Saltwater Girl: C.S. Hagen

By C.S. Hagen

This novel by C.S. Hagen is both an unexpected love story in a time and place of great violence and prejudice and a stirring tale of a man running from his past who challenges the British opium monopoly in China known as the Combination.

Saltwater Girl is set during the Boxer Rebellion (1900) - an anti-imperialist struggle waged by North China's commoners clinging to ancient mystic beliefs against a decadent Qing Dynasty and foreign aggression. Set in colorful strokes against a broad historical canvas including the Western nations vying for China's treasures, one man - James Innocent - disguised as a Lutheran reverend and AWOL from the US First Marine Corps, delves deeply into the opium trade in an attempt to destroy the Combination's powerful consortium. From inside the port city Tientsin (Tianjin) where foreigners and Celestials (locals) are divided into two parts, two wars emerge - the war against opium and the war against aggression. The Reverend not only finds his own life in danger , but struggles against falling for a Saltwater Girl - a river prostitute - who he believes may be his only friend.

Filled with sensual imagery amidst breathtaking devastation and beauty, the Saltwater Girl is a rare look into colonial and Chinese history, the clash of cultures and the ravages the opium trade brought to the Asian masses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jul 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481797788

C.S. Hagen

Chris Hagen, born in Orange, California, is an old-Tianjin hand after seventeen years behind the bamboo curtain. From a one-room country school in the Ozark Mountains as a child to the first international school of Tianjin, China since 1949, Chris returned to America and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in communications from Wheaton College in 1995. After three years working as a journalist for the Gaston Gazette in North Carolina, Chris traveled back to China where he established himself as the first successful Western restaurateur in Tianjin until 2009, when he turned back to writing. Since then, Chris has been published in the Fargo Forum, the China Daily, the Wilson Times, and maintains his website, www.cshagen.com. Chris currently resides in Fargo, where he prepares for the release of his third book - The Ninth Tail, the other side of Magpie Bridge.

Book preview

SALTWATER GIRL

C.S. HAGEN

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AuthorHouse™ UK Ltd.

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403 USA

www.authorhouse.co.uk

Phone: [phone]

© 2013 by C.S. Hagen. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/11/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-9776-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-9777-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-9778-8 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Chapter One

The Preacher Man, Spring, 1900

Chapter Two

Hot Summer, 1900

Chapter Three

Coffee Talk

Chapter Four

Boxers

Chapter Five

The Internationals

Chapter Six

Blood is Thicker than Water

Chapter Seven

Whispered Secrets

Chapter Eight

The Sinner

Chapter Nine

Prisoners

Chapter Ten

Hit the Devil

Chapter Eleven

Walk of Shame

Chapter Twelve

Out of the rice tub, into the wok

Chapter Thirteen

Fox Fairy

Chapter Fourteen

Face to the Devil

Chapter Fifteen

A Deal with a Drunken Devil

Chapter Sixteen

Into the Opium Dens

Chapter Seventeen

Gunboats on the Peiho

Chapter Eighteen

Escape

Chapter Nineteen

Captain Tie Dan

Chapter Twenty

Borrow a Knife to Kill an Enemy

Chapter Twenty-One

Saltwater Girl

This book goes out to everyone who has strolled Tianjin’s old Victoria Street with an imagination. Special thanks goes to Knut Reinfjord, the Last Viking, for helping me survive on more than rice when I first began, to Mark Buntyn Sr., a godfather of sorts for modern Tianjiners, and lastly to my mother, Pamela Faye Hoff Hagen Lacy, for dragging me by the shirttails to Tianjin in the first place and for believing when I doubted.

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Chapter One

The Preacher Man, Spring, 1900

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Reverend James Innocent sucked his tongue against his incisors and pursed his lips. He needed a somber countenance today, a look that was difficult after five iced gins and Wanda’s naked skin, smooth as smoked white jade. One russet hair, a stray in the neatly groomed congregation of his moustache, caught his attention in the mirror. A clipper’s snip laid the nonconformist low.

The hair seesawed into a washbasin, a lonely lifeboat amidst frothy bubbles. He longed to sail away, like that buoyant moustache hair. Fancied his self an adventurer, yet a hundred reasons kept him from leaving the Tientsin Settlement. Why stir the bee’s hive when life was easy? Hated bees. Loved honey though. He liked a room with windows but preferred to keep the curtains shut. Spent his weekends at the horse races on Racecourse Road, but never laid a bet. He thought of marriage, but spent his time with a Celestial whore, a saltwater girl. The gods had no place in his life and dirt stained his clerical collar. Never smoked opium. The drug had made him rich. Gold made beggars into kings, without it, like the Celestials said, he might as well be a man buried in a rice tub with his mouth sewn tight.

There were no roles less fitting for him, the pious reverend’s life and the secret dealings of a smuggler, he fit somewhere in the middle, but fate chose him four years ago at the Shanghai docks and freed him from Major Littleton Waller, US First Marines.

The reverend moved his mouth in circles, warming up the muscles. He had a congregation to lead, a sermon to preach, and to the devil with them all. But not quite yet, there was still business and gold to be made. The viceroy’s runners were arriving soon after the Sunday service.

Past his grey brick chamber walls, the choir’s singing resembled mewling cats. It was a good thing Lady Lippisley took charge of the choir every Sunday morning; he didn’t have the patience. The reverend double checked his clerical collar, tied the knotted cincture around his thick, white surplice. A green stole around his neck completed the costume. Pausing at the door to his chambers he resumed the somber pose, relaxed his eyes and lowered his chin, just an inch.

It is easy to forget our Christian calling when we are so far from our homes, the reverend opened his sermons each Sunday with a story. Half the oak pews were filled with expectant, some penitent-looking faces. The First Lutheran Church was simple, as if hewed from one large stone and seated up to one hundred people. Light filtered through the tall, arched windows illuminating wall cracks that snaked upwards toward a raftered ceiling. Through the church’s partially open double doors, across the Purple Bamboo Grove on which the church was built, over the crisscrossing roads of the Settlement with its godown storehouses, teahouses and curious sex shops, from the other side of the Mud Wall that separated the Settlement from the Celestial City, a distant bell clanged the hour, distracting him.

When I was a boy growing up in the Dakota Territories, his voice sounded gravelly, the tenacious work of too much gin, I walked two miles to church every Sunday, and between you and me, I despised every step.

The congregation chuckled quietly. He smiled at Herbert Hoover, a general manager for the Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation who sat front pew. His wife, Lou, sat next to him in a simple hat and bobbed hair.

For ten years, a total of roughly two thousand and eighty miles both ways, I daydreamed about the swimming hole my siblings and I shared along the Red River. About rosy-cheeked Alice Erickson. About the milking chores that I knew awaited me when I returned home. It wasn’t until one day, about the time I was planning to run away from my father’s wishes to attend seminary in Minneapolis that the most incredible thing happened. I got lice, and my mother shaved off all my hair. My head shone brighter than Thomas Edison’s light bulb in the sun, my brothers told me. Anyway, to make this story shorter, while on our way to church, Indians attacked my family.

Sharp intakes of breath skipped the onlookers’ penitent heads like a game of Duck, Duck, Goose. The reverend bowed his head for suspense, paused for the lie he had told more times than he could remember. I don’t recollect much about that day, but I do remember an Indian, a Sioux chief with a scar across his face. Stretched from his forehead to his chin. He spared my scalp, you see. Most likely on account I had no hair. For many years after I was angry, and I wanted revenge, but the homestead sold and I went on to fulfill my father’s wishes and attended seminary. One day, a year or so after I was ordained, that same Indian with the scar across his face found me. He was no longer dressed in feathers and leather leggings wielding a tomahawk, but he wore robes, much like the ones I wear today. He found God, he told me, and came to ask me for forgiveness for his sins against my family.

The reverend dabbed an eye with a sleeve and found a crusty at the corner.

It was only through the power of the one true God that I was able to forgive that man, and I have never experienced a greater peace in all my days. The peace actually had come with a knife through the Indian’s neck, and his hurried signature on a contract with the US First Marines a day later. His congregation didn’t know that and didn’t need to know. The lie was justified because it served a greater good—him.

"As the gospel of Matthew states so emphatically: ‘For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.’ That day not only the Indian was forgiven, but the Almighty God also forgave me.

So is it here, with us. God called us to these Chinese shores for a reason. To forget our ethics only leads to heathenism, a trait we see daily in the English enforcement of the opium trade, which ravages this land. We see it in the coolie trade, a disguised form of the slave trade, carried on by the English, French and Americans and Chinese. Now, if I may be so bold as to feed the white elephant in the room, it is rumored that the populace rises against us. Can you be surprised after corporations that I won’t name at this pulpit have done? These so called Boxers have taken control in Shantung Province and like the merciless hand of an angry God sweeps toward us. It is in this dire hour that forgiveness will be needed most, for only by forgiving others can we find forgiveness for ourselves…

Beneath his robes his foot grew its own mind and tapped incessantly while he greeted the congregation after the service. He smiled warmly at the Lippisleys, his only British parishioners and fast-talking, card-carrying Anti-Opium Society members. Lady Lippisley’s eyes watered over and couldn’t thank him enough for the wonderful sermon.

He shook Herbert Hoover’s meaty hand next and greeted his wife, thanking them both for their attendance. An invitation for dinner by the Hastings’ family he had to postpone—indefinitely. The last thing he wanted to do was spend his time with evangelicals over dry brisket. As the line thinned, his excitement grew, tingling his groin and lengthening his smile. He waved goodbye and retreated inside the First Lutheran Church, breathing sighs that could extinguish a dozen candles. He still smelled gin on his tongue and hoped no one else had noticed.

No sooner than he reorganized the first pews’ hymnals, the front door opened. Dressed in Lutheran vestments and wide-rimmed hats covering their faces, their polished staffs clanged against the stones.

If wishes were horses, the reverend spoke the traditional greeting in Chinese.

Then beggars would ride. The lead man bowed slightly at the waist.

Follow me.

He led them to his chambers at the church’s rear, waiting until all the viceroy’s runners had entered before he bolted the door.

Business must be good? The reverend said. The lead man nodded. He was heavy-set, taller than the rest. His black queue sucked his neck like a giant leech. The man had visited him before. He was hard to miss in any crowd.

If your excellency would be so kind as to show us the goods.

Yes, of course. No matter how many times he concluded similar arrangements with the viceroy’s pettifoggers, or runners, their presence always came with a nervous flurry that resided an inch or two above his groin. The viceroy’s runners were slippercrafty, a pidgin word for cunning. It was typically a quiet transaction, both sides getting what they wanted. He wanted the gold. The runners wanted the Chinese opium, just as potent and cheaper than imported Indian Malwa. But the viceroy’s runners were renowned for corruption and cunning, one never truly knew where their loyalties lay on any given day.

The reverend pushed against a bookshelf until he heard the accompanying click. Stepping back, the shelf sprung open and instantly flooded the room with cloying, flowery incense. The flattened opium balls were waiting where he left them in his secret niche behind the bookcase. He brought them out, twenty-four balls—half a wooden cask—each the size of monkey’s heads for the runners’ evaluation.

The tall man peeled back the brown paper revealing the tarry substance beneath. After a deep sniff, he nodded.

Lifting his staff horizontally, he uncorked the end, tipping the staff over a bronze bowl that the reverend used for children’s treats. One spidery ball of dragon’s beard candy remained. The first gold ingot, resembling a ship, tumbled from the hollowed staff, crushed the brittle candy when it hit the bowl. Four other gold ingots followed. When he was finished, the man slipped the wrapped opium into pouches under his robe and stepped aside while the next man took his turn.

The runners filed silently out when the transactions were complete, off to the Tientsin opium dens or their own distributors. The reverend didn’t care if the runners smoked the opium as long as the goods were gone and he was paid. He knew he risked his life with each transaction. The runners could kill him and take his stash. They could betray him to his ambitious competitor, the Combination—a joint venture between private merchants and the English Crown—who upon discovering his true identity would most likely present him with the gift of death by a thousand cuts. The Combination strangled their opium monopoly with a dying man’s desperate fingers. Commissioner George Detring, who doubled as head of the Combination, was growing desperate as demand for imported opium plummeted.

The tall man paused at the door, as if he had forgotten something. Departing co-runners resembled slinking cats, their footsteps nearly undetectable but their staffs, clicked like sharp claws against the church stones.

What is it?

He said nothing. Thin, black slits smoldered beneath a hole in his wide hat’s thatching. The vestment robe hugged his beefy shoulders, trailing to his ankles. He had only to flex his shoulders, the reverend imagined, and the robe would tear in two.

His left hand choked the staff. With his free hand he reached under his robe and procured a small knife.

There’s no need for— the reverend said.

Without flinching, the man slid the blade across his left forearm, drawing a red line that dripped on to the floor. My surname is Tsao. You would do well to remember.

For the first time in four years, protocol was broken. Names were not to be given. Sweat trickled from the reverend’s left armpit. His hands grew moist. The pleasant groin tickling from before shot to his rectum, loosening his bowels. The need to pee made his hands tremble over a golden boat shaped ingot.

One day, our great Middle Country will be washed clean of you foreign devils, he said.

The reverend’s mind scurried for a response. The viceroy must be waiting his rewards, the reverend said. You are not wise to keep him waiting.

Tsao slipped the knife back under his robes, stooped his head under the door’s frame and left. Blood droplets formed a small puddle at his office doorstep.

Hatred. It was the only word that fit the awkward feeling. Not only would the runners make their weight in gold one day, piece by piece, one sticky ball after another, he was ruining the Combination, and Commissioner Detring. The Celestials should be pleased. They made their money. He made his. Their black trade employed hundreds of thousands of Celestials across the provinces, forcing lower prices and depriving the Combination for the first time in four hundred years. Why should the tall man hate him so?

He had heard of the hunhunr, or Dark Drifters. He supposed Tsao was one of them. Ragtag gangs comprised of drifters who prized heroism above all else, they ran gambling and opium dens, worked as bouncers, muscled merchants and became runners for the viceroy, frequently cutting their own flesh to prove a point. The hunhunr did not fear death.

He nervously swallowed two fingers of gin from a bottle he kept in his desk drawer. The warmth spread from his stomach to his fingertips almost instantaneously, made a slower trip to his head where infernal bees had started to hum. Waiting for the gin to do its work, he wondered if he should leave with his gold now, but by the time the humming stopped, he chuckled at himself and decided it was all much ado about nothing.

Irony was not lost on the reverend as he collected his profits—thirty pieces of gold. He scrawled the number into a notebook he kept hidden behind a fake brick inside his secret storage room and added the amount to his last total—two thousand four hundred gold boats. The boats were curious things, shaped like Celestial junks, rounded on both ends with a raised dip in the middle and each weighing approximately five ounces, worth more than one hundred American dollars each. At the current exchange rate he had just over two hundred and forty thousand dollars, more than he could ever spend in his lifetime.

The reverend quickly changed into his usual black shirt and clerical collar. The gold ingots fit into a satchel he designed, with loops that kept the gold boats from bouncing. The bag’s strap pinched his shoulder, but the Mud House wasn’t far. After making sure the church doors were locked, he strolled to the Peiho River. The foulest river in China, some called it, but without the swiftly flowing waters that led east to the China Sea, Tientsin would have never existed. A high-floating British opium hulk approached. The Blonde, was written in bold white letters along its side. Steam poured from a central smokestack and the green waters churned before its bow. Chinese junks and fishermen cast nets while trolling a zigzagged path upstream under the fleeting shadows of seagulls. The bird’s distant cries had a soothing effect on the reverend, reminding him how far from home he was. There were no seagulls in the Dakota Territories.

The reverend ambled toward his home, the Mud House, the only luxury hotel in the Settlement, no, in the whole city of Tientsin. The city was dubbed the Pearl of the North for its deep-water ports and twisting river bends allowing merchant ships from around the world to trade. It was here the Opium Wars had ended. And it was here where the foreign powers began carving sections of China for themselves.

The Celestials described the Settlement was like a dragon’s teardrop, oozed from the Peiho River. And the reverend supposed they were right. Narrow at the northern tip where the French, Austrians and Russians made their claims, the Settlement widened to the south, where the English and Germans continued to expand. A Mud Wall, but made of brick, towered over the twisting hutongs and the Settlement beneath, surrounded the Celestial City on all sides. From anywhere in the Settlement the Mud Wall loomed like a dragon’s back, old scales tossed carelessly to form the winding streets and squalid hutongs between the Settlement and the Celestial City. So far, the Roundeyes kept mostly to their side of the city, and the Celestials did not disturb them.

The reverend’s stomach growled when he came upon vendors selling everything from fried crullers, spicy dog-meat skewers and chrysanthemum tea in long-spouted copper pots, and settled on a bright red apple from an elderly woman with lily feet.

An old woman with bound feet selling apples. Never would have dreamed such a sight four years ago. Bound feet were a symbol of mandarin aristocracy. The Celestial race was comprised of many minority groups, with the Han Mandarins the largest, but beaten by the Manchus in 1644 and now led with the Empress Dowager’s pig iron fist.

The reverend paid a copper, twice more than the apple was worth and thanked the old lady. She was a Mandarin, and a Christian no less by the wooden cross at her neck. An old Celestial lady with bound feet and a Christian cross, she had been spat from the Celestial City and landed in the hutongs, shamed.

The old lady smiled in return, and refused to take his coin.

Fluted yellow and white kites trailing snappy dragon’s tails sailed against a tile-blue sky. Sunlight sparkled through a willow’s rustling boughs, shining incandescently off wet leaves trailing in the river water. A seagull’s cry warned his brothers away from its fish feeding. He stooped to watch a cricket fight, one coal black monstrous cricket pitted against a smaller green one. Shirtless coolies, skin bronzed to a chocolate hue from backbreaking labor under the sun, waved carved brown cricket gourds while cheering on their favorite, paying him scant attention. An old man with eyelashes drooping to his jawline guarded a pile of copper coins. When asked to pay he politely declined and moved away, gagging on the river’s scent when the winds shifted. After four years he had grown accustomed to many things, but not the smell of Peiho River.

The unpleasant smell soured his mood, and he left the river’s side taking Meadows Road, which led to Victoria Street, the main avenue splitting the Settlement in half. Stone facades, immaculate porticoes, banks and office building, consulates and a range of cheap hotels and taverns packed neatly like Rothman’s cigarettes. He passed the nondescript Combination headquarters, closed on Sundays, and drank in the medieval columns of Gordon’s Hall, the Settlement’s proud city center. Across the street from Gordon’s Hall was the Mud House, the city’s only luxury hotel, and his home. Skirting well-dressed women with parasols, groomed dogs in tow, he headed toward the Mud House.

Although he had never been to Paris he imagined Tientsin’s Settlement might resemble the French city. Stone facades, immaculate porticoes, banks and office building, consulates and bawdy hotels and taverns packed the street sides neatly like Rothman’s cigarettes. The real pubs, the ones with saltwater girls and watered-down drinks, weren’t here on Victoria Street, but further north along Taku Road.

He adjusted the satchel’s shoulder strap and entered the Mud House from its rear entrance.

Good afternoon, reverend, a porter tipped his hat.

Good afternoon, Reverend Innocent, Pickering, the hotel’s manager said. The reverend didn’t like the fellow. His face was too clean, moustache too well oiled, his hair was always slicked to a sheen that could dull a pearl’s luster. A man so well groomed on the outside was most likely a villain on the in. Was he stealing from the till? Did Commissioner Detring, the hotel’s