On a more sanguine note, the doctor went on to observe, perhaps with some pride, that there was one group of people who seemed to have endured the recent calamity with the least amount of devastation, disruption, or corruption, and that was the local Chinese community.
It was said by some people that the Chinese lost the least because they had the least to lose, but this was only evidence of their blind ignorance. The truth is that they lost the least because they took better precautions to preserve what they had. The doctor wrote that a long history of similar disasters in China had long since encouraged the development of methods to secure both personal and financial survival. Centuries of experience had made the Chinese familiar with such implacable catastrophes. But somehow, in spite of long wars, bloody revolutions, and devastating natural disasters, the pulse of banking, commerce, and trade never really ceases. Their fiscal system operates under a purely pragmatic tenet of extended accountability. If a man carries debt, his whole family must shoulder the burden until the obligation is resolved. It’s simple and it works. And to that end every commercial transaction floats on a “tranquil pond” of extended credit. Unless otherwise stipulated, official repayment of debt is ceremoniously transacted twice a year, sometimes only on New Year’s Day.
Dr. Lao-Hong was pleased to make note that, unlike most people in the city, the local Chinese were essentially self-sustaining in respect to food, clothing, shelter, and especially medical care.
Suddenly the doctor stopped writing in midsentence and put up his pen. With a deep sigh born of frustration, he set aside his letters on the desk. Upon reflection it disturbed him to realize that in spite of the serious subject matter, everything he’d written sounded awkward, superficial, and distracted.
And there was no doubt about it. The doctor was seriously distracted, almost painfully preoccupied with the discomforting realization that the other story, the one he could never document in any form, kept encroaching on his thoughts at all hours of the day and night. He was often reflectively engaged to such a degree that all else, including the present turmoil, became little more than a monochromatic background. But whether he wished to or not, it was very likely that Dr. Lao-Hong would once again surrender his thoughts to the recent past, and again try to envisage and qualify the inscrutable machinations of destiny, a fate that had goaded him onto the course he was now committed to follow with eternal fidelity.
Dr. Lao-Hong had known from the very first that the discovery of Admiral Zhou Man’s stone testament, and the accompanying imperial seal, would cause widespread controversy within the higher echelons of the Chinese tongs in northern California. But that aside, he hoped to resolve the issue in an equitable manner. Nonetheless, the young doctor, having been born, raised, and educated in America, and espousing as he did a semi-Western sensibility, knew quite well that he was now embroiled in a thorny situation that could easily erupt into perilous tong rivalries.
Dr. Lao-Hong’s predicament was hardly new. In truth, he had been dealing with variations of the same dilemma all his adult life. Simply stated, it centered on the fact that immigrant Chinese, despite the fact that Dr. Lao-Hong spoke flawless Mandarin and Cantonese, perceived him as being too American, while white Americans, of course, treated him like they did all Chinese, no matter how well he spoke English, or how advanced his education.
This fish-nor-fowl quandary had required Dr. Lao-Hong to walk a very narrow path in both worlds, and though his loyalties had always sided with his Chinese brethren, his intellectual sensibilities were Western in the main, and herein lay another ungainly dilemma. Though the Chinese had considered themselves fully literate for many centuries, the truth was at odds with that presumption, at least for those Chinese who had come into the shadow of the Gold Mountain as poor laborers, with little or no formal education of any kind. Sadly, most were illiterate in all but the simplest Chinese characters. In many cases these people arrived in San Francisco from different parts of China and could hardly communicate with one another, much less their white employers. Even Lao-Hong found he sometimes experienced great difficulty comprehending the least bit of the various local dialects. In some instances he found his poorer interlocutors spoke a local patois of Chinese that was totally incomprehensible even to their neighbors in the next province. It was like the difference between French and Norwegian.
The doctor had long been aware that blistering ignorance invariably walked hand in hand with blind superstition, but that was true of all mankind and hardly unique to his own race. However, this tradition did cause some conflict within the Chinese communities themselves. Those who were raised in conservative and better- educated Mandarin societies brought their ancient prejudices east, and so looked down on those fellow countrymen who spoke Cantonese, or any other dialect for that matter. On the other hand, those Chinese who spoke various forms of Cantonese traditionally suspected the high-handed motives and cultural vanities of those who spoke Mandarin, and herein lay one of the problems he was about to confront.
The various tongs represented the cultural tastes and inclinations of their elders and constituents, and in the past their competing interests had sometimes led to outright warfare between them. This was by no means a local novelty. Such conflicts had been going on in China for centuries. Dr. Lao-Hong was reminded of something his esteemed father had told him: “The Chinese Empire had only one all-powerful enemy in the world, and it was the Chinese themselves.”
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.
DR. LAO-HONG 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
