Gold Mountain Blues

by Ling Zhang

  “Porridge … porridge.…” the girl mumbled.

  2004

  Hoi Ping County, Guangdong Province

  In the morning, Amy was woken by the phone. Confused about where she was, she sat up and opened her eyes. White spots like flowers or butterflies seemed to be dancing on the walls. She finally realized it was the sun’s rays filtering in through the curtains.

  She had a splitting headache, and the relentless ringing of the telephone seemed to hammer away at the cracks in her skull, pounding tiny sparks from it.

  “How’s the hangover?” asked a man’s voice.

  Amy had no idea who it was.

  “This is Auyung from the Office for Overseas Chinese Affairs. We met yesterday,” he said.

  Amy began dimly to recall the previous evening.

  “Did I have a lot to drink?” she asked.

  “You could say that! Not to put too fine a point on it, you got blind drunk.”

  Amy jumped out of bed. “Impossible!” she exclaimed. “I never drink with strangers.”

  “Then maybe you don’t regard me as a stranger,” said Auyung with chuckle.

  “Maybe not. But how are you going to make me believe that I got really drunk?”

  “You sang a song. In English. Over and over again.”

  “No!” yelled Amy. “Impossible! I never sing. Certainly not in public.”

  “It’s a wonderful thing, alcohol,” said Auyung. “In vino veritas, as they say. The song was ‘Moonlight on the River Colorado.’ In English. Shall I sing a bit?”

  Amy said nothing. She used to sing that song a lot when she was student at Berkeley. She had not done a lot of studying in those days. In fact, she had spent most of her time on sit-ins in City Hall Square with her friends. All kinds of sit-ins, pro or anti one thing or another: anti-war, antidiscrimination, anti-exploitation. Pro-women’s rights, pro-draft dodgers, pro-gays. Sometimes, after a day sitting in the town square, she had forgotten why she was there. When she and her fellow students got bored, someone would strum a few chords on the guitar and they would all sing. The most popular song was “Moonlight on the River Colorado.”

  That was all such a long time ago. How strange that a bottle of liquor should unlock those long-repressed memories.

  “I must have made a horrible noise. When I was a kid, I only had to open my mouth and my mother would yell at me for singing out of tune.”

  “It depends what you’re comparing it with. Compared to me, it was music to the ears.”

  “What other embarrassing things did I do? Better have it all out in one go. It’s less scary than finding out in bits and pieces.”

  “Actually I think you should have it in instalments. Otherwise, seeing me might send you right over the edge.”

  Amy burst out laughing. Under that droopy exterior, Auyung was quite a character, she thought.

  “So, Mr. Auyung, did you get drunk too?”

  “I certainly felt like drinking, if I hadn’t had today’s duties ahead of me.…”

  “What duties? Surely not another evening’s drinking with your bosses?”

  “That’s only one duty. There are lots of others, for instance clearing all the remaining antiques out of the Fongs’ diulau with you, and persuading you to put your signature on the trusteeship document. Of course, the most urgent problem facing me right now is getting you up and dressed so we can go and have breakfast. The hotel stops serving breakfast in half an hour.”

  “Ten minutes … give me ten minutes.”

  Amy hurriedly showered—then discovered there was no hair dryer. No iron either. She rifled through her suitcase looking for the painkillers, but in vain. In the end she dug out a T-shirt that was not too crumpled, and a pair of jeans. She pulled a rubber band off her wrist and tied her wet hair roughly in a ponytail and flew down the stairs.

  From a distance she saw Auyung sitting on a sofa in the hotel lobby, his eyes narrowed and with a foolish grin on his face. She waved at him but there was no reaction. It was only when she was up close that she realized he was asleep. Amy had never seen someone look so silly in sleep. She could not resist pulling out her camera and taking a close-up shot. At the flash, he woke up with a start. Wiping a drop of saliva from the corner of his mouth he put his head on one side and looked at Amy. “Yesterday you were a prof. Today you look like a student,” he said. “I prefer the student.”

  Amy cocked her head and looked back at him. “Now you’re awake, you look like an old man. When you were asleep, you looked like a kid. I like you better asleep.”

  Auyung put his finger to his lips. “Shhh. Best not to say things like that in a public place. People might get the wrong idea.”

  They both roared with laughter.

  “How come you’re sleepy at this time in the morning?” asked Amy. “One person’s morning is another’s midday,” he said. “I’ve already done two hours’ work.” He looked at his watch. “Right. We’re too late for the hotel breakfast. Let’s go straight to the diulau and then I’ll get the driver to go and buy some soy milk and a sticky rice cake for you.”

  They got into the car. “What was my great-grandmother’s name?” asked Amy. “Her full name was Kwan Suk Yin,” he replied. “But when she was young, everyone called her Six Fingers, and when she was old, it was Granny Kwan. Hardly anyone knew her proper name.”

  Amy thought for a moment. Suddenly, light dawned. “My great-grandfather was Fong Tak Fat and my great-grandmother was Kwan Suk Yin. The name of the diulau is Tak Yin House—they must have put the two names together.”

  “Nowadays it’s no big deal to call a house after a woman,” said Auyung. “But in the countryside of Guangdong in 1913, it was considered very avant-garde. In those days, no one outside the family knew the names of unmarried girls. When a girl reached marrying age, the full name would be written out properly on a piece of paper, sealed inside a red envelope, laid on a gold-painted tray together with her horoscope and given to the matchmaker to take to the boy’s family. That’s why asking for a girl’s hand in marriage was also called ‘asking the girl’s name’.”

  “Was she pretty, my great-grandmother?” asked Amy, remembering the eyes she had seen in the wardrobe mirror the day before.

  “There should be a photo of her in Tak Yin House. You can see for yourself.”

  Years twenty to twenty-one of the reign of Guangxu (1894–1895) Spur-On Village, Hoi Ping County, Guangdong, China

  The wedding took place at the end of the first month of year twenty of the reign of Guangxu. For many years after, the elders of Spur-On Village still remembered that day, even though they had only been children then.

  The banquet began when the sun had just risen to the tops of the trees and continued till midnight with guests dropping in and partaking as they pleased … a “running water” banquet, it was called. The chef and his assistants had been commandeered from the famous Tin Yat Tin Restaurant in Canton city. There were six of them and they were on their feet the whole time, alternately preparing and chopping the vegetables and cooking the food. As time went on, some of the children began to make a racket. Their mothers beat them over the head with their chopsticks, berating them: “This is Uncle Ah-Fat’s big day. Don’t you go spoiling it! Get a bowl of food and take it home to eat.” The children were quick to catch on: obediently they filled their bowls to overflowing with something from every dish. They did not eat at home, of course. Instead, they ran off to play on the muddy banks of the village river, before going back to the banquet again. When their foreheads felt the blow of their mothers’ chopsticks once more, the whole performance was repeated. For many days after the wedding, no smoke rose from the chimneys of Spur-On Village as every family continued to enjoy the bounty of Ah-Fat’s wedding banquet.

  The longer the banquet went on outside, the more the bride suffered torments in her bridal chamber.

  In the small hours of the morning, Auntie Cheung Tai woke Six Fingers with the news that the helpers had arrived. They washed her,
trimmed the fine hairs on her face and neck, dressed her and applied her makeup. A dazed Six Fingers found herself gripped and kneaded from head to toe by a dozen hands. She had still not fully recovered from her illness but the face powder covered her sickly pallor. Half a dozen women worked for several hours to get her ready. Then someone gave her a square mirror. In its reflection, she saw a stranger, one with a pearly-white complexion, pink-blushed cheeks and lustrous bright eyes. She smiled. The stranger smiled back and the jewelled headdress jiggled gently.

  At midday, the palanquin came to take her to the Fongs’ house, though the distance was no more than fifty yards or so. The heavy mantle over her head left her in complete darkness, but this only made her other senses more acute. She could tell who the bearers were, which route their black cotton shoes were taking, whose dog was barking furiously as the sedan passed, how hot the sun’s rays were on the palanquin roof. She could smell the scorching heat of the gaze of the bystanders as their eyes burned through the curtains of her palanquin, and she could even distinguish fiddle in the welcoming band whose timid notes were slightly out of tune. She had not imagined that the road from girlhood to her new life as married woman would feel so simple, so trouble free and so familiar.

  It was the first month of the new year and, although it was still cool, the icy chill that had held them in its grip in winter was gone. Her forehead and the palms of her hands perspired slightly. She knew she had a scarlet handkerchief tucked into her waistband and could perfectly well have used it to wipe her face and hands. She tugged at it gently—then put it back. It was a gift which the matchmaker had brought her from Ah-Fat when she delivered his written marriage proposal, and she could not bear to use it. Ah-Fat had also given her two bracelets, one gold and one silver, an eightpanelled, embroidered skirt in silk gauze, four pieces of satin and two pairs of embroidered shoes. All these gifts had come from Canton city. “Everything he bought in Gold Mountain for the first girl has gone to her and her family,” the matchmaker informed them. The woman had passed on Ah-Fat’s message but not what it meant, since she did not know, but Six Fingers had understood immediately. Ah-Fat wanted to start their lives with a clean slate, putting new wine into a new bottle and leaving the old bottle for the past. So when Auntie Cheung Tai grumbled that the Fongs had been hasty and mean with their wedding gifts, Six Fingers merely looked down and smiled slightly.

  In return, Six Fingers had given to her new husband the traditional gifts a bride gives the bridegroom: a figure of a boy on a lotus leaf, modelled in flour paste (symbolizing a succession of precious sons), ten guava fruits also made from flour paste (symbols of plenty), a pair of shoes and ten bags of salt. Everything was put together by Auntie Cheung Tai except for the shoes—a personal gift which she had made entirely herself, from gluing the cloth and stitching the soles to cutting out the uppers and sewing them together. She had not let Auntie Cheung Tai help her in any way, not even by finding out what his shoe size was. The day that he and she had written the scroll together in the back room, she had found out his shoe size. She had measured it at a glance.

  Six Fingers used two kinds of stitches for the soles: chain stitch on one side, cross-stitch on the other. Of all the women in Spur-On Village, only her future mother-in-law had worked the stitches this way, when she was a young woman. On the uppers, she embroidered two clouds, each in a different colour of blue-grey, one light, one dark, one half-concealed behind the other with just a slender “tail” showing. It took Six Fingers three nights to complete these shoes. At cock crow on the third day, the matchmaker was waiting at the door for them. The shoes were still moist from her fingers as Auntie Cheung Tai wrapped them in red paper and gave the package together with the marriage proposal to the matchmaker. Six Fingers suddenly felt as if her heart had emptied, as if those shoes had taken her body and soul away with them.

  Bridal firecrackers welcomed her as she stepped out of Auntie Cheung Tai’s house, and they continued to pop and sparkle until the palanquin arrived. When she felt it tilt slightly, she knew the bearers were about to take her up the steps of the Fongs’ house. One, two, three, four, five. As they reached the fifth step, she suddenly remembered the couplets which hung on either side of the door, the ones Mrs. Mak had asked her to do. Neither of them had had any inkling that she was writing the scrolls to celebrate her own wedding.

  Life was a strange thing, she thought, unable to suppress a small sigh.

  The palanquin halted and she heard the light tap-tap of a bamboo fan against the door—a signal for her to alight. She knew who had tapped, and she heard its urgency. Under the thick veil, she felt her face flame as hot as a well-stoked fire. The beads of sweat seemed almost to sizzle. The curtain was drawn back and someone pushed something into her hand. She ran her finger over it—it was a key.

  I mustn’t let it drop, she thought.

  She gritted her teeth and clenched her fists until the key scored sharp teeth marks on her palm. She knew that what she was gripping was not just a key but her future—indeed, the future of the entire Fong family. From this day on, her life did not belong to her alone. It would be chopped into little pieces and mixed in with their lives. There would be no more “mine,” “yours” and “his.” The thought made her hands tremble a little, and feelings of both terror and warmth crept over her. Terror because she had lost herself—from today, she would be made up of fragments which did not form a whole. Warmth because although she was leaving her old self behind, she would gain what she had never had before—companionship, support and courage.

  As she got out of the palanquin, someone handed her one end of the “wedding stick” and, holding it, she was led into the Fongs’ house. She could not see where she was going. She only saw scarlet flowers—on the hem of her skirt—dancing lightly along as they brushed the dark grey flagstones. She felt sure-footed. She knew who it was that held the other end of the stick. He would not let her stumble and fall.

  With the customary bow to heaven and earth and the parents, she entered the bridal chamber. Outside, the wedding feast was about to begin. She heard the man tell Ah-Choi in a low voice: “Take her a bowl of lotus seed soup. She must be hungry.” The man’s shoes scuffed on the floor and she heard his footsteps retreating. She did not know if the man was wearing the shoes she had made for today. Ah-Choi came in with the soup. “For the young mistress!” she said. It took Six Fingers a moment to realize that that was her. The servant put the bowl down and went out, leaving Six Fingers sitting motionless in the chamber. The noise of the banquet outside came at her like the roar of waves in a typhoon. But her ears passed over the clamour and alighted on an almost inaudible sound—the sizzling of the lotus seeds and jujubes in the boiling-hot soup. Her belly rumbled in answer. It felt like hordes of rice weevils were gnawing at her. Not a drop of water or a crumb of food had passed her lips since getting up in the early hours of the morning. She knew the bowl was on the low table next to her. The sweet scent of osmanthus flowers rose from it and filled her nostrils. She only had to make a small movement with her hand to touch it. But she must not touch it. The bride could not go out to use the toilet until the guests had gone. She would have to bear her hunger.

  The desire to relieve herself grew gradually. It started as an obscure, dull need which invaded her body. Then it became an insistent, acute jabbing in her gut, desperately seeking a way out. She felt as bloated as an inflated paper lantern, which the slightest movement might cause to split open. So she sat straight, absolutely motionless. She even slowed her breathing, smoothing the gap between her breaths in and out.

  But her body rebelled. Her nostrils, beaded with sweat, began to tickle.

  Hold it in. You’ve got to hold it in.

  She was still thinking the thought to herself when her body shook and she was overwhelmed by an enormous sneeze. A warm gush of liquid coursed down her thighs, leaving a dark streak on her silk skirt.

  She shot to her feet, hoisting up the skirt, and squatted by the bed. The warm urine spur
ted onto the floor, forming a dark puddle. She must not soil the bridal bed, whatever happened.

  She pulled off her veil and bolted the bedroom door. On the bookshelf she found a pile of good-quality absorbent rice paper. She made a thick wad of the paper and, squatting down again, mopped up the urine, then threw the sodden paper under the bed. Fortunately there was only one wet patch on the skirt—her body heat would dry it. She picked up the bowl of soup and drank it all down. The liquid and the lotus seeds and jujubes made only a small dent in her hunger, but they at least served to boost her courage. She unbolted the door, veiled herself again and took up her position, seated upright on the bed. Even before the pounding of her heart had eased, she was suddenly overcome by an overpowering urge to sleep.

  She was awakened by a fierce light; two glowing orbs seemed to shine right through her.

  Ah-Fat’s eyes.

  “Ah-Yin, I never gave you any of the nice things I brought back from Gold Mountain,” he said.

  Suk Yin was the name she had been given at birth, but no one knew it outside her immediate family. For her whole life, she had been called Six Fingers, until the day the matchmaker had given the big red marriage proposal, with her name written in it, to Ah-Fat. Now it was their secret. And he had released the secret from its red packaging and given it back to her. A violent tremor shook her.

  “Next time. Bring me something next time,” she stammered.

  “There won’t be a next time. I’m taking you with me to Gold Mountain and you can choose whatever you like for yourself.”

  Ah-Fat blew out the red candle and pulled down the silk curtain behind him. He said no more but his hands began to speak as he felt for the buttons which fastened the front of her jacket. The fabric was a soft satin but it was heavily embroidered with peony blossoms, leaves and branches and was as stiff as armour plating. The buttons were made from fine strips of satin coiled into elaborate knots in a cloud pattern, and it was with some difficulty that Ah-Fat finally managed to undo them.