Gold Mountain Blues (65 page)

She did not dare think such thoughts in the daytime. She was just skinny little slit-eyed Chinese girl, and Johnny's eyes would flit over her without pausing. But nighttime was different. Her dreams were like bulls on the rampage. For instance, that night she had been dreaming that in Miss Watson's class, her hand had been put in Johnny's. But before she had had time to look up at his hazel eyes, she had been shaken awake by that enormous crash.

She lay in bed with her hands clutched over her thudding heart, then realized it was her mother and father fighting.

Yin Ling had not had a chance to talk to her mother for a long time.

Sometimes they did not see each other from one week to the next. Her mother did not get home until after midnight from her shift at the Lychee Garden Restaurant and when Yin Ling got up to go to school in the mornings, her mother was still asleep. For months, Yin Ling had wanted her mother to take her to the department store in Dupont Street to buy a new overcoat. The coat she was wearing was a cut-down one of her mother's; the cuffs were threadbare and there was a small, black hole on the pocket where her father's cigarette had burned it. Her mother had Mondays off. So Monday evening was the only time when they could sit down together for a meal and talk.

Today was Monday.

But at tonight's dinner, both Yin Ling and her mother, Cat Eyes, had been preoccupied. Normally her mother ate all her meals at the restaurant. When she did eat at home, the atmosphere at the dinner table was so tense that Yin Ling found it next to impossible to break it with a conversation, especially one involving money.

Her father's leg was still no better. He could do no physical work at all, apart from taking the odd portrait photograph. The bits of cash he made scarcely covered his cigarettes each month. Her grandfather's café was still going, but by the time he had paid the cook and the rent, the income was only enough to buy a ticket to the Cantonese opera.

Yin Ling had often heard her mother whispering quietly in her father's ear about the café. “How come it never goes into the red?” she would say. “If it starts losing money, he'd have to shut up shop and be done with it.” His father would shout at her to keep her mouth shut, but Yin Ling knew that her father hoped that her grandfather would close the business too, although for a different reason. Her father wanted him to go back to Hoi Ping and settle down with her grandmother, while her mother wanted him to help out more around the house in Gold Mountain.

The only person who earned a proper salary in the house was Cat Eyes. She was paid weekly and her cheque had to be split many different ways. One bit was set aside to be sent home to Granny. A letter would arrive from Yin Ling's granny every couple of months, and every letter would say the same: the harvest was poor, they couldn't collect the rents, there were so many mouths to feed, the cost of living had gone up. Cat Eyes could not read so Kam Shan read the letter out to his father in a loud voice which, Cat Eyes knew, was intended for her ears. Cat Eyes said nothing in front of her father-in-law but outside of his hearing, she would say to Kam Shan: “It would be cheaper to support a Buddhist monastery than your family.” Kam Shan was not pleased by such talk but he had to listen. Cat Eyes' cheque fed, clothed and sheltered the whole family, an unpalatable fact which bowed Kam Shan's shoulders.

Yin Ling's mother might complain but at the end of every month, come rain or shine, she never failed to send money back to Hoi Ping. Some of what remained had to go towards paying Granddad's debts. After the
collapse of his farming business, Ah-Fat was left owing substantial amounts of money and from time to time the creditors would come calling.

Basic necessities such as food and utilities also made demands on Cat Eyes' wages. By the time that cheque had been fought over, only a few cents remained. Cat Eyes hung on to them like grim death, and used them to buy a few nice bits and pieces for herself. If Yin Ling wanted a new overcoat, she would have to winkle the money out of her mother. To do that, she would have to catch her mother in an odd moment of generosity.

As soon as Cat Eyes sat down at the table, Yin Ling directed a sidelong glance at her. She was unable to make out what sort of mood her mother was in; those large, feline eyes, their irises overcast with green, moved so little they seemed to have been painted on her face. Yin Ling had only ever once in her life seen her mother laugh heartily. That was the day when her granddad had gone with her dad to Whitewater to see some old friends from his railroad-building days. Her mother happened to have a day off and had invited some of her restaurant friends over for a meal.

With no men in the house, the women let their hair down, drinking two bottles of Shaoxing rice wine between them. Cat Eyes' face was flushed deep pink. She improvised a posy of flowers for her hair out of her folded apron, and launched with gusto into the opera aria “Peach Blossom Red,” making “orchid finger” gestures with her hands. Yin Ling was astonished that her mother could sing so beautifully. She never uttered a sound when Granddad put his Cantonese opera record on. Cat Eyes sang herself hoarse. Then the women sat down to play mahjong. Cat Eyes was on a winning streak that day and she swept the board. At the end, she tied her winnings into a handkerchief and sent her daughter out to buy snacks for her friends to eat. To Yin Ling, her mother had seemed like a flower squashed under a boulder, bursting irrepressibly forth as the sun's rays touched it.

But Yin Ling never saw her mother laugh like that again.

When her mother's expression relaxed, and she sat down, she was good-looking woman. But she did not get a chance to sit down often. She was on her feet all day at the restaurant, and over the years had developed an unattractive slouch, making her look old and droopy.

Yin Ling noticed that her mother had changed into something different this evening. Normally when she was at home, she wore a grey cotton tunic
buttoned down the front. She had two of these, so when she had one on, the other hung on the clothesline. But today she wore a green dress with dark-coloured flowers, and her waved hair was tucked neatly behind her ears and fastened on one side with a silver hair clip. It must mean she was going out tonight. And that could mean one of two things, either she was happy or she was depressed. Yin Ling watched her mother scooping the last grains of rice from her bowl. Finally she took the plunge.

“Mum, I want a new coat,” she muttered into her bowl.

The words seemed to bounce off the sides of the bowl, scaring her with their mighty echoes.

Her mother looked as taken aback as if Yin Ling had asked her for a mountain of gold or silver. She shot her a hard look and Yin Ling felt herself shrink like a snowman in sunshine.

“And I'd like a mink coat. Are you going to give me the money?” Cat Eyes finally said coldly.

“Why not have a look in the Christmas sales?” said Kam Shan, his head buried in his bowl as well. It was not clear whether he meant Yin Ling's coat or her mother's mink.

Cat Eyes put down her bowl. “Did you hear that, Yin Ling? Come Christmastime, you just need to ask your father for the money.”

Yin Ling knew there was absolutely no hope. She would have to wear that old overcoat to Miss Watson's etiquette class for the whole winter and sit in front of Johnny, who would eye her shiny worn coat cuffs and mutter: “She's just another Chink, they never change!”

Yin Ling felt her eyes burn. She had to leave the table this instant or tears of disappointment would start to roll down her face. She put down her bowl and chopsticks and flew up the stairs to her room.

She turned on the bedside light, a twelve-watt bulb which threw a tiny circle of yellow light into the darkness of the room. To save on electricity, they used these dim bulbs in every room. Yin Ling sat down. Do I really want to spend the rest of my life in a house like this? she wondered to herself. How long was a lifetime? Was it as long as the Fraser River, or ten times longer? A hundred? Would a thousand do it?

Yin Ling felt utterly dejected.

Money, money, money. Everyone in the house was busy doing sums with her mother's paycheque. Everyone kept their sums a closely guarded secret, but none of them included her in their calculations.

Yin Ling heard footsteps on the stairs. She hurriedly turned out the light, lay down and pulled the quilt over her head. She could not face anyone just now. Someone stumbled across the room, and then tripped and something crashed to the floor. She threw back the covers, turned on the lamp and saw her grandfather rubbing his knee and muttering.

He took something out of his pocket and put it on her table. “A good thing it didn't break,” he said. It was a pottery pig with a big mouth and big ears and a small slit in its head, the kind of moneybox Chinese New Year lucky money was kept in.

Then he got a few dimes from his pocket, letting them drop into the belly of the pig with a tinkle. “I've given up smoking,” he said. “I'm saving up to get my granddaughter an overcoat. Today I've only saved enough for a button, but in a couple of days it'll be enough for a sleeve.”

Yin Ling pulled a face and did not speak. Bitter words festered inside her, and they went something like this: “It's no good. What's the point? I can't wait. By the time the piggy's full up, the etiquette class will be over.”

I can't dance the tango with Johnny wearing that coat, she thought.

I'll get sick, that's it, I'll get sick. Dizziness, tummyache, a cold—any excuse will do!

She started to work out how to avoid Miss Watson's class if the teacher paired her up with Johnny for the tango.

“You know, your mum's job is hard on her,” said her grandfather.

Yin Ling was thinking she ought to get up and give his leg a rub for

him, but her body felt like a lead weight and she could not move. Even as she watched him hobble out of the room and downstairs, she still could not move.

Later, she heard the front door open and then click shut. Her mother must have gone out. That left just the two men in the room. They did not talk, and silence filled the house. Then gradually an acrid smell filtered from the room where they sat, through the cracks under the doors, into every room and up the stairs. She smelled it in her nostrils and it caught in her throat.

Her father and grandfather were smoking.

Give up smoking? Like hell! she said fiercely to herself.

Yin Ling tore a page from her school exercise book, sprawled on the bed and got ready to write a letter. She wrote the characters for “grandmother” in Chinese, then paused. It was not that she did not know what to say, it was that she did not know how to say it in Chinese. She spoke Cantonese at home with her family, but she still laboured under a handicap; she could neither read nor write Chinese.

In fact, when she started her third year in primary school, her grandfather had wanted to send her to classes at the Overseas Chinese School on East Pender Street. Yin Ling was always finding reasons not to go—it was too windy, it was raining, it was too hot or too cold. And of course she could always wheel out the excuse of a headache or a temperature. When she ran out of excuses and had to go, the only thing that she enjoyed was making paper cuts and dragon lanterns. Learning the strokes of Chinese characters bored her rigid. At the end of two years at the school, she could still only make out the characters in the lunar calendar.

Yin Ling wrote her first sentence.

The sentence should have had three words in it, but Yin Ling could not write the middle word. She left a big space between the “I” and the “you,” because the middle word should have been huge. She racked her brains but could not think how to write the character. Eventually, she stuck in an English word.

“I HATE you.”

That was just the beginning. Yin Ling had many sentences queuing up to follow the first. Like “Granny and Auntie Kam Sau, why don't you earn your own money? You're always so well-dressed in your photographs, but I don't even get a new overcoat because my mum sends all the leftover money to you every month.” Like “My classmates always tell jokes about ‘Chinks trying to make a dollar out of ten cents' but in our family, every single cent has to make a dollar. And it's all because of you.”

Yin Ling had been storing up all these resentments for years and now they were like a river in spate, crested waves tumbling by, one after another.
But the pen point was only the thickness of a needle, and no matter how fierce her resentments, she could not force them through the eye.

Yin Ling's temples began to throb as if praying mantises were battling inside her head, and her eyes bulged from their sockets. She crumpled her letter and threw it in the wastebasket. She lay down on the bed and stared hard at a dirty brown water stain on the ceiling until its edges blurred and she eventually fell asleep.

The crash that woke her up was the sound of the door slamming. Her mother had come home and her father, who had been waiting in the passage, shut it quickly behind her. In the silence of the night when even the alley cats were asleep in doorways, the sound echoed alarmingly up and down the road, making the doors and windows shake.

Yin Ling put her slippers on, shuffled to the door of her bedroom and opened it. Then she tiptoed to the top of the stairs. She could see her mother, a small leather bag in her hand, making straight for the kitchen. She dropped her bag on top of the stove and took a towel from the clothesline. Then she bent over the basin and began to wash her face.

Her father picked up her bag and weighed it in his hand. He lowered his voice: “How much did you lose?”

Her mother snatched back the bag, hung it over her shoulder and carried on washing her face. She was scrubbing it as if it was engrained with dirt and a whole river full of water would never wash it off. Finally her father lost patience. He grabbed her by the collar of her dress and hauled her back from the sink as if he was holding a chicken by the scruff of the neck.