Synopsis
Book by Fowler Karen Joy
Extrait
The years after the American Civil War were characterized by excess, ornamented by cults and corruptions. Calamity Jane rode her horse through Indian country, standing on her head, her tangled hair loose along the horse's sides. Chang and Eng, P. T. Barnum's Siamese twins, hunted boar, fathered children, and drank like the gentlemen they were. The Fox sisters held seances and secretly cracked their toe knuckles to dissemble communication from the beyond. T. P. James, a psychic/mechanic in Vermont, channeled Charles Dickens, allowing him to complete his final book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, posthumously. Big Jim Kinelly plotted the kidnap of Abraham Lincoln's body. Brigham Young married and Victoria Woodhull told everyone who was sleeping with whom. Football and lawn tennis had their first incarnations.
In 1871, strange events took place in the skies over the central and northern United States. Eyewitness accounts allude to spectacular meteor showers, ghostly lights, and, on the ground, a number of fires whose origins were unknown and whose behavior was, in some ways, disquietingly unfirelike.
In 1872, the residents of the asylum for the insane in Steilacoom, Washington, were thrown out of their beds by earthquakes resulting from volcanic activity in the Cascade Mountains. The event was so profound it cured three of the patients instantly. These cures were responsible for a brief and faddish detour in the care of the mentally ill known as shake treatments.
Across an ocean, in China, the Manchus prepared for the Year of the Rooster and the end of the female Regency. The power of the Dowager Empress shrank. The influence of the place eunuchs grew. Neither had much energy to spare for the Celestials dispersed abroad.
In 1873, in the fir forests below Tacoma, Washington, a white woman with short black hair and a torn black dress stumbled into a Chinese railway worker's camp.
Chapter One: The Year of the Rooster
To this World she returned.
But with a tinge of that--
A compound manner,
As a Sod
Espoused a Violet,
That chiefer to the Skies
Than to Himself, allied,
Dwelt hesitating, half of Dust
And half of Day, the Bride.
-Emily Dickinson, 1864
The railway workers were traveling from Seattle to Tenino on foot and had stopped, midday, to rest. They hadn't really made a camp, just a circle of baskets and blankets around a circle of damp dirt that Chin Ah Kin had cleared with his hands prior to building a fire. Chin was briefly alone, although in the distance to his left he could hear the companionable sounds of two men urinating.
It was midwinter, the tail end of the Year of the Monkey and just before noon. There was no snow, but the ground was wet with the morning's frost and the trees dripped. Underfoot, the fir needles were soggy and refused to snap when stepped upon, which might explain why Chin Ah Kin did not hear the woman approach. It was a mystery. She was just there suddenly, talking to someone, maybe to him, maybe to herself. Her speech had no meaning he could discern. Chin, whose mother had worked as a servant for German missionaries and later for a British family in the ceded area of Canton and briefly for a family of Mohammedans, had been surrounded by foreign languages all his life. People speaking a foreign tongue often appear more logical and intelligent than those who can be actually understood. It is inconceivable that extraordinary sounds should signify something trivial or mundane. But this woman's speech felt lunatic, and it was cold enough to give Chin the momentary illusion that her words had form inste
ad of meaning, were corporeal. He could see them, hovering about her open mouth.
In spite of the cold, the woman wore only a dress with crushed pannier and insubstantial leggings. This, too, was a mystery. Chin Ah Kin had been told that Puyallup Indians could sleep in the woods at night without blankets or shelter, but he had never heard this ability attributed to a white woman. Initially, he mistook her for a ghost.
He had been hoping for a ghost. Ghost women often appeared to men of his age, luring them away, entrapping them in seductions that might last for centuries. Such men returned to bewildering and alien landscapes. The trees would be the same, though larger; there the apple tree that grew in the corner of the yard, there the almond that once shaded the doorway. Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come. But the house would be gone, the people transformed; granddaughters into old women, daughters into the grass on their graves. Popular wisdom held that these men were lucky to have escaped at all, but Chin had his own opinions about this. Chin was a philosopher, his uncle said. Philosophers and running water always sought the easy way out. No more mining. No more working on the railroad. No need to send explanations or apologies to your parents back in China. But I was enchanted, he could always say later. Who was going to argue with this? Who would still be alive?
The ghost lover was so beautiful, she broke your heart just to look at her. She wore the faint perfume of your sweetest memories, a perfume that would be different to every man, depending on his province, the foods he liked, what his mother had used to wash her hair. The ghost lover dressed in clothes that were no longer fashionable. She seldom appeared in broad daylight, preferring shadows, and seldom faced you directly. There was something strange about her eyes, a light-swallowing flatness that always seemed to be an illusion no matter how closely you looked at her. Chin looked more closely at his apparition. She was the ugliest woman he could imagine. He revised his opinion. His second guess was that she was a prostitute.
To the best of his knowledge, he had never seen a white prostitute before. It was always possible that he had and not known it, of course, since the white men called prostitutes seamstresses and they called seamstresses seamstresses, too, and occasionally, like the famous Betsy Ross, revered them. It could get tricky. He recalled briefly the prostitute he had seen last year in eastern Washington. He and his uncle had been sluicing on the Columbia when a big-footed woman from Canton was taken through the mining camps. She wore the checkered scarf, so there was no mistaking her, and also a rope, one end tied around her waist, the other in the hands of the turtle man. While the man talked, the woman's head had drifted about her neck; her eyes rolled up in their sockets. She was ecstatic or she was very ill. She had a set of scars, little bird tracks, down the side of one cheek. Chin had wondered what would make such scars. "Very cheap," the turtle man assured them and then, to make
her more alluring, "She has just been with your father."
The woman in the forest gestured for Chin to come closer. Chin asked himself what could be gained by any intercourse with a white woman who had hair above her lip and also a nose that was long even by white standards. He looked away from her and into the trees, where his uncle was returning to camp holding two small birds that appeared to be domesticated doves. It was not at all clear that the woman had been gesturing to him, anyway.
"There is a small white woman with a large nose here," his uncle pointed out. Of course, he said it in Cantonese in case she understood English; it would not be so rude. "She is very ugly." Chin's uncle dropped one of the doves onto his blanket roll and shook the other; its head bobbed impotently on its neck. He took his knife from his boot and spread the bird on a tree stump fortuitously suited to this purpose. It was not a large stump, maybe two hands across, but it had many rings, each one fitting inside the next like a puzzle. People were like this too, Chin thought. A constant accumulation--each year, a little more experience, each year, another layer of wisdom. Old age was a state much to be envied.
Chin's uncle severed the bird's feet in a single motion. "So very sad. So tragic, really. The life of an ugly woman. If she does not leave soon, she will bring us all kinds of trouble. You must make her go away."
"She is looking for opium," Chin suggested, opium being the obvious antidote to the woman's state of overexcitement and the only thing he could imagine that would bring a white woman into a camp of Chinese men. He had smoked opium himself on several occasions and drunk it once. At no time had it left him in anything like this agitated condition. Poor ugly woman. He was overcome with sorrow at the situation. He moved to the other side of a tree, out of sight, and shouted at the crazy lady to go home. Her voice rose in response, an unpleasant, exultant clacking. It was possible she did not know that he was talking to her.
"You must be forceful," his uncle said. He had an unusually mobile face and one mole to the left side of his nose, which quivered distractingly when he spoke. He himself held forceful opinions, which he hinted had brought him powerful friends as well as potent enemies. He lived life inside the fist, belonging, or so he claimed, to the secret Society for the Broadening of Human Life and the Chinese Empire Reform Association as well. He hated the Dowager Empress, Tz'u-hsi, with a particularly forceful passion. "Overthrow the Ch'ing and restore the Ming," he might say, instead of "Good day," or "The Manchu Dowager contains twelve stinkpots that are inexplicable," but only if there were no strangers present.
He disapproved of Chin, whose philosophy of life was more flexible. Chin didn't care anymore who was Emperor in China. Chin could read American newspapers and would say anything anybody wanted to hear, even when no strangers were listening. It was a shocking attitude.
"You must make a place for yourself in the world," Chin's uncle told him. "And not always shrink to fit the place that is made for you. You must make the big-nosed woman go away. I am cooking." He picked up one of the dove's severed feet and curled its toes around the index finger of his left hand, sliding it up and down like a coin on a string. "This is not a good time for opium-eating white women to be found inside our camp."
When would have been a good time? The gold was gone and the first feverish speculations in transcontinental railroads had ended in disaster for the investors. The economy was depressed and so were the white men. The American Congress had just announced its intention, given the alternatives, to depend in the future on Nordic fiber. Nordic fiber had settled the Midwest. Nordic fiber could win the West as well. The Chinese, according to this thinking, while well suited to railway work, were not otherwise needed. They had no families and were absolutely indifferent to human suffering; wore their hair in long pigtails, which they prized above all other possessions; and relished a dish called chopsooey, whose main ingredients were rats and snakes. They had been massacred in Los Angeles's Nigger Alleys and in Martinez, and they were picked off one at a time, like fleas, in Union Square in San Francisco and, like fleas, they just kept coming. Chin understood quite well, his uncle did, too, though he didn't always admit it, that it was best to be invisible and, when that could not be achieved, then quiet, at least. All the alternatives in this current dilemma were noisy ones.
Chin came out from behind his tree. The woman stood before him, spine straight as a hanged man's, face transfigured, tongue fluttering in a strange, noisy speech of clicks and bangs. "Go away," Chin told her. "Go home." He said it in English. He said it in German. "Gehen Sie nach Hause!" He said it with his hands and facial expression. She fixed her eyes upon him. Were the pupils curiously flat? Or was that just a drugged dilation? She answered him with a steady and joyful stream of nonsense. Chin gave up.
"You are not being forceful enough," his uncle said. The mole on his cheek quivered.
Chin tried to change the subject. "Why doves?" he asked. "Was there no rat?" It was a joke. His uncle did not laugh. His uncle began to remove the dove's feathers with one hand, a repetitive up-and-down motion at which he was very accomplished. He was ignoring Chin. A snow of feathers fell at his feet.
"When I first saw her," Chin said, "I thought she might be the ghost lover." This was even funnier than the rat joke. His uncle did not pause in his plucking. Chin said something serious. "Sometimes," he said, "the immortals send someone in disguise to test us. Where did this woman come from? I have never seen this woman before."
If she were an immortal, merely feeding her would not be sufficient. She would have to be given the very best parts of the bird--the soft meat of the breast, the dark meat of the heart. His uncle resisted this explanation. In Tacoma, maybe, he said to Chin, they had seen everybody. But in Seattle there were some three thousand people and Chin had seen almost none of them. Was it so hard to believe a crazy woman could have traveled here from Seattle? Hadn't they just traveled here from Seattle themselves? Or Steilacoom? Wasn't there a hospital for crazy people in Steilacoom? "She is not immortal," his uncle said. "She is just lost. We cannot arrive in Tenino, ready for railway work, dragging a crazy white woman behind us. There would be questions. If you cannot convince her to leave on her own, then you will have to go to Steilacoom and ask someone to fetch her." The disadvantages to this plan did not even have to be stated.
"She will soon grow tired and go," Chin suggested. She will take her gifts of long life and many sons and excessive prosperity and give them to someone else.
They waited. Her words continued, frenzied, high-pitched gibberish delivered in a cat-gut voice. The other railway workers arrived with water and wood for the fire. "There is an ugly, noisy, long-nosed white woman," they said. "Right there. By the tree." They seemed to think it was Chin's problem. Chin had seen her first. "Make her be quiet. Make her go away."
Chin's uncle reached inside his heavy right boot and scratched his ankle. "She has come for opium," he assured them. "And we have none. She will soon grow tired and leave."
"She is a crazy woman," Wong Woon said. "Crazy people never grow tired."
All the crazy people were supposed to live together at Fort Steilacoom, where the asylum had enough opium and opium tinctures for everyone. They were not supposed to wander the country alone, turning up in Tacoma or Squak or who knew where else. Neither were prostitutes. Neither were women of any other kind. Chin lowered his voice. "She is an immortal," he said. "The ugliest woman in the world has been created as a test for us." There was no response to this theory. Chin waited a long time for one. "Where did she come from?" he asked. "Seattle? Then she has been walking for days. With no food. With no blanket. Tacoma? Steilacoom? She would still have had to walk all night. And wouldn't she have frozen, dressed...
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