City of God (32 page)

A
CCORDING TO
B
O
Big Belly, who had left the Middle Kingdom just after the Lantern Festival in this year of the Tiger, white-smoke-swallowing-clouds war was done and over. Big guns of English ships had flattened junks and sampans of Imperial Chinese Navy. That was why now, when Ah Chee came back from the market and opened the door of number thirty-nine Cherry Street, she did not smell man stink or shit stink or little-bit-better stink of food cooking. Instead she smelled little-bit-sweet smell she thought she had left behind when she said goodbye to the Pearl River sampans of the pirate Di Short Neck. “
Ya-p’ien
legal now,” Big Belly reported. “Soon everybody in Middle Kingdom swallow clouds, feel all the time happy.”

“Ha! Swallow clouds and get nothing done. No time to work. Only smoke.” Ah Chee had not forgotten that on the pirate sampans the fingers were cut off anyone who smoked the ya-p’ien. Food was put in their bellies by trading silver for the sticky black balls the English brought from somewhere very far away, and the pirate sampans sold the black balls to other Chinese, who got still richer by selling it to the smoking fools on the mainland, while the English used the silver to pay the Hong
merchants, who would accept nothing else for their tea and silk. But on the sampans, no smoke. No smoke. All the fingers on one hand first. All the fingers on the other for a second offense. The third time no head.

“No work. No work,” she said now, and kicked at the baskets of rubbish and spent ashes lining the hall by the front door. “Why you not bring this mess outside? Right now. Before the Lord Samuel comes and beats you all to death. Right now.”

That should have been a threat with teeth. The Lord Samuel was on Cherry Street most days for at least a few hours. Many times he slept the whole night beside his
tai-tai
, and in the morning played with his daughter Mei Lin. But Ah Chee was aware that somehow the lord didn’t seem to care that at thirty-nine Cherry Street there was the stink of white smoke in the downstairs hall. Not too much outside the rooms of those who had lived longest in the building; Leper Face and Taste Bad and the rest of the old-timers didn’t swallow clouds. “Very much too bad thing,” Leper Face said one night when Ah Chee was with them playing cards. “Too bad.”

The game they played was called
Ya Pei
, and that night, Ah Chee was invariably the first to lay down a run of plum flower or orchid or bamboo or chrysanthemum cards and take all the coins in the middle of the table, chortling with pleasure when the men cursed her luck. “Not enough incense burned in these rooms,” she had said, sniffing the air. “Not enough attention paid to Fu Xing happy god or even Matsu sea god. Not enough.”

“Matsu very important when at sea. Not so much important here on land,” Taste Bad said. “Anyway, back in Middle Kingdom is where they need to burn more incense. Build more temples to Guan Sheng Di war god. Maybe not lose every time and give away little pieces of kingdom to stinking dog turd English.”

“What little pieces?” Ah Chee demanded. “How?”

“Hong Kong now have English rulers,” Leper Face explained. “In Hong Kong stinking dog turd English people now do whatever they want, don’t have to obey Middle Kingdom emperor.”

“Stinking no good island anyway,” Ah Chee said. “Not to worry if English have it. Bo Big Belly say Chinese sampans all blown away by
stinking English warships,” she added, turning the subject back to the topic of most interest to her. “You think every one blown up? Even dog turd river pirates on Pearl River?” If Di Short Neck was dead, the plum blossom must burn incense in his memory.

The men could not, however, answer her question. Maybe yes, maybe no they said. Though it was important to bear in mind that the war began when the emperor sent his army to the Pearl River to throw all the chests of
ya-p’ien
into the sea. Who had lived and who had died? Very much impossible to say for sure.

Better to err on the side of caution, Ah Chee decided. So for the next four days she instructed both Mei-hua and Mei Lin to burn five sticks of incense to Chuan Yin, who was the goddess of compassion as well as fertility. “Help father and grandfather be happy in new crossover place. Much incense. Much incense.”

Mei-hua had no happy memories of the man who had fathered her. Nonetheless she understood the need to show respect to her father’s memory so as not to make the gods angry. It was she who guided the hand of her seven-year-old daughter when Mei Lin offered the stick of burning incense at the altar set up to honor her grandfather, Di Short Neck, who had sold her mother for a few chests of
ya-p’ien
. Never mind. Show respect.

As for Mei Lin, she did not find it difficult to do as her mother asked. At least it was a new distraction. She was only rarely allowed out of the rooms on the top floor of thirty-nine Cherry Street, and when she was—always in the company of Ah Chee—she was unhappy and intensely conscious of the way people stared at the old woman with the funny feet and the funny clothes and the little girl at her side. The little girl who, unlike her elderly guardian, understood every derisive word she heard.

Both things—the size of Mei Lin’s feet and the fact that she spoke English—existed because Sam Devrey had made them so. Each morning that she could remember, her father spoke to Mei Lin in English. From the day she started to speak, she answered him in that language, though when Ah Chee or Mei-hua talked to her she replied in Chinese. They
were not two separate languages to the little girl, simply a bigger language in which it was appropriate to use certain words some of the time and other words at other times.

It was also her father who decreed that Mei Lin’s feet not be bound. He did not, however, discuss this with Mei-hua or Ah Chee ahead of time, and he was not in the house in 1838, when for the first time Ah Chee had bent back the big toes of three-year-old Mei Lin and wrapped them tightly in cotton bindings. He did not hear Mei Lin’s screams or the soothing words of Mei-hua, who smiled with satisfaction even while she offered the little girl sweets and kisses as comfort for her pain.

Mei-hua had chosen that particular occasion to begin the binding because she knew the lord would be away for a little time. In the past she had never known when he would come and when he would leave, but since these days the lord was almost never gone two nights in a row, he had informed Mei-hua that she would not see him for perhaps seven nights, and she was not to worry. Mei-hua had shared this information with Ah Chee and said it was an excellent opportunity to begin the foot-binding. Not because she anticipated any objection from her lord—however tired and distracted he might be, Mei-hua could still make him rock hard simply by rubbing her tiny silk-wrapped feet on his crotch—but because she knew Mei Lin would at first cry and scream. The lord must not be subjected to that annoyance.

Mei-hua broached the possibility of breaking Mei Lin’s tiny arches right away so that too would happen when the Lord Samuel was not there to hear the screams. “No can,” Ah Chee muttered, taking the child’s tiny feet in her old and wrinkled hands. “No can. Not again. Not now.” She remembered how it had been before, how inflicting such pain was, she was quite sure, worse for her than for Mei-hua who had to bear it. “Wait maybe until next time the lord is not here.”

“Very much too bad this house so small,” Mei-hua grumbled. “No proper women’s quarters.” These days that was the closest she came to complaining about what she had seen on the one occasion she had left her house, the day the Lord Samuel drove her to the place where her son was stolen from her womb. She no longer pressed Ah Chee for details
of what the old woman saw when she went outside to buy food or other necessary things such as cloth to make their clothes. The Lord Samuel had come to be with them the night the city burned, and ever since he spent very much more time with her than with the big ugly yellow hair with floppy too big feet. Never mind that he would not let clouds and rain happen while he was inside her. Never. Never. And never mind that Ah Chee had burned the hollow bamboo thing Mei-hua used to make Mei Lin. No more blown up delicious duck. No more babies. Never mind.

But a daughter with floppy too big ugly feet? Who would want such a thing? How could Mei-hua know her lord would be overcome with rage when he came back and saw what they had done or that he would rip off the binding cloths with his own hands? Mei Lin, who had been crying less and less since the wrappings went on, now screamed in agony as blood rushed into the cramped toes. “You cannot bind her feet,” the Lord Samuel said. “Not in America. It is impossible.”

“Who will want her if she does not have golden lilies?” Mei-hua demanded. “What kind of husband will you find for her if she has big ugly floppy feet like a man?”

She did not notice Ah Chee’s look of satisfaction. Very too much in her mind that in all the years they were here she had never seen a
yang gwei zih
woman with golden lilies. Very too much possible that in this place it was better if Mei Lin not have them. But not her place to make such a decision. Better if the lord did so. And as long as the arch had not been broken, the choice could still be made. Whatever the plum blossom who understood so little might think.

“No binding,” the Lord said. “Never. Never. No binding.”

Sam Devrey was already deeply conflicted about the question of who would marry his half-Chinese daughter, but that was not a problem he could discuss with Mei-hua. He could only do his best to give the child a few tools with which to survive. That’s why he had originally made it his business to see that she spoke English, and having set about doing that, had fallen entirely under the spell of this child born of love, while he had no particular feelings for Zachary, the son born of duty, or Celinda,
the daughter born of calculation. He said none of this to Mei-hua, only thanked God he had come back before they broke her arches, and made it a matter of his law, which reigned supreme beneath this roof, that Mei Lin’s feet be allowed to grow naturally. And in 1840, when she was five, he issued another not-to-be-questioned decree. Mei Lin must go to school. “There is a place not far. I will arrange it.”

In fact, though Sam told Mei-hua that sending young children to study outside the home was the norm in New York, it was not entirely true.

The New York rich tutored their children at home until they were old enough to be sent to boarding schools or private day schools. For the offspring of artisans and journeymen, the part of society now frequently referred to as being from the middle walks of life, there were a few free schools and some that charged a nominal fee.

All taught elementary reading, writing, and arithmetic, but there were never enough to serve the thousands of children born to paupers and the laboring class. Consequently those same subjects were included in the many Sunday schools active throughout the city, basic instruction to accompany lessons in the Word of God. The Evangelical churches, with their belief in democracy and republicanism, soon had sixty such schools meant to teach “the depraved and uneducated part of the community.” And while the Episcopal Church did not share the radical social ideas of the Evangelicals—abolition and women’s rights and the rest—they established a dozen schools of their own. In both networks excellence was rewarded with certificates which could be saved until the student had enough of them to exchange for a bible.

In addition to private funds, some money to support both the free schools and the Sunday Schools was provided by the Common Council. After a time the Free School Society objected to sharing the small sums available. Using taxpayer money to support Sunday Schools run by religious institutions, they said, was a violation of the separation of church and state guaranteed in the Constitution. Aid to the denominational schools was promptly cut off. In 1826, having won that battle, the Free School Society became the Public School Society.
Education, they insisted, must be not charity but a right. Nonetheless their resources remained so limited that public schools were opened only in areas considered to be quiet and orderly.

The nearest public school to Cherry Street was a bit up the town in the somewhat better-class neighborhood of Hester Street. That was where Sam Devrey enrolled his daughter under the name Linda Di, giving her the surname of Mei-hua’s pirate father since he could not bestow his own.

Hester was too far from Cherry for a five-year-old to walk alone. Sam decided that Bo Fat Cheeks would escort the child each morning and pick her up at one when classes ended. He chose Fat Cheeks precisely because the man’s queue had never grown back properly after it was cut off. Growing hair long enough to be braided and allowed to hang freely down the back was a young man’s game. Fat Cheeks, in his forties now, had only a scrawny little one-inch braid at the nape of his neck. It was easy enough to hide that and his shaved skull under the knitted hat he usually wore with the checked shirt and oiled pants of the tar he’d once been.

Sam did not, however, reckon with the amount of trouble that would be caused by the fashion sense of Mei-hua and Ah Chee.

Mei Lin was sent to school on her first day wearing a knee-length red silk robe over a long red silk skirt. Both garments were lavishly embroidered with flowers and dragons picked out in gold thread, work done for her daughter by Mei-hua’s own hand. Sam eyed the outfit with some trepidation when he kissed the child goodbye, and resolved he must find some way to have proper Western clothes made for her as soon as possible. His good intentions were too little and far too late. That first day Mei Lin came home from school with her clothes torn to shreds and most of her hair hacked off. The girls in her class had cut off her hair, she explained to her father when eventually she stopped crying.