The Chinese Alchemist (21 page)

“Whether you have realized this or not, you have become my apprentice. It is you who have worked and reworked the formulations according to my experiments.”

“But how do you know how to do this?” I asked.

“Do you recall I told you of a Taoist convent to which I was sent when I first left my home? It was there that I was trained to be a concubine, but where I was also apprenticed to an adept at the adjoining monastery. Like you, I did not at first realize that I was being initiated into the mysteries of the elixir. However, I was wrenched from the convent too soon. I knew the ingredients for the elixir, but not in what combination. It is only from an adept that one can learn details like that. The exact formulations are never written down, but passed along orally only to those deemed worthy. I tried to contact the adept with whom I studied, but learned that he joined the Immortals soon after I left him. It was a most encouraging event. He was speaking to his new apprentice when suddenly he disappeared. Only his robes remained. It was cause for much celebration, and he is now venerated. Do not forget your promise to me,” she said. “And I will share the secret of the elixir with you.”

It was terrifying, of course, to think that Golden Lotus, the gang that was causing so much trouble at home, was nearby. When I managed to get my fear under control, however, I realized that the people I was up against had made their first mistake.

Rob once told me that the British secret service had an expression to describe the Russian gangsters on British soil, and that was that they, the gangsters, still had snow on their boots, which is to say that they were not local talent per se, but had very strong ties back to their homeland. I don’t know what the Chinese equivalent of snow on boots is, but that one phone call told me that Golden Lotus, too, had ties back to Mainland China. And if I needed more evidence that a gang was operating here, I had only to look at the deaths of Song Liang and the man in the mosque, both of them with slit throats, one of them with severed hands. If ever there was the mark of a gang, surely that was it.

At home, Golden Lotus was, as Rob had told me, engaged in fraud and extortion and was attempting to move into the territory of other gangs, most specifically those who controlled drug trafficking, thus initiating gang wars in which innocent people were being hurt and occasionally killed. Were they calling me in Xi’an because I lived next door to a Canadian police officer, one who spent more time than was absolutely necessary to be neighborly with the woman who lived next door? Had they tracked me all the way to Xi’an to continue to threaten me? I didn’t think so. They were calling because of what I was doing in Xi’an.

It was time to call for backup. I left a long and detailed voice mail for Rob. This time I didn’t care if I worried him. He should be worried. I told him Golden Lotus was here and was again telephoning threats to me. I told him exactly where I was, and what I had been doing, and that I would notify him of every move I made. Then I set out to figure this all out.

Up until that unpleasant telephone call, I’d judged the facts of the case, and my relative safety for that matter, on what was happening in China exclusively. I was in danger because Burton had been murdered. I was safe because he had killed himself. I should be frightened because I knew the man in the alley, or I was invulnerable because he was not the person I thought he was, and so on.

This call said I was quite possibly looking in the wrong place. What happened if I factored Toronto into the equation? When I had first received the threatening phone calls at my home, I had not yet spoken to Dory about the silver box. Did that mean these events were not related to the silver box? The deaths of two men—one the possible thief of the box and the other a contact of Burton’s who was possibly even more determined than I to possess this same box— both killed in a way favored by mobs said they were. The box and Golden Lotus had to be related in some way I did not yet understand. I just had to find out as much as I could about all of them. I decided I could not assume anything, that I had to look very carefully at everything, and not just carefully, but with a jaundiced eye. What part of this whole exercise, right from the first threatening phone call and the moment Dory had invited me to her house for lunch that fateful day, had to be included in my research?

In effect, I had two starting points: the threatening phone calls to my home and Dory’s request to get her the silver box in New York. I would look for intersections of those two streams.

I started with the silver box. Dory and I had had many conversations about China, and I had professed my mixed feelings about the country. She had been born there, and there was no ambivalence whatsoever in her view, or if there was, she never let me see it. I had been in China in the 1980s, right out of school, and I loved it. People were wonderful. They didn’t live well by our standards, but they all believed in the dream, Mao’s dream. I didn’t share their dream, but I admired them for having one. I have that tendency, to admire and possibly envy people who are so clear about what they believe in, when I tend to be a little wishy-washy on the subject of just about anything philosophical. To me China seemed less complicated and more real than the life I was used to.

When I told Dory these things, she had countered by saying that when the Chinese espoused Mao’s particular brand of communism they had merely replaced one set of despotic rulers, by which she meant two thousand years of imperial rule followed by several decades of the tyranny of Koumintang warlords, for another equally despotic leader.

When I said the country seemed to be moving toward democracy, however slowly, she said that China would never be free, that the one republic that had been created, in the early part of the twentieth century, had fallen into complete decay and despotism within a short time. She believed, as Dr. Xie also professed, that Chinese people somehow could never accept a democracy.

I told her that China, for whatever faults that she might see in it, was the most enduring civilization in the world. She said that was because it resisted change, refused to listen to fresh ideas.

I said that I loved everything I had seen, the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Ming Tombs, the hutong neighborhoods, and that I thought Chinese art was surely some of the most aesthetically pleasing there was anywhere in the world. Surely, I had said to her, having devoted her career to Asian antiquities, she could not possibly disagree with that.

She replied that might be true, but that rather than cherishing what they had, the Chinese people, specifically the Red Guard, had set out to destroy all that was most beautiful in the country, that during the Cultural Revolution anyone considered to be an intellectual was hunted down, humiliated, and often killed. Anyone who could read was considered an intellectual. “They burned books, Lara!” she would exclaim. “Books! And they turned beautiful paintings, homes, temples into firewood.”

“But for all its faults, the Communist Party lowered the infant mortality rate and raised the level of education in the country,” I countered.

“At first, yes, but then there was the Cultural Revolution. Schools were closed, weren’t they? What do you think that did for the level of education?”

“But you weren’t in China during the Cultural Revolution,” I would sometimes meekly protest.

“I wasn’t there, but I know,” was her standard reply.

It was not that I didn’t know what she was talking about. It was just that I didn’t share her pessimism for the future. I am not naive. I enjoyed that first stay in China, but was not unaware that there was another China, one that gradually infiltrated my consciousness. This was the China of communist indoctrination. Government guides, who proved extraordinarily difficult to avoid, insisted that I go to so-called model factories, which had frankly appalled me with their poor working conditions. One in particular, a silk embroidery factory where young women worked long hours in poor light and unpleasantly cool temperatures, bothered me more than most. I was later told they could only work a very few years before their eyesight was destroyed. I’d bought an embroidered panel depicting cranes on a gold silk background in the shop there before I’d seen the factory floor itself. The workmanship was exquisite. I didn’t know whether I was right to support them to the extent that they would continue to be paid their wages if people like me bought the products, or if I was encouraging exploitation of the women. I have the embroidery still, framed, too, and I still don’t know how I feel about it.

I went out into the country, and was shown a bridge that had been built by the common people without the help of engineers. At least that’s what the government guides insisted. The trouble was, I knew enough about the terrible period called the Cultural Revolution, where essentially the country had turned on itself in the most brutal way, to know that anyone considered bourgeois—and that included doctors, teachers, and, yes, engineers—was criticized and sent to the country to be reeducated through hard labor. Individually, they had suffered terribly, of course, unaccustomed to the harshness of their new environment, and in many cases separated from their families forever. The country had suffered even more, the school system essentially shut down for ten years, as Dorothy had maintained, people told what to think. This bridge had been built by engineers, all right, just engineers who now picked cabbage.

But those visits to the village and the factory were nothing compared to how I felt when I went to Tibet. I had a rough time getting there, because while the authorities said I could go, they made it difficult to do so. But I got there, and as spectacular as Tibet is, I was appalled by what I saw. China talks about its “religiously correct” policy toward minorities. They can say all they want. At least as far as Tibet was concerned, it’s garbage. The Tibetans were persecuted relentlessly. Monks were considered dissidents and thrown in jail for twenty years for nothing. After that, I had a couple of run-ins with party cadres, petty officials who thought their position entitled them to treat everyone else like dirt. Still, I know you can’t equate the people with their government, so I left China, feeling on balance that I liked the place, and that eventually things would
get
better.

Not long after I had returned home, however, there had been that odious moment in recent Chinese history, the massacre in Tian’anmen Square. I remember watching the television as grainy pictures, a lurid red from the night lenses, were beamed around the world, and wondering if some of the wonderful young people I’d met had been hurt or killed. At that moment, I told myself I would never go back to China. Until Dory Matthews spoke to me from the dead, I never had.

Still, I am an optimistic person. Even before my return to China to try to buy Dory’s box, I knew that people clearly lived better lives. The country was modernizing at an unprecedented rate. Where once it had been a crime to be remotely bourgeois, now there was a new government directive: it is glorious to be wealthy. True, there were still the men in black, the army officials who considered themselves above the law, and that continued to make me uncomfortable. Beyond mere wealth, though, the people I’d seen had a degree of freedom they had not had in more than half a century, maybe ever. Dory had heard the same things I had, but it didn’t change anything for her. She said that while she loved Chinese history and culture, had made it her life’s work, really, she would never go back to Mainland China, that her memories of the place were of a war-ravaged country, with zealots of every stripe so determined to rule that they cared not how many people died in the process.

She had plenty of reasons to feel that way, regardless of whether she was right or wrong. It was difficult for me to argue with her when it came to her own experiences, the ones on which she based her opinions. Yes, I could make a case for the big picture, but what influenced her opinion was what she knew on an intensely personal level. True experience trumps theory every time. Dory had left China with her mother at the age of five. Young as she was, she still had very vivid memories, and they were not good ones. She told me that her father was from Shanghai, and had been a successful businessman. Her mother Vivian, also born in Shanghai to British parents, was well-off too. Shanghai was an enticing city in those days before World War II and the Japanese invasion: Chinese, but with some European influence as well; affluent, but also a little decadent. But the proverbial storm clouds were on the horizon, Japan having occupied Manchuria in 1931, putting the last Qing emperor, Puyi, on a puppet throne.

That must have seemed a distant threat at the time, but it came much, much closer. In July of 1937, the Japanese were at the gates of Beijing, and that city fell to them on July 29, 1937, in an incident known to us now as that of Marco Polo Bridge. In late 1937, Shanghai also fell to the Japanese and remained under Japanese control until the end of World War II.

On December 13, 1937, Japanese soldiers captured Nanking, then the capital of China, and slaughtered their way through the city for several weeks, an ignominious event called the Rape of Nanking. It is said that during the war with Japan, something between ten and thirty million Chinese were killed, although there are many who believe that number is much, much higher. The Chinese people have come to regard the Japanese occupation of their country, which lasted through World War II, as the Forgotten Holocaust.

Amazingly enough, Vivian and her family managed very well during the Japanese occupation. In Shanghai, whole areas of the cities had in some sense been ceded to the large and powerful nations of Europe, like Britain, France, Italy, and Russia. The Japanese, at this point not willing to rouse the ire of such powerful foes—that would come later—left them alone. Vivian would recall that time as reasonably happy, home with her parents in a beautiful house on a hill complete with servants. The Japanese were not the only problem, however. The Chinese were fighting among themselves. There were two factions, the Red or Communist Army led by Mao Zedong, and the Koumintang, led by Chiang Kai-Shek.