The captain and crew assembled by the ship’s rail. The sailcloth containing Guo Si’s body was placed on a plank resting on trestles. The captain took off his cap. He read from the Bible, then launched into a hymn. Elgstrand and Lodin joined in with powerful voices. Just as the captain was about to give the signal for the sailors to tip the body overboard, Elgstrand lifted his hand.
‘This simple Chinese man, Wang Guo Si, saw the light before he died. Even if his body will soon be on its way to the bottom of the ocean, his soul is free and already soaring over our heads. Let us pray to the God who looks after the dead and liberates their souls. Amen.’
When the captain gave the signal, San closed his eyes. He heard a distant splash as the body hit the water.
San returned to the place he and his brother had occupied during the voyage. He still couldn’t register that Guo Si was dead. Just when he’d thought that his brother’s will to live had been boosted, not least by the meeting with the two missionaries, Guo Si had been whisked away by an unknown illness.
The night after the sea burial San began the unpleasant task of cutting away skin and sinews and muscles from Guo Si’s foot. The only tool he had was an iron screw he’d found on deck. He threw the bits of flesh overboard. When the bones were clean, he rubbed them with a rag to dry them and hid them in his kitbag.
He spent the following week in solitary mourning. There were times when he thought the best thing he could do was to climb silently over the rail under cover of darkness and sink into the sea. But he had to take the bones of his dead brother back home.
When he started his lessons with the missionaries again, he could never stop thinking about how much they had meant to Guo Si. He hadn’t screamed his way into death; he had been calm. Elgstrand and Lodin had given Guo Si the most elusive thing of alclass="underline" the courage to die.
During the rest of the voyage, first to Java where the ship replenished stores again, and then the final stretch to Canton, San asked a lot of questions about the God who could bring comfort to the dying, and who offered paradise to all, irrespective of whether they were rich or poor.
But the key question was why this God had allowed Guo Si to die just when he and San were on their way back home after all the hardship they had undergone. Neither Elgstrand nor Lodin could give him a satisfactory answer. The ways of the Christian God were inscrutable, Elgstrand said. What did that mean? That life was nothing more than waiting for what came next? That faith was in fact a riddle?
San was brooding as the ship approached Canton. He would never forget any of what he had been through. Now he wanted to learn to write, so that he could record what had happened in his life alongside his dead brothers, from the morning when he’d discovered his parents hanging from a tree.
A few days before they expected to see the Chinese coast, Elgstrand and Lodin came to sit down beside him on deck, wishing to know of his plans on arriving in Canton.
He had no answer.
‘We don’t want to lose touch with you,’ said Elgstrand. ‘We’ve become close during this voyage. Without you, our knowledge of Chinese would have been even more sketchy than it is. We’d like you to join us. We shall pay you a wage, and you will help us to build up the big Christian community we dream about.’
San sat in silence for quite a while before responding. When he’d made up his mind, he stood up and bowed twice to the missionaries.
He would go with them. Perhaps one day he would achieve the insight that had gilded Guo Si’s final days.
On 12 September 1867, San stepped ashore in Canton. In his kitbag were the bones from his dead brother’s foot. That was all he had to show for his long journey.
He looked around the quay. Was he searching for Zi or Wu? He didn’t know.
A few days later San accompanied the two Swedish missionaries on a riverboat to the town of Fuzhou. He contemplated the countryside drifting slowly by. He was looking for somewhere to bury the remains of Guo Si.
It was something he wanted to do alone. It was a matter between him, his parents and the spirits of his ancestors.
The riverboat sailed slowly northward. Frogs were singing on the banks.
San had come home.
15
In the autumn of 1868, San began with considerable effort to chronicle his story and that of his two dead brothers. Five years had passed since he and Guo Si had been abducted by Zi, and it was now a year since San had returned to Canton with Guo Si’s foot in a bag. During that year he had accompanied Elgstrand and Lodin to Fuzhou, had been in attendance as their personal servant and, thanks to a teacher arranged for him by Lodin, had learned to write.
The night San sat down and began writing his life story, a strong wind was rattling the windows of the house in which he had a room. He sat with his pencil in his hand, listening to the sounds and imagining himself back at sea.
It was only now that he was starting to grasp the significance of everything he’d been through. He made up his mind to recall and record every detail, skipping nothing.
Though who would read his story?
He had nobody to write for. And yet he wanted to do it. If there really was a Creator who ruled over the living and the dead, he would no doubt see to it that whatever San wrote would end up in the hands of somebody who wanted to read it.
San started writing, slowly and labouriously, while the winds made the walls creak. He swayed slowly back and forth on the stool he was sitting on. The room had soon turned into a ship, and the floor was moving under his feet.
He had placed several piles of paper on the table in front of him. Just like crayfish in the riverbed, he intended to work his way backward, to the point where he had seen his parents dangling on the end of ropes, swaying in the wind. But he wanted to start with the journey to the place where he was right now. That was the one most vivid in his memory.
Elgstrand and Lodin had been both exhilarated and nervous when they disembarked in Canton. The chaotic mass of people, strange smells and their inability to understand the special Hakka dialect spoken in the city made them insecure. They were expected — a Swedish missionary by the name of Tomas Hamberg was there to greet them: he worked for a German Bible society devoted to spreading Chinese translations of biblical texts. Hamberg was very hospitable and let them stay in the house in the German legation where he had his office and his flat. San played the role of the silent servant he had decided to assume. He took charge of the Chinese delegated to carry the missionaries’ baggage, washed his employers’ clothes, and saw to their needs at all hours of the day and night. Although he said nothing and kept in the background, he listened carefully to everything that was said. Hamberg spoke better Chinese than Elgstrand and Lodin and often spoke with them in order to help improve their fluency. Through a door standing ajar, San heard Hamberg asking Lodin about how they had come into contact with him. San was surprised to hear that Hamberg warned Lodin not to place too much trust in a Chinese servant.
It was the first time San had heard any of the missionaries say anything negative about a Chinese. But he was confident that neither Elgstrand nor Lodin would think the way Hamberg did.