Later, Master Ah Chung took the doctor to meet the three o’clock train north. Before parting, Dr. Lao-Hong presented his host with a gift of a fine gold pocket watch made in France. The case bore a small but exquisite enamel painting of a floating swan wearing a gold crown, and the dial face was surrounded by seed pearls to mark the hours. Master Ah Chung was much surprised and very pleased with the gift. He promised to think of his friend and benefactor every time he read the hour. They parted with deep respectful bows and salutations. The doctor was moved to see a mist of gratitude in his friend’s eyes.
DR. LAO-HONG WAS OVERJOYED TO be back with his family, and he promised Mui Choi that he would do no more traveling for quite some time, if at all. However, he felt that he might have spoken too soon, as on the fourth day after his return he received an urgent summons from his uncles to come to their offices at once.
When he arrived, it was to witness a scene of great distress. He was told at once that there had been a terrible accident. The steamer carrying the treasure to Santa Cruz had suffered an explosion, caught fire, and was lost. Happily, there were no fatalities, though the deckhand and stoker had suffered minor burns, but it was no less a tragedy for all that. If it hadn’t been for the courage of the helmsman and stoker, Master Chow Eng-Shu might have lost his life. For at the time of the accident he was suffering from a bad case of seasickness, which rendered him all but helpless to save himself. The seamen had to break out the cabin windows to help him escape, but by then the fire had grown so intense that it proved impossible to go back for the chest.
Lao-Hong was relieved to hear that the four men had escaped to the safety of the jolly boat, and were soon rescued by a passing schooner that had seen the smoke from several miles away. The doctor was told that Master Chow Eng-Shu had only just arrived that very morning with the terrible news. The poor man had been so thoroughly traumatized by the whole experience that he was contemplating taking the robes of a Buddhist monk and retiring to a monastery. Barring that, he had taken a solemn vow never to set foot on a steamship again. He was devastated at the loss of the treasure, felt he had failed his masters, and knew not how he would survive his disgrace.
Dr. Lao-Hong took great pains to convince his uncles that Master Chow Eng-Shu was far too valuable a servant to discharge over a matter of chance, and since the loss was well insured, he should be exonerated of all blame. Indeed, the tragedy must be attributed to bad joss, and not any failure on his part. The doctor reminded his uncles that the fates had determined that Zhou Man’s treasure, which had been raised from its guarded obscurity in the earth by mere chance, should now return to the guarded obscurity of the sea in like manner. Perhaps the long- revered and powerful spirit of the venerable Zhou Man had taken a hand in the matter. Who could tell?
Again the doctor was presented a purse of money for his services, but he politely refused it on the grounds that all concerned should share in the loss of the treasure. It was only just and right that he not gain where others had sacrificed. He went on to suggest that the money might be given to Master Chow Eng-Shu, for it was he who had almost surrendered his life in faithful service to the Three Corporations. The uncles were quite impressed with their nephew’s worthy suggestion. He gained great face with the gesture, and Master Chow Eng-Shu became his loyal friend for life.
As Dr. Lao-Hong made his way home through the busy streets, he was drawn to one interesting but totally unimportant question: How much would his uncles settle on the owner of the lost vessel? Then he smiled and put the question aside. It was none of his business anyway. Everyone had lost something in the bargain, everyone except perhaps Admiral Zhou Man. That intrepid explorer had long since secured his place in the Chinese pantheon of great men. In the eyes of most scholars, the loss of the seal and stone would hardly affect his brilliant reputation one way or the other. There remained the improbable chance, of course, that in the future some enterprising salvage diver might find the sunken launch and recover her cargo. But it was highly doubtful that eventuality would come to pass. The great Imperial explorer Admiral Zhou Man was beyond all that now. He was at rest under the sheltering devotion of his people.
AND THE SEA SHALL
GIVE UP ITS DEAD
“Wisdom is not a birthright, it is a treasured inheritance.”
—CHINESE PROVERB
NINETEEN NINETY-EIGHT WAS A TROUBLING year for young Charles Lucas, known as Luke to his family and friends. He had shown himself to be an indifferent C student for the first two years of high school, and his lack of application had troubled his parents exceedingly. Luke’s parents had both been honors graduates of Stanford University, and they felt they had somehow failed their son. More so since Luke had always tested in the top five percent of every intelligence test he had ever taken. There were even those who believed, once upon a time, that Luke would most likely be inducted into Mensa by the age of fifteen. But such was not to be, for an ironbound, teenage streak of rebellion set in like a Siberian winter, and he refused to be influenced by any reasoning not his own. As if to pour acid on his poor parents’ wounds, he developed a full-blown obsession with surfing that seemed to occupy almost all of his time, attention, and money.
Unfortunately, Luke, being a normal teenage boy, possessed little or no abiding sense of personal direction whatsoever. He floundered at everything remotely academic, which only made matters worse for his long-suffering parents. Their daughter, Beth, five years older than Luke and thriving with honors back east at Princeton, had never been a real problem. At least that was how they liked to remember her.
Luke thought his sister was a thoroughgoing cow, a shameless suck-up, and a bullying snitch. He was subsequently transported on the wings of heavenly delight the day she moved east. Beth departed with tears in her eyes, a low-mileage BMW station wagon, and a stack of credit cards that could choke a goat. Luke was almost giddy as he hugged his sister good-bye and snickered at her departing tailpipe. It was all he could do to keep from jumping madly into the air, arms arched upward in triumph, while screaming at the top of his lungs, “Eat my shorts, Spooky!” Luke delighted in calling his older sister “Spooky” because she hated it so much.
Luke’s limited curiosity about academic matters continued to hobble along in a halting fashion, while his parents tore out their hair. Then suddenly, just in the middle of his sophomore year, his biology teacher, a brilliant educator with the improbable name of Mrs. Tallulah Entwhistle, took Luke in hand. With skills his parents could not possibly invoke or duplicate, Mrs. Entwhistle somehow turned her rebellious pupil completely around. It didn’t hurt that she looked like an Italian movie star, but that didn’t disguise the fact that she was a hard-core polymath, and possessed an encyclopedic mind and a memory only rivaled by her laptop. Luke was once quoted as saying that “the Intrepid Tallu” could spot sham work and BS through a brick wall and, like she did her dead frogs, publicly dissect the offending student in moments. Nothing got by Mrs. Entwhistle, but she tempered her occasional disappointments with understanding, humor, and compassion, which only made Luke work harder to please her.
Within a half semester, Luke was suddenly making straight A’s in all his courses, and in some subjects, like biology, mathematics, geology, and history, he was adjudged either first or second in the class. This pattern continued and increased in energy through his junior and senior years. In fact, Luke’s quantum leap from disinterest to total absorption was so remarkable that his amazed parents tried to persuade him to undergo a more advanced battery of computer-aided intelligence tests so they could calibrate the remarkable change in his development.
