Read an Excerpt
I Feel I Have Fallen
among Friends
THE CITY WAS not yet in sight. It lay behind the hill called Monkey Head, around the great bend in the river, but the foreign doctor in the incongruous bowler hat--incongruous in the hinterlands of Fujian Province--asked the boatmen to put him ashore. He was sure he could walk faster than the river junk was being rowed.
By the Chinese calendar, Edward Bliss, M. D., had arrived in that province on the sixteenth day of the tenth moon in the eighteenth year of the reign of Emperor Guangxu. The date by Western reckoning was November 5, 1892. The coastal steamer had left Shanghai at daybreak on the fourth and had reached Fuzhou on the night of the fifth, picking its way up the intricate channel to Pagoda Anchorage in the light of a yellow moon. That same night, writing home, he described the broad harbor mouth and the encircling mountains and the warm welcome given him by the Fuzhou missionaries. He had wondered if he would feel lost among them, for they were all strangers, but he was able to say, "I feel I have fallen among friends."
He had been assigned to the mission station at Shaowu, on the upper reaches of the Min, which required a river trip that, in that time, took three weeks. He had planned to proceed there directly, but the American consul advised him to wait. The Min, with its rapids and marauding pirates, was no river to travel alone. Joseph Elkanah Walker, D. D., and his wife, Adelaide, would be making the trip in about a month and were old China hands. Walker had founded the Protestant mission at Shaowu and may have known more about China than any other "roundeye" in the province, for he made a serious study of its culture, wrote beautifully in Chinese, and was able to translate hymns. It was said that he was as at home with the parables of Confucius as he was with those of Christ.
Walker's personal history captured the imagination of the children of the mission. His father, a graduate of Bangor Theological Seminary in Maine, had served as missionary to Indian tribes in Oregon Territory. The journey across the American continent from Maine took 178 days, most of them on horseback. The son enrolled at the same seminary a year before completion of the transcontinental railroad, and so to reach Bangor from Oregon Territory he had traveled by ship to Panama; by train--in a boxcar-- across the isthmus; by ship to New York, and then by train the rest of the way. It was on a paddle-wheeled steamer of the Pacific Mail Line that he came to China from San Francisco in 1872.
Now with his wife he was returning from furlough in America, and the consul had no doubt they would welcome the young doctor's presence on the long, upriver trip. As it turned out, the Walkers did not reach Fuzhou for two months. Although Edward chafed at the delay, he put the time to good use at the mission hospital, treating fearsome, often unfamiliar diseases he later would have to treat by himself. (His first patient was a deaf mute who set forth his symptoms in unintelligible Chinese characters.) Descendants have an old photograph of Edward taken in this period. He appears in a group picture. "Oh," he said one time, recalling the occasion, "that was my first Christmas in China. The Foochow [Fuzhou] people had a celebration, and there was plum pudding and a tree." The photograph shows him wearing a mustache--the goatee came later--but he has the same alert eyes and well-shaped bald head that proves he lost his hair early.
It was not until January 19, 1893, that they started upriver. Walker superintended the loading of the two boats like a seasoned docker, shouting orders in shrill Fukienese and smiting his forehead with the palm of his hand in exasperation whenever a box was placed in the wrong boat or a crate of breakables was too rudely set down. Sacks of oranges and potatoes, flour bags wrapped in oil paper, canned dried beef, cocoa, condensed milk, and medicines were stowed under loose deck boards. Other provisions, packed in bamboo baskets, were set aside for use during the trip. Live cargo consisted of five caged chickens.
The bustle seemed out of all proportion to the business of transporting three foreigners and their worldly goods. Coolies with broad bamboo hats and flouncing queues trotted to the boats in impressive succession with the missioners' possessions while, through it all, a solitary crewman sat in the stern of the Walker boat, mending a sail. He seemed the only serene, right-minded person in the whole affair.
Their flotilla consisted of three river junks of the class called duck boats. In fact, all Min River boats were in the "fowl" class. There were duck boats and rooster boats, made of camphor wood, and super duck boats and sparrow boats. A rooster boat was twice as big as an ordinary duck boat and only a little smaller than a super duck. The so-called salt boat was a version of the super duck used to transport salt, which was a government monopoly. The sparrow boat, which reminded Edward of a whale boat, was the smallest craft on the river, measuring no more than twenty feet. With their narrow beams and V-bottoms, the little sparrows darted between rocks that would tear other boats apart. The duck boats chartered by Walker were puny compared to the great river junks of North China, which sometimes measured more than a hundred feet. The Walkers and their belongings, including a new set of dining room furniture, took up two of the boats, Edward shared his boat with a bright-faced Shaowu boy of fifteen who had been attending the middle school at Fuzhou. With a crew of nine on each boat, no one had room to spare.
It was 250 miles from Fuzhou to Shaowu, and on the first day they traveled only fourteen miles. While the patched sail fluttered dismally between an occasional breeze, Edward studied with the schoolboy Tsien, who had cheerfully agreed to teach him a few phrases in the Shaowu dialect. These lessons took place in the open bow of the boat. A large thatched canopy, or peng, covered the craft amidships. Edward and the boy slept in the forward cabin with a few yards of mosquito netting draped over the entrance. The large aft cabin belonged to the crew. During that first day the crewmen were strangely invisible, although their voices, low and aspirate, could be heard through the bulkhead. In the stern, the frowning helmsman stood on a raised platform, his arm on the great sweep oar, looking straight ahead, rarely moving, a graven image of purpose.
Toward noon the Walker boat pulled alongside, and Edward went aboard for a Chinese meal of mushrooms, fried red peppers, and rice. Walker said that mushrooms raised at Shaowu were famous for their tenderness and flavor. Reminiscing, he told how he and two other missionaries, Simeon Woodin and D. W. Osgood, "discovered" Shaowu on the fifteenth day of November 1873, the first Americans ever to enter the walled city. Osgood, too, was a doctor and treated such cases as presented themselves, while Woodin and Walker traipsed through the countryside, distributing tracts.
The three missionaries reconnoitered for a week, then withdrew to Fuzhou. But in 1876, Joseph Walker returned with Adelaide and stayed. During the next sixteen years they were joined by other missionary families, but the merciless climate, and malaria, forced all but two families to leave. An excitement filled Walker as he talked. Pioneering came to him naturally. He said, "I had to pioneer," and told how his parents had gone to Oregon Territory.
Walker said that normally they would proceed under sail as far as Shuikou, now a matter of sixty miles. If the wind died absolutely, the men would take to the oars. Shuikou marked the foot of the first rapids, where tracking would begin. To track, six men from each boat would go ashore and don their harness. Only three stayed on board--the helmsman to steer and the two others to keep the boat off the rocks with their iron-tipped poles. "In some places," Walker said, "you will see eighteen or twenty men on a single tracking line. They will pull one boat through the rapids and then go back for another. I have seen it take an hour to pull one salt boat fifty feet."
He picked up one of the lines and showed Edward how it was plaited with strands of bamboo and how each line, no matter its diameter, was composed of sixteen of these strands. If the line was heavier, each individual strand was heavier, but the number of strands was always the same magic number, sixteen. The lines were hundreds of feet long, so that they would reach several times across the river if let out their full length. And if they dipped into the current, it made no difference. They would not gain weight and encumber the trackers because bamboo does not absorb water. Walker called the river ruthless. "In four thousand years," he said, "the Chinese have built perhaps a hundred bridges between Fuzhou and Shaowu, and today not one of them stands."
As he talked, the missionary flotilla passed a village, where on the riverbank women were washing clothes. The women were kneeling. Again and again they dipped the clothes in the water, cudgeled them, and wrung them. Near the opposite shore a mandarin's caravel moved majestically downstream, propelled by fourteen oarsmen whose shafts rose and dipped rhythmically, like the oars of a Roman galley. The chant of the oarsmen came to Edward across the water, and he could make out a large dragon flag waving at the stern.
