Maiden Voyages (44 page)

And then my mind turns back to Manus. What is happening here is a kind of paradigm of something that is happening all over the world: grandparents and parents settle for the parts they themselves can play
and what must be left to the comprehension of the children. The Manus have taken a direction no one could have foreseen thirty-seven years ago. Yet in the midst of change they are recognizably themselves. Field work provides us with a record of the experiments mankind has made in creating and handing on tradition. Over time it also provides a record of what men can do and become.

(1905–)

from
TIMES AND PLACES

THE BIG SMOKE

Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China. The opium ambition dates back to that obscure period of childhood when I wanted to be a lot of other things, too—the greatest expert on ghosts, the world’s best ice skater, the champion lion tamer, you know the kind of thing. But by the time I went to China I was grown up, and all those dreams were forgotten.

Helen kept saying that she would go home to California, where her
husband was waiting, as soon as she’d seen Japan, but as the time for her departure drew near she grew reluctant and looked around for a good excuse to prolong the tour. As she pointed out to me, China was awfully close by and we knew that an old friend was living in Shanghai. It would be such a waste to let the chance slip. Why shouldn’t we go over and take just one look, for a weekend? I was quite amenable, especially as, for my part, I didn’t have to go back to America. My intention was to move on south in leisurely fashion, after Helen had gone home, and land someday in the Belgian Congo, where I planned to find a job. All this wasn’t going to have to be done with speed, because I still had enough money to live on for a while. My sister accepted these plans as natural, for she knew that a man had thrown me over. Officially, as it were, I was going to the Congo to forget that my heart was broken; it was the proper thing to do in the circumstances. My attitude toward her was equally easy going. If she didn’t want to go home just yet, I felt it was none of my business. So when she suggested China I said, “Sure, why not?”

We went. We loved Shanghai. Helen shut up her conscience for another two months, staying on and cramming in a tremendous variety of activities—parties, temples, curio shops, having dresses made to order overnight, a trip to Peiping, embassy receptions, races. I didn’t try to keep up with her. It had become clear to me from the first day in China that I was going to stay forever, so I had plenty of time. Without a struggle, I shelved the Congo and hired a language teacher, and before Helen left I had found a job teaching English at a Chinese college. It was quite a while before I recollected that old ambition to be an opium smoker.

As a newcomer, I couldn’t have known that a lot of the drug was being used here, there, and everywhere in town. I had no way of recognizing the smell, though it pervaded the poorer districts. I assumed that the odor, something like burning caramel or those herbal cigarettes smoked by asthmatics, was just part of the mysterious effluvia produced in Chinese cookhouses. Walking happily through side streets and alleys, pausing here and there to let a rickshaw or a cart trundle by, I would sniff and move one, unaware that someone close at hand was indulging in what the books called that vile, accursed drug. Naturally I never saw
a culprit, since even in permissive Shanghai opium smoking was supposed to be illegal.

It was through a Chinese friend, Pan Heh-ven, that I learned at last what the smell denoted. I had been at a dinner party in a restaurant with him, and had met a number of his friends who were poets and teachers. Parties at restaurants in China used to end when the last dish and the rice were cold and the guests had drunk their farewell cup of tea at a clean table. That night, though, the group still had a lot to say after that—they always did—and we stood around on the pavement outside carrying on a discussion of modern literature that had started at table. We were in that part of town called the Chinese city, across Soochow Creek, outside the boundaries of the foreign concessions. It was hot. A crumpled old paper made a scraping little sound like autumn leaves along the gutter, and the skirts of the men’s long gowns stirred in the same wind. During dinner, they had spoken English out of courtesy, but now, in their excitement, they had long since switched to the Chinese language, and I stood there waiting for somebody to remember me and help me find a taxi, until Heh-ven said, “Oh, excuse us for forgetting our foreign guest. We are all going now to my house. Will you come?”

Of course I would. I’d been curious about his domestic life, which he seldom mentioned. So we all moved off and walked to the house—an old one of Victorian style, with more grounds than I was used to seeing around city houses in America. I say Victorian, but that was only from the outside, where gables and a roughcast front made it look like the kind of building I knew. Indoors was very different. It was bare, as one could see at a glance because the doors stood open between rooms—no carpets, no wallpaper, very little funiture. Such chairs and sofas and tables as stood around the bare floor seemed as impersonal as lost articles in a vacant shop. Yet the house wasn’t deserted. A few people were there in the room—a man who lounged, as if defiantly, on the unyielding curve of a sofa, four or five children scampering and giggling in whispers, an old woman in the blue blouse and trousers of a servant, and a young woman in a a plain dark dress.

This last, it appeared, was Heh-ven’s wife, and at least some of the children were theirs. I was embarrassed because the whole household
gawked at me; one small boy who looked like a miniature Heh-ven said something that made the others giggle louder. Heh-ven spoke briefly to his family and told us to follow him upstairs, where we emerged on a cozier scene. Here the rooms were papered, and though everything still seemed stark to my Western eyes, there was more furniture around. We trooped into a bedroom where two hard, flat couches had been pushed together, heads against a wall and a heap of small pillows on each. In the center of the square expanse of white sheet that covered them was a tray that held several unfamiliar objects—a little silver oil lamp with a shade like an inverted glass tumbler, small boxes, and a number of other small things I didn’t recognize. I sat on a stiff, spindly chair, and the men disposed themselves here and there in the room, very much at home as they chattered away, picked up books and riffled through them, and paid no attention to what was going on on the double couch. I found the proceedings there very odd, however, and stared in fascination.

Heh-ven had lain down on his left side, alongside the tray and facing it. He lit the lamp. One of his friends, a plump little man named Huaching, lay on his right side on the other side of the tray, facing Heh-ven, each with head and shoulders propped on the pilows. Heh-ven never stopped conversing, but his hands were busy and his eyes were fixed on what he was doing—knitting, I thought at first, wondering why nobody had ever mentioned that this craft was practiced by Chinese men. Then I saw that what I had taken for yarn between the two needles he manipulated was actually a kind of gummy stuff, dark and thick. As he rotated the needle ends about each other, the stuff behaved like taffy in the act of setting; it changed color, too, slowly evolving from its earlier dark brown to tan. At a certain moment, just as it seemed about to stiffen, he wrapped the whole wad around one needle end and picked up a pottery object about as big around as a teacup. It looked rather like a cup, except that it was closed across the top, with a rimmed hole in the middle of this fixed lid. Heh-ven plunged the wadded needle into this hole, withdrew it, leaving the wad sticking up from the hole, and modelled the rapidly hardening stuff so that it sat on the cup like a tiny volcano. He then picked up a piece of polished bamboo that had a large hole near one end, edged with a band of chased sliver. Into this
he fixed the cup, put the opposite end of the bamboo into his mouth, held the cup with the tiny cone suspended above the lamp flame, and inhaled deeply. The stuff bubbled and evaporated as he did so, until nothing of it was left. A blue smoke rose from his mouth, and the air was suddenly full of that smell I had encountered in the streets of Shanghai. Truth lit up in my mind.

“You’re smoking opium!” I cried. Everybody jumped, for they had forgotten I was there.

Heh-ven said, “Yes, of course I am. Haven’t you ever seen it done before?”

“No. I’m
so
interested.”

“Would you like to try it?”

“Oh, yes.”

Nobody protested, or acted shocked or anything. In fact, nobody but Hua-ching paid any attention. At Heh-ven’s request, he smoked a pipe to demonstrate how it was done, then relaxed against the pillows for a few minutes. “If you get up immediately, you are dizzy,” explained Heh-ven. I observed his technique carefully and, by the time I took my place on the couch, had a reasonable notion of how it was done. You sucked in as deeply as possible, and held the smoke there as long as you could before exhaling. Remembering that I’d never been able to inhale cigarette smoke, I was worried that the world of the opium addict might be closed to me. In daydreams, as in night dreams, one doesn’t take into account the real self and the failings of the flesh. The romantic is always being confronted by this dilemma, but that night I was spared it. When I breathed in I felt
almost
sick, but my throat didn’t close, and after a moment I was fine. I couldn’t dispose of the tiny volcano all in one mighty pull, as the others had done, but for a beginner I didn’t do badly—not at all. Absorbed in the triumph of not coughing, I failed to take notice of the first effects, and even started to stand up, but Heh-ven told me not to. “Just stay quiet and let’s talk,” he suggested.

We all talked—about books, and books, and Chinese politics. That I knew nothing about politics didn’t put me off in the least. I listened with keen interest to everything the others had to say in English, and when they branched off into Chinese I didn’t mind. It left me to my
thoughts. I wouldn’t have minded anything. The world was fascinating and benevolent as I lay there against the cushions, watching Heh-ven rolling pipes for himself. Pipes—that’s what they called the little cones as well as the tube, I suppose because it is easier to say than pipefuls. Anyway, the word “pipeful” is not really accurate, either. Only once, when Hua-ching asked me how I was, did I recollect the full significance of the situation. Good heavens, I was smoking opium! It was hard to believe, especially as I didn’t seem to be any different.

“I don’t feel a thing,” I told him. “I mean, I’m enjoying myself with all of you, of course, but I don’t feel any different. Perhaps opium has no effect on me?”

Heh-ven pulled at the tiny beard he wore and smiled slightly. He said, “Look at your watch.” I cried out in surprise; it was three o’clock in the morning.

“Well, there it is,” Heh-ven said. “And you have stayed in one position for several hours, you know—you haven’t moved your arms or your head. That’s opium. We call it Ta Yen, the Big Smoke.”

“But it was only one pipe I had. And look at you, you’ve smoked four or five, but you’re still all right.”

“That’s opium, too,” said Heh-ven cryptically.

Some weeks later, I got sick. I must have smoked too much. In a relatively mild case of overindulgence, one merely gets nightmares, but this wasn’t mild. I vomited on the way home from Heh-ven’s, and went on doing it when I got in, until the houseboy called the doctor. This doctor was an American who had worked for years in the community, but I didn’t know him well. Of course, I had no intention of telling him what might be wrong, and I was silent as he felt my pulse and looked at my tongue and took my temperature. Finally, he delivered judgement. “Jaundice. Haven’t you noticed that you’re yellow?”

“No.”

“Well, you are—yellow as an orange,” he said. “How many pipes do you smoke in a day?”

I was startled, but if he could play it calm, so could I. “Oh, ten, eleven, something like that,” I said airily, and he nodded and wrote out a prescription, and left. No lecture, no phone call to the police,
nothing. I ought to have appreciated his forbearance, but I was angry, and said to Heh-ven next day, “He doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does. People don’t count pipes—one man’s pipe might make two of another’s.” The truth was that I resented the doctor’s having stuck his foot in the door of my exclusive domain.