Month: May 2018

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Pell Street Blues Chapter 4

Once in a while Foh Wong had news of Yang
Shen-Li. His friends would read in Canton papers, or in the local Chinatown weekly, the Eminent Elevation, owned and edited by Yung Tang, how the Manchu also was steadily making his way—how, a favorite of the Dowager Empress, he had been appointed captain-general of the Pekin troops, commander-in-chief of the Northern army, and finally—this happened at the turn of the century, at about the same time when Foh Wong paid off the twenty-thousand-dollar mortgage on his Pell Street house—military governor of his native province.
With every rise in the other’s fortunes, Foh Wong’s ambition grew. His hate, expressed by his jealousy of material achievement, was not weakened by his own success, although in this thoughts of Na Liu no longer played a direct part.
He was still a good husband to her, in that he treated her with scrupulous politeness and presented her occasionally with expensive gifts. But his passion was dying. For several reasons. One—logically, inevitably—was that he had never been able to make her love him. Besides, she was getting to be an old woman. And—the gravest reason—she had borne him no children.
She, on the other hand, had not ceased to be his faithful wife: looking after his bodily comfort, making his home a thing of tidiness and beauty, cutting down household costs. Nor did she dislike him. Not at all. Indeed, it would be a hunting after lying, sentimental effect to say that she blamed him for having forced her into marriage. For she also was of Mongol race. She believed, to quote a Chinese proverb, that it was just and proper to take by the tail what one could not take by the head; and she would have acted as Foh Wong had acted—in fact, did act so several years later—had the positions been reversed.
Therefore she gave him her respect. She even gave him a measure of friendship. But no love; she could not. She had not forgotten the Manchu; could never forget him.
So Foh Wong’s love died. It became indifference. And then one day his indifference changed to hate, as blighting as his hate for Yang Shen-Li. . . .
On that day, coming home for lunch, he found his wife in tears. He asked her what was the matter. She did not answer, only sobbed.
He saw a crumpled letter on the floor. He picked it up, forced her to read it aloud to him. It was from her brother.
The latter wrote—for that was the time, after the death of the Dowager Empress, when revolution all over China was no longer the pale, frightened dream of a few idealists, but a fact that seared the land like a sheet of smoldering flame, yellow, cruel, inexorable—he wrote how in Ninguta, too, several months earlier, the masses had turned against their rulers, the iron-capped Manchu princes. He wrote vividly—and Foh Wong smiled as he pictured the grim scene.
THE mob of enraged coolies—hayah! his own people—racing through the streets, splashing
through the thick blue slime, yelling:
“Pao Ch’ing Mien Yong—death to the foreign oppressors!”
Running on and on, like a huge snake with innumerable bobbing heads, mouths cleft into toothy cruel grimaces, crying:
“Pao Ch’ing Mien Yong!”
Rushing on through Pewter Lane. Through the Bazaar of the Tartar Traders. Past the Temple of the Monkey and the Stork. On to the palace of the military governor. Wielding hatchets and daggers and clubs and scythes. Overpowering the Manchu banner-men who fought bravely.
“Pao Ch’ing Mien Yong!”
Heads then—heads rolling on the ground like over-ripe pumpkins. Heads of Manchus, of foreign oppressors; and among them—doubtless, wrote Na Liu’s brother, though it had not been found in the crimson shambles—the head of Yang Shen-Li.
Yang Shen-Li’s head, thought Foh Wong—his handsome, arrogant head!
He laughed. Then suddenly his laughter broke off—and staring at Na Liu, so wrinkled and faded and old, he said:
“I wish he had lost his head years ago, when I gave him the choice between losing it, and losing you. For had he chosen death, I would not have married you, O turtle-spawn!”

She did not reply. She kept on weeping. And then he beat her—partly because he hated her, and partly because her tears told him that she still loved the Manchu, loved his memory even after death. . . .
He left the room, the house.
He thought, with self-pity:
“Here I am, wealthy and powerful, and my loins still strong—and saddled with this ancient gnarled crone! Hai! Hai!”—as he saw three young Chinese girls crossing Pell Street arm in arm, with swaying hips and tiny mincing steps. “When there are so many soft, pretty buds waiting to be picked!”
He turned and looked. He knew one of them: SiSi, the daughter of Yung Tang, editor of the Eminent Elevation.
Foh Wong did not care for the latter. The man, New York born and bred, was a conservative, an adherent of the former imperial regime, and had recently returned from China, whence he had sent articles, to his own and American papers, praising the Manchus and denouncing the revolutionaries as tools of the Bolshevists.
Still, considered Foh Wong, his daughter was lovely. What an exquisite wife she would make! And he smacked his lips like a man sipping warm rice wine of rich bouquet. . . .
So time passed.

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Pell Street Blues Chapter 3

They stood there. For long minutes they looked at each other. They did not touch hands. For was she not now betrothed to Foh Wong?
They turned and went their different ways. And a few days later Na Liu became the coolie’s bride, while Yang Shen-Li traveled south, to be a captain in a Manchu banner corps and rise high in the favor of the Dowager Empress.
NA LIU was a faithful wife to Foh Wong, since it was her duty; obeying the ancient maxim that a married woman must first widen her tolerance, then control the impulses of her heart and body, then entirely correct herself.
He was a good husband to her. Nor did the notion of her loving Yang Shen-Li—he knew it, though they never spoke of it—disturb his massive Mongol equanimity. Indeed, he was conscious of a keener tang and zest to his passion when he reflected that the other was an aristocrat and he himself a despised mud-turtle; yet his the woman who might have had her luxurious ease in a mandarin’s palace.
Still, there were moments when he was prey to a certain jealousy. Not jealousy of the flesh—how could that be, with Yang Shen-Li in Pekin and Na Liu so rigidly observing the conventions? Jealousy, rather, of the brain, the imagining; of the gnawing, recurrent idea that, married to his rival, Na Liu would have lived in splendor of silks and jade, while as his own wife, her life was sordid and mean and frugal.
He would reason, thereby doing her an injustice, that she compared her existence, such as it was, with what it might have been. And it was less through love of her, and more because of this jealousy—this avid longing for material achievement, for precious things to put at her feet, telling her, “Behold! I can give you whatever the Manchu could have given you!”—that ambition came to him, that he dreamed of rising from his lowly estate to power and riches.
It was about this time that a Ninguta man returned to his native town, his pockets clanking with gold and amazing tales on his lips of the fair fortune awaiting the men of China in a land beyond the Pacific. America was its fantastic and barbarous name. And it seemed that the work there was plentiful, and the wages generous and princely.
Foh Wong listened to him eagerly. He asked many astute, practical questions. Presently, he made up his mind.
He sold his meager belongings. He took Na Liu to Canton, and crowded there aboard a Yankee clipper with a gang of his countrymen. And even before the ship warped out, he received his first taste of the New World’s crass realities at the hands of the Gloucester mate, who, short of help, picked decidedly involuntary and as decidedly unpaid stevedores from among his Chinese passengers— forcing them to labor all day, to shift cumbersome freight, to direct to the derricks the heavy slings of cargo, to toil for long hours with bleeding fingers and tired, aching bodies. Once Foh Wong, taking a breathing spell, said to Na Liu, who stood by the gunwale:
“Ah—hard, hard work! But it does not matter. For I shall succeed. No doubt of it.” And in a whisper: “You want me to succeed?”
“Yes.”
“You love me—a little bit?”
Her reply was hopeless in its honesty, hopeless in what it did not say:
“I shall be a faithful wife to you—always.”
“But—”
He began to plead with her, when the
Gloucester mate’s bellow interrupted him:
“Cut out that Chinkie talk, yer yaller-skinned heathen—and git back to them derricks!”
And though Foh Wong did not understand the words, he had no trouble in understanding the length of knotted rope that whistled through the air.
Such was the beginning of his odyssey—which was destined to end, ironically, in a sweltering Pell Street garret, with the door locked and the windows tightly shuttered, and an agony of fear forever stewing in his soul. The beginning of his odyssey— almost as bitter as this same end—with all about him, stretching east toward San Francisco, the world of the sea, enigmatic and alien.
Slimy, brutish toil. Seasickness and wretched food and brackish water. The Gloucester mate cuffing and cursing him and his countrymen with a certain austere Puritan determination. Days with the waves house-high under a puffed and desolate sky. Nights of blackness flecked with white, and running back to a yet deeper blackness. Once a gale that shivered a mast into matchwood and swept the bridges clean as with a knife.
He was conscious of fear. But paradoxically, he was not afraid of his fear. For there was his ambition. There was his passion for Na Liu. There was, stronger than his passion, his hate of Yang Shen-Li. These sustained him too through the decades of heavy labor that followed.
First in California—California of the smashing, roaring, epic era. Gold was king then. Silver-lead was viceroy. Everywhere railroads were being pushed. There was timber. There was wheat. There were cattle ranches and orchards. There was the White Man’s bragging:
“Give us the dollar! To hell with the cents! Let the Yellow Men earn ‘em!”
The Yellow Men did. Among them, Foh
Wong—striving desperately, year after year, living close to the danger line of starvation, in California, Arizona, Colorado, Chicago, at last reaching New York. Frugally hoarding his money, climbing up the ladder of success, until his was a name for shrewdness and solid riches to conjure with in Chinatown, and stout merchants, sipping their tea or smoking their opium-pipes on an afternoon at the Azure Dragon Club, would comment admiringly:
“Gold comes to his hand unasked—like a dog or a courtesan.”

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Pell Street Blues Chapter 2

Never, through the decades, though for years they did not see one another, did the hate of

these two weaken.

It stretched, hard and stark and blighting, athwart the full span of both their lives. It followed the churned steamship lane to San Francisco and Seattle. It traveled thence across the continent to New York—there to abut and peak to a grim, rather fantastic climax in the maze and reek and riot of half a dozen tired old streets that, a few blocks away from the greasy drab of the river, cluster toward the Bowery, toward the pride of the Wall Street mart, as far even as busy, bartering, negligent Broadway.

Streets of Chinatown, squatting turgid and sardonic and tremendously alien! Not caring a tinker’s dam for the White Man’s world roaring its up-to-date, efficient steel-and-concrete symphony on all sides.

Rickety, this Chinatown; moldy and viscous, not over-clean, smelling distressingly of sewer gas and rotting vegetables and sizzling, rancid fat. Yet a fact to be reckoned with in Gotham’s kaleidoscopic pattern. A cultural and civil entity not without dignity. A thing aloof, apart, slightly supercilious—and intensely human. And being human, a fit background for a tragic tale. . . .

Not that this tale is entirely tragic. For tragedy, no less than comedy, is after all only a matter of viewpoint, perhaps of race and religion—two accidents whose sum-total spells prejudice.

Therefore, if your sense of humor be faintly oblique, faintly Oriental, in other words, you may derive a certain amusement from the thought of Foh Wong, no longer a coolie but a prosperous New York merchant, cooped up in the sweltering garret of his Pell Street house, with the door locked and the windows tightly shuttered, and an agony of fear forever stewing in his brain. You may also laugh at the idea of Yang Shen-Li lording it gloriously over Foh Wong’s Cantonese clerks, spending Foh Wong’s money with a free and reckless hand—and in the evening, after a pleasant hour or two at the Azure Dragon Club over an archaic mandarin gambling game of “Patting Green Butterflies” or “Ladies on Horseback” or “Heighoh! Flies the Kite,” mounting to the second floor of the Pell Street house, there to bow courteously before Na Liu, his wrinkled old wife, once the wife of Foh Wong! She would be sitting stiffly erect, in the proper Chinese manner, on a chair of ebony and lacquer encrusted with rose-quartz, her tiny feet barely touching the floor and her hands demurely folded; and Yang Shen-Li would say to her:

“Moonbeam, was there ever love as staunch as ours?”

She would give a quaint, giggling, girlish little laugh.

“Never, O Great One!” she would reply.

“Never!” he would echo. “The same love until death—may it not be for many years! The same love that came to you and me, so long ago, when the world was young back home in Ninguta—and

we were young—”

“And you the iron-capped prince—and I the gardener’s daughter!”

“But all the world to me—as you are today.”

“For the sake of my love,” she said with a queer triumph,

“—I shall marry another!”

Always, as often as he spoke the words, he made a great gesture with his strong, hairy hand. A gesture that cleaved the trooping shadows in the room with a certain brutality, that brushed through the sudden, clogged stillness like a conjurer’s wand, sweeping away the dust and grime of Pell Street, the dust and grime of the dead years, and calling up the cool, scented spring sweetness of the small Manchu-Chinese border town where both had lived and loved. . . .

He remembered as clearly as if it were yesterday how, on that morning after his talk with Foh Wong, he met Na Liu where they always met, in back of the Temple of the Monkey and the Stork, in the shelter of the enameled pagoda roof that mirrored the sun a thousand-fold, like intersecting rainbows, endless zigzag flashings of rose and purple and blue and green. There he told her what had happened, told her the full bitter tale; and he said to her as he had to Foh Wong:

“I do not fear death. But there is the honor of my father to be considered—the honor of my ancestors for countless generations.”

“Pah!” she cried. “And what do I care for the honor of your father, the honor of all your noble ancestors? It is you I care for. You alone. And the thought of you dead—why, I cannot bear it. Because, you see”—her voice was thin and

brittle—“I love you.” He was silent.

“I love you so,” she continued. “There is nothing, nothing, nothing I would not do for the sake of my love. Ah”—in a tense whisper—“for the sake of my love, I would lie, I would steal, I would kill! For the sake of my love”—more loudly, with a queer triumph in her accents—“I shall marry

another!”

He sighed. He spoke dully:

“The book has been read. The grape has been pressed. There is no more. This is the end of our love.”

“The end? No, no! There can be no end to our love, as there was no beginning. Why—don’t you see?—our love is a fact. A fact!”

He weighed the thought in his mind. Then he inclined his head.

“That is so,” he replied. “A fact, like the living Buddha, eternal and unchangeable. A fact, whatever may happen to you and to me!”

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Pell Street Blues Chapter 1

Fate wrote the first chapter of this tale some centuries ago, when it planted the seeds of mutual hate in two kindred Mongol races: in Chinese and in Manchu, and by the same token, in patient, earthbound peasant and in hawkish nomad, hard-galloping across the land, conquering it with the swish of the red sword, the scream and bray of the long-stemmed war-trumpets, the hollow nasal drone of the kettle-drums—and overhead, the carrion-fed vultures paralleling the marauders’ progress on eager wings.
Fate wrote the second chapter sixty-odd years ago, when Foh Wong and Yang Shen-Li were boys in the cold northern town of Ninguta, where they threw stones at each other and swapped salty abuse; although it was Yang Shen-Li, the Manchu, the mandarin’s son, who did most of the stonethrowing, whereas Foh Wong, whose parents were Chinese coolies tilling the barren clay, did most of the cursing—from a safe distance. For he valued his skin—which, together with his shrewd brain, was his sole possession.
Fate wrote the third chapter a little over fifty years ago, when parlous times had come to China—with Russia at the western and Japan at the eastern border, both waiting for an excuse to invade the tottering Empire and tear it to pieces—and when, one morning, Foh Wong stopped Yang
Shen-Li on the street and said:
“A word with you!”
“What is it, mud-turtle?”
“Indeed,” replied the other, “I am no more than a mud-turtle, while you are an aristocrat, an ironcapped prince. And yet”—slowly—“today I have the whip-hand.”
“Eh?” exclaimed Yang Shen-Li.
He was startled. He wondered if Foh Wong knew, how he knew—heard him drop his voice to a purr:
“You were not alone last night. I watched from behind a tree. And should I proclaim what I saw, there would be your handsome head spiked on a tall pole in front of the Palace of August Justice.”
The Manchu shrugged his shoulders. He tried to speak casually:
“I do not fear death.”
“Of course not—since you are a brave fool. But being also an honorable fool, you would not wish to bring black disgrace on your father, to cause him to lose face. And—forgive the wretched pun—your father would lose a great deal of face, if you should lose your head. A murderer’s head—”
“I did not murder.”
“You killed.”
“In self-defense. He insulted me, struck me, drew his revolver and fired—the insolent
foreigner!”
“But—be pleased to remember—a most important foreigner. A high Russian official whose corpse you—ah—buried in back of Han Ma’s camel stables.” He stabbed out an accusing finger.
“I saw you.”
“Have you witnesses?”
“Not a one. I was alone.”
“Then?”
“There will be witnesses, when the time comes.
Three of my cousins. A dozen, if you prefer.”
“Lying witnesses!”
“Lying, only, in swearing they saw the deed. Not lying as to the deed itself. And though you are a mandarin’s son, the Dowager Empress, with Russia’s soldiers massed at the frontier, will give an order to her red-robed executioners, will have your handsome head removed, if I should—”
“IS there a price for your silence, coolie?” interrupted Yang Shen-Li.
“Is there not a price for everything?”
“How much?”
“No money. Not a single silver tael.” Foh Wong paused. “The price of my silence is—a word.”
“A word?”
“Yes. A mere word from you—to Na Liu. A word telling her I desire her greatly—wish her to be my wife.”
“But”—the Manchu stammered with rage— “she—”
“Loves you? I know. And I know, too, that, loving you, she will not relish the thought of your bleeding head grinning down at her from a tall pole, and will therefore marry me, the mud-turtle. . . . Hayah!” with sudden violence. “Go to her! At once!
For today I command, and you will obey!” Yang Shen-Li stared at the other.
“Yes,” he said heavily. “I shall obey.” He took a step nearer. “But—listen to me, coolie!” His words clicked and broke like dropping icicles. “I hate you. Ah—by the Buddha!—I shall always hate you.”
“You hate me no more than I hate you,” was the answer. “But”—and Foh Wong’s eyes gleamed triumphantly through meager almond lids—“you are helpless, O paper tiger with paper teeth. I am not. So—keep on hating me!”