sat precariously upon the end of his nose. He was dressed in a grey gown that was partly covered by an ink- smeared apron, and his queue was coiled into a tight and workmanlike bun.
‘And is this your pang-yauh, Mr Vico?’ Compton squinted at Neel with the worried frown of the chronically short-sighted. ‘Who is he, eh?’
‘Mr Anil Munshi. He is Seth Bahramji’s letter-writer. You are looking for a proof-reader, no?’
Compton’s eyes grew unnaturally large behind his thick glasses. ‘Gam aa? Proof-reader! Is true?’
‘True.’
Within minutes Neel was sitting on a bale of paper, scrutinizing the proofs of the next issue of the Register. By the end of the day, he and the printer were on first-name terms: Compton had asked him to drop the ‘Mr’ and he had become Ah-Neel. He left the shop with a string of cash wrapped around his wrist and was back again the next day.
Compton had another set of proofs ready, and while looking through them Neel asked: ‘Have you heard anything about a new Governor? One Lin Tse-hsu?’
Compton glanced at him in surprise: ‘Haih-a! Gam you have heard the talk also?’
‘Yes. Do you know about him?’
Compton smiled. ‘Maih-haih! Lin Zexu is great man – one of best poet and scholar in China. He is man with big mind, open mind – always want to learn new things. My teacher his friend. Speak of him a lot.’
‘What does he say?’
Compton lowered his voice: ‘Lin Zexu not like other mandarin. He is a good man, honest man – best officer in country. Wherever there is trouble, there he is sent. He never take cumshaw, nothing – jan-haih! He become Governor of Kiangsi while he is still very young. In two years he stop all opium trade in that province. People there call him Lin Ch’ing-t’ien – that means “Lin the Clear Sky”.’
Compton paused and put a finger on his lips. ‘Better not tell this to your master bo. He will get too much worried. Dak?’
Neel nodded: Dak! Dak!
Soon Neel took to dropping by the print-shop when he had time to spare, and sometimes Compton would lead him down the passageway that separated his shop from his living quarters. This part of the building was two storeys high, with the rooms arranged around a courtyard. Although the courtyard was paved with stone tiles, a profusion of potted plants, trees and vines gave it the feel of a garden. The washing that fluttered overhead, strung between the rails of the upstairs balconies, provided a canopy of shade; on one side was a cherry tree, with leaves that were beginning to turn colour.
When Neel entered this part of the house the womenfolk would disappear, but the children, of whom there were many, would remain. Often Neel would see faces he had not seen before, and this gave him the impression of an extended family, frequently augmented by visitors: he was not surprised when Compton told him that his ancestral village lay at the mouth of the Pearl River, at Chuenpi, which was why he often had to play host to visiting relatives.
Compton himself was not Canton-born and nor had he grown up in the city. As a boy he had spent much of his time on the water: his father had made his living as a ship’s comprador, and the family had usually spent the trading season travelling between the Bogue and Whampoa, in the wake of foreign vessels.
The job of a ship’s comprador was different from that of a factory comprador; the latter, like the dubashes of India, were responsible for providing supplies to foreign traders after they had taken up residence in Canton. Ships’ compradors were more like ship chandlers, procuring provisions and equipment for the vessels that engaged their services. Unlike factory compradors, who had close links with the merchants of the Co-Hong, ships’ compradors worked on their own and had no powerful patrons to rely on. Theirs was a fiercely competitive business: as a boy, at the start of each season, Compton and his father would take it in turns to keep a lookout for the opium fleet, from a hill near their house. When the first vessel was spotted, they would go running down to the harbour to unmoor the family sampan. Then would begin a wild race against the rest of the bumboat fleet. The first boat to reach the incoming vessels stood the best chance of being taken on as the comprador, especially if the captain happened to be known to the family; if they were quick and lucky, they would secure a contract that would keep them busy for the next several weeks.
Compton’s family had been in the business long enough to be known to the skippers and crews of many foreign ships and some would hire them every time they returned to southern China. Among their oldest and most loyal customers were the vessels of a Boston-based firm, Russell amp; Co. Through them their family had acquired a large American clientele, many of whom gave them letters of recommendation to show to other American ships; some of their customers stayed in touch with them long after they had stopped sailing, and some even sent them little gifts and tokens with younger seafaring relatives. In this way the family had acquired letters from a Mr Coolidge, a Mr Astor and a Mr Delano, all of whom, they had later discovered, were from families that were of the first importance in America. A Canton trader called William Irving had even given them a book, Tales of the Alhambra written by his uncle, Washington Irving: unfortunately Compton had no memory of this man; to him he was just one amongst hundreds of friendly travellers who had given him lessons in English.
From the time he could walk, Compton had accompanied his father on his visits to foreign vessels. He was a winning child and was always made much of by the seamen and ship’s officers. At Whampoa, where inbound ships had to spend several weeks at anchor, time always hung heavy on the hands of the crewmen and they would amuse themselves by speaking English with the boy. A quick learner, Compton became an invaluable asset to his family, winning them many clients with his fluency. In time this talent also earned him a job at the De Souza print- shop, in Macau. But printing was not all he did there: during his apprenticeship, he had also conceived the idea of combining his knowledge of English and Chinese to produce a glossary of the Canton jargon, for the use of his own countrymen.
The title of this short booklet was translated for Neel as ‘The-Red-Haired-People’s-Buying-and-Selling- Common-Ghost-Language’. It was more commonly known however as ‘Ghost-People-Talk’ – Gwai-lou-waah – and it sold very well, far better than its author could ever have imagined, and the proceeds had allowed Compton to set up his own print-shop in Canton.
Several years after its publication the popularity of ‘Ghost-People-Talk’ was still undiminished: many vendors and shopkeepers kept a copy at hand, for reference, so its cover was a familiar sight in Fanqui-town. It featured a drawing of a European in eighteenth-century costume, with knee-breeches, stockings, a three-cornered hat and a buckled coat. The figure held a thin cane in one hand, and in the other something that might have been a handkerchief – this at least was the surmise of Compton himself. Handkerchiefs had once been an object of fascination for people in China, he explained to Neel; many had believed that Europeans used them to store and transport their snot – in much the same way that thrifty Chinese farmers carried their excrement to the fields.
The cover of ‘Ghost-People-Talk’ had caught Neel’s eye long before he met Compton and he had sometimes wondered about the booklet’s contents. He was astonished to learn that it was a glossary – and was delighted also to discover that the author was none other than his part-time employer.
Of the book itself, Neel understood very little since it was written entirely in Chinese. But being besotted with words of all kinds, Neel had fallen headlong in love with Chinese writing: for him Canton offered no greater pleasure than the ubiquitous presence of the ideograms, on shop-signs, doorways, umbrellas, carts and boats. He had already learnt to recognize a few of them: the character for example, which was easy to remember because its two legs represented its meaning – ‘man’. Similarly ‘big’, which was, in its mysteriously evocative way, merely a man with arms extended; and ‘dollar’, the sign for which was omnipresent in Fanqui-town being featured on innumerable shop-signs. Having once come to know the characters, he saw them everywhere: they would leap out at him from the most unexpected places, waving their limbs as if to catch his attention.
In leafing through ‘Ghost-People-Talk’ Neel was surprised to find that the first entry featured two ideograms he had learnt to recognize: one was the character for ‘man’ and the other the sign for ‘dollar’. The pairing of ‘man’ and ‘dollar’ puzzled him. Was it perhaps a subtle philosophical statement?
Compton laughed at this. ‘Mat-yeh?’ he said. ‘What, don’t you see? “Dollar” is maan in Cantonese.’
Neel was greatly taken by the ingenuity of this: instead of using phonetic symbols, Compton had suggested the pronunciation of the English word by using a character that sounded similar when pronounced in the Cantonese dialect. For longer and more complicated words, he had joined together two or more one-syllable Cantonese words: thus ‘today’ became ‘to-teay’ and so on.
‘And all this you did yourself?’
