by Ling Zhang
“Those few old things in the house we found, leave them on display,” Amy told Auyung. “I’ve photographed them for myself. And the place must be restored to its original condition. You can have gaps in history, but you can’t have substitutes. Add that clause to the contract, otherwise I won’t sign it. You can bring me the modified contract to sign at the hotel this evening.”
Auyung did not reply. After a little while, he said with a smile: “It was a marvellous feeling.”
“What feeling?” “That hug.” They both laughed.
They went down the stairs. As they turned a corner where one of the treads had collapsed, Amy missed her step and twisted her ankle. She took off her shoe and sat on the stairs to give it a rub. As she bent her head, she found herself looking at a pair of shoes. They were lying upside down in the recess at the back of the stair and she hooked them out. They were a man’s cloth shoes with hand-sewn layered soles. They seemed never to have been worn—there were no traces of mud on the soles—but the fabric on the uppers had lost the sturdiness once provided by the interlocking rows of stitching. The shoes were stuffed with cloth bags. As Amy touched the bags they fell open, to reveal a thick pile of papers rolled up inside.
They were letters.
Letters densely covered with lines of Chinese characters written with a brush.
Carefully, Amy pulled the yellowing sheets out of their envelopes and spread them out on the floor.
“Hold the magnifying glass over them,” she ordered.
“Good heavens above!” exclaimed Auyung in delight. “These haven’t been written with a fountain pen. Otherwise, the writing would have completely faded.”
Amy’s eyes lit up. “My great-grandmother? But why would she have hidden these letters back there?”
“Your great-grandmother spent her whole life waiting. First for a boat ticket to Gold Mountain, then for someone to come and collect these letters. She’s waited all these years for you to come. Don’t you believe in spirits?”
Amy suddenly recalled the pair of eyes she had seen floating in the wardrobe mirror two days before. A strange feeling crept over her and seemed to flood her heart.
It was pain, she realized finally. What she was feeling was pain.
“Auyung, I’d like to be alone with my great-grandmother for a while,” she said.
Years twenty-one to twenty-two of the reign of Guangxu (1895–1896)
Vancouver, British Columbia
My dear Ah-Yin,
Many months have passed since I left and much has happened. My address has changed several times and things have not gone smoothly so I have not been able to send dollar letters home regularly. The day you saw me off on my journey with Kam Shan in your arms, he was too small to understand but you were plunged into such deep sorrow that I can never forget it. If it were not for the weakness of the Great Qing Empire and the impossibility of making a living, people like me would never have left our homes and families. You have so many responsibilities now that I am gone—my mother, our child and the management of the fields. For my mother’s eyes, you should consult a doctor in Canton. There is an Englishman called Dr. Wallace who specializes in eye diseases. Kam Shan must be made to work, even when he is little, so that he develops a healthy mind in a healthy body. Do not let him become spoilt. When he is old enough, you should approach Mr. Auyung and ask if he would be good enough to accept Kam Shan as a pupil. He is a teacher of inestimable worth, whom I have always greatly admired. This year Vancouver is flourishing, and most of the Chinese have moved here from Victoria to find work. I have done the same. Not long ago, I ran into a man I worked with when we built the railroad, Ah-Lam. It was a great pleasure to see him again and we discussed working together. As soon as I have got the laundry going, I will send dollar letters home to support the family. My last trip home exhausted all my Gold Mountain savings, and I have had to start all over again. The government is very hard on us Chinese and heaps exorbitant taxes on us. As soon as I have saved enough money to pay the head tax and your passage, I will bring you and Kam Shan over to join me.
Your husband, Tak Fat, the third day of the ninth month, 1896, Vancouver
A city is born in the same manner that a seed comes to life buried deep in the ground. The germination period is long, dark and quiet, and fraught with unforeseen difficulties. Conditions have to be just right: soil, sun, humidity, fertility, winds. Yet these very same factors can also prevent a seed germinating. A seed can lie dormant for a very long time—for a whole season or even longer—waiting for a fortuitous combination of the elements. Only then can its first green shoots spring from the soil.
Victoria burst forth like a green leaf, in just this way. Before the age of the railroad, water stimulated Victoria’s growth. The ocean breezes brought ships from every country and all corners of the earth to make landfall on the island. Waves of people surged ashore, blown by these favourable winds and currents, and along with them came opportunities for wealth. In this way, these long-desolate shores gave birth almost overnight to a flourishing green tree of a city.
But the train changed all of that.
First the train snaked westwards from the East Coast until it met the impenetrable barrier of the Rocky Mountains. Then, desperate hordes of men came to gouge a great hole in the belly of those mountains with their bare fists. Finally the train penetrated the tunnel made by these men and huffed and puffed its way to a spot on the West Coast across the water from Victoria. This spot faced the ocean with the mountains at its back. The mountains brought the railroad, the ocean brought the sails. The mountains formed the feet of the ocean, which, in turn, gave wings to the mountains. And so, the door of opportunity opened wide. Here, where sea and land came together, enormous wealth accumulated, multiplied and dispersed; accumulated, multiplied and dispersed again. Blessed by its natural advantages, this spot where mountain and sea converged quietly developed the power to transform itself. Victoria, surrounded by water, did not benefit from the expansion of the railway. Gradually, people began to see the city’s limitations. Suddenly one day, a thought struck them like a thunderclap: Why not cross the water and live on the other side, in the new coastal city?
Almost overnight, the new city on the other side of the water was on everyone’s mind.
At first, the Chinese in Gold Mountain could not get their tongues around the surname of the English captain. To them it sounded like snack, or perhaps a disease. It did not sound anything like a place name. So they chose their own name instead, “Salt Water Port.” Many years passed before their children learned how to utter the syllables of its proper name.
“Van-cou-ver.”
After Ah-Fat arrived back in Gold Mountain from Hoi Ping that summer, he moved from Victoria to Vancouver. Borrowing a bit of money from fellow Cantonese, he set up a laundry. It was called Whispering Bamboos, like the first one, but this one was in the yeung fan part of town. In the year that Ah-Fat had been away, rents had shot up and so had other costs. Although it looked the same from the outside, his new laundry was smaller than the first. There was a front room and a back room. The back room was for drying and airing the clothes, and it had two large wooden tubs in it and a cobweb of clotheslines overhead. If you were not careful, you could bark your shins on the tubs or get water down your neck from the wet clothes. The front room was for greeting customers and for doing the ironing. It was even smaller than the back room: just big enough to hold a counter and two ironing boards.
Ah-Fat hired a boy to help. It was his job to do the heavy work, washing and hanging up the clothes, while Ah-Fat did the ironing and mending, which required more skill and care. Every day at midday, the boy would load the tubs full of dirty washing onto the cart and drive the horse a few li to the river. Here he would fill the tubs with water and wash the clothes. By the time he had finished it would be dinnertime. If the clothes were not needed urgently, they could be left to dry slowly in the back room, after which they would be folded in neat piles. If it was a rush job, Ah-Fat would light the
charcoal in the iron straightaway and iron them dry. If he had a lot of rush jobs, he might spend the whole night ironing.
One day, he did not finish the ironing till dawn. It was too much bother to go home so he stretched out on the ironing board and had a nap. He was awakened by cries of “Saw-lee, saw-lee, saw-lee.…!” He opened his eyes to see a yeung fan customer arguing with the boy. A spark from the charcoal in the iron had singed a hole in one of the garments the man had come to collect. The boy only knew the odd word of English so all the customer got was a stream of apologetic “saw-lee, saw-lees.” Ah-Fat could see the hole was at the bottom, and so small it hardly showed, so he got out his sewing kit and gestured to a stool. “I’ll fix it,” he said. “Just wait a moment.” When Ah-Fat was at home, Six Fingers had taught him some of her darning skills, though he never imagined they would come in useful so soon.
The yeung fan did not sit down, however. Instead, he stared intently at Ah-Fat. Ah-Fat knew it was the scar that had drawn his attention. He was used to that now, after all these years, but at the beginning when the scar was fresh, those looks felt like a teasel prickling his skin.
“Didn’t you work on the railroad?” the man asked hesitantly.
Ah-Fat looked up and scrutinized his customer. Although he had got to know some Whites during his years in Gold Mountain, he still found it hard to tell them apart. This one was much the same as all the others he encountered in the street: he was tall with a ruddy complexion and slickedback hair separated into strands by his comb; he wore a dark grey, three-piece suit and a fob watch in the pocket of his waistcoat. Ah-Fat made a quick mental check of all the yeung fan men he knew, but none of them cut as respectable a figure as this one. He could not place him.
“Twenty-nine. Aren’t you twenty-nine?” asked the man.
Ah-Fat was startled. Twenty-nine was his work number in the railroad construction team. They had been divided into a large number of groups of thirty men each. He was number twenty-nine in his group. The yeung fan foreman did not know his name, and did not need to. To his foreman, he was just a number on the worksheet and the payroll. His number was like a string bag which could wrap itself around him; the foreman held the drawstring and only had to tweak it with his finger for Ah-Fat’s whole life to be caught inside the bag.
During his years on the railroad, Ah-Fat used to write his name on the trees in the clearing outside their tent, over and over, in all the calligraphy styles he knew, because he was afraid of forgetting how to write his own name. But he could not help looking up now and answering to the number twenty-nine, even long after the railroad work was finished.
The yeung fan leaned over the ironing board and gripped Ah-Fat in bear hug.
“I’m Rick Henderson. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me. That goddamn railroad!”
Ah-Fat looked blank. Then he suddenly realized. This man was his old camp foreman. His first thought was, how the hell had a railroad turned that roughneck into such a respectable-looking man? Unfortunately his English was not up to phrasing the question. What he actually asked, after the thought had rolled around in his head a few times, was something quite different.
“Mr. Henderson! What … what are you doing here?”
The yeung fan released him and laughed: “What’s all this ‘Mister’ talk! Call me Rick. You saved my life and I’ve done something with it since then. I’ve opened a guesthouse here with a friend, so employees of the Pacific Railroad Company and their families have a place to stay.”
Ah-Fat looked at the immaculately knotted tie at Rick’s shirt collar and suddenly thought of Red Hair and Ah-Lam. Red Hair had been number twenty-eight and Ah-Lam, number thirty. Their numbers had spent many years squeezed together on the record-keeper’s work log, just like they had squeezed together onto sleeping mats in the tents. Red Hair in front, Ah-Lam behind, and Ah-Fat in the middle. They were packed in so tight that the only way to sleep was to curl up one behind the other like prawns. Half-suffocated by Red Hair’s farts, and with Ah-Lam’s snores rattling against his neck, Ah-Fat sometimes woke up in the night itching to throttle one with each hand. But he was squeezed in so tight he could not even sit up. Then one day Red Hair’s space was empty and Ah-Fat’s arms and legs finally had space to move. Later still, Ah-Lam’s space was empty too. That was when he learned that he much preferred to be squeezed. If he should fall, there was someone to catch him. Being squeezed meant being supported.
Ah-Fat sighed. “That railroad.…” he said. “It made so many men rich, and took the lives of so many others.” Ah-Fat might speak with a heavy accent, but Rick heard the cutting edge in those words and embarrassment showed in his face. After a pause, he echoed Ah-Fat: “That railroad, huh! Last year I took the train to Montreal, and the ghosts flew around outside the train window as we went along. Actually, I was unemployed for a couple of years after it was completed. I was stuck in a small town by the rail track without work. It was only when I met an old acquaintance from the Pacific Railroad Company that this opportunity came up.
“What about you, number twenty-nine?” Rick asked, and then exclaimed: “You know, after all this time, I still don’t know your name. You Chinese have such strange names!”
“Even if I tell you, you won’t be able to say it. Forget it!” But Rick gripped his arm and insisted: “No, come on, let me hear you say it. Who says I can’t learn it? After all, I can blow up mountains!”
Ah-Fat enunciated the sounds one by one, and Rick repeated them after him as best he could, until Ah-Fat could not help laughing. “Please! Spare me!” he said. “Just say it in the English way and call me Frank. As you can see, I run this laundry, been running it for the past few years. I started in Victoria and moved here just a couple of months ago. Everyone says business is booming here, but there are laundries everywhere and business is going from bad to worse.”
Rick looked around him. He thought to himself for a moment and then said: “I’ve got a few dozen rooms in my guesthouse. I can send all the bedding and tablecloths to you to wash. I’ve got a few other friends with guesthouses too, and I can send them along to you, but you’ll have to smarten this place up, and hire some more boys to help you. And whatever you do, don’t scorch the cloth next time.”
Ah-Fat pulled out a thread from inside the shirt and darned the hole. It did not take him long and he gave the shirt back to Rick. The mend was flawless. Ah-Fat smiled. “You caught us out today. Usually I would have mended it before you saw it and you would never have known. It would just have been between me and the Lord above.”
Rick shook his head in wonder. “God must have just woken up the day he created you, Frank. He made you devilishly skilful. They’re saying the Pacific Railroad Company is going to build a huge guesthouse here. Of course it’ll be called a ‘hotel,’ not a ‘guesthouse.’ It’ll be like a palace, with several hundred rooms. Imagine how many sheets and table cloths and napkins that’ll be. When the time comes, I’ll get hold of someone I know and we’ll see if we can find a way to give the work to you. Then you’ll really need to hire another dozen boys.”
After Rick left, Ah-Fat told the boy to mind the shop and went off for a big meal in Chinatown. By the time he got there, the sun was up as high as the forks in the trees. The air was mellow and the wind had filled the street with a mass of soft pink blossoms. Ah-Fat hummed a little tune as he went along. It was, he remembered, the bridal tune which Red Hair used to saw away at on his battered old fiddle. He kicked at pebbles and the flower petals and thought to himself that that bastard Rick was not such a bad sort after all. At least he had not forgotten that he owed his life to someone else. He could not help imagining the new business Rick’s guesthouse would bring him. He could almost feel the bank drafts clasped in his hand, and the softness of his wife’s body as she lay curled up in his arms.
“It won’t be long, Ah-Yin. Good times will be here soon,” he muttered.
He went into the Wong Kee Congee Cafe on Dupont Street, and sat down at his usual table by the
window. He used his sleeve to wipe a small patch of greasy tabletop and leaned his elbow on it. “A bowl of rice porridge with lean meat and preserved egg,” he told the boy. “And two silver thread rolls, a plate of prawn rice rolls, and a dish of chicken feet and one of snails.” The boy taking the order was surprised. “Tripped over a pile of dollars on your way here, did you?” he asked. Ah-Fat laughed but said nothing.
He looked around him as he waited for his food. Most people had already had their breakfast and gone and the place was almost deserted. Apart from him, there was only one other customer. The man had his head down, slurping a bowl of plain rice porridge. A bluebottle was climbing up the edge of his bowl and had almost reached the tip of his nose. When Ah-Fat noticed, he reached across and rapped on the man’s table. “Hey, mate, do you eat flies too?” The man looked up at Ah-Fat. His bowl dropped from his hand and crashed to the ground.
“Ah-Fat, you motherfucker! You’re not dead! How many years have I spent looking for you?”
Ah-Fat stared at him in shock. “Ah-Lam? Or is it your ghost?”
Ah-Lam sighed. “I wish it was. My ghost wouldn’t be having such a hard time.” He stretched out his left leg for Ah-Fat to see. “When we got separated in Port Moody, I took a tumble down the mountainside and broke a leg. I couldn’t walk so I had to stop where I was. I lived in a Redskin village, stayed there some eight years and only got back to Victoria last year. I came over here to Vancouver at the beginning of this year with everyone else.”
“What are you doing in Vancouver?” Ah-Fat asked.
“There’s not a lot I can do, dragging this leg around. I heard there was work at the canning factory cleaning fish so I thought I’d go and try it out. But that’s only summer work. As soon as it gets cold, that’ll stop too.”
It was still warm, but Ah-Lam had on a lined jacket. It was shiny with grease and fraying at the collar and cuffs, and his hair was grimy and tangled. Ah-Fat could see that he was struggling. He called the boy over: “Bring a portion of prawn dumplings and some mixed seafood ho-fen noodles for my friend here.” He turned to Ah-Lam: “Do you want to come and work for me at my laundry? It’s ironing and mending. It’s not difficult to pick up, you just have to take care with it.” And he told him what Rick had said that morning.