THE WILTED FLOWERS OF TALENT by Allison Alsup
Tianfu, Shantung Province
March 1917
1.
Fifteen trunks and bags surround them as they wait for the midnight express to Hankow. Chow would go inside the station house where it’s warmer, but Meyer insists the train will only stop for a minute, and there is too much luggage to load. Chow unrolls the horsehoof sleeves of his padded robe to cover his hands, though even this fails to warm his fingers against the air tunneling over the tracks. He’d hoped their time in Shantung would at least offer some relief from Peking’s brutal freezes. Instead all of China remains pinned under winter’s grip. He stares at the clock. Half past eleven. Somehow he must keep from freezing to death in the next thirty minutes.
“They will play at this hour?” Meyer asks, pointing his thumb down the platform, past the two uniformed porters asleep on their stools, to where a band has gathered. Meyer’s fingers poke through the tips of his woolen gloves. “They are expecting someone, ja?”
The five men wear pointed hats tied under their chins and stamp their feet against the cold. Chow imagines the air slipping through their thin jackets, the metal of the horns and cymbals numbing their skin. He is grateful for his fur cap.
“Yes,” Chow says, “someone important.” He notices the explorer’s raw lips, the cracks along the corners. It’s been a week since they left Peking for this excursion south and, Chow suspects, since Meyer last trimmed his beard. In his fleece-lined coat and hat, the man resembles a giant goat.
They turn at the sound of voices from the station house door. Four porters emerge carrying the corners of a sedan chair, which they bear down the platform and lower next to the band. From each of the chair’s poles, red streamers snap in the wind so fiercely Chow expects them to break off and fly into the night. He thinks that whoever has hired the ensemble must have once achieved a high rank. Mandarins, or those who once were, can’t pay for fanfare from a government salary anymore. Any man who now wishes to have his comings and goings noticed must reach into his own pockets. These days it’s soldiers, not scholars, who run the country. Soldiers, Chow thinks, like his brother Shen.
“All this fuss just to parade an old man around in the middle of the night?” the explorer asks, waving towards the band, the sedan chair. Meyer’s breath hangs thick and white. The glow of the station lamp pools under his pale eyes, making them appear bruised. “And this is seen as a productive use of energy?”
The interpreter says nothing. Meyer has spent too many years in China not to know the answer, and Chow has spent too many years with the explorer not to know the question isn’t a question. In civilized nations, Meyer tells Chow, men line up in silence. They do not gabble like excited geese. If they must speak, they do so quietly, so that others may contemplate or read. Or sometimes: In a democracy each man stands as important as the next.
Chow finds the logic of this last statement lacking. In his country, no one, not even the fledgling Republicans in Peking, pretends that each man is as important as the next. They do not refuse to be carried in sedan chairs, as the explorer does, on principle. Despite his many years collecting plants in China for the United States government, Meyer still wishes for Chow’s country to be something it is not, as if a tiger could suddenly become a sparrow.
“It’s disrespectful to play so late. Loud people cannot be thinkers,” Meyer announces, and reaching for the handkerchief in his pocket, blows his nose like a trumpet.
But Chow’s mind is already drifting from the explorer’s voice and the frozen station back to Peking, to the snow-covered sidewalk outside his father’s tailoring shop, to Shen. His brother waited until Chow was away combing the mountains outside the capital with the explorer. When Chow returned to Peking, his mother told him the news. His brother was no longer sewing; Shen had enlisted in the Republican army. Of course, with their father’s eyes, they’d had to close the shop. For two months, they heard nothing from Shen. At home Chow and his parents avoided speaking of the obvious. His interpreter’s salary couldn’t sustain them, and there was no way to know when, or even if, Shen would send money. Without the business, they would soon be broke.
Then six weeks ago, someone rang the bell next to the shop’s shuttered window. It had snowed the night before and footsteps had packed the ice into a hard crust. Chow stood on the sidewalk in disbelief. Shen wore his new uniform, a fitted grey woolen jacket and trousers, stack heel boots that added two inches to his height. Shen’s cap was sharply creased; snow melted on the shiny patent brim. He offered no apologies for not having written or for not sending word he would be coming, saying only that the new recruits had been given a half day for the New Year.
“You don’t recognize your own brother?” Shen asked.
Indeed for a moment, Chow did not. His brother’s queue had been cut, the hair nearly shorn to the scalp. Leather holsters criss-crossed his chest like a harnessed animal. A black pistol waited at Shen’s waist.
Chow watches the ice spread like shiny, slippery roots across the Tianfu platform. His joints are stiff in a way no amount of hot tea can loosen. If he didn’t think he would die, he would lay down and go to sleep. Growing up in Peking, he learned how the season directs the wind: spring from the East, summer from the South, fall from the West and winter from the North. But Chow imagines the wind blowing past the Tianfu train station comes from a place where snow never melts and plants grow white.
2.
Chow and Meyer have been in Shantung Province six days, though not for the wild pears that otherwise occupy the explorer – particular Chinese strains that have proven resistant to a withering disease in America. Indeed, collecting wild pear seeds is the reason why they must now continue south to Hankow. However, Chow has worked as Meyer’s interpreter long enough to know there’s always something else to be collected: more seeds, more saplings, more samples.
Here in Shantung, more has meant fei tao or imperial peaches. Since Meyer’s supervisor wrote that the previous shipment arrived brown and leafless in Washington, D.C. (the packing moss was not wet enough and the roots dried out), the explorer has been obsessed with obtaining more fei tao cuttings. The task would have been impossible while the emperor still ruled. Then the entire crop would have been sent to the Forbidden Palace. But like many, many things, what was is no longer.
And so the day before last, Chow spent hours following Meyer, their faces covered by scarves, squinting against the wind and edging frozen ponds as they made their way to a remote hothouse. Ice and dust sliced the air. Chow’s right knee, the one he broke falling down a mountain on Meyer’s previous expedition, went stiff, and Chow was forced to bounce for miles in a springless cart pulled by a grunting coolie. In his mind Chow retreated to Peking, to the familiar warmth of his mother’s hot and sour soup and eventually to his friend Ming’s apartment with its apricot-colored chaise and phonograph. He imagined sipping whiskey there until the caverns of his chest filled with fire and he could almost believe he was warm. Like Chow, Ming was among the last to pass the provincial examination and be awarded a Flower of Talent degree, only to see the system abolished the next year. Ming was twenty-four; Chow twenty-one, both obsolete before their first post. As Ming has often said over his third or fourth whiskey, It is a problem to be us.
At the inn, Chow and Meyer slept fully dressed, side by side like countless times before, sharing the stinking rag of a blanket. The interpreter lay awake, listening to Meyer snore and smelling the explorer’s unwashed beard. The firewood gave out in the night, and long before dawn, their brick kang grew cold. Fortunately the next morning Chow convinced one of the local magistrates to help them secure cuttings of the fei tao. Perhaps it was Chow’s long robe or his careful speech that made the official shyly ask if the interpreter had once been a scholar. Such respect grows sparse these days. At the very least, the man saved Chow from another night at the inn.
As Meyer packed the fei tao cuttings (this time in very wet moss), Chow brought out his ink stone and brush to paint the white labels. Meyer makes a point of including the local names for the plants he sends to his superiors in Washington. He says Chow’s calligraphy offers the authentic touch.
Once Chow took great pride in the practice of his lines, as if his life depended on it. Even now he can recall his tutor Master Li chanting, Clearness of stroke reveals clearness of thought! The interpreter agrees with Meyer that it is good to include the Chinese names for the specimens they ship to the United States. But Chow also knows that once the plants arrive there, they will be given foreign names. Just as he knows the pink-faced American men who will momentarily admire his brushwork will have no idea if the label says imperial peach or legs up in the air whore.
3.
The station clock reads 11:40 p.m. Chow stares into the black beyond the station, hoping to see a distant headlight, but there is nothing.
“It’s too cold,” he tells Meyer.
“Yes, but cold is also good.” Meyer crosses his coat sleeves, warming his fingers in the crook of his armpits. “You see, people from cold places must plan ahead. They can’t afford to be lazy.”
Like Chow, the explorer speaks English fluently. But Meyer’s accent remains hard around the edges. Sharp, Chow thinks, like the Dutch themselves. Before the explorer became the American called Frank Meyer, he was Dutch, born Frans Meijer. Chow has seen the name spelled out on the thin blue envelopes sent from Meyer’s family in Amsterdam. The interpreter cannot understand how a man can trade one country for another.
”Because of the cold, the Northerner is always a bit smarter than his Southern neighbor,” Meyer says, reaching into his pocket. “Oats?” he asks, holding out the grubby little sack he insists on carrying.
It would be easier if Johannis were still here, Chow thinks. For two and a half years – indeed Meyer’s entire previous expedition – the explorer and his yellow-haired assistant were inseparable. Like Meyer, Johannis was born in Holland. Like Meyer, Johannis had thick legs and shoulders and could walk for twelve hours. The pair often slipped into their native Dutch, calling one another Frans and Jo and eventually broer. Brother. When Meyer and Johannis spoke between themselves, Chow didn’t have to translate plant names or directions into English or negotiate with inn owners or nurserymen. He was free to think about other things: whiskey, dice, poetry, his own apartment, all the things that would have been his if he’d just been born a little earlier.
But Chow knows better than to mention Johannis. When the expedition ended, Johannis did not renew his contract, not even for more money. Now a year and a half have passed since Johannis left to take a job as a dockhand on the coast, and despite making inquiries, Meyer cannot find a single man to take Johannis’ place. Chow knows it confounds the explorer that his countrymen, whether American or Dutch, do not wish to leave the comfort of their beds and women to roam the rutted backroads of China in the name of progress and superior fruit.
“How can a man who climbs mountains be satisfied with lifting crates?” Meyer suddenly demanded the night before last. They were at the filthy inn, having bitter soup with mustard greens, the pork bits thin and tough. The explorer lowered his spoon. “Boxes. We were the men who found the things that go in the boxes.” Meyer left the table, his soup unfinished.
Chow watches as curls of breath rise from Meyer’s nostrils. The explorer’s eyes are closed as if in prayer, and Chow remembers what Johannis once told him. Frans is like a missionary but without the promise of heaven.
4.
“It is almost midnight,” Chow says. He would point to the clock, but he doesn’t want to risk uncovering his hands.
“This is a Belgian-made train, not Chinese,” Meyer says as he paces, making a tight loop around the baggage. “The Belgians are an organized, efficient people. The train will arrive on time. It is the baggage we must consider.”
“There will be a guard posted at the luggage car.”
“Yes, but that means nothing if the man is not Belgian. The camera stays with us.”
“My trunk also,” Chow says.
Meyer raises a mittened hand as he circles. “Fine. But some things must go in the luggage car. There won’t be enough space for everything next to the seats. We’ll take turns watching at the stops. The guard won’t care. Some thief will walk off with our supplies in the night.”
The interpreter envisions how the hours will pass: Meyer rising at every stop, bumping past Chow, waking him and then returning with a report of how the Chinese porter has disappeared or fallen asleep. His employer will take the first watch and expect Chow to take the second. They will arrive exhausted at Hankow, spend several more hours before they have settled the equipment in their rooms, at which point Meyer will want to move on in his eternal search for the wild pears, refusing to let the day be wasted on sleep. Chow tells Meyer to tip the guard a quarter so the man will remember their luggage.
Meyer snorts, wipes his nose again with the filthy handkerchief. “And let him nap with my quarter in his pocket?”
“Tell him he gets another when we get to Hankow. He stays awake then.”
“So I must pay a half dollar to a man for performing his duty?”
Even though Meyer is now American, the explorer is still Dutch when it comes to money. Chow has met plenty of Dutch in the concession cities and knows the word for this tightness: cheap.
“Where are the men of principle?” Meyer asks, as if they’ve just been misplaced among the supplies, buried under the burlap sacks and the cooking pots.
Chow must resist the urge to remind Meyer that his men of principle are currently rotting in trenches in France and efficient Belgium, shooting and gassing themselves to death. The brief satisfaction wouldn’t be worth the long melancholy to follow. Meyer grows morose at talk of the war and lectures Chow on the need to form what he calls the United Federation of Earth. He has told Chow that in another hundred years there will be no more conflict or countries. In the name of progress, everyone will speak the same language, use the same currency, wear the same clothes. So Chow doesn’t mention the war just as he doesn’t mention Johannis. Just as he never mentions the hurricane that sunk the ship to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico carrying most of the specimens Meyer and Johannis collected.
“The money is worth it,” Chow tells him. “You can’t work tomorrow if you are tired.”
He sees Meyer’s pale eyes move from side to side as the explorer weighs the value of fifty cents versus a productive day in Hankow. If there’s anything his employer values more than saving money, it’s the value of a productive day. Chow almost feels sorry for Meyer. They’ve been up for eighteen hours in the cold, and even the man who astonishes the hired coolies with his endurance is tired. The explorer often complains he’s no longer young like when he first came to China. He says he needs a replacement, to return to the United States, to a place called Colorado. There he will build a cabin high in the mountains and a Chinese-style greenhouse and grow hearty plants. Yet Chow knows Meyer will never stop, for there is no place as perfect as the one he carries in his head.
“I will give him a tip,” Meyer says, folding his hands under his arms. “So you can rest.”
One of the sedan chair carriers has fallen asleep on his feet. Perhaps the man is dead. Chow looks down the railway tracks, but there is still no sign of the train. As a pancake-faced boy in Master Li’s study, Chow learned how time moved with the dragon’s breath. Each emperor was a dragon; when an emperor perished, time stood still until a new dragon emerged from the depths to take his rightful place on the throne. Only then could time begin again. The interpreter thinks that his beloved China is like himself, standing on this miserable platform, in a between place, a between time. A waiting time. A nothing time.
5.
The efficient Belgian train is late. Chow and Meyer slowly shuffle around the expedition supplies to keep themselves from freezing. Finally at half past twelve, a whistle sounds in the distance, and the band jolts upright. Meyer grimaces as the musicians clang out bright notes of importance.
“Call the porters!” he shouts at Chow.
The express exhales steam into the night air, and the doors open with a slap. Meyer pushes forward, nearly slipping on the ice. Chow reaches for his own trunk, then stops. Framed in the car’s opening above stands the mandarin, his white beard parted in two and twisted on the ends. The man pauses, as if unsure of how to navigate the new metal steps. His full robe covers his feet; as he descends, he appears to float.
Chow’s eyes travel over the thick winter robe, the cuffs and collar trimmed in fox. He sees the embroidered silk square on the scholar’s chest: wide wings. He can only guess at the bird – peacock or golden pheasant, a very high rank, before the mandarin eases himself into the chair, is lifted up and the jangling group moves towards the station house. The interpreter guesses the man is over eighty, too old to give up his privilege now.
“Quick!” Meyer barks. “Watch the camera equipment.”
The interpreter lifts his own trunk and silk bag; Meyer wears his rucksack, grabs the camera equipment and two porters manage the rest. He and Meyer push up the metal steps, past the white sleeping berths marked wagon-lits with their pressed sheets and flannel blankets, and into first-class Chinese. There are no other whites in the Chinese cars. Such cheapness is Meyer’s privilege as a Westerner. Chinese cannot ride in white cars for any amount.
Chow watches through the window as the mandarin’s procession make its way into the yellow light of the station house: the band in front, then the sedan chair and the old scholar’s bobbing hat. The sedan chair porters number four; the mandarin himself makes five, an auspicious number and sits, as rulers should, in the center of his own universe. A few bystanders edge themselves to the sides of the room and bow to the passing chair. The farther one moves from Peking, the more the old ways still hold.
“You’re thinking that you should be him,” Meyer says, situating the camera on the shelf over their seats before dropping onto the bench. “But what does that man do? Nothing. He is a decorated doll. A relic. The emperor has been gone five years. If your country would only move on, it might achieve something.”
The whistle blows, and the interpreter imagines the steam billowing from Meyer’s mouth. The train jerks forward. The collector punches the tickets. When the gas lights are dimmed, Meyer sends Chow to tip the luggage guard. Chow is glad his brother was not there to witness the old mandarin. It is easy to throw away Meyer’s words. The explorer sees only what stays the same. But with Shen, it is never easy.
As expected, the frog-faced luggage guard widens his eyes at the quarter. Steadying himself with the seat backs, Chow makes his way back through the cars. He returns to his seat to find Meyer knees to chin, his sherpa coat tucked around him. Neither man speaks. At times, the explorer is so lost to his thoughts that he appears unconscious. Outside the windows show only black.
6.
The cold seeps through the window, keeping Chow from sleep. Watching the sky, the words of his favorite poet Li Bai come to him: Lifting my head, I watch the bright moon. Lowering my head, I miss my northern home. The words have survived one thousand years. He wonders who will be left to remember them when all the men like him have died. Already Master Li is gone.
For thirteen years Chow followed the same routine each afternoon in his tutor’s study: sitting for writing, standing for reciting, his back to the book to keep from cheating. Up and down, up and down. The sages’ words appeared like scrolls in Chow’s head: a girl waving a fan, a sampan floating downstream, a lantern swaying at night. The pictures whispered answers – words, rhythm, meaning. The other boys saw nothing, remembered nothing. When called on, they stood with their eyes rolled towards the ceiling, sloppy queues dragging down their spines. Balling their fists, they bounced as if they could shake the words from their bowels.
Master Li kept a bamboo rod for those who slipped and used modern words. The pain was for their own good, their tutor reminded them. Careless errors were like sloppy brushstrokes; they would cost the boy the exam. His name would never appear on the Emperor’s list of the Flowers of Talent or bring honor to his family by earning the right to wear an embroidered bird of rank, as Master Li did, on his chest for all to see.
Left hand.
It was not for them to question the sages’ thoughts, Master Li told the cringing boy. The exams were a thousand years old. The truth remained the same. As it always would.
Palm up.
Unlike the other boys, when Shen slipped – and he often slipped – Chow’s brother never cried or looked away when the rod snapped. Instead Shen stared at Chow, as if it were his older brother who held the stick.
When Chow was twelve, Shen nine, Master Li came to their father’s shop, claiming to need a new jacket. The boys were sent out, but kept their ears pressed against the thin door separating the shop from the family’s rooms. Already their father’s eyes were growing dim.
I do not wish to waste an honest man’s money, their tutor told their father. Besides, it is only natural that the first son be the wisest, yes?
From then Chow continued to go Master Li’s house for lessons after school while Shen stayed in the shop learning to measure, cut and sew. Eventually their father’s eyes clouded over, and Shen stopped going to school altogether.
7.
When Meyer snores, Chow rises in search of the kitchen where he orders a hot noodle bowl. Unlike the formal dining room, the all-night diner allows Chinese. He finishes quickly and orders a whiskey, letting its heat rest on his tongue before swallowing. He wonders what he will eat once they reach Hankow. He has never been this far south of Peking.
He watches two men complain to the porter about an old man with a pipe in the corner. Chow knows from their accents and boiled egg faces the two are British. One smokes a cigarette, the other drinks cognac from a bell-shaped glass and points a finger towards the man with the pipe, then turns it on the porter.
“Opium,” he accuses as if it were not his own country that peddled the drug. “Tell the old boy to put it out.”
Chow knows it angers the English to have to share the car with Chinese, to have to breathe air ripe with garlic and soy and cabbage, to listen to Chinese yak yak and gamble into the night. Europeans cannot sit apart here, as they do in the concession cities, with their own police, their own laws and walled gardens, their own clubs on whose doors they post signs that read: No dogs or Chinese. After the Japanese, it is the British Chow hates the most. The British are not as cruel but only because it pleases them to look over their possessions and congratulate themselves on their benevolence. The British make servants of everyone and then expect gratitude. They call this process civilization.
The porter pretends to speak to the old Chinese who is not smoking opium. Chow orders a second whiskey and sinks into his glass. Chow knows he should return to his seat. To be awake so late is to invite dark thoughts. He tells himself he will drink just enough to forget the pain in his knee.
The Englishmen continue to speak loudly after the old man leaves the car, their skin deeply flushed from alcohol. The whiskey sloshes in Chow’s glass as the train turns. He thinks of his friend Ming as he always does when he drinks. The last time they met Chow brought a bottle, like so many times before. Ming put on his newest jazz record, turning up the volume until the windows rattled with the beat. The latest raw sounds from America – trumpets and oboes and drums – excited Ming and he swayed, arms raised towards the ceiling, while Chow drank on the apricot-colored chaise, fingering a small tear in the silk and smoking the last of his Turkish cigarettes.
When the music was finished, Ming sat in his regular place on the lacquered teak chair and pointed to the old long table in the next room where he kept his brushes. He was quitting calligraphy, he told Chow. He could see his brushwork for what it had become: a quaint touch on wedding invitations and birth announcements. Nothing more. Besides, it didn’t pay enough. For months, Ming had been asking his father for money. It was just a matter of time before his father refused. When he did, Ming would have to give up the apartment.
Chow emptied his glass. He couldn’t bear the thought of Ming losing the apartment or his evenings there. Since the fall of the emperor, the capital had been full of men like them, robed ex‑scholars hopelessly waiting for positions with the new regime. The Wilted Flowers of Talent, Ming called them. Everyone knew stories of the most desperate, men who swallowed the sulphured tips of matches. It was the cheapest and quickest way. One, two boxes and then over. His evenings with Ming had kept him from that.
“Why waste your time digging in the dirt?” Ming asked. He was standing again, swaying even though the record was done. Ming was drunk. “You always say you hate it. You can’t stand the American, but you never quit.”
“There’s no work here,” Chow said. “You know that.”
“Well, maybe there is.” Ming put down his glass on the small side table. One of the feet was missing and it wobbled, spilling his drink.
Chow stood to find a cloth and Ming snapped.
“Leave it. It’s all my father’s, anyway. From that house. Hand-me-down, throw-away. Never the good stuff.”
Chow was still standing, wanting to wipe the table.
“Leave it, I tell you. From now on, I buy my own things.”
“And how will you get the money?” Chow demanded.
Ming crossed his arms. “I have an appointment at the University of Peking. The new Director is looking for professors to teach the new ideas.”
Chow had heard about the Director from the papers. The man was not much different from them – a former Confucian scholar who now clothed himself in Western isms: capitalism, Marxism, imperialism, modernism, even feminism. It didn’t matter if the concepts contradicted one another. They were new. The word reminded Chow of the hard, stacked heels Europeans wore. Everyone noticed them simply because they sounded louder than cotton slippers.
“The university will want you,” Ming told him. “You know English. All you have to do is present yourself as a new man.”
Chow tried to swallow the taste rising in his throat. Ming had said nothing before making the appointment or even asked Chow’s opinion. Chow saw how it would be. Soon someone else would be sitting in the apricot-colored chaise and snapping his fingers to Ming’s records, someone dressed in a tight western suit.
Ming stood and poured himself another drink. “I can’t pretend anymore, understand?” For a moment, his friend’s face stared from the speckled mirror above the phonograph, then it was gone.
Ming flipped the record and stumbled to the bleating trumpets. Chow couldn’t say if his friend didn’t see him leave or simply pretended not to notice. Outside Chow flagged down a rickshaw. At some point he told the driver to stop and vomited.
8.
He feels his way forward through the cars until he recognizes Meyer’s bundled silhouette. Meyer may be sleeping; Chow cannot tell. Except for the light at the end of the car, it is very dim. The interpreter hoped the whiskey would help him sleep, but the constant jolt of the tracks makes rest impossible. He sees Meyer blink.
“Sometimes I should quit exploration. Quit China altogether.”
It is nothing Chow hasn’t heard before. The second expedition was to be Meyer’s last. Then the third. Now this, the fourth. Chow thinks it would have been better if the explorer had quit years ago. Then Chow would have had to find something else. But Meyer won’t quit. It doesn’t matter how many wild pear seeds, peach saplings, cherry trees, apricots, lemons, oranges, persimmons, pomegranates, lychees, figs, jujubes, cabbages, mustard greens, mushrooms, soy beans, tofu samples, bamboo shoots, chestnuts, walnuts, pistachios, hickory nuts Meyer sends to the United States. The man will never be finished with China. The explorer has a disease, a withering sickness like the American pears. It is more than just curiosity, more than just restlessness. Meyer is like the ghost of a man who has yet to die.
“You will feel better once you arrive in Hankow and can walk again,” Chow tells him. “You’re always sad when you’re not walking.”
“I have been thinking,” Meyer says, looking out the dark window. “All the work Johannis and I did. Lost in the hurricane. More was destroyed than I understood at the time.”
“It’s not good to think about what is gone,” Chow says.
Along with his specimens, Chow knows some of Meyer’s personal possessions sunk with the ship – photographs, letters. But Chow thinks Meyer means more than even these. The explorer is thinking the unbearable, what he will never say aloud: Johannis was right to leave.
Meyer’s hands grope at his neck. In the low light, he looks as if he’s trying to strangle himself. “My scarf. The green one from Alida for my birthday. It’s missing.”
Chow knows the scarf knit by Meyer’s sister, its yarn bright out of the parcel, now misshapen from so much wear these last months. Meyer hasn’t seen his family in Amsterdam since before the war began. Passenger ships won’t risk the German submarines.
“I’m sure you have it,” he tells Meyer.
“No, I can’t find it.” Meyer’s hands roam over the seats, the floor, his head bumping Chow’s knees. “I think it fell off at the station. Chow, help me.”
The explorer almost never calls him by his first name. In front of the field coolies, it is always Yes, Mr. Meyer. Thank you, that is all, Mr. Ting.
“I don’t remember you wearing it,” Chow says. “Look in your rucksack.”
The explorer reaches towards the shelf above, his coat falling open. The stiff sherpa lining brushes against Chow’s face. The wool smells of dirty ice, iron.
“It’s not here. I can’t find it. Wait. Yes. Yes.” Meyer collapses onto the bench, clutching the green bundle.
“Put it on. It will help you sleep.”
“Ja,” Meyer says nodding, catching his breath. He wraps his hair like a grandmother and curls up on the seat. “Around my head. Of any part, it is the head that must stay warm. The man in the field who forgets this, well, as they say, game over for him.”
Outside the window, obscure shapes shift, dark on dark. A pond glints like a polished black stone. A lantern flashes and is gone. Chow doesn’t care if he sees the terrain. He can picture it well enough: fields of wheat or cleverly terraced hillsides, layers of rice, each plant watered by trickling bamboo pipes. Or perhaps the famous silk farms of Shantung, where caterpillars silently chew mulberry leaves and spin the threads once destined for the brilliant robes of emperors.
9.
Throughout the dinner their mother rushed to prepare, Chow waited for his brother to mention the future of their father’s shop. But Shen said nothing during the meal and neither did their parents. It was as if their earlier lives had never existed, as if Shen had been born a soldier.
After dinner, Shen bowed to his parents, then wrapped their father’s hands around a small purse until their father nodded at the clinking coins. He wouldn’t get another leave for a while, Shen explained. Several provinces were threatening to break from Peking; his regiment might be sent away to fight the rebels. The uncertainty seemed to please him.
As their mother sobbed, Chow saw his brother to the street. The lamps were lit, pale spheres against black. It was snowing again.
“This American you work for, older brother,” Shen said. “He is no different than any other Westerner who steals from Chinese soil.”
“The American takes only plants,” Chow reminded his brother. Unlike the words in Master Li’s study, Shen seemed to have no trouble remembering the ideas of his new bunkhouse. “He takes what others don’t want and pays for the rest.”
“You’re quick to defend him.”
“He doesn’t work for profit, only to help his country.”
“That’s what I do, older brother. But I work to help our country.”
“And what about our father’s shop?” Chow demanded. “Who will work that?”
Shen’s fingers gripped Chow’s shoulder, pulling him in until Chow could feel the buckles of his brother’s holster jabbing at his robe. “You’re the smart one,” Shen told him. “You figure it out.”
A flash lights the train window, then disappears. A lantern, a fire, a grenade, Chow can’t say. The train moves too quickly.
“Tell me a poem,” Meyer says. “Something to help me sleep. Something from your favorite.”
But it is too late for Li Bai, Chow thinks. So he chooses from the slightly later Du Fu.
Brother of mine
often my one companion
how well you know
long wandering is my fate
“No, not that one,” Meyer interrupts, “another.”
The train slows as it pulls into the next station. Snowflakes, like plucked feathers, drift under the lamps. Shadows move through the car. The ticket collector slides the door shut, and then they are moving again, clattering down the track.
Allison Alsup’s stories have appeared in The New Orleans Review, The Madison Review, River Styx, Salamander, The New Guard, and in the 2014 O. Henry Prize Stories.