Daughter of Fortune (24 page)

Tao Chi'en sank into widowerhood with total despair. He made an altar with the portrait of Lin and some of her belongings, and spent hours staring at it in desolation. He stopped seeing his patients or sharing studies and research with Ebanizer Hobbs, activities on which their friendship was based. He was repelled by the advice of the Englishman, who maintained that what he needed was a bit of the hair of the dog, and that the best way to get over his grief was to visit the brothels in the port, where he could choose all the women he wanted with deformed feet—Hobbs's term for golden lilies. How could his friend suggest such an abhorrent idea? The woman didn't live who could replace Lin; he would never love another, of that Tao Chi'en was sure. All he accepted from Hobbs during that period were his generous bottles of whiskey. For weeks he lived in a haze of alcohol; gradually his money ran out and he had to sell or pawn his possessions, until the day came that he couldn't pay his rent and had to move to a cheap hotel. Then he remembered that he was a
zhong yi
and began to work again, although he barely managed, unshaven, dirty, the hair in his queue flying. Since he had a good reputation, his patients put up with his unkempt appearance and drunken errors with resignation, but gradually they stopped coming to see him. And Ebanizer Hobbs stopped calling on him to treat difficult cases because he had lost confidence in Tao's judgment. Until that time they had complemented each other well: the Englishman was for the first time able to perform surgery boldly, thanks to the powerful drugs and golden needles that soothed pain, reduced hemorrhaging, and shortened the time of healing, and the Chinese physician had learned to use the scalpel and other techniques of European science. But with his trembling hands and eyes clouded by intoxication and tears, Tao Chi'en represented a danger more than he did support and assistance.

In the spring of 1847, Tao Chi'en's destiny took a sudden turn, as it had once or twice before in his life. As he lost his regular patients and the rumor spread of his downhill course as a physician, he had to concentrate more in the poorest sections of the port, where no one asked for references. The cases were routine: contusions and knife and bullet wounds. One night Tao Chi'en was called to an emergency in a tavern to stitch a sailor's injuries following a royal free-for-all. They led him to the back of the room where a man was lying unconscious, his head split open like a watermelon. His opponent, a gigantic Norwegian, had picked up a heavy wood table and used it as a club to defend himself against his attackers, a gang of Chinese intending to beat him to a pulp. They had rushed the Norwegian and would have made mincemeat out of him had not several Scandinavian sailors drinking at the same bar come to his rescue, and what had begun as an argument among drunken gamblers turned into a racial brawl. By the time Tao Chi'en arrived, anyone who could walk had long since disappeared. The Norwegian, uninjured, was escorted to his ship by two English policemen, and the only ones left in sight were the tavern keeper, the dying victim, and the ship's pilot, who had worked out an arrangement to send the police on their way. Had the victim been European he would have been taken to the British hospital, but since he was Asian the port authorities were not putting themselves out too much.

Tao Chi'en took one look and could see that nothing could be done for that poor devil whose skull was cracked wide open and his brains spilling out. This he explained to the pilot, a bearded, heavyset Englishman.

“Damned chink! Can't you stop the blood and sew him up?” he demanded.

“With his head like that? Why sew him up? He has a right to die in peace.”

“He can't die! My ship sails at dawn and I need this man onboard. He's my cook!”

“Very regrettable,” Tao Chi'en replied with a courteous bow of his head, trying to hide his disgust at the
fan wey'
s insensitivity.

The pilot ordered a bottle of gin and invited Tao Chi'en to have a drink with him. If the cook was beyond consolation they might as well lift a glass in his name, he said, so his fucking ghost, a pox on him, didn't come and pull their toes at night. They sat down a few feet from the dying man to take their time getting drunk. Occasionally Tao Chi'en bent down to take the man's pulse, calculating that he couldn't have more than a couple of minutes longer to live, but the man was slower to die than he'd thought. The
zhong yi
was oblivious to how the Englishman was pouring him drink after drink while barely downing his. Soon Tao felt so dizzy he couldn't remember what he was doing in that place anyway. And an hour later, when his patient twice shuddered violently and actually died, Tao Chi'en missed it because he had rolled to the floor, unconscious.

He waked to the blinding light of midday, opened his eyes, squinting, and as soon as he could raise his head saw nothing but sky and water all around him. It took him quite a while to realize that he was lying faceup on a large coil of rope on the deck of a ship. The pounding of the waves against the hull beat in his head like a clanging bell. He thought he heard voices and shouting, but he wasn't sure of anything; he could just as easily have been in hell. He struggled to his knees and crawled forward a couple of meters, but was overcome by nausea and collapsed back onto the deck. A few minutes later he felt the shock of a pail of cold water splash over his head and heard a voice speaking to him in Cantonese. He looked up and saw a beardless, sympathetic face greeting him with a wide smile from which half the teeth were missing. A second pail of seawater shook him from his stupor. The young Chinese man who had so solicitously dumped water on him squatted down beside him, laughing loudly and slapping his thighs as if Tao's pathetic condition were irresistibly funny.

“Where am I?” Tao Chi'en managed to stammer.

“Welcome aboard the
Liberty
! We're sailing west, I think.”

“But I don't want to go anywhere. I have to get off. Immediately.”

New guffaws met this statement. When finally the man could control his hilarity, he explained to Tao that he had been “shanghaied,” just as he himself had been a couple of months earlier. Tao Chi'en felt he was going to faint. He knew what that meant. If there weren't enough men to fill out a crew, the captain or pilot fell back on stopgap measures: getting some unwary bar patron drunk, even knocking him out and “signing him on” against his will. Life at sea was rough, and paid badly; accidents, malnutrition, and illness cut into the ranks; on each voyage one or more sailors died and their bodies ended up on the ocean floor with no one to give them another thought. Added to that, the captains tended to be despots who did not have to give an accounting to anyone and who punished the slightest offense with a lashing. In Shanghai it was so bad they'd had to reach a gentleman's agreement among captains to put an end to kidnapping free men and stealing one another's crew. Before the accord, every time a sailor came into port to have a few drinks he ran the risk of waking up on a different ship. The pilot of the
Liberty
had decided to replace his dead cook with Tao Chi'en—in his eyes all the “yellow” race were alike, one was as good as the next—so after getting Tao drunk he had him hauled aboard. Before Tao came to, the pilot had stamped his thumbprint on a contract that signed him up for two years. Slowly, the magnitude of what had happened sank into Tao Chi'en's soggy brain. The idea of rebelling was never a consideration, that would be suicide, but he intended to desert the minute they touched land, wherever on the planet that might be.

The young Asian helped Tao get to his feet and wash his face, then led him belowdecks to where the berths and hammocks were lined up. He assigned Tao a bunk and a box to store his gear in. Tao Chi'en feared he had lost everything, but found the case containing his medical instruments on the wood planks that would be his bed. The pilot had had the good sense to save it. Lin's portrait, however, was left behind on its altar. He realized with horror that the spirit of his wife might not be able to locate him in the middle of the ocean. The first few days at sea were torture; at times he was tempted by the thought of jumping overboard and ending his suffering once and for all. Almost as soon as he could stay on his feet he was assigned to the rudimentary galley, where the pots hung from hooks, clanging together with every toss of the waves, making a deafening racket. The fresh provisions brought aboard in Hong Kong were rapidly depleted and soon there was nothing but fish, salted meat, beans, sugar, lard, wormy flour, and biscuits so stale that sometimes they had to be hacked into pieces. Every bite of food was smothered in soy sauce. Each sailor had a pint of liquor per day to drown his sorrows and rinse out his mouth, because inflamed gums were one of the problems of life at sea. For the captain's table, Tao Chi'en had eggs and English marmalade, which he had been directed to protect with his life. Rations were calculated to last the trip if no unusual difficulties arose—such as storms that blew them off course, or lying becalmed—complemented with fresh fish netted along the way. Great culinary skill was not expected of Tao Chi'en; his role was to dole out the food, liquor, and fresh water assigned to each man and to do battle against spoilage and rats. He also had a normal share of swabbing and sailing chores, like any other sailor.

After a week he began to enjoy the fresh air, the hard work, and the company of those men who came from the four corners of the earth, each with his stories, his nostalgia, and his skills. During breaks from work they would play instruments and tell tales of the phantoms of the waves and the exotic women in distant ports. The crew came from many places, from many tongues and customs, but they were united by something that resembled friendship. Isolation, and the knowledge that they needed one another, made comrades of men who on dry land would not have given one another a second look. Tao Chi'en began to laugh again, as he hadn't laughed since Lin's illness. One morning the pilot called him to introduce him to Captain John Sommers, whom Tao had seen only from a distance, on the bridge. He found himself facing a tall, darkly bearded, steely-eyed man tanned by the winds of many latitudes. He spoke to Tao through the pilot, who knew a little Cantonese, but Tao replied in his book English, with the affected, aristocratic accent he had learned from Ebanizer Hobbs.

“Mr. Oglesby tells me that you are some kind of healer?”

“I am a
zhong yi
, a physician.”

“Physician? What do you mean, physician?”

“Chinese medicine is several centuries older than the English, Captain.” Tao Chi'en laughed gently, using his friend Ebanizer Hobbs's exact words.

Captain Sommers raised his eyebrows, angered by the lowly crew member's insolence, but was disarmed by the truth of the statement. He laughed with good nature.

“Well, we'll see. Mr. Oglesby, pour us three glasses of brandy. We're going to drink a toast to our doctor, here. This is a rare luxury. For the first time we're carrying our own physician onboard!”

Tao Chi'en did not effect his plan to desert in the first port reached by the
Liberty
, because he didn't know where to go. To return to his life as a miserable widower in Hong Kong made as little sense as to go on sailing. Here or there, it was all the same, and at least as a seaman he would travel and learn the ways medicine was practiced in other parts of the world. The one thing that really tormented him was that in all that wandering across the waves Lin might not be able to find him, however much he screamed her name to the winds.

In the first port, he went ashore, like the others, with a six-hour pass, but instead of spending that time in taverns, following the captain's orders he dove into the market in search of spices and medicinal plants. Now that we have a doctor, we'll need remedies, he'd said. He gave Tao a pouch with a specified sum of coins, and warned him that if he gave a thought to escaping or tricking him, he would hunt him down and slit his throat with his own hands, for the man hadn't been born who could cheat him and get away with it.

“Is that clear, Chinaman?”

“It is clear, Englishman.”

“You address me as sir!”

“Yes, sir,” Tao Chi'en replied, looking down, because he was learning not to look white men in the face.

His first surprise had been to discover that China was not the absolute center of the universe. There were other cultures—more barbaric, that was true, but much more powerful. He had not suspected that the British controlled a large part of the globe, just as he had never suspected that other
fan wey
were masters of far-reaching colonies in distant lands spread across four continents, as Captain John Sommers went to the trouble of explaining to him the day that Tao pulled his infected tooth as they were sailing off the coast of Africa. He accomplished that operation cleanly and almost painlessly, thanks to a combination of his gold needles in the captain's temples and a paste of cloves and eucalyptus applied to his gums. When it was over, and the relieved and grateful patient was polishing off his bottle of liquor, Tao Chi'en dared ask where they were going. It was upsetting to him to travel blindly, the blurred horizon between sea and an infinite sky the only reference.

“We're sailing in the direction of Europe, but for us nothing changes. We are seafarers, always on water. Do you want to go back home?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you have a family somewhere?”

“No, sir.”

“Then it's the same to you whether we're going north or south, east or west, isn't that true?”

“Yes, but I like to know where I am.”

“Why is that?”

“Because if I fall overboard, or the ship sinks, my spirit will need to know where it is in order to find its way back to China; if not it will wander around aimlessly. The gates to heaven are in China.”

“Where did you get that daft idea?” the captain said, laughing. “So, in order to get to paradise you have to die in China? Take a look at the map, man. Your country is the largest, that's true, but there's a lot of the world outside China. Here is England, it is only a small island, but if you add our colonies you will see that we are masters of more than half the globe.”