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readallthenewberys2017-09-03 02:12 pm
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2017-09-03 02:12 pm
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Newbery Medal: Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze
I know almost nothing about Chinese history, so I started this off with some googling. Apparently this story's contemporary setting is the Republic of China (not Communist), not to be confused with the People's Republic of China (Communist). The Republic of China lasted roughly from 1912 (fall of the Empire) to 1949 (rise of Communist rule in China), although its government only gained actual control of all of China in 1928, and from 1937 onward it was focused on fighting a Japanese invasion. So this story will take place, it seems, in a sort of brief 9-year halcyon period when China is united, not Imperial, not Communist, and not particularly at war.
* Young Fu -- a first name is not given -- and his family are moving into a tenement in Chungking (now Chongqing), the "economic center of the upstream Yangtze basin" per Wiki. They have just come from the countryside where they used to live.
* Okay, Young Fu's name is Fu Yuin-fah. He's thirteen. He and his mother, Fu Be Be, have come to Chungking after Mr Fu's death; Young Fu is to be apprenticed to a coppersmith named Tang, presumably so he can eventually support his mother. We get some detail about how Chungking is a trade center and where it stands in Szechuen (Sichuan) province, roughly in the center of mainland China, fifteen hundred miles by river from the major port city of Shanghai.
* There's a note that Fu Be Be has bound feet; apparently during the Qing Dynasty (the last Chinese imperial dynasty) this was a common practice among all social classes, though both the Republic and People's Republic of China strongly discouraged it and it has now disappeared.
* The ongoing war between the Kuomintang and the northern warlords, which more or less ended in 1928, damaged many of the farms in the area, and the constant loss of his crops to soldiers' and bandits' raiding is part of what caused Mr Fu's premature death.
* There's a lot of very evocative description about the way things work here in 1930ish Chungking, most of which I'm skipping so as to finish this liveblog at some point. ^_^
* Young Fu meets an old scholar, who banters with him for a while and points out that his good luck is in being young and strong, not (as Young Fu had remarked aloud) in having come to the big city. Scholar Wang lives in the upstairs apartment above the Fu family's downstairs apartment. Wang also mentions that the coppersmith Tang is known as a skilled artisan and that Fu is lucky to be apprenticed to him.
* A sedan chair passes, its carriers announcing that the person inside is a "rich foreigner", or as one of the passersby notes, a "foreign devil" -- a person from outside China, in this context usually a white American. The sedan-chair's rider is not visible, but Young Fu is excited to note that there are foreigners in Chungking and that he may have a chance to see one someday.
* There's also a sidenote that the sea, whatever a "sea" is, separating China from the foreigners' land, cannot be nearly so big as the Yangtze-kiang... I went to read up on the Yangtze River and discovered that technically, only the lowest 435km of the river is known within China as the Yangtze, though English-speakers use "Yangtze" for the whole river. Young Fu would properly think of it as either the Chang Jiang (Long River) or the Chuan Jiang (Sichuan River). I'm going to assume that "kiang" up there is an alternate anglicization of "jiang" (river) unless otherwise notified.
* Okay, back to the story. Young Fu is older than apprentices normally start out, but Tang the coppersmith agrees to take him on. Due to the war, he will serve a three-year apprenticeship instead of the usual five years. (I don't quite follow the reasoning, but okay.) Young Fu will receive his meals while he is an apprentice, but since Fu Be Be is a widow living alone, Tang will allow Fu to sleep at his mother's place instead of at the copper shop.
* Fu Be Be knows which Chinese character "fu" is the proper one to have the clerk sign Young Fu's contract with, since Mr Fu was apparently fairly educated for a farmer, but she cannot write it; Young Fu is embarrassed and determines he will learn to read and write. (Which is gonna be a hell of a job, given the complexities of Chinese written language...)
* Having gotten her son settled at Tang's, Fu Be Be goes to look for work for herself, so as to pay the rent, feed herself, and buy clothes for herself and Young Fu as needed. She gets a seasonal job at a brush-maker's, sorting pig bristles by size; when the hot season hits, she'll need to find something else, but she'll worry about that when the time comes.
* Young Fu, as the newest apprentice, is assigned to tend the fire and keep the heat steady. There are two other apprentices and five journeymen in the shop; the two most important journeymen are Old Tsu and the lanky Lu. The second newest apprentice is Small Den, who criticizes Young Fu's technique of fire-tending. At lunch, all of these people make pointed snarky remarks about how country people (like Young Fu) are inferior to city people; however, Old Tsu also makes a crack at Small Den about how he's been showing off his little knowledge and lording it over Young Fu.
* Ooh, it seems we're earlier than 1928 right here, since the men's discussion of politics revolves around what may happen if the current Tuchun (warlord) should be defeated. I presume we'll be following Young Fu for a few years, then.
* After lunch, a newcomer called Small Li turns out to be the other apprentice, and Young Fu is sent out with him to deliver a load of brass kettles (the shop works both brass and copper). Li's grandfather was a farmer, so he's not as snarky at Young Fu as the others are. Li hopes someday to cross the Great River -- there are no bridges across the Yangtze in Chungking or downstream at this point in history -- and see the view from the hills.
* Ah, okay, it turns out Den resents Young Fu for taking the spot his cousin wanted. Den, it seems, is not a very good apprentice and Tang didn't want another like him. Li is disappointed that Fu will not be sleeping on the roof of the copper shop with the other apprentices, since Den is also not very good company.
* Tang is always sharp-tongued, but doesn't beat his apprentices, Li informs us. Tang also lets Fu go home early his first night so his mother won't worry. As time goes on, we learn that Tang is a good artisan, a good salesman, and a just master.
* One day an American comes into the shop. A conversation between Fu and a workman called Dsen gives us the basic attitude most Chinese of this time and place hold toward white Westerners: that everything they do is the opposite of what is proper and Chinese-like, that they are barbarians with no manners, but they are rich and spend their money freely.
* Fu Be Be worries that the foreigner's presence will bring bad luck, but Young Fu takes Dsen's view that he was harmless.
* Chungking is a cloudy, rainy, overcast, wet city -- Wiki tells me it has a humid subtropical climate and as little as 8% sunshine over the course of January. It's also built up the sides of the hills surrounding the river.
* Young Fu is super impressed by the fancy upper class homes to which he sometimes makes deliveries, and thinks there can't be any more splendid buildings in the whole world, an opinion Tang's accountant tells him is foolish. He's also amused by the way the wealthy ladies treat the tradesmen the same way Fu Be Be treats shopkeepers she buys from.
* There's another reference to foot-binding, this time of a small upperclass girl. The practice of foot-binding was becoming less common in metropolitan China at the time this book is set, but in remoter areas like Chungking and among upperclass families it was still popular; it didn't completely cease until the Chinese Communist government made efforts in the '50s to stamp it out.
* Young Fu is occasionally reminded when he passes schools that he wants to learn reading and writing, but he currently has no time and doesn't wish to bother Wang Scholar with the request.
* Six months after coming to Chungking, when Young Fu has turned fourteen, he encounters a group of soldiers trying to force a "load-coolie", a low-class man treated almost like a beast of burden, to carry their gear. The coolie pleads that he cannot leave the job he's been hired to do, and the soldiers shoot him. Young Fu is so shocked he freezes instead of running away, and the soldiers force him to carry the coolie's load of rice for them; he isn't really strong enough, but he has to do it or be shot.
* Once they reach the soldiers' quarters at the far end of the city, however, some of the other soldiers point out that the captain will not let them keep Young Fu as a personal slave, since he "wishes to win the favor of the new government at Nanking", that being the Republic of China government led by Chiang Kai-shek. One of the soldiers pulls Young Fu aside and tells him to run, explaining that "I was your age when they tore me from my father's house".
* When Young Fu gets home, his mother has been worrying, but once she hears his story, she goes to a small streetside shrine of Kwan Yin, the goddess of mercy, to thank her for Young Fu's escape and ask her special protection on the soldier who saved him.
* After this experience, Young Fu is scared of soldiers, though he continues to be curious about everything else. He now knows his way around the city fairly well, and outside "one of the foreign temples (a French cathedral)" -- there are French, German, US, and Japanese consulates in Chungking at this time -- he watches a public letter writer and tries to memorize some of the Chinese characters. Small Li scolds him for wasting time, but Young Fu continues.
* One night Wang Scholar sees Young Fu practicing drawing characters in the air, fusses at him a bit for having learned the strokes wrong, and brings him upstairs to start teaching him to read and write. He also says that knowledge "has been given that men might learn how to live, not to win fortune", a teaching which impresses Young Fu greatly.
* Young Fu dislikes Tang's accountant, who we are now told has a "supercilious air", and he keeps his studies secret so that the accountant and the others will not mock him.
* One day Young Fu is sent out of the city to carry a letter to a workman in a nearby town about a commission from a foreign gunboat captain. (The Yangtze is not easily navigable by steamboat as far upstream as Chungking, but during this time period there were a lot of efforts made.) On his way back, there's an incident where a group of beggars swear revenge on Young Fu.
* Three months later Young Fu, thinking about his learnings rather than looking where he's going, trips and drops a brazier he's carrying down the road outside the gate, where most of the beggars congregate. Some beggars pick up the brazier and ruin it with scratches and dents. Fu considers delivering it anyway and letting someone else take the blame for the damage, but eventually decides to take it back, tell Tang what happened, and accept whatever his punishment turns out to be.
* Tang quotes at him the same line he was thinking about earlier, "If a man's affairs are to prosper, it is simply a matter of purpose", gives him a scolding for loitering around on his errands, and forbids him to run any more errands for a month.
* Once the month is over, Young Fu moves so fast on his errands that Small Li complains about it. His apprenticeship is now almost halfway over, and once he becomes a journeyman he can start earning wages and help support Fu Be Be. He starts to feel proud of himself and his work.
* Then one day, when Tang jets him go early as a reward for finishing all his errands so fast, he wanders into Thief Street -- the area where stolen goods are sold for low prices -- and sees a nickel watch with a black face. The shopkeeper flatters him, shows him how it glows in the dark, and sells him the watch on credit, charging five dollars, an astonishing sum. Fu Be Be is quite reasonably extremely angry at him for this waste; she had hoped to save up enough money to buy herself a nice coffin, which they could use as a combined table and storage-chest until her death.
* A couple of months after Young Fu buys the watch, it stops running, and the glow-in-the-dark paint runs out of glow. Young Fu is even more depressed by this, but Fu Be Be is happier, since the "foreign spirit" has lost its power. However, though she paid two dollars of the five-dollar debt, the shopkeeper is still hounding Young Fu for the other three dollars, and the New Year is coming, "when debts as well as clothing and food must be new".
* On New Year's Eve, Tang lets the whole shop staff leave early, and Young Fu heads off across the Yangtze -- loading vegetables on a trader's boat in exchange for the trip across -- to seek out his mother's brother's family who live in the hills. When he gets there, he explains that he's hiding overnight from a creditor, and after some scolding the family let him stay.
* That night it snows, which Young Fu has never seen before and is very impressed by. The snow is said to be a good omen for the new year, "the wintry breath of the Dragon". Young Fu borrows two large copper kettles and packs them with snow, planning to sell the snow in Chungking and pay off his debt -- which, astonishingly to me, actually works. :D
* There are still soldiers in the streets, but everyday life isn't much affected by which warlord controls Chungking, unless one is young enough to be conscripted or has a shop the soldiers might loot.
* This particular day there's a fire outside the city walls near the foreigners' hospital. After work Young Fu wants to go and see, though Fu Be Be warns that rubbernecking may draw the Fire Dragon's attention and bring bad luck. Young Fu ignores this, but after he heads out, Fu Be Be quickly makes an offering of incense at Qwan Yin's shrine, hoping to ward off the coming bad luck.
* A blond American woman is in charge of evacuating the hospital. Next to the hospital are a school and a house; when a piece of burning wood falls on the house's roof, she asks for a volunteer to go knock it off, and when no one volunteers (all the onlookers fearing the wrath of the Fire Demon), she goes to climb up herself. Young Fu, noticing that she has no skill at climbing, yells to her to come down and goes up himself. He saves the house from catching fire; the foreign woman, who speaks good local Chinese, thanks him and says she will send a reward of money in the morning, which Young Fu tries to refuse.
* The next day, Small Den insists Young Fu has brought misfortune on his house, but Tang points out that it was the outgoing warlord's soldiers, not the Fire Dragon, who set the hospital on fire.
* When Young Fu gets home that night, there is a letter from the American woman thanking him for his help, along with a gift of five dollars. He gives Fu Be Be four and a half dollars, and takes the other half dollar to buy a small kettle from Tang as a return gift for the foreign lady, this apparently being proper manners. Tang lets him buy a very nice kettle at a steep discount, hoping to get more business from the foreigners if they have a good eye for craftsmanship. The American lady is appropriately impressed.
* It is now the second drummer of Young Fu's apprenticeship, and it's hot. There is talk of plague, which may or may not be transmitted via eating pork. Cholera is followed by typhus, and one day Wang Scholar does not come down from his apartment. Young Fu goes up to check on him; he doesn't feel sick, only very tired, but Fu Be Be sends Young Fu to buy some herbs and makes a healing brew for Wang Scholar. Young Fu stays up half the night seeing to Wang Scholar and is late for work in the morning.
* Young Fu explains the situation to Tang, including how he's been learning to read, and Tang has him read a segment from a newspaper to demonstrate. He says that Wang has taught Young Fu well, and on hearing that Wang asks no payment for his teaching, says "Truly you are a favorite of Heaven!"
* Small Den tries to mock Young Fu for learning to read, but Old Tsu tells him to shut up, and Small Li isn't too angry at Young Fu for not telling Li that he had a teacher.
* The next day Small Li faints from heatstroke, and after a few days when he hasn't gotten any better, Young Fu discusses the matter with Tang and eventually goes to the foreign hospital to ask the American lady's opinion. She agrees to visit Li's house, and if he has typhoid as she thinks he does, to take him to the foreign house (now being used as a hospital), given his parents' permission.
* It turns out Small Li has appendicitis, but the foreign doctors are able to fix him up. Young Fu, walking along, ponders how much good fortune has come from his risk-taking with the anger of evil spirits and foreigners.
* During the disease outbreak Dsen the workman died, and a new workman named Wei has come to the shop, who does not respect Old Tsu or Lu or even Tang as they ought to be respected.
* Okay, it is now 1925 or 1926, since Sun Yat-sen has recently died. The city of Peking, "Northern Capital", is now known as Peiping, "Northern Peace", since the Chinese Nationalists -- the joint government by the Republic of China and the Communists, who have teamed up to take on the warlords -- have make Nanking their capital city. A new Tuchun or governor has been put in place in Chungking, who is said to be one of the Nationalists' men.
* A commission comes from the town of Hochow, upstream on a tributary of the Yangtze, for a large order of brasses to be presented to the new governor. Tang invites Young Fu to travel with him to deliver the commission, since Young Fu seems to have good luck and no fear of devils; perhaps, he notes, this will extend to river bandits.
* Ten soldiers also accompany Tang and Young Fu on the trip as a bodyguard. When the expedition stops for the night, some visiting friends of Tang's warn that there are river bandits close by. Tang is unwilling to risk his fine brasses out of his sight until they have been delivered, however.
* Tang tells Young Fu of how he himself grew up on a farm, came to Chungking after soldiers slaughtered his family, and begged there until Tu the coppersmith took him on as apprentice and taught him the trade.
* On the way upriver to Hochow, bandits fire some warning shots but do not attack the boat. However, after the brasses are sold for silver, the soldiers don't return to the boat in the morning, so Tang orders the boat captain to leave without the soldiers.
* A storm catches them four miles upstream of Chungking and they have to anchor in a little cove, where bandits corner them. Young Fu has an idea of how to hide himself and the silver, so that Tang can pass for an ordinary traveler rather than a successful businessman with an apprentice; he lies down under a pile of rags and bamboo matting near the side of the boat.
* The bandits are suspicious for a bit, but Tang fools them successfully, and congratulates Young Fu on saving the silver.
* More time passes. Small Den finishes his apprenticeship and goes to work as an accountant at the shop of Tang's competitor, Wu, a less skilled artisan. A new apprentice, Feng, takes Den's place, and at first Young Fu joins in teasing him, but then remembers his own first day and speaks encouragingly to Feng.
* The next day, after making a delivery to an official up in the Chungking hills, Young Fu has trouble finding a ride back across the river, and the city gates close before he gets back. He fears that Fu Be Be will worry about him; otherwise, he's rather excited to spend the night outside the gates.
* Rather than go to a cheap inn, Young Fu finds an old lady, Old Mother Ling, and offers to pay her for food and lodging. She refuses payment, but offers him hospitality. Young Fu talks with Mother Ling and her husband, who is a scholar fallen on hard times, over dinner and learns that they come from the same area, Smiling Heaven Hill, where Tang grew up; he makes a note to tell Tang about them.
* That night, the annual river flood rises. Mr and Mrs Ling expect to be drowned, since there's nowhere to go, but Young Fu knows a way up the cliffs to the back of the foreign buildings, and there's a gap in the wall where the foreign hospital burned, which they should be able to get through. It's a terribly difficult climb for the elderly Lings, but they make it eventually, and the foreign lady finds a place in the crowded house-hospital where they can rest.
* When Young Fu tells Tang about the Lings, it turns out Mr Ling was the best friend of Tang's father.
* Small Li soon finishes his apprenticeship and becomes a journeyman worker at Tang's.
* There is a lot of news and chatter about the new government at Nanking. There have been new roads built and horseless trucks brought, old buildings torn down and new foreign-style ones built.
* One day Young Fu passes a tea house where a young man is yelling about the Nanking government. He uses the phrase "Workers of the World", so I speculate he's a Communist agitator, bringing foreshadowing of the split soon to come between the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) and the Communists.
* Apparently there are quite a lot of these agitators from out of town currently in Chungking. Most of the people at the shop speak dismissively of them, but Wei the new guy supports the Communist view and also favors throwing all foreigners out of China. Finally, Wei quits his job, as the Communist agitators keep looting various foreigners' houses and driving them out of town to the gunboat stationed in the river.
* Old Tsu's youngest son is getting married, and he invites everyone at the shop to the wedding feast. Tang asks Young Fu to watch the shop that night, since somebody needs to, and Fu is less close to the Tsu family than the journeymen are; also, Young Fu has a knack for dealing with trouble.
* While he watches the shop, Young Fu finds a spare piece of scrap metal and starts working on a small brazier he has an idea for. But Wei and two of the out-of-town Communist agitators break into the shop, and Young Fu hits Wei over the head with the tongs, then tries to hold off the other two. Just in time, Tang and a couple others come back from the wedding, because Li noticed Wei hanging about in the street and warned Tang that something was up. They take down the robbers and have the soldiers take them away.
* The next day, Young Fu and Li chat over lunch. Li's mother wants to marry him off so she can have a daughter-in-law to help run her household. Li doesn't want to marry yet, but he doesn't really have a choice.
* That night, it's oppressively hot. Fu Be Be has gone to the hills to care for her ailing sister-in-law, so at least she's out of the heat. She doesn't know how long she'll be gone, so she left Young Fu two dollars, enough to keep everything going for a couple of months. Since Fu Be Be isn't around to worry about him, Young Fu goes out to the wall over the riverside for some cooler air, then gets lost on his way home. He sits down to watch some mahjongg players (the narrator refers to the game as "dominoes"), then when one player folds, they invite Young Fu to take his place. Once the game finishes, they tell him he owes them three dollars in gambling debt, and take the two dollars Fu Be Be left him from his belt, so now he's broke and can't afford either water or rent.
* Tang lends Young Fu the money he needs, saying he'll take it out of Young Fu's wages once he becomes a journeyman. Young Fu also chooses to tell his mother the truth about what happened, and both Fu Be Be and Tang are proud of him for doing so.
* Finally Young Fu finishes his apprenticeship and becomes a journeyman. Tang will pay him three dollars a month to start out, a higher wage than many starting journeymen receive.
* Young Fu asks for and receives Tang's permission to reorganize the shop in order to show off the finest goods better. While he's working, Small Den spends a lot of time coming in and out of the shop chatting with the accountant. After some weeks, Li tells him there is chatter in the shop about thievery; Li doesn't realize that Young Fu is under suspicion, but Fu does.
* Eventually Young Fu notices one of the missing items in the front window of Wu, the rival coppersmith. He runs back to the copper shop to talk to Tang about the matter; the accountant claims Young Fu came back to steal, and Tang pretends to believe him but secretly warns Young Fu to keep quiet. Then Den happens by the shop again, and lo and behold! the missing vase is back on the shelf.
* Den and the accountant were both in the stealing together, Den because the accountant was his only friend and in order to frame Young Fu, the accountant because he owed gambling debts. Tang doesn't have either of them arrested, but warns them both sternly. The next day the accountant doesn't come in to work.
* Young Fu asks Tang why he acted like Young Fu was under suspicion; Tang explains that he needed to trick the accountant into betraying himself, but that he actually trusts Young Fu like his own son.
* Eventually Li gets married, and Young Fu arranges to have a silk suit tailored for himself in the city style, so that he will appear less like a countryman on grand occasions.
* Young Fu and his mother also move out of their little one-room apartment into a two-room arrangement. Young Fu promises to visit Wang Scholar often; Wang has also become friends with Father Ling.
* One day Tang is asked to visit the "ya-men", which appears to be a place combining courthouse, jail, and general bureaucracy; Tang asks Young Fu to accompany him, wearing the fancy silk suit. It turns out the journeyman Lu is suspected of opium smuggling; Tang and Young Fu are both sure he's not guilty, but Tang asks Young Fu to go to Lu's house that evening on a faked errand and try to figure out what's going on. If the matter is not solved in three days, Lu will be arrested.
* Young Fu finds nothing suspicious, and Lu is accordingly arrested. That night, Young Fu goes back and spies on Lu's place, and follows the real opium smuggler down to the river, where the smuggler hands the packet off to a worker on the foreign steamer. Young Fu then follows the smuggler home and reports his findings to Tang, and soon the real smugglers are arrested and Lu is free again.
* While Lu is recuperating from his arrest, Young Fu has to do more of the hands-on work of the shop than usual. He dislikes welding and is sloppy at it; Tang tells him off, and he works hard to improve.
* Eventually, Tang says that if Young Fu continues "to prove this manhood you are so anxious to assume", Tang, who has no living family, will adopt Young Fu as his own son. Happy ending! :-)
* Young Fu -- a first name is not given -- and his family are moving into a tenement in Chungking (now Chongqing), the "economic center of the upstream Yangtze basin" per Wiki. They have just come from the countryside where they used to live.
* Okay, Young Fu's name is Fu Yuin-fah. He's thirteen. He and his mother, Fu Be Be, have come to Chungking after Mr Fu's death; Young Fu is to be apprenticed to a coppersmith named Tang, presumably so he can eventually support his mother. We get some detail about how Chungking is a trade center and where it stands in Szechuen (Sichuan) province, roughly in the center of mainland China, fifteen hundred miles by river from the major port city of Shanghai.
* There's a note that Fu Be Be has bound feet; apparently during the Qing Dynasty (the last Chinese imperial dynasty) this was a common practice among all social classes, though both the Republic and People's Republic of China strongly discouraged it and it has now disappeared.
* The ongoing war between the Kuomintang and the northern warlords, which more or less ended in 1928, damaged many of the farms in the area, and the constant loss of his crops to soldiers' and bandits' raiding is part of what caused Mr Fu's premature death.
* There's a lot of very evocative description about the way things work here in 1930ish Chungking, most of which I'm skipping so as to finish this liveblog at some point. ^_^
* Young Fu meets an old scholar, who banters with him for a while and points out that his good luck is in being young and strong, not (as Young Fu had remarked aloud) in having come to the big city. Scholar Wang lives in the upstairs apartment above the Fu family's downstairs apartment. Wang also mentions that the coppersmith Tang is known as a skilled artisan and that Fu is lucky to be apprenticed to him.
* A sedan chair passes, its carriers announcing that the person inside is a "rich foreigner", or as one of the passersby notes, a "foreign devil" -- a person from outside China, in this context usually a white American. The sedan-chair's rider is not visible, but Young Fu is excited to note that there are foreigners in Chungking and that he may have a chance to see one someday.
* There's also a sidenote that the sea, whatever a "sea" is, separating China from the foreigners' land, cannot be nearly so big as the Yangtze-kiang... I went to read up on the Yangtze River and discovered that technically, only the lowest 435km of the river is known within China as the Yangtze, though English-speakers use "Yangtze" for the whole river. Young Fu would properly think of it as either the Chang Jiang (Long River) or the Chuan Jiang (Sichuan River). I'm going to assume that "kiang" up there is an alternate anglicization of "jiang" (river) unless otherwise notified.
* Okay, back to the story. Young Fu is older than apprentices normally start out, but Tang the coppersmith agrees to take him on. Due to the war, he will serve a three-year apprenticeship instead of the usual five years. (I don't quite follow the reasoning, but okay.) Young Fu will receive his meals while he is an apprentice, but since Fu Be Be is a widow living alone, Tang will allow Fu to sleep at his mother's place instead of at the copper shop.
* Fu Be Be knows which Chinese character "fu" is the proper one to have the clerk sign Young Fu's contract with, since Mr Fu was apparently fairly educated for a farmer, but she cannot write it; Young Fu is embarrassed and determines he will learn to read and write. (Which is gonna be a hell of a job, given the complexities of Chinese written language...)
* Having gotten her son settled at Tang's, Fu Be Be goes to look for work for herself, so as to pay the rent, feed herself, and buy clothes for herself and Young Fu as needed. She gets a seasonal job at a brush-maker's, sorting pig bristles by size; when the hot season hits, she'll need to find something else, but she'll worry about that when the time comes.
* Young Fu, as the newest apprentice, is assigned to tend the fire and keep the heat steady. There are two other apprentices and five journeymen in the shop; the two most important journeymen are Old Tsu and the lanky Lu. The second newest apprentice is Small Den, who criticizes Young Fu's technique of fire-tending. At lunch, all of these people make pointed snarky remarks about how country people (like Young Fu) are inferior to city people; however, Old Tsu also makes a crack at Small Den about how he's been showing off his little knowledge and lording it over Young Fu.
* Ooh, it seems we're earlier than 1928 right here, since the men's discussion of politics revolves around what may happen if the current Tuchun (warlord) should be defeated. I presume we'll be following Young Fu for a few years, then.
* After lunch, a newcomer called Small Li turns out to be the other apprentice, and Young Fu is sent out with him to deliver a load of brass kettles (the shop works both brass and copper). Li's grandfather was a farmer, so he's not as snarky at Young Fu as the others are. Li hopes someday to cross the Great River -- there are no bridges across the Yangtze in Chungking or downstream at this point in history -- and see the view from the hills.
* Ah, okay, it turns out Den resents Young Fu for taking the spot his cousin wanted. Den, it seems, is not a very good apprentice and Tang didn't want another like him. Li is disappointed that Fu will not be sleeping on the roof of the copper shop with the other apprentices, since Den is also not very good company.
* Tang is always sharp-tongued, but doesn't beat his apprentices, Li informs us. Tang also lets Fu go home early his first night so his mother won't worry. As time goes on, we learn that Tang is a good artisan, a good salesman, and a just master.
* One day an American comes into the shop. A conversation between Fu and a workman called Dsen gives us the basic attitude most Chinese of this time and place hold toward white Westerners: that everything they do is the opposite of what is proper and Chinese-like, that they are barbarians with no manners, but they are rich and spend their money freely.
* Fu Be Be worries that the foreigner's presence will bring bad luck, but Young Fu takes Dsen's view that he was harmless.
* Chungking is a cloudy, rainy, overcast, wet city -- Wiki tells me it has a humid subtropical climate and as little as 8% sunshine over the course of January. It's also built up the sides of the hills surrounding the river.
* Young Fu is super impressed by the fancy upper class homes to which he sometimes makes deliveries, and thinks there can't be any more splendid buildings in the whole world, an opinion Tang's accountant tells him is foolish. He's also amused by the way the wealthy ladies treat the tradesmen the same way Fu Be Be treats shopkeepers she buys from.
* There's another reference to foot-binding, this time of a small upperclass girl. The practice of foot-binding was becoming less common in metropolitan China at the time this book is set, but in remoter areas like Chungking and among upperclass families it was still popular; it didn't completely cease until the Chinese Communist government made efforts in the '50s to stamp it out.
* Young Fu is occasionally reminded when he passes schools that he wants to learn reading and writing, but he currently has no time and doesn't wish to bother Wang Scholar with the request.
* Six months after coming to Chungking, when Young Fu has turned fourteen, he encounters a group of soldiers trying to force a "load-coolie", a low-class man treated almost like a beast of burden, to carry their gear. The coolie pleads that he cannot leave the job he's been hired to do, and the soldiers shoot him. Young Fu is so shocked he freezes instead of running away, and the soldiers force him to carry the coolie's load of rice for them; he isn't really strong enough, but he has to do it or be shot.
* Once they reach the soldiers' quarters at the far end of the city, however, some of the other soldiers point out that the captain will not let them keep Young Fu as a personal slave, since he "wishes to win the favor of the new government at Nanking", that being the Republic of China government led by Chiang Kai-shek. One of the soldiers pulls Young Fu aside and tells him to run, explaining that "I was your age when they tore me from my father's house".
* When Young Fu gets home, his mother has been worrying, but once she hears his story, she goes to a small streetside shrine of Kwan Yin, the goddess of mercy, to thank her for Young Fu's escape and ask her special protection on the soldier who saved him.
* After this experience, Young Fu is scared of soldiers, though he continues to be curious about everything else. He now knows his way around the city fairly well, and outside "one of the foreign temples (a French cathedral)" -- there are French, German, US, and Japanese consulates in Chungking at this time -- he watches a public letter writer and tries to memorize some of the Chinese characters. Small Li scolds him for wasting time, but Young Fu continues.
* One night Wang Scholar sees Young Fu practicing drawing characters in the air, fusses at him a bit for having learned the strokes wrong, and brings him upstairs to start teaching him to read and write. He also says that knowledge "has been given that men might learn how to live, not to win fortune", a teaching which impresses Young Fu greatly.
* Young Fu dislikes Tang's accountant, who we are now told has a "supercilious air", and he keeps his studies secret so that the accountant and the others will not mock him.
* One day Young Fu is sent out of the city to carry a letter to a workman in a nearby town about a commission from a foreign gunboat captain. (The Yangtze is not easily navigable by steamboat as far upstream as Chungking, but during this time period there were a lot of efforts made.) On his way back, there's an incident where a group of beggars swear revenge on Young Fu.
* Three months later Young Fu, thinking about his learnings rather than looking where he's going, trips and drops a brazier he's carrying down the road outside the gate, where most of the beggars congregate. Some beggars pick up the brazier and ruin it with scratches and dents. Fu considers delivering it anyway and letting someone else take the blame for the damage, but eventually decides to take it back, tell Tang what happened, and accept whatever his punishment turns out to be.
* Tang quotes at him the same line he was thinking about earlier, "If a man's affairs are to prosper, it is simply a matter of purpose", gives him a scolding for loitering around on his errands, and forbids him to run any more errands for a month.
* Once the month is over, Young Fu moves so fast on his errands that Small Li complains about it. His apprenticeship is now almost halfway over, and once he becomes a journeyman he can start earning wages and help support Fu Be Be. He starts to feel proud of himself and his work.
* Then one day, when Tang jets him go early as a reward for finishing all his errands so fast, he wanders into Thief Street -- the area where stolen goods are sold for low prices -- and sees a nickel watch with a black face. The shopkeeper flatters him, shows him how it glows in the dark, and sells him the watch on credit, charging five dollars, an astonishing sum. Fu Be Be is quite reasonably extremely angry at him for this waste; she had hoped to save up enough money to buy herself a nice coffin, which they could use as a combined table and storage-chest until her death.
* A couple of months after Young Fu buys the watch, it stops running, and the glow-in-the-dark paint runs out of glow. Young Fu is even more depressed by this, but Fu Be Be is happier, since the "foreign spirit" has lost its power. However, though she paid two dollars of the five-dollar debt, the shopkeeper is still hounding Young Fu for the other three dollars, and the New Year is coming, "when debts as well as clothing and food must be new".
* On New Year's Eve, Tang lets the whole shop staff leave early, and Young Fu heads off across the Yangtze -- loading vegetables on a trader's boat in exchange for the trip across -- to seek out his mother's brother's family who live in the hills. When he gets there, he explains that he's hiding overnight from a creditor, and after some scolding the family let him stay.
* That night it snows, which Young Fu has never seen before and is very impressed by. The snow is said to be a good omen for the new year, "the wintry breath of the Dragon". Young Fu borrows two large copper kettles and packs them with snow, planning to sell the snow in Chungking and pay off his debt -- which, astonishingly to me, actually works. :D
* There are still soldiers in the streets, but everyday life isn't much affected by which warlord controls Chungking, unless one is young enough to be conscripted or has a shop the soldiers might loot.
* This particular day there's a fire outside the city walls near the foreigners' hospital. After work Young Fu wants to go and see, though Fu Be Be warns that rubbernecking may draw the Fire Dragon's attention and bring bad luck. Young Fu ignores this, but after he heads out, Fu Be Be quickly makes an offering of incense at Qwan Yin's shrine, hoping to ward off the coming bad luck.
* A blond American woman is in charge of evacuating the hospital. Next to the hospital are a school and a house; when a piece of burning wood falls on the house's roof, she asks for a volunteer to go knock it off, and when no one volunteers (all the onlookers fearing the wrath of the Fire Demon), she goes to climb up herself. Young Fu, noticing that she has no skill at climbing, yells to her to come down and goes up himself. He saves the house from catching fire; the foreign woman, who speaks good local Chinese, thanks him and says she will send a reward of money in the morning, which Young Fu tries to refuse.
* The next day, Small Den insists Young Fu has brought misfortune on his house, but Tang points out that it was the outgoing warlord's soldiers, not the Fire Dragon, who set the hospital on fire.
* When Young Fu gets home that night, there is a letter from the American woman thanking him for his help, along with a gift of five dollars. He gives Fu Be Be four and a half dollars, and takes the other half dollar to buy a small kettle from Tang as a return gift for the foreign lady, this apparently being proper manners. Tang lets him buy a very nice kettle at a steep discount, hoping to get more business from the foreigners if they have a good eye for craftsmanship. The American lady is appropriately impressed.
* It is now the second drummer of Young Fu's apprenticeship, and it's hot. There is talk of plague, which may or may not be transmitted via eating pork. Cholera is followed by typhus, and one day Wang Scholar does not come down from his apartment. Young Fu goes up to check on him; he doesn't feel sick, only very tired, but Fu Be Be sends Young Fu to buy some herbs and makes a healing brew for Wang Scholar. Young Fu stays up half the night seeing to Wang Scholar and is late for work in the morning.
* Young Fu explains the situation to Tang, including how he's been learning to read, and Tang has him read a segment from a newspaper to demonstrate. He says that Wang has taught Young Fu well, and on hearing that Wang asks no payment for his teaching, says "Truly you are a favorite of Heaven!"
* Small Den tries to mock Young Fu for learning to read, but Old Tsu tells him to shut up, and Small Li isn't too angry at Young Fu for not telling Li that he had a teacher.
* The next day Small Li faints from heatstroke, and after a few days when he hasn't gotten any better, Young Fu discusses the matter with Tang and eventually goes to the foreign hospital to ask the American lady's opinion. She agrees to visit Li's house, and if he has typhoid as she thinks he does, to take him to the foreign house (now being used as a hospital), given his parents' permission.
* It turns out Small Li has appendicitis, but the foreign doctors are able to fix him up. Young Fu, walking along, ponders how much good fortune has come from his risk-taking with the anger of evil spirits and foreigners.
* During the disease outbreak Dsen the workman died, and a new workman named Wei has come to the shop, who does not respect Old Tsu or Lu or even Tang as they ought to be respected.
* Okay, it is now 1925 or 1926, since Sun Yat-sen has recently died. The city of Peking, "Northern Capital", is now known as Peiping, "Northern Peace", since the Chinese Nationalists -- the joint government by the Republic of China and the Communists, who have teamed up to take on the warlords -- have make Nanking their capital city. A new Tuchun or governor has been put in place in Chungking, who is said to be one of the Nationalists' men.
* A commission comes from the town of Hochow, upstream on a tributary of the Yangtze, for a large order of brasses to be presented to the new governor. Tang invites Young Fu to travel with him to deliver the commission, since Young Fu seems to have good luck and no fear of devils; perhaps, he notes, this will extend to river bandits.
* Ten soldiers also accompany Tang and Young Fu on the trip as a bodyguard. When the expedition stops for the night, some visiting friends of Tang's warn that there are river bandits close by. Tang is unwilling to risk his fine brasses out of his sight until they have been delivered, however.
* Tang tells Young Fu of how he himself grew up on a farm, came to Chungking after soldiers slaughtered his family, and begged there until Tu the coppersmith took him on as apprentice and taught him the trade.
* On the way upriver to Hochow, bandits fire some warning shots but do not attack the boat. However, after the brasses are sold for silver, the soldiers don't return to the boat in the morning, so Tang orders the boat captain to leave without the soldiers.
* A storm catches them four miles upstream of Chungking and they have to anchor in a little cove, where bandits corner them. Young Fu has an idea of how to hide himself and the silver, so that Tang can pass for an ordinary traveler rather than a successful businessman with an apprentice; he lies down under a pile of rags and bamboo matting near the side of the boat.
* The bandits are suspicious for a bit, but Tang fools them successfully, and congratulates Young Fu on saving the silver.
* More time passes. Small Den finishes his apprenticeship and goes to work as an accountant at the shop of Tang's competitor, Wu, a less skilled artisan. A new apprentice, Feng, takes Den's place, and at first Young Fu joins in teasing him, but then remembers his own first day and speaks encouragingly to Feng.
* The next day, after making a delivery to an official up in the Chungking hills, Young Fu has trouble finding a ride back across the river, and the city gates close before he gets back. He fears that Fu Be Be will worry about him; otherwise, he's rather excited to spend the night outside the gates.
* Rather than go to a cheap inn, Young Fu finds an old lady, Old Mother Ling, and offers to pay her for food and lodging. She refuses payment, but offers him hospitality. Young Fu talks with Mother Ling and her husband, who is a scholar fallen on hard times, over dinner and learns that they come from the same area, Smiling Heaven Hill, where Tang grew up; he makes a note to tell Tang about them.
* That night, the annual river flood rises. Mr and Mrs Ling expect to be drowned, since there's nowhere to go, but Young Fu knows a way up the cliffs to the back of the foreign buildings, and there's a gap in the wall where the foreign hospital burned, which they should be able to get through. It's a terribly difficult climb for the elderly Lings, but they make it eventually, and the foreign lady finds a place in the crowded house-hospital where they can rest.
* When Young Fu tells Tang about the Lings, it turns out Mr Ling was the best friend of Tang's father.
* Small Li soon finishes his apprenticeship and becomes a journeyman worker at Tang's.
* There is a lot of news and chatter about the new government at Nanking. There have been new roads built and horseless trucks brought, old buildings torn down and new foreign-style ones built.
* One day Young Fu passes a tea house where a young man is yelling about the Nanking government. He uses the phrase "Workers of the World", so I speculate he's a Communist agitator, bringing foreshadowing of the split soon to come between the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) and the Communists.
* Apparently there are quite a lot of these agitators from out of town currently in Chungking. Most of the people at the shop speak dismissively of them, but Wei the new guy supports the Communist view and also favors throwing all foreigners out of China. Finally, Wei quits his job, as the Communist agitators keep looting various foreigners' houses and driving them out of town to the gunboat stationed in the river.
* Old Tsu's youngest son is getting married, and he invites everyone at the shop to the wedding feast. Tang asks Young Fu to watch the shop that night, since somebody needs to, and Fu is less close to the Tsu family than the journeymen are; also, Young Fu has a knack for dealing with trouble.
* While he watches the shop, Young Fu finds a spare piece of scrap metal and starts working on a small brazier he has an idea for. But Wei and two of the out-of-town Communist agitators break into the shop, and Young Fu hits Wei over the head with the tongs, then tries to hold off the other two. Just in time, Tang and a couple others come back from the wedding, because Li noticed Wei hanging about in the street and warned Tang that something was up. They take down the robbers and have the soldiers take them away.
* The next day, Young Fu and Li chat over lunch. Li's mother wants to marry him off so she can have a daughter-in-law to help run her household. Li doesn't want to marry yet, but he doesn't really have a choice.
* That night, it's oppressively hot. Fu Be Be has gone to the hills to care for her ailing sister-in-law, so at least she's out of the heat. She doesn't know how long she'll be gone, so she left Young Fu two dollars, enough to keep everything going for a couple of months. Since Fu Be Be isn't around to worry about him, Young Fu goes out to the wall over the riverside for some cooler air, then gets lost on his way home. He sits down to watch some mahjongg players (the narrator refers to the game as "dominoes"), then when one player folds, they invite Young Fu to take his place. Once the game finishes, they tell him he owes them three dollars in gambling debt, and take the two dollars Fu Be Be left him from his belt, so now he's broke and can't afford either water or rent.
* Tang lends Young Fu the money he needs, saying he'll take it out of Young Fu's wages once he becomes a journeyman. Young Fu also chooses to tell his mother the truth about what happened, and both Fu Be Be and Tang are proud of him for doing so.
* Finally Young Fu finishes his apprenticeship and becomes a journeyman. Tang will pay him three dollars a month to start out, a higher wage than many starting journeymen receive.
* Young Fu asks for and receives Tang's permission to reorganize the shop in order to show off the finest goods better. While he's working, Small Den spends a lot of time coming in and out of the shop chatting with the accountant. After some weeks, Li tells him there is chatter in the shop about thievery; Li doesn't realize that Young Fu is under suspicion, but Fu does.
* Eventually Young Fu notices one of the missing items in the front window of Wu, the rival coppersmith. He runs back to the copper shop to talk to Tang about the matter; the accountant claims Young Fu came back to steal, and Tang pretends to believe him but secretly warns Young Fu to keep quiet. Then Den happens by the shop again, and lo and behold! the missing vase is back on the shelf.
* Den and the accountant were both in the stealing together, Den because the accountant was his only friend and in order to frame Young Fu, the accountant because he owed gambling debts. Tang doesn't have either of them arrested, but warns them both sternly. The next day the accountant doesn't come in to work.
* Young Fu asks Tang why he acted like Young Fu was under suspicion; Tang explains that he needed to trick the accountant into betraying himself, but that he actually trusts Young Fu like his own son.
* Eventually Li gets married, and Young Fu arranges to have a silk suit tailored for himself in the city style, so that he will appear less like a countryman on grand occasions.
* Young Fu and his mother also move out of their little one-room apartment into a two-room arrangement. Young Fu promises to visit Wang Scholar often; Wang has also become friends with Father Ling.
* One day Tang is asked to visit the "ya-men", which appears to be a place combining courthouse, jail, and general bureaucracy; Tang asks Young Fu to accompany him, wearing the fancy silk suit. It turns out the journeyman Lu is suspected of opium smuggling; Tang and Young Fu are both sure he's not guilty, but Tang asks Young Fu to go to Lu's house that evening on a faked errand and try to figure out what's going on. If the matter is not solved in three days, Lu will be arrested.
* Young Fu finds nothing suspicious, and Lu is accordingly arrested. That night, Young Fu goes back and spies on Lu's place, and follows the real opium smuggler down to the river, where the smuggler hands the packet off to a worker on the foreign steamer. Young Fu then follows the smuggler home and reports his findings to Tang, and soon the real smugglers are arrested and Lu is free again.
* While Lu is recuperating from his arrest, Young Fu has to do more of the hands-on work of the shop than usual. He dislikes welding and is sloppy at it; Tang tells him off, and he works hard to improve.
* Eventually, Tang says that if Young Fu continues "to prove this manhood you are so anxious to assume", Tang, who has no living family, will adopt Young Fu as his own son. Happy ending! :-)