During the first lesson on Taoism, the Dao De Jing was open on the table between them. Robert stared at the beginning lines.
The way, which can be uttered, is not the eternal Way.
The name, which can be named, is not the eternal Name.
“It makes little sense to me, Master,” he said.
“That is because to grasp the meaning of the Way you must understand how to balance yin and yang. To do that you must understand what emptiness means in relation to your life. It cannot be put into words.” Master Ping tapped his chest. “The meaning of the Way must be found in here.” Then he tapped his skull. “And in here. That is how I understand it. You must learn how to bend with the wind and to allow the river to flow around you when you are standing in the current. The world and all the people live in the river’s current. To survive, you must allow it to flow around you, because you cannot change it.”
Soon Robert was to be sorely tested, and the Tao entered his life in unexpected ways to keep him sane. Uncle Bark would also play an important role in that lesson.
In the afternoons and late into the evenings, Robert worked as an interpreter for foreign ship captains that didn’t speak Chinese. He was fluent in Mandarin and was picking up other Chinese dialects like the one from Ningpo and another from Shanghai. He was also learning Cantonese, which he couldn’t speak clearly but understood.
This traveling back and forth on the river was a big bother. Guan-jiah did the shopping in Ningpo, and Robert carried the products to the cottage in Uncle Bark’s sampan. He hated the time lost with his girls and looked forward to the end of summer and autumn when he planned moving back to the Ningpo house for the winter.
With Ayaou and Shao-mei, he had discovered unspoiled happiness. Simple things became glorious to treasure like eating a bowl of bland rice porridge with pieces of yam in it or some vegetable he’d never tasted before.
A meal didn’t have to be a feast of delicacies to be enjoyed when the girls cooked. Life was close to ideal—at least what Robert saw as ideal at the time. He never imagined that the simple things he once took for granted were splendid when colored with love, which he gorged on daily.
“What is this?” he asked one evening. He leaned over his plate examining the thick stems and dainty leaves of the wok steamed greens Ayaou had cooked with oil, garlic and ginger for one of the dinner dishes.
“Weeds,” she said. “The peasants eat them. Because they eat them, they are stronger and have more vitality than people who live in the city. We are now eating peasant food. A peasant can work from before sunrise to well after sundown and still have energy for bedroom activities.”
Robert tasted one of the strands. It was crunchy and delicate at the same time. It rather tasted like broccoli, which he had never liked. This was better.
“Eat it, Robert,” Shao-mei urged. “It will make your legs like tree trunks, and your sun instrument will grow stronger roots.”
“Be quiet, Shao-mei. He has too much already.” Ayaou reached for Robert’s plate. “You won’t like it, Robert. It’s better if you don’t eat it.”
He slapped her hand away. He stuffed another stalk of the dark green leafy vegetable into his mouth and chewed. “I like it,” he said. He sat up straight with his back stiff like a board. He opened his eyes wide and smacked his lips. “I can feel it working already. We won’t get any sleep tonight.”
The girls laughed—a light, carefree sound, which reminded Robert of the Lancashire Handbell Ringers.
Sometimes Robert sensed the undercurrent of jealousy still lurking behind the girls’ eyes, but there was never a serious argument in the cottage—at least while he was there. Squabbles were expected but not raging arguments.
The girls greeted him each day when he returned home. This was why he loved sunsets more than mornings. Like a peacock, the sun spread its colored feathers along the horizon in a blaze of fading brilliance. In the shadowy dusk, the girls stood waiting near the water. The moment they saw the sampan or heard Uncle Bark’s oar in the water, they’d start cheering. Every return was a surprise and every departure heartache. In the mornings, Uncle Bark rowed down river into the rising sun. Robert hated that glaring, hot orb blinding him when it filled the sky in front of the boat and bounced harsh light off the water.
In the evenings from where he sat in the sampan, Robert saw their silky silhouettes jumping in excitement like puppies greeting a master when he returned home after a long day. It must have been lonely spending so much time at the cottage with no one near. To fill their time, the girls had planted a flourishing garden filled with vegetables and flowers.
When he stepped out of the boat, the girls moved to either side of him. Shao-mei took his left arm and Ayaou his right. Just the touch of their warm skin chased away the flagging energies brought on by the long day at the consulate and the trip upriver.
“Robert,” Shao-mei said one evening, “we have a surprise for you. We have worked all week on a new dance we saw once in a Peking opera and have combined it with something else. We had to alter one of your robes to be more in character.”
“Yes,” Ayaou said, “there is a role for you to play, but we must paint your face first.”
“What colors?” he asked. He knew the colors of his face paint revealed what kind of character he was to play.
“Today we are going to paint you blue and white,” Shao-mei replied. When Robert studied her expression, he saw there was a mischievous look in her eyes. Ayaou was better at hiding her feelings. Shao-mei was like glass.
Blue and white meant he was to be cruel and wicked. Robert wondered if there would be a twist added, so he could act out of character. Maybe he would get to spank one of them. That would be interesting. They hadn’t done anything like that before.
“And what color is your face going to be painted?” he asked.
“Black,” Ayaou said with enthusiasm. Black meant she was going to be impulsive. Just thinking of the possibilities excited him.
“My nose is going to be white,” Shao-mei said. “I insisted.” That meant she was going to be full of laughter and be the fun of the little family comedy—for he was sure it would be more comedy than drama. The girls were usually too lighthearted for anything serious or dark.
“That’s all you are going to paint,” he said, “just your nose?”
“No, silly,” she replied. “My face will be black like Ayaou’s face, but I will have a touch of white. I want to be wicked too.”
“And what are we performing tonight?” he asked.
“Something Ayaou discovered by Tuan Cheng Shih, who lived during the Tang Dynasty,” Shao-mei said.
“Be quiet, sister,” Ayaou said. “That is supposed to be a surprise.”
Robert had studied Tuan Shih’s Miscellaneous Record of You Yang with Master Ping. He took a wild guess what they were going to enact. “Does this little comic drama of yours have a girl who loses her parents and is deprived of her rightful place in life by evil relatives?” he asked. He thought of the Brothers Grimm and their collection of stories that included Cinderella. He knew the first Cinderella story had originated in China—not Germany. The Chinese version had been published a thousand years before the Grimm brothers had been born.
“You will have to wait to find out,” Ayaou said. She turned to Shao-mei. “Close your mouth sister. It is about to spill the surprise.”
He knew what they were doing wouldn’t be the same as the Chinese Cinderella. Ayaou always altered the stories so the result turned into an orgy after they went to bed. She planned these rare comedy dramas when it was her night to sleep with him. Shao-mei didn’t have Ayaou’s wild, inventive imagination.
What they planned turned out to be a riot of laughter. It kept Robert up late. This made going to the consulate the next morning more difficult. He endured the next day’s exhaustion just to spend an hour or two with his girls in a room full of fun.
Every morning was the opposite of his evenings. When he left, they accompanied him
to the boat in a gloomy silence. Before he climbed into the sampan, they took turns hugging and kissing him as if he were going to float out of sight and never return.
“Do not fall in the water, Robert,” Shao-mei said. “We do not want you to be swallowed by a giant carp.”
“Silly, sister,” Ayaou said. “There is no carp large enough to swallow Robert. All he has to do is roll over on his back and float to Ningpo.”
“Then the eels will bite him in the ass,” Shao-mei replied. “I do not want to see his smooth ass full of puncture wounds. Stay in the sampan, Robert. Do not go swimming. It is more fun to eat fried eels than have them eat you.”
English was never spoken at home, and Robert did not intend to teach Ayaou or Shao-mei his language. He didn’t want either of them to learn anything about his culture, its religions, its customs, its philosophies, or its beliefs. He wanted to immerse himself in their world, the Chinese world—this Confucius, Taoist place where he’d finally found some peace of mind.
He knew the truth and realized he’d fled to China, not to escape his sins as he’d originally thought, but to find a different world. He had found exactly that in these two girls.
Most evenings after the language lessons, Robert played his violin while Ayaou danced and Shao-mei played the pee pah, which she preferred over dancing anyway.
“Tell us a story about growing up in Ireland,” Shao-mei asked one night.
“It’s no comparison to China,” he replied.
“How can that be?” Shao-mei said. “If it is where you were born, it must be a wonderful place.” She looked at Robert with doubt as if she suspected he wasn’t being honest.
“We don’t have time to waste talking about Ireland. It’s on the other side of the world. We live in China, so we read Chinese stories, not Irish.”
“I agree with Robert,” Ayaou said. “It stinks there. They do not take baths. It is a horrible, smelly place populated by crazy people who want nothing but power over others.”
Shao-mei pouted and didn’t bring the subject up again.
He was selfish wanting to keep them the way they were. He didn’t feel they needed anything. They were naturally beautiful, kind and hardworking. What could his culture offer them? They might walk away from him once they learned to read a Bible and listened to a Christian missionary.
To keep them occupied he guided them in adapting songs so the two musical instruments worked together in harmony. The girls taught him Chinese songs, which they sang together. His favorite was a humorous song called Sour Grapes. The girls fell on the floor laughing every time he sang it.
With the love of two women, his longevity was assured. He thanked God every day for bringing them into his life. If this was living in sin, he wanted to sin to stay alive. He couldn’t imagine living any other way. He had discovered his true God in China. This God showed him that what was natural and universal prevailed.
It was in early May when Shao-mei made her announcement. She came to Robert with both hands spread across her swollen belly. “The baby is going to come soon,” she said.
“Are you sure? Has your water broken?”
She stared at him with an odd expression of disbelief on her face. “How can you break water?” she asked.
Robert explained.
She shook her head. “No, there has been no broken water.”
“So, you have labor pains.”
“He kicks me all the time.”
Robert told her what labor pains were. She shook her head again. “Then how do you know?” he asked.
“I had a dream that told me we were going to have a boy any day. The doctor said so. Do not tell Ayaou. I want it to be a surprise.”
“Was the doctor in your dreams too?” he asked.
She nodded. Her eyes glowed. She waddled away leaving him speechless. After that, he couldn’t concentrate. It wasn’t easy seeing himself as the father of another man’s child—a man he did not like. Shao-mei also expected him to mate with her soon after the baby was born. That was another dilemma Robert had to deal with that he hated to admit he was looking forward to.
Originally, Robert worried because the pregnancy was taking so long. Before leaving Ningpo for the summer cottage, he’d taken Shao-mei to a Chinese doctor. The man held her wrist, felt her pulse and said everything was fine. She was fit as a buffalo. The baby would be healthy too.
Robert couldn’t understand how feeling a pulse told the doctor so much. In China, they practiced medicine differently from Britain and Europe. The Chinese had been practicing it for thousands of years, so it had to work.
He made a mental note to have Master Ping teach him something about Chinese medicine. He wanted to understand. There must be a text he could read.
“First you wanted to learn about Chinese customs. Then you wanted to learn about Chinese women. Now you want to learn about Chinese medicine,” Tee Lee Ping said. He took a deep breath and sighed. “You are a hungry man. I have never had a student like you.”
“I have a voracious appetite.”
“I have discovered that.” Ping’s shoulders drooped. He looked tired. “Where do you want to start?” he asked. “I will do my best.”
“At the beginning.”
Ping was quiet for a moment. “That means we have to go back before China had a written language to the time of the Yellow Emperor, Huang-ti, about twenty-seven hundred years before your Jesus Christ was born. It has been said that Huang-ti invented traditional Chinese medicine.” Ping looked thoughtful and stared at the ceiling.
When he looked down, he said, “You could read Li Shizhen’s book, the Ben Cao Gang Mu. However, that is a lot to study. He lived three hundred years ago and is considered the greatest physician and pharmacologist in China. There is a famous British man of science who sailed the world to study animals and nature. I heard he referred to Li’s book and that he quoted Li in what he wrote.”
“Charles Darwin,” Robert said. Darwin had published a book in 1839 titled Journal and Remarks about his voyage on the HMS Beagle. Robert had read it.
“Charles Darwin,” Master Ping said. “Yes, I believe that is the name.”
“Charles Darwin’s voyage of discovery lasted almost five years,” Robert said. “He had enough time to read this Ben Cao Gang Mu.”
“We could spend years on that book. I have seen it, but I have not read it. It is more for men of medicine like this Charles Darwin than for students of literature like us. Li Shizhen spent twenty-seven years writing the Ben Cao Gang Mu.”
“Wait,” Robert said. His mind was spinning. Did he want to do this and abandon the poems and literature he loved to read and discuss? Wasn’t it enough of a struggle to understand Taoism and Buddhism? If he added medicine to the soup, that could all be left behind.
“Maybe you could explain to me the difference between the way my people practice medicine and the way the Chinese do. That should quench my thirst.”
“I hope so,” Ping said. “I understand foreign medicine is designed to fix a person after he is broken, but Chinese medicine focuses on how a person should live his life so he avoids getting sick. To do this you must balance your life by eating good food, exercising in moderation and having a balanced attitude. This is the foundation of health in China. Most foreigners do none of these things. They eat anything, which means bad food. They consume too much alcohol. They do not exercise, and when the body breaks, they run to a doctor and say fix me.” He tilted his head at an angle and looked at Robert with expectation.
“What about an example? I don’t understand what you mean by eating right.”
“Hmm, you want an example.” Tee Lee Ping rubbed his chin in thought. His thick, bushy eyebrows lowered and almost covered his eyes. “Ah yes, I have one. Adapting to the seasons is the foundation of good health and healthy aging. Maybe you have noticed as the seasons change, what your concubines put on the table also changes. In the spring and summer, there should be more fruit or vegetables. In the fall and winter, you should s
ee more grain than fruits and vegetables.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed that. Anything else?”
“Where foreign doctors sometimes let blood out of a person when he is sick, Chinese doctors practice Gua-Sha, which means they scrape an area of skin near where the suffering takes place. They do this to stimulate the circulation of the blood in that area believing that stimulating the blood will lead to healing. Chinese doctors do not drain blood out of the body as foreign doctors do.”
Master Ping threw up his arms and looked frustrated. Robert had never seen him like this before. “I’m sorry,” Master Ping said. “I am not a doctor. I teach people how to read and speak Mandarin. I teach Chinese literature. If you want to know more about Chinese medicine, I suggest you read Li Shizhen’s book, but do it on your time. I do not feel it would benefit your education regarding the Chinese language or its literature or its people.”
That was the end of his education about the difference between Chinese and Western medicine. The next day, they were back to studying Taoism.
To avoid thinking about what fatherhood would do to his life, Robert buried himself deeper in the language lessons and the work at the British consulate. He added hours to his workday and returned home later in the evenings. Most days, when Uncle Bark tied his sampan to the rebuilt dock below the cottage, it was dark as tar out, and Robert expected to hear a baby crying.
He knew the importance the Chinese gave to the birth of a son. If the baby was a boy, he was sure Ayaou would be happy, crushed and threatened at the same time. He felt as if he were sitting on a powder keg, and the fuse was burning slowly toward an explosion.
He decided to start making love to Ayaou more often in the hope she’d get pregnant. The herbs Guan-jiah had found for him to feed Ayaou hadn’t worked their magic yet. He prayed that Shao-mei was wrong, and her baby would be a girl. This would help keep harmony in the house. If Guan-jiah was right, it should be a girl. Robert had fed her double doses of the herbs for the last few weeks to insure it.
My Splendid Concubine Page 31
