Daughter of Fortune

  This was the state of affairs when Tao Chi’en met Dr. Ebanizer Hobbs, an English aristocrat who had none of their usual arrogance and who, unlike other Europeans, was interested in the local color of the city. Tao Chi’en saw him first in the market picking through the herbs and potions in a healer’s shop. Hobbs knew only ten words of Mandarin, but he spoke them in such a booming voice and with such conviction that a small crowd—half mocking, half frightened—had gathered around him. He was easy to see from a distance because his head rose far above the Chinese. Tao Chi’en had never seen a foreigner in this part of the city, so far from the sectors they normally frequented, and he moved closer to observe him better. Hobbs was a young man still, tall and slender, with noble features and large blue eyes. Tao Chi’en found to his delight that he could translate the fan wey’s ten words, that he knew at least that many more in English, and that it might be possible to communicate. He greeted the Englishman with a cordial bow and the foreigner answered by clumsily imitating his gesture. Both smiled, and then broke out laughing, chorused by the friendly chortles of the spectators. They began an eager dialogue of twenty words badly pronounced on both sides and a comic pantomime performed to the growing hilarity of the curious. Soon there was a group sizable enough to block traffic, all weak with laughter, which attracted a British mounted policeman who ordered the throng to disperse immediately. That was the birth of a solid alliance between the two men.

  Ebanizer Hobbs was as aware of the limitations of his calling as Tao Chi’en was of his. The former wanted to learn the secrets of the Eastern medicine he had seen flashes of during his travels through Asia, especially the control of pain through needles inserted at nerve terminals and the use of combinations of plants and herbs to treat a number of illnesses that in Europe were considered fatal. Tao Chi’en was fascinated by Western medicine and its aggressive methods of treatment; his was a subtle art of balance and harmony, a slow process of rerouting misdirected energy, preventing illness, and seeking the causes of symptoms. Tao Chi’en had never practiced surgery, and his knowledge of anatomy, extremely precise in regard to the different pulses and acupuncture points, was limited to what he could see and touch. He knew from memory the anatomical drawings in the library of his former master, but it had never occurred to him to dissect a cadaver. That custom was not accepted in Chinese medicine: his wise master, who had practiced the art of healing for a lifetime, had rarely seen an internal organ and was incapable of a diagnosis if he encountered symptoms that did not fit within the repertory of known ills. Ebanizer Hobbs, on the other hand, dissected cadavers and looked for the cause; that was how one learned. Tao Chi’en did that for the first time in the basement of the English hospital, on a night of typhoons, as assistant to Dr. Hobbs, who that same morning had placed his first acupuncture needles to relieve a migraine in the consulting office where Tao Chi’en attended his patients. In Hong Kong there were a few missionaries interested in curing the body as well as converting the souls of their congregation, with whom Dr. Hobbs maintained excellent relations. These evangelists were much closer to the local population than the British physicians of the colony, and they admired the methods of Eastern medicine. They opened the doors of their small hospitals to the zhong yi. The enthusiasm of Tao Chi’en and Ebanizer Hobbs for study and experimentation inevitably led to friendship. They met almost in secret, because had their mutual respect and admiration been common knowledge, they would have risked their reputations. Neither European nor Chinese patients admitted that the other race had anything to teach them.

  As Tao Chi’en became more comfortable financially, the wish to buy a wife began to occupy his dreams again. On his twenty-second birthday, he once again added up his savings, as he often did, and was elated to find that he had enough for a woman with tiny feet and a sweet nature. As he did not have parents to assist him in making his choice, as custom demanded, he had to consult an agent; there he was shown portraits of various candidates, but they all looked alike; he found it impossible to deduce a girl’s looks—much less her personality—from those modest ink sketches. It was forbidden for him to see the prospective wife with his own eyes, or hear her voice, as he would have liked; neither did he have a female family member to do it for him. One thing was allowed: he could view a girl’s feet as she stood behind a curtain, but he had been told that not even that was reliable because the agents often cheated and substituted the golden lilies of a different woman. He had to trust in fate. He came close to leaving the decision to the dice but the tattoo on his right hand reminded him of past misadventures in games of chance, and he chose to commend the task to the spirits of his mother and his acupuncture master. After going to five temples to make offerings, he cast the I Ching sticks, where he read that it was the propitious moment, and so chose his bride. The method did not fail him. When he lifted the red silk kerchief from the face of his new wife—following minimal ceremonies, since he did not have money for a more splendid wedding—he saw a harmonious face with eyes cast obstinately to the ground. He repeated her name three times before she dared look at him with tear-filled eyes, trembling with fright.

  “I will be good to you,” he promised, as emotional as she.

  From the moment he lifted that red cloth, Tao adored the girl fate had bequeathed him. That love took him by surprise; he had not imagined that such feelings could exist between a man and a woman. He had never heard anyone discuss that kind of love, he had only read vague references in classical literature in which maidens, like landscapes or the moon, were the obligatory subjects of poetic inspiration. Even so, he had believed that in the real world women were either creatures for working and reproducing, like the peasant women he had grown up among, or else were expensive ornaments. Lin did not fit into either of those categories, she was a mysterious and complex person capable of disarming him with her irony and challenging him with her questions. She made him laugh like no one else could, invented impossible stories, provoked him with word games. In Lin’s presence, everything seemed to be lighted with an irresistible glow. That miraculous discovery of intimacy with another person was the most profound experience of his life. He had had his share of hurried, cock-of-the-walk encounters with prostitutes, but had never had the time and love to know anyone deeply. To open his eyes in the morning and see Lin sleeping beside him made him laugh with happiness, and an instant later tremble with anguish. What if one morning she didn’t wake up? The sweet fragrance of her perspiration in their nights of love, the fine line of her eyebrows lifted in an expression of perpetual surprise, the impossible slenderness of her waist, everything about her choked him with tenderness. Oh, and the two of them laughing! That was best of all, the natural joy of that love. His old master’s pillow books, which had caused such empty excitement in his adolescence, proved to be a great benefit at the hour of their pleasure. As befitted a young, well-bred virgin, Lin was modest in her everyday behavior, but almost as soon as she lost her fear of her husband, her spontaneous and passionate femininity emerged. In a short time, that eager student learned the two hundred twenty-two manners of making love and, always willing to follow in that headlong race, suggested to her husband that he invent new ones. Fortunately for Tao Chi’en, the refined knowledge learned in theory in his mentor’s library included countless ways of pleasing a woman, and he knew that vigor counted for much less than patience. His fingers were trained to perceive the body’s pulses and to locate its most sensitive points blindfolded. His warm, strong hands, expert in soothing his patients’ pain, became instruments of infinite pleasure for Lin. Furthermore, he had discovered something the honorable zhong yi had forgotten to teach him: that the best aphrodisiac is love. In bed they could be so happy that by night life’s problems were erased. But those problems were many, which was evident all too soon.

  The spirits Tao Chi’en had invoked to help in his matrimonial choice had done their work to perfection: Lin had bound feet and was as sweet and timid as a squirrel. But Tao Chi’en had not thought to ask that h
is wife also be strong and healthy. The same woman who seemed inexhaustible at night was during the day transformed into an invalid. She could walk no farther than a block or two on her tiny, mutilated feet. It is true that when she walked, she moved with the soft delicacy of a reed in the breeze, as the ancient acupuncture master had written in one of his poems, but it was no less true that a short trip to the market to buy a cabbage for dinner was true torment to her golden lilies. She never complained aloud, but he had only to see her perspire and bite her lips to guess the effort of every step. She also had weak lungs. She breathed with the sharp whistle of the goldfinch, lived through the rainy season with a runny nose and in the dry season choked because the warm air seemed to pass no farther than her lips. Neither her husband’s herbs nor the tonics of his friend the English doctor could help her. When she became pregnant she grew worse, for her fragile build could barely support the weight of the child. In the fourth month, she stopped going out altogether, and sat listlessly before the window watching life passing in the street. Tao Chi’en hired two servant girls to take over the domestic chores and stay with her, because he feared that Lin would die in his absence. He doubled his working hours and for the first time harassed his patients to pay, which filled him with shame. He could feel the critical gaze of his master reminding him of the duty to serve without expecting a return, for “he who knows most has the greatest obligation toward humanity.” He could not, nevertheless, work for free or in exchange of favors as he had before; he needed every cent to keep Lin comfortable. By then he had rented the second floor of an old house, where he installed his wife with refinements that neither of them had known before, but he wasn’t satisfied. It was in his mind to get her a house with a garden; that way she would have beauty and pure air. His friend Ebanizer Hobbs told him—since Tao himself refused to see the evidence—that Lin’s tuberculosis was very advanced and that there was no garden capable of curing her.

  “Instead of working from dawn to midnight to buy her silk dresses and beautiful furniture, stay with her as much as possible, Dr. Chi’en. You must enjoy her while you have her,” Hobbs counseled.

  The two physicians agreed, each from the perspective of his own experience, that the birth would be a test of fire for Lin. Neither was expert on this subject, for in Europe as well as China births were in the hands of midwives, but the men decided to study in that area. Neither Hobbs nor Tao Chi’en had any confidence in the expertise of some low, coarse woman—which was how they regarded all the women who practiced midwivery. They had watched them work, with their revolting hands, their witchery, and their brutal methods for separating the baby from the mother, and were determined to spare Lin that miserable experience. She, however, did not want to give birth in the presence of the two men, especially when one of them was a fan wey with pale eyes, someone who could not even speak the language of civilized beings. She begged her husband to go to the neighborhood midwife, because the most elementary decency prohibited her from spreading her legs before a foreign devil, but this time Tao Chi’en, always ready to please her, was inflexible. Finally, they agreed that he personally would attend her while Ebanizer Hobbs stayed in the next room to lend verbal support, should it be needed.

  The first indication of the coming birth was an asthma attack that nearly cost Lin her life. Her efforts to breathe were enmeshed with those of her womb to expel the infant, and both Tao Chi’en, with all his love and science, and Ebanizer Hobbs, with his medical texts, were helpless to know what to do. Ten hours later, when the moans of the mother had been reduced to the harsh gurgling of someone drowning and the baby gave no signs of being born, Tao Chi’en raced out to look for the midwife and despite his revulsion practically dragged her home. As Chi’en and Hobbs had feared, the woman was a foul-smelling old drab with whom it was impossible to exchange the least medical information because her knowledge came not from science but from long experience and ancient instinct. She began by shoving the two men aside, forbidding them even to put their heads through the curtains that separated the two rooms. Tao Chi’en never learned what happened behind that barrier but he felt better when he heard Lin breathing without choking and screaming. In the following hours, while Ebanizar Hobbs slept exhausted in a chair and Tao Chi’en desperately consulted the spirit of his master, Lin brought a lifeless girl child into the world. As the baby was female, neither the midwife nor the father made any effort to revive her, though both gave themselves to the task of saving the mother, who was losing what little strength she had at the rate the blood flowed from between her legs.

  Lin scarcely mourned the death of the baby girl, as if she knew she would not live long enough to have raised her. Slowly she recovered from the difficult delivery and for a while tried to be the happy companion of their nighttime game. With the same discipline she had used to mask the pain of her feet, she pretended enthusiasm for her husband’s passionate embraces. “Sex is a voyage, a sacred voyage,” she had often said to him, but now she lacked the spirit to accompany him. Tao Chi’en so longed for that love that one by one he ignored the telltale signs and kept believing to the end that Lin was the same as she had been. For years he had dreamed of sons, but now all he wanted was to protect his wife from another pregnancy. His feelings for Lin had become a veneration that he could confess only to her; he thought that no one could understand such consuming love for a woman, that no one knew Lin as he did, that no one knew the light she brought to his life. I am happy, I am happy, he kept repeating to drive away the dark premonitions that assaulted him when he dropped his guard. But he was not happy. He didn’t laugh now with the same lightheartedness, and when he was with Lin he took little pleasure from it, except in some perfect moments of carnal intimacy, because he was watching her every minute, worried, always thinking of her health, aware of her fragility, measuring the rhythm of her breathing. He came to despise her golden lilies, which in the early days of their marriage he had kissed with sublime passion. Ebanizer Hobbs wanted Lin to take long outings in the open air to strengthen her lungs and pique her appetite, but she could barely take ten steps without faltering. Tao could not stay beside his wife every minute, as Hobbs suggested, because he had to provide for them. Each instant he was away from her seemed life wasted in unhappiness, time stolen from love. He placed all his experience with herbs at the service of his beloved, all the knowledge he had acquired over years of practicing medicine, but one year after the birth Lin had become a shadow of the happy girl she had once been. Her husband kept trying to make her laugh, but their laughter rang false to them both.

  One day Lin could not get out of bed. She lay choking, her strength draining away, coughing blood and trying to breathe. She refused to eat anything except spoonfuls of a clear soup, because the effort exhausted her. She slept in spurts during the few moments she wasn’t coughing. Tao Chi’en calculated that for six weeks her breathing had been a liquid rasping, as if she were underwater. When he picked her up in his arms, he could tell how much weight she was losing, and his heart shrank with terror. He had watched her suffer so much that her death should have come as a relief, but the fateful morning when he awakened embracing Lin’s icy body, he thought he, too, would die. A long and terrible scream born from the depths of the earth, like the roar of a volcano, shook the house and waked everyone in the vicinity. The neighbors came and kicked down the door to find him naked in the middle of the room, holding his wife in his arms and howling. They had to pry her body from his arms and hold him down until Ebanizer Hobbs arrived and made him drink a dose of laudanum capable of felling a lion.

  Tao Chi’en sank into widowerhood with total despair. He made an altar with the portrait of Lin and some of her belongings, and spent hours staring at it in desolation. He stopped seeing his patients or sharing studies and research with Ebanizer Hobbs, activities on which their friendship was based. He was repelled by the advice of the Englishman, who maintained that what he needed was a bit of the hair of the dog, and that the best way to get over his grief was to vis
it the brothels in the port, where he could choose all the women he wanted with deformed feet—Hobbs’s term for golden lilies. How could his friend suggest such an abhorrent idea? The woman didn’t live who could replace Lin; he would never love another, of that Tao Chi’en was sure. All he accepted from Hobbs during that period were his generous bottles of whiskey. For weeks he lived in a haze of alcohol; gradually his money ran out and he had to sell or pawn his possessions, until the day came that he couldn’t pay his rent and had to move to a cheap hotel. Then he remembered that he was a zhong yi and began to work again, although he barely managed, unshaven, dirty, the hair in his queue flying. Since he had a good reputation, his patients put up with his unkempt appearance and drunken errors with resignation, but gradually they stopped coming to see him. And Ebanizer Hobbs stopped calling on him to treat difficult cases because he had lost confidence in Tao’s judgment. Until that time they had complemented each other well: the Englishman was for the first time able to perform surgery boldly, thanks to the powerful drugs and golden needles that soothed pain, reduced hemorrhaging, and shortened the time of healing, and the Chinese physician had learned to use the scalpel and other techniques of European science. But with his trembling hands and eyes clouded by intoxication and tears, Tao Chi’en represented a danger more than he did support and assistance.