Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

‘Surely they don’t actually enforce that,’ protested Letty. ‘What about the wives? And the maidservants?’

‘The expats here hire local servants, and they keep their wives in Macau. They’re quite serious about enforcing these laws. The last time a British man tried to bring his wife to Canton – William Baynes, I believe it was – the local authorities threatened to send in soldiers to remove her.^* Anyhow, it’s for your own benefit. The Chinese treat women very badly. They have no conception of chivalry. They hold their women in low esteem and, in some cases, don’t even permit them to leave the house. You’ll be better off if they think you’re young men. You’ll learn that Chinese society remains quite backwards and unjust.’

‘I wonder what that’s like,’ Victoire said drily, accepting the cap.

The next morning they spent the sunrise hour above deck, milling about the prow, occasionally leaning over the railing as if those inches of difference would help them spot what navigational science claimed they were fast approaching. The thick dawn mists had just given way to blue sky when the horizon revealed a thin strip of green and grey. Slowly this acquired detail, like a dream materializing; the blurred colours became a coast, became a silhouette of buildings behind a mass of ships docking at the tiny point where the Middle Kingdom encountered the world.

For the first time in a decade, Robin found himself gazing at the shores of his motherland.

‘What are you thinking?’ Ramy asked him quietly.

This was the first time they’d spoken directly to each other in weeks. It was not a truce – Ramy still refused to look him in the eyes. But it was an opening, a grudging acknowledgment that despite everything, Ramy still cared, and for that Robin was grateful.

‘I’m thinking about the Chinese character for dawn,’ he said truthfully. He couldn’t let himself dwell on the larger magnitude of it all. His thoughts threatened to spiral to places he feared he could not control unless he brought them down to the familiar distraction of language. ‘Dàn. It looks like this.’ He drew the character in the air: 旦. ‘Up top is the radical for the sun – rì.’ He drew 日. ‘And under that, a line. And I’m just thinking about how it’s beautiful because it’s so simple. It’s the most direct use of pictography, see. Because dawn is just the sun coming up over the horizon.’

Chapter Seventeen

Quae caret ora cruore nostro?

What coast knows not our blood?

HORACE, Odes

A year ago, after overhearing Colin and the Sharp brothers loudly discussing it in the common room, Robin had gone alone to London over a weekend to see the celebrated Afong Moy. Advertised as the ‘Chinese Lady’, Afong Moy had been brought out of China by a pair of American traders who’d initially hoped to use an Oriental lady to showcase goods acquired overseas, but who quickly realized they could instead make a fortune exhibiting her person across the eastern seaboard. This was her first tour to England.

Robin had read somewhere that she was also from Canton. He wasn’t sure what he’d hoped for other than a glimpse of, perhaps a moment of connection with, someone who shared his motherland. His ticket granted him admission to a garish stage room advertised as a ‘Chinese Saloon’, decorated with randomly placed ceramics, shoddy imitations of Chinese paintings, and a suffocating quantity of gold and red damask illuminated by cheap paper lanterns. The Chinese Lady herself was seated on a chair at the front of the room. She wore a blue silk buttoned shirt, and her feet, bound conspicuously in linen, were propped up on a small cushion before her. She looked very small. The pamphlet he’d been handed at the ticket booth claimed she was somewhere in her twenties, but she could have easily been as young as twelve.

The room was loud and packed with an audience of mostly men. They hushed when, slowly, she reached down to unbind her feet.

The story of her feet was also explained in the pamphlet. Like many young Chinese women, Afong Moy’s feet had been broken and bound when she was young to restrict their growth and to leave them curved in an unnatural arch that gave her a tottering, unstable gait. As she walked across the stage, the men around Robin pushed forward, trying to get a closer look. But Robin could not understand the appeal. The sight of her feet seemed neither erotic nor fascinating, but rather a great invasion of intimacy. Standing there, watching her, he felt as embarrassed as if she’d just pulled down her trousers before him.

Afong May returned to her chair. Her eyes locked suddenly on Robin’s; she seemed to have scanned the room and found kinship in his face. Cheeks flushing, he averted his eyes. When she started to sing – a lilting, haunting melody that he did not recognize and could not understand – he pushed his way through the crowd and left the room.

Apart from Griffin, he had not seen any Chinese people since.