God's Chinese Son Read Online Free PDF Page B

needle and thread, to mend your clothes, or play a game of chance together, the prize a pair of shoes; a healer presses bamboo cups to men's naked backs, to draw the blood; tinkers at their stalls mend locks and pipes, drill broken glass and porcelain and mend the shards with finest wire, sharpen razors, fill cracks in metal pots. Bird fanciers squat in solemn circles, some with their precious birds in cages, others with birds perched on sticks, or cradled in their hands. 25
    Three streets cut through the foreigners' businesses and residences, dividing them into four blocks of unequal width. All are densely packed with shops. Old China Street, the widest, is twelve feet broad, New China Street and Hog Lane a little less. The streets in general are so narrow that it's almost impossible to move, and one is jostled by the crowds, or bumped harshly by the coolies carrying palanquins with passengers, or massive loads. 26 Buddhist nuns with shaven heads, Taoist and Buddhist priests, ratcatchers with a dozen or more of their captured prey dangling in rows from bamboo poles, fortune-tellers, itinerant doctors, money changers, sellers of the finest fighting crickets that have been collected from the hills outside the town—all join the throng. 27 The shops that sell expensive goods the foreigners might like to buy have signs in Roman letters to render the owners' names and English descriptions of their trea­sures: carvings of ivory, turtle shell and mother-of-pearl, silks of all kinds, lacquer ware, and paintings of insects and fruits, or of famous battles, where red-coated Englishmen in cocked hats sit rigidly in rows under the relentless fire of Chinese guns. For every item purchased you must get the shopkeeper's chop or seal on your invoice, else it will be confiscated as you leave Canton. 28
     

     
     
     
     
    One June evening in 1835, at the entrance to a side street leading to the more affluent Canton suburbs, a dead baby lies in a basket among the rubbish, its body doubled up and its head, slightly swollen, dangling over the basket's edge. So narrow is the way, at this spot, that a Westerner, returning from a stroll in the countryside, has to step over the basket, noticing the contents only when his foot is in midair. As he stares in shock and bewilderment at the baby's face, a group of Chinese bystanders gaze, in equal bewilderment, at him. 29
     

2   THE WORD
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    The Reverend Edwin Stevens has been in Canton since October 1832. His sights are set on higher things, for in Yale College he was caught up in the great religious "awakening" that swirled through New England, was ordained a minister after study in the New Haven Theological Seminary, and accepted a post­ing to Canton as the chaplain of the American Seaman's Friend Society. Living in the American hong, he has followed a rigorous schedule of study, preaching, and tract distribution, commuting on Saturdays down the Pearl River on whatever foreign longboat can offer him a ride to the main anchorage for ocean vessels at Whampoa, and returning thence each Monday. When Stevens cannot find a foreign boat, he must hire the local Chinese boatmen to take him to his duties. It is four Spanish dollars for the twelve-mile passage, and about three and a half hours rowing and sailing time when against the tide, with mandatory checks at every cus­toms station. Even this short trip has its dangers. Foreign officers and sailors, traveling the same route, have been waylaid by Chinese ruffians, and robbed or held to ransom. Stevens sometimes finds it hard to persuade ship's captains to let him use their decks or cabins for his services, for some find him "austere and unsocial," since he shuns everything "vain or sportive," and devotes his energies to combating the evils of strong drink, visiting the sick and dying, and giving the dead a Christian burial.'
    The seamen to whom he preaches are often in desperate enough straits after long months at sea