Anthony Grey

by Peking- A Novel of China's Revolution- 1921-1978 (epub)

  In his eagerness to savor every detail of his arrival, Jakob had been on deck at dawn to watch the Japanese freighter leave the East China Sea and enter the mouth of the mighty Yangtze River. The typhoon had blown itself out with surprising suddenness in the night and most of the exhausted passengers were then still sleeping. Although tired, Jakob had been unable to sleep and he had watched, fascinated, as the rocky islets and mountains of Chekiang’s crenellated coastline gradually gave way to a low, blurred, featureless shore which bordered the estuary of Asia’s greatest river.

  Watching the waters grow dark and turbid, Jakob had felt a sense of awe steal over him — this giant stream, he knew from his missionary college lessons, was China’s jugular. After rising among the snowy crests of the Asian continent in Tibet, it rushed down through steep mountain gorges, pumping life-giving water endlessly eastward along a winding, three-thousand-mile course through China’s heart- lands. In its benign moods it irrigated a vast bowl of rice plains and helped nourish half the nation; in its destructive phases it burst its banks to flood and devastate, claiming victims equally by the million. The Yellow River, to the north, and the Yangtze, he knew, were known as “China’s twin sorrows” because of the regularity with which they inundated the land and its people, and as Jakob gazed into the wide river’s muddy brown waves he sensed something of its enormous power.

  The treeless banks of the estuary on which he could pick out gray- roofed villages and an occasional mud fort seemed drained of color in comparison. It was as though the river, while refreshing the earth, at the same time sucked something vital from it. The pale colors of the estuary’s shores seemed to have been muted with dust and bleached by the sun, giving the land a fiercely austere appearance that was so different from the emerald green hills and woods of northern England. But although few figures moved through it at that hour, the bleak grandeur of the landscape immediately captivated him and this feeling grew steadily stronger the longer he stood by the rail.

  When some sixty miles from the estuary mouth the bows of the Tomeko Maru swung to port to head into the Whangpoo River, Jakob understood fully for the first time why the two Chinese ideograms that made up the name “Shanghai” meant “above the sea.” The winding tributary river that meandered away southward through the low-lying mud flats provided a natural refuge from the harsh sweep of the Yangtze’s great union with the ocean. He could see also why the thousand-year-old walled settlement ten miles farther upstream had proved such an ideal site for the greatest of China’s foreign-ruled treaty ports. Silk, rice, cotton, jade, gold, hides — all the exotic produce of China’s inland provinces — had poured naturally down the Yangtze into Shanghai in the wake of the Opium War nearly a century before. Opium and other cargoes shipped across the world’s oceans to China had obviously filled the same Shanghai warehouses just as conveniently on their journey inland to the world’s most densely populated marketplace.

  While thinking these thoughts and gazing at the tidal creeks veining the Whangpoo’s banks, Jakob became aware suddenly that his preoccupation with these first inland vistas of China had led him to neglect his normal daily devotions. Each morning during the voyage he had set aside half an hour for prayer and Bible study; but his insatiable curiosity had on this special morning caused him to neglect his routine. He at once hurried below and began to pray for strength and guidance in all his tasks in China, and the intensity of these prayers confined him to his cabin right up to the moment when the Tomeko Maru at last dropped anchor opposite the congested Shanghai waterfront.

  As soon as his baggage was finally secured, Jakob rushed eagerly up to the deck, and on emerging into the afternoon heat he was struck first by the frenzy of activity that met his eyes in all directions. Grunting, bare-chested coolies were already swarming over the ship, manhandling the surviving hold cargo into native lighters that reared beneath the stern. Beyond the rails at which he stood, the brown surface of the Whangpoo, stirred to turbulence by the inflowing tide, was covered with crowds of moored and moving craft. Along the whole length of the curving mile-long Bund, vessels of all sizes were plying back and forth, disgorging and taking on cargo, dropping or weighing anchor, mooring, casting off. Chinese junks with high, square sterns and dragon’s eyes emblazoned on their wooden bows lumbered among the rust-caked freighters and tramp steamers from Europe; wallowing sampans and lighters weighed down with baled cotton, basketed vegetables, wine barrels, and livestock scurried back and forth between the cargo ships and the congested jetties. Among this seething, waterborne throng, pale, sleek warships from Europe and Japan lay ominously at rest as though silently reminding Shanghai’s four million Chinese inhabitants that it was the twenty thousand foreigners among them who ruled the city.

  Beneath the towering neo-Georgian frontages of the Bund’s famous European trading houses, which had founded nineteenth-century Shanghai, Jakob could see dense crowds of Chinese mirroring the frenetic activity on the water. Long processions of ramshackle wooden carts and giant wheelbarrows drawn by oxen, buffalo, and perspiring coolies were hauling precariously stacked bales of goods to and from the wharves and waterfront warehouses. Trams built in England clanked noisily across rails set in the cobbled highway, wheezing trucks honked and hooted at the crowded pier heads, and rickshaws bearing white-clad Europeans and silk-jacketed Chinese threaded slowly through the confusion. Here and there Jakob noticed gleaming American and European limousines nosing among the crush with an almost stately dignity and it struck him that they were the land- borne equivalent of the dominating warships anchored in midstream.

  “China itself is like the ocean, you’ll find, Monsieur Kellner — it salts everything that’s drawn into it.”

  Fragrant wisps of smoke from a cheroot drifted to Jakob with the words of Jacques Devraux and he turned to find the Frenchman standing beside him, looking across the river to the waterfront. “Those grand buildings might make it seem as though we’ve brought European civilization here — but when you know more, you’ll discover all we’ve really done is adapt the corrupt and brutal ways of old China for our benefit.”

  Since the moment when the hog cages broke loose at the height of the typhoon, Jakob had noticed that Devraux’s manner had been subdued. Although he had declined to join the group around the piano, he had not been immune to the horrors of the storm, and along with Jakob and the other passengers he had attended. a short Buddhist funeral service for the drowned coolie that had been arranged by the Japanese captain on the freshly swabbed afterdeck soon after breakfast. He had stood silent and expressionless at Jakob’s side, watching the Japanese crew members bow low and sprinkle incense before an improvised altar, and for the remaining hours of the voyage, like the rest of the passengers, he had remained wrapped in his own thoughts. Now as he peered across the harbor at the yellowish mass of humanity swarming along the Bund, his voice had a dull, resigned edge.

  “Half of those poor wretches you can see, Monsieur Kellner, will die of disease or some natural calamity before they’re thirty. In the countryside they’re abused by corrupt mandarins and grasping landlords — that’s why they flock to treaty ports like this in their millions. And here, even if our countrymen pay the Chinese compradors a fair rate for the coolies’ labor, the comprador pays out only a paltry sum that barely keeps the coolie’s family in rags. So the comprador grows rich on the coolie’s sweat and in the interests of smooth trading we turn a blind eye.”

  “The Anglo-Chinese Mission doesn’t turn a blind eye,” said Jakob quietly. “Our missionaries represent many Christian denominations. They live among the people and try to help them in a lot of different ways.”

  Devraux shrugged. “Missionaries take European habits deep into the interior. You blaze new commercial trails for foreign goods wherever you go. Mission schools turn out a steady stream of Chinese translators and interpreters to run those trading offices over there. And where do you think all the donations come from to pay for your upkeep while you’re saving a handful of Chinese souls
?”

  “I hope, Monsieur Devraux,” said Jakob firmly, “that when I know as much about China as you, I won’t be as cynical.”

  “It’s quite likely, as I said before, that your knowledge of China is already superior to mine.”

  “But that can’t be true,” protested Jakob.

  “Don’t be too sure. There’s an old saying that a foreigner understands China best on the day he arrives here. Then everything he’s learned beforehand is clear in his mind. After a few years he becomes confused — and clings desperately to some of his early insights. But a man who’s been in China a long time always comes to feel he understands nothing of this strange country where people eat their soup at the end of the meal instead of the beginning and call the compass the ‘point-south needle’ . .

  Devraux broke off with another shrug as a cluster of canopied sampans that had put out from the nearest jetty began drawing alongside the Tomeko Maru. Groups of passengers had begun moving across the deck toward the gang ladder and several of them paused to shake Jakob warmly by the hand and wish him well. On catching sight of Lu Mei-ling and her brother, Jakob raised his broad-brimmed hat, smiled warmly at the Chinese girl, and wished her good afternoon. She was wearing a cool, full-skirted dress of blue and cream French muslin, and a ribboned sun hat of the same colors framed her face, heightening the beauty of her pale skin and lustrous hair. Although she merely acknowledged his greeting with a formal smile, Jakob turned involuntarily to follow her with his eyes all the way to the top of the gang ladder. No opportunity to speak with Mei-ling or her brother had arisen since the height of the typhoon; with the passing of danger he had been restricted once more to the ship’s second-class areas and the sight of Mei-ling preparing to disembark produced a sudden sense of impending loss within him. Realizing he would have to hurry to disembark in the same sampan, he turned quickly and extended his hand in a farewell salutation to Jacques Devraux.

  “Good-bye, Monsieur Devraux. You’ve made me appreciate that things won’t be easy for me. But I hope God will give me the strength to do good work in China.”

  “I wish you bonne chance,” said Devraux in a formal tone and stood aside to let a perspiring coolie shuffle by, bearing Jakob’s heavy cabin trunk. The Chinese cleared his throat noisily and spat over the rail close to them as he went on his way, and the Frenchman raised a world-weary eyebrow in Jakob’s direction.

  “By the way, the Communists have a new slogan, Monsieur Kellner,” said Devraux in an acid voice. “They say that if every Chinese could be persuaded to spit at the same moment, all the foreigners in China would drown.”

  5

  Choppy waves slapped noisily at the steps of the stone jetty opposite the Cathay Hotel, where the first canopied sampan was trying to land its passengers. The clash between the inflowing tide and the fast, brown current of the Whangpoo was lifting the craft high one moment and dropping it the next. Seeing Lu Chiao rise from his seat to take his sister’s arm, Jakob hurried impulsively ahead of them to the sampan’s dancing stern and bounded across a gap of several feet onto the slimy steps. Turning quickly, he extended his right hand smilingly toward Mei-ling, offering to assist her ashore.

  As the sampan lifted her, a pucker of uncertainty appeared fleetingly in Mei-ling’s expression; then as she came level, she calmly stretched out a slender, white-gloved hand toward him and when he grasped her fingers she stepped confidently across the gap to the jetty.

  “Thank you, Mr. Kellner.” Her smile again carried a hint of warmth and her eyes held his as she spoke, but when they reached the top of the steps she withdrew her hand quickly from his.

  “I haven’t had the chance to thank you for playing the piano for us last night.” Looking directly into her lovely face, Jakob felt his breath quicken. “I shall never forget the way you played.”

  Mei-ling gave him a puzzled smile. “But it was nothing

  At a loss for words, Jakob continued to stare at her. “Your dress, Miss Lu, is very charming . . . you must have bought it in Paris.”

  “My sister, Mr. Kellner, cares little for flattery or compliments.” Lu Chiao strode confidently to the top of the steps, smiling broadly, but behind the smile Jakob noticed for the first time the hard, almost insolent intelligence of his gaze. “She’s as determined as I am to change old Chinese habits. It’s a thing of the past to regard young girls merely as ornamental flower jars.” He held out his hand and shook Jakob’s firmly. “Good-bye, Mr. Kellner.”

  “I hope we may meet again sometime.” Jakob turned eagerly toward Mei-ling.

  “Since you are a missionary, Mr. Kellner, our paths are not likely to cross. Good-bye.”

  Chiao guided his sister quickly away into the melee of yelling dock coolies and lightermen crowding the jetty and Jakob caught a glimpse of a gleaming limousine with a uniformed Chinese chauffeur at the wheel standing beyond the crush. Then he heard a voice call his name and he swung around to see a grinning white face approaching through the throng.

  “Jakob Kellner? I’m Laurence Franklin. I’ve come to escort you to the mission house.”

  A pale, bespectacled Englishman in a dark suit and wide-brimmed hat offered his hand quickly; spotting Jakob’s labeled trunk and baggage, he snapped his fingers in the direction of a group of hovering shoulder-pole coolies and, speaking sharply in staccato Shanghai dialect, barked orders at the first Chinese to scamper forward. Jostled by streams of stevedores sagging beneath pole-borne casks, canvas-wrapped boxes, and brimming vegetable baskets, Franklin led the way toward a phalanx of rickshaws. The pullers, bare-chested like the dock coolies, stood before the hooded vehicles, with the shafts jutting skyward over their shoulders, and when Franklin made a signal, half a dozen lunged toward them.

  The pair who won the scramble dropped to their knees to hold the shafts firm against the cobblestones and Laurence Franklin lowered himself immediately into one of the cushioned seats, mopping his face with a snowy white handkerchief. Jakob, however, stood staring down at the bony, hollow-chested Chinese who knelt before him: the strip of cotton cloth wrapped turban-fashion around the aging man’s head was streaked with sweat and grime and his puny shoulders sagged with fatigue. The expression of mute supplication that burned in his narrow eyes appalled Jakob and rooted him to the spot. In that moment he also became acutely aware of the throbbing, hundred—degree heat, the ceaseless surge of human energy all around him, and the raucous “heb-ho, heb-ho, heb-ho” chants of the trotting coolies which both cleared the way and gave rhythm to their breathing and their gait. An acrid, unfamiliar stench of body sweat rose sickeningly in his nostrils and he found that he was bracing his knees against the imaginary heave of the wharf induced in his senses by seven weeks at sea.

  “Are you all right, old man?”

  Jakob looked up to find Franklin watching him with concern. “Do we have to ride in these things?” he asked uneasily.

  The bespectacled missionary laughed good-naturedly. “Ah, you’ve got a touch of ‘rickshaw-itis’! A lot of new arrivals from Europe get it. It’ll soon pass. You’re just taking rice out of the coolie’s mouth if you refuse the ride. Jump in. He can’t make a living any other way.”

  Jakob obeyed reluctantly and as soon as he was seated, his coolie broke into a hobbling run, following in Franklin’s wake. Coming out onto the crowded Bund they seemed to be carried along by the momentum of thousands of other iron-wheeled rickshaws; the shriek of tram sirens augmented the din, the feral reek of mules and buffalo hung heavy in the saturated air, and Jakob noticed with a start that the human draft animals hauling the giant platformed wheelbarrows rumbling all around him were often coolie women. With hempen ropes biting into their narrow shoulders they leaned low toward the road, staggering now and then with effort while their husbands strained and pushed the barrows from the rear. They never raised their heads and the unseen rickshaws swept past them like leaves on a millrace into the Nanking Road: there, thickets of brilliant hanging name banners splashed with golden Chinese characters drif
ted and rippled against every facade, dazzling Jakob’s eyes.

  The jumbled mass of carts, trucks, cars, and rickshaws ground to a standstill around the pedestal of a black-bearded Sikh policeman who was regulating the flow of traffic. As he waited, Jakob stared wide-eyed at the occupants of the rickshaws clustered around him — a wizened, obviously wealthy Chinese in a black long-gown and a mandarin’s skullcap stared expressionlessly over the shoulder of his satin-jacketed puller; a palely powdered Chinese courtesan wearing a thigh-split cheongsam of mauve silk hid her face beneath a waxed- paper parasol; a corpulent, perspiring German abused his coolie in guttural pidgin English between pulls on a big cigar. On the congested pavements white-suited men from a dozen or more Western nations who enjoyed the protection of their own laws in Asia’s largest city shouldered their way arrogantly through the milling crowds of Chinese, ignoring the ragged beggars and food hawkers stretching toward them from the gutters, stepping around the professional letter writers squatting at corners with ink and brushes, occasionally patronizing the Chinese bootblacks crouching before department store windows where British glass and wool, German leather, and French gowns were piled high beside Chinese silk and jade. The white men, Jakob noticed, greeted one another effusively and talked animatedly as they walked; but always they held themselves aloof from the swarm of yellow-brown humanity eddying all around them.

  The rasp of the coolie’s breath filled Jakob’s ears again as the traffic blockage eased and the rickshaw jolted forward. The fierce sun, he saw, was basting the coolie’s scarred back with films of sweat and the revulsion he had felt on the dockside at using a fellow human being as a personal beast of burden returned with a rush. Ahead of them the rickshaw of Laurence Franklin turned abruptly into a side lane and Jakob’s coolie increased his pace to keep it in sight.