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.
Though he was anxious to please his uncles in all things, Dr. Lao-Hong was not happy to be parted from his wife and children, not to mention his other business interests. As he considered his situation and the many possible outcomes, the doctor found himself being rocked about by a small storm brewing in the Western-educated portion of his brain.
That part of the doctor’s American education that had inspired him to revere the imperative lessons discovered reading Xenophon, Euripides, Plutarch, and Livy had also inspired him to mine most of Edmund Burke and all of Thomas Paine. The doctor drifted off as he recalled that once, while attending a Harvard Christmas gathering, he had tapped a fifty-dollar wager by memorizing, word for word, all of Paine’s Common Sense between the dinner gong and the same chime at breakfast the next day. Just to show off, young master Lao-Hong also threw in Paine’s American Crisis. He didn’t make any friends doing it, but he did pay off his commissary bill with enough money left over to convince Mr. Finch at the bookstore that he wasn’t a complete deadbeat.
Suddenly Dr. Lao-Hong came out of his daydream as Thomas Paine, the China Point fire, and Zhou Man’s treasure all came crashing together in his mind. There was no question that the fishing families had been doomed from the start, even if they did make accommodations for the inevitable. Nonetheless, recent newspaper accounts concerning the lawsuit instituted by the Chinese against the Pacific Improvement Company indicated that, despite Judge Kimmerlin’s predilections to lean toward the interests of the Chinese tenants, the Pacific Improvement Company had harnessed a sleek team of high-priced railroad lawyers to argue their case, and it looked as though an expensive legal struggle might drag on for years without an adequate resolution.
It was here, just as Paine’s philosophical specter appeared out of the fog, that Dr. Lao-Hong’s cultural struggle came back to the fore. The doctor’s personal loyalties could never be called into question, but he was conflicted by the role he was being asked to play in the name of familial obligation. There was definitely no question in his mind that what the Three Corporations were attempting to accomplish was little more than a blend of cultural extortion laced with face-saving bribes plumed with implied threats. But this had always been the way of things, even in China. The greater tongs kowtowed to the Three Corporations, or some such body, and the lesser tongs always bowed to the greater, and so on in a descending scale until one found the poor fisherman or laundryman, who must in turn kowtow to his guild master for the privilege of laboring night and day to feed his family a few bowls of fish, seaweed, and steamed rice each day.
It was painful to admit, especially in his present situation, but Dr. Lao-Hong’s sympathies were not totally invested with his uncles, the Three Corporations, or the purpose of his errand. He was scourged not just by history and Burke’s First Principles, but also by what he personally felt was basically honorable and just. For the less privileged elements of society to automatically succumb to the arbitrary ambitions of those more powerful might be a primal law of nature, but it made for damn poor politics and did little to cultivate minority cohesion.
The doctor had to admit that in the last decade, disturbing instances of tong conflict had become more frequent and more often bloody. Though many powerful elders preferred to disavow the obvious, the doctor had witnessed a tenacious series of small internal rebellions, each adopting noble guises and espousing selfless motives. But to the doctor’s way of thinking, it was as rampant within the tongs as it was within the Californian society at large. Or perhaps the tong elders had deluded themselves into believing that the rise in factional insurgence was just another of those despised Western novelties that some of the younger Chinese had taken a fancy to, and then refashioned to their own covetous ends.
As much as Dr. Lao-Hong wished it were otherwise, he knew full well that if the Three Corporations didn’t take charge of Zhou Man’s treasures, some other cadet-level tong would pounce on the opportunity to gain the artifacts, even if outright theft had to be employed to gain possession. It had happened before in an unfortunate, murderous incident involving several ancient Taoist texts belonging to a small tong in Seattle. Such crimes would more than likely happen again if the rewards were judged worthwhile and the penalties negligible, as is usually the case when the powerful intimidate and extort from their weaker brethren. Dr. Lao-Hong’s father had been right after all. Whether in China or California, the only real enemy the Chinese faced was their own countrymen.
At last Dr. Lao-Hong’s thoughts flew back to his family. There, as always, he found great peace and moral resolution in remembering his wife’s honest, empathetic insights and her mature and gentle wisdom. As he watched the countryside and the distant ocean fly by his window, he became more determined to follow her prudent counsel, particularly since at present he was bereft of any workable plans of his own.
As it neared Monterey, the train entered a heavy fog bank that seemed to shroud the doctor’s mood with increasing misgivings. The train slowed for lack of visibility, and when it finally arrived at the station in Monterey,
