Robert was regularly learning something new about the Chinese culture. His girls were teaching him, and they didn’t know it. He cherished any knowledge that came his way, however insignificant. Every time he learned something, he came closer to unwrapping the veil from this culture that was so unlike his.
On the eve of the Lantern Festival, he returned home from the consulate to find Ayaou decorating the front door of the house.
“What is the significance of this?” he asked, knowing that everything the girls did had some sort of meaning to improve life or offer protection. He turned and looked down the street. For the first time, he noticed lanterns of all shapes and sizes hanging from the trees and buildings.
With a look of silent concentration, Ayaou finished fastening on the door a canvas picture of an old fat man leaning on a walking stick. He had multiple chins, a hunchback and a big bump on his head. He held a leash with a young deer tied to the end.
When she finished, she stepped back to examine it. She pointed at the ugly old man. “This is Shou, the god of longevity. On the other side is Kwan-yin, the goddess of mercy.”
The goddess of mercy was a beautiful woman with long flowing hair. She was sitting on a lily pad. Her calm look reminded Robert of the Virgin Mary except Kwan-yin was Chinese.
“Look above the door and you will see the Chinese symbols for Kwan-yin, Fu, Lu, and Shou. Fu means happiness and Lu means success.” She turned a beaming smile toward Robert.
“Did you paint those words above the door?”
She laughed. “No, Robert. I could never do calligraphy like that. I am still clumsy with a brush. I bought them.”
It was easy to believe. This artwork was of a higher quality than the paintings in the kitchen. Robert didn’t believe in these superstitions. However, unlike most of his brethren, he was tolerant of them, because it taught him about the Chinese and how they thought.
Robert would always be a Christian, but unlike so many others from Europe and America, he refused to condemn the Chinese for the way they were. He never attempted to convert them into Christianity or rob them like the opium merchants were doing. To him it was all hypocrisy.
On one hand, the Europeans and British were shoving Christianity’s message of brotherly love down the Chinese collective throat with the barrel of a rifle. At the same time foreign merchants, mostly British, were selling opium to the populace. No wonder the Chinese were resisting. The Chinese had believed and lived this way for several thousand years. Did anyone have the right to force them to change against their will?
Robert never told his girls any of his true feelings about their superstitions. If it made them happy, he didn’t want to be a spoiler. It didn’t matter. No one ever visited except Chinese friends and relatives of the sisters.
A few days later Shao-mei hung nine red lanterns in the room where they studied.
“Do we need this many?” Robert asked.
“Oh, Robert,” Ayaou replied. “This is simple. I am surprised you do not know the significance of these nine lanterns.” Ayaou talked to him as if he were a child. He didn’t mind. He liked it. “The Imperial lucky number is nine, which means to develop everything to its potential without over spilling. That is why the Forbidden City has nine hundred and ninety-nine buildings inside its walls. Only the Emperor can get that close to heaven. The rest of us have to be satisfied with the number nine.”
“Why not eight or ten or eight hundred or a thousand?” he asked.
“Because ten is too much,” she said. “Only God can do a ten. Nine means to be humble and acknowledge God as perfect.”
Shao-mei handed Robert a necklace and asked him to put it on. He held it close to his eyes. The beads looked familiar. There were nine on the string. They turned out to be olive pits.
“This will protect you, Robert,” Shao-mei said. “We spent hours sanding off the pointed ends of the pits and then drilling holes in them with little needles. Look,” she held up a hand, “see where I grew a callus from all the rubbing. I poked myself more than once with the needle.”
Robert reached for the hand and pulled it to his lips. He kissed the callus. This little dull looking, nothing necklace was full of love from Ayaou and Shao-mei.
“Not only that,” Ayaou said, “wear it so you will have peace.”
Robert saw that they wore olive pit necklaces too. He took the necklace, slipped it over his head and settled it around his neck.
Eventually, Ayaou added red colored woodcarvings to the walls just inside the front door. The images were characters in various calligraphy styles. Robert recognized them immediately. No one had to explain the significance. They represented the six relationships and the mandate of heaven—the basis of all social connections between people in China. They were all variations of xiao, or piety. This time he understood and asked no questions. Living with his girls was teaching him more about the Chinese culture than any number of books or teachers could.
Robert pulled the girls into his arms. He stood there and studied the carvings. “Do you like it?” They asked as if they were one voice.
With a serious expression on his face, he stood for a moment in silence and stared at the carvings a bit longer as if he might not approve of them. He sensed the girls fidgeting nervously. They cast looks of inquiry at him and at each other.
“Yes,” he finally said, and smiled. “I like this. It’s the right touch to greet me when I come home. It shows what kind of family we are and the harmony that fills our house.”
He managed to convince himself that life would go on like this without end. He forgot Ward and relaxed his vigilance against an assault. The accusing note—the one he had a habit of rubbing with his thumb and index finger—was forgotten too. The note was turned to pulp when he didn’t remove it from the pocket, and the shirt was washed. He stopped thinking of his family back in Ireland and even erased the Christian missionaries from his thoughts.
It was fortunate that Guan-jiah had not forgotten. His servant arrived every morning and accompanied him to work. The eunuch carried a sturdy walking stick that doubled as a club. Guan-jiah said nothing and became doubly alert to make up for Robert’s lack of vigilance. He saw that his master was happy, and he realized happiness was fleeting. He decided not to remind Robert of the dangers. There was no need to spoil things.
There were performances throughout the city on the day of the Lantern Festival. Robert watched the dragon lantern dance, a lion dance, and a land boat dance. He saw men walking on stilts and beating drums. At night, he walked the streets with his girls. They read the riddles that were written on the lanterns. They guessed the answers; then knocked on the doors to ask the owners of the houses if they were right.
They ate a feast that started with small dumpling balls made of glutinous rice flour with rose petals, sesame, bean paste, jujube paste, walnut meat, and dried fruit. Robert couldn’t identify some fillings. The dumplings tasted sweet, and he liked the texture in his mouth. He realized that in the West quantity counted and taste and texture took second place. It wasn’t like that in China.
When Robert asked Master Ping about the dumplings, his teacher replied, “The name for the dumplings sounds the same as the Chinese word that means reunion. People eat them for harmony and happiness in the family.” Master Ping wrote the Chinese symbols for both words on a piece of rice paper and showed Robert what they looked like. He pronounced them. He then had Robert pronounce them until he was proficient. The difference between the words was a slight variation in tone.
“There, you have just added two more words to your knowledge of Chinese,” his teacher said, looking pleased.
Each day was a lucky day and a celebration. He was convinced he’d become something more than just a foreign devil. To most men from both the West and East, women were for pleasure and to be breeding machines—each culture just went about it differently. On the other hand, he had transcended both cultures.
Instead of using his girls like objects, he treated them as indi
viduals. They still read together each night and discussed poems. When plays came to Ningpo, they went. Robert and the girls grew closer.
Years later, Robert bought the house in Ningpo. He had the front door dismantled and the stove crated up with the woodcarvings and the lanterns. He kept all these items in storage behind his mansion in Peking. On lonely nights, and there were many, he’d take a pot of tea and go into the storage room and sit next to that stove. He’d smoke an Egyptian cigarette and remember.
Chapter 22
Bugs were everywhere, and the hotter it got the more they resembled a horde of blood sucking barbarians. The winter of 1856 was history and spring was flourishing. By the time summer arrived, the bugs would be in the food. If Robert left his mouth open, they ended in there too. The heat and humidity increased the sewer stench making it undesirable to breathe the putrid air through his nose.
The previous summer, before he had stayed with Patridge, he awoke in the night gasping for air as if his lungs had filled with hot, smelly water, and he was drowning.
As temperatures and humidity soared, he washed often. In Ireland, his family bathed once a month during the winter and twice in the summer. They had a large wooden tub. Every other Saturday the entire family carried buckets from the spring into the house where the water was heated and the tub half filled. The oldest bathed first. By the time Robert’s turn came, the water had turned gray and there was a grease line where the water’s surface met the tub’s wood. Robert wasn’t the youngest. Number twelve bathed last.
Since coming to China, he had taken up the habit of bathing with a damp cloth. Though he had a large tub, he didn’t want the girls to work that hard heating the water. Instead, he used a bucket wide enough to fit his feet and a tin cup to pour lukewarm water onto his naked body. Then he soaped and rinsed.
“I have watched you do this before, Robert,” Ayaou said from the kitchen doorway. “I kept my mouth shut, because I thought this is what you wanted. You should just go to the bathhouse. It costs the price of three eggs, and the water is clean and hot.”
Robert stood with his feet crimped in the bucket and water running down his naked skin. A mosquito landed on the back of his right hand. He swatted it away. “Bathhouse?” he said, bewildered. “Where is this place?”
“It’s on the next street behind the teahouse.”
“I’m going to try it,” he replied. “What is it like? There are no bathhouses where I grew up.”
“How can that be?” she said. “England is a powerful empire. You must be wrong.”
“No, I’m not. In England before 1800 the church outlawed bathing as a mortal sin.”
Ayaou’s mouth dropped open. “And I thought the English were sensible people since they had so much power. I am disappointed, Robert. This means the English are not as civilized as the Chinese. If your God’s church said bathing was a sin, the British made a bad choice in the God they worship.”
“Being clean has nothing to do with being powerful or what god is worshiped,” Robert replied. When he picked up the pitcher of rinse water and poured it over his head, he gasped from the cold hitting his warm skin. “Hand me that towel, Ayaou.”
While drying himself, he said, “Queen Elizabeth bathed maybe three times in her life, and in 1588 her navy defeated the Spanish Armada, which established England as the dominant sea power in the world.”
“England must be a smelly place,” she said. “If you have to stink to be powerful, maybe the Chinese should stop bathing too.”
“Your logic defies explanation,” he replied. He was rewarded with a blank look.
“Logic?” she asked. “What does that mean?”
On Saturday Ayaou led him to the public bath behind the teahouse. The tiger stove that heated the water for tea also heated water for the bathhouse. They just opened the water taps and let the water poor into the grated traps. From there the water ran through a pipe under the floor toward the baths.
After a long conversation, Ayaou paid the attendant guarding the entrance to the public baths. She had assured him Robert spoke fluent Mandarin and was not like other foreigners. The man tested Robert and was satisfied when he answered several questions. He was allowed in.
That first experience started as a shock. Back home in Ireland when he bathed, he went alone into a small room off the kitchen and stepped into the bathtub everyone else used. He dried himself and dressed before leaving.
When Robert stepped through the door at the back of the teahouse after Ayaou deserted him, he entered a short hall with both men and women coming and going. He joined the line going in on one side of the hall while clean men and women went the other way to the teahouse. He had no idea what to expect. He was the only foreigner. Almost everyone stared at him as if he had just arrived from the moon or maybe Mars.
The hall turned and went down a staircase descending into a room below ground. When the line reached the bottom, the hall branched at the foot of the stairs. Robert relaxed when the women went to the left and the men turned right. He eventually walked through a door into a steamy room with twenty to thirty naked men of all ages. There was a large pool in the center and several big wooden soaking tubs against the walls. Most of the men were in the pool.
A burly, older woman with the arms of a wrestler and stumps for legs stepped forward, demanded that Robert take off his clothes, and hand them to her. “I will see they are brushed clean and sprayed with a jasmine scent to make them fresh,” she said. He stared at her waiting hand. She looked like a witch with frizzy, dry hair protruding in all directions. He didn’t want to undress in front of her.
“After you take your clothes off, you will get in the number three wooden hot tub and join the two men already there.”
For an instant, he was tempted to leave. All he had to do was turn and run. He’d never taken his clothes off in front of a group before and never in front of a woman except for Ayaou and Shao-mei. The only other time anyone had seen him naked was when he was a baby. All his seductions in college had been at night in dark rooms. Usually he’d been half drunk.
He had no desire to be in this room full of strangers, but what would Ayaou say if he left without taking a bath? He was sure if he came back sweaty and dirty, she’d scold him for being stupid and accuse him of cowardice. He thought of what she’d said about the English being a dirty, smelly people. He had to prove her wrong.
Robert pressed his lips together in a rigid, straight line and pulled off his clothing as fast as possible. He stared straight ahead at the wall avoiding the woman attendant’s eyes and the eyes of everyone else, who must have been staring at him as they had in the hall. The skin beneath his clothing hadn’t seen the sun for most of his life and was a pale, slug white. Only his hands, face and neck were tanned. He must have been a disgusting, sickly sight.
Once naked, he hurried to get in the tub and gasped when he sunk into the steaming water. He was sure it was going to scorch the skin off his bones. With his body below the surface of the dark water, Robert investigated.
On the far side of the room beyond the pool were tables. When a man left the pool, he went to a table and crawled on top where a male or female attendant used a rough towel wrapped tightly around one hand to scrape all the skin clean. Then the massage started, which looked more like a beating. Since he’d never had one before, he did not know what a massage was like.
What was going on in the common pool fascinated him the most. The pool was more like a small community. All he had to do was focus to hear each conversation. On one side of the pool several old men were arguing about the best types of fighting insects. Across from them two younger men were playing a board game of some kind while others watched or waited for their turn to play. A few slept with their heads propped on the side of the pool. Most surprising of all was the singing. Two of the men were singing songs in an unfamiliar peasant dialect.
Then an ancient looking man, stooped, no hair, facial skin sagging as if it were already falling off the bones, was moving
toward the pool from one of the wooden hot tubs. He was so close to the end of life, he couldn’t lift his feet. He had to slide them along inch by inch on trembling legs. He wasn’t alone.
On one side was probably his middle-aged son, who already had gray hair at his temples. On the old man’s other side was a young boy about ten, probably his grandson. The father and son were gently helping the grandfather toward the pool, so he could take the next step in his bath. This was a part of the Chinese culture unlike anything Robert had encountered before. It not only cleansed the body, but it helped cleanse the soul too. It made life more bearable.
The look of love and affection on the grandchild’s face as he looked up at his grandfather put a lump in Robert’s throat and tears in his eyes. He dipped his head under the hot water to wash the evidence of his emotions away before anyone noticed.
Robert was hooked and resolved to get over his embarrassment. If he hadn’t walked through that door and forced himself to strip naked in front of the female attendant—something no one would have done back home—he would never have discovered this precious jewel of life.
It never stopped impressing Robert how much dirt and dead skin those attendants at the massage tables scraped off him each Saturday. Before going to the baths, he must have carried several pounds of the filth with him.
Once he was used to being clean, it was difficult to be dirty again.
It became a ritual that every Saturday he went early to bathe, be scraped clean and pummeled on the massage table until he ached.
After his bath, he spent time in the teahouse taking part in the traditional Chinese lao-jen ch’a, the old man’s tea ceremony and was introduced to the game of Weiqi, known in English as Go. The first time he sat at a table where the game was played, he watched. The second time, he asked questions. One of the men playing was a poet and the other a watercolor artist.
My Splendid Concubine Page 29
