Canals and streams fed into the Yangtze. The banks were dotted with the artillery-darkened ruins of bridges, remnants of decades of wars that had been waged up the river.
Amelia watched all this go by with a sense of wonder in her eyes, and Grayson watched her.
“Is any of this familiar?” he asked her late afternoon on the second day as she watched the sunset in orange and pinks and golds over the smooth river waters.
“It’s not unfamiliar,” she said. “But I don’t know it. It’s unsettling how much it doesn’t unsettle me.”
That was how he felt about her. This thing between them felt at home in his heart; it was just that his heart didn’t know the feeling of home.
After several days traveling upstream, they arrived in Liyang. The entire journey had been comfortable. Too comfortable.
Grayson and Amelia presented their passes to the local district registrar who shook his head. He spoke Mandarin, but swiftly enough that Grayson couldn’t completely follow. The interpreter started to speak, but couldn’t keep up with the rapid-fire questions. Something about passes, business…
Amelia managed to smooth everything over. She offered humble apologies for not knowing the proper protocols and begged for the official’s instruction in the matter. The man looked at her, then at Grayson. Finally he nodded and took their letter.
“He says your passes look to be in order,” the interpreter finally told them. “You may stay here, but you must report where you are staying on a daily basis.”
“Xie xie,” Grayson said.
The man cast him a searching, curious look, then turned to the interpreter, asking something else. Amelia colored and tensed.
“He wants to know what kind of barbarian you are. I can set him straight,” Amelia started to say.
Grayson shook his head. “The Chinese think all non-Chinese are barbarians.”
It was not as if Grayson could fault that belief, not when China’s contact with the West included two wars fought over the West’s supposedly God-given right to opiate the Chinese people. They’re barbarians to me too, he wanted to say. But there was no real way for him to explain centuries of chattel slavery and a family that had grown up on the edges of that travesty, fighting it. And he was not without ties to Britain.
How could he explain this to someone who saw the entirety of the world outside China as an undifferentiated mass of barbarianism?
“Funny you should ask,” Grayson said instead. “Let’s have dinner and discuss the matter. I’ll buy the wine.”
When this was translated, the man nodded, pleased.
“We’re looking for Mrs. Smith’s family,” Grayson told the man. He waited a moment for the interpreter to translate that, and another for the man to turn his head to Amelia.
“Se-mi-su?” He shook his head.
“That’s my English name,” Amelia explained. “I was separated from my family years ago.”
“Ah.” The man looked disturbed. “What is your Chinese family name?”
“It’s Liang,” Amelia said. “Or Leong or Lang or something like that?”
The official stared at her a moment before shaking his head rapidly.
“Useless,” the interpreter conveyed to Grayson. “He wants to know what character they use.”
“I don’t know. An Occidental told me.”
A long sigh. “He says that could be practically anyone, the way Westerners speak.”
The official said something else. Amelia blushed, and the interpreter cleared his throat and didn’t translate.
“I suppose we’ll have to inquire.” Amelia sighed. “This might take a while.” That last was directed at Grayson in English. But the interpreter translated it, and the district registrar just tilted his head, considering.
“There are thirty thousand people in Liyang,” came the apologetic reply. “Luckily, everyone will want to see you.”
The district registrar had it right. The two of them were curiosities and everyone turned out to catch a glimpse. Grayson, who was used to the British and Americans doing their damnedest not to see him at all, found the whole endeavor of being noticed a little nerve-racking.
Word quickly got out about the Black barbarian and the English Chinese. Within a few hours, the courtyard at the inn they took rooms in was crowded with those who wanted to meet them in person.
Grayson had always been good with language and dialect. But he could see Amelia leaning forward, little flickers of confusion on her face crossing with wide-eyed moments of understanding. At one point, she answered a question before the interpreter had a chance to translate.
“I don’t know,” she said, after Grayson inquired. “I’ve spent months with Auntie Zhu and Miss Chu speaking Shanghainese, and this is closely related. But it’s more than that. It feels like…” She wrinkled her nose. “It’s not that it’s in my brain somewhere. But it feels like…it fits in my brain. Like there’s space for it.”
Grayson had imagined there would be difficulty getting people to speak to them. He’d imagined bribes and snubs. Instead, it was the opposite. They were bombarded with questions and when they responded in a friendly way, inundated with offers of help that it would take them years to take advantage of.
Someone at the inn started bringing food out as the sun flirted with the horizon. Mutton strips with hearts of cabbage, some rice porridge cooked with a dark, rich black substance that the translator told Grayson was thousand-year egg.
It was impossible for the interpreter to keep up with the crowds; Grayson sat back and left the majority of the talking to Amelia. At some point, she explained the concept of a telegraph—the interpreter tried to translate that, and it turned out that neither dialect nor enthusiasm was up to the task. Still, she sketched Western codes and Chinese characters, using claps to convey the concept of dots and dashes. She gestured to Grayson as she did so, and apparently, the news that the Taotai of Shanghai had made an agreement with him brought a widening of eyes, some deeper bows, and a dish of chicken feet that had been simmered in sweet soy sauce until the meat melted off the bone.
As Amelia was finishing her rice, someone said something that had her laughing, blushing, shaking her head, and then glancing at Grayson.
“He said she’s obviously from here,” the interpreter informed Grayson. “The way she said ‘xia xia’ just now—very Liyang.”
“It’s not necessarily that.” Amelia was still blushing. “I’ve always mirrored the speech of people around me.”
The translator went on. “He said she should marry the district magistrate’s son.”
That set Grayson back. He’d once told Amelia that she would have no trouble marrying—that she might make herself unsuitable for boring men, but that all the interesting ones would be all the more drawn to her. He’d known it was true, and yet time was ticking on. He couldn’t hold on to her, and someday, he would lose her.
He just didn’t want it to be today. But she blushed again, shaking her head, and he had no right to selfish jealousy.
Sometime after someone pressed orange slices preserved in a sweet syrup on them, he saw Amelia turn to a man in front who shouted something at her. Grayson thought the man was speaking Mandarin, but it was late enough—and the accent rough enough—that he wasn’t sure.