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INDEED the latter—whose American odyssey was destined to be quite as hard as that of Foh Wong, decades earlier—needed every cent of the fifteen hundred dollars. To enumerate all those whom he had to bribe would be to give an ethnographical survey of many of the Far East’s more gaudy rogues.
But let us pick out a few.
There was, in Shanghai, a Kansuh ruffian on whose shaven poll had been a blood-price ever since the Boxer affair, and who met the former warlord and thirty other prospective emigrants in a first-chop chandoo place west of the To Kao Tien Temple. There was, furthermore, a squint-eyed Lithuanian skipper, wanted for murder in Riga and for piracy in Pernambuco, who took them to Vladivostok and into the tranquil presence of a Nanking compradore with gold-encased fingernails and a charming taste in early Ming porcelain. This gentleman passed the adventurers through yet two more middlemen to a Japanese captain who flaunted British naturalization papers and called himself O’Duffy Ichiban.
He was supposed to clear directly for Seattle. But he managed to cruise off the British Columbia coast—“contrary head winds, half a gale,” he wrote in his log, and lied—until a narrow-flanked clipper shot out from the fogs of Queen Charlotte Sound and took away the living freight, drowning no more than seven. The remainder had an interview, next morning, with a government inspector who—hating himself for it—drowned his conscience in his greed.
Then a stormy night. A motorboat chugging recklessly across the Straits of San Juan de Fuca. A dumping overboard into the swirling, greasy sea half a mile from land. A screaming wave that swallowed all the merry band of Mongol rovers with the exception of the former warlord. . . . His swim ashore. And at last, his strong hand reaching out from the water and gripping the slippery piles at the foot of Yeslerway, in the city of Seattle. . . .
Seattle in spring.
Spring, too, in New York.
Spring brushing into Pell Street on gauzy pinions. Hovering birdlike over sordid, tarred rooftops. Dropping liquid silver over the toil of the streets, adding music to the strident calls of pavement and gutter.
Spring in the heart of Foh Wong—to whom, that morning, the editor had said that he had received a telegram from the hatchetman. The latter would be here on Saturday—would seek out the merchant immediately upon his arrival, at nine in the evening.
So, on Saturday afternoon, Foh Wong entered the joss temple. There he attended to his religious duties more thoroughly and unctuously than usual. Not only did he make kowtow to the Buddha of the Paradise of the West. He also kowtowed seven times to the Buddha of the Light Without Measure, and nine times to the purple-faced Goddess of Mercy. He heaped the bowls in front of the idols with dry rice. He burned twenty-seven incense sticks. He made the rounds of the temple, bowing right and left, beating gongs, ringing a small silver bell. He paid the priest a handsome sum to exorcise whatever evil spirits might be about.
FINALLY, his soul at rest, he went home. He presented his wife with gifts, thinking shrewdly that Si-Si would enjoy them after Na Liu’s demise—an expensive radio set, a robe of purple satin embroidered with tiny butterflies, a pair of coral-and-jade earrings and a precious Suen-tih vase.
Na Liu smiled. She said:
“You have made me very happy these last few months.”
“Have I?”
“Yes,” she agreed; “by forgetting your anger against me, your just and righteous anger. For, you see, I have been a bad wife. I have never loved you. I have grown old and ugly. And I have borne you no children.”
“Three things which only fate can help,” he replied quite gently.
“Fate is bitter.”
“Fate, at times”—as he thought of Si-Si—“is sweet. Let us not blame fate.” He interrupted himself as there was a loud knocking at the street door below. “A friend whom I expect,” he explained, and hurried out.
He reached the shop, crossed it, threw open the door. A man stood there—tall, broad, a black handkerchief concealing all his features but the hard, staring eyes.
“Upstairs,” whispered Foh Wong. “The first room to the left.”
The stranger inclined his head without speaking. Noiselessly he mounted. He disappeared.
There was a pall of heavy, oppressive silence— suddenly broken by a sob that quickly gurgled out. And Foh Wong trembled a little, felt a cold shiver along his spine—saw, a minute or two later, the man return.
He asked:
“Is it—finished, O hatchetman?”
“Yes. It is finished, O mud-turtle.”

“Is it—finished, O hatchetman?” Foh Wong asked; and the stranger replied: “It is finished, O mud-
turtle.” Then the merchant gave a shriek of fear.
That voice!
THEN the merchant gave a shriek of surprise and fear. Why—that nasal, metallic voice so well remembered! The voice of Yang Shen-Li! And as the other tore off the black handkerchief— the face of Yang Shen-Li! Older, much older. But still the bold, aquiline nose, the high cheekbones that seemed to give beneath the pressure of the leathery, copper-red skin, the compressed, sardonic lips brushed by the drooping mandarin mustache, the combative chin. . . .
“But you,” Foh Wong stammered ludicrously, “—you died—in Ninguta!”
“And I came to life again,” was the drawling answer, “as Kang Kee, the warlord. Kang Kee, who last year forged a chain of strong and exquisite friendship with one Yung Tang, who was visiting China. Kang Kee—no longer a warlord, but a hatchetman come here for the sake of a small
killing.”
“A killing,” cried Foh Wong, rapidly collecting his wits, “for which you will lose your head.”
He had decided what he was going to do. Outside somewhere, on Pell Street or Mott, his friend Bill, detective of Second Branch, would be walking his beat. He would call him, would tell him that his wife had been murdered. He was about to run out—stopped as he heard the other’s drawling words:
“Not so fast, mud-turtle! You spoke of my losing my head. And what of your own head?”
“You killed, not I.”
“You hired me.”
“Prove it!”

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.

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.”