Meredith Quartermain: I, Bartleby

Recipes are symptomatic, Alice wrote to Harold Knapik. The snails are plentiful and excellent. But now the guide takes us to the oldest schoolroom in the city, built by Yip Sang for his twenty-three children, its blackboards and tongue-and-groove wainscoting just as he left it, our host explaining, except for its new green paint, since Yip means green leaf . We crowd against the scarred blackboards, the leather couple holding hands and brushing chalk dust from their sleeves, next to the chorus of simmering Japanese, and Alice, who preferred not to sell one of the paintings though her flat was only 12 degrees. Alice of the averted gaze, thinking of Lilyana, Isabel, Louise, Carl, and Fania or the Kiddies and winter that must be arranged not for but against. Yip Sang’s Chinese characters painted on the blackboard, calling for happiness and celebration.

Come outside. We want to take a picture. He tells them he will change. No no. Just as you are. He swishes another dish, wipes it, then another and another. Doctor beckons. He slings the dishtowel and lights a cigarette. A photograph just as he is in cook’s coat and soiled apron. Doctor stands him in the middle of a clearing behind the cabin. Missus offers him an ashtray. No, he will keep the cigarette. Just as I am. Missus looks at Doctor. Doctor peers into his camera on its three legs. Not Doctor who wants the picture. It’s Missus. Asking him, Did he go to Shanghai Alley last night, did he play fan-tan? Where did he get his silk brocade jacket? Which now they do not let him wear so he could look like more than a nobody cook in their picture. Could look like a proper man. Could walk like other men the streets of Gold Mountain. Could buy things, sell things, smoke and talk like other men. No no, the light’s too low here. Doctor moves him to a sunny patch, moves the three-legged camera, squints into it, waves him toward the trees. Squints into the box, fiddles with the lens. Missus smiles at him. Tells him to smile for the camera, say cheese . He takes a drag of the cigarette cupped in his hand.

Even if they give him a copy of this picture, he will not send it to his wife in Beijing — Mo-li, his jasmine flower, who can’t come here. No more Chinese, the government says, even if he pays $500. Yellow peril, the newspaper says.

Chow Lung doesn’t look at the camera. Doesn’t smile. Lets the camera photograph smears on his apron. He looks up at the trees — huge, heavy branches loom over the cabin, throw dark damp everywhere. Why don’t they cut them down, let in sun, grow apples, pears, plums? Missus looks at him, like she does with her notebook, writing him down. Writing down Shanghai Alley. He’s seen her there. Evenings, sitting in the car, bent over her notebook, while Doctor takes his black bag to someone sick. Chow Lung striding past the car in his good jacket, daring her to see him on the way to mah-jong. Doctor clicks the camera, writing Chow Lung in its black box. He picks up his doctor bag, kisses Missus goodbye, walks down the road to the next boat to Vancouver. Not back till tomorrow.

Missus in her chair with her notebook, smiling now that Doctor’s mother has gone to live with Doctor’s sister. Writing, writing, writing. Writes about him, Chow Lung. She calls him Yow. Stories about him for the New Statesman . People will read about him all around the world, not like in Vancouver’s yellow-peril newspaper. Why does she make him into Yow the cook when she could make him a doctor or a businessman like Yip Sang, with his tall building and three wives? Instead she makes him into Yow, who steals and goes to prison. He, Chow Lung, does not steal. Back at his dishes in the lean-to kitchen behind the cabin, clatter and bang so she hears it on the front veranda. Only a wood stove here, no electricity like in town — wood and kindling to chop, fire to watch, oven always too hot. He does not steal, but people everywhere will read about him, just the same. He goes out for more wood, sits on the chopping block, smokes a cigarette. Just him and Missus tonight. He will cook rice and Chinese vegetables like she asked. After dinner, what? Trees, trees, trees, an island of trees, except the hotel at Snug Cove, three miles away. Sit on the dock, then; look at the water between him and Vancouver. Even more water between him and Mo-li and his baby boy. Now sixteen, never seen. Mo-li, if I come to you, they will not let me back in Gold Mountain.

Missus stooping over her notebook — she will turn crooked like a walking stick — only see the ground. Not good for a lady. Not good for a lady to spit either — Missus spits on the iron — he catches her, he tells her. She promises. Then she does it again. She takes the iron into the lounge, he catches her. She takes it into her bedroom, he catches her. Even the bathroom, he catches her. A game. A joke. Like when he is Yow in her story on this same island: he serves Grandmother, Aunt Topaz, Rachel, and Rose their breakfast on the veranda. Look, a snake out on the grass, they shriek, don’t touch; it will bite. He dangles the snake near the table, tells them he’ll put it in the stew for dinner. Oh, don’t, please don’t, they beg him.

Missus looks at him. When a woman looks at you like that, she wants something. Why does she make Yow steal silk stockings for a white waitress, till he goes to prison? He takes off his cook’s apron and coat, puts on his high-collared black silk jacket. If she asks again what it’s like where he came from, he’ll tell her how big his family is, all his cousins and uncles, their businesses, their wives, all the sons they have. He grabs an old telephone book half torn up for lighting fires, slides through the cabin to the veranda — she’s bent over her notebook writing, writing, writing. Looks up. Chow Lung? He waves the telephone book in her face. My family’s bigger than all your Wilsons in here; we have banquets, parties, weddings — Peking duck, roast pork, hot pot, wontons. How come you don’t invite all your Wilsons to your big house in town?

He was driven, volcanic, to sea, to write, to unfold a story of man and the sea. Man and the heavens. Man the voyager. He shipped out to Singapore, China, Siberia, Siam, the Philippines. Hired on as stoker on a tramp steamer to Archangel, jumped ship to find the Norwegian poet Grieg, who wrote The Ship Sails On . For years worked on a play, The Ship Sails On . Began In Ballast to the White Sea , a novel. Sailed to America for Conrad Aiken’s Blue Voyage , with only Moby-Dick in his trunk. Played his taropatch and planned to measure the height of Montserrat. Wrote Ultramarine , lost it, rewrote it in “Hotel Room in Chartres.” For years wrote Under the Volcano . For years The Voyage That Never Ends, Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, La Mordida, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven .

He would rewrite the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, every fellow passenger singing of the real in man’s imagined universe. Two thousand pages of it burned in a Dollarton shack on the west coast of Canada. His shack called Eridanus after a ship that sank there. Eridanus the celestial river pouring from Aquarius, marking the crazed path of Phaethon driving the sun. Eridanus, across the inlet from the _hell Oil refinery.

He sailed in a bauxite hauler to Haiti, then in a French cargo ship through the Panama to France. Rode buses and trains to another hotel, another bar, another French pension’s wrong instructions. A game en route with Margerie listing all breeds of ducks, rabbits, geese, turkeys, grasses and chickens: Yokohama bantams, silkies, silver Sebrights, rosecombs, Andalusians, mille fleurs, dark brahmas, bull-faced polishes.