In the Shadow of the Cypress by Thomas Steinbeck Page A

Lao-Hong’s predicament was hardly new. In truth, he had been dealing with variations of the same dilemma all his adult life. Simply stated, it centered on the fact that immigrant Chinese, despite the fact that Dr. Lao-Hong spoke flawless Mandarin and Cantonese, perceived him as being too American, while white Americans, of course, treated him like theydid all Chinese, no matter how well he spoke English, or how advanced his education.
    This fish-nor-fowl quandary had required Dr. Lao-Hong to walk a very narrow path in both worlds, and though his loyalties had always sided with his Chinese brethren, his intellectual sensibilities were Western in the main, and herein lay another ungainly dilemma. Though the Chinese had considered themselves fully literate for many centuries, the truth was at odds with that presumption, at least for those Chinese who had come into the shadow of the Gold Mountain as poor laborers, with little or no formal education of any kind. Sadly, most were illiterate in all but the simplest Chinese characters. In many cases these people arrived in San Francisco from different parts of China and could hardly communicate with one another, much less their white employers. Even Lao-Hong found he sometimes experienced great difficulty comprehending the least bit of the various local dialects. In some instances he found his poorer interlocutors spoke a local patois of Chinese that was totally incomprehensible even to their neighbors in the next province. It was like the difference between French and Norwegian.
    The doctor had long been aware that blistering ignorance invariably walked hand in hand with blind superstition, but that was true of all mankind and hardly unique to his own race. However, this tradition did cause some conflict within the Chinese communities themselves. Those who were raised in conservative and better-educated Mandarin societies brought their ancient prejudices east, and so looked down on those fellow countrymen who spoke Cantonese, or any other dialect for that matter. On the other hand, those Chinese who spoke various forms of Cantonese traditionally suspected the high-handedmotives and cultural vanities of those who spoke Mandarin, and herein lay one of the problems he was about to confront.
    The various tongs represented the cultural tastes and inclinations of their elders and constituents, and in the past their competing interests had sometimes led to outright warfare between them. This was by no means a local novelty. Such conflicts had been going on in China for centuries. Dr. Lao-Hong was reminded of something his esteemed father had told him: “The Chinese Empire had only one all-powerful enemy in the world, and it was the Chinese themselves.”
    Through his university studies, the doctor had since learned that the same could be said of the Americans, the English, the French, the Germans, and virtually every other nation on earth. The only possible exception was the Duchy of Lichtenstein, whose minuscule population and limited acreage precluded the luxury of having enemies, either domestic or foreign.
    For reasons that Lao-Hong could only imagine, Dr. Gilbert had ultimately refrained from publicly divulging what he knew but could not prove, and the local population of Monterey remained ignorant of Mr. O’Flynn’s discoveries. The same, however, could not be said of the Chinese community. The Chinese were quite capable of maintaining an ironclad secrecy as far as foreigners were concerned, but within their own ranks, secrecy was next to impossible. Word of the stone tablet and Zhou Man’s Imperial seal traveled like a thatch fire throughout the tongs all the way to San Francisco.
    Within weeks, a close and heated debate arose among the various factions. Some bearded elders insisted the treasures should be held and guarded by the parent tongs in San Francisco, while others believed they should be sent back to China. But the cold facts were sad, as most just wanted the treasures