Extract
from
A HOUSE BY THE RIVER
‘The
foreigners are many, but if we all spit
once they will drown’
Anti-Western
leaflet,
PROLOGUE
The river runs for a thousand miles across south
Downstream the river escapes the hills. It slows in
In the early years of the twentieth century, two
Westerners came to the beach. Later, one of them was shot and sank into the
river. He began to drown, but couldn’t move because of his wound. He willed
himself up towards the light.
But he saw that the gods of
In the beginning, though, the beach was home to the
fisher folk. They came from the lowlands, where the river is warm and shows a
man’s reflection, but had spread upstream through the generations until the
river grew talkative, then bared its teeth around the rocks of the upland
rapids. At last the current was too swift for boats, so the fisher folk came to
the pebble beach on foot.
At first they only camped here, sleeping beside their
lines for a summer month or two. But the beach lay in a great bend where the
river was turned by a mountain, and they saw how the river slowed as it turned,
growing wide and shallow. On the far bank, the mountain was undermined and its
scree slid into the water. On this side, though, the current slackened and
dropped its pebbles.
They brought boats from their settlements downstream,
dragging them on bamboo ropes against the current until they came to the quiet
waters off the beach. While they fished, an old man stayed on the beach,
turning the catch on drying racks, covering it during the thrashing summer
storms and chasing away foxes and river birds. He buried their refuse in the
gritty soil beside the beach and grew a few vegetables.
The land is limestone, which submits to water, so the
valley sides are steep. Above the old man’s garden the slope climbed swiftly to
a great ridge, restless with sliding stones, the first arm of the mountains.
Tribespeople watched from this ridge. They were
jealous of the boats, made of hardwood from downstream, and decided they were
being robbed of fish they couldn’t catch. Each winter they took anything the
fisher folk left, even the fertilised earth, which steamed in the cold air and
seethed with insects as they dug. One summer they painted their faces and
raided the drying racks, stealing half the catch while the old man fled into
the shallows and the fisher folk watched in silence from the river.
Next season the fisher folk camped off the far bank,
sleeping in their boats tethered to half-submerged boulders, drying their fish
on poles wedged into the grey scree, in terror of the rocks which tumbled from
above.
The old man took charge and a trade began. The tribes
acquired fish in exchange for game or for the crops they raised around their
own summer camps, though the barter was made with grunts and mime and much
suspicion.
The fisher folk returned to the beach and raised their
improbable platforms, twice as tall as a man, which swayed above the shallows
on driftwood poles as thin as a wrist. There was a floor of matting, a mat
roof, and one mat wall that was moved to face the wind but taken down when the
wind grew too strong, lest the whole trembling contraption should founder.
The fisher folk still slept in their boats, which were
more precious than any dwelling, but now stayed on the beach through the
winter, when snow in the mountains ceased to melt and there was less water to
hide the fish. The fangs of half-submerged rocks became more numerous, but the
water was so tame that even the tribes took to the shallows in their clumsy
rafts, though they disliked the river, which crossed their land like a foreign
army and was too cold to touch. The fisher folk, too, had lost their downstream
affection for the river, and forgot how to swim.
But the river still took their dead: the old man was
launched into the water in a fishskin cap, his wrists and ankles tied, his
mouth sewn shut around his one treasure, a silver hook which would pay the fish
god for passage to the underworld, or (some said) would convince the god that
he was only a dead fish.
The fisher folk houses moved up the beach, acquiring
thatched walls and roofs, and crouching on shorter, stronger poles. Women
appeared around the houses and were watched by the tribes, who had ceased to
resent the fisher folk, only bad-tempered old men recalling that the beach had
once been theirs.
The fisher folk had caught all the fish in the
shallows behind the headland, dipping their bamboo scoops into the slick water
or casting their nets, so they moved into midstream, which was too fast for
nets and scoops, except perhaps during the winter drought. Instead they grew
adept with hooks and occasionally spears.
The midstream fish were big from fighting the current.
A man might catch nothing for days but when he trapped a midstream fish,
dragging it to the shallows then leaping into the water to club it to death
like a man, he could eat for a week. Downstream, fisher folk honoured the river
for its muddy fecundity, because the fish were anonymous and unending. But here
the great clean fish had to be beaten one by one, and the fisher folk shouted
as each was wrestled ashore, strong as a leg. They grew contemptuous of their
cousins downstream, who had to boil their drinking water and could hold a rod
in each hand because the fish were small: if they were big, they seemed in
recollection to have watery flesh or be diseased.
The fisher folk explored upstream. They took a tribal
path along the narrowing gorge, wary of tigers and the poison darts of the
tribesmen, launching their fishing lines from tiny beaches, or dropping them
into mist from the walls of thunderous ravines, or balancing over slimy
boulders to drift them into deep pools at the foot of rapids.
Young men went furthest. A few climbed to the high
mountains and saw the river issue from the womb of a grey dragon. But all of
them saw the monastery which stood among its graves in a side valley. Some
learnt that they were reincarnations of dead monks and stayed there for ever,
becoming will-less as water, finding themselves through obedience as water
does. But the rest came back to the pebble beach because at last even young men
cease to resent their parents.
During
But taxation meant protection, so the Yi people had
talks with the collectors. The region had been too troubled for farming, but
assurances were made and an opium plantation appeared in the valley next to the
beach.
This valley lay behind the great ridge above the
beach. It had its own stream, fed by reliable springs, whose water grew muddy
in irrigation channels among the poppies, at last entering the river downstream
from the beach. Opium boats came, hauled by gangs of coolies, and it was the
highest port on the river. The wealth of the Yi brought traders, who spread
their goods on blankets, then on stalls, and the plantation was called
The fisher folk sold their fish there, but felt
subdued among the strange tribals from the hills, the bright clothes of the
plantation slaves, and the wealth of the Yi planters, who had silver necklaces
and strong houses, although the houses were on the ground where animals and
dirt could come in. On their way to market, the young men of the fisher folk
bathed in the icy river to remove the shameful smell of fish, and later sang in
the moonlight as they staggered home drunk over the steep ridge, which they
called the Hog – an auspicious animal to which it bore no resemblance.
The Yi plantation required a permanent tax collector.
Two wooden houses, brought in sections from down-river, appeared on the slope
above the fisher folk village. One was reserved for official visitors, and the
second, higher up the slope, sheltered generations of collectors from the
summer rains, though not from the stink of fish. Next door, Imperial soldiers
grumbled in a shed with no windows and an earth floor.
One collector was called Yue Fat. On a warm day in
spring, relaxing on his veranda, he opened a package of official mail. He was
startled to read that the pebble beach would be home to two white people.
CHAPTER 1
John Gerrard knew nowhere but
The Chinese of California couldn’t vote, own land,
testify in court against a white person, or be buried in white cemeteries. They
couldn’t work for the State, nor send their children to public schools. At
Marysville their houses were confined to floodland near the
He joined a Baptist mission to the poor, treading
wooden ghettoes where police and firemen did not go. The Chinese smiled and ate
the Christian rice, but were seen later at their temples. Nevertheless he
dreamt of a great harvest in the Orient.
‘A fifth of humanity!’ he said, though his wife
frowned and turned away. ‘A fifth!’
He approached the Society for the
His job at the bank was a treadmill of pettiness, and
he saw the glory of bringing
Off the coast of
The whites avoided her because she was only a
missionary’s wife, so she leant on the rail pretending to watch a smoking
volcano among the icy mountains. Instead, though, she stored the ugliest images
of the heathens, telling her husband how they huddled in a corner to smoke
opium and gamble and how they had doubtless supplied the fever which gripped
him. He said that they were ignorant of the Lord and therefore innocent: she
had seen their sagging loin-cloths, though, and disagreed.
She ceased to argue with him, since her victory seemed
assured: he had worsened during a storm in the
On the quay at
In the
She would not accept a native doctor, although the
Near the end of her convalescence she took short walks
with a guide book but without her infant. She ignored the
Her purchases were suddenly more expensive. The ladies
disputed whether they signified an interest in
The arguments half worked: Mrs Gerrard disappeared but
left her baby, a note pinned to his smock revealing that she was going home
under the protection of a ship’s officer, who had thus shown himself to be ‘the
truest kind of Christian gentleman’.
John’s substitute mother was Song Lan. She had been
part of the
She worked in the kitchens of a rich river trader but
came each afternoon to stare at the Chinese Bible, printed in Japan between
wooden covers and the size of a suitcase. She wished to be baptised, but was
told that she must first learn the Gospel message: she could read only the
common shop signs, however, and her studies lagged.
The women of the
She would wash and cook and sew, she decided –
anything the
Its president, Mr Burkett, tested her knowledge of the
Gospel, but Song Lan began to cry. ‘Will the
Now Burkett understood. Song Lan had been sold as a
child and had no relations. She had never married and was too poor to buy a
son. With no one to light lamps and give offerings, she would be a beggar in
the spirit kingdom, wandering in the cold and dark. At last, mad with grief and
rage, she would return as a hungry ghost, doing harm in the kingdom of the
living.
Song Lan knew how loneliness poisons the heart and had
tried to stay good. How could she contemplate an afterlife of evil? And how
consoling was Mr Burkett as he recited our Saviour’s promise.
‘In my Father’s house are many mansions,’ he said as
Song Lan knelt and wept. ‘I go to prepare a place for you. I will come again
and receive you unto myself.’
She became the
But the
In the Mission’s register she was classified as
Christian, but owed this distinction to the normal eclecticism of Chinese
worship: she was soothed by a worn wooden Buddha, smooth as a thumb in her
apron pocket; she whispered to a Cantonese spirit of the ashes when she cooked
in the basement kitchen next to the nursery; she bowed secretly to a stone
shelf over the oven, where the Kitchen God had presided until expelled by the
Jesus-worshippers; and she shuddered at the stories of Christ on the cross,
wondering at a Lord of the Dead who let himself be tortured.
At last, learning that Jesus had walked on the lake at
No one noticed a similar pantheism in young John. He
attended the
Sometimes, though, this text was very fearsome,
because it meant that everything was only a twist of air, and that John too was
insubstantial and might be gathered back to heaven like the dew. At such times
the oil lamp only multiplied the shadows, which were busy with Chinese spirits
that rustled with the roaches in the dry toilet, were couched in glory on the
charcoal in the kitchen, and coiled in a whispering nest under his cot, their
murmurs growing sinister until Song Lan gave him sugar cane smeared with opium
paste, after which their muttering was louder but couldn’t touch him.
He was her safeguard. She disliked the other children,
the scrapings of the streets, but the white boy would surely tend her spirit.
She listened politely to Mr Burkett’s stories about the spirit world where
Jesus awaited her, welcoming all who were Christian, but in the evening she
turned to John, who – like the all-knowing Lao Tsze – had been born with the
white hair of wisdom. ‘Never forget me,’ she said. ‘Remember to pray for me,
and light incense, and save my soul from wandering.’ Like him she had no
parents, and called herself tan-min,
which was an obscure joke and meant ‘child of the river’.
She spoke in Cantonese, which was John’s mother
tongue: he knew English but it didn’t fit his gestures. Like her, he didn’t
like reading: he learnt English and Chinese scripts, but the shapes were a
fence that he peered through. He was the only white child in class, smirking
with his friends when Mr Burkett taught them in a mincing Cantonese, his
dentures whistling.
One day he wept because of his pale hair, and Song
took him across the river to a modest gate, then through shading banyans and
tiny courtyards to the Ocean Banner Monastery and the statues of the Kings of
Heaven. One had a green face and controlled the winds; one with a red face
controlled the elements of air, fire and water; the dark-faced one, holding a
pearl in one hand and a golden dragon in the other, ruled the weather. But it
was to the fourth that she dedicated the youngster, because this god – the lord
of rain and rivers – also had a white face: John touched his forehead to the
ground, next to the point of the god’s handsome umbrella, but wept on the ferry
home because his hair wasn’t cured.
He began creeping out with his friends, a blanket over
his Western clothes, a cap over his hair, his blonde brows like the shaved
brows of the natives. They slipped from the dormitory window, barefoot,
dropping from an outhouse roof to a teeming alley, then taking a regular route
through the street of the porcelain makers, past the traders in human hair,
peering into the shop of Koo Mow, which was hung with birds’ nests from the
caves of Borneo, and visiting the pigs which crouched in baskets outside the
slaughterhouse, their eyes sewn shut.
A bridge marked the border of the European quarter.
Here a watchman fired his cannon at 9pm, and they competed to be furthest from
the dull report, swimming in some foul canal or treading an alley in the
Chinese city, hurrying home as incense sticks were lit by every door, skipping
under shoulder poles, leaping the baskets of the street vendors, pausing at the
more fearsome shrines where John bowed with his friends. He pulled their
pigtails and they snatched his cap.
Their favourite temple had paintings of the chambers
of the Buddhist hell. In one, animals took revenge on meat-eaters, so that
chickens boiled human limbs, cows on their hind legs struck off heads, and men
were hung by the heels and disembowelled by top-hatted pigs: the vegetarian
elect were carried to heaven by the creatures they had spared. They sniggered
at the newer chambers of Hell where those who adopted Western ways must dance
forever on red-hot boards while cigarettes burned their mouths and female devils
proffered drinks of molten copper.
The boys outgrew this tameness, squeezing into the
courtroom where prisoners knelt on chains and broken glass, or were hung up by
a hand, or had their mouths whipped and their ankles smashed. They followed
their favourites to the prison, mingling with visitors and pointing through the
wooden bars, and thence to the potter’s field, where they crawled to the front
of the crowd to stand on hot jars, fresh from the ovens, and watched their
heroes kneel for the headsman. A parricide was tied on a cross for the death of
a thousand cuts, and the boys talked about Jesus.
In the classroom John was still mocked for his strange
hair and he still dipped pigtails into ink, stuck pencils in pigtails, trapped
pigtails in desks, or tied boys together by their pigtails. Then some of his
classmates changed to short hair and Western clothes and grew solemn, having
given themselves to Christ.
But his best friends vanished for ever into the
streets, pigtails flying, where now he couldn’t go. He still wore a cap, but
was too tall to merge into crowds and was followed by mutterings of ‘Foreign
demon’ and ‘Kill!’ and was once chased by beaten stragglers from the Boxer
Rising. Children were shielded from his glittering eyes, cats were afraid and dogs
barked. In public toilets where he had flicked the little white maggots at his
friends, no one sat next to him.
He was obliged to read. The Mission library was only a
shelf in a corridor, since anything but the Bible might mislead, but there was
a startling volume, nibbled by beetles, about missionaries who stained
themselves with tea to map forbidden provinces – counting their paces with a
rosary, measuring altitude with the boiling point of their kettle, their
compass in a false-bottomed bag – until they were heroically lost and bamboo
grew through their bones.
Often they were murdered. He crouched by a window in
the corridor, frowning with effort, moving his finger along the lines of a
report by the Catholic Church into the death in Kwangsi province in 1857 of
Abbe Chapdeleine, whose heart was torn out of his chest ‘and, still beating,
chopped into pieces, fried in a pan with pig’s grease, and eaten’. A fresh
newspaper cutting told how the Boxers killed forty-five Christians in the
courtyard of the governor’s building in Taiyuan, a witness reporting, ‘Mrs
Farthing held the hands of her children, but the soldiers parted them and with
one blow beheaded her. The executioner beheaded all the children and did it
skilfully, but the soldiers were clumsy. Mrs Lovitt said, “We came to
///////ENDS//////
‘With A House By the River,
Sid Smith has fully established himself as one of
‘This is a remarkable novel…Reality has altered by the time you finish
reading it’ Spectator
‘Well plotted, vivid and original. Sid Smith’s work to date is a
triumphant testimony to the power of the imagination, dancing on the grave of
the notion that people should begin writing about what they know’ The Times
‘A poetic novel and a serious literary novel, but also an adventure
story. The writing is wonderful, absolutely brilliant. There is no Whitbread
second novel award, but if there were he would be up for it’ Tom Sutcliffe,
Radio 4
‘Once again, Sid Smith uses his cool spare prose and meticulous
research to capture the turbulent clash of beliefs and cultures in a book that
is absorbing and strikingly informative’ Daily Mail
‘Like Heart of Darkness,
although with fewer adjectives’ Guardian
‘A gentle comedy of manners blossoms into a full-blown adventure story,
with murders, kidnappings and hair-raising encounters with the elements . . . a
touchingly crafted fable about our hunger for the spiritual – and the more
prosaic forces that thwart that hunger’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Smith’s powerful new novel vividly conjures up another wild landscape.
The novel is a perceptive, often exciting and finally sad study of idealists
defeated by their ignorance of an alien world’ Sunday Times
‘A House By the River has
ambition, intelligence and, beneath it all, a guiding gentleness’ Daily
Telegraph
‘Smith manages the potentially lurid genre of the adventure story with
skilled understatement . . . The writing has a purity and an austerity well
suited to its missionary subject matter, illuminated by flashes of imagistic
brilliance’ Times Literary Supplement
Spectator
review of ‘House by the River’