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In April of 1848, at latitude 70 degrees 05 minutes North, longitude 98 degrees 23 minutes West, Captain Fitzjames of the H.M.S. Terror stood on the blank field of pack ice and examined a block of tea. It seemed such a strange thing to him. How could it be that a tea cake, something that belonged on the shelves of warm and friendly English kitchens in London and Liverpool, came to be in such an unearthly, inhospitable place as this? It made no sense. He had seen such violence and suffering, experienced such helplessness and fear in this barren place that such a simple, pleasant, English thing as this tea cake seemed to have materialized out of thin air. He really did not know how it could have come to be.
There were many things Captain Fitzjames did not know, among them an incident beginning in May of 1843.
On that day, on the eighth branch of the fourth stem of a tea bush halfway up a Chinese mountain that the locals call Mount Khwăn, two young leaves grew from the same twig. But the blistered hand that plucked them trembled, and one leaf fell into the tea-picker’s bamboo basket as the other fell into the mud. The leaf in the mud sank within its native soil, soon to return to the roots that had nourished it; the leaf in the basket settled amongst fellow fragrant leaves as the tea-picker walked, unsure whence or where it would go.
“Catkins floated on the breeze in the Hsieh family court
Thwarted is my desire to become a butterfly in the western garden.”
The tea-picker’s voice soared above the verdant slopes, as light as gauze, yet ragged with breathlessness. He had once performed these words on the finest stages in Chinkiang, swathed in silks as bright as gemstones as the beauty Tu Lee Niang—he, Yü Tzŭ Yü, the finest tân actor in Kiangsu. He recalled how he had flown across the stage as lightly as a faery amid spiraling silks. He had enchanted all who saw him, old and young, rich and poor. Fine mandarins from as far away as Peking came to see him, their rich brocades gleaming from their boxes like idols in their shrines, and small children clung to the edge of the stage to stare up at him in awe. Who would have expected that he would find himself hauling tea leaves across a distant mountain, his steps ragged and painful, his voice more pained still?
The first Yü Tzŭ Yü heard of the war was teahouse gossip: have you heard that Lin Tse Hsü drowned English opium at Humen? My goodness, my goodness, what a bold man. What a shame he didn’t drown the English with it. Wouldn’t that have been a sight! But proximity soured romance, and the rumors that followed this one grew ever more broken and uncertain as they filtered through murmuring stagehands and spooked managers. Have you heard that the English are running rampant at Kowloon? Those filthy pigs. Have you heard that we drove the English out of Canton? Of course! There is justice in the heavens after all.
Have you heard that the English have taken Chusan?
Have you heard that English warships are in the Pearl River and the Yangtze?
Have you heard that they have taken Shanghai?
Have you heard—
Have you heard they will be here next?
Surely they couldn’t. Surely you heard wrong.
Rumor became fact on the twenty-first day of the seventh month, when a cannonball shattered the roof of the theatre just as Tu Lee Niang was about to awaken from her dream of romance. Yü Tzŭ Yü had scrambled to his feet ahead of schedule; someone else’s brains had gotten onto his glistening costume. He recalled a voice screaming, “Chinkiang has fallen!” He recalled the sound of violence on the streets, and as a musket ball felled Tu Lee Niang’s lover Lu Măng Mei not five feet away, his own muscles and blood made the decision to flee without the intervention of his spirit and mind.
The bullet that passed through Yü Tzŭ Yü’s thigh as the city gates came in sight did not shatter his bone. As the rough pavement of the main road sheared a layer of skin off his palms as he fell, Yü Tzŭ Yü found himself remembering the theatre manager’s mistress telling the troupe that she had prayed to the city god that they would all be safe. The actors had all laughed at the time, but perhaps—Yü Tzŭ Yü braced his teeth against the pain and crawled into an alley, where he pulled up his skirts and roughly bound the messy, meaty wound with a torn strip of fabric—perhaps it was because of the city god’s intervention that he could still hobble through the gates with the aid of a dead woman’s crutch. But his Lu Măng Mei was gone forever, his blood painted artlessly across the stage. Why had the city god protected one but not the other? It did not bear thinking about.
Yü Tzŭ Yü survived that day, but Tu Lee Niang did not. Chinkiang drowned in blood behind him; the only place he could go was Mount Khwăn near Lien-yun-kang, from whence his father who acknowledged neither his mother nor him hailed. It was a journey of almost two hundred miles. Some days he could plunder his costume for a ride in the back of a refugee’s cart, but even on those days every jostle of the rutted road seemed to tear his bullet wound open afresh, and it was only by biting down on a strip of stained and twisted brocade that he could keep himself from screaming aloud from the pain.
“Quite ruined” was the doctor’s opinion of his leg when he arrived at Mount Khwăn. Aided by a hot knife that peeled away his dead flesh like a chef shaving a beefsteak and a salve to help the gaping cones of muscle close, he was permitted to retain his leg, but the dead woman’s crutch would always be his. He would never perform again.
With cracked hands that left blood on his tools, Yü Tzŭ Yü crushed the wilted tea leaves to prepare them for fermentation. Because his surname was Yü, he had not been driven out of Mount Khwăn like the other refugees, but he was not permitted to live like his half-brothers and -sisters. Hobbling on a leg that had not yet truly healed, he roamed the mountain plucking tea leaves, preparing them for aging and sale. He was paid in copper cash. He was not a member of the Yü family proper; he would never touch the heavy silver merchants paid for the tea he made. He would hobble up and down Mount Khwăn on a leg that remembered its bullet wound with every step in exchange for a few coins as thin as leaves, and he would do this for the rest of his life.
A leaf caught under Yü Tzŭ Yü’s nail as he worked. He scowled at it as he smoothed it back down, not realizing that he had abandoned its twin in the mud some days before.
He had not been unambitious. It was not by accident that Yü Tzŭ Yü was called the finest tân actor in Kiangsu. He had spent years practicing for ten, twenty, forty hours a day. He sang until his mouth stung, pushing his voice into a higher and purer falsetto as though goading a dog; he stretched and leapt until his hips seemed to have come loose in their sockets. And he had done less pure things as well—paid the right bribes, submitted to the right patronages, sabotaged the right performances. A lifetime of struggle, a lifetime of achievement, and after one ounce of heavenly lead he could not even afford an ounce of opium for his agonized leg.
“Ask not what sorrows follow spring, for they are limitless.
Take for a while this loan of green shade for your strolling.”
Yü Tzŭ Yü stacked paper-wrapped cakes of tea in the back of an ox-cart. He had plucked these leaves, bruised them, pressed them, packaged them, and now they would go far away, he could not know where. As for Yü Tzŭ Yü, he would inevitably return—fine hands blistered, strong leg ruined, long queue wrapped around the sunburned forehead that had always been clothed in the jeweled headpieces of beauties past—to the blank green slopes of Mount Khwăn.
The next hand to touch these tea cakes was broad and soft, and the man to whom it belonged said, “Old sir, you really must be insane to ask those prices in these times.”
“And what price would Master Chin consider reasonable?” asked the representative of the Yü family who had accompanied the goods to their buyer.
Chin Foo Hsiâo turned the tea cake over, his thin lips pursed. “With all these English soldiers crawling around like flies on meat, who’s buying? I’m doing you a kindness by taking these things off your hands at all.”
“Forgive this Yü for not finding Master Chin’s kindness particularly pleasant.”
With a bright look and a sudden smile, Chin Foo Hsiâo closed his hand around the tea cake. “I’ve heard that Old Master Yü is ill these days.” The steward did not deign to answer, but Chin Foo Hsiâo’s smile did not dim a whit. “Out of consideration for the old master as my father’s friend, I’ll give you twenty strings of cash. I’m afraid that’s all I can manage.”
The steward was not happy about it, but what could he do? Transporting the tea here was dangerous enough; better to take twenty strings of cash here than try to take the tea home and have the whole shipment destroyed by a rogue cannonball or a marauding band of soldiers. As for Chin Foo Hsiâo, he retreated into his mansion, tea cake still in hand, quite pleased with himself for how much money he had managed to save. Already the weight of the tea cake felt like the weight of a box of opium. Once he took this tea to the East India Company, the silver they gave him should just about be enough to cover what the dapper opium smuggler at the port would ask, and then…!
Wholly by accident, the corner of Chin Foo Hsiâo’s gaze caught on the solemn structure of his father’s memorial tablet. He stopped in his tracks as though struck by lightning.
His father had always been a stern and ascetic man. He had been like an immortal who could survive on one jar of pure water a day. But he had no filial son to fetch that water from a spiritual lake for him. He only had this wretch of a son who spent his youth wallowing in flower houses with the smell of opium smoke and the sounds of dice pouring from their carven windows. And now the stores of silver his father had filled with a lifetime’s effort ran shallower with every trip Chin Foo Hsiâo made to the dapper opium smuggler at the port. How long could he keep up this farce? How long could he prop up this business’s struggling facade, which his father had backed with granite but by now was nothing but paint? Perhaps he should imitate Lin Tse Hsü and drown his opium in the South China Sea. Perhaps he could finally dare to call himself a son, and a father, and a Chinese if he did that.
“Son…” his mother called, hearing his footsteps stop. Chin Foo Hsiâo already knew how she must look as she spoke that wavering word—propped up on an elbow, her eyebrows drawn together in pain, her golden lotus feet bare on the bed looking somewhat grotesque without her shoes. It was the pain of the binding that had first driven her to opium nearly half a century before. It was the same with Chin Foo Hsiâo’s daughter, his little Plum Blossom.
Chin Foo Hsiâo furrowed his brow in indecision for a moment, but from first noticing his father’s memorial tablet to hissing out a resigned sigh, the pang had only lasted a few seconds. He might be reborn as a pig or a dog. This was true. But at the end of the day this was the only filial piety he knew how to show. He retreated a few steps to set the tea cake with its fellows, calling out as he did so: “One moment, Mother. I’ll come prepare your pipe for you.”
Plum Blossom in Golden Vase undulated in the water of the port like a sick jellyfish, more and more of its pages drifting loose every time the tide rocked the little paperback book against the pier. The Chin family’s tea cakes rattled in their wooden crates as the horse-drawn wagons slowed and stopped before a ship so tall its mast seemed to puncture the clouds. A pair of hands wrapped around the splintering edges of the crate and heaved it up—aged and calloused hands, hands worked until they were more like leather than flesh, more like wood than leather.
“Hurry it up, Old Timer!” called a supervisor, his English words thin and flat, his English face thin and stretched-out as though some demon had grabbed the tip of his nose and pulled.
The man gritted his teeth and flung the heavy case onto his shoulder. A hundred more cases like these until the job was done, a hundred more jobs like these until his life was done. The bosses called him “Old Timer,” but that was not his name, and before that they called him “Jack,” but that was not his name either, and earlier still they called him “Jackie Bull,” not because that was his name, but because he did not fall beneath their lash as they worked him like a beast of burden. He had corrected them in those days, and he had taken the lashes for it, his eyes dark and full of fire. He was over sixty now, so he did not play such games anymore. It was only when he saw a fellow indentured laborer on the ships with skin like teak and a face like a tethered eagle’s that he said, “My name is not Old Timer. My name is Vishnu Jayashankar.”
Vishnu Jayashankar spoke English almost perfectly. Whenever arguments broke out on the ship, he would wake his aching bones and run to stand between them, translating every language he knew and some that he did not until the knotted fists around him relaxed and uneasy, half-drunken peace returned to the ship. He knew that it was not easy for anyone to be here, pumping bilge under the captains’ fine white soles. He would speak English until the English split his tongue, if it made it just a little easier for his fellows.
And yet in all his fifty years with that language on his tongue, he had never yet dreamed in it. All of his dreams rang with Maranthi amid the humid warmth of Bombay, the home he had lived in as a child. The smell of tea that reached him from the crate on his shoulder took him back there too. He remembered his aunt brewing bitter medicine from wild tea leaves, promising her young daughter sweets if she was good and drank up. Vishnu is a protector, his uncle had said to him as they repaired sandals on the roof. If you want to be worthy of your name, then be good and protect your cousins. A whitewashed Anglican church now stood where that house had been, but Vishnu Jayashankar carried its rooftop in his heart. When he was called Jackie Bull, he had lashed out against the men that worked him and his fellows like beasts of burden, and he had received lashes in return, but he alone was too weak for that kind of protecting to be any good. Jackie Bull turned into Jack, who carried the heaviest burdens on his stone-hard feet so that those weaker than him would not be made to, and Jack turned into Old Timer, who held up his hands in reconciliation and negotiated a ceasefire whenever the belly of the ship began to boil.
Some days he felt he had been beaten down, but he always told himself that this was not the case—that he was still a protector, with every conflict he smoothed over and every crate he carried—with every dream in which the Bombay of his boyhood still lived.
Vishnu Jayashankar set down the crate of tea with professional care and smoothed the greying hair from his face. Pains raced through his aging body, and for a moment he wished his aunt could make him a cup of bitter medicinal tea. But he owned nothing but his trousers, his debt, and his mind. In such a place as this, he did not have much left to protect. In such a place as this, what did he dare to lose?
Channels and seas crept by as slowly as summer clouds before the tea cakes moved from their place. An aeon later, under a different sky, a youth called Ross pressed the crate into the soft pouch of her stomach to brace it against her pelvis and ran on shoes with rags for soles across the jetty. Under her cloth cap, Ross’s dark braid had grown matted after a week without touching a comb; disregarding her hitched-up skirt, her patched and sweated-through linen shirt and vest made her look precisely like any other young man on the Bristol port. She put a lot of work into letting people assume she was a hale and hearty English lad called Ross. Foremen trusted that kind of person to be their stevedore. They paid a guinea a day for it.
Ross set down the crate and involuntarily leaned against its hot, spicy wood. She tried to suppress it, but the exertion had been too much. She couldn’t help but cough.
She liked being a hale and hearty English lad called Ross. She liked the drinks she shared with her peers in pubs where she was known as a woman but seen as a boy. She would much rather be Ross than the thing her mother wanted her to be when she told stories of a Galway Ross couldn’t even remember. She didn’t want to be a little Irish girl called Roísín with the consumption in her lungs.
As Ross’s cough turned sweet, she expertly repositioned her mouth to let the blood fall on her bare forearm rather than the threadbare white linen of her sleeve. A gob of clean spit, a scrub with the heel of her hand, and no one would need to know.
For now, at least.
Filling her lungs with the fortifying sea air of Bristol, her home, Ross pushed herself off the crate and hurried back toward the fine tall ship. The truth will out, her mother always said, the truth will out even if you drop it in the bottom of a well, but Ross had so much she still wanted to do, to do and to be until she wasn’t allowed to anymore.
By nightfall, the crate of tea rested in a warehouse with steel locks and wooden walls. The humid air of the seaside night coaxed out the sweet and pungent aroma of the leaves. The scent filled the alley, mixing with the bitter tobacco smoke of a woman’s pipe as she leaned against the water-warped boards and waited for johns. Jims, she called them in her own private lingo, because John was still at sea. He wasn’t lost, she knew he wasn’t lost, but he was away.
When are you coming back, John? she thought, stabilizing the pipe’s stem between the middle and ring fingers of her left hand, since the first two fingers were nothing but stumps. And what will you say when you’re back? ‘Where’s the rest of ye, Margo?’ But where could it have gone? You’ve been away so long we’ve got nothing left to pawn, so I’ve gone to the mills until my hands are half worn away and I can’t hardly see nor hear naught but ringing. And now I’m wearing out the rest of me here by the docks so I don’t die for the waiting of you. What would you have me do, John? Where would you have an unsupported woman go?
She was well-practiced in grief, calloused against the sight of a future of nothing but pain. If she were a wealthy woman, she could be sitting in her fine home in her warm furs and velvets, speaking with her wealthy friends of commissioning a ship to find the ship John had been on, receiving him home into her plump, pure-white arms. But she didn’t even have her own cunt left to her name. It was on John himself to come home—and if he wouldn’t have her back, well then, what was new.
When she rested the backs of her hands on the wall beside her and lowered her half-sightless eyes, the evening mist and tobacco smoke gave her the appearance of a divine vision of the Virgin. She liked this place because of its smell of tea. Fine smells were about the last beautiful thing in the world she had left to her. She’d always appreciated fine things, be they ever so small, and she almost felt like she could live out a lifetime in this wafting scent’s embrace.
The crate of tea remained in the warehouse until her short lifetime was done. Not long after she departed, more money than she or any of the others who had touched the crate had ever known changed hands as easily as tea pouring from pot to cup, and the crate of tea cakes rattled and swung in the canvas straps of a crane and passed between scarred and tattooed palms until it rested in the hold of another ship still. There it remained, nestled among the rat droppings and the private affairs of conscripts in the heat of summer and the cold of winter, and the cold of summer and the cold of winter, and the punishing freeze of summer and the hell-frost of winter. Only then did they once again see daylight: hoisted by a man who carried a lifetime’s guilt for once eating dog meat and who would eat human flesh not long from now, exposed to the sun with a crowbar manufactured by a child who was already dead, then finally picked up in the gloved hand of a man who had always been called James Fitzjames.
Captain James Fitzjames regarded this cake of tea with hooded, critical eyes. He lifted it to his nose and inhaled its dusty fragrance. The only memories the scent brought to his mind were in boardrooms with gilt-framed paintings, parlors with the sound of the pianoforte echoing off the walls, drawing rooms with plush carpets as soft as an overripe peach, and dining rooms with polished tables as long as the road to Heaven. All utter foppery, as rigid and insubstantial as meringue.
The smell did not remind him of his time in China only a handful of years before. He did not remember the smell that the fresh leaves released under a boot, the temples with gilt goddesses whose breasts he and his comrades fondled, the old men who came out to greet them with tea and desperate obsequence.
He did not remember lying flat on a clay-tiled rooftop in Chinkiang, interfering in the street-by-street fighting as God and his rifle saw fit and listening to a fellow soldier chatter beside him with the easy callousness of a hundred battles, an ease and callousness he shared. “I’m telling you, Fitzjames,” said the soldier, “don’t ever go to bed with a Chinese girl. Because the Chinese are tricky, see. They dress their men up like women and you’ll never know the difference, not till the lights are out and it’s too late.”
“They’re that skilled?” Despite himself, Fitzjames could not stem a rush of interest, nor could he stop the brief image of himself dressed up as a Chinese girl, embroidery of peonies and cranes on his neck and wrists and flowers filling his hair, his face so smooth and pretty no one would ever know the difference. The Tartars were ruthless, he had heard. Perhaps they would do that to him if he got captured.
“There’s one, right there,” the soldier said. He was pointing to a whirl of gems and silk careening down the street toward the gate—beautiful, unstoppable, terrified.
James Fitzjames scrutinized the figure. He could not have said what he felt in that moment. “How do you know?”
“I just know. Kill it, kill it.” When James Fitzjames hesitated for a moment—once more, not for any reason he could have named if asked—the soldier turned his face to scrutinize him. “What, do you want to bed it?” he asked. Only then did James Fitzjames wrinkle his nose and shake his head, firing a quick round that downed the fleeing beauty in one.
The tea that beauty later made fell from the hand that had made the beauty into a pained and hopeless man. James Fitzjames’s last thought had been of the great distress he had suffered some time ago when a drop of tea fell quite inadvertently on his white breeches at a rather important social function. “We leave the tea,” he said. “We don’t have room for frivolous things.”