An Ocean Apart, a World Away Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  A Note on the Manchus, Manchuria, and Manchukuo

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM DELL LAUREL-LEAF BOOKS

  Copyright Page

  “You must know how much you mean to me!” he whispered urgently. “Come with me to the north. Since that day in the Shanghai alley, I can’t stop thinking about you, about your coolness and your bravery. I can’t get you out of my mind!”

  “But—but—your plans,” I stammered. “I’ll be in your way!”

  His eyes were bright. “What a glorious team we would make! You’ve always wanted adventure, Yanyan. Here is your chance!”

  Things were going too fast for me. “What about my medical studies?” I asked. “I want to study to be a doctor.”

  I just stared at Baoshu. My heart was pounding, and even if I had had the words, I was unable to speak. “What are you saying?” I finally managed to croak.

  CHAPTER 1

  “It’s out of the question!” said Father. I was usually able to coax him into seeing things my way, but this time he was firm. “Shanghai is one of the most disorderly cities in the world! Even in England, I heard people use the term ‘to shanghai,’ and it means . . .” He stopped, looked embarrassed, and then continued. “Anyway, it’s an evil place. I can’t allow a daughter of mine to be exposed to that wicked city without protection.”

  We continued eating, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Having lost my appetite, I just picked at the grains of rice in my bowl.

  In a few days my dearest friend, Tao Ailin, was leaving on a steamship from Shanghai to America. It was possible that I would never see her again. I desperately wanted to say good-bye to her before the ship sailed.

  Then Mother spoke, and to my surprise, she took my side. “Yanyan and Ailin were very close, and I can understand how much she wants to see her friend one last time.”

  Father thought for a while. “Very well, Yanyan can go to Shanghai if we find someone to accompany her as protector,” he said finally. After a moment he said, “How about my secretary, Xiao Lin?”

  “We cannot have Yanyan go to Shanghai accompanied by a man who is not a relation!” cried Mother, shocked.

  “Besides, he’s not much of a protector,” I said. The secretary was a meek little man who would cringe in alarm if a cockroach crossed his path. “If a bully showed up, I would have to protect him!”

  Help came from a most unexpected source. Eldest Brother cleared his throat. “Actually, I was thinking of going to Shanghai myself. My friend Liang Baoshu has some people he wants to meet there, and he asked if I would like to accompany him. Maybe Yanyan can come with us.”

  I had heard Eldest Brother mention Liang Baoshu before as a fellow student in his martial arts class. According to tradition, a well-educated gentleman should be good in both wen, meaning book learning, and wu, meaning martial skills. My two elder brothers had taken martial arts lessons from a master. Second Brother had dropped out after a while, but Eldest Brother continued the lessons, and we knew he was one of the best students in his class. The class had another outstanding student called Liang Baoshu, he had said.

  My parents decided to invite Liang Baoshu for dinner the following night so that they could meet him and judge for themselves whether he would be a suitable companion for the trip to Shanghai. I was overjoyed. I had always been interested in the martial arts, and now I would meet one of the best students in the class. Best of all, I would have a chance to go to Shanghai and see Ailin after all.

  “This is Liang Baoshu,” said Eldest Brother, introducing his friend.

  The boy bowed to my father first, then to my mother. He did not turn toward me, nor did Eldest Brother introduce me.

  This allowed me to study the visitor. He was very tall, which made me suspect he was a northerner. Our family, the Zhangs, had lived in Nanjing for generations. Our city is about halfway up China, and Nanjing literally means “Southern Capital,” while Beijing means “Northern Capital.” So we tended to think of ourselves as southerners. Most northerners were tall, with high cheekbones, and they had a reputation for being taciturn. They claimed they were people of deeds, not words. We southerners said they just couldn’t express themselves very well.

  Liang Baoshu was not only tall but moved with easy grace, and I could well believe that he was one of the best students in the martial arts class. When he spoke, I became certain that he was a northerner, because he had the accent of Beijing City.

  We sat down to eat dinner, with the men on one side of the table and the women on the other side. I had heard that in some families, men and women were placed in alternate seats. We were modern, but not that modern!

  As usual, I gave Mother my arm as she walked to the dining table. She had bound feet and tottered a little while she walked. After I had helped Mother sit down, I straightened up and found the visitor looking at my feet and then straight into my face.

  “Didn’t my brother tell you?” I said. “I don’t have bound feet.”

  Liang Baoshu blinked at being addressed directly but recovered quickly. “Manchu women don’t have bound feet, either,” he said.

  Father dominated the dinner conversation. Sometimes my brothers openly contradicted him, for unlike many Chinese fathers, he permitted his children to do this. He actually enjoyed arguing with us. Of course, he enjoyed winning the argument even more. Tonight he started talking about vehicles that were not pulled by men but powered by engines.

  For once Mother joined the conversation. Usually she was too shy to speak out, especially when there were male guests present. But lately Father had been encouraging her to speak up. (The fact that I spoke out a lot had its effect on Mother, too.) “I thought we already had vehicles powered by engines,” she said softly. “Don’t they run on those iron roads that are being built all over the country? There’s one that runs all the way from here to Beijing!”

  “You’re thinking of trains,” said Father. “I mean something different. I’m talking about motorcars that carry only three to four people. They don’t need iron tracks, but can run on regular roads. Mark my words, we’ll see our streets full of these motorcars someday!”

  The rest of us looked skeptical. I frankly couldn’t imagine our streets jammed with these motorcars. The rickshaw men wouldn’t stand for it, and think of the mess if one of these things should become tangled up with a mule cart!

  Eldest Brother smiled at our guest. “The so-called motorcars might replace your beloved horses one day!”

  Liang Baoshu smiled back. “Maybe they will in the city streets, but not in the wide-open countryside. There’s nothing more exhilarating than riding a good horse.”

  His eyes were bright as he talked about riding, and I could easily picture him galloping like the wind. I must have been listening with my mouth open. Again he looked directly into my face.

  I blushed and looked down. I didn’t often blush, and I was almost never embarrassed, so I made an effort to raise my head and meet his eyes again. What was he seeing when he looked at me? I knew I was not beautiful. I didn’t have what writers called cherry lips, moth-wing eyebrows, and plum-blossom cheeks. In fact, I thought my cheeks were too round. Mother liked to call me her cute little dumpling, but I couldn’t trust the words of a mother. Besides, I didn’t want to be a dumpling; I wanted to be a woman warrior, like the ones in the adventure novels I was always reading. I wondered if our guest liked girls who were bold and active.
>
  When the meal was ended, Eldest Brother said he wanted to show his guest a book recommended by his teacher. Liang Baoshu bowed politely to my parents and thanked them for their hospitality. Before he left the table, he glanced at me once again. It was such a quick glance that I would have missed it if I hadn’t been waiting for it.

  The next day, my parents gave their approval to my trip to Shanghai with Eldest Brother and Liang Baoshu. I would be seeing Ailin again.

  The night before we left for Shanghai, I thought back on my friendship with Tao Ailin. We had first met at the MacIntosh School, which was run by American missionaries. Ailin and I were among the few girls who did not have bound feet, and we had immediately become friends.

  But Ailin’s unbound feet caused her engagement to be broken. After her father died, the Tao family encountered financial problems, and Ailin’s position at home became so intolerable that she left to work as a nanny for the Warners, an American missionary family.

  My family, the Zhangs, was well-off because we had managed to keep our money even after the revolution in 1911. In the case of Ailin’s family, their money had come largely from land that had been taken over by various warlords. It was now ten years after the revolution, but conditions in China were still very unstable. The central government controlled only a small part of the country, while the rest was dominated by powerful warlords, some of them no better than bandits.

  It was one of the saddest days of my life when Ailin had to drop out of school after her uncle decided he could no longer pay the fees. During the two years Ailin worked for the Warners, I saw her only a few times. I think she avoided me and the rest of her former school-mates. Our English teacher, Miss Gilbertson, once invited her to a party for her students. Ailin looked uncomfortable the whole time, and she never came to a gathering again. I tried inviting her to my house, but she would always say that her duties as a nanny kept her too busy to come. I gave up trying to press her.

  And now Ailin was about to go to America with the Warners. She would cross the ocean and go to a country nearly at the other end of the world! A part of me envied her this great adventure. But going to America was not in my future. I already knew what I was going to do, and what my future was going to be.

  Four years before, when I was twelve years old, I had decided I wanted to become a doctor. Our family doctor was a dignified gentleman with a long white beard. He would stroke his beard and talk in his deep voice about the philosophical aspects of various illnesses. I didn’t understand anything he said, but I was deeply impressed by his manner.

  To examine his patients, he felt the pulses in various parts of their body. In the case of a woman patient, he took the pulses in her arm, which she extended while she stayed hidden modestly behind the curtains of her bed. After feeling the pulses, he would diagnose the illness and prescribe an herbal medicine.

  I used to be awed at the way the doctor could diagnose an illness simply by feeling some pulses. Then something happened that started me wondering. One of our maids got a deep cut in her hand, which became red and puffy. The family doctor was summoned, and as usual, he felt the pulses in her arm while offering his philosophical discourse. At the end, he prescribed a yellowish powder, which was mixed with hot water and given to the girl to drink.

  My father looked on skeptically while the family doctor treated the maid. Father had traveled to Europe and lived for two years in London, working at the Chinese legation there. During that time he had become fascinated with Western science and medicine. In Europe, Father had heard that something with alcohol, such as a strong liquor, could help kill the poisons in a wound. After the family doctor had left, Father decided to try this new treatment. “Fetch me some strong liquor,” he said to Mother.

  Mother brought over a bottle of our best wujiapi liquor, and Father splashed some over the wound. The maid screamed and leaped out of bed, knocking over Mother and two other maids who were holding her down. She howled and shrieked for a while, and then fell into an exhausted sleep. After a few days, she began to recover.

  I never forgot that incident. Was it the liquor that cured the maid? Or was it the powder from the old family doctor? How could there be such drastically different ways to treat a wound? That was when I resolved to become a doctor. I wanted to know about Western medicine, as well as traditional Chinese medicine.

  From that day on, I tried to look on whenever the family physician visited someone at our residence. Pretty soon the doctor became annoyed by my nosiness, and once he actually ordered me out of the room. Although Father never again had wujiapi liquor splashed directly into a cut, he ordered it used to wipe the surrounding area whenever someone received a hurt. I eagerly took on the role of bringing the bottle of liquor, and even helped wipe the wound.After a while our people began to say that they really healed faster, and some even gave me credit for bringing them luck. I became convinced that alcohol, rather than the physician’s yellow powder, was more effective for treating wounds.

  By that time, I had already been attending the MacIntosh School for Girls, which was run by American missionaries. Some of our relatives found it shocking that I should be going to a school run by foreigners, where they would fill me with strange, modern ideas. “Things have been changing since the revolution,” said Father. “It’s high time for Yanyan to be exposed to new and modern ideas.”

  I got into a lot of trouble in school because I was loud and liked to contradict the teachers. My teacher asked the class one day what we intended to do after leaving school. For once I won the teacher’s approval, when I announced my ambition to study Western medicine.

  My determination to study medicine had Father’s support. He returned from Europe bringing fascinating Western instruments, including one called a microscope. He let me peer through its glass opening, and I saw some tiny things moving around. Father told me they were germs, and they were invisible to the naked eye. He said some of these germs could have caused our maid’s hand to swell. He was pleased that I would be able to learn about germs one day.

  There were a number of modern,Western-style hospitals in China, most of them set up with foreign help. Some even had women doctors, trained in Japan, Europe, and America. They dealt mostly with problems of childbirth, but I heard Father mention one woman doctor who became a surgeon and actually cut people open with a sharp knife called a scalpel! She sounded like a true heroine, and I wondered if I could ever become a doctor like her.

  “Working as a doctor would ruin Yanyan’s chances of getting married!” declared my aunt, one of our more conservative relatives. “No decent gentleman would want to marry a woman who worked outside the home.”

  “I don’t intend to get married,” I declared. “I’m going to earn a living by my work.”

  And I felt that way still—at least until I met Liang Baoshu.

  The journey from Nanjing to Shanghai was about forty-five miles, and it would take five hours. This was only my second train trip. The first was a group outing of our class last year, when we had been taken to visit the famous gardens of Suzhou. We had been crowded into compartments with eight girls in each, and I still remembered the high-pitched noise of the other girls’ chattering. One girl in our group became sick, and we had to open a window to let her throw up. Unfortunately, some of the vomit blew back inside, and this made several other girls sick, too. It was not a trip I wanted to remember.

  But this trip was different. Although the purpose was a sad one—seeing off my friend—the journey itself was much more comfortable. We were in a first-class compartment, and for a while the three of us had the little room to ourselves. I had a window seat, and Eldest Brother sat next to me. Liang Baoshu was seated opposite me, and at first I was too shy to look up into his eyes.

  The compartment became uncomfortably warm and I tried to open the window, but I couldn’t raise it. Liang Baoshu stood up, jerked at the window, and got it halfway open. At that moment, the train gave a loud toot and a lurch. We both staggered. Just as we regai
ned our balance, a black cloud of soot from the coal-burning engine blew straight into our faces.

  After I finished coughing, I opened my eyes and saw a stranger with a black face laughing hysterically. I looked again and saw that it was Liang Baoshu. He took a breath, pointed at my face, and broke into another fit of laughter. I realized that my face was just as black as his.

  Dipping a handkerchief into my cup of tea, I tried to wipe the soot from my face, but only succeded in smearing it. Liang Baoshu did the same, and judging from smudges still left on his face, I gathered that I looked just as bad. Eldest Brother grinned broadly as he surveyed the two of us, and told us that we both resembled street ragamuffins.

  After that, I lost my shyness and relaxed. Before too long I found I was hungry. We stopped at a station, and I saw people selling food on the platform. When one of the vendors saw my nose pressed against the glass, he grinned and held up a bowl of soup noodles. I looked at Eldest Brother, but he shook his head. “Better not take a chance. You never know how clean the food is from these vendors.”

  “There’s a dining room aboard the train,” said Liang Baoshu, smiling at me. “We can eat lunch in a proper manner.”

  The thought of eating in a room full of strangers was exciting, although Mother would have turned pale at the very idea. I wanted to know how I could clean my face before appearing in public. Again, Liang Baoshu knew the answer. I had the impression that he was an experienced traveler. “There is a washroom at the end of this car. You’ll find basins and a supply of water. There’s even a mirror.”

  I found not only a washroom, but also a toilet. Having used a flush toilet at the MacIntosh School, I was able to manage without disgracing myself.

  The three of us, looking reasonably clean, went into the dining car, which had small rectangular tables covered with white linen cloths. A man in a white jacket ushered us to a table, and his eyebrows rose when he saw that I had unbound feet. He probably thought I was some sort of maid, accompanying the two boys to serve them.