God's Chinese Son (4 page)

But years of experience have led to the growth of a language shared by
nearly all who live among the foreign hongs, a language known as "Can­ton Jargon" or "Pidgin English." This serves to keep the differing commu­nities in touch, by mixing words from Portuguese, Indian, English, and
various Chinese dialects, and spelling them according to Chinese syntax,
with
r
transformed to
I,
and
b
to
p.
"Pidgin" itself comes from the word
"business," via its intermediate mispronunciation "pidginess"; gods ar
e joss
from Deos; and a religious service is thus a "joss pidgin." Sex is "lof-
pidgin." Thieves become
la-de-loons
from ladrao, ships becom
e
juntas,
mar­kets
bazaars,
lunch
tiffin,
a letter a
chit,
one who commands (mandar) a
man-ta-le
or
mandarin,
a document a
chop,
an urgent document
chop-chop,
one hundred thousand of anything a
lac,
a laborer a
coolie,
a conference a
chin-chin,
one's good acquaintance
number one olo flen
.
¹²
Double
ee
is
added after dental consonants, so want becomes
wantee,
catch
catchee.
Chi­nese shopkeepers have at hand little books of terms compiled locally as
guides to business, guides in which the Chinese characters for a given
object are also glossed below, with other characters suggesting—in Cantonese dialect—the way to say the English. Scales are rendered
sze-kay-le-sze,
January
che-na-li-le,
west wind
wi-sze-wun,
and one-two-three
wun,
too, te-le.
¹³
Thus can the wealthy merchant Howqua, forewarned that a
senior Chinese official is coming to demand a massive bribe, say with
resignation to a young American trader "Man-ta-le sendee one piece chop.
He
come tomollo, wantee too-lac dollar," and everyone knows what he means.
¹⁴

Even though the city of Canton is closed to Westerners, Chinese life
enfolds them in their little enclave. The riverbank is lined with boats of
every size and shape, so that one can barely see the water. There are
cargo boats from up-country, passenger craft, floating homes and floating
brothels, drifting fortune-tellers, government patrol ships, barbers' boats,
boats selling food, or toys, or clothes, or household notions.
¹⁵
And mixed
with these amid the din are the ferryboats that run from the jutting pier
at Jackass Point across the river to Honam Island, with its tea plantations,
ornamental gardens, and temples where the Westerners are—at inter­vals
—
permitted to take the air.
¹⁶
There are eighty of these little ferry
craft, each holding eight passengers, and charging a standard fee of two
copper cents a passenger, or sixteen for the whole boat, if one wishes to
travel alone. And there are the larger floating theater boats, where the
actors rehearse their plays as they travel from location to location between
engagements, and where opium is provided to all visitors with the ability to pay.
¹⁷

If the owners of such floating pleasure palaces by smile and gesture
invite the foreigner aboard in hopes of financial gain, the same commercial
motive is not present in all those one meets, and genuine hospitality or
warmth is by no means lacking. The workers from a wheat-grinding mill,
washing their bodies after a day of work, and munching their meal of rice
and vegetables, welcome a visitor to view their eleven huge grinding
wheels, and the oxen who drive them. A noisy group of carpenters and
masons, gathering at sunset to eat and drink beneath an awning spread
across an angle of the street for shade and shelter, beckon a passing West­erner to join them. Gangs of tough, barefoot or grass-sandaled, almost
naked coolies, after waiting patiently for hours in the sun for casual work,
squatting or standing amidst the stalls and markets, each with his bamboo
pole with ropes dangling empty, still greet one cheerfully and show noth­ing but good will.
¹⁸

The foreigners know some of the Chinese they deal with by name, or
at least by Western variants of their Chinese names. Among these are the
hong merchants, thirteen in all, who have the formal monopoly on foreign
trade, own the buildings in which the Westerners live, and filter all their
petitions and complaints to the higher authorities, and whose own huge
homes and warehouses flank the thirteen factories to west and east along
the Pearl River: Howqua, Kingqua, Pwankhequa, and the rest. The offi­cial "linguists," five in 1836, who travel door to door with crucial messages,
which they deliver in their hybrid Pidgin English—Atom, Atung, "Young
Tom," Alantsei, and Aheen—are known to all.
¹⁹

Others have become known in their role as patients, carefully recorded
in the registers of Dr. Parker's dispensary and hospital, opened in late
1835 on the second floor of number 7, Hog Lane, rented for $500 a year
from Howqua. Atso, the rice merchant, the girl Akae, Matszeah, the
scribe in the governor's office, Changshan, the soldier, Pang she, the seam­stress, 925 of them in all, just between November 4, 1835, and February
4, 1836, with cataracts, tumors, abscesses, deafness, partial paralysis, and a
score of other woes.
²⁰

At first glance, Hog Lane is an unlikely site for such benevolent work,
but number 7 is at the north end of the narrow street, away from the river,
near the busy Chinese thoroughfare that marks the northern boundary of
the foreigners' domain. As Parker explains his choice, his "patients could
come and go without annoying foreigners by passing through their hongs,
or excite the observation of natives by being seen to resort to a foreigner's
house." Bamboo strips, numbered in Chinese and English, are issued by
the porter downstairs to each patient who comes to seek treatment (some
have been waiting outside all night), and they are received in turn on the
upper floor, where Parker deals with all he can manage. Their ages range
from six to seventy-eight, and there are women as well as men, and in
large numbers, to his surprise: "Difficulty was anticipated in receiving
females as house patients, it being regarded [as] illegal for a female to enter
the foreign factories," as Parker put it, but with male relatives usually in
attendance, to watch over them and prevent any whispers of impropriety,
"the difficulty has proved more imaginary than real," and female patients
number around one-third of the total.
²¹

Others, nameless to the observers, give a fuller sense of Chinese life.
Two blind girls, nine years old at most, walk to the esplanade, holding on
to each other and clutching their wooden begging bowls, laughing and
chatting despite their rags, bare feet, and lice.
²²
A
traveling librarian,
banging his rattle, his current stock of popular novels packed into boxes
dangling from a bamboo pole across his shoulder, evades the rules that
apply to bookshops by walking from door to door in search of customers
among the Chinese clerks and coolies.
He
shows his wares to foreign
questioners, and tells them he has no complaints. The three hundred vol­umes he is carrying
—
small, light, paperbound—are but those remaining
from over a thousand he currently has out on loan.
²³

On the esplanade are rows of stands, whose owners—each with a dis­tinctive cry
—
sell fruit and cakes, sweets and soup, dogs, cats, and fowl,
slabs of horsemeat with the hooves still attached and strings of dried duck
tongues, shaped like awls and hard as iron to the touch.
²⁴
Others lure
viewers to their peephole boxes, decorated brilliantly in red, or erect a tiny
stage on which to mount their puppet shows. Old women sit on the
ground, with needle and thread, to mend your clothes, or play a game of
chance together, the prize a pair of shoes; a healer presses bamboo cups to
men's naked backs, to draw the blood; tinkers at their stalls mend locks
and pipes, drill broken glass and porcelain and mend the shards with
finest wire, sharpen razors, fill cracks in metal pots. Bird fanciers squat in
solemn circles, some with their precious birds in cages, others with birds
perched on sticks, or cradled in their hands.
²⁵

Three streets cut through the foreigners' businesses and residences,
dividing them into four blocks of unequal width. All are densely packed
with shops. Old China Street, the widest, is twelve feet broad, New China
Street and Hog Lane a little less. The streets in general are so narrow that
it's almost impossible to move, and one is jostled by the crowds, or
bumped harshly by the coolies carrying palanquins with passengers, or
massive loads.
²⁶
Buddhist nuns with shaven heads, Taoist and Buddhist
priests, ratcatchers with a dozen or more of their captured prey dangling
in rows from bamboo poles, fortune-tellers, itinerant doctors, money
changers, sellers of the finest fighting crickets that have been collected
from the hills outside the town—all join the throng.
²⁷
The shops that sell
expensive goods the foreigners might like to buy have signs in Roman
letters to render the owners' names and English descriptions of their trea­sures: carvings of ivory, turtle shell and mother-of-pearl, silks of all kinds,
lacquer ware, and paintings of insects and fruits, or of famous battles,
where red-coated Englishmen in cocked hats sit rigidly in rows under the
relentless fire of Chinese guns. For every item purchased you must get the
shopkeeper's chop or seal on your invoice, else it will be confiscated as you
leave Canton.
²⁸