The Chinese did not, at the time, want to fight, and so the telegraph stayed.
Fun times.
Finally, about the being able to send telegrams at sea while laying cable: I have not been able to find any references to people being able to send telegrams. However, accounts of laying the long telegraphic lines all mentioned checking current every so often to make sure the lines were functioning. If you have current, you can send telegrams because a telegraphic signal is nothing more than current that gets interrupted in a systematic fashion.
There may be some battery-based limitations (if the battery is on the ship, they may not have enough capacity to continually run a current), but there is no reason the battery could not be powered from the shore for some periods of time in order to enable the sending of messages.
Hence: Grayson has very slow internet access on his boat.
Some other random non-telegraph related stuff
Grayson’s reference to travel in first versus second class across the United States may not make sense for those who are used to thinking of travel in the US before the 1960s as inherently segregated. But there was actually a period when it wasn’t clear that segregated travel was legal. Before Plessy v. Ferguson (and in fact the reason we got Plessy v. Ferguson), there were active attempts to bring court cases against segregated travel. Some of these were successful. Others, not so much. It wasn’t until 1896 that the Supreme Court (erroneously) ruled that state-mandated separate but equal travel arrangements were Constitutional that this became temporarily settled, until overruled by Brown v. Board of Education.
I put the factory that produced cable in San Francisco. There was not such a factory in San Francisco at the time, but since I’m already rewriting the history of gutta percha, I think I can invent a cable factory that would process and use that gutta percha.
I actually tried to make other options like Boston and London work, but the travel time would have been utterly enormous and I didn’t want to have multiyear gaps between when Grayson and Amelia met.
I want to say a little about what trips to the interior of China would have looked like, and that is this: I don’t actually know, and with almost everything I read about China, I had to do a lot of extrapolation. The main reason for this is the incredible, intense racism. The racism impacts how things are depicted. But more than that, if you’re asking the question of “how will Chinese people in the interior of China react to Westerners?” you have to ask if Westerners who look down on Chinese people will receive harsher treatment.
If you read Western accounts of trips to the interior of China in the late 1800s, you hear about petty, vexatious Chinese officials over and over again—so much so that I had initially taken it as a fact that Chinese officials would be vexatious. The thing that changed my mind on this point was Henry Lansdell’s Chinese Central Asia: A Ride to Little Tibet. Lansdell seeks advice from a great many people about how to deal with vexatious Chinese officials. The advice he gets goes like this:
“Threaten complaints to the great men I knew in Europe.”
“Ask nothing, but demand everything. With small officials, send for them to call upon you, and not vice versa. Do everything by force and never allow a Chinaman to take the least liberty with you.”
“The Chinese respect nothing but force.”
This all sounds very grim. But finally, he asks his friend who he describes as a “heathen” (probably not a white person, is my guess). His heathen friend says this: “There is one rule that is useful all the world over… In short, be humble; and apologize to the officials for not knowing their ceremonies as you should, asking that your shortcomings may be attributed to ignorance, not to lack of good intention.”
That kind of broke something open in me. Are you going to get people being polite to you if you barge into their territory, threaten them with important people half the world over, demand they come to you instead of going to them, and do everything by force? I mean, if I were a Chinese official and Westerners I’d never heard of kept telling me I had to go to them to do my job, I would probably be annoying to them, too.
I had to do an enormous amount of extrapolation to figure out what things would be like. Every story I read I had to feed through a filter to try to remove judgment, to try to understand what was happening on the other side.
I struggled a lot with how to depict Amelia’s mother. Would she have bound feet? What would she be like? What would she allow? The book didn’t give me a lot of space to include information, but 1870 is late enough that reformers in China had already pushed back against feet-binding. One of the things I had decided was that since she had known that her daughter was raised by the English already, she’d come to peace with the inevitability of cultural differences that would arise between them, and while they would arise, they’d approach them like adults with the expectation that they’d need to talk things through, rather than with the weight of knee-jerk reflexive demands behind them.
One of the things that I had to calibrate for this book was the question of how much racism to include. This is not a book where racism is a thing that happens in the background. Amelia’s story may feel particularly salient today, when children have been separated from families on the US border and in some cases, given to other families without their birth parents’ consent. But when I came up with the idea for this book in 2008, this was not on the national radar. I struggled with the parallels between the past and the present. I hadn’t intended to write a book that was a response to those current events, but I knew it would be impossible to read it outside of that context.
I found my peace in this by recognizing that taking children from their families is something that has been happening for centuries. I based this story on the fact that Christian missionaries literally took Chinese children from their parents in the nineteenth century. This behavior is not new, and it’s not limited to one racial group. This is a part of that history. It’s not the same as our current situation, but it comes from the same place.
The amount of racism in this book is upsetting. The truth is, I have toned it down considerably. The comments made by Mrs. Flappert in the beginning (and to a lesser extent, Mrs. Acheson) were very much inline with the tone I read from works from that era, and honestly, very, very mild in the historical scheme of things.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, thank you to everyone who helped me make this book a reality, including everyone (and there are so many of you) who took time to make this book what it is, in some cases on very tight deadlines. Rose Lerner, Rawles Lumumba, May Peterson, Linda Kay, Rashi Rohatgi, Michelle Li, Lillie Applegarth, Savannah Frierson all provided immeasurable assistance. Thank you. A special note of thanks to Melissa Blue who kicked my ass in the right direction once and helped me break this book open, and then kicked my ass again when I was on the verge of despair.
I also could not have written this book without the encouragement of everyone in the ’Rona Writing Group. Special thanks to Bree, Beks, and Alyssa, for that point near the end when I dropped a text in a group chat in which I admitted that I didn’t know how I was going to get this book finished and got the love, encouragement, and the kick in the pants that I needed to take a deep breath and make it happen.