Gold Mountain Blues

by Ling Zhang

  Rat-a-tat-tat.

  The person was still there.

  It must be the postman.

  He shuffled over to the door and opened it. It was not the postman, it was a woman wearing a yellow plastic raincoat.

  She greeted him with an exclamation: “Is it really you, Fong? You look so old! And you’ve got a limp!”

  Kam Shan looked blank, then stammered: “You know me?”

  The woman pushed her way past him. As she took off her coat, she said: “Making me stand out in the rain is not the way you Chinese usually greet your guests.”

  Under her outer coat, the woman wore a threadbare old black housecoat, its buttonholes gaping and revealing eyelets of bare flesh. She was old, and her hair was grey and her face wrinkled as a walnut. Still, she carried herself erect and her feet were planted firmly on the floor.

  Kam Shan shrugged, and asked again: “Do you know me?”

  The woman gave a short laugh: “Heavens! Don’t you recognize me? I’m Sundance!”

  As Kam Shan looked at her, something seemed to shatter within him: the picture he had cherished all those years, of a young girl chasing butterflies among the bulrushes, the rays of the sun gilding her hair and skin. He had engraved the image on his heart and was sure it would last forever— but with just a few words, this woman had shattered it into small pieces. Even if he picked them all up, he could never put that picture back together again.

  As he shook hands with her, he felt her skin rasping his palm painfully.

  “Sundance, I spent years looking for you! Why did you wait till I’m on my last legs to come looking for me?”

  “Well, at least it’s better than waiting till you’re in hell,” she said. “Why are you so sure I’ll be going to hell?” asked Kam Shan. She burst out laughing: “If we could go to hell together, that would be heaven!”

  Still the same old laugh … Kam Shan thought secretly that even if his eyes had not recognized her, his ears would have told him.

  Sundance looked at the photos on the mantelpiece. “Is that your daughter?” she asked. “That’s right. I just had one child.” “Your granddaughter?” She pointed. Kam Shan nodded. “Just the one. What about you?” “I’ve got three sons and two daughters, eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild.” “You certainly know how to make a big family,” Kam Shan said. Sundance pulled a photo out of her bag. “This is my eldest son, Paul, and his grandson, Ian.”

  The child was about five years old, and had dark eyes, black hair and flat features. Kam Shan smiled: “Why does he look so Chinese?” “Because he is Chinese! His mother’s Chinese. She’s called Mei.”

  “Why are there no pictures of your wife?” asked Sundance. “She’s been dead for years. What about your husband?” Sundance pulled out a newspaper cutting and pointed to a brief death notice. “He died just last month.” “So sorry.…” Kam Shan began, but Sundance smiled. “It was a good thing. He’d been ill for years.” Kam Shan wanted to ask if that was the reason she had not looked him up, but did not.

  Suddenly there was nothing else to say.

  Under the easy small talk yawned an abyss of more than half a century. Their words floated briefly on the surface then vanished into its impenetrable darkness. Sundance got up. “I’m off to collect my great-grandson from school,” she said. “Where do you live?” asked Kam Shan. Sundance mentioned the name of a street not fifteen minutes’ walk away from his house. There must have been thousands of chances over all that time that they would bump into each other—yet they never had.

  That’s destiny, he thought to himself.

  He opened the door for her. “Goodbye,” she said, with a glimmer of hope in her eyes. He knew what she was hoping for, but he could not give her any reason to hope. He had spent many years longing to see her again, but when it happened, he wished it had not.

  He shut the door behind her and went back to the living room. Then he saw that Sundance had left the photo behind. He turned it over. On the back was written:

  Paul’s fifty-seventh birthday, with Ian, 22 March 1970

  Kam Shan began counting on his fingers. If Paul was fifty-seven last year, he must have been born in 1913. He had left Sundance’s tribe in the autumn of the previous year, and Paul had been born the following spring.

  In a flash, Kam Shan understood. He ran to the door. “Sundance!” he shouted. Her car had pulled away from the curb but she must have seen him frantically pursuing her in the rearview mirror. She braked and wound down the window. “So you’re finally going to make a date with me, are you?”

  He held the photo up in front of her.

  “Whose child is Paul?” he asked.

  Sundance was taken aback. Her smile froze on her face.

  The answer was a long time in coming.

  “Mine.”

  Kam Shan had a fall that evening in the bathroom. Just like in a Hollywood film, everything happened in slow motion. He got out of the bathtub, very slowly got dressed, sat down to put on his slippers, and then slipped slowly from the chair to the floor.

  He had not had an acute attack of any kind.

  It was possible that, after working so hard all his life, he had just died of old age and exhaustion.

  At least, that was the diagnosis the doctor gave to Yin Ling after cursory examination of Kam Shan’s body.

  Yin Ling did not dare look the doctor in the eye.

  If hard work could be measured in pounds and ounces, she hated to think how much extra weight she had added during her father’s lifetime.

  She had been working that night at the restaurant. She was now the manager. When the hospital called first, she was eating her dinner and refused to take the call. The old man would do anything to get her to the house, she thought. It was only when they called for the third time that she realized something was seriously wrong. She drove like the wind but when she arrived at his bedside, her father’s heartbeat was very feeble.

  “Amy’s on her way, Dad. Wait, please wait,” Yin Ling begged him.

  His lips trembled, and there was a spike in the heart monitor. She pressed her ear close to his mouth, but his voice was very faint.

  She heard just a couple of words: “…kapok flowers…”

  He was thinking of the red kapok blossom of his home village.

  The doctor filled in the death certificate.

  Time of death: 11:27 p.m., 1 February 1971.

  Yin Ling watched as the nurse pulled the sheet over her father’s face. She tried very, very hard to call up the tears, but they seemed to have abandoned her. A desert, that was what she was, a waterless desert.

  She balled up her hand in a fist. Crumpled inside was a news cutting which she had brought to show her father.

  It read as follows:

  Today was a red-letter day for the Canadian Pacific Railway company, as a nine-person delegation from Red China rode first class in one of its carriages from Montreal to Ottawa. Sub-zero temperatures outside could not dampen the spirits of the delegates as they broke the ice of a twenty-year-long Cold War. The delegation was setting out in search of a site on which to build the new Chinese Embassy. This breakthrough is due to the persistence of Prime Minister Trudeau and his cabinet in the face of criticism of his policy to establish diplomatic relations with China. The Communist Chinese have always harboured friendly feelings towards Canada thanks to the heroic work of Dr. Norman Bethune in wartime China. This time around, as Ottawans will soon realize, the Chinese are here to stay and will soon establish themselves as part of the scenery.

  Afterword

  2004

  Hoi Ping, Guangdong Province

  A sheet of plastic. A basket of fruit. A trowel. A bunch of incense sticks.

  “Shall we dig the hole?” Mr. Auyung asked Amy.

  “Wait a moment. I can’t talk to the spirit of my great-grandmother through this.”

  Amy removed the plastic sheet and knelt on the ground. It was still dewy, and the dampness seeped through her trousers to her knees.
>
  Amy bowed low.

  The tombstone had only been erected yesterday. It was of plain white stone with the following names carved on it:

  Fong Tak Fat (1863–1945)

  Kwan Suk Yin (1877–1952)

  Fong Kam Sau (1913–1952)

  Fong Yiu Kei (1930–1939)

  Tse Wai Kwok (1934–1941)

  Tse Wai Heung (1937–1952)

  Erected in loving memory by their Canadian descendants, 2004

  The burial ground was on top of a hill and the narrow road wound up to it through dense clumps of bamboo. The wind had scattered white flowers under their feet, probably from graves which had been swept and tidied at the Festival of Qing Ming only a month ago. The site was a hillock on which clusters of graves jostled higgledy-piggledy for space. “Are all these Gold Mountain families?” Amy asked. “All the families in these villages have relatives overseas,” Mr. Auyung said, “so I suppose you could say they’re all Gold Mountain families.”

  Mr. Auyung had helped Amy choose the gravestone and the inscription. In a red cloth bag, she had the remains of Fong Tak Fat: some nail clippings wrapped in silk. Kam Shan had cut them from Ah-Fat’s hand when his body lay in its coffin before burial. Kam Shan had passed the silk wrapping and its contents to Yin Ling and she had taken it with her to each of the houses where she lived. Just before Amy left for China, Yin Ling gave it to her daughter.

  Amy took the trowel and dug a small hole at the foot of the tombstone. The soil was a strange colour, it seemed to Amy, and a little shiver ran over her. She put the cloth bag into the hole, covered it with earth and firmed it down. With the bag she was burying a lifetime of secrets, now to be swallowed up by the silent earth.

  Mr. Auyung sighed: “A Gold Mountain promise that in the end could not be kept. What a pity.”

  “I don’t see it like that. There are some promises which are never kept but still mean more than kept ones. They’re more….”

  She struggled to find the right adjective in Chinese, and finally gave up and said: “…profound.”

  She used the English word, but Mr. Auyung understood anyway.

  “There’s still a big gap in the Fong family history which I need to fill. You’re the only descendant of the fourth generation and I still know very little about your adult life. Can you fill me in on that?” Mr. Auyung asked.

  “Ever the investigator!” said Amy with a smile. “Actually, Fong family history has become less colourful with every generation, and when it comes to mine, it is disgustingly conventional. It’s simply the story of the daughter of a Chinese single mother who was always looked down on by white people, but whose one desire was to drag her daughter out of the mud and give her a head start in the world. That mother worked in menial jobs for her whole life and spent every last cent of her earnings trying to turn her daughter into an upper-class white girl. She had lessons in piano, art and ballet, everything an upper-class child was supposed to learn. Then she was sent to a private Catholic school. Her mother wanted her to become doctor or a lawyer or an accountant. She never imagined her daughter would sneak off and study sociology at Berkeley, using the school fees her mother had sweated blood to save up, because she had absolutely no interest in anything else.

  “The path that girl took through life was the precise opposite of what her mother expected. Instead of studying hard, she joined every political movement going and was present at every single demonstration. Instead of finding herself a nice man to marry—he had to be white, of course—she got involved with one useless lover after another. In an odd twist of fate, instead of leaving every vestige of her Chinese inheritance behind her, she ended up studying Chinese at university. And to cap it all, a Chinese man has just inveigled her into acknowledging to the whole world that she half Chinese.”

  Mr. Auyung could not help smiling. “I’ve only tapped into an innate positive feeling that you already had.”

  “Oh, my story isn’t finished yet,” said Amy, and went on: “At least in one respect, this girl—or rather, this woman—has finally fulfilled her mother’s ambitions by becoming a famous professor at a famous college.”

  “Thank you,” said Mr. Auyung. “Now the Fong family story is finally complete.”

  “Huh! Your story may be complete, but mine isn’t. Who are you anyway? Why do you know more about my family than I do?”

  “I knew this question would come up sooner or later. It’s simple, really. My great-grandfather and my grandfather happened to teach your great-grandfather and great-uncle and great-aunt. But that’s not really the reason why I got interested. Thirty years ago, a young man called Auyung Wan On read the diary left by his grandfather, the revolutionary martyr Auyung Yuk Shan. As he did so, he came across stories of your great-grandfather, Fong Tak Fat’s family. In the mid-seventies there was a power vacuum in local politics and, on the pretext of researching a distant relative from Spur-On Village, he broke into the diulau when no one was looking, and began to pry into its secrets. He might have been doing what fashionable scholars would later call sociological research, but at the time, of course, he was just an ignorant youth and this was one of many crazy things he did to satisfy his curiosity.

  “Of course, the tracks he left behind him just confirmed the villagers in their belief that the diulau was haunted.”

  Mr. Auyung gave Amy a brown envelope and said: “Burn this in their honour.” Amy took out a stack of “spirit money” and, borrowing Mr. Auyung’s lighter, set it ablaze. She watched the paper burn down to a little heap and then turn into a few black charred scraps which scattered in the wind. There were more sheets of paper in the envelope which, instead of denominations, had scribbled titles such as: “Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting,” “A Copybook of Regular Calligraphy,” “300 Poems from the Tang Dynasty,” and “Conservatory of Music.”

  “Your great-grandmother was a literate woman. She kept her brain working all her life,” said Mr. Auyung.

  Bit by bit, Amy consigned everything in the envelope to the flames. The last thing she took out was a paper boat, folded completely flat. When she pulled it open, it was bigger than she expected. It had been made with great care, complete with decks, sails and rigging, and a lively dragon’s eye painted on the prow.

  “That was the sort of boat the emigrants to Gold Mountain sailed in. The locals called them Big-Eyed Roosters.”

  Amy held the boat in the palm of her hand and examined it closely before placing it on the fire at the foot of the tombstone. It was made of cardboard and burned slowly. The sails had been coated with layers of glue and made a crackling noise when the flames licked them. The boat burned to ash and only the sails were left, winking in the embers.

  “Now you can board the boat for Gold Mountain at last, Greatgrandmother, and go and see Great-grandfather,” Amy murmured.

  Something tickled her face. She brushed it away with the back of her hand and discovered it was a tear.

  They went down the hill and Mr. Auyung told the driver to take Amy back to the hotel so she could get ready before the farewell dinner. Amy’s cell phone bleeped. It was a text message. She read it and suppressed smile. Then she looked serious. “I’m afraid I can’t attend the banquet,” she said. Mr. Auyung was startled. “But it’s all been arranged!” he protested. “Number one,” she continued, “I’m not leaving tomorrow, so you don’t need to say goodbye. Number two, if I go to the banquet, I’ll have to sign over the diulau, as you told me yourself. I’ve changed my mind. I’m not signing it over for the moment.”

  Mr. Auyung stared blankly at Amy. “What on earth.…” he stammered.

  “It puts you in a predicament, doesn’t it?” said Amy. “You’ll have some explaining to do to your bosses. All that time and energy wasted on me.… So I’ll tell you straight up why: I’m not signing right now because I want to use the diulau for a wedding, while it still belongs to the Fong family.”

  “Whose?” asked Mr. Auyung in surprise.

  “Mine,” said Amy. “There
’s only one thing I want to ask of you. Will you be my witness?” Amy continued.

  “Er … when?” Mr. Auyung was finding it hard to absorb all this new information.

  “Mark’s plane has taken off. He’ll be here tomorrow about midday.”

  “Good heavens! You haven’t given me much time to get things ready!”

  Amy burst out laughing.

  “That’s your problem. I’m leaving all that to you.”

  LIST OF RESEARCH MATERIALS

  Jennifer S.H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1980.

  Anthony B. Chan, Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World Vancouver: New Star Books, 1983.

  Denise Chong, The Concubine’s Children: Portrait of a Family Divided. New York: Viking, 1994.

  Harry Con et al, From China to Canada: A History of Chinese Communities in Canada. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982.

  Robin Fisher, Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774–1890. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1992.

  Evelyn Huang, Chinese Canadians: Voices from a Community. Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1996.

  David Chuenyan Lai, Chinatowns: Towns Within Cities in Canada. Vancover: UBC Press, 1988.

  David Chuenyan Lai, The Chinese Cemetery in Victoria. B.C. Studies 75, Autumn 1987.

  David Chuenyan Lai, A ‘Prison’ for Chinese Immigrants. The Asiandian 2: 4, Spring 1980.

  Peter S. Li, The Chinese in Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988.

  Huping Ling, Surviving on the Gold Mountain. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998.

  Dennis McLaughlin and Leslie McLaughlin, Fighting for Canada: Chinese and Japanese Canadians in Military Service. Minister of National Defence of Canada, 2003.

  Geoffrey Molyneux, British Columbia: An Illustrated History. Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2002.