Well, almost the whole of Idaho City. The Chinamen were busy preparing for Chinese New Year.
For the whole week the Chinamen talked about nothing except the coming New Year celebration. Strings of bright red firecrackers shipped from San Francisco were unpacked and laid out on shelves so that they would be kept dry. A few of the more nimble-fingered were set to the task of folding and cutting the paper animals that would be offered along with bundles of incense to the ancestors. Everyone worked to wrap pieces of candy and dried lotus seeds in red paper to be handed out to the children as sweet beginnings to a new year. Two days before New Year’s Eve, Ah Yan directed all the men in the preparation of the thousands of dumplings that would be consumed on New Year’s Day. The living room was turned into an assembly line for a dumpling factory, with some men rolling out the dough at one end, others preparing the stuffing of diced pork and shrimp and chopped vegetables mixed with sesame oil, and the rest wrapping scoops of stuffing into dumplings shaped like closed clams. The finished dumplings were then packed into buckets covered with dried sheets of lotus leaves and left outside, frozen in the ice, until they could be cooked in boiling water on New Year’s Eve.
Lily helped out wherever she could. She sorted the strings of firecrackers by size until her fingers smelled of gunpowder. She learned to cut pieces of colorful paper into the shapes of chickens and goats and sheep so that they could be burned in the presence of the gods and the ancestors and allow them to share in the feast of the people.
“Will Lord Guan Yu be there to appreciate the paper sheep?” Lily asked Logan.
Logan looked amused for a moment before his face, made even ruddier than usual because of the cold, turned serious. “I’m sure he will be there.”
In the end, Lily proved most valuable as the final step in the dumpling assembly line. She was an expert at sculpting the edges of the dumplings with a fork to create the wavy scallop shell pattern that signified the unbroken line of prosperity.
“You are really good at that,” Logan said. “If you didn’t have red hair and green eyes, I’d think you were a Chinese girl.”
“It’s just like shaping a pie crust,” Lily said. “Mom taught me.”
“You’ll have to show me how to make a proper pie crust after New Year’s,” Ah Yan said. “I’ve always wanted to learn that American trick.”
The activity of the Chinamen stirred up all kinds of excitement in the rest of Idaho City.
“Everybody gets a red packet filled with money and sweets,” the children whispered to one another. “All you have to do is to show up at their door and wish them to come into their fortune in the new year.”
“Jack Seaver has been raving about the cooking of the Chinamen for months now,” the women said to one another in the shops and streets. “Here’s our only chance to try it out. They say the Chinamen will serve anyone who comes to their door with pork dumplings that combine all the flavors in the world.”
“Are you going to be at the Chinamen’s when they celebrate their New Year?” the men asked one another. “They say that the heathens will put on a parade to honor their ancestors, with lots of loud music and colorful costumes. At the end, they’ll even serve up a feast such as never before seen in all of Boise Basin.”
? ? ?
“What was Logan like back in China? Does he have a large family there?” Lily asked Ah Yan as she helped the young man carry large jars of sweet bamboo shoots into the house. She was tired from all the work she had done that day and couldn’t wait until the feast tomorrow. Truth be told, she felt a little guilty. She was never this eager when her own mother asked her to help around the house. She resolved to do better after tomorrow.
“Don’t know,” Ah Yan said. “Logan wasn’t from our village. He wasn’t even a Southerner. He just showed up on the docks on the day we were supposed to ship out for San Francisco.”
“So he was a stranger even in his own land.”
“Yup. You should ask him to tell you the story of our trip here.”
It is hardly the happy and the powerful who go into exile.
— Alexis de Tocqueville
When in America
On a good day the captain allowed a small number of his cargo to come up on deck from steerage for some air. The rest of the time each man made do with a six-foot bunk that was narrower than a coffin. In the complete darkness of the locked hold they tried to sleep away the hours, their dreams mixtures of unfounded hopes and cryptic dangers. Their constant companion was the smell of sixty men and their vomit and excrement and their food and unwashed bodies crammed into a space meant for bales of cotton and drums of rum. That, and the constant motion of the sailing ship as it made the six-week journey across the Pacific Ocean.
They asked for water. Sometimes that request was even granted. Other times they waited for it to rain and listened for leaks into the hold. They learned very quickly to cut salted fish out of their diet. It made them thirsty.
To keep the darkness from making them crazy, they told one another stories that they all knew by heart.
They took turns to recite the story of Lord Guan Yu, the God of War, and how he once made it through six forts and slew five of ??Treacherous Cao Cao’s generals with the help of only Red Hare, his war steed, and Green Dragon Moon, his trusty sword.
“Lord Guan Yu would laugh at us as mere children if he heard us complaining about a little thirst and hunger and taking a trip in a boat,” said the Chinaman whom the others called Lao Guan. He was so tall that he had to sleep with his knees curled up to his chest to fit into his bunk. “What are we afraid of? We are not going there to fight a war but to build a railroad. America is not a land of wolves and tigers. It is a land of men. Men who must work and eat, just as we do.”
The others laughed in the darkness. They imagined the red face of Lord Guan Yu, fearless in any battle and full of witty stratagems to get himself out of any trap. What was a little hunger and thirst and darkness when Lord Guan Yu faced down dangers ten thousand times worse?
They sucked and nursed on the turnips and cabbages they had carried with them from the fields of their villages. The men held them up to their noses and inhaled deeply the smell of the soil that still clung to the roots. It would be the last time they would smell home for years.
Some of the men became sick and coughed all night, and the noise kept everyone awake for hours. Their foreheads felt like irons left for too long on the stove. The men had no medicine with them, no cubes of ice sugar or slices of goose pear. All they could do was to wait in the darkness silently.
“Let us sing the songs that our mothers sang to us as children,” said Lao Guan. He was so tall he had to stoop as he felt his way around the dark hold, clasping the hand of each comrade, sick and healthy alike. “Since our families are not with us, we should do as Lord Guan Yu did with Lord Liu Bei and Lord Zhang Fei in the Peach Orchard. We must become as brothers to each other.”
The men sang the nonsense songs of their childhood in the stifling air of the hold, and their voices washed over the bodies of the sick men like a cool breeze, lulling them to sleep.
In the morning the coughing did not resume. A few of the men were found in their coffin-wide bunks, their unmoving legs curled close to their still bodies like sleeping babies.
“Throw them overboard,” said the captain. “The rest of you will now have to pay back the price of their tickets.”
Lao Guan’s face was redder than the fever-flushed faces of the sick. He stooped next to the bodies and cut off locks of hair from each of them, carefully sealing each lock into an envelope. “I’ll bring these back to their ancestral villages so that their spirits will not wander the oceans without being able to return home.”