Daughter of Fortune (43 page)

When Tao Chi'en had reached San Francisco the year before, he had devoted himself to establishing the contacts he needed to exercise his profession of
zhong yi
for a few months. He had some money, but he wanted to triple it in a hurry. In Sacramento the Chinese community consisted of some seven hundred men and nine or ten prostitutes, but in San Francisco there were thousands of potential clients. Also, many ships were constantly crossing the ocean, and because there was no running water in the city, some gentlemen sent their shirts to be laundered in Hawaii or China, which allowed Tao to order his herbs and remedies from Canton without any difficulty. In San Francisco he would not be as isolated as in Sacramento. Here, too, there were several Chinese practitioners with whom he could exchange patients and information. He did not plan to open his own consulting office because he was trying to save money, but he could associate with another, already established,
zhong yi
. Once installed in a hotel, he had taken a walk around the quarter, which had spread in all directions like an octopus. Now it was a small city with sturdy buildings, hotels, restaurants, laundries, opium parlors, brothels, markets, and factories. Where before only cheap trinkets were for sale, now stood shops of Oriental antiques, porcelains, enamels, jewels, silks, and ivories. Rich merchants came there—not just Chinese but Americans as well—to buy goods to sell in other cities. The merchandise was displayed in a motley clutter, and the best pieces, those worthy of connoisseurs and collectors, were not set out in plain sight but were shown in the back of the shop to informed clients only. Down dark streets, some buildings housed rooms where serious players met to gamble. At those exclusive tables, out of view of public curiosity and the watchfulness of authorities, extravagant sums were bet, murky deals negotiated, and power exercised. American law had no bearing among the Chinese, who lived in their own world, with their own language, customs, and ancient laws. The “celestials” were not welcome anywhere; the whites considered them the lowest among the undesirable foreigners invading California, and could not forgive them for prospering. Americans exploited them however they could, attacked them in the street, robbed them, burned their shops and homes, murdered them with impunity, but nothing quelled them. The population was divided among five tongs; on arrival, every Chinese immigrant joined one of these brotherhoods, the one guarantee of protection, of finding work, and of assuring that at death one's body would be sent back to China. Tao Chi'en, who had avoided associating with a tong, now had to do so, and he chose the largest, the one most Cantonese affiliated with. Soon he was put in contact with other
zhong yi
and they explained the rules of the game to him. First of all, silence and loyalty: everything that happened in the quarter stayed inside its boundaries. No going to the police, not even in the case of life or death; conflicts were resolved within their kind, that was what the tongs were for. The common enemy was always the
fan wey
. Tao Chi'en once again found himself a prisoner of the customs, hierarchies, and restrictions of his days in Canton. Within a couple of days everyone had heard his name and he began to receive more patients that he could attend. He did not have to look for a partner, he decided, he could open his own office and make money in less time than he had thought. He rented two rooms above a restaurant, one to live in and the other for his work; he hung a sign in the window and hired a young assistant to spread word of his services and receive his patients. For the first time, he used Dr. Ebanizer Hobbs's system for following the history of the sick. Until then he had trusted his memory and intuition, but because of the growing number of patients, he began keeping records to note the treatment at each visit.

One afternoon in early autumn, Tao Chi'en's assistant came to him with an address on a piece of paper and a message to come as soon as possible. He attended his last patient of the day, and left. The wooden, two-story building decorated with dragons and paper lanterns was in the heart of Chinatown. One look was enough to tell him that this was a brothel. On either side of the door were small barred windows where he could see the faces of young girls calling to him in Cantonese: “Come in and do what you will with pretty Chinese girl.” And for the benefit of white visitors and sailors of all races they repeated in indecipherable English, “Two bittie lookie, four bittee feelee, six bittee doee,” as they exposed pitiful little breasts and tempted passersby with obscene gestures which, coming from those children, were a tragic pantomime. Tao Chi'en had seen them many times; he walked down that street every day and the mewing of the “singsong” girls pursued him, reminding him of his sister. What had happened to her? She would be twenty-three now, in the unlikely case that she was still alive, he thought. The poorest among the poor prostitutes began very early and rarely lived to be eighteen; by twenty, if they'd had the bad fortune to survive, they were ancient. The memory of that missing sister kept him from going to Chinese whorehouses; if he was maddened with desire, he sought out women of other races. The door was opened by a sinister-looking old woman with dyed black hair and eyebrows drawn with charcoal pencil, who greeted him in Cantonese. Once it was established that they belonged to the same tong, he was led inside. All the length of an evil-smelling corridor he saw the girls' cubicles; some were chained by an ankle to the bed. In the darkness of the hall he met two men adjusting their trousers as they left. The woman led him through a labyrinth of passages and stairways that covered an entire block before they descended rickety stairs into darkness. She indicated that Tao Chi'en should wait, and for a time that seemed interminable he waited in the blackness of that hole, listening to the muted noises of the nearby street. He heard a faint screech and something brushed his ankle; he kicked out and thought he had hit the creature, maybe a rat. The old woman returned with a candle and guided him through more twisting passageways until they came to a padlocked door. She took a key from a pocket and struggled with the lock until it opened. She held the candle high, lighting a windowless room in which the only piece of furniture was a board pallet a few inches above the ground. A wave of fetid odors struck them in the face and they had to cover nose and mouth in order to go in. On that platform were a small, cramped body, an empty bowl, and a burned-out oil lamp.

“Check her,” the crone ordered.

Tao Chi'en turned the body over to find that it was already stiff. It was a child of about thirteen, with two circles of rouge on her checks and scars on her arms and legs. Her only clothing was a thin blouse. It was obvious she was nothing but bones, but she had not died of hunger or illness.

“Poison,” he determined without hesitation.

“You don't say.” The woman laughed as if she had heard something very funny.

Tao Chi'en had to sign a paper stating that the death was due to natural causes. The old woman stepped out into the corridor, banged a small gong twice, and a man promptly appeared, stuffed the body in a bag, slung it over his shoulder, and bore it off without a word as the procuress placed twenty dollars in the hands of the
zhong yi
. Then she led him through new labyrinths and left him finally before a door. It was to a different street, and it took Tao Chi'en a long time to find his way back to where he lived.

The next day he returned to the same address. Again there were the girls with rouged faces and crazed eyes, calling out in two languages. Ten years ago, in Canton, he had begun his practice of medicine with prostitutes; he had used them as rented flesh and to practice with his master's gold acupuncture needles, but he had never paused to think about their souls. He thought of them as one of the universe's misfortunes, yet another of the errors of creation, beings who suffered ignominy to pay for offenses in former lives and improve their karma. He felt sorry for them, but it never occurred to him that their fate might be modified. They awaited disaster in their cribs, exactly as a chicken in its coop in the market: that was their destiny. That was the anarchy of the world. He had walked down that street a hundred times without focusing on those small windows, on those faces behind the bars or the beckoning hands. He had some vague notion that they were slaves, but in China more or less all women were slaves; the most fortunate served fathers, husbands, or lovers, others, employers for whom they labored from dawn to dusk, and many were like these girls. That morning, however, he did not see them with the same indifference because something in him had changed.

He had not tried to sleep the night before. After he left the brothel he had gone to a public bath where he soaked for a long time to rid himself of the dark energy of his sick patients and the deep repulsion oppressing him. When he got to his office he sent his assistant home and brewed jasmine tea to purify himself. He had not eaten in many hours, but it was not the moment for food. He took off his clothes, lighted incense and a candle, knelt with his forehead to the ground, and said a prayer for the soul of the dead girl. Then he sat in meditation for hours, in total immobility, until he was able to isolate himself from the noise of the street and the odors of the restaurant and sink into the void and silence of his own spirit. He did not know how long he sat, absorbed, calling, calling Lin, until finally the delicate ghost heard him in the mysterious reaches she inhabited and slowly found her way, moving toward him with the lightness of a sigh, first nearly imperceptible but gradually more substantial, until he clearly felt her presence. He did not see Lin inside the room but, rather, in his bosom, in the very core of his tranquil heart. Tao Chi'en did not open his eyes, or move. For hours he sat in the same posture, separated from his body, floating in a luminous space in perfect communication with Lin. At dawn, once both were sure they would not lose one another again, Lin softly said good-bye. Then the acupuncture master had come, smiling and ironic as he had been in his best days, before he was beat down by the delirium of senility, and stayed with Tao, keeping him company and answering his questions until the sun rose, the neighborhood awoke, and he heard the discreet taps of his assistant at the door. Tao Chi'en got up, refreshed and renewed, as if after a peaceful sleep, dressed, and went to open the door.

“Close the office. I will not attend patients today, I have other things to do,” he announced to his assistant.

The investigations of that day changed the course of Tao Chi'en's destiny. The girls behind the bars had come from China, picked up in the street or sold by their own fathers with the promise that they were going to the Golden Mountain to be married. Brokers selected the strongest and cheapest among them, not the most beautiful, unless it was a matter of a special order by wealthy clients who acquired them as concubines. Ah Toy, the clever woman who had invented the spectacle of the voyeuristic holes in the wall, had become the city's major importer of young flesh. For her chain of establishments she bought girls at the age of puberty because they were easy to tame and, after all, none lasted very long anyway. She was becoming famous and very rich; her coffers were overflowing and she had bought a palace in China where she planned to retire in her old age. She prided herself on being the Oriental madam with the best connections not only among Chinese but also influential Americans. She trained her girls to gather information, and so learned the personal secrets, political deals, and weaknesses of men who had power. If bribery failed, she had recourse to blackmail. No one dared defy her because everyone from the governor down lived in a glass house. Shipments of slaves came through the docks of San Francisco with no legal tie-ups and in full light of day. Ah Toy, however, was not the only trafficker; that vice was one of the most profitable and secure business dealings in California, as golden as the mines. Expenses were minimal, the girls were cheap, and they were transported in the holds of ships in large padded crates. They lived for weeks without knowing where they were going, or why; they saw daylight only when they were given lessons in their calling. During the crossing the sailors made it their business to train them, and by the time they got off the ship in San Francisco they had lost the last trace of innocence. Some died of dysentery, cholera, or dehydration; others managed to jump overboard during the minutes they were taken up to the deck to be washed down with saltwater. The rest were trapped; they spoke no English, they did not know that new country, they had no one to turn to. The immigration agents took bribes, turned a blind eye to the girls' obvious distress, and signed the false adoption or marriage papers without reading them. Newcomers were met at the dock by an old prostitute whose heart had turned to black stone. She herded them with a cane, like cattle, right through the center of the city, in plain view of anyone who wanted to look. The minute they crossed into Chinatown they disappeared forever in the subterranean labyrinth of dark rooms, false corridors, twisting stairs, hidden doors, and double walls where police never ventured because everything that happened there, they said, was the business of the Chinks, a yellow race of perverts with whom it was best not to meddle.

In an enormous below-street-level area ironically called “The Queen's Room,” the girls confronted their fate. They were allowed one night's rest; they were bathed, fed, and sometimes forced to drink a cup of liquor to quiet them a little. At the hour of the auction, they were taken naked into a room crowded with buyers of every conceivable ilk who felt them, checked their teeth, put their fingers anywhere they pleased, and finally made their offers. Some girls were sold to high-class bordellos or the harems of the rich; the strongest often ended up with factory owners, miners, or Chinese farmers, where they worked for the remainder of their brief existences. Most stayed in the cribs of Chinatown. Old whores taught them their duties; they learned to tell brass from gold, so they would not be cheated, to attract clients and please them without complaint, however humiliating or painful their demands. To give the transaction an air of legality, the girls signed a contract, which they couldn't read, selling themselves for five years, but it was craftily calculated to ensure that they would never be free. For every day they were sick, two weeks were added to their time of service, and if they attempted to escape they were enslaved for life. They lived crammed into unventilated rooms divided by heavy curtains, laboring like galley slaves until they died. It was there Tao Chi'en went that morning, accompanied by the spirits of Lin and his acupuncture master. An adolescent scantily clad in a smock led him to a filthy straw mattress behind a curtain, held out her hand, and asked him to pay first. She took his six dollars, lay down on her back and spread her legs, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Her pupils were dull and she was breathing with difficulty; he realized she was drugged. He sat beside her, pulled down her smock, and tried to stroke her head, but she screamed and bared her teeth, ready to bite him. Tao Chi'en moved away; he spoke to her a long time in Cantonese, without touching her, observing recent bruises, until the litany of his voice calmed her. Finally she began to answer his questions, more with gestures than words, as if she had lost the use of language, and he learned some details of her captivity. She could not tell him how long she had been there because counting days was a futile exercise, although it could not have been long since she still remembered her family in China with heartrending precision.