Chapter 2912: The Family Visit

Refitting and rebuilding old hulls was clearly not nearly enough. In 1637, no sooner had the Bopu shipyard's Hongpai port works been completed than it laid down a batch of machine-cannon launches. The Navy hoped they might exploit small size and shallow draft to close in and destroy or suppress the Ming's shore-battery fire, covering the spar-torpedo boats' barrier-breaching operations. Under the tactical scheme of the "god of war of small boats," the immortal Staff Officer Wang, the gun launches must also shoulder the duty of ranging out in independent squadrons to sweep the enemy's small craft and fire ships from the water. To that end they had been redesigned off the spar-torpedo prototype with improved stability and lengthened hulls, so that even at slightly greater displacement, on the same type of engine they outsped the torpedo boats. That virtue was at the moment causing Helmsman Guan Zongbao considerable trouble. Kap Shui Mu did not belie its name: the raging current broke against the turtle-backed bow and poured away to either side; the engines, spinning full out, drove the launch head-on into the stream, and ever and again a flying wavehead climbed the conning tower, burst into spray against the armored top, and leaked in through the vision slits straight down into Guan Zongbao's eyes. He wiped away the salt water that stung his lids and peered out: everywhere nothing but heaving white water, the launch ahead glimpsed only in flickers between the crests. To hold course and interval truly, to keep the formation running, in such conditions was wearing, thankless drudgery of the first water. Guan Zongbao bit his lip. This, he knew, was a mere foretaste; harsher training, and battle itself, still waited behind.

Toward noon the Jieyun handed her canvas and let go her anchor at a berth near the Kowloon wharves. Mai Ruibao stayed out on deck. The sea air that had cut to the bone at dawn had climbed degree by degree since sunrise, and now, baking under the sun, it hung hot and heavy — hot enough to set his very heart to fretting. Earlier he had counted himself lucky, watching the Jieyun stand past the Hong Kong island piers of Sheung Wan and Central, crowded hull to hull, and make for Kowloon — a step nearer home, after all. He had not expected the Tsim Sha Tsui berths to be ranked full of timber carriers in flocks and strings, cranes hissing white steam as they swung great rough logs up out of the holds, iron arms slewing this way and that to lay them down in the stacking yards. "You see that?" Mai Ruijin flung an arm out, mightily pleased with himself. "Ironwood out of Annam, red rosewood — timber good enough in Shuntianfu for the Emperor Zhu's dragon bed, and the Chiefs put it into shipbuilding. I ask you: is that style, or is it style? Once I've passed second mate and saved the money, I'll have a ship built and go run timber to Annam and Siam myself."

For ever since the disposable old ships the Nanyang Company had inherited from its forerunner, the Southeast Asia Company, had one and all gone up as boiler fuel, that nerve of President Zhou's — "learning from the advanced experience of the natives" — had swollen thick and long past all restraint. By every means he could devise he had recruited a band of native boatwrights out of the Pearl River delta and set up a rudimentary shipyard at Can Tho — capital-to-be of the southern Vietnam colony, though for the present no more than a colonial outpost. There, in harness with the roaring "agricultural reclamation" (that is to say, clear-cutting) of the Nine Dragons River plain, cheap fir and cypress were sawn on the spot and nailed straight into hulls without waiting to season; loaded with high-value hardwood; and upon reaching Sanya or Hong Kong, the one-voyage ships were broken up outright into plank and sold off to the shipyards and the woodwork mills. A business that turned one unit of capital into ten thousand of profit, it had already carried handsome sums into the Nanyang Company's coffers — handsome enough that men were now raising fresh funds about it, intending to raise a second disposable-ship shipyard at Thonburi, a trading post specially licensed by King Prasat Thong of Siam, himself a principal wellspring of Siamese teak.

Mai Ruibao could not be bothered to mock his brother's dream of riches, and asked him point-blank instead how long it would be before the Jieyun worked up to a berth, so the two of them might go home together — whereupon Mai Ruijin hemmed and hawed, pleaded the need to lay in spare timber for the ship's nailing and patching, and made off. Only when they met again did he tell his little brother: the captain had just announced that once the Jieyun tied up, the holds must be washed out, every hand would be on overtime, and tomorrow they would up anchor and stand direct for Lingao. "No getting home this trip. Presently the post office will send a mailman aboard for the letters — you go along with his sampan."

Mai Ruibao all but swore aloud. Mai Ruijin glared. "The hold's packed barrel to barrel with raw tung oil, and once it's out we load Siam rice for Lingao. Don't wash the hold, let the Chiefs' rice take up tung oil and ruin their stomachs, and when it's traced back they'll clap the lot of us in the lockup — will you come carry us our meals?"

"You just don't want to live with my sister-in-law, that's all!"

"Don't you name that poxy pockmarked old crow again!" Mai Ruijin was so angry his very beard trembled.

Mai Ruibao knew his third brother loathed the wife their parents had bought cheap for him long ago. Over it he had raised a great falling-out with the family, more than once sought to put Third Sister-in-Law away, and cited the Chiefs besides — divorce, so he said the Chiefs said, was the advance of civilized society.

The mail sampan had scarcely pulled past Tsim Sha Tsui when the spanking-new Hong Kong shipyard rose into view — long past its old likeness of a crude beachyard. With the development of the Sheung Wan and Central trade markets and wharves, and the building of the Causeway Bay naval base eating most of the usable land along Saintess Bay on the island, room had grown scarce — and the island being all hills, the works had nowhere to spread. So Shi Jiantao and his people, having at last failed in their attempt to absorb the Bopu shipyard, had simply gone the whole hog: hauled the works across Saintess Bay and started afresh at Hung Hom in Kowloon, on the very ground where, in the old timeline, the Hutchison Whampoa dockyard had stood. And so out of the farmland opened up by the Hong Kong land-reclamation companies there sprouted slips and docks and shop floors, chimneys and warehouses standing up everywhichway. The yards' facilities were strung together by well-drained service roads, surfaced in spoil from the Hong Kong quarries, and threaded besides with the little railways of Li Chiqi's design, flatcars hauling steel, logs, coal, and other bulk goods. The pity of it was that the Senate's industry was climbing and spreading faster than powered locomotives could keep pace with demand — so along the little rails one often enough met a buffalo, or several, dragging a string of laden flatcars, plodding patient and alone.

Ashore, Mai Ruibao found the steam hammers banging away in the distant workshops seemed to reach him through the earth itself, trembling the gravel road underfoot — it put ever more spring into his stride, and in a twinkling he had left several ox-carts behind, making straight for the workers' housing. There stood a few double-story row houses of the terrace sort, walls of cinder brick a drab gray, roofs of corrugated tin sheeting painted a dull black with asphalt anti-rust — had Qi Feng or one of the architecture-minded Senators set eyes on them, a blistering assault would surely have followed. Yet to the naturalized-citizen workmen and their families, to dwell in dormitories with an indoor kitchen and a flush toilet (shared, grant you, among several households), every room fitted with glass windows and gauze screens — it was nothing short of a vast grace bestowed by the Chiefs. After all, around a great enterprise like the Hong Kong shipyard there had sprung up no few satellite shops besides, making cables, oars and sculls, sailcloth and awnings; and the hands those native-run little plants and workshops hired had no lodging but the shanties thrown together of bamboo strips, waste boards, and reed matting — the very predicament of Mai Ruibao's own family when first they drifted into Hong Kong.

"Sai lou — you come home and never a word ahead?" It was his second sister, Mai Ruili, who opened the door. A moment later his mother, née Li, came tottering out of the room on her bound feet, clutched his arm, reached up high to pinch her son's cheek, murmuring that he had gone thin, gone dark — and smiling, smiling, she gradually fell to wiping away tears.

"Ma, just look — the sai lou has grown a good hand taller." Second Sister laughed. "Solid as a post. Eating the Chiefs' rice — it does make a difference, that."

Mai Ruibao, mightily sheepish, disentangled himself from his mother's embrace. "Where's my brother-in-law?"

"Still sleeping. And I'm only just up myself." Mai Ruili hastily gathered up her loosened long hair and coiled it with a wooden hairpin — a pin made from offcuts off the sawmill floor, something of a badge peculiar to shipyard workers' families. "The works are on rush orders just now, two shifts every day, day and night round. — Wah-tsai! Sau-nui! Come greet your uncle!" Her son and daughter had been crouching in the corner of the front room, shy before kin so long unseen; the moment Mai Ruibao drew from his luggage the Zhangji biscuits from Guangzhou and the newest picture-books, their faces bloomed with delight, and the "big dormitory room" of barely twenty-odd square meters brimmed over with cheer.

His nephew and niece duly played with, Mai Ruibao's eye fell upon the altar table set against the wall, where the spirit tablets stood enshrined — of his late father, and of his eldest brother Mai Ruicai, carried off young by the epidemic. He was about to ask his mother for incense to make his offerings when several joss sticks were already pressed into his hand. He turned, startled — and there stood Third Sister-in-Law. "Sai lou — your brother didn't come home together with you?"

He had no help for it but to repeat the reasons Third Brother Mai Ruijin had given him. Before the words were half out, that face of Third Sister-in-Law's — seamed all over with the scars of smallpox — began to twitch. By the time Mai Ruibao's voice had dwindled to nothing, she had covered that face, so unloved by her husband, with her short-knuckled hands and wept aloud. Happily, Second Sister Mai Ruili was at that moment carrying water in for her brother's bath; quick to read the moment, she seized on the excuse of laying supper and hurried Third Sister-in-Law out the door.

By suppertime Mai Ruibao had grasped that his expectations for this homecoming were a lovely mirage, and one breaking up fast. His mother would not let go of him; her murmuring ran either to weeping for husband and firstborn gone early, or round and round to matching her youngest son with a wife — the latter being precisely Mai Ruibao's least favorite subject at present. When they sat down to eat, Third Sister-in-Law simply never appeared, but stayed hidden away in the kitchen. Happily his brother-in-law at last pulled out another thread of talk: "Are the Chiefs going to send the army against Korea? I heard it from your paper."

"Half a year now of day-and-night shifts, double tides, building all these great ships — if they don't cross the sea and chastise Korea, it makes no sense at all."

Mai Ruibao turned it over in his mind. These two months past, the Lingao Times had indeed run several dispatches: that King Injo of Korea had ordered the Royal Guard Command's troops south to harry Jeju in concert with his fleet; other reports had it that Injo had sent envoys to Beijing to beg the Chongzhen Emperor to unleash heavenly soldiery to help extirpate the "Jeju Kun." Hard upon these came a signed commentary on the Times' front page, over the name "Lin Sheng," rating the Korean sovereign and his ministers for their provocation of the Senate — "plunging three thousand li of rivers and mountains, and millions upon millions of souls, into fire and flood" — and warning them "let no one say they were not forewarned." But Mai Ruibao knew as well that the Yi dynasty's king had escaped being ladled into the pot with all the rest by the Manchu Qing for reasons inseparable from the doings of that mysterious New Army in Shandong. Just what the Chiefs' true intent might be, then, was not an easy thing to guess.

Of course, none of this could he say. He merely served the newspaper items up as seasoning for the table. Hearing his brother-in-law — a workman of literacy-campaign schooling, his letters never carried past the C-grade diploma — declaring between mouthfuls that "those Korean louts have a good thrashing coming, and no mistake," Mai Ruibao knew the Chiefs had achieved their object in manufacturing opinion — setting aside the question of whether some further object lay behind that one.

(End of Chapter)