Eve of a Hundred Midnights Read Online Free Page A

fall over the nearby port. He began a letter to his mother and stepfather:

    The clatter of wooden shoes and the high pitched jabber of foreign voices has finally ceased. Even the village drums have quit their mighty rattle—in a word, it is now exactly one a.m. and the most glorious Oriental moon imaginable is rising. Its light makes visible the aged salt junks and square rigged whalers on the sluggish river. All this I can see from the window as I sit and write you tonight.
    Canton was one of the five “treaty ports” at which Western governments carved out essentially sovereign “extraterritorial” settlements from Chinese territory. It was a cauldron of political ferment in the early twentieth century. Here Sun Yat-sen—considered by Communists and Nationalists alike the father of modern China—began his revolutionary work. But Lingnan, accessible only by boat from Canton, was largely isolated from the surrounding turmoil.
    Still, Lingnan’s campus—with its palm-shaded brick dorms and vines creeping across walkways—was not hermetic. With the river’s mouth just beyond campus, Mel could see waters packed with subsistence fishers, crowded sampans steered by large wooden rudders, cargo boats, and all manner of other craft. Countless thousands of destitute people, known as “those born on the waters” (Sui Seung Yan) and considered ethnically distinct from China’s Han majority, worked and survived on the river. In the letter Mel wrote that night while sitting in his dorm window, he noted that local residents made the equivalent of only about 31 U.S. cents each to spend on food every month.
    â€œThe river people, a distinct tribe, have a hard life,” he wrote. “I’ve noticed how hard they work. Women row, and children start before they can walk and few have slept on land.”
    Not all of Mel’s letters contemplated social issues. Some dripped with privileged Western arrogance about the squalid conditions in China. Others glowed with wide-eyed wonder at the places he saw and even a touch of compassion for the people he met. Some brimmed with warm love for his family. Others bristled with the kind of filial griping that parents have endured through the ages.
    The epistolary Melville Jacoby was at different moments a know-it-all, a brash adventurer, an insecure student, a casual—even aloof—lad, and a charming flirt who frequently wrote about this or that date he had arranged.
    Mel also wrote frequently about the friendships he was developing at Lingnan. He quickly bonded with his Chinese roommate, Chan Ka Yik, and Chan’s best friend, Ching Ta-Min (who went by the Westernized name George Ching), who lived across the hall with a Harvard student named Hugh Deane.
    â€œI tried to take them to see Chinese things,” George later recalled. “Things that they don’t have [in America].”
    One day, for example, George took Mel and some other American students for an exotic dinner.
    â€œThe first course was snake soup,” George remembered. “I tried it first, and said, ‘Ah, very delicious,’ so I convinced them to try it.”
    Two or three of the exchange students still refused. George insisted.
    â€œTry a little bit,” he said. “You come to China, I want to show you something that’s good.”
    The Americans brought the soup to their lips hesitantly. As they took tiny sips, looks of surprised pleasure washed across their faces.
    â€œThey finished the whole thing, and later they ordered two more,” George said.
    Mel wasn’t quite as enthusiastic when he wrote home about the meal.
    â€œRoommate and a Chinese friend took me in last night for a snake dinner,” Mel wrote. “Considered a real delicacy and is very costly over here. Suffered through five courses of the reptile and felt the effects last night. Some food, snakes.”
    In addition to this kind of culinary