Gold Mountain Blues

by Ling Zhang

  “Stuff this into your shoe, then it won’t look as if one leg’s longer than the other.”

  Six Fingers felt a rush of warmth; tears filled her eyes and trembled there for a moment. She swallowed them back, and there was a salty taste at the back of her mouth. She knelt down on all fours in front of the old woman, as if she were a beast of burden.

  “I’ll carry you downstairs, Mum, so Ah-Fat can pay his respects to you.”

  When Ah-Fat had seen the last guest off and went into the bedroom, Six Fingers was sitting at the mirror, removing her makeup. The jade hairpin with its broken end lay on the dressing table, catching the light with a cold gleam. In the lamplight, Six Fingers looked a little tired. Thirteen years of separation had left crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and on her forehead.

  Ah-Fat picked up the hairpin and ran his hands over it. The edge of the broken end was rough and scratched his skin.

  Ah-Fat let her mass of loose hair run over his hand. With one finger he traced a line around her neck until he reached the dip just below her right ear. There was a round scar there, the size of a pea.

  Six Fingers stiffened. His finger ran over the scar, backwards, forwards, as if he were gradually smoothing its rough surface with fine sandpaper. The scar was a reminder of her kidnapping by Chu Sei. When the bandit tried to rape her, she had stabbed herself in the throat with her hairpin. Chu Sei had let her alone then, because he urgently needed the ransom money.

  “Does it still hurt here?”

  Six Fingers was startled. “Who told you?” she asked. Ah-Fat laughed. “How many people around here have you taught to write? Even the Fong family’s dogs are literate these days. You can’t hide any family business from me.”

  It must have been Mak Dau who had written to Ah-Fat, she realized. No one else knew except him.

  “Ah-Yin, stop using this hairpin,” said Ah-Fat. “In a couple of days, I’ll go to Canton and get you a silver one. Fashionable women don’t wear jade any more, they wear silver ornaments.” “Just get a jade carver to grind the broken edge smooth, then I can wear it,” said Six Fingers. “It was so dear, how can I just get rid of it?” “Nothing is dearer to me than the honour of my family,” said Ah-Fat. “I’d buy you a house of gold if I had the money.”

  Six Fingers gave a little laugh. “You might have had. Is it true you gave it all to the Monarchist Reform Party?” “Who told you that?” asked Ah-Fat. “You may have your sources but so have I,” said Six Fingers. “Do you regret it? How much land and property could you have bought with all that money? And after all that you couldn’t keep the Emperor on his throne.” Ah-Fat sighed. “Who can foresee what’s going to happen in the world? If the emperor Guangxu was still alive, then the Great Qing Empire could have been saved. But once our country passed into the hands of the young emperor, there was no hope for it.”

  Six Fingers looked at the ever-deepening lines on Ah-Fat’s face, and took his hand between her own. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s the empire or a republic, there’s nothing we common people can do to rescue it. You just look after your own family.”

  Six Fingers’ hands were soft. They had not dug soil or shovelled manure or been soaked in soap or brine for many a year. They were plump and white, with five dimples on the backs of each one. Ah-Fat’s gaze stumbled from one dimple to the next and his hands, trapped between hers, began to get ideas. He freed them and reached inside her jacket. He felt an obstruction. “Are you wearing the corset?” he asked.

  Six Fingers gave another laugh. “Of course I am. You bought it for me, didn’t you?” Ah-Fat’s fingers began clumsily to wrestle with the complicated fastenings, but it took him several attempts before they surrendered. Finally his hands roved unimpeded all over her body. Like frozen earth warmed by the sun, her body slumped soft and shapeless against him. Then before Ah-Fat could stop her, she blew out the candle and the room was plunged into darkness.

  Ah-Fat groped his way to the bed, Six Fingers in his arms. She had grown much plumper than before, something that Ah-Fat’s hands told him before his eyes had explored her carefully. His hands told him of another change in Six Fingers too—her body was on fire and the flames licked around him, enveloping him and singeing his own body and fingers until they sizzled. Ah-Fat felt a frenzy in Six Fingers which he had never felt before.

  Afterwards, Ah-Fat stroked her damp hair. “Ah-Yin, don’t turn out the light next time, OK? Every scar on your body you got because of me. Let me look at them, then I can remember.” Six Fingers was silent. She did not want Ah-Fat to see the tears on her cheeks.

  By the time her tears had dried, snores were coming from Ah-Fat. Six Fingers did not remember him snoring on his last visit home. His snores vibrated like rumbles of thunder in her ears. She could not sleep, and shook him awake.

  At first Ah-Fat did not know where he was. “Leave me alone, Ah-Lam!” he mumbled. Six Fingers was seized with a sudden fear. “Ah-Chu’s old man came home last year and gave her syphilis. Do you go off with women when you’re out there too?” she asked quietly after a moment. Ah-Fat was wide awake now but did not answer. When Six Fingers asked again, he said: “Ah-Yin, I’m only staying four months this time. I want to get back to pay off the money I borrowed to build the diulau. Then when I’ve saved up the head tax, I’m taking you out with me.”

  Her question remained unanswered, thought Six Fingers, but she felt she could not ask again.

  “What will happen to Mum when I’ve gone?” she asked. “I’ll borrow more money and bring you both over together.” Six Fingers sighed. “But Mum’s getting old, she won’t want to be uprooted and go to Gold Mountain. Just getting her to move from the old house to here.…” Ah-Fat ran his hand over the dent in Six Fingers’ thigh where the scar tissue had formed, and could think of nothing to say. On one side there was his mother, on the other, his wife. He could not do without either of them. He knew the only hope was to wait till his mother passed away. But how long would that be? It could be a year, or five, or ten, or even twenty. Maybe he would die before his mother. Or maybe by the time she died, Six Fingers would have become a silver-haired old woman. The two of them seemed destined to steal happiness from the brief time allotted them between the death of one and the death of another.

  “Take Kam Ho. Take him with you. When he’s bigger, he should be able to help out,” said Six Fingers.

  Ah-Fat grunted. “Not much hope there,” he said. “Can’t expect much from either boy.” With the tip of her finger, Six Fingers smoothed the knot which had formed between Ah-Fat’s eyebrows. Cautiously, she asked: “Has Kam Shan done something to make you angry?” She was aware that since his arrival, Ah-Fat had not said a word about his eldest son.

  Ah-Fat did not answer. Instead he turned over and went to sleep.

  They were still in bed the next morning when the cook sent up two bowls of jujube and lotus-seed soup. As Six Fingers bent over the soup, ready to drink it, she saw the shadow of a magpie in the liquid. She knew then that Ah-Fat had planted a seed in her belly.

  Ah-Fat did not drink the soup. His digestion had accustomed itself to coarse fare during his time in Gold Mountain, and he needed time to get used to refined home cooking. He gazed absently at Six Fingers as she drank.

  “Ah-Yin, we haven’t given the house a proper name. I think we should call it ‘Tak Yin House.’ I, Fong Tak Fat married you, Kwan Suk Yin, and that has brought the family great good luck. And there’s something else: if you get pregnant and give me another boy, call him Kam Tsuen. If it’s girl, she should have the generation name Kam, and you can choose her other name.”

  Nine months later, Six Fingers gave birth in Tak Yin House.

  While she was still resting after the birth, she got Kam Ho to write to Ah-Fat, who had returned to Gold Mountain, to tell him that he had baby daughter, named Kam Sau.

  5

  Gold Mountain Tracks

  Year two of the reign of Xuan Tong to year two of the Republic (1910–1913)

  Britis
h Columbia

  “How many siblings does your grandfather have?”

  “He only has one younger brother.”

  “How many children does his younger brother have?”

  “My great-uncle has one son and two daughters.”

  “What is the son called?”

  “Fong Tak Hin.”

  “Where does your great-uncle live?”

  “He lives with us.”

  “Does he live upstairs or downstairs?”

  “He lives in the second courtyard.”

  “How many steps are there to the courtyard?”

  “Two.”

  “Wrong. Last time you said five.”

  “There are five steps up to the main entrance. But from the first to the second courtyard, there are only two steps.”

  “Is there a river in your village?”

  “There’s a little river. All the village kids swim in it in summer.”

  “What’s the name of the river?”

  “It hasn’t got a name, so it’s called No-Name River.”

  “Whose houses do you pass if you walk from the river to your home?”

  “Once you’ve gone up the steps from the river, you get to old Missus Cheung Tai’s house first, then Pigmy Fong’s house, then Au Syun Pun’s. Pigmy Fong’s house and Au Syun Pun’s houses are back to back. Then there’s the village well, and then it’s us.”

  “Which way does your woodshed face?”

  This question stumped Kam Shan. It was new, not one of the many his dad had prepared him for. He knew where the woodshed was—he and Kam Ho used to play hide and seek in it when they were little. And he knew that its doorway faced neither the kitchen nor the courtyard but a point somewhere in between. So did that count as north facing or west facing? He hesitated, then said doubtfully: “North, it faces north.” His interrogator and the interpreter exchanged glances and both men wrote a question mark in their notebooks. Kam Shan’s heart sank.

  Kam Shan was taken back to his cell.

  It was a small room, lined with upper and lower bunks on three sides. He had four roommates, two adults and two children. Only a boy of about ten was in the cell when he returned. He was from Toi Shan and had arrived a couple of days previously. He lay on his bunk bed looking utterly bored, picking at the frayed ends of his jacket cuffs. The moment Kam Shan came through the door, he vaulted to his feet in a rising handspring. “Have they finished with you? That was really quick. What did they ask?” Kam Shan sat down looking glum and said nothing.

  Kam Shan had come on the same boat as Ah-Lam’s wife and they had been in Gold Mountain for five days. They had been heading for Vancouver but, just before arriving, the boat changed course and berthed at Victoria instead. Half of the several dozen Chinese passengers on board had been brought straight to detention; Kam Shan and Ah-Lam’s wife were among them.

  His dad and Ah-Lam had visited once. His dad stood outside the building, with the interpreter keeping a close eye on him, shouting up at Kam Shan’s window. It was blowing a gale and Ah-Fat’s words scattered in all directions, so that his son only caught a few of them.

  “Are … they … feeding you?”

  “Are … you … warm enough … at night?”

  Looking down from above, Kam Shan saw his father through the grille covering the window. His dad’s head looked like a melon cut in two: the front half was white with some dark bits showing through (that was the shaven bit) and the back half was dark with some white showing through (that was because his dad was going grey).

  He had not seen his dad for ten years, and did not remember seeing any grey hairs, although that may have been because he had not had such commanding view from above back then. Today Ah-Fat had on a grey cotton jacket, loose black trousers tied tightly at the ankles and a pair of round-toed cotton shoes. His clothes were shabby and patched at the cuffs and knees, and made him look like an old peasant who had never left the confines of Spur-On Village.

  Kam Shan knew his dad had come over from New Westminster to see him. That explained his appearance; he had been working in the fields when he got the news of his arrival and had come straight here without bothering to change or wipe the mud from his shoes. Still, he looked completely different from his last visit home, when he had worn a brandnew gown with creases still crisp from the suitcase. He had strolled confidently along, holding a folding fan in his hand for show, apparently unconcerned as to whether the day was warm or not. Back there, his dad drawled his words instead of yelling the way he did now. Now he was getting on a bit, not much to look at, a real backwoods man. Which one was his real father—this one or the one who came home to Spur-On Village? Kam Shan shouted down: “Write to Mum and tell her.…” but the last half of his sentence was blown back into his throat by the wind and he bent over in a fit of coughing. Afterwards, he realized that he had not called to him: “Dad!”

  On the day that Kam Shan’s date of departure to Gold Mountain was fixed, Six Fingers cried. She never let him or anyone else see, but he could tell from her reddened, puffy eyes when she got up in the morning that she had cried every day since the news. The day she saw him off at the entrance to the village, she wept openly. “Kam Shan, the house will be empty now that you and your dad have gone,” she cried. Kam Shan replied, “But you’ve got Kam Ho, haven’t you?” The tears coursed down his mother’s face: “He’ll go too, sooner or later. Every son of mine will go. Maybe if I have a daughter, I might be able to keep her.”

  “We’ll bring you to Gold Mountain one day,” was what Kam Shan wanted to say. But he knew this was an empty promise. As long as his granny was alive, his mum could not budge. Kam Shan may have been only fifteen but he already knew that certain things were better left unsaid. “When I get to Gold Mountain, I’ll write,” were his only words.

  “The women are making a racket today,” the boy from Toi Shan said. He had been alone for hours, and wanted to talk. “Someone went into the women’s cells to do medical inspections but they refused to strip. They fought like wildcats to keep their clothes on.”

  Kam Shan had no desire to chat and pretended to be asleep. He had said a lot in the interrogation today, enough for a whole lifetime. Before he left, his dad got someone to sketch a map of Spur-On Village, showing how it was laid out and which family lived where. He said the head tax had been going up and up over the years until now it was five hundred dollars, but that had not stopped the Chinese. When the Gold Mountain men went back home, they went for a year or maybe two. Some had children while they were there, some did not. But all of them, when they returned to Gold Mountain, made sure to register a birth with the local government. According to the register, they had all had sons, and some had had twins. In an attempt to stem the flow of Chinese immigrants, the government had built this detention centre, where they kept the new arrivals for a couple of days to several months. They gave them medical exams and compared the statements of the fathers and the sons. At the slightest discrepancy, the detainee would be ordered back to Hong Kong on the next boat. Only the fit and healthy, whose testimonies were corroborated, were permitted to make the payment of five hundred dollars in head tax.

  His dad had insisted that Kam Shan learn every detail of that map. He wrote out pages of questions so that Kam Shan could memorize them and get the answers right under cross-examination. The questions were about every detail of the construction of their home, and the age of every family member. Kam Shan had been questioned several times in the last few days, and no question had tripped him up. But still his dad’s preparations had not been exhaustive enough. His dad had overlooked the woodshed. Which way does the woodshed face? Kam Shan knew every brick and tile and every corner of his home but he did not know the answer to that question.

  North facing, Dad, you’ve absolutely got to say north facing, Kam Shan mouthed silently.

  The boy from Toi Shan had given up his efforts at conversation, and Kam Shan stopped pretending to be asleep and opened his eyes. He was in the bottom bunk and the vie
w was limited to a few square feet of the bed board of the upper bunk. The board was smeared with spots that looked suspiciously like snot. Kam Shan’s imagination made them into the clumps of wild bananas at the front of their house in Spur-On Village. Then they morphed into the water wheel in the fields, then the storm clouds that presaged rain. Then he got bored and stopped thinking about them.

  The weather was good today and the sunlight glared on the wall beside his bunk. Someone had scratched some lines in Chinese with a knife, in tiny, cramped writing. When Kam Shan bent down and peered at them closely the day he arrived, he could only make out the characters: “Inscribed by Mr. No-name of San Wui.” Now, with the sunlight on the wall, he could begin to make sense of them. He sat and scrutinized the writing close up. The rest of it said: “The black devil is absolutely unreasonable, making me sleep on the floor. And I’m starving; they only give us two meals a day.…”

  The room suddenly went dark. The kid from Toi Shan was standing in front of the window, blocking the light. He had been here two days but he had been neither visited nor interrogated. He was bored stiff and spent his time pestering the others to talk to him. Now he was counting the number of bars in the window: one, two, three, four, five, six. And backwards: six, five, four, three, two, one. Then from one to six again. Then again from six to one. Kam Shan began to feel sorry for him. “Does your dad know you’re here?” he asked. “He’s in Montreal. He can’t come, so he asked my big brother to come and get me.” “Why hasn’t he come?” The boy did not answer. He just said: “In the village, they said it was a good sign if the yeung fan put you in the cell. In the end you always get out of it. If they really don’t want you in Gold Mountain, they won’t let you off the boat.”

  Kam Shan was annoyed. “Get out of my light!” he yelled. The boy snickered. “It’s gonna rain soon, that’s why it’s getting dark. It doesn’t make any difference whether I’m in your light or not.” “Huh!” said Kam Shan. “And you’re the Jade Emperor, are you, deciding whether it’s going to rain or not? You won’t get far, seeing as it’s such a nice day.” The boy pointed to the bars on the window. “If you don’t believe me, come and look.” Kam Shan crawled out of the bunk bed and went to look. The window bars were coated in a mass of ants, one piled on another so thickly that each bar had more than doubled in size. It gave him goosebumps to look at them. “Bring over the stool by the door.” “What for?” “Do what I tell you.” So the kid got the stool and put it down in front of the window.