Shanghai (116 page)

Then he noticed it—the flower in his son's hand. A vivid red hydrangea.

“Where did you get that?” he asked.

“The night-soil boy gave it to me for good luck.”

Maximilian nodded. A beautiful flower from a night-soil boy. It was perfect—perfectly Chinese.

—

“It might be time for the Tusk to return to the Bend in the River,” the Carver said as they continued to climb.

“Not yet, but in good time,” Loa Wei Fen said.

“What do we do now?” asked the Carver.

“We wait,” Jiang said.

“For what?” asked the Carver.

“For the Confucian to complete his task. In his arrogance, he is not able to see that he is still in service of the Compact.”

“You're not going to …?”

“Kill him for betraying the Compact?” Jiang asked. “No. The city at the Bend in the River has survived the
Age of White Birds on Water and is now in the hands of the Black-Haired people—the only ones who can build the Seventy Pagodas.”

“But the Communists …”

“Are just another foreign fish in the great sea of China.”

Loa Wei Fen turned to the Carver. “You must leave Shanghai. The Confucian will surely punish you.”

“He's already taken my workshop and every piece I've made. What more can he do?”

“Bring me your son,” Loa Wei Fen said.

“What will you …?”

“He will come with me and my sons.”

“And where …?”

“Away. Far away, to get ready for the return of the Sacred Relic. Do not ask me where we will go. I will not tell you.”

The Carver nodded and agreed to bring his son before the dawn.

Finally, at the top of the hill, Loa Wei Fen turned to Jiang. “Will the Confucian harm you?”

“I think not.”

“Why?”

“Because he thinks he loves me.”

The Assassin nodded. “May I ask one last favour?”

“Surely.”

“Let me hold your daughter.”

Jiang nodded.

Loa Wei Fen took the Japanese girl's hand, then lifted the child gently in his arms and kissed her forehead.

Jiang went to speak, but Loa Wei Fen put a finger to her lips. “It's something I should have done the first time I saw her.”

Jiang wiped away a tear. “Will we …?”

“No,” he said, “we will never meet again. But our children or our grandchildren will—and with the Tusk they will oversee the building of the Seventy Pagodas and complete the First Emperor's vision at the Bend in the River. Now look.”

From their position on the top of the rise at the far reach of the Huangpo, the Carver, the Assassin, Jiang, and her Japanese daughter watched as the mighty ship accepted the wind and, like a great White Bird on Water, took the
Fan Kuei
, after over a hundred years, out of Shanghai—down the great river, toward the sea.

Nestled safely in its Baghdad hiding place, beneath the floorboards on the second storey of the Abdullahs' family compound, the sacred Narwhal Tusk continues its voyage of revelation. Although there is no one to see it, the First Emperor's prophetic plan continues to reveal itself as the Tusk rots slowly in the dry desert air of Mesopotamia.

Then the great Tusk cracks.

And the alignment of the filigree on its surface re-forms and brings a new idea to the world. The classic characters spelling out “Age of Dry Water” magically form above the Man with a Book portal. And although the Tusk remains in Baghdad, as if the phrase was carried on the desert winds, madness winds, from the west, the citizens of Shanghai begin to refer to the new time after Mao's arrival—the time when Beijing actively ignores the city at the Bend in the River for forty years—as the Age of Dry Water.

Shanghai: The Ivory Compact
is a work of fiction. It uses some of its historical facts and characters with accuracy, others with much liberty.

To start with, there are no Warrens in Shanghai. They would be a physical impossibility with the Huangpo River so close. However, the streets are as described and most of the buildings are correctly placed. The Old Shanghai Restaurant is real, as are the intricate foods eaten in the scene with Charles and Silas. The Temple of the City God, the Yu-Yuan Gardens, the various tea shops, and the Long Hua Temple are quite real and, I believe, accurately portrayed. The Pudong was for a long time a place of substantial wildness and danger. Shanghai was not known, however, as the city at the Bend in the River.

The depiction of the opium trade is basically accurate, and the great Shanghai trading companies named in the novel did exist. A monopoly on direct trade between China and England was granted to one such company (represented here by the Vrassoons) and was subsequently lost, but this happened at a much earlier date, and there is no indication that there was extortion involved.

The First Emperor, builder of the Grand Canal linking the Yangtze to the Beijing basin, did unite China for the first time, and his accomplishments are much as described in the novel. He also hunted down and murdered Confucians and burned their books, and sent people to the ends of his wide realm in search of a stone that would grant him eternal life. It is reported that the First Emperor was found frozen to death on the top of a holy mountain—naked, with a round stone pressed to his crotch.

It would have been hard to concoct behaviour more outrageous than that of the real Dowager Empress, who did, in all likelihood, murder emperors and her own child. She did outlive her last emperor—and apparently celebrated her victory much as described in the novel.

Silas Hordoon did exist, and he did marry his Chinese mistress (outraging both ethnic communities). The story of how they took in twenty street children and raised them as their own inside a large walled garden is a true one. Richard and Maxi Hordoon, however, are fictitious characters. And there was no Great Shanghai Road Race.

A real Charles Soong worked in a Boston bar as a boy, attended seminary school in the southern United States, and arrived in Shanghai as a Southern Methodist missionary, where he eventually ran a printing house of some sort. He became the wealthiest man in China and provided financial support to Dr. Sun Yat-sen's revolution—but no one knows exactly where all that money came from.

Soong did indeed have three daughters, who were referred to as She Who Loves Money, She Who Loves Power, and She Who Loves China. One became Madame Chiang Kai Shek, and another married Dr. Sun Yat-sen.
Soong's middle daughter was, in all likelihood, a Communist supporter, but it's unlikely that she was Mao's mistress. T.V. Soong, Charles's eldest son, was Finance Minister in the Republican government and by many accounts the architect of one of the greatest thefts of all time.

Gangster Tu was a real person, and the Tong of the Righteous Hand was—and is—quite real. Big-Eared Tu was certainly as ugly as described in the novel.

The depictions of many of the historical events in the novel—the Boxer Rebellion, the Taiping Revolt, the Hong Kong Typhoon, and the battles between the Shanghailanders and the European Shanghainese—are rooted in fact, though liberties are taken in their telling.

The events in the book relating to the Rape of Nanking are fictional —but quite true. There is a difference between a History Chronicler and a History Teller, but neither has a monopoly on truth itself, especially when it comes to horrors like those that took place in Nanking.

There is a Peking Opera called
Journey to the West,
but it is completely unlike the one described in this book.

And of course (unless it is indeed very carefully hidden) there is no Narwhal Tusk dictating events in the Middle Kingdom—although when you look at the history of China, it is not hard to imagine that there is some extraordinary guiding hand at work. China was the wealthiest nation on earth until 1842; nations throughout Asia paid it tribute. Opium brought this nation to its knees—but it is rising—and the Seventy Pagodas are proudly on display in the Pudong even as you read these words.

You can't write a large book like this without a tremendous amount of support. First and foremost from my wife, Susan Santiago, without whose patience and encouragement this book would never have come into being. Then from Michael Levine, my agent and friend, who has been in my corner for many years now. Then from the fine folks at Penguin Canada—David and Helen and Lisa and Catherine and Tracy—their expertise can be readily seen on the pages of the book. Then there are my prelim-readers and researchers, Charles, Suzanne, and Wayne, whose input was greatly valued. Thanks as well to my translator, Zhang Fang, my business partner at the Professional Actor's Lab, Bruce Clayton, and all those who so freely opened their hearts to my, all too often, foolish inquiries. And finally, a note of gratitude to two teachers: a grade school teacher named Mr. Patterson who read to us every Friday morning before class and a high school teacher who showed me the glory contained within the word, Mr. Gallanders—back then we didn't know our teachers' given names.

 

David Rotenberg

Toronto, 2008

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.

—G
ERARD
M
ANLEY
H
OPKINS
, 1877

For my Canadian, Puerto Rican/American,
Jewish/Agnostic, Christian son, Joey,
and daughter, Beth—with
much thanks to them for bravely being
who and what they are.