In the Shadow of the Cypress (11 page)

Through his university studies, the doctor had since learned that the same could be said of the Americans, the English, the French, the Germans, and virtually every other nation on earth. The only possible exception was the Duchy of Lichtenstein, whose minuscule population and limited acreage precluded the luxury of having enemies, either domestic or foreign.

For reasons that Lao-Hong could only imagine, Dr. Gilbert had ultimately refrained from publicly divulging what he knew but could not prove, and the local population of Monterey remained ignorant of Mr. O’Flynn’s discoveries. The same, however, could not be said of the Chinese community. The Chinese were quite capable of maintaining an ironclad secrecy as far as foreigners were concerned, but within their own ranks, secrecy was next to impossible. Word of the stone tablet and Zhou Man’s Imperial seal traveled like a thatch fire throughout the tongs all the way to San Francisco.

Within weeks, a close and heated debate arose among the various factions. Some bearded elders insisted the treasures should be held and guarded by the parent tongs in San Francisco, while others believed they should be sent back to China. But the cold facts were sad, as most just wanted the treasures only for themselves.

As might be expected, possession of these artifacts brought great prestige and honor to the tong that sheltered them, and the Chinese in Monterey felt they held a proprietary interest in the matter. For them possession was better than nine-tenths of the law; it was everything. Regrettably, it was within this context that Dr. Lao-Hong found himself precariously wedged between several tigers at once. He was easily persuaded that if he didn’t employ great political dexterity, he might just be crushed by the impetus of conflicting interests, and that would mean defeat and a public loss of face for his family and clan.

D
R.
L
AO-
H
ONG WAS THE PROUD
scion of a very influential and respected family. Sadly, he was away at school in the east when his mother and father died in the typhoid epidemic of 1887. He was then taken under the collective wings of two aging but extremely powerful uncles. Between them, these venerable gentlemen managed eighty percent of the Chinese export market leaving San Francisco. They also controlled nine seats on the august council of the Three Corporations, which gave them the majority vote on almost every issue. There wasn’t a tong in California that dared close its doors to them on any pretext. And though they showed all the outward signs of great modesty and frugality, they were in fact men of phenomenal wealth, influence, and responsibility.

It was to these gentlemen that Dr. Lao-Hong owed the most profound marks of respect and gratitude. They had financed his expensive education and seen to it that he lacked for nothing in his pursuit of academic excellence. Having no siblings to care for, Dr. Lao-Hong was free to indulge his studies for as long as he liked. And though his uncles were of a traditionally conservative
strain, they had always treated him with the greatest affection and indulgence, in some cases even more so than their own children. They were very proud of their nephew’s scholarship and academic achievements, and came to depend upon his help and advice in matters that related to business dealings with Yankee officials or government placemen. His uncles’ indulgence and generosity even extended to breaking with convention and ceding their rights to secure all matrimonial arrangements, and he was allowed to marry the girl of his choice. Happily, she was the jewel of an ancient and prestigious family, and it was a love match from the first. After ten years and three children, his wife, Mui Choi, was still considered a great beauty. The doctor loved her above all else and revered her compassionate and insightful sensibilities.

After his extended interview with Master Ah Chung, the tong elders, and Dr. Gilbert, Dr. Lao-Hong returned to San Francisco by ship and immediately went to his uncles to report in detail all that had transpired in Monterey.

Almost at once, strong opinions concerning the matter were lofted everywhere. At first he too had been in favor of secretly returning the treasures to China. But his wife, with whom he shared everything of importance, had reasonably pointed out that the markers had been buried on purpose. If the grave of the great admiral had been discovered instead, there would be few who would dare play fast and loose with his revered bones, or use them to garner prestige. The desecration would only serve to strip that man and his entire family of all honor and respect. When the doctor asked his wife what she recommended be done, she cast one of her soft, beautiful smiles and said she believed the treasure should be secretly put back where it was found, only much deeper in the ground. They should shelter
beneath those ancient cypress trees, where Zhou Man intended them to rest.

A few days later, Dr. Lao-Hong was pondering Mui Choi’s suggestion when he received a polite but urgent summons to attend a meeting at his uncles’ offices. When he arrived he was not surprised to discover the presence of two austere, bearded elders from the Three Corporations sitting in attendance. For arcane reasons of security as well as tradition, the men who sat on the council of the Three Corporations were always referred to by number, and never by name. Thus, Dr. Lao-Hong politely bowed to Uncle Eight and Uncle Eleven. In the scheme of things, his own uncles were known as Uncle Four and Uncle Six. The numbers reflected a strict code of seniority, with all votes being proportional. Only Uncle One and Uncle Two possessed veto power, which was rarely if ever employed against the wishes of the majority.

After all the social amenities had been dispensed with and tea had been served, Dr. Lao-Hong was informed of the purpose of his presence. He was told by his uncles that after considerable candid and productive deliberation, the council of the Three Corporations had come to what they believed was an equitable solution for the future of Zhou Man’s stone testament and Imperial seal.

First of all, they agreed that the artifacts were to stay under the Gold Mountain, and thus in California, but they viewed it as their duty to forestall what they believed might easily become an acrimonious and bloody rivalry between the various parent tongs for possession of the treasures.

By their estimation the stones were now sheltered in a diminutive tong hall on the storm-wracked coast of Monterey Bay, and secured with nothing more than a curtained altar and
some vigilant but powerless elders. It was their opinion that a few illiterate fishermen could not possibly know the true meaning or cultural significance of the artifacts in their possession. The council had thus determined that the Three Corporations should offer the security of their wealth and organization to protect and care for the artifacts in the name of the presiding tong of record in Monterey. The uncles would undertake to reveal the artifacts only to the scrutiny of enlightened Chinese scholars, and they were additionally prepared to swear and sign binding oaths promising that the heathen Yankees would never know of or possess the treasure, on pain of a financial penalty if they violated this agreement.

To place the matter in its proper rank of significance, the Three Corporations were generously prepared to secure the interests of the fishermen’s tong with a cash bounty of twenty-five thousand dollars in gold, plus a substantial insurance bond to indemnify the loss if any harm were to come to the treasures while in transport and under the protection of the Three Corporations.

As Dr. Lao-Hong well understood, this thinly veiled scheme was, in reality, little more than a gilt-edged act of extortion, albeit plumed with a handsome bribe to assuage dignity all around. It thus represented the price that face, status, and respect demanded in exchange for the inestimable honor of protecting these priceless cultural treasures on behalf of all concerned interests.

On the other hand, though it didn’t help him feel any better about the situation, the doctor knew that the uncles were right in principle. For these priceless symbols of a great and proud history to reside within a flyblown tong hall in a peasant fishing village was not deemed appropriate in light of their
importance. After all, stealing valuables from the Chinese was not unheard of, and there was a well-worn axiom that declared that one should gather only those valuables that can be most easily secured. The fishermen had little to boast of in that regard. And, as the uncles were well aware, there was still a very good chance that word might leak out through Professor Gilbert, which would only promote another disquieting series of complications.

The conclusion of the interview focused on a detailed set of instructions. Dr. Lao-Hong was to return to Monterey as an official representative of the Three Corporations, and in the most amenable and respectful manner possible make all the necessary arrangements.

Had he been invited to do so, Dr. Lao-Hong could have listed any number of foreseeable obstacles to an equitable and happy outcome. But he was not. Nor did he feel it was his place to taint his uncles’ sanguine expectations with pessimistic speculations. Negative sentiments only opened the doors to ill fortune, and joss played a large part in everything Chinese.

Privately, the doctor had drifted around to his wife’s way of thinking. He had come to believe that Zhou Man’s treasure, whether the uncles suspected it or not, was going to dispense far more than honor or face. It saddened him, but the doctor would not be in the least surprised to hear that blood had been shed in the serpentine wake of the orphaned treasures. And in that regard, he also believed his first responsibility was to make sure that it wasn’t his blood.

Dr. Lao-Hong smiled to recall that Mui Choi had been right about something else as well. The only really intelligent course open to him was to assume a benign posture of enlightened disinterest. It was one of those annoying mystical conundrums that
always seemed to surface at the wrong time. It was an ancient philosophical puzzle. One defends and protects either everyone or no one. What is the path of an honorable man who finds no principled alternatives at his disposal? The irresolvable questions of justice and loyalty flowed in and out like the tides, and the doctor was quite sure that failure on his part might find his professional “corpse” floating out to sea on one of those tides.

In the broadest sense, Dr. Lao-Hong’s family allegiances were as solid as stone. Despite his relative youth, at thirty-seven the doctor occupied important positions within the clan that related to Western business interests. As a result of these lucrative arrangements, and because he had always bowed to his father’s call to observe financially modest habits, the doctor was, in all contemporary respects, a very wealthy man. He held deeds covering a profitable range of commercial real estate in San Francisco, and cash assets in a score of gainful business interests. And for all his financial success and familial bliss, nurtured, to be sure, by an exceptional education, the doctor honored a mortal debt to his ancestors, his parents, his uncles, his own family, and, lastly, his clan.

It was that last debt that encompassed the greatest risk. Every family, clan, state, or nation, unless under the thumb of a very powerful patriarch, is perennially riddled with conflicting interests of one stripe or another. It obliged the doctor to recall that, as much as the Chinese universally profess their undying veneration of peace, social harmony, piety, and order, they can rarely get those elements to march in step in their own extended families.

Factions pecked at one another like young cockerels in a never-ending and foolish roundabout of posturing for place and recognition. He was reminded of the cautionary joke about a
half-crazed dog that incessantly chases its own tail, until one day he manages to catch up with his quarry and, reveling in his unexpected victory, bites it off. Dr. Lao-Hong knew from experience that a quarrelsome state of affairs could grow exponentially with the size of the clan. Inevitably, the resulting disharmony must somehow be restored to a proper balance, and only those with great power and prestige can apply real force of will to make it so.

Dr. Lao-Hong took all this in stride when it came to his own culture. By his own estimation the Chinese had survived and prospered under the Gold Mountain by creating for themselves those institutions of administration and law denied them by the civil government. It was only reasonable to suppose that, as in China, the management and supervision of those institutions followed traditional clan lines of ascending seniority and power. It was an ancient and proven system with which every Chinese, regardless of birthplace or dialect, had been familiar since birth. It was with good cause that they trusted nothing else. And possessed with this historical experience, they had every reason to be highly suspicious of all Western political novelties. Nonetheless, the doctor knew his people to be substantially pragmatic, sometimes to a fault. If perhaps some Western innovations were judged necessary, practical, profitable, and inexpensive to reproduce, like the telegraph, then the Sons of Heaven could be depended upon to adopt it at once, and then turn around and reengineer the device to serve their particular needs.

Dr. Lao-Hong pondered his precarious situation as he took the coaches south to Monterey. The train rattled and groaned over the points as it slowly steamed away from the depot, leaving the rusting rail yards and the acrid air behind. With the passing of the last outlying factory buildings, the gravitational
pull of the city was lessened. Once released, the engine sped up and pressed on past surrounding farms and fields, and then out along undulating hills of ocher-colored grasslands, punctuated here and there with resilient outcroppings of oak and orchards dispensing partial shade to small gatherings of cattle and antelope. Two hours farther south, the upper mantles of the mountains on either side of the valley were showing off small green patches of new grass. Dr. Lao-Hong knew that in a few days, with the continued blessings of rain, the whole vista would transform into a lush, emerald green landscape rolling like sea swells down the valley. The rich hillsides would be dotted all about with thick carpets of brightly colored lupines and pastures rich with bluebells and white cow lilies. The doctor wistfully hoped it might all appear in its verdant glory for his return journey. He believed the natural splendor might reflect a propitious omen, for at that moment he felt in dire need of celestial endorsement to help balance his leaden feelings of inadequacy.