John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

The sea was still furious, though, and tried to wrench her away from the boat and smashed her against its side and covered her head with water again and again, but Mei held on, held on with her two hands and her teeth because her life was not nothing, she was the raft this little girl was going to ride to safety.

Then the sea began to tire of its anger and the black clouds skulked away and left the sky purple and gray and ashamed at what it had done. People on the boat saw Mei then and strong arms began to pull at her, but she didn’t unclamp her teeth from the little girl’s arm till she was lying face-down across the laps of the men on the boat.

The little girl was not alive. She had drowned maybe or had her neck broken, they said, and thought Mei was her mother.

“I am so dreadfully sorry,” said an English man.

They spent the night huddled together in the boat, a dozen people with the body of the little girl wrapped in canvas, wet, freezing, the men bailing water out with their hands. When the sun came out of the water again there was another steamship in the distance and the men stood and peeled their shirts off and waved them in the air, shouting.

The people from the lifeboats that did not go under were gathered together in a warehouse on the dock in what they said was Manila, sitting on benches, wrapped in blankets. The officials, yang gweizi with black hair and moustaches and a few Monkey People, had not yet reached Mei when Mr. Wu strode in with two men in uniform beside him and walked along the benches looking into the faces of the women who had survived.

“This one is mine,” he said when he came to Mei.

Two of the port officials came over then and one of them tried several languages she didn’t know till he asked her in very poor South China talk, “Do you know this man?”

“My life is nothing,” she answered.

Niles stops at a bakery for a buñuelo and a cup of the hot liquid mud they sell as chocolate, watching the last of the chaperoned young ladies hurry to shelter themselves from the blaze of noon. They are flat-nosed, like a lot of the darky gals back home, and rather meager in the hindquarters. The cream of the city’s courtesans will become available, he suspects, when the last of the Dons are packed off, but by that time he may be relegated to the hinterlands with nothing but barefooted, betel-chewing peasant maidens for comfort. As he leaves the bakery a funeral procession rolls past, the brass band in the van playing a dirge-like version of The Star-Spangled Banner that they have no doubt picked up from the nightly military concerts on the Luneta, the driver of the wagon bearing the coffin dignified in top hat and bare feet, the pair of scrawny Filipino equines supplying the motive power barely coming above his hip. Niles uncovers and stands watching with hat over heart as the mourners’ carriages rattle by, trying not to smirk.

Many of the Celestials do without a siesta. Niles passes through the Plaza Moraga and onto the narrower confines of Rosario Street, John China-man’s bailiwick, and they are out in abundance, hawking, hustling, shouting at each other in their harsh singsong, a teeming yellow horde fairly crawling over each other in their frantic quest for sustenance. Shriveled roots that resemble mummified animals are offered at one stall, whether for food or medicine he does not dare wonder, while another vendor presides over arm-thick live pythons wrapped around poles, their heads bound to the bamboo with wire, and a third sends lung-splitting cries into the air as he waves a pair of flapping chickens like a signal corpsman wig-wagging his flags on a ship’s bow. Niles takes a deep breath and attempts to hold it all the way to An’s.

A sullen-faced Chinaman slouches with arms folded inside his sleeves next to the door, seeing all and reacting to none, a caution to any highbinders contemplating pillage within. The interior reeks of sandalwood and incense, walls laden with silken tapestries, the narrow space a forest of intricately worked statues and figurines in porcelain and rare stone, banners with Chinese characters in thick black strokes hanging from the ceiling. A small boy wearing only a shirt that barely covers his shame squats near the door, pulling the cord to operate a punkah fan overhead, and An, with his cold abacus eyes and billygoat wisp of chin hair, sits back on a carved throne of zitan wood he claims once cradled the posterior of the Ming Emperor.

“The handsome lieutenant,” he observes, his accent that of a British tea merchant. “To what do we owe the honor?”

Niles lifts the satchel to his chest. “Western medicine.”

An smiles and rises from the throne, crossing to a beaded curtain, where he barks a few instructions in his native tongue. Niles caught a glimpse through the curtain on his first visit — Oriental gentlemen and at least one well-dressed Spaniard recumbent on divans, languidly sucking at hoses attached to smoke-filled globes. A scene he’d love to capture with a snap, but woefully under-illuminated.

An pulls a lacquered miniature pagoda off a table to make room and Niles lays the satchel on it. The Chinaman is silent as he lifts each of the vials to the light bouncing in from the street, reading the etiquette with a jeweler’s loupe.

“These might only be bottles filled with water,” he says.

Niles picks up a golden, ruby-encrusted scabbard. “And this may be nothing but paint and paste.”

“You distrust me?”

Niles bows slightly, lays the scabbard down. “I think you are a master of your trade. It amounts to the same thing.”

An smiles and carefully replaces the last vial. He writes a figure on a slip of paper, hands it to Niles.

“Twice this,” says Niles after a glance. “At the least.”

An looks over the medicines in their compartments, methodically clacking a pair of ivory mahjong tiles together in his hand. “I believe we can come to terms,” he announces finally, “but gold—”

“I can’t accept coins,” Niles avers. “And neither can my client.”

Paper money is distrusted, quite properly, at the moment, and nobody carries more than a few of the heavy Mexican cartwheels in their pockets, preferring to do business with letters of intent, coolies crisscrossing the streets with sacks of gold coins in wheelbarrows to settle the account at the end of each month, pistol-wielding guards trotting alongside them. Niles looks around the shop.

“Surely you have something of equal value but lesser magnitude?”

An strolls past a few of his display cases, clacking the tiles, before selecting an ornately carved dragon about the size of a ferret and holding it up for Niles’s inspection. It has a pleasing weight, a deep, translucent emerald color with reddish-orange highlights on its dorsal spines.

“Kingfisher jade from Burma,” says the trader proudly. “From the time of Han — when your Jesus Christ was alive.”

Niles bristles inwardly at the heathen’s mention of the Savior, but allows it to pass. He scratches at the dragon’s scales with a fingernail. “This will very likely do,” he says.

The ama of the house in Sampaloc was Señora Divinaflores and she did not ask Ling-Ling to demonstrate the use of the water closet. She was a moody woman even when she wasn’t drinking, and had a lover who was in the guardia civil who did not treat her well. There were only five other girls in the house — Eulalia, Dionisia, Carmen, Ynés, and Keiko, who was a karayuki-san. The Filipina girls all came from different villages far from the city and spoke at least three different languages as well as some Spanish, which Señora Divinaflores insisted they talk with the visitors, who were mostly from the army and the government, “ oficiales y caballeros ,” as she described them. These were more likely to sing than the English, and spent more time in front of the mirrors in the rooms, but they were only men. Ling-Ling opened herself up to their words, love words, some of them, and joder words, and to the words of their songs and poems and stories. There was one young man who was a junior officer of the fusileros named Rodrigo Valenzuela who always asked for Ling-Ling and came twice or three times a week, staying the night if the other visitors weren’t too noisy. He made Ling-Ling say his name over and over until she could pronounce it, but was not interested in learning the North China talk. The sisters were allowed outside at this house, a house like many others on the street, and if she woke early Ling-Ling would sit on the sill of the front window, underneath the huge red-and-yellow Spanish flag hung on the outside wall, and watch the coolie gangs hurry by on the Calzada with their loads. They looked like South China men, stripped to the waist, running with knees bent and poles that supported large and heavy objects in their hands or on their shoulders. She sat watching them pass for hours sometimes, but they never seemed to notice her, as intent on their next step as the oxen pulling carts they sometimes drove, whipping their massive flanks, running to their great meaty heads to splash water on them. She wondered if there was a South China girl for every one of them, waiting for her man’s contract to be up and for him to brave the ocean crossing with the gold he had won in his hands. To work like beasts and have no one to dream of, no one to suffer your labor for — she did not want to imagine it.