Gold Mountain Blues

by Ling Zhang

  When Kam Ho arrived at the house, he found the door unlocked and pushed it open but saw no one inside. Then he heard the faint sound of opera—his father must be playing that old record of his. He bent down to take off his shoes and suddenly saw an unfamiliar pair of women’s shoes. He could tell at a glance that they did not belong to Cat Eyes. Cat Eyes had been used to working in the fields as a child and had big feet. These shoes were dainty, with white soles and blue uppers with peonies embroidered on them in pink. Two small butterflies rested on the peony petals, as if about to take flight. It was rare to see dainty old-style cloth shoes like these in Chinatown nowadays.

  Kam Ho went inside, and nearly fell over a pile of belongings—Yin Ling’s coat and school bag. He hung the coat on the coat stand, made his way through the messy living room, down the dark passageway and into the kitchen. There he saw a man and woman standing in the kitchen by the window, singing opera. The woman seemed not to have warmed her voice up and sang hesitantly and huskily. However, she took both male and female roles while the man accompanied her.

  The man was not singing but tum-te-tummed and tra-la-la’d as if he was the fiddle accompanying the woman as she sang.

  The dancing butterflies have long gone

  The oriole laments the shortening sun

  Neither chevalier nor archer was I born

  My only art is in poetry and song

  To die for my fallen empire I really yearn

  Rather than in shame and disgrace lingering on

  But when I see the south in the grip of invaders

  My people homeless and country war-torn

  I’d be resigned to this life in shameful captivity

  So that in peace my subjects can live on

  Weeping blood and tears, your majesty

  Yet with all your compromises, the new emperor shows no sign of mercy

  The clouds of war hang over the southern sea

  We caged birds have no hope of breaking free

  Kam Ho thought he recognized the opera about Emperor Li Houzhu and the young empress Zhou. His father was humming the string accompaniment. The woman had her back to Kam Ho and all he could see was her bun at the nape of her neck. Her hair was streaked with grey, and he guessed she must be an opera friend of his father’s. He knew that after he closed his café, his father had spent days in the Cantonese Opera Club in the company of other opera fans. Every now and then, he would bring one home and they would sit and smoke and sing and talk opera, until Kam Shan kicked up a fuss.

  Kam Ho gave a loud cough, and the singing was neatly cut off in mid-note. “Today’s not Saturday,” his father exclaimed with raised eyebrows. “What are you doing here?”

  Kam Ho’s breath was taken away at his father’s words. When he could speak again, he said: “You mean I can’t come home any other day?”

  The woman who had been singing turned around and the corners of her mouth twitched in a slight smile. “You must be Kam Ho,” she said. “Your father says you’re the most dependable son in Chinatown.”

  The woman was wearing a dark green silk qipao dress, he saw, with a jade pin at the collar. She had a pearl hairpin stuck into her bun. Her whole outfit seemed to come from another age, and even smelled a little musty. Kam Ho did not like the ingratiating tone in her voice. He smiled coldly. “I hope you’re not taken in by what my father says.”

  The woman was taken aback at the rebuff but maintained her composure and continued to smile quietly. “Come here, Kam Ho,” said his father, gesturing to her. “You’re looking at Gold Mountain Cloud, a star of Cantonese opera. Twenty or so years ago, you could have asked anyone in the streets of San Francisco and they would all have known her name. She was queen of the opera in those days.”

  Kam Ho suddenly recalled that the singer on the old opera record his father kept playing was called Gold Mountain Cloud. He grunted, then asked: “Where’s Yin Ling?” “Her Chinese class is going on a march tomorrow, to collect money for the Chinese troops, for planes to fight the Japs. Yin Ling’s gone to rehearse.” “And my brother?” “The Association’s organizing a recruitment drive for the Chinese army, and they’re having a meeting.” It was on the tip of Kam Ho’s tongue to say that his brother, with his injured leg, could not even support himself, so could not possibly go and fight the Japanese. But he did not want to make comments like that in front of a woman he did not know, so he simply turned round and went upstairs.

  In the attic room, he lay down on the bed. It was wooden and squealed under his weight. Down below, the piercing sound of the strings and the singing started again, filtering up through the floorboards and assaulting his ears. He pulled the quilt over his head but the sound cut through as easily as if the quilt were just fish netting. He flung off the quilt and thumped on the floor but that only earned him a few moments’ respite. Then there was a clattering of cooking utensils; it was his father making dinner.

  It occurred to Kam Ho that he had arrived at dinnertime but his father had not asked him if he had eaten. Instead he was cooking now for this Gold Mountain Cloud woman. His father had never cooked a meal for his mother in his entire life. And his mother had brought up his three children and looked after Mrs. Mak until the day of her death.

  Downstairs the clattering was interspersed with the woman’s laughter. Kam Ho’s heart felt as if it was leaping like frogs in a pond after rain. He felt around the pillow, the quilt and the bedside cabinet. Lucky for them, he did not find anything that could serve as a weapon. He might have rushed downstairs, knife at the ready, if he had had one.

  Gold Mountain Cloud had really done nothing to offend him. And it was also true that both he and Kam Shan enjoyed Cantonese opera. Last year the Singapore Red Jade Opera troupe had come to Vancouver. He had been there three weekends in a row and bought tickets for best seats in the middle of the front row. Any other day, any other time, he would have been happy to brew a cup of tea and sit down with the woman for a good chat about Chinese opera in Canada. But today was not the right time. The unworthy way his father behaved towards this woman made him think of his mother pushing him onto the boat to Gold Mountain. Every year his father said he would go home to her; every year his mother continued to wait. It seemed as if his father’s boat would never arrive, while his mother continued to grow older. And his mother was growing old alone and lonely—how could his father be enjoying himself with another woman? Especially a woman like Gold Mountain Cloud.

  Kam Ho felt he could not stay at home a moment longer. He would put on his shoes and make a run for it. He fished around for his shoes under the bed with his feet, but they only brought out an old newspaper. He was flipping through it when he saw a news item under a huge headline on the middle page.

  The situation of the war in the Pacific is becoming more serious every day. Overseas Chinese are buying Victory Bonds in order to raise money to provision the national army. Some hotheaded youths are even thinking of returning to China to join up, all the quicker to slaughter the Japanese bandits. Opinions differ among the Overseas Chinese on joining up. Some feel that when their country is in difficulty young men have a duty to do all they can to protect it; others that we have been in Canada for such a long time that it has become our second home. The Canadian army is now short of soldiers and our young people should join its army as a way of winning the trust of the Canadian government. However, if the provincial legislature of British Columbia persists in refusing Chinese the right to vote, our young people cannot join the army to serve the country. The Chinese have recently set up an association with the aim of persuading the federal government to allow our young people to join the army as Canadian residents, as a way to express loyalty to the country they consider to be theirs.

  With a small shock, Kam Ho realized where he wanted to spend the cheque he had in his pocket.

  Would it be enough to buy a plane? he wondered. He would ask his brother tonight.

  7

  Gold Mountain Obstacles

  Year thirteen of the Republ
ic (1924)

  Spur-On Village, Hoi Ping County, China

  Cat Eyes made her way to No-Name River with a laundry basket on her arm. Yin Ling was sound asleep on her back, nodding against her as she walked. At first glance, Cat Eyes looked just like any other Spur-On Village woman; she wore a sprig of jasmine behind her ear, her blue cotton tunic fastened slantwise across her front, dark blue wide-legged trousers and wooden clogs that clip-clopped along the cobbled road. Even the sling in which she carried Yin Ling was a village-style one, made of black cotton and heavily embroidered with peonies. Its crossed straps framed breasts swollen with milk, pushing them out until they looked like watermelons. Of course, only outsiders could have taken Cat Eyes for a Spur-On villager, the same way they lumped together people from different South China provinces. But the Spur-On villagers were sharp-eyed. They saw straight through Cat Eyes’ outward appearance to the Gold Mountain woman underneath.

  The first thing that gave her away was the underclothes she wore. The village women found out about the brassiere when Cat Eyes was breastfeeding Yin Ling. Even though she turned her back to feed the baby, they noticed that after she had undone her jacket, she opened up another layer of lacy white cotton underneath. Her panties, too, were a subject of village gossip. No one knew about them except Kam Shan until one day, one of the household servants saw them in the laundry bucket. She went out and told her friends that the woman from Gold Mountain was so stingy with cloth that she had cut down her panties until they hardly covered her buttocks.

  Of course, the panties were only the beginning. Although Cat Eyes did not know it, gossip swirled around her. The villagers directed their comments to her mother-in-law, and these comments accumulated in Six Fingers’ ears like earwax. Six Fingers looked glummer by the day.

  Cat Eyes did not actually need to wash her own clothes. There were plenty of women servants to do the cooking, the washing and the sewing. But Cat Eyes did not want anyone to see her underwear. Besides, she found it comforting to go to No-Name River, because it reminded her of the village where she grew up. Her home village had plenty of water, just like this one, and her family had depended on its water as much as on the land for their food. She had worked in the fields alongside her mother, and when her father went fishing, she rowed the boat for him. She had had no news of her family since the day she and her elder sister were kidnapped and taken to Gold Mountain, so when she arrived in Spur-On Village with Kam Shan last year, she got him to take her back to her home village. There was no one left of her family; on the untended graves of her parents the artemisia grew tall.

  It had rained continuously for some days and the waters of No-Name River had risen so high they covered all but half of the topmost stone step on the bank. Cat Eyes put the basket down, sat down on the step, rolled up her trouser legs and, with her clogs still on, stretched her feet into the water. She leaned forward until she could see her reflection. The water rippled in the breeze, elongating her face like a cucumber and stretching it as broad as a tomato. As Cat Eyes laughed, she heard the water whisper something in her ear. Softly, softly the words beseeched her: “Why not come in … come in…?”

  Cat Eyes snapped out of her reverie. She remembered her father’s warning to her and her sister when they were little. When it rains and the river’s in spate, he had said, the water spirits lure people in. But Cat Eyes feared neither the water nor the water spirits. She stirred up the mud with her foot and retorted: “In your dreams!” And the water was silenced. Cat Eyes could not know that a dozen or so years later, another Fong would hear the waters speak and, knowing nothing of water spirits, would be lured in.

  Although the water had fallen silent, Cat Eyes was still on the alert. At times like this, it would have been better to have a man with her, but Kam Shan was not the sort of man to go around with a woman. When she ran away from the brothel all those years ago and hid in his cart, he had only agreed to take her in because she threatened to kill herself. That act of kindness had estranged him from his father for many years. She knew he had done it out of pity, the way he might pity a lame horse or a dog with a broken leg. At the time, pity was enough for her. It was the lifeline that pulled her from the bog. But after she reached safety, she realized that it was not enough. She hungered for something more.

  During their first two years together, Kam Shan did not touch her once. She knew that to him she was used goods, and he was afraid of catching syphilis from her. Taking her from the brothel made him guilty of abduction, so neither of them could show their faces in Vancouver’s Chinatown again. They took refuge in a town so small and remote even the Thunder God would not find them. She could not find a Chinese herbalist, so, in the end, it was Pastor Andrew who managed to get hold of some Salvarsan for her, so she could treat her syphilis.

  Finally, Kam Shan relented and was intimate with her. From the very first time, she knew she wanted to give him a child. He talked with fury about his father rejecting him, but she knew this anger was just a cloak he wore. Underneath it, he concealed the heart of a good son. While he was estranged from his father, he could not settle down with her and marry her properly. The only way that the two men could become reconciled was through a child. And it had to be a boy, of course.

  For Kam Shan’s sake, she had dosed herself with a succession of remedies—Chinese, Western and Redskin. She boiled them into broths, burned them to ashes, ground them into powder, kneaded them into pancakes and injected them through syringes. Over ten years, she had taken enough medicines to fill No-Name River, but her belly showed not the slightest tendency to swell into a bump.

  Her barren womb did nothing for Cat Eyes’ self-esteem and she could only watch helplessly as Kam Shan caroused with rowdy Redskin women in cowboy boots and Stetsons who sat on his knee, rolling cigarettes for him and putting them between his lips. Sometimes he stayed out all night, but when he returned, she never asked where he had been. She just lit the stove and heated up the porridge for breakfast.

  Then, when she had completely despaired of getting pregnant, it finally happened. At first, as she leaned over the gutter spewing her guts out, she thought it was the medicine making her sick. But when three months had gone by without any sign of her period, she realized she had conceived. She did not tell Kam Shan until she felt the first flutter of movement in her belly. Kam Shan said nothing, but one day began to dismantle his photographic studio piece by piece. Tears coursed down Cat Eyes’ face. She knew that he could go home and see his father now, and that, maybe, she could gain a foothold there too.

  Though she gave birth to a girl, Cat Eyes was still pleased and proud of her accomplishment. She was still very young. Her body was a field in which paddy rice had grown and sooner or later it would produce a boy too. The fact that her firstborn was a girl meant that she would have help with all those baby boys to come. It never occurred to Cat Eyes that Yin Ling was a miracle baby whose birth was the result of the coincidence of sun, rain and soil. Her womb would remain barren for many years after.

  Kam Shan had recently gone to the city of Canton and would not be back until the beginning of the ninth month. That was Yin Ling’s birthday and there was to be a feast to celebrate it. Such celebrations for baby girls were rare in the village but Six Fingers had insisted. For Six Fingers, Yin Ling was life itself and the baby spent most of the time in her granny’s arms. In fact, Cat Eyes hardly got a chance to look after her daughter, unless it was time to put her to the breast. In Six Fingers’ words, Yin Ling was the first of the next generation. Her auspiciously round little face, fleshy earlobes and grooved upper lip were signs, according to ancient belief, that she would be welcoming many little brothers and sisters into the world.

  Kam Shan had gone to Canton to get his leg treated. Even before their ship docked, Six Fingers had been making inquiries about doctors. She tracked down a highly-thought of herbalist in Canton who had once attended to the broken bones and injuries of the Imperial family. He was elderly and had retired long ago but Six Fingers, by d
int of turning two mu of land into a large amount of silver, persuaded him to see her son.

  Kam Shan’s lameness meant that he could not walk much or stand for long, so he was unable to go out on photography assignments. He took pictures only occasionally, when customers came to his house. His father, Ah-Fat, was no better off: after his farm went bankrupt, creditors hounded him so mercilessly he did not dare go home. Kam Ho’s monthly wages at the Hendersons’ were not enough to keep two families, so Cat Eyes was forced to go out to work. A new establishment called the Lychee Garden Restaurant had just opened in Chinatown and was in need of a waitress. Cat Eyes went to see the boss and was immediately taken on.

  She knew why that was.

  There was a dearth of young women in Chinatown in those days, and very few of them went out to work. Those who did work out of the home were regarded as used goods. In the restaurant, Cat Eyes had to put up with every man stripping her naked with his eyes. But she didn’t care. For a girl who had worked in the Spring Gardens brothel, those stares were nothing. In any case, she did not mind being a slut in their eyes so long as it meant her new family did not go hungry.

  Prying eyes were not confined to the restaurant. At home Kam Shan stayed up until her shifts ended after midnight. He skulked behind the dusty old curtains, watching her fumble in her pocket for the door key, on the lookout in case some man was escorting her home. In the old days, it was she who had been worried about him messing around. Now it was the other way round—and she liked it that way. She almost hoped his leg would never heal.

  Late one night, after finishing her shift at the restaurant, she returned home. Without turning the light on, she went in the door, down the dark passage and into the kitchen. Kam Shan did not speak to her, just followed her with his eyes. His eyes nibbled her all over. She gave her face a quick scrub, and was ready for bed and sleep. But Kam Shan had been at home all day with nothing to do, and now he wanted her. He pressed her down on the bed and pushed himself furiously into her. In the past, he only bothered to do it once in a blue moon, and then it was perfunctory. But now it was as if, every time he saw her, his body craved her. His eyes gleamed with a green light and she said jokingly that he should change his name to Cat Eyes.