Хеннинг Манкелль - The Man from Beijing

True to his word, Zi returned that evening.

‘Wake your brothers,’ said Zi. ‘We have to go. I have work for you.’

‘Wu is ill. Can’t it wait until tomorrow?’

‘Somebody else will have taken the work by then. Either we go now, or we don’t go at all.’

San hastened to wake up Guo Si and Wu.

‘We have to go,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, we’ll have work at last.’

Zi led them through the dark alleys. San noticed that he was trampling on people sleeping on the pavements. San was holding Guo Si’s hand, and in turn he had his arm around Wu.

Soon San noticed from the smell that they were close to the water. Everything seemed easier now.

Then everything happened very fast. Strangers emerged from the shadows, grabbed them by the arms and started to pull sacks over their heads. San caught a punch that felled him, but he continued to struggle. When he was pressed down to the ground again, he bit an arm as hard as he could and managed to wriggle free. But he was caught again immediately.

San heard Wu screaming in terror not far away. In the light from a dangling lantern he could see his brother lying on his back. A man pulled a knife out of his chest, then threw the body into the water. Wu was carried slowly away by the current.

The shattering truth struck home: Wu was dead, and San had failed to protect him.

Then he received a heavy blow on the back of his head. He was unconscious when he and Guo Si were carried onto a rowing boat that took them to a ship anchored offshore.

All this happened in the summer of 1863. A year when thousands of Chinese peasants were abducted and taken across the seas to America, which gobbled them up into its insatiable jaws. What was in store for them was the same drudgery they had once dreamed of escaping.

They were transported over a wide ocean. But poverty accompanied them all the way.

On 9 March 1864, Guo Si and San started hacking away the mountain blocking the railway line that would eventually span the whole American continent.

It was one of the severest winters in living memory in Nevada, with days so cold each breath felt like ice crystals rather than air.

Previous to this, San and Guo Si had been working further west, where it was easier to prepare the ground and lay the rails. They had been taken there at the end of October, directly from the ship. Together with many of the others who had been transported in chains from Canton, they had been received by Chinese men who had cut off their pigtails, wore Western clothes and had watch chains across their chests. The brothers had been met by a man with the same surname as their own, Wang. To San’s horror, Guo Si — who normally said nothing at all — had begun to protest.

‘We were attacked, tied up and bundled on board. We didn’t ask to come here.’

San thought this would be the end of their long journey. The man in front of them would never accept being spoken to in such a way. He would draw the pistol he had stuck into his belt and shoot them.

But San was wrong. Wang burst out laughing, as if Guo Si had just told him a joke.

‘You are no more than dogs,’ said Wang. ‘Zi has sent me some talking dogs. I own you until you have paid me for the crossing, and your food, and the journey here from San Francisco. You will pay me by working for me. Three years from now, you can do whatever you like, but until then you belong to me. Out here in the desert you can’t run away. There are wolves, bears and Indians who will slit your throats, smash your skulls and eat your brains as if they were eggs. If you try to escape even so, i have dogs that will track you down. Then my whip will perform a merry dance, and you will have to work an extra year for me. So, now you know the score.’

San eyed the men standing behind Wang. They had dogs on leads and rifles in their hands. San was surprised that these white men with long beards were prepared to obey orders given them by a Chinaman. They had come to a country that was very different from China.

They were placed in a tented camp at the bottom of a deep ravine, with a stream running through it. On one side of the creek were the Chinese labourers, and on the other side a mixture of Irishmen, Germans and other Europeans. There was high tension between the two camps. The stream was a border that none of the Chinese passed unnecessarily. The Irishmen, who were often drunk, would yell abuse and throw stones at the Chinese side. San and Guo Si couldn’t understand what they were saying, but the stones flying through the air were hard; there was no reason to suppose that the words were any softer.

They found themselves living alongside twelve other Chinese. None of the others had been with them on the ship. San assumed Wang preferred to mix the newly arrived labourers with those who had been working on the railway for some time and would be able to tell the newcomers about the rules and routines. The single tent was small; when everyone had gone to bed they were squashed up against one another. That helped them to keep warm, but it also created a distressing feeling of not being able to move, of being tied up.

The man in charge of the tent was Xu. He was thin and had bad teeth but was regarded with great respect. Xu showed San and Guo Si where they could sleep. He asked where they came from, which ship they had sailed on, but he said nothing about himself. Sleeping next to San was Hao, who told him that Xu had been involved in building the railway from the very start. He had come to America at the beginning of the 1850s and started working in gold mines. According to rumour he had failed to pan gold in the rivers, but he had bought a decrepit old wooden hut where several successful gold prospectors had lived. Nobody could understand how Xu could be so stupid as to pay twenty-five dollars for a shack that nobody could live in now. But Xu carefully swept up all the dirt lying on the floor; then he removed the rotten floorboards and swept up all the dust and dirt underneath. In the end he filtered out so much gold dust that he was able to return to San Francisco with a small fortune. He decided to go back to Canton and even bought a ticket for the journey. But while he was waiting for his ship to sail, he visited one of the gambling dens where the Chinese spent so much of their time. He gambled and lost. He even ended up gambling away his ticket. That was when he contacted Central Pacific and became one of the first Chinese to be employed.

How Hao had found out all this without Xu himself ever having said anything about his past, San could never work out. But Hao insisted that every word was true.

Xu could speak English. Through him the brothers discovered what was being shouted over the stream separating the two camps. Xu spoke contemptuously of the men on the other side.

‘They call us Chinks,’ he said. ‘That is a very disparaging term for us. When the Irishmen are drunk, they sometimes call us pigs, which means that we are gau.’

‘Why don’t they like us?’ wondered San.

‘We are better workers,’ said Xu. ‘We work harder, we don’t drink, we don’t dodge and shirk. And we look different — our skin and eyes. They don’t like people who don’t look like they do.’

Every morning San and Guo Si clambered up the steep path leading out of the ravine, each carrying a lantern. It sometimes happened that one of the gang would slip on the icy surface and tumble all the way down to the bottom. Two men whose legs had been broken helped to prepare the food the brothers ate when they came back after their long working day. The Chinese and the labourers living on the other side of the stream worked a long way apart. Each group had its own path up to the top of the ravine and its own workplace. Foremen were constantly on the lookout to make sure they didn’t come too close. Sometimes fights would break out in the middle of the stream between Chinese with cudgels and Irishmen with knives. When that happened, the bearded guards would come racing up on horseback and separate them. Occasionally somebody would be so badly injured that he died. A Chinese who smashed the skull of an Irishman was shot; an Irishman who stabbed a Chinese was dragged away in chains. Xu urged everybody in his tent not to become involved in fights or stone throwing. He kept reminding them that they were guests in this foreign country.