by Ling Zhang
Ah-Fat felt a smack on the face and shut his eyes involuntarily. When he opened them again, it was to see a bright red duck egg suspended over his head. After a few moments, he realized it was the sun. Gradually his vision cleared and he looked at the trees and the men standing around him. They seemed to be slowly spinning, each branch and leaf and face coloured in a single hue—the vermilion red of the print in his school books.
There were shouts of “Ah-Fat, Ah-Fat!” Some of the men rushed to pull Ah-Fat to his feet, others made to grab the foremen.
“Don’t move! Or I’ll blast you with this!” Ah-Fat leaned against a tree trunk, holding the bottle of Yellow Water in his hand. The men froze, and the shouts died in their throats, reduced to astonished gasps.
“It’s the Pacific Railroad Company who took this decision. What’s the point of killing these three? It’ll take us a month or more to walk back to the city, and if we don’t get supplies, we’ll all starve. We’ll keep two of them here and send the third down the mountain to cable for supplies. If no supplies turn up, then we’ll keep them pri—”
Ah-Fat crumpled to the ground before he finished talking.
Three days later, the supply team arrived in the camp heavily laden with sacks. There were eighty rice sheets for every navvy. Carrying the food sacks and tools over their shoulders, the motley crowd of men trailed like yellow ants down through the autumnal forests, at the start of the long trek through the wilderness to the city.
Ah-Fat dozed fitfully on the back of the foreman’s horse. His wound was long and deep—it stretched from his left temple to the right side of his mouth. He was capable of walking but the foreman insisted that he ride pillion on his horse—at least as far as the major road.
“You nearly took my life, but you nearly lost your life to save me, so that makes things even and we’re quits,” said the foreman and asked the record-keeper to translate.
“What’s his name?” Ah-Fat asked the record-keeper. He could only speak through one side of his mouth and his words came out faint and fuzzy.
“Rick Henderson.”
When they parted, the foreman took a walking stick out of his baggage and gave it to Ah-Fat. It had been made by a Redskin and was of hardwood, with a grinning eagle carved at the top. The foreman patted Ah-Fat’s shoulder. “Maybe we’ll meet again, kid.” Ah-Fat got down, holding the walking stick, and felt the weakness in his legs.
I hope I never set eyes on you again, was what he thought to himself. But he did not say it. Instead he said: “Maybe, Rick, maybe.”
Ah-Fat began to walk but he had not gone far when he heard the clopping of hooves behind him. The foreman was back again.
“Nitroglycerine is kept under lock and key. How did you get hold of it?” he asked.
Ah-Fat laughed. His lips were thickly swollen and the laugh twisted his features into a savage grin.
“That was horse piss. Your horse.”
As Ah-Fat made his way through the almost uninhabited forests towards the city, carrying on his back one long cloth bag and a smaller round one, he had no idea that the last spike had been driven into the railroad sleepers in a little town called Craigellachie. At long last, the Pacific Railroad had joined up with the Central and Eastern Railroads, creating a great artery snaking across the chest of the country. Lavish celebratory banquets were taking place, to the popping of champagne corks, and gentlemen in black tuxedos shouted and laughed in between clinking wineglasses. Newspapers and magazines flew off the printing presses, carrying photographs and news reports on their front pages.
But not a single photograph or news report made mention of the
Chinese navvies who built the railroad.
That was something else Ah-Fat did not know.
Ah-Sing got up early in the morning and, before opening up the store, shouted to the boy to come and hang up the lanterns. They had been hung up last New Year and then been put away in the attic in the intervening months. They were dusty and the boy took off his apron and gave them a rub, revealing gold lettering underneath: “Years of Plenty” on one, and “Everlasting Peace” on the other. He was too short to hang them on the nails on the wall even when he stood on a stool, so he fetched a bamboo cane and lifted them up onto the nails. A tenuous air of good cheer filtered grudgingly through the door and windows and into the street outside.
The boy shook out his apron and the air filled with clouds of grey dust.
“Uncle Ah-Sing, how much New Year stuff do you want me to get today?”
The boy was referring to gift boxes of snacks such as sesame and green bean cakes and lotus crisp, with a festive red paper cover stuck on top. Ah-Sing bought these in from the cake shop. He did not stock them or make them himself.
Ah-Sing counted up on his fingers. “Five boxes,” he said. “Just five, each kind.”
The boy was startled. “Five?” he queried. “Will that be enough for the New Year festival?” “If we sell ’em all, then you can go and light incense before your mother’s picture!” said his boss. “Haven’t you seen the railroad navvies are back and the streets are full of them? They haven’t even got rice to eat. How can they afford cakes?”
Ah-Sing watched the boy clopping off down the street, two large baskets slung from the ends of his carrying pole. Then he went back inside and opened the shop, laying the goods out on display. He looked up at the sky. A thick cloud pressed down so low, it was almost as if he could put up his hand and tweak one corner. Leaden skies like this meant snow, he knew, and it would come down with a whoosh just as soon as the wind blew an opening in the cloud. The snow might tip down for the duration of a day, or a season. You never knew.
On a cold day like this, no one would get up at such an early hour to come to his store. There was no hurry.
The truth was that it was a long time since he had had any fresh food. By the last month of the old year, fruit and vegetables were long gone, except for a few apples he had stored since the autumn, now so dried up, they were smaller than tangerines and as wrinkly as an old woman’s face. There were a few South China delicacies like dried bamboo shoots which he got in last autumn too, but they had not sold either. Even the cigarettes and tea which always sold well had gradually stopped moving off the shelves. At least the tea leaves were packed in foil in wooden boxes and would keep for a year or so. To prevent the tobacco from going mouldy Ah-Sing wrapped it in cloth bags and put it in sacks of rice which absorbed any moisture.
Business was going from bad to worse.
The Pacific Railroad had taken five years to build, stretching farther and farther into the interior. Before it had time to begin carrying goods and people, the trash it created began to surge towards the city—an army of unemployed for which absolutely no preparations had been made. They appeared overnight on the streets of Victoria’s Chinatown and scurried hither and thither like rats hunting for a corner to take shelter, searching for food and warmth in the chinks left between one man and the next.
Things were constantly being pilfered from Ah-Sing’s shop: an egg, a cucumber, a bag of rice, a potato, even a pack of needles and thread. So Ah-Sing moved all the goods displayed at the entrance back inside the shop. Then he locked the side door and back door and kept just one side of the double front door open. That way, everyone who came into the shop had to pass in front of his eyes. Even so, things kept disappearing. He simply did not see how these pilferers could use such seamless sleight-ofhand tricks. What he did not understand was that a hungry man could learn tricks in one day that someone with a full belly would never learn in a lifetime.
In recent years, the city had found itself with more and more mouths to feed, and less and less to feed them with. If you had had a full plate of food before, now you only had half. If you had only had half a plate before, now you only had a few crumbs. If you had had a few crumbs before, now you did not have a single one. The city’s inhabitants believed that it was the Chinamen with the pigtails hanging down from the back of their heads that had brought this
bad luck upon them. The newspapers explained that it was the fault of the Chinamen that everyone only had half the amount of food on their plates, so a campaign was launched to prohibit doing business with them. A few young hotheads even noted the names of people who continued to buy from the Chinamen and scrawled a sign on their walls with whitewash during the night. Anyone marked with such a sign met scowls in the street or suddenly found themselves being elbowed out in business deals with other White men. Little by little, Ah-Sing’s yeung fan customers dropped off.
Today, Ah-Sing had scarcely finished arranging the baskets of produce when the first customer came in.
He was squatting down at his work and at first only saw a pair of feet. He could tell straightaway that this was a navvy from the railroad. He had on a pair of boots so worn that the uppers were coming away from the soles but the toecaps looked almost new because metal strips had been nailed over them. The trouser legs were covered in burn holes, where sparks from a fire had scorched the material. Ah-Sing gradually raised his eyes to the man’s body. He was wearing a heavily patched, double-fronted jacket. The stitches around the patches were so crude that they looked like crawling maggots. He had a bag slung over each shoulder, a long one and a smaller round one of the sort used to carry foodstuffs on long journeys. This one looked saggy. The long sack had something solid packed into it but it was impossible to tell exactly what. Then he saw the man’s face. He dropped the rice wine bottle he was holding and it shattered on the floor.
The man had a scar that stretched from his left eyebrow to the right side of his mouth. Although the scar no longer wept pus, it had not healed over either. The winter wind had dried it to a desiccated gash which looked like the furrow of a newly ploughed field.
“Give me a sup of porridge,” said the man. “I haven’t eaten for a day.” He spoke gently, even with a slight smile. But the scar refused to cooperate with the expression on his face. The smile and the scar kept falling out, and the scar turned his gentle smile into a sombre grimace.
The hand which Ah-Sing was using to collect the fragments of glass began to tremble. “You want porridge?! You can kiss my arse! ” was what he wanted to say. He had seen too many beggars in Chinatown. But this one was different and he did not dare give him the brush-off. Instead he stammered out: “Fi … Fisgard Street, at the Chi … Chinese Benevolent Association, they’ll see to you. Have you, have you paid your dues?” Ah-Sing knew that every Chinese who stepped ashore at Victoria paid two dollars towards the Association fees.
The man burst into a laugh so loud it set the window frame shaking.
“You wouldn’t know your own granddad, would you, Ah-Sing? What kind of a song-and-dance routine is this you’re giving me?”
Ah-Sing was startled. He looked up again and scrutinized the man’s face carefully. It looked vaguely familiar. “Are you that … are you that…?” he began.
The man put down the bags and with his toecap hooked out a stool from under the counter with complete familiarity. Sitting down, he said: “I’m that … that Ah-Fat.”
Ah-Sing’s mouth dropped open and stayed open.
“You were just a snot-nosed kid, Ah-Fat,” he finally managed to say. “You’ve grown so tall. And who did that gash on your face?”
“What gash? If a railroad navvy comes back alive, that’s divine protection enough, isn’t it?” “Red Hair and Ah-Lam went with you, didn’t they? What happened to them?” asked Ah-Sing. “Red Hair’s gone.” “What do you mean ‘gone’?” “How many ways of ‘going’ are there? If you didn’t fall to your death or get killed in an explosion, you got sick or starved to death. Red Hair’s luck ran out, he was killed off by all of those.” “What about Ah-Lam, is he ‘gone’ too?” “I don’t know if he’s dead or alive. We walked together from Savona to Port Moody, then we got separated. We only had a few rice sheets left. But we’d already agreed that whatever happened, we’d meet up again at Ah-Sing’s store.”
“You walked all the way from Savona?” said Ah-Sing in astonishment. “How long did that take you?” “We started out last autumn. There were one hundred and fifty-six of us. By the time we got to Port Moody, only ninety or so were left. We’d worn out three pairs of shoes. Do you rent out places to sleep still?” “Yes I do, but not at the same prices as back then. Board and lodging is four dollars a week now.” “You’re a bastard, Ah-Sing!” “Hey, prices have skyrocketed these last years, you must know that! We’re just clawless crabs—we don’t have any other skills to sell. Keeping the shop and renting out sleeping space is the only way I’ve got of earning a living!”
Ah-Fat offloaded the long bag he carried on one shoulder and handed it to Ah-Sing. “This is Red Hair’s fiddle,” he said. “You keep it here for now and I’ll take it back to China sometime. I’m going to move in here. Give me a few days to get the week’s rent together. Give me a bit of porridge and I’ll go and get work today.”
Ah-Sing scraped some rice from the bottom of the pot and heated it up in some hot water. Then he got a few pieces of pickled vegetables out of a jar. As he handed Ah-Fat the bowl, his expression tightened.
“Ah-Fat, it’s not that I don’t want to look after folks from back home,” he said, “but too many men come to me with the same story every day. Get work? What work? Just walk around and see how many out-of-work people there are. Haven’t you seen the announcements put out by the Association telling folks from the Four Counties not to come to Gold Mountain to look for work any more? The railroad is finished and there’s nothing else for ‘piglets’ to do. I can’t let you stay here. If I let you stay, we’ll just starve quicker together.”
Ah-Fat just kept eating and did not answer. He ate slowly, as if he were counting every grain of rice in the bowl. He had lived off hard rice sheets for months and had almost forgotten what porridge tasted like. He wanted the gentle warmth of the rice to last forever—but eventually the last mouthful went down. He tucked the last piece of pickled vegetable under his tongue. Its rank, salty flavour permeated his saliva and coated his tongue from root to tip. In the end, the saliva almost made him dribble and he reluctantly swallowed it.
He put down the bowl, picked up the long bag and the small one, made a deep bow to Ah-Sing and went out into the street.
The wind had got up. It whipped round every corner and gathered in the middle of the street. It penetrated every hair of Ah-Fat’s head and every bone in his body. The clouds parted, but what came down was not sunlight but snow. Fat, wet snowflakes turned into grey slush where they landed. Ah-Fat looked up. The whole sky was a dirty grey.
As he got out into the street, he heard a squelching sound as someone laboured through the slush behind him. He looked around, to see Ah-Sing running after him. When Ah-Sing caught up with him, he pulled out of his inside pocket a yellow paper packet with a red label fixed to it. “Put this into your food bag,” he said. “I sent the boy to get some in today. After all, it is the end of the old year and you should have something for the New Year. There’s no work here in Chinatown. Try your luck where the yeung fan live. When you get work, come back and I’ll let you have a place to sleep—three dollars fifty a week for you.”
Ah-Fat never imagined that this would be the way he acquired his knowledge of the city of Victoria.
Up till now, Chinatown was all he knew. It had been his whole life, providing him with a place to sleep, eat, piss and shit. While in this Gold Mountain city, he had never gone beyond Chinatown—either physically or in his imagination. He had no idea that anywhere else outside Chinatown even existed.
Now he discovered that Chinatown was only one corner of Victoria. In the time he had been away building the railroad, this Canadian town had suddenly grown from a little kid into a hale and hearty youth. In every street and alley radiating out from the steamship docks, new houses had sprung up like mushrooms after spring rain. Their walls were built of neat red or grey-black bricks. The roof tiles were more varied—terracotta red, grey, grey-green, buff, even black. There were always s
teps leading up to the door, at the foot of which were lawns and flowers. Once, Ah-Fat had a serious look at these gardens and came to the conclusion that they were nothing like any that he had seen before—but he knew there was an amazing variety of things on this earth. At the top of the steps were the door and windows. A wreath often hung on the door; at the windows, the linen curtains were usually drawn, revealing only shadowy figures behind them. When the lamps were lit on dark evenings, their faces shone more brightly through the curtains than in full daylight. Despite Ah-Fat’s very limited knowledge, he could see that these homes were very different from the ones in Chinatown. He wanted to describe them with words like “warmth,” “plenty” and “sweet dreams.”
Gradually Ah-Fat learned about the people who lived behind these linen-curtained windows. Every day at the time when the sun rose to the level of the forks in the tree branches, the mistress of the house would make an appearance. She came to the door to see her husband off to work and her children off to school. He watched as she came out of the front door onto the driveway. Before the horse and carriage clip-clopped away, she would bend forward from a waist nipped in so tightly that it seemed about to snap in two, and peck at the cheeks of her man and her children, in rather the same way that a hen pecks at rice grains. He learned that this pecking motion was called a “kiss.” When the sun rose to the top of the tree, it was time for lunch. This was a simple meal for the mistress of the house since her husband and children did not return: usually a slice of bread, a doughnut and a cup of tea. Things only really got busy behind the curtains when the sun started to go down—that was when the cook prepared the evening meal. Ah-Fat could guess pretty accurately by now what they would be eating and how many guests would be there.
He guessed that from the contents of their trash.
After dinner the servants threw out the household waste, and these provided rich pickings: potatoes which had sprouted, rotting tomatoes, the dirt-ingrained outer leaves of cabbage, fish heads, tails and gills, meat bones which had not been gnawed clean, a tin of caviar which still had something left at the bottom. Sometimes there would be mouldy bread. If there were guests at dinner, Ah-Fat might even find a half-empty bottle of wine.