The Last Mandarin Read Online Free PDF Page A

Yen, or Yen’s minions. Manchuria in 1945 had been cosmopolitan, a land of many skins.
    Yen’s car was, or seemed to be, a green 1939 Packard. Battered and peeling, it looked as if its owner had spent his Manchurian winters in it. The coolie had stowed the bag, and stood waiting. Burnham dug for money. “No, no,” Yen protested, and tossed the boy a sheaf of the old bills, saying bitterly to Burnham, “it is worthless. As you say, the looms are empty. I gave him ten ten thousands in the old bills. It will buy him a bowl of noodles from some equally poor vendor.”
    They settled in, and Yen ran through a pre-flight check. He banged at the dashboard. He tapped the horn. He tested the lights. He inserted a key. The motor ground, shrieked, caught. “A miracle,” Yen said. “I am not really so indifferent to the cold, you know. Why am I not as smart as you? Why do I not wear the quilted clothes of my own people? I have been corrupted by imperialism and persuasive tailors. I wore this suit to honor you, and am now paying the price. You have been in Japan recently? Do the Japanese now wear Western clothes?”
    â€œThey have begun to.”
    â€œA bad thing. And those are your own clothes that you wear? From a previous time?”
    â€œI bought them here in 1945,” Burnham said. “I was assured that they were the height of fashion.”
    Yen chuckled briefly. “They are still the height of fashion. They were also the height of fashion some centuries ago. Will you be overwarm if I activate the heater?”
    â€œNot at all.”
    â€œIn this antique spirit-cart the heater is the only reliable element.”
    â€œThe car is perhaps what the Americans call a lemon.”
    â€œA lemon. But why a lemon?” Yen was pleased.
    â€œPerhaps because its very essence is sour; perhaps because it sets the teeth on edqe.”
    â€œIndeed! You see? You hear? Another miracle. My lemon shudders, barks, howls, and in the fullness of time even moves.”
    â€œAfter the first miracle, disbelief is vulgar,” Burnham said solemnly.
    They cut across a runway. Yen leaned on the horn; a work crew scattered. Burnham had known all his life that in China cars were driven by horn, yet he found himself wishing that Yen had driven around these men at work. He rebuked himself: that was a Western wish. Liberty, equality and fraternity were not Oriental inventions.
    â€œYou must tell me all about yourself,” Yen said. The car banged into a pothole, rebounded, and chugged on. In this land of innumerable laborers, the airport road had once been smooth, and now it was pits and ruts. Rickshas crawled, veering aside at Yen’s blasts. Burnham saw few real rickshas, the man-pulled ones; there were mainly the bicycle rickshas, the pedicabs, called in Peking three-wheelers, san-lun, except that in Peking endings were musically slurred, so it was san-luerh. He saw porters, farmers driving geese and sheep; even in winter, even outside a doomed city, even in a land with confetti for money, men and women cut cloth, contrived lanterns, fanned, bought, sold; life ran on, whatever the rules, climate or state of the roads. China was perhaps like Yen’s lemon. Repairs to the national machine were made by hairpin, rubber band and string; yet it ran on.
    Burnham recognized the onset of humility, or perhaps merely proportion. “I am of no interest,” he said. “Only in that the lord of all under heaven saw fit to set me down in China.”
    â€œThen you are an adopted son of Han.”
    Burnham saw a Peking cart, and brightened: a covered cart pulled by a pony. In one of those he had traveled to see the Ming tombs. A quarter century ago! But what was a quarter century here?
    They passed a teahouse, and he thirsted. There would be wooden stools and a long wooden table, and at the back a counter and many shelves, and on the shelves cheerfully colored canisters or paper cylinders