God of Luck (4 page)
In response, two lieutenants pounced on the man who’d thrown in the oily copper, causing more oil-streaked coins to fall out of his pockets. When accused of stealing them from the peanut-oil peddler, however, the man insisted he had not. Why? Because a suspect has to confess before he can be sentenced, and the man knew from Magistrate Bau’s reputation that he was too honest to break the law.
Magistrate Bau, though, was as relentless as he was honest and clever. So he ordered the man tortured, and after the application of both finger
and
ankle screws, the thief confessed.
Then and only then did Magistrate Bau pass sentence.
In the Macao hiring hall, I took note of how closely the iron-faced giant watched each man as he responded to the spider’s query, “Are you willing to go overseas to work?” And I started having questions of my own. If the iron-faced giant resembled Magistrate Bau in brilliance and determination as well as appearance, wouldn’t he somehow divine I was signing a contract just to get the advance? Instead of countersigning it, wouldn’t he denounce me, order me tortured if I tried to deny the lie?
Much as I wanted the silver dollars for my family, I would not risk my freedom for cash. So when my turn came, I answered honestly, “No.”
“Wah, what a joker!” Clapping me on the back, the man to my left called on those around us to bring me to my senses.
Their response was rapid and strong.
“Don’t be a fool.”
Afraid the giant would be angered by the commotion and blame me, I loudly repeated, “No!”
To my relief, the spider beckoned a guard, ordered him to escort me out.
I wanted nothing more than to quit the pigpen as fast as I could, to put the horror of the last few days behind me. But I was still bruised from my fall into the hold, and when the guard and I reached the stairs, I was wary of doing myself more damage by tumbling down. The guard, a brutish lout, spewed oaths at my cautious descent, quickened my step with his club.
After the spacious cool of the hiring hall, the suffocating heat, noise, and disorder of the pigpen hit me with the force of another blow. More captives were pouring in through the main door, and as the guard—forging a narrow opening in the crowd—led me in a different direction, I prayed I’d get outside before my head shattered like the long strings of exploding firecrackers.
My eyes teared from the pungent smoke. When we came to another set of stairs, I grasped the banister and stumbled down blindly. At the bottom, I smeared my eyes dry with my knuckles—discovered what the prolonged blasts of firecrackers, deep drumrolls, and brassy gongs were hiding from passersby, the captives upstairs.
My hands flew up again to cover my eyes. But I could not shut out the anguished shrieks of those being beaten with the flats of swords, the smelly splatter of human waste cascading from privy holes overhead onto men caged below. Thanking Heaven I’d not lied and was free to leave, I separated my fingers, peered through the slots for the guard who was guiding me out.
He was approaching a man bound by his thumbs to a beam overhead. The man’s toes touched the floor, but barely, certainly without the purchase necessary to ease the torture of the cord and, his face twisted with pain, he was bleating piteously.
The guard, yanking the cord tying the man to the beam, jacked his feet into the air, jolting from him a piercing wail.
“
Now
are you willing to labor overseas?” the guard sneered.
I realized then the hiring hall was a sham, the iron-faced giant corrupt, and my chest cleaved open; my mind raced like a cornered rat. How long could I withstand torture? And to what end? Were those who insisted, “No, I won’t go,” tortured to death? What about those who became too injured to work? Were they released? Could I, as a cripple, make my way home?
At home, we had to raise thousands of worms during the long silk season. How could I return a cripple and burden my family with a useless mouth to feed?
Nobody in a village hires hairdressers except for weddings, however, and then the woman, doubling as a dai kum, bridal escort, has to be the mother of sons, many sons, in hopes that the bride, too, will have sons. Even the wives of landlords and gentry don’t have their hair combed by an outside person but by their maids.
In cities, though, wealthy women favor more elaborate styles, and they hire hairdressers to come to their homes. At night, these ladies hold their heads off their beds by resting their necks on narrow pillows of cool porcelain. Nevertheless, they usually find it necessary to have their hair redone every few days.
Moongirl, as an independent spinster, required no one’s permission to leave Strongworm for the city. But she realized her actions reflected on both her family and her sister spinsters, and a move to Canton would be marked by every eye and tongue in the village since no woman in Strongworm had ever traveled beyond the market town. Hoping to deflect criticism, protect her own modesty, and ensure her success, Moongirl asked the abbess of the largest nunnery in the market town, Ten Thousand Mercies Hall, to help her.
When Moongirl told the family, my brothers-in-law and their wives chortled. Under his breath, Ah Lung admitted to me that had Moongirl not discussed her intentions and reasoning with us, he would have laughed, too.
If their amusement ruffled Moongirl, she did not show it.
“Did I hear you right?” Third Brother-in-law goaded. “You asked a woman who shaves her head to help you become a hairdresser?”
His wife, the rest of our sisters-in-law and their husbands laughed harder. Even so, Moongirl’s square face remained placid. Nor did she attempt an explanation. But Ba glowered, thwarting any further teasing, smothering the smallest titter.
“The abbess is from the largest clan in our village
and
she’s the head of this district’s most important nunnery,” he reminded.
“
Can
Rooster help you?” Ma worried out loud.
At her mother’s use of the abbess’s childhood name, Moongirl smiled. “Two of her nuns will accompany me to Canton on a boat operated by women. And one of the nunnery’s largest donors contacted her cousin, a wealthy widow by the name of Choy Tai, in the city. Choy Tai has arranged respectable quarters for me to rent. She’s also promised to hire me to comb her hair and introduce me to her friends.”
As she spoke, Ma beamed relief, Ba pride, Ah Lung and I our support. And when Moongirl finished, there were no naysayers, only praise:
“Ho yeh, great!”
“You’re as clever with your head as your hands!”
Our family used to transfer our worms from dirty paper onto clean by brushing them with a quill. Of course we were careful. But many of the worms—no thicker than a thread when hatched—would be injured anyway. Bo See showed us how to place one side of a soiled sheet at the edge of a fresh piece on which she’d spread finely cut mulberry so the worms, attracted by the smell of the leaves, would quit the old paper of their own volition, crawling unharmed onto the new.
As the spider flashed silver dollars before us, I heard Big Belly gloating to Toothless and Sleepy, “See? I did win.” And the morose graybeard—apparently fearful his age would deny him the chance of a contract—fashioned a turban out of his jacket, and used it to cover the scraggly gray queue coiled around his crown. He pinched one of his frail whiskers between two gnarled fingers, yanked it out with a startled little yelp, a sudden watering of his rheumy eyes, and resolutely fumbled for another betraying hair.
He was still plucking, squealing and squeaking with each whisker, when one of the hirelings nudged me in front of the spider with a jovial, “Your turn.”
“Are you willing to go overseas?” the spider asked.
More jangled than ever, I scarcely managed a nod.
“Name?”
As I struggled to unknot my tongue, the hireling joked, “Better hurry or I’ll jump queue,” stirring laughter, a wave of goodnatured, “Fai-dee-ah, hurry.”
“W-w-wong Yuet Lung,” I stammered.
The spider scrawled the characters. “Age and district?”
“T-twenty-four. Sun Duk.”
Turning the contract so it faced me, the spider jabbed a long-nailed finger at the space next to a ream of words, only the last of which I had a chance to read: “This contract has been explained in full, and I freely and spontaneously agree to bind myself to labor obediently in Peru for eight years, the time to count from the day I begin to work.”
Jogged by the hireling, I grasped the brush, dipped the bristles into the black puddle at the center of the ink-stone. But I could not make myself write my name.
“Let me help you, brother,” the hireling said.
Snatching the brush, he inked my thumb and pressed it onto the paper as if I’d not attended school for almost three years but was completely illiterate. Then he passed the contract to the giant for countersigning.
IN THE JUNK that ferried us from the quay to the devil-ship, we were locked below.
The spider had warned us that it would be necessary lest the unscrupulous among us disappear. “You’ll also have to walk to the quay shackled and guarded by soldiers with muskets.”
Skillfully, the hirelings had cut off protesters:
“That’s fair. We’ve been given a lot of money.”
“Yeah, I understand.”
One tipped his head meaningfully at the iron-faced giant. “Better shackles and armed guards than have Magistrate Bau catch us running.”
Many in the hall shuddered, grunted agreement.
“You can bet he’d turn a runaway over to his lieutenants for a lashing.”
“Or worse.”
The morose graybeard, no longer morose or bearded, rattled the silver coins in his pocket. “I’m glad for the soldiers and their muskets. They’ll protect our money from thieves.”
The biggest thieves, though, were our captors, who sold us supplies—everything from tobacco to blankets—at four, maybe five times their value.
My last taste of tobacco had been the morning I was kidnapped. Cradling my longstemmed pipe, I’d breathed in the delicate yet distinctive scent of Bo See along with the smoke’s fragrance, and as its heat had coursed through me, I’d savored again the red-hot pleasuring we’d shared on waking. Since then, I’d lost every trace of Bo See’s scent in the accumulated stink. My jacket and pants, crusted with filth, crackled, and I yearned for a wash and change of clothes as much as a smoke.
Even more, I longed for Bo See. So I made no purchases. Instead I vowed I’d spend every copper of my eight silver dollars on sacrifices to Fook Sing Gung if he’d come to my aid and show me a way home.
EMERGING ONTO THE junk’s deck, we were surrounded by foul-mouthed strongmen, ringed so tightly we couldn’t spread our legs for balance, and we teetered and rocked as the junk heaved in long swells. The soldiers that had been guarding us since we left the pigpen remained, their muskets at the ready. But the hirelings had melted away, and without their misleading patter, there was plenty of grousing, some of it black as the devil-ship alongside. Yet my own mood lightened. For the devil-ship’s hull rose much higher than the junk’s deck, and it seemed to me that any gangway between the two would have to be steeply raked, making it doubtful we’d be fettered together for the climb. Furthermore, the plank being set up looked barely wide enough for a pair of feet, too narrow for the unwilling to be dragged aboard.
Already I could see myself mounting the gangplank, studying my feet as if I intended climbing to the devil-ship with every care. A couple of small steps, and I’d feel hot sun on my crown, know I was leaving the gloomy shadow cast by the devil-ship’s hull. Another two or three, and I’d gulp a mouthful of moist, salt-laden air, buckle my knees, and tumble from the heat into the sea’s cool embrace.
A bellowed order for us to face the shore snapped me back. But I offered up a quick prayer of thanks as I turned towards the bellower: a short, powerfully built man with small, close-set eyes. Nor was I discouraged when Small Eyes, his voice dripping spite, pointed out how the stone buildings at the quay, although double-and-triple storied, seemed the size of huts because they were so far away. Yes, we were in the outer harbor, which was crowded with tall-masted foreign vessels, and it had been years since I’d been in water except to wash. But I’d swum great distances as a boy. Moreover, junks and sampans littered the glittering jade-green water. Surely they didn’t all serve man-stealers like the junk we were on. If I floundered during the swim, one with sympathetic boatmen would save me, perhaps even carry me home.
“Man-eating sharks live in these waters. What’s more, the devil-captains offer standing rewards for the return of anybody foolish enough to jump. The jumpers don’t have to be brought back alive or whole. A single limb will do.”
Determined not to fall victim to another hoax, I stopped listening to Small Eyes and began mapping a course to shore. If I took the most direct route, there’d be four foreign vessels in my path. Each had a garish foreign God or Goddess carved on its prow, and any one of them might be a devil-ship, but the heads, even the decks, rose high above the water, so neither their Gods nor their crews seemed likely to notice me. Butting up against their hulls, however, were sampans, their boatmen shouting offers of wares, rides to the quay. Junks, too, plied back and forth, some so weighed down by cargo that the large, all-seeing eyes painted on their prows almost touched the water. Perhaps I should avoid the risk of discovery by going underwater like a waterbrave.
The waterbraves who’d fought against the devil-foreigners in the first opium war had been renowned for their reckless courage in the face of danger, and they had among them astonishing divers who could walk on the seafloor for hours on end. As children, Moongirl and I had worked long and hard at emulating them, and we’d learned to keep our toes from stirring up a single thread of the streambed’s soft silt, to glide without moving our arms and legs or leaking a trace of air. . . .
“Piglet overboard!”
The alarm, repeated many times over, did not come from our junk or the devil-ship alongside. But our cordon of strongmen immediately tightened their noose; the soldiers stiffened; Small Eyes dashed to the side.
Pinched together, we trampled each other’s feet, our sweat-soaked clothes and skin melded as one. Worse, men were yelling instructions to pursuers from every direction, Small Eyes was taking wagers from the crew on whether the jumper would be caught dead or alive. Did a jumper have absolutely
no
chance of success?
Stretching my neck, I ogled over shoulders and between heads in search of someplace the jumper might seek refuge besides the faraway quay—saw a foreign vessel with a face as unadorned and compassionate as Gwoon Yum’s carved on its prow. If the jumper swam to this ship, perhaps the crew crowding its side would take pity on him.
There were no sampans around its hull that would block his way, no junks nearby, and from the few skiffs hovering close came haunting cries rather than shouted instructions from the chase. Or were the cries echoes from seabirds screeching at the black head bobbing in the shallow dip of a golden-green swell?
These traitorous birds, swooping low, were acting like a beacon to the boatmen in pursuit, and the jumper, despite frantic paddling, was making little progress. With a horrible sinking sensation, I realized there was every reason I’d fare as badly.
Moongirl and I had swum in a stream that was four or five feet at its deepest, and I’d never experienced a river’s current let alone a sea’s. Moreover, waterplay had ended for us at the age of seven, when I’d started school and Moongirl had begun laboring in earnest, so we’d never been hampered by clothing while swimming.
Watching the jumper, I felt his struggle as though it were my own, and as the sampans gained on him, I silently urged,
Dive! Dive now!
His head did vanish. But was it intentional?
Maybe I’d just lost sight of him in the swells.
Or he could be hidden by the sampans that had converged.
If he
was
swimming underwater, was he deep enough to elude the tangle of grappling hooks and nets the boatmen were now hurling?
The answer came in a triumphant, “We’ve caught the piggy!”
“He’s a goner,” Small Eyes boomed.
So, it seemed, was I.