Down to a Soundless Sea (25 page)

At first, the light and shadow pattern of his surroundings appeared familiar, as was the detached voice of the man inquiring as to his symptoms and state of relief. What Sing Fat was not prepared for, however, was the extraordinary beauty, tranquil grace, and imperturbable serenity of the young woman who sat close by watching his every movement with clinical impartiality. To her right and across the room sat an older gentleman of somber aspect. This fellow labored at a worktable carefully preparing bewildering compounds over the coals of a small brazier.

Though he rarely looked up from his work, the wizard addressed the stranger with an informality that disarmed Sing Fat. But for all that, Sing Fat could not take his gaze from the girl for more than a moment. It was as though the sight of anything but her literally hurt his eyes, and he felt compelled to return his gaze to her as if gasping for breath.

Sing Fat had never experienced any sensation remotely like the spiritual commotion he was undergoing at that moment. He sincerely believed that he had been possessed by a supernatural being. Every detail of his existence was instantly in attendance upon every aspect and inclination of this creature.

It was all too much to sustain in his present state, so Sing Fat chose to shut his eyes before his heart fell out of his sleeve. The maneuver didn’t work. The girl’s image was burned into his retina like a flash of lightning on a black night. However he
turned his eyes beneath his darkened lids, her likeness, etched in blue and violet sparks, floated to the center of his vision and remained there.

The next words that Sing Fat heard came from the apothecary and were spoken at his bedside. He instructed Sing Fat to drink an offered preparation at one go and to disregard the flavor. His reward would be a mug of sweet tea to take away the aftertaste.

Sing Fat opened his eyes and saw the man holding a small bowl of thick, brown liquid. His host now occupied the place where the girl had been. She now knelt by the hearth across the room. She was stroking a large white cat that reclined with its front paws splayed upon her lap. The girl’s attention was drawn to a simmering clay pot set in the coals, but the cat eyed Sing Fat with the same dispassionate and thoughtful expression the girl exhibited. Sing Fat contemplated the similarity. It was as though the girl and the cat were two halves of the same being.

The apothecary centered his guest’s attention with a pointed reminder about the elixir at hand and the necessity of immediate consumption to achieve maximum effect. Sing Fat blinked as though hearing the man’s voice for the first time. He reached out for the medicine and became aware that he was dressed in a clean smock that was not his own. Instantly his hands rushed to his waist, but before a search commenced, Sing Fat heard the man say that there was no reason to be alarmed. His possessions had been safely set aside in a secure place. He might redeem them intact as soon as he was well.

The man smiled, and Sing Fat took the bowl and swallowed the odious blend at one go. The apothecary seemed pleased and rubbed his hands together with sincere satisfaction.
Good patients never labored their benefactors with objections or obtuse questions. Next he offered Sing Fat a small cup of sweet tea as promised.

The apothecary then called over his shoulder to the girl and asked that she prepare their guest a bowl of fish soup. Within moments the bowl was passed from girl to apothecary to patient. Sing Fat thought it was the most wonderful soup he had ever tasted, and he ravenously devoured it almost at once. The girl brought another, and this too he consumed.

The apothecary advised against gorging and insisted that the stranger take advantage of the opportunity to rest and sleep. Only then would his health and vigor return to him. Sing Fat nodded and thanked his host.

The vision he took to his dreams was that of the girl watching him. Her white cat reclined against her quilted jacket as though the girl’s lap was its natural setting. The cat too watched Sing Fat and flicked the tip of its tail every so often as a display of applied feline disinterest. The last thing Sing Fat recalled, before a medicated sleep towed him under, was an innocent observation that hinted at a note of disquieting coincidence. The girl and the cat wore identical expressions and shared the same languorous bearing. One could almost believe that they were related by blood. With one last quizzical glance in their direction, Sing Fat surrendered to the apothecary’s potions and drifted off in a warm, safe fog.

Sing Fat awoke the next morning with an exquisite sense of well-being, but when he discovered that he was all alone he became somewhat apprehensive. The fact that the girl and her cat were no longer watching over him brought on twinges of sadness faceted with relief.

For a few moments Sing Fat was forced to confront the
possibility that everything he had experienced in the throes of his illness might have been nothing more than a fevered dream, and yet the details of his present surroundings were as he remembered them. Now that the morning’s light, cast from a small window high in the rear of the room, illuminated more of his environment, Sing Fat realized that he must have been attended to in the workshop and storeroom of the apothecary’s establishment.

The worktable, with its myriad instruments, little boxes, and porcelain jars, was well within sight, but the back of the room, which had remained hidden in the dark, now revealed stacks of hinged wooden boxes and large jars perched on long shelves. Each was labeled with elaborate characters, but since he had never seen such ciphers, Sing Fat could not understand what they really contained.

As he rose from his low pallet and swung his legs to the floor, Sing Fat heard a door open to the accompaniment of a tinkling bell. He listened as two muffled voices conversed for a moment. Then the door behind him opened and a pleasant-looking old woman came in carrying a covered tray, which she placed on a low table next to Sing Fat’s bed. The old lady nodded, said that she hoped the young master was feeling better, and encouraged him to eat while the food was hot. She then bowed politely and withdrew the way she had come.

The savory odor of the meal reached out and seduced Sing Fat at once. Setting aside all other considerations for the moment, he surrendered to his appetite. He could not remember the last time he had eaten so well. All the delightful flavors and aromas, so long excluded from camp rations, came back to greet his palate with childhood memories of bounteous kitchens and long tables of laughing people.

It was just as he set his chopsticks across the empty bowls that the door opened again and the apothecary entered carrying a paper-wrapped parcel and a bundle of clean clothing that proved to be Sing Fat’s own.

The apothecary introduced himself as Chow Yong Fat and was truly taken aback when his guest responded with his own surname, Sing Fat. The elder Fat smiled broadly and said that the gods must have guided the young man’s footsteps. Though there was no direct relation between the two men, the elder Fat insisted on calling the younger man “cousin” as an acknowledgment of their distant clan affiliation.

When Sing Fat hefted the parcel he knew at once that it must be his gold. When he unwrapped the canvas belt he found all the pockets still stitched and sealed just as he had left them.

He thanked the elder Fat for his diligence and kindness and further expressed his gratitude for the efforts expended to save his withered remains from certain death and an unmarked, roadside grave. He said that he would be honored to generously recompense the sage apothecary for all his masterful efforts.

The elder Fat bowed his head politely and said that while under his roof payment was not necessary, but if the young man truly felt an obligation, perhaps he could honor the debt with simple answers to a few questions. Sing Fat nodded his head in turn and declared a willingness to respond to any queries his host might have.

The elder Fat was most curious about Sing Fat’s adventures. He was impressed with the young man’s parentage and education and sympathized deeply with the story of his family’s destruction. The apothecary knew only too well of the predations inflicted by the burgeoning class of petty warlords in China. He appreciated Sing Fat’s resolution to escape the escalating bloodshed.

The apothecary himself had suffered from the military rivalries sparked by the end of the Boxer Rebellion and had chosen to come to America to help minister to fellow countrymen laboring like ants to build the local railroads.

But the elder Fat was most amused with the methods by which Sing Fat had amassed his little fortune. Gleaning discarded specks of gold from the waste of the placer mines required cunning, patience, and attention to detail. These qualities indicated a sense of diligence and perseverance not readily found in most young laborers.

The older man then tactfully inquired what Sing Fat’s future course might be and, for the first time, found a degree of confusion on the part of his guest. Sing Fat shyly admitted that he was not sure what he should do. His first priority had been to escape the lethal labor of the mines. He had thought to go into business of some kind, but knowing so little of the country and the prospects available to a foreign stranger, he had set aside any contemplation on the matter until he became better informed.

Sing Fat freely admitted that he had chosen to take on the challenges one at a time and had hoped that after he had found refuge amongst his own people, some worthy elder might be able to counsel him on the best policy to follow. He was forthright when it came to self-criticism and expressed total ignorance in the ways of Western commerce. He had been groomed, he said, to take on the responsibilities of his ancestors’ estates, and he knew little else. Now that such things were no longer possible, he would have to apprentice himself to a new profession and start all over again. He would be content with any occupation except mining, he said with a laugh. Outright slavery seemed preferable to mining in his estimation. The elder Fat chuckled knowingly in agreement.

During the length of the informal interview, Sing Fat had been bursting to ask the apothecary about the mysterious young woman who had attended him, but he knew that etiquette and custom frowned on a stranger’s curiosity in these matters. Sing Fat had hoped that perhaps his host would incidentally mention her presence or her name, but that expectation went unfulfilled, and the prospect that he might never see the girl again tormented him to an extent he had never thought possible.

Sing Fat had little or no experience with women, at least with those not directly related to his family. He had never been counseled about what to expect from his own emotions in these matters. In fact, as a youth, he had been scrupulously tutored to keep his sentiments about women under tight rein at all times. A man susceptible to the vicissitudes of temperament and desire was considered vulnerable and at risk to all manner of reversals in life. Sing Fat now found it almost impossible to leap this hurdle of parental guidance, particularly as it had delivered him from personal calamities in the past.

The elder Fat mused upon what he had heard, looked up, and asked what profession seemed most appealing to the young man. Again Sing Fat shook his head and pleaded bewilderment. But any path, he said, that would lead a soul to a competent livelihood, providing ample ability to support a family, was worthy of consideration.

He was not proud or overly ambitious, he said, and entertained no desire to return to his long-dead social status. But he was anxious to nurture any blossom, no matter how small or solitary, of his truncated ancestral tree. If he could not do so in the heart of the Middle Kingdom among his own people, then he would attempt a minor resurrection of his clan abroad.
Here in the land under the Gold Mountain he would make peace with his ancestors and his fate.

The apothecary, having taken up his place at his worktable, looked up from his concoctions and studied the young man for some moments. Then he said that perhaps the gods had indeed led the young man to his present circumstances with a purpose. The elder Fat asserted that he was, at present, searching for just such a person to bring into his learned occupation.

The work required a studious and disciplined nature to be sure, but the future might shine brightly for a young man who understood the importance of such a meaningful undertaking. The people had great need for masters of the healing arts. He had hoped to draw upon the talents of his sons one day, but that day would never come. This last statement obviously pained the elder Fat, and it took a moment for him to regain his composure.

Chow Yong Fat said his beloved children had passed into the shadow world to join their venerable ancestors eight years past. They had died of an exotic malady contracted from the whites. Sadly the illness had proven unassailable and immune to all his medical skills. His poor wife had died of protracted anguish, grief, and shame a year later.

All his love, talent, and medicine had shown itself even less effectual in that instance. When her two beautiful sons died, the apothecary’s despondent wife had abandoned the will to live. She expired under the darkest of all human veils, he said: self-recrimination, remorse, and illusions of culpability.

Since then he had carried on alone. Sing Fat could see these confidences distressed the elder Fat, but he chose not to interrupt with formal condolences until his host had concluded his story.

Chow Yong Fat had a few distant relations, he continued, but they lived to the north in Santa Cruz. After laboring on the Monterey and Salinas Valley railroad, they had taken to the fishing trade with only marginal success. Abandoning that vocation as too dangerous and unprofitable, some had taken on an even more perilous occupation laboring for the California Powder Works on the shores of the San Lorenzo River, while others worked as lime packers for the Henry Cowell Lime and Cement Company.

Unfortunately their endeavors had a marked tendency to narrow their focus to the health of their purses. They knew, or wanted to know, little else. Their children, he confessed, enjoyed scant education and seemed content, as did their elders, to make their living in the same traditional ways.