service examinations, a musician who prepared for each lesson with a full hour of silent meditation, a Scottish lady as outlandish as a penguin, a French former sergeant given over to opium, an aged archer formerly of the Empress’s guard, a calligrapher who fabricated his own brushes and ground his own ink.

  And when the time came, Yang Yu-lin was enrolled in a foreign university in Peking, a Roman Catholic institution run by Frenchmen and their Chinese minions. Its Catholicism was incidental. Yang’s father had no doctrinal prejudices; worshipping his own ancestors, conferring with Confucius and communing with Lao-tzu, being, in short, an ignorant and barbarous reactionary, he believed, like so many educated and civilized liberals, that the various forms of Christianity were so many childhood diseases—discommoding, itchy and to be suffered for no more than three weeks.

  What he wanted for his son was entrèe to the European world. The authorities seemed to understand that, and even to sympathize; when Yang the elder explained to the headmaster, or Father Superior, that the Yangs were not Roman Catholic, nor even Christian, he was vouchsafed a haunting reply: “Oh, ca va. Nous avons même un Anglais,” which was translated, “Oh, never mind about that. We even have an English boy here.” His perplexity was lifelong.

  So at twenty-one Yang Yu-lin spoke, read and wrote Mandarin Chinese, a little Scots English, some Latin and much French, and had studied world history, physiology, government, economics (including the mysterious Marx) and French literature, not to mention the New Testament, Saint Augustine and papal history. He knew himself an upper bourgeois, a flunky trained to perpetuate an unjust world, and happily acknowledged the budding socialist deep within him—that was his dark secret, and for the moment, the time and place, Peking in 1913, he kept it locked away.

  His father expected that ultimately he would become an ambassador, perhaps even president of a unified China—one Sun Yat-sen, a monomaniac and not a Pekinger, had established a republic, whatever that was, in remote Canton. Yang the elder had no faintest notion of what this republic’s “Three People’s Principles” might be (something to do with the worm people, in the old phrase, the ordinary people, the millions of coolies and peasants and beggars, people who did not even pay taxes). But whatever a republic was, whatever China might become, it was clear that his son, Yang Yu-lin, must play a major part in its history. Yang Yu-lin exemplified the Confucian ideal, the superior man, the prince; why, the boy was even expert with the bow and arrow!

  At twenty-two Yang Yu-lin shocked his father almost into the grave by journeying to Canton and joining the army of the new China as a subaltern. At twenty-four Yang Yu-lin was promoted to first lieutenant and sent, at the head of a company of coolies, to France, where a mysterious war was in progress. The war was mysterious because it consisted principally of hundreds of thousands of men living in trenches, rising sporadically from those trenches to attack other men in other trenches, and dying by tens of thousands in their tracks. It was soon obvious to Yang that a whole generation of Europe’s best, its most intelligent and compassionate, its most loyal and patriotic, those who cared most and therefore accepted their obligations, was simply being murdered, and with them was dying Europe’s future.

  Yang’s coolies dug trenches, unloaded cargo from vessels and trains, were referred to as “labor battalions” and earned pennies a day. Their officers earned more, were often gratified by references to “our glorious Chinese allies,” and became objets d’art, or at least knicknacks, in the salons of Paris. Yang himself knew an enormous success. He was taller than average, for one thing, and thus was never patted on the head by a hostess; he had begun to fill out and consequently to resemble a traditional warrior, unlike some of his fellow officers who were scrawny and jittery by nature, with marked tendencies to drop forks and duel steaks with fish knives.

  Wrestling with tableware was Yang’s most serious undertaking in World War I until he met Florence. She was the daughter of a steel magnate whose holdings, in northeastern France, should in logic have been leveled by a determined enemy but remained intact, positively humming, thanks to the highly civilized mutual courtesy that left also intact the German industrial works across the border, a refined arrangement that, in a reasonable world, would have proved definitively the superiority of commercial intelligence and morality over political or military. The paradox reinforced Yang’s conviction that the flower of Europe was being—almost literally—ground into the earth by brutish politicians and generals. Believing that Asia was sure to predominate as a result, and in his own lifetime, he felt rather cheerful about this. Florence’s father could only be an inhuman ogre; another paradox.

  By then he was besotted. He had met her at dusk in the late fall of 1917. Paris was gray and drizzly, streetlights on early, an occasional quick waft of rummy fumes from a yellow doorway reminding homeward-bound pedestrians that cafes were oases. Yang went coatless deliberately because he enjoyed the attention his puzzling uniform drew from the bourgeoisie; more than once he was taken for Japanese or Indochinese. He was on leave and had been invited to a soirée at the apartment of a French colonel on the Avenue Ségur; the colonel was one of the few French officers to whom Yang was required to report directly, a just officer who had complimented the young lieutenant and taken a serious, even paternal, interest in this sprig of an alien culture.

  Yang arrived cold, his uniform damp; spoke gallantly to the astounded concierge, who actually pressed the light button for him so that he could march up three flights without groping; and entered a crowded flat, sensing immediately that he was among sophisticated and cosmopolitan friends because conversation did not extinguish itself at his entrance, only fell for the briefest moment from fortissimo to mezzo forte. The colonel’s wife came to shake hands, then took his left hand in her right, smiling virtuously as she demonstrated that holding hands with Oriental gentlemen was all in a day’s—No. Yang rebuked himself for cynicism. She was doing what any hostess would do. Furthermore, she was a colonel’s lady; to hear he was not a Chinese but a lieutenant.

  Then she presented him to Florence. “Mademoiselle de Morvan, Lieutenant Yang de l’armée chinoise.” Florence de Morvan was young, small and short-haired, with happy greenish eyes and a mobile, quirky face. Yang was half in love even before her first words: “I never met a Chinese before, but I’ve always wanted to be Chinese.” They were shaking hands. Yang, highly educated, well-traveled, man of the world, crack shot, linguist, connoisseur, wanted only to gape and dote yet summoned inner forces to ask, “But why? In China a woman as beautiful as you would have been betrothed at twelve and probably married at fifteen to some aging tycoon.” Actually he had said “gros industriel d’un certain âge,” relieved that he had managed to speak at all and pleased by the aptness and fluency of his remark, and he was full of joy until she said, “Mais mon père est un gros industriel d’un certain âge!”

  He fumbled for apologies, but she was laughing sweetly, laughing in merry delight, hooking her arm through his and saying, “Now you must let me find you an apéritif, and promise not to leave without me. You’re the catch of the evening, you know. Vermouth? Whisky?” He s
aid, “Pernod, thank you,” and she said, “How vulgar! Where is your Oriental delicacy?” And he said, “I never knew what delicatesse was until this moment.”

  It was the coup de foudre, the lightning bolt of love. He was lost forever. He sipped his milky Pernod. About him the buzzing chorus of French, the frequent peal of laughter, warmed the room. Florence spoke of Lao-tzu, he of Victor Hugo; challenged, he improvised a translation into Mandarian of Hugo’s famous quatrain about flame in the eyes of youth and light in the eyes of age. The incomprehensible syllables charmed her. She spoke of philosophy, serenity, order, art; he of war, destruction, revolution, death. “I suppose we must circulate now,” she said. “Meet me at the door at seven.”

  They dined, they set a rendezvous for tomorrow, they prowled a flea market, they drove through the Bois in a horse-drawn carriage, a day passed, two, a night passed, two, and he could not say if he suffered more in her absence or gloried more in her presence; and then it was evening and they were in her father’s flat—that gentleman was in Metz—and it was all amazingly simple. Despite his limited experience, he was versed in theory; classical pornography was high art in China and he rejoiced her avid soul with the Chinese names for this and that: the fish with two backs, horse upon horse, the two snakes, bamboo syrup, bird’s-nest soup. “Oh that’s nice!” she announced with a moue of pleasure, a gleeful frisson. He was slightly bewildered; whores feigning ecstasy had whimpered, arched their backs, screamed and moaned, but his little Florence warbled and twittered. She was indeed his bird of paradise. When she did pant, did cry quickly, “Ah oui ah oui ah oui,” he rejoiced; but he was never sure when, or whether, or how hotly, the true ecstasy came upon her. Perhaps it was none of his business. How puzzling and difficult to be a gentleman of the West!

  His own ecstasy was, nevertheless, constant. He was permanently intoxicated, perhaps insane. He no longer lived on earth but in some starry realm, lovers’ heaven, gods’ madhouse. In sober moments, when at work or writing dutifully to his father, he feared retribution. With her in public places, he could barely breathe for joy, pride, immortality. In private he knew impulses to weep, rage aloud, hang himself—it was all too much for one poor heart to withstand. He was not sure always that it was she, precisely; perhaps it was the loving and not its object that he loved. He knew so little. He learned so much. Winter passed. Toward Easter he took a furlough, and they traveled in the Pyrenees, less ecstatic now and more occupied with tickets, reservations, bathrooms, more aware of the sullen disapproval in Gascon glances, more oppressed by a small-town waiter’s condescending stare. He gobbled his whitebait, mopped the bowl with good French bread, tossed off the last of a local white wine and said, “Let’s go back to Paris.”

  Her relief was almost palpable, so he exacted a price: he wanted to meet her father. She agreed, giggling in mischievous expectation, and one day late in spring they made a date with Monsieur de Morvan. They were to dine at one of Paris’s internationally beloved culinary landmarks where, in the words of Yang’s by now good friend the colonel, “the doorman dresses like a field marshal and the gourmets unfold napkins three feet square, tuck them into their braces at the collarbone, and perform, for two hours, a gastronomic Götterdämmerung.”

  Yang bathed, shaved and dressed with care and elegance. He powdered his joints. His leather gleamed. His ribbons—both of them, one for being in Europe at all and the other for a visit to the front during which he and his party were, by only a moderate stretch of the imagination, shelled—proclaimed valor. He flagged a cab. En route he made a desperate effort to calm himself. This man, he mused, is rich because others are poor or dead. You love his daughter, who is only twenty-two and may or may not love you. You will be courteous and cautious until your moment comes. You will not, however, cringe, lie or prostitute your toothy smile. Entudu, mon lieutenant?

  His imagination raced ahead: Florence, tearstained, was forced to choose, decay with her father and bourgeois capitalism or build a new world with Yang Yu-lin. Hands crossed on her heaving breast, she—But the thought of her breast distracted him. Would her father be kind enough to leave early? The apartment was surely out of bounds but there were comfortable hotels. Only to be with her. Moonlight rippling on he Seine. By the time he reached the restaurant he was almost frisky. He overtipped the taxi driver and strode briskly toward his fate.

  Morvan greeted the lieutenant heartily; Yang recognized the dinnertime camaraderie of the international businessman. The mâitre d’ bowed, addressed Morvan by name, led them to the royal table, secluded in a windowed corner, the windows curtailed now, Paris by night blacked out. They ordered. Conversation proceeded along amicable and conventional lines: the war, the fall of the Romanov dynasty, the possible Bolshevization of Europe, the future of America. Yang would never forget the grilled trout, the Macon ’II, the tournedos, the Richebourg ’06, or his own voice saying, out of nowhere, someone else impersonating him, some fool, some clown, “Monsieur de Morvan, I am in love with your daughter and would like to marry her.”

  He knew instantly that he had failed to slay the dragon and was doomed to bitter exile, wandering the earth without his beloved. He looked disaster in the face and reminded himself that he was an officer and gentleman.

  Morvan was simply incredulous, finding voice finally and blurting, “My dear sir! You’re Chinese! It’s not even a real army! You’re only the head coolie!”

  Florence’s face had blotched red and white. “I didn’t mean that!” she pleaded with Yang. “I never thought of marriage!”

  Yang rose and dashed the remains of his wine in Morvan’s face. He spoke to Florence: “Then think of it now. Let us leave this place hand in hand!”

  Morvan was a cartoon of Gallic exasperation; Yang wondered—idly, it was amazing how much time one seemed to have in these moments of comic melodrama, these flashes of eternal verity—if he was about to thunder, “My dear sir! That was a Richebourg of nine-teen-oh-six!” But Morvan snarled, “Independent! Modern! ‘Papa, I’m a grown woman!’ This is what comes of it, you foolish girl! Shame and humiliation, for us and for him!”

  “I’m sorry,” she said helplessly to Yang, and tears started. “I’m so infinitely sorry.”

  Yang shrugged. He said, “Adieu, Florence.” He bowed coldly to her father. He strode away. The last words he ever heard her say, and he heard the tears too, were, “Papa! Papa! He was very nice and he was my first Chinaman, and you hurt his feelings!”

  Hurt his feelings! By the gods! Whether tears sprang first to his eyes or nervous laughter to his lips he could never remember, but he remembered the iron entering his soul. He collected his cap and gloves, leaving no tip, and marched stiffly down the red carpet and out the door; in his distraction he saluted the field marshal.

  He walked all the way to the Avenue Ségur and craved audience of the colonel. By then his small, miraculous reserve of icy control had melted away; almost gasping, knotted in pain, he broke every code he knew, Oriental’s, officer’s, gentleman’s, lover’s, and sought the truth. He had judged his man well, a fighting colonel and not a desk colonel, a lover of God, country and wife and not merely a Sunday Catholic, wartime patriot, or lunchtime husband. The colonel was gentle. With his own hands he poured cognac for Yang. “There are so many like her now,” he said softly, understandingly, forgivingly. “The war excites them, you see. They are young and rich and full of hot blood. Yes: her first Chinaman. After her first Frenchman and her first Belgian and her first Englishman and her first American and probably her first German, Italian, Senegalese, Algerian, legionnaire, spahi, aviator. I am sorry. If you love her, none of that matters, I know. Believe me. I know. ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.’ You know the verse? All you can do now is suffer.”

  Yang returned to the front next morning and applied for immediate repatriation. His application was denied. On his next furlough in Paris he joined what was in effect the East Asian Section of the French Communist Party.

  He did not do that
“because of Florence.” Had she loved him, he might have remained in France, persisted in his suit, married her, advanced himself en bon bourgeois; or carried her back to Peking in a grand gesture of private revolution. Betrayed by love, he rebounded not to another woman or to idiocies like whoring and drink, but to thinkers and writers that French Catholics, and later French cafés, had taught him to love: La Bruyère, Saint-Simon, Tom Paine, Marx, Michelet—even, with a pang, Victor Hugo. He rebounded to a world of men and egalitarians. He attended meetings in public halls and private rooms on the sixth floor without water. He debated with French professors who stank of cheap tobacco and with wiry young Orientals who sniped butts from the gutter. One of these he liked extremely, a skinny Annamite barely older than himself who had changed his name from Nguyen Tat Tan to Nguyen Ai Quoc, lithe and quick, as confused about methods as any of them but surer of his goals: self-rule for Asia and equality for all men and women. “They argue, which must come first,” Nguyen Ai Quoc scoffed. “I tell you, both come first. With the left hand we level wealth, income, wages, land holdings; with the right we level privilege and power. And if it proves impossible, or too slow, then we shall use both hands at once and in them will be weapons. Your Sun Yat-sen is a great man but he is no soldier.”