Читать книгу CHINA BOYS: How U.S. Relations With the PRC Began and Grew. A Personal Memoir - Nicholas MD Platt - Страница 7

I was fifteen when I took a summer job at “Naumkeag,” the estate of my great-aunt Mabel Choate in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Mabel had inherited the large summer “cottage” in the Berkshires. Architect Stanford White had designed it for her father, Joseph H. Choate, the New York lawyer who made his name opposing the graduated income tax and became U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s (1899–1906). Mabel added what became a famous array of gardens to the working farm that served the estate. At 75 cents an hour, I weeded bricks, mowed lawns, milked cows, and did whatever the farm manager instructed. I was proud of my Social Security card, whose early number I carry to this day, and moved seamlessly between “Upstairs” and “Downstairs” at the big house.

Mabel Choate was amply sized. She strongly believed that good health depended on the vital organs being surrounded by a layer of fat. Witty and quick, responsible and philanthropic, she made herself easily accessible to all ages. Mabel had suffered from a number of ailments in her life, and apparently kept on taking every medicine ever prescribed for her. One of these was Argyrol for sinus problems. As a result, over time she turned a distinctive color. The children in our family referred to her fondly as “our navy blue aunt.” A more accurate description would be a light battleship gray. She wore a set of silver bracelets that tinkled loudly when she walked and announced her presence from a distance. My mother adored Aunt Mabel, her father ’s younger sister, and so did we.

Aunt Mabel had traveled extensively in the “Orient” as a young woman. She fell in love with the arts and architecture of China and brought home, brick by brick, an entire ancestral temple, which she reconstructed at Naumkeag. As an employee during the day, I would sweep the dragon walk and clean the spirit gate. In the evenings I would sit on the temple porch and listen to her traveler ’s tales and the lore she had absorbed. The spirit gate, she told me, was placed to block the direct approach to the temple, forcing visitors to detour around it. Evil spirits could fly only in straight lines and were thus denied entry.

Mabel imported other Chinese practices valuable to teenage boys. It was the height of politesse in old Peking (as Americans then called Beijing), she reported, to belch loudly in appreciation for a delicate dish or a fine meal. She had mastered the technique and taught it to me, empowering me to disrupt school study halls for years to come. At the time, I had no conscious sense of pull toward China. Seeds Mabel Choate sowed would sprout later.

The source of another early family link with Asia was my father’s Aunt Lina, his mother ’s sister. Mary Caroline Hardy graduated from Radcliffe College in 1902, one of the original “Blue Stockings.” The years had bowed her legs and placed wisps of moustache under her hatchet nose, but left her sharp and wise. Sunday dinner at her walk-up apartment on Sparks Street in Cambridge was a regular feature of my years at Harvard. She cooked us toothsome dishes with odd names––“Cry Like a Child,” roast chicken basted with 7Up, was so delicious you did just that; and “Train Wreck,” a beef stew with sour cream and red wine, was chaotic in appearance but equally good. Sunday nights were a haven for family. My cousins Charley and Frank and my sister Penny all overlapped with me at college and were regulars at table. Literary people like John Updike also enjoyed Aunt Lina’s company and the victuals and steady flow of sherry from S.S. Pierce.

Aunt Lina’s Hardy family photograph album showed pictures of nineteenth-century Bostonians, large males in frock coats with muttonchop whiskers and ladies in elaborate dresses shaped by whalebone corsets and bustles. Among them was a small Asian gentleman.

“Who was this?” I asked Aunt Lina, as we sat on her sofa going through the album one Sunday evening.

“That was your Japanese relative, Joseph Hardy Neesima,” she replied, and told me the story that Japanese, as I discovered years later, remember and repeat to this day. His name was Nijima Jo, a twenty-year-old Samurai who stole out of Japan in 1864, four years before the Meiji Restoration. Under the Tokugawa Shoguns, his country had been closed for 250 years, and emigration was a capital crime. But Admiral Perry’s black ships had appeared in Japanese waters ten years before, bringing evidence of a different world, new technology, and strong Christian beliefs that Nijima and other young Japanese were not permitted to study. So frustrated that he became physically ill, Nijima had to escape. With the help of a Russian Orthodox priest and an American packet-schooner skipper, he made his way to Shanghai. There, in the roads of the Whampoa River, he found an American clipper ship, the Wild Rover, owned by Alpheus Hardy, Aunt Lina’s grandfather. Nijima, an extraordinarily focused young man, made straight for the vessel and found a job as cabin boy.

By the time Wild Rover reached Boston a year later, stopping in Hong Kong and Manila among other Asian ports, Nijima had learned English, translated portions of his Chinese Bible into English, and made strong friendships with key members of the crew, most notably the captain, who arranged for him to meet the boss. In 1865, Alpheus Hardy, a handsome, imposing, and deeply religious man, received Nijima in his Boston office, standing next to a large rolltop desk.

“Why did you come here?” he asked, simply.

“This is why I came,” Nijima replied, and placed on the desk several pages of the New Testament he had translated. Hardy, impressed, asked him to write an essay that described his feelings and motivations. In Nijima’s quaint but passionate prose, he told Hardy and his wife that he had felt like a “rat in a bag” in Japan. Originally thinking to hire him for the household, they were so moved that they adopted him as their son.

Nijima became a close member of the Hardy family for the next ten years, calling himself Joseph Hardy Neesima. Under Alpheus’s patronage and guidance, he studied with characteristic intensity and graduated from Phillips Academy Andover, Amherst College, and Andover Theological Seminary. In 1875, he returned to Japan to found the country’s first, and still largest and most successful, Christian university, in Kyoto. He called it the Doshisha (Society of Friends). Every year Mary Caroline Hardy received an engraved invitation to attend graduation. Nijima’s story fascinated me. Like Aunt Mabel’s Chinese temple tales, the early Japanese connection would echo in later years. With great fanfare, my father and I attended the Doshisha centennial anniversary in 1975, while I was serving in our embassy in Tokyo.