All the Flavors, page 1
February 1, 2012 Volume 2 No 4
A Tale of Guan Yu, the Chinese God of War, in America
by Ken Liu
“All life is an experiment.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“For an American, one’s entire life is spent as a game of chance, a time of revolution, a day of battle. “
– Alexis de Tocqueville
Idaho City
The Missouri Boys snuck into Idaho City around 4:30 AM, when everything was still dark and Isabelle’s Joy Club was the only house with a lit window.
Obee and Crick made straight for the Thirsty Fish. Earlier in the day, J.J. Kelly, the proprietor, had invited Obee and Crick out of his saloon with his Smith & Wesson revolver. With little effort and making no sound, Obee and Crick broke the latch on the door of the Thirsty Fish and quickly disappeared inside.
“I’ll show that little Irishman some manners,” Crick hissed. Through the alcoholic mist, his eyes could focus on only one image: the diminutive Kelly walking towards him, gun at the ready, and the jeering crowd behind him. We might just bury you under the new outhouse next time you show yourselves in Idaho City.
Though he was a little unsteady on his feet, he successfully tiptoed his way up the stairs to the family’s living quarters, an iron crowbar in hand.
Obee, less drunk, set about rectifying that situation promptly by jumping behind the bar and helping himself to the supplies. Carelessly, he took down bottles of various sizes and colors from the shelves around him, and having taken a sip from each, smashed the bottles against the counters or dashed them to the ground. Alcohol flowed freely everywhere, soaking into the floors and the furniture.
A woman’s scream tore out of the darkness upstairs. Obee jumped up and drew his revolver. Not sure whether to run upstairs to help his friend or out the door, down the street, and into the woods before he could be caught, he hesitated at the bottom of the stairs. Overhead came the sound of boots that no longer cared about silence, followed by the crash of something heavy and soft onto the floor. Obee cursed and jumped back, his big, dirty hands trying to rub out the coat of dust that just fell from the ceiling into his eyes. More muffled screams and cursing, and then, complete silence.
“Woo!” Crick appeared at the top of the stairs, the gleeful grin on his face limned by the light of the oil lamp he held aloft. “Grab some rags. Let’s burn this dump down.”
By the time the 7000 people of Idaho City had tallied up the damage of the Great Fire of May 18th, 1865, the Missouri Boys were miles away on the Wells Fargo trail, sleeping off the headache from hard drinking and fast riding. Idaho City lost a newspaper, two theaters, two photograph galleries, three express offices, four restaurants, four breweries, four drugstores, five groceries, six blacksmith shops, seven meat markets, seven bakeries, eight hotels, twelve doctor’s offices, twenty-two law offices, twenty-four saloons, and thirty-six general merchandise stores.
This was why, when the band of weary and gaunt Chinamen showed up a few weeks later with their funny bamboo carrying poles over their shoulders and their pockets heavy with cold, hard cash sewn into the lining, the people of Idaho City almost held a welcome party for them. Everyone promptly set about the task of separating the Chinamen from their money.
Elsie Seaver, Lily’s mother, complained to Lily’s father about the Chinamen almost every evening.
“Thaddeus, will you please tell the heathens to keep their noise down? I can’t hear myself think.”
“For fourteen dollars a week in rent, Elsie, I think the Chinamen are entitled to a few hours of their own music.”
The Seavers’ store had been one of those burned down a few weeks earlier. Lily’s father, Thad (though he preferred to be called Jack) Seaver, was still in the middle of rebuilding it. Elsie knew as well as her husband that they needed the Chinamen’s rent. She sighed, stuffed some cotton balls in her ears, and took her sewing into the kitchen.
Lily rather liked the music of the Chinamen. It was indeed loud. The gongs, cymbals, wooden clappers, and drums made such a racket that her heart wanted to beat in time to their rhythm. The high-pitched fiddle with only two strings wailed so high and pure that Lily thought she could float on air, just listening to it. And then in the fading light of the dusk, the big, red-faced Chinaman would pluck out a sad quiet tune on the three-stringed lute and sing his songs in the street, his companions squatting in a circle around him, quiet as they listened to him and their faces by turns smiling and grave. He was over six feet tall and had a dark, bushy beard that covered his chest. Lily thought his thin, long eyes looked like the eyes of a great eagle as he turned his head, looking at each of his companions. Once in a while they burst into loud guffaws, and they slapped the big, red-faced Chinaman on his back as he smiled and kept on singing.
“What do you think he’s singing about?” Lily asked her mother from the porch.
“No doubt some unspeakably vile vice of their barbaric homeland. Opium dens and sing song girls and such. Come back in here and close the door. Have you finished your sewing?”
Lily continued to watch them from her window, wishing she could understand what his songs were about. She was glad that the music made her mother unable to think. It meant that she couldn’t think of more chores for Lily to do.
Lily’s father was more intrigued by the Chinamen’s cooking. Even their cooking was loud, the splattering and sizzling of hot oil and the suh-suh-suh beating of cleaver against chopping board making another kind of music. The cooking also smelled loud, the smoke drifting from the open door carrying the peppery smell of unknown spices and unknown vegetables across the street and making Lily’s stomach growl.
“What in the world are they making over there? There’s no way cucumbers can smell like that.” Lily’s father asked no one in particular. Lily saw him lick his lips.
“We could ask them,” Lily suggested.
“Ha! Don’t get any ideas. I’m sure the Chinamen would love to chop up a little Christian girl like you and fry you in those big saucepans of theirs. Stay away from them, you hear?”
Lily didn’t believe that the Chinamen would eat her. They seemed friendly enough. And if they were going to supplement their diet with little girls, why would they bother spending all day working on that vegetable garden they’ve planted behind their house?
There were many mysteries about the Chinamen, not the least of which was how they managed to all fit inside those tiny houses they had rented. The band of twenty-seven Chinamen rented five saltbox houses along Placer Street, two of them owned by Jack Seaver, and bought three others from Mr. Kenan, whose bank had been burned down and who was moving his family back east. The saltbox houses were simple, one-story affairs with a living room in the front that doubled as the kitchen, and a bedroom in the back. Twelve feet deep and thirty feet across, the small houses were made of thin planks of wood and their front porches were squeezed so tightly together that they formed a covered sidewalk.
The white miners who had rented these houses from Jack Seaver in the past lived in them alone, or at most shared a house with one roommate. The Chinamen, on the other hand, lived five or six to a house. This frugality rather disappointed some of the people in Idaho City, who had been hoping the Chinamen would be more free with their money. They broke down the tables and chairs left by the previous tenants of the houses and used the lumber to build bunks along the walls of the bedrooms and laid out mattresses on the floors of the living rooms. The previous occupants also left pictures of Lincoln and Lee on the walls. These the Chinamen left alone.
“Logan said he likes the pictures,” Jack Seaver said at dinner.
“Who’s Logan?”
“The big, red-faced Chinaman. He asked me who Lee was, and I told him he was a great general who picked the losing side but was still admired for his bravery and loyalty. He was impressed by that. Oh, and he also liked Lee’s beard.”
Lily had heard the conversation between her father and the Chinaman by hiding herself behind the piano. She didn’t think the big Chinaman’s name sounded anything like “Logan.” She had listened to the other Chinamen calling out to him, and it sounded to her like they were saying “Lao Guan.”
“Such a strange people, these Celestials,” Elsie said. “That Logan scares me. The size of his hands! He has killed. I’m sure of it. I wish you could find some other tenants, Thaddeus.”
No one except Lily’s mother ever called her husband “Thaddeus.” To everyone else he was either “Mr. Seaver” or “Jack.” Lily was used to the fact that people had many names out here in the West. After all, everyone called the banker “Mr. Kenan” when they were at the bank, but when he wasn’t around they called him “Shylock.” And while Lily’s mother always addressed her as “Liliane,” Lily’s father always called her “Nugget.” And it seemed that the big Chinaman already got a new name in this house, “Logan.”
“You are my nugget of gold, sweetie,” he told her every morning, before he left for the store.
“You’re going to puff her up full of vanity,” Lily’s mother said from the kitchen.
It was the height of the mining season, and the Chinamen began to head out to look for gold the moment they were settled in. They left as soon as it was light, dressed in their loose blouses and baggy trousers, their queues snaking out from under their big straw hats. A few of the older men stayed behind to work in the vegetable garden or to do the laundry and the cooking.
Lily was largely left alone during the day. While her mother went shopping or busied herself around the house, her father was away working at the site for the new store. Jack was thinking of setting aside a section in the new store for preserved duck eggs, pickled vegetables, dried tofu, spices, soy sauce, and bitter melons imported from San Francisco to sell to the Chinese miners.
“These Chinamen are going to be carting around a lot of gold dust soon, Elsie. I’ll be ready to take it from them when they do.”
Elsie didn’t like this plan. The thought of the Chinamen’s strange food making everything smell funny in her husband’s store made her queasy. But she knew it was pointless to argue with Thad once he got a notion in his head. After all, he had packed up everything and dragged her and Lily all the way out here from Hartford, where he had been doing perfectly well as a tutor, just because he got it in his head that they’d be much happier on their own out West, where nobody knew them and they knew nobody.
Not even Elsie’s father could persuade her husband to change his mind then. He had asked Thad to come to Boston and work for him in his law office. Business was good, he said, he could use his help. Elsie beamed at the thought of all the shops and the fashion of Beacon Hill.
“I appreciate the offer,” Thad had said to her father. “But I don’t think I’m cut out to be a lawyer.”
Elsie had to placate her father for hours afterwards with tea and a fresh batch of oatmeal cookies. And even then he refused to say goodbye to Thad the next day, when he left to go back to Boston. “Damned the day that I became friends with his father,” he muttered, too loud for Elsie to pretend that she hadn’t heard him.
“I’m sick of this,” Thad said to her later. “We don’t know anybody who’s everdone anything. Everyone in Hartford just carries on what his father had started. Aren’t we supposed to be a nation where every generation picks up and goes somewhere new? I think we should go and start our own life. You can even pick a new name for yourself. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
Elsie was happy with her own name. But Thad wasn’t. This was how he ended up as “Jack.”
“I’ve always wanted to be a ‘Jack,’” he told her, as if names were like shirts that you could just put on and take off. She refused to call him by his new name.
Once when Lily was alone with her mother she had told Lily that this was all because of the War.
“That Rebel bullet put him on his back in less than a day from when he got onto the field. This is what happens to a man when he has to lie on his back for eight months. He gets all sorts of strange notions into his head and not even an angelic manifestation can get those ideas out of him.”
If the Rebels were responsible for getting her family out here to Idaho, Lily wasn’t sure they were such evil people.
Lily had learned the hard way that if she stayed in the house her mother would always find something for her to do. Until school started again, the best thing for Lily was to get out of the house the first chance she had in the morning and not return until it was dinner time.
Lily liked to be in the hills outside the town. The forest of Douglas firs, mountain maples, and ponderosa pines shaded her from the noon sun. She could take some bread and cheese with her for lunch, and there were plenty of streams to drink from. She spent some time picking out leaves that had been chewed by worms into shapes that reminded her of different animals. When she was bored with that she waded in a stream to cool off. Before she went into the water, she took the back hem of her dress, pulled it forward and up from between her legs and tucked the hem into the sash at her waist. She was glad that her mother was not around to see her turning her skirt into pants. But it was much easier to wade in the mud and the water with her skirt out of the way.
Lily waded downstream along the shallow edge of the stream. The day was starting to get more hot than warm, and she splashed some water on her neck and forehead. Lily looked for bird nests in the trees and raccoon prints in the mud. She thought she could walk on like this forever, alone and not trying to get anything done in particular, her feet cool in the water, the sun warm on her back, and knowing that she had a good, filling lunch with her that she could have any time she wanted and would have an even better dinner waiting for her later.
Faint sounds of men singing came to her from around the bend in the river. Lily stopped. Maybe there was a camp of placer miners just downstream from where she was. That would be fun to watch.
She walked onto the bank of the river and into the woods. The singing became louder. Although she couldn’t make out any of the words, the melody told her it wasn’t any song that she recognized.
She carefully made her way among the trees. She was deep in the shadows now and a light breeze quickly dried the sweat and water on her face. Her heart began to beat faster. She could hear the singing voices more clearly now. A lone, deep, male voice sang in words that she could not make out, the strange shape of the melody reminding her of the way the Chinamen’s music had sounded. Then a chorus of other male voices answered, the slow, steady rhythm letting her know that it was a working men’s song, whose words and music came from the cycle of labored breath and heartbeat.
She came to the edge of the woods, and hiding herself behind the thick trunk of a maple, she peeked out at the singing men by the stream.
Except the stream was nowhere to be found.
After they found this bend to be a good placer spot, the Chinese miners had built a dam to divert the stream. Where the stream used to be, there were now five or six miners using picks and shovels to dig down to the bedrock. Others were digging out bits of gold-laden sand and gravel from between the crevices in areas where the digging had already been done. The men wore their straw hats to keep the sun off their head. The solo singer, Lily now saw, was Logan. The red-faced Chinaman had wrapped a rolled-up handkerchief around his thick beard and tucked the ends of the handkerchief into his shirt to keep it out of his way as he worked. Every time he bellowed out another verse of the song he stood still and leaned on his shovel, and his beard pouch moved with his singing like the neck of a rooster. Lily almost giggled out loud.
A loud bang cut through the noise and activity and echoed around the banks of the dry stream bed. The singing stopped and all the miners stopped where they were. The mountain air suddenly became quiet and still, and only the sound of panicked birds taking flight into the air broke the silence.
Crick, slowly waving above his head the pistol that fired the shot, swaggered out of the woods across the stream bed from where Lily was hiding. Obee came behind him, his shotgun’s barrel shifting from pointing at one miner to the next with each step he took.
“Well, well, well,” Crick said. “Lookee here. A singing circus of Chinee monkeys.”
Logan stared at him. “What do you boys want?”
“Boys?” Crick let out a holler. “Obee, listen to this. The Chinaman just called us ‘boys.’”
“He won’t be saying much after I blow his head off,” Obee said.
Logan began to walk towards them. The heavy shovel trailed from his large hand and long arm.
“Stop right where you are, you filthy yellow monkey.” Crick pointed the pistol at him.
“What do you want?”
“Why, to collect what’s ours, of course. We know you’ve been keeping our gold safe and we’ve come to ask for it back.”
“We don’t have any of your gold.”
“Jesus,” Crick said, shaking his head. “I’ve always heard that Chinamen are thieves and liars, on account of them growing up eating rats and maggots, but I’ve always kept an open mind about the Celestials. But now I’m seeing it with my own eyes.”
“Filthy liars,” Obee affirmed.
“Obee and me, we found this spot last spring and claimed it. We’ve been a little busy lately, and so we thought we’d take pity on you and let you work the deposit and pay you a fair wage for your work. We thought we were doing our Christian duty.”
“We were being nice,” Obee added.
“Very generous of us,” Crick agreed. “But look where that’s gotten us? Being kind doesn’t work with these heathens. On our way here I was still inclined to let you keep a little gold dust for your work these last few weeks, but now I think we are going to take it all.”
