by Ling Zhang
Not all of Chinatown was so dilapidated, however. There was one brickbuilt house on Fisgard Street, which, although it was a low, single-storey affair, was built of good honest bricks, and tiled with real tiles. When the sun shone down, the brightness glared off it. And on Store Street there was another building, so square and flat it looked like a box of Pirate-brand cigarettes lying on its side. Most of the time, its door was closed, as if closely guarding a secret. There were no stalls in the street in front of the door, and there were never any men resting and sunning themselves in the corner against the wall. Its door did not bear even a shop sign. It was a pity that the only two remotely presentable-looking buildings in the whole of Chinatown were not lived in, at least not by the living.
The low, single-storey building on Fisgard Street was the temple of Tam Kung, who was worshipped by the people from Guangdong Province. Chinatown belonged to the people from Guangdong’s Four Counties. Tam Kung’s birthday was celebrated every year at the beginning of the fourth month of the lunar calendar, and on that day, Chinatown was as noisy and bustling as on market day. In the temple, offerings were made and incense burned. In front of the temple, there were lion and dragon dances, staged operas and vendors selling snacks. Even the yeung fan came to Chinatown. They were there not to pay their respects to Tam Kung, but because the noise and excitement was irresistible. The real reason for the hustle and bustle lay thousands of miles away and was not the slightest concern of theirs.
The square, flat building on Store Street was the morgue, though it did not contain any coffins. Instead it was piled high with small wooden caskets, each of which contained one complete set of bones. Each skeleton belonged to someone who had been dead seven years: their bones were brought from all over Gold Mountain and collected here to wait for the boat back to Hong Kong. On each casket, the following details were meticulously noted: full name, place and date of birth and date of decease, and also the number under which the death was registered. The souls of the registered lay quietly in the pitch darkness of their caskets, yearning for fair wind from the Four Counties to start the sail home. Unlike Tam Kung Temple, the morgue was a well-kept secret within Chinatown, a secret as tightly sealed from the outside world as a pearl within an oyster shell. If it had not been for a fire a few years back which bore Chinatown’s secret on the winds to the rest of the city, no one would ever have guessed at the “spirit goods” inside.
Today was a half-day holiday in Chinatown so all the shops were shut. Not because of the Chinese New Year or for Tam Kung’s birthday, but because today the steamship had arrived from Hong Kong. The many hundreds of souls that had waited so long in their caskets could finally begin the journey back to the Four Counties, and everyone in Chinatown would go and see them off.
This farewell was a solemn occasion because the Chinatown folk felt grief for the dead. But their grief was mixed with other, more complex feelings too. The contents of these number-registered caskets had started out as flesh-and-blood human beings, who had disembarked at these docks and dispersed into the streets around. Chinatown had not looked after them properly and had abandoned them in these caskets. There was also a feeling that they would all share the same fate eventually. These flesh-and-blood beings had brought many stories with them and now they were going back with even more. But once the lid of each casket was shut, those stories were chopped cleanly in half—one-half in the world of the living, the other in the box. The living tales that had been passed from one person to another were eventually changed beyond recognition, while the half which lay in the casket would never be known by anyone ever again. The living who came to bid farewell to the dead grieved for these untold tales. They did not know when their own stories would be chopped in half by the shutting of the casket lid.
Ah-Fat was on holiday today. He was now helping out in the San Yuen Wash-House across from the Tsun Sing General Store. Every day he went to meet the steamship as it docked and collected the seamen’s dirty clothing. He stuffed it into big sacks which he loaded onto the carrying pole and took back to the laundry. The next day, he delivered the washed and ironed clothes. Sometimes he made this trip several times a day. None of the three helpers at the laundry knew any English, but Ah-Fat could count in English so he was the one who dealt with the seamen. The sacks were stuffed so full it was like carrying two iron balls, and the pole bowed under their weight. Ah-Fat crept along all day long, bent low to the ground like a praying mantis with a rock on its back. The laundry was open seven days a week, which meant no days off. Ah-Fat’s shoulders had been yearning for a rest for a very long time.
Ah-Fat was no stranger to the caskets. Ah-Sing, the owner of the Tsun Sing General Store and Ah-Fat’s landlord, had a cousin who had died several years before and was buried in an out-of-town cemetery. On the day of the steamship’s arrival, Ah-Sing summoned Red Hair and Ah-Fat, and asked them to go with him to the cemetery to dig up the bones. This had to be done seven years after the burial, to give time for the flesh to rot away from the skeleton. They poured cooking wine onto cloths and covered their noses and mouths. The bones, when they dug them up, were a yellowish-brown like aged elephant ivory, but they whitened up once they had been carefully rubbed clean with the cloths dipped in the wine. Ah-Sing and Red Hair laid the cleaned bones out on the ground to make sure that they were complete, and then called Ah-Fat over to pack them one by one into the wooden casket. The big bones went at the bottom, the smaller ones on top, then finally on the very top, the pigtail, as desiccated as year-old raw-silk threads. Not a scrap of flesh clung to the bones.
As Ah-Fat was collecting the bones together, he discovered that one shin bone was thicker on one side than on the other, and on the thick side there was a black mark. Thinking he had not cleaned it properly, he scratched it with his fingernail. But however hard he scratched, he could not get the mark off. Ah-Sing told him his cousin had broken his leg and had not been able to get up for three months. “Who broke it?” asked Ah-Fat. Red Hair shot him a meaningful glance but Ah-Fat did not notice. He kept on pestering Ah-Sing with his questions until eventually Ah-Sing lost his temper: “Quit asking so many fucking questions!” Then he gulped down the last of the wine and hurled the bottle as far away from him as he could. It hit the ground and rolled off down the hill until it finally hit a rocky outcrop and shattered with a dull thud. Ah-Fat was quiet then, and nailed the casket down. He covered it with gold paint and recorded on it the details as Ah-Sing dictated: full name, place of birth, and birth and death dates. It was only when he had finished writing that he realized that the cousin had just had his twenty-second birthday when he died.
“Are you scared?” asked Red Hair. “No,” said Ah-Fat. Red Hair went on, “These bones have rotted away so clean there’s fuck-all on them. Even a starving mongrel wouldn’t bother licking them.” Ah-Sing sighed. “It’ll be up to you to collect my bones,” he said to Red Hair. Ah-Sing, at forty-three years old, was older than the rest. “You can’t tell who’ll be collecting whose bones,” said Red Hair. Then he gave Ah-Fat a shove: “You can send my bones back, you little shit. I brought you out here, you send me home, then we’re quits.”
“Uh-huh,” said Ah-Fat indistinctly. It sounded like he was agreeing, but it was an automatic response, one which did not come from his heart. He could not know then just how important that “uh-huh” was to be. He was very young, after all, just starting out in Gold Mountain. All this talk of death made no more impression on him than a flat stone skimming across the surface of a pond. At the moment, all he thought about day and night was earning money. He wanted nothing more than to have three pairs of eyes and four hands so he could learn every detail about how to run a laundry. Sooner or later, he would open a laundry of his own. It would have six men to do the fetching and carrying, two horses and carts, each with a driver, and would run twenty-four hours a day. A pair of lanterns would hang from the eaves, and its name would be painted in big red letters on the doors. He had already thought of the name, Whispering Bamboos
Laundry, taken from the beautiful lines by the famous classic poet Wang Wei: “Bamboos whisper of washer-girls returning home/Lotus-leaves yield before the fishing boat.” He had learned this classical poem at school with Mr. Auyung. None of the yeung fan customers would understand the allusion, nor would the other workers, but it was enough that he did.
That day, there was an incense table with offerings arranged in front of every lodging house and store in Chinatown. There was a big table right in the middle of Chinatown too, piled high with offerings of cakes and fruit of every sort, and chickens and ducks and roasted suckling pigs which gleamed golden. At each end of the table were two burners for the “spirit money.” From a distance, the whole street seemed to be wreathed in smoke. At midday, a propitious time chosen according to the lunar calendar, the consul gave a great shout and the orchestra struck up. There were ten master players of the Chinese fiddle, dressed in white gowns, with their instruments swathed in white cloth too. The strings trembled and an almighty wailing issued forth, the high notes ear-splitting and the low notes like dull hammer blows, overwhelming the listeners with waves of melancholy. When the first piece had finished, there was a sudden change in the weather: a chill blast of wind swept the ashes of the paper money in the burners into the air, where they spiralled upward, the column of ash getting thinner as it blew higher, until the very top formed a sharp point which lingered high in the air.
There was consternation among the watching crowds. The consul, a man of mature years and experience, threw himself on his knees in front of the burners and cried loudly: “Great Buddha, our countrymen have died in foreign parts. They suffered numerous injustices, yet today, finally, they can begin the journey home. There they will pay their respects to their ancestors, and will be reunited with their earthly sons and daughters. We beg you to bless them with a fair wind and a smooth sailing. When one spirit is safely home, ten thousand spirits will rejoice.” As he finished speaking and raised his head, the ash plume dispersed and the wind dropped.
In front of the mortuary, eight horses stood harnessed to four open carriages covered in white mourning drapes. The order was given and the horses slowly set off towards the docks, heavily laden with several hundred wooden caskets. As the sound of the horses’ hooves gradually faded into the distance, and nothing remained but a faint puff of dust, some of the spectators could be seen wiping their eyes with their sleeves.
“He bartered some tea for a pair of boots from the Redskins, and gave them short measures. The Redskins beat him up,” Red Hair told Ah-Fat on the way home.
“Who?” asked Ah-Fat.
“Ah-Sing’s cousin.”
Years seven to thirteen of the reign of Guangxu (1881–1887) Province of British Columbia, Canada
This afternoon, five hundred Chinese navvies from Victoria and New Westminster boarded a steamship bound for Port Moody. They are part of the work force which will build the Pacific Railroad. After ten years of intense negotiations within the Canadian Federal Government, work can now begin on the railroad project. In order to cut costs to the minimum, Chief Engineer Andrew Onderdonk has overseen the recruitment of over five thousand navvies from Canton and California. Several thousand more will arrive over the next few months. These figures do not include a significant number of Chinese already living in Victoria who have joined the work teams.
The Pacific Railroad will extend through the precipitous Rocky Mountains of the Fraser Valley region. Here the rocks are of solid granite and all the railroad foundations will have to be hacked out by hand. Between the towns of Yale and Lytton alone, a mere seventeen miles, it will be necessary to hack out thirteen tunnels. In one mile-and-a-half section, four tunnels will be built in quick succession. The coolies will undertake the most dangerous work, pitting human flesh against hard rock.
Within these construction teams, those who blast the rock earn the highest wages, estimated to be four dollars a day. Metal-grinders earn three dollars fifty a day, bridge-building carpenters earn three dollars a day and bricklayers, two dollars fifty to three dollars a day. Wood cutters earn two dollars a day. The least skilled of the workers earn one dollar seventy five per day. Although some among them are hefty and strong, most of the workers are quite diminutive. Some appear like pre-pubescent boys, though all workers are required to show documentation stating they are at least eighteen years of age. When the navvies arrive on site, they are divided into groups of thirty men, each headed by a foreman appointed by the railroad company. Each work group includes a cook and a record keeper.
The record-keeper logs the hours of work completed and liaises between the workers and the foreman. Most of the Chinese workers understand almost no English, and the authorities are concerned about whether they can properly understand work instructions. Another safety concern is the peculiar long pigtails they wear. A representative from the railroad company explained that the Chinese regard their pigtails as sacred because they are bestowed by the Emperor and their parents. Indeed, to the Chinese, they are more important than life itself. According to the English Constitution, which enshrines the protection of basic human rights, no one can force a Chinese to cut off his absurd pigtail. And so thousands will set out on this unknown road with their pigtails and their bags of rice.
The British Columbian, New Westminster, 7 April 1881
They lived in rudimentary tents, each made of seven tree branches and covered by two tarpaulins. The trees used were either fir or silver birch. These were felled and the branches stripped off, leaving only the trunk. They were erected in two rows of three on each side, interlocking at the top, and along the three forks was laid the seventh, thicker trunk, forming the roof pole. Over this went the tarpaulins and these were sewn together with the coarse thread used for making fishing nets, by means of a needle made from an animal bone. All of this was learned from the Redskins.
Fires were kept burning all night on either side of the tent; anyone who got up for a piss in the night would add a bit more firewood to them. At daybreak, when the cook got up to make breakfast, he only needed to rake the remaining fire and add some sticks and he could make their porridge. As soon as the sleepers in the tent opened their eyes, the porridge would be ready. Making fires in the mountains served several purposes: they kept the men warm, gave light, cooked food and gave them courage. Before these men arrived, the mountains were the domain of wild beasts.
The tents were simple because the men struck camp and moved on every couple of weeks. As the building of the railroad proceeded the men moved with it, keeping pace with the construction. Striking camp meant rolling up the tents and sleeping mats, loading the rice sacks and water buckets onto the pack horses and then walking to the next camp. They did not take the branches with them. One thing the mountains had in plenty was trees, so they could fell them as they needed. Every time they struck camp, Ah-Fat sewed a cross on the corner of one of the tarpaulins. There were six crosses now.
Ah-Fat was awakened by the screeching of Red Hair’s fiddle, which seemed to be sawing right into his skull. He kicked away the leg which Ah-Lam, a fellow navvy in his team, had flung across him in his sleep, crawled out of the tent and chucked a stone at Red Hair. The fiddle screeched to a halt and Red Hair swore: “That’s a bridal tune. If you stop me playing, you’ll never get yourself a bride, ever!”
It had rained in the night and leaked into the tent, wetting Ah-Fat’s trouser bottoms. As he wrung them dry, the sun burst through. The sunlight was cut into fine-ribboned rays by the dense stands of trees, which cast damp shadows underfoot. Overnight a layer of white mushrooms had sprung up among the trees, some as small as buttons, others as big as plates. On the top of one mushroom perched a spotted squirrel, quite a young one, only a few inches long. It had a thin covering of fur and beady black eyes. Ah-Fat picked up a stick to tease it and the little creature was not afraid, it just whiffled its nose and sniffed. Ah-Fat pulled up his jacket and relieved himself with a long piss in the direction of the mushroom. Startled, the squirrel raised i
ts tail in the air and scurried away, rustling through the undergrowth. Ah-Fat could not help laughing out loud.
Ginger woke up too, stretched lazily and emerged from behind a tree, cocking his hind leg and pissing against the tree trunk. Then he raked the ground with his claws, filling the forest with a dense musky odour.
Ginger was a stray dog that had attached himself to them when they got off the boat at Port Moody. They had tried to shake him off several times but he stuck with them. Then someone said a dog would give them courage in the mountains, and they kept him.
After she pissed, Ginger wagged his tail and, placing his wet paws firmly against Ah-Fat’s leg, licked him till the warm drool ran all over his hand. Ginger was a wolf-dog cross and stood so tall that if he stretched, he could almost reach Ah-Fat’s shoulder. Ah-Fat had to shove the dog away a few times before he finally got rid of him.
He asked the cook what was for breakfast. “Boiled potatoes, rice porridge and salt fish.”
“It’s potatoes every day,” complained Ah-Fat, “potatoes every meal. We piss potatoes … can’t we have something different?” “You don’t know how lucky you are,” said the cook. “If we ever get snowed in, there won’t be a fucking crumb to eat.” “If there’s no fucking crumb to eat, then at least there won’t be potatoes,” said Ah-Fat. The cook’s expression tightened: “Potatoes are all the supply team ever bring into the mountains. Even if you killed me off, you wouldn’t get anything different to eat.”
When they had finished breakfast, the record-keeper relayed the foreman’s instructions: “You’re breaking up stones all day today.” The stones which had been blasted out the previous two days all had to be carried up the mountainside basket by basket and tipped down into the canyon. The thirty-strong team would be divided into groups of ten, one to do the stone-breaking, another to load the baskets and the third to carry them up the mountain. Red Hair and Ah-Fat were stone-breakers; Ah-Lam was in the carrying team. “Mind your step,” said Red Hair to him as he set off. “If you miss your footing, you’ll be over that damned cliff quicker than an eagle can squawk.” “I know my way well enough,” said Ah-Lam. “Don’t go wishing bad luck on me.”