The zhong yi was content with his fate, although the lack of descendants weighed like a shadow over his serenity of spirit. He had never had sons, despite the miraculous herbs regularly ingested during an entire lifetime to cleanse his blood and fortify his member, and the remedies and spells applied to two wives, both dead in their youth, as well as the many concubines who followed. He had to accept with humility that it had not been the fault of those self-denying women but the apathy of his virile liquors. None of the remedies for fertility he had used to help others aided him, and finally he became resigned to the irrefutable fact that his loins were barren. He stopped punishing his wives with fruitless demands and enjoyed them to the full, in accord with the precepts of the beautiful pillow books in his collection. However, the aged physician, far more interested in acquiring new knowledge and exploring the narrow path of wisdom, had long ago, one by one, shed the concubines whose presence distracted him from his intellectual pursuits. He did not have to have a young woman before his eyes in order to describe her in elegant poems; memory was sufficient. He had also surrendered hope for sons of his own, but he needed to prepare for the future. Who would help him in the last stage of his life and at the hour of his death? Who would clean his tomb and venerate his memory? He had trained apprentices before, and with each had nourished the secret ambition of adopting him, but none was worthy of the honor. Tao Chi’en was no more intelligent or intuitive than the others, but he carried within him an obsession for learning that the master immediately recognized because it was identical to his own. He was, besides, a sweet and entertaining lad; it was easy to become fond of him. In the years they lived together, he gained such an appreciation of Tao that often he asked himself how it was possible that he was not a child of his blood. Nevertheless, esteem for his apprentice did not blind him; in his experience the changes of adolescence may be very profound, and he could not predict what kind of man Tao would make. As the Chinese proverb says, “Brilliance in youth does not guarantee worth in maturity.” He feared he would be mistaken, as he had been before, and he preferred to wait patiently for the true nature of the boy to be revealed. In the meanwhile, he guided him, as he did the young trees in his garden, to help him grow straight. At least this one learns quickly, the aged physician thought, calculating how many years he had left to live; according to the astral signs and careful observation of his body, he would not have time to train a new apprentice.
Soon Tao Chi’en learned to select their supplies in the market and herb shops. Watching the physician as he worked, he came to know the intricate mechanisms of the human body, procedures for cooling fevers and fiery temperaments, for giving warmth to those who suffered the cold of approaching death, for stirring the juices in sterile men, and for stopping the flux of watery bowels. He made long trips through the fields to look for the best plants at the precise point of maximum efficacy, then wrapped them in damp rags to keep them fresh on his way back to the city. When he turned fourteen, his master considered him ready to practice and regularly sent him to attend prostitutes, with the stringent order to abstain from any commerce with them because, as he himself would see when he examined them, death rode on their shoulders.
“Diseases of the brothels kill more people than opium and typhus. But if you carry out your obligations and learn at a good pace, in due time I will buy you a young virgin,” his master promised.
Tao Chi’en had suffered hunger as a boy, but his body stretched until he became taller than any other member of his family. At fourteen, he felt no attraction toward those girls for hire, merely scientific curiosity. They were too different from him; they lived in a world that was so remote and secret that he could not consider them truly human. Later, when the sudden onslaught of nature unhinged him and he was staggering around like a drunk tripping over his shadow, his teacher regretted having let his concubines go. Nothing so distracted a good student from his responsibilities as the explosion of virility. A woman would calm him, and in passing be useful in giving him practical knowledge, but the idea of buying one was bothersome—the master was comfortable in his solely masculine universe—and he gave Tao herbal teas to calm his ardor. The zhong yi did not remember the hurricane of carnal passions, and with the best intention gave his student the pillow books from his library to read as part of his education, not thinking to measure the debilitating effect they would have on his wretched pupil. He made Tao memorize each of the two hundred twenty-two positions of love, along with their poetic names, until he could identify them unhesitatingly in the exquisite illustrations of the books, all of which added immeasurably to the young man’s distraction.
Tao Chi’en became as familiar with Canton as once he had been with his small village. He liked that ancient, chaotic, walled city of twisting streets and canals, where palaces and huts were jumbled together indiscriminately and there were people who lived and died on boats on the river without ever stepping onto dry land. He grew used to the humid, hot climate of a long summer lashed with typhoons but pleasant in the winter months of October to March. Canton was sealed to foreigners, although from time to time pirates flying flags of other nations made a surprise raid. There were a few locations where from November to May foreigners could trade their merchandise, but there were so many taxes, regulations, and obstacles that most international merchants chose to set up business in Macao. Early in the morning, when Tao Chi’en was on his way to the market, it was not unusual to find newborn baby girls thrown like garbage into the street or floating in the canals, often chewed on by dogs or rats. No one wanted them, they were disposable. Why feed a daughter who had no value and was going to end up as a servant in the home of her future husband? “Better a deformed son than a dozen girls as wise as Buddha,” was the popular saying. There were too many children anyway. Brothels and opium dens proliferated on all sides. Canton was a populous city, rich and lighthearted, filled with temples, restaurants, and gaming houses, where all the festivals of the calendar were noisily observed. Even punishments and executions became a cause for a celebration. Great crowds gathered to cheer on the executioners with their bloody aprons and collections of sharp knives that could lop off a head with a single sure-handed blow. Justice was meted out promptly and simply, with no appeal or unnecessary cruelty except in the case of betrayal of the emperor, the worst possible crime, which was paid for with slow death and the banishment of all relatives, thereby reduced to slavery. Minor crimes were punished by lashing or by placing the guilty party’s head in a wood stock for several days so that he could not rest or reach his head with his hands to eat or scratch. Squares and markets were home to the popular storytellers who, like mendicant monks, traveled about the country preserving a centuries-old oral tradition. Jugglers, acrobats, snake charmers, transvestites, traveling musicians, magicians, and contortionists performed in the streets, while all around them seethed a commerce in silk, tea, jade, spices, gold, tortoiseshell, porcelain, ivory, and precious stones. Vegetables, fruits, and meats were offered in colorful profusion: cabbages and tender bamboo shoots were displayed beside cages of the cats, dogs, and raccoons that at a client’s request the butcher killed and skinned in one maneuver. There were long alleys where only birds were sold—for no one was ever without birds—and their cages, from the simplest to those made of the finest woods inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl. Other passageways in the market were devoted to exotic fish, which were known to attract good fortune. Tao Chi’en, always curious, would entertain himself looking at everything and making friends, and then he would run to complete his errands in the sector where the supplies for his vocation were sold. He could identify it blindfolded from the penetrating scent of spices, plants, and medicinal barks. Dried serpents were rolled up and set in heaps like dusty coils of rope; toads, salamanders, and strange marine creatures were strung on cords like beads; crickets and large beetles with hard phosphorescent shells languished in boxes; monkeys of all kinds awaited their turn to die; bear and orangutan paws, antelope and rhinoceros horns, ti
ger eyes, shark fins, and claws of mysterious nocturnal birds were sold by weight.
Tao Chi’en’s first years in Canton were spent in study, work, and service to his aged mentor, whom he came to respect like a grandfather. Those were happy years. The memory of his own family faded and he forgot the faces of his father and his brothers, but not his mother’s, because she appeared to him frequently. Study soon ceased to be a task and became a passion. Every time he learned something new, he flew to his master to blurt it out to him. “The more you learn, the sooner you will know how little you know,” the ancient would say, laughing. On his own initiative, Tao Chi’en decided to learn Mandarin and Cantonese, because the dialect of his village seemed very limited. He absorbed the knowledge of his master so swiftly that the old man jokingly accused him of stealing even his dreams, but his passion for teaching made him generous. He shared with the boy everything he wanted to investigate, not only in matters of medicine but other aspects of his vast reserve of knowledge and refined culture. Magnanimous by nature, he was nonetheless severe in his criticism and demanding of effort, because, as he said,” I do not have much time left and I cannot take all I know to the other world, someone must use it upon my death.” However, he also warned his pupil against greed for learning, for that could fetter a man as surely as gluttony or lust. “The wise man desires nothing; he does not judge, he makes no plans, he keeps his mind open and his heart at peace,” he maintained. He reprimanded Tao Chi’en with such sadness when the youth failed that he would have preferred a lashing, but that practice went against the nature of the zhong yi, who never allowed anger to determine his actions. The only occasions on which he ceremoniously punished Tao Chi’en with a willow switch, without anger but with firm didactic purpose, was when he could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that his apprentice had yielded to the temptation of gambling or had paid for a woman. Tao Chi’en used to juggle the market bills in order to make bets in the gaming houses, whose attraction he could not resist, or for a brief, student-rate consolation in the arms of one of his patients in the brothels. It never took the master long to discover these offenses, because if Tao lost in gambling he could not explain what had happened to the change, and if he won he was incapable of hiding his euphoria. As for women, his master could smell them on his skin.
“Take off your shirt, I will have to apply the bamboo and see if finally you understand, my son. How many times have I told you that the worst evils in China are gambling and brothels? In the former, men lose the product of their labors, and in the latter they lose their health and life. You will never be a good physician or a good poet if you have those vices.”
In 1839, when the Opium War between China and Great Britain broke out, Tao Chi’en was sixteen years old. At that point the country was overrun with beggars. Masses of humanity poured from the countryside and appeared with their tatters and pustules in the cities, where they were driven back, forced to wander the highways of the empire like packs of starving dogs. Bands of robbers and rebels fought an endless war of ambushes against the government troops. It was a period of destruction and pillage. The weakened imperial armies, under the command of corrupt officers receiving contradictory orders from Peking, could do nothing against the powerful and well-disciplined English fleet. They could not draw upon popular support because the peasants were so weary of seeing their paddies destroyed, their villages in flames, and their daughters raped by soldiers. At the end of almost four years of struggle, China had to accept a humiliating defeat and pay the equivalent of twenty-one million dollars to their British conquerors, yield Hong Kong to them, and grant them the right to establish “concessions,” residential enclaves protected by extraterritorial laws. There the foreigners lived with their own police, services, and government and laws, guarded by their own troops. The “concessions” were true foreign nations inside Chinese territory, from which the Europeans controlled trade, principally opium. They did not enter Canton until five years later, but after the acupuncture master witnessed the degrading defeat of his venerated emperor and saw the economy and morale of his nation sag, he decided there was no reason to go on living.
During the war years the aged zhong yi’s spirit visibly deteriorated and he lost the serenity so arduously won over the course of his lifetime. His withdrawal and inattention to material matters reached such a point that after his master had eaten nothing for days, Tao Chi’en had to spoon food into his mouth. The accounts became hopelessly entangled and creditors began to beat at the door, but his master dismissed them, for anything having to do with money seemed a repugnant burden from which sages were naturally immune. In the senile confusion of his last years, Tao’s teacher forgot his good intentions in regard to adopting his apprentice and providing him with a wife; in truth, his mind was so cloudy that he often sat staring at Tao Chi’en with a perplexed expression, unable to remember his name or to place him in the labyrinth of faces and events that assailed him without order or harmony. But he had enough spirit still to direct the details of his burial, because for enlightened Chinese the most important event in life was one’s funeral. The idea of putting an end to his depressing life by means of an elegant death had been with him for some time, but he awaited the outcome of the war with the secret and irrational hope of seeing the triumph of the armies of the celestial empire. The foreigners’ arrogance was intolerable; he felt a great scorn for those brutal fan wey, white ghosts who seldom washed, who drank milk and alcohol, and who were ignorant of the elementary norms of good behavior and incapable of honoring their ancestors as custom demanded. To him, the commercial accords seemed a favor the emperor had granted the ingrate barbarians who, instead of bowing before him with praise and gratitude, kept demanding more. When the treaty of Nanking was signed, it was the final blow for the zhong yi. The emperor, and every citizen of China down to the most humble, was dishonored. How could one recover his dignity following such an affront?
The ancient sage poisoned himself by swallowing gold. When his disciple returned from one of his excursions into the country to gather plants, he found the zhong yi in the garden, lying on silk cushions and dressed in white as a sign of mourning for himself. By his side, his tea was still warm and the ink from his brush still fresh. On his small desk was an unfinished poem, and a dragonfly cast a shadow upon the smooth parchment. Tao Chi’en kissed the hands of this man who had given him so much, then paused in the crepuscular light for an instant to appreciate the tracery of the dragonfly’s transparent wings, just as his master would have wished him to do.
An enormous crowd attended the sage’s funeral, because during his long life he had helped thousands of persons live in good health and die without agony. Government officials and dignitaries filed by with the greatest solemnity, literati recited their best poems, and courtesans showed up in their finest silks. A seer determined the most favorable day for the burial and an artist who crafted funeral offerings visited the house of the deceased to copy his possessions. He went around the property slowly, without taking measurements or notes, although beneath his voluminous sleeves he was making marks in a wax tablet with his fingernail. Later he constructed paper miniatures of the rooms and furnishings of the house, including the dead man’s favorite objects, to be burned with bundles of paper money. He must not in the other world be deprived of the things he had enjoyed in this one. The coffin, which was huge and decorated like an imperial carriage, passed through the streets of the city between two rows of soldiers in dress uniform preceded by horsemen attired in brilliant colors and a band of musicians playing cymbals, drums, flutes, bells, triangles, and a variety of stringed instruments. The noise was unbearable, befitting the importance of the deceased. Flowers, clothing, and food were heaped upon his grave; candles and incense were lighted; and, finally, the money and quantities of paper objects were burned. The ancestral gold-sheathed tablet engraved with the master’s name was placed upon the grave to receive his spirit, while the body returned to the earth. It was the role of the eldest son to accept
the tablet and install it in a place of honor in his home beside those of other male ancestors, but the physician had no one to carry out that duty. Tao Chi’en was only a servant and it would have been an unforgivable breach of etiquette for him to offer. He was genuinely moved; among the throng he was surely the only one whose tears and wailing represented true grief, but the ancestral tablet ended up in the hands of a distant nephew whose moral obligation it would be to bring offerings and pray before it every two weeks and on each anniversary.