Shanghai (63 page)

—

Silas gathered together the pages and sorted them carefully. Then he stacked the journals and got to his feet. He took two steps toward the bookshelf before he stopped himself. He once more rose on tiptoe and took what he believed were the rest of his father's writings in hand. He didn't want these journals with his other books. These were special. They were his. He looked at the journals in his hands, but he didn't see journals—he saw one great thing—one book.

He left the study and returned to his bedroom—his and Miranda's bedroom before, but now just his. There he opened the delicately inlaid table beside the bed and slid Richard Hordoon's journals—his book—into the waiting drawer. Then he closed it, and for the first time since Miranda's death he fell into a deep and restful sleep.

And as he slept the dust in his study sifted down from the ceiling and set a thin layer of impediment between any reader and the three final pages of Richard Hordoon's testament, which his son, Silas, had inadvertently left on the uppermost shelf of his bookcase. The three pages bore a simple title: “Doing the Devil's Work.”

—

And as the sun crested the horizon, a second barber took his place on the sidewalk on Julu Lu. He stared at the barber who was already set up, then the two nodded—and a young scholar with a wine stain on his cheek entered the shop of another “collaborator.”

1894–97

Charles Soon's return to his native China was not all that he had hoped for. The Chinese treated him as if he were a yellow-skinned
Fan Kuei,
while his
Fan Kuei
fellow Southern Methodist missionaries treated him as if he were a barely literate Celestial who had somehow weaseled a degree out of Wesleyan College. Charles, although he had not stood first in his class, had earned respectable grades at school, and although the only Asian in his class, he was well liked. Under the guidance of Captain Malachi and an American industrialist who had taken him in as a ward, he had blossomed into a fine young man. He was highly regarded by both his church and his peers and invited to all the best events of
Wilmington society—although he was careful never to be alone in the company of any of the fine young American ladies of the town.

But here, in Shanghai, where his entire life had clearly been leading him, he found himself for the first time alone and friendless. Then without so much as a word of explanation his superiors shipped him out of the Foreign Settlement to a small village two hundred miles to the north.

In the depths of rural China he was even further at a loss. His cultured Mandarin speech was barely understood by the people of the village, and the crude living conditions were like nothing he had experienced before. There wasn't even running water, let alone a proper toilet, in the whole village. He wrote many letters pleading with his Bishop in Shanghai to increase his allowance so that he could purchase some basic amenities, but he was always curtly rebuffed—in the way a
Fan Kuei
might rebuff a stupid Hakka servant.

He resisted the temptation to use his only two possessions of value—a watch given him by Captain Malachi and a small pouch of gold coins given to him on his leaving by his industrialist benefactor—to better his living conditions, believing that these two gifts were to be saved for more important things.

The squat, windowless hovel that was his church was alive with scorpions and stank of mould. His first two services were attended by a single old lady who slept until it was time for Communion, when she promptly got to her feet and downed the wafer and wine with a nod and a burp.

Charles had never been so low.

It was at the beginning of his second month in the village that he answered a knock at the ill-fitting
planking that passed for a door to his hut to find a peddler selling, of all things, a single page of a novel.

“What would I do with a single page?” he asked.

“Read it, of course, assuming you can read,” the peddler replied.

“Trust me, I can read.”

“Good. So pay me, then read the page, and then read it to others in the village and charge them. I'll be back in a week with another page, and you can buy that one from me and read that one to them—and charge them, of course.”

“It could take years to read a whole book that way.”

“True, but that's not a problem with this kind of book. They'll be waiting for every new page, now, you trust me,” the peddler said with a wink.

Charles took the page and read the first two lines. To his shock, the thing was set in a courtesan's boudoir. He was about to throw the page back at the peddler, but something told him not to. He looked at the man carefully. Then at the man's cart. The thing was piled high with finely made cooking utensils, including a dozen or so hand-beaten woks, many bolts of fine Chinkiang silk and Persian cloth, along with the usual array of pins, needles, thread, ribbons, and other sundries that were common to peddlers the world over. Most impressively, he also had a fine, strong horse. This man was making good money!

“Are books popular?”

“Books?”

“This kind of book? Are they popular?”

“Very,” the man said with a cackle.

“How much per page?”

The figure quoted was small, but when Charles calculated the per-page cost of a three-hundred-page
book against the modest cost to buy it, he was surprised by the profit. No, he was impressed—very impressed.

Two months later he was granted his first leave, and he immediately headed toward Shanghai and its French Concession—not to the brothels and opium dens common in the alleys there, but to the bookshops. There he saw shelf upon shelf of books, many in translation, and in one corner a single badly bound magazine. On a whim he bought the magazine and read the inept articles. Then he turned to the front leaf and sought out the printing credits. The printer's address was displayed prominently. It was on Hua Hai Lu. Charles Soon headed in that direction.

Crossing Bubbling Spring Road, he was almost run down by a fast-moving horse-drawn carriage. Then, much to his shock, another carriage, pulled by a fine white horse, darted out from an alley, and the two headed directly for each other. A loud thud was followed by the ear-piercing neighs of horses that were in turn drowned out by angry female shrieks.

Along with everyone else, Charles Soon ran toward the tumult and was amazed when he got there to see two very beautiful young Han Chinese women, exquisitely dressed, standing in their respective carriages and screaming insults of the most salacious nature at each other. As the women hurled their scurrilous epithets the crowd doubled, then doubled again. It finally occurred to Charles that these young women were courtesans and that this huge and growing crowd was fascinated by everything these ornate creatures said—or did.

He got close enough to hear one call the other a “cunt-faced loon!”

That brought squeals of joy from the crowd—especially from the older women. Then the other shouted
back that at least she kept her feet in her own shoes—a reference that really thrilled the crowd, although Charles didn't completely understand what the tiny shoes that held bound feet had to do with the sex act.

Finally the police arrived. When they did, one of the watchers slipped back into the crowd, the raspberry blotch on his face turning yet a deeper crimson with fury. After much complaint the officers sent the two courtesans on their ways.

Charles watched the crowd slowly disperse. As they did they chattered loudly about the incident and argued with real intensity as to which of the two courtesans had won the verbal battle. It was clear to Charles that they had had an exceedingly entertaining time.

Charles looked down. His sweaty palms had adhered to the pages of the magazine and the cheap ink had run onto his hands. He looked in the direction that the courtesans' carriages had gone, then once more down at the mangled magazine in his hot hand, and headed toward the print shop.

At the end of a long alley close to the west wall of the Old City, he spotted the printer's address. Entering under a stone portal he found himself taking a stairway down into a sub-sub-basement where dozens of men were hunched over tables busily picking out single character tiles from racks that held thousands. The tiles were set into precise brackets that would eventually be run through a printing press that would produce pages of print that would tell the news to the people of Shanghai or entertain the indolent wealthy of the city at the Bend in the River.

The speed with which the men worked was astonishing. A chubby Japanese man with glasses approached
him and asked, “Do you have an order for me?” His Mandarin was word-perfect, but his accent was as foreign to Shanghai as was Charles's. “Well?” he demanded.

Charles hemmed and hawed, then managed, “I need a few more details about your operation before I am willing to offer up the kind of large contract I have in mind.”

“Fine,” the chubby man said, “ask me whatever you like.” He took out a Snake Charmer cigarette and lit it as he scraped ink off his hands onto his blue apron.

“I am anticipating placing a very large order,” Charles said.

“Good,” the chubby Japanese printer said as he let out a long line of smoke. “The bigger the better.”

Charles smiled inwardly—he was good at this. All those years of telling the truth at the seminary must have masked an innate skill at prevarication.

Charles quickly established that handwritten material was brought to this print house, where these men supplied the enamel tile characters that went into the tight brackets that went to the printer, and that the place could reproduce documents at a rapid rate and for what Charles thought of as a remarkably cheap price. Then the man added, “And of course we can handle the new lithograph technique. We were the first ones in Shanghai who could take a photograph or drawing and reproduce it in a book.”

“Or magazine?” Charles was surprised to realize that he'd been holding his breath.

“Sure. Magazine, book, scroll, or a whore's ass. Anything that fits into a printing press.”

—

That evening Charles Soon sat in an inexpensive wine store down by the Suzu Creek with a glass of strong Chinese wine on the table in front of him. He was going to spend the night in the shop, sleeping in the hard chair, hopefully not having to buy more than the one glass of wine.

“Is that wine poisoned or something? Wine's for drinking, not staring at, Padre.”

Charles looked up into the face of a young, inebriated Han Chinese man. Then at the long blue robe of the literati that he wore. He couldn't help noticing the robe was filthy and torn.

“Excuse me?”

“You've been staring at that glass of wine for almost an hour. If you're not going to drink it, I'll take it off your hands.”

“Oh, will you?”

“I'm not asking for charity. I'll recite a poem for you. My fine poem for your cheap glass of wine? A fair trade.”

Charles was intrigued and replied, “Okay.”

The young, impoverished scholar then stood and recited for the better part of twenty minutes the opening of one of the classic poems of the early Ming Dynasty. When he finished Charles applauded, truly impressed. “Where did you learn that?”

“A sip of your wine, your honour, and I'll tell you.”

Charles pushed the glass across the table. The man drank greedily, but Charles reached over and tilted the cup away from his mouth. “Tell me where you learned that.”

The young man spread his arms wide and wailed out, “I am an educated man. I am a literate man—a scholar. But here in this city where only businessmen matter, I am nothing.”

“Did you write the civil service exams?”

“Stood third in my whole prefecture. Third!” The man held up his three end fingers to emphasize his point. Then he reached for the wine again.

Charles stopped his hand before it got to the glass. “Then why don't you have a job with the Doatai?”

“Because, friend, Padre, whatever you are, this is the
Fan Kuei
's Concession and they run things their way here, and they don't need literate men, writers, real writers, like me.”

“Okay. But why not work in the Chinese section of …?”

He didn't get out any more before the man's laughter drowned out his question. “Because, my stupid friend, there is no money to be made there, almost no one lives there. Everyone lives in the Foreign Settlements. They have all the money. All the power … and they don't give a dumpling's squirt about whether a Slant like me can read or not.”

Charles pushed the cup across to the man. “Can you really write?”

The man nodded. “Read, write, recite, you name it.”

“And do you have other friends who can write?”

“Dozens.”

Charles took one of the coins from his benefactor's pouch and ordered the man another cup of wine. When the wine arrived he told the young scholar about the shouting match he had seen on the street between the two courtesans. “Could you write about women like that?”

“Sure, why not? Until recently courtesans saved their special favours for scholars. They only really fell in love with scholars. Now they just fuck merchants and scream at each other in public. What was that, that one called the other?”

“A cunt-faced loon,” Charles said, amazed that he was able to say the words without blushing.

“That's good. Very good. It even scans. ‘Cunt-faced loon' is very good.”

“Yes. But could you write stories about these kinds of women?”

“Those kinds of women? Absolutely.” Then a slyness came into his face as he added, “If you paid me for it.”

“Waiter. Bring this man writing implements and a bottle of wine.” The waiter nodded when he saw a second coin from Charles's pouch appear and headed back behind a cheap curtain. Charles turned to his tablemate and asked, “And you have friends who are also able to write?”