Gold Mountain Blues (69 page)

Her mother turned around. “Huh! What does it matter what she studies? She still has to get married and have babies. It's much more important for her to get a job and earn her living so I don't have to carry on slogging away till I die!”

Her father grimaced and began to mutter something about “a woman's ideas.…” but then bit back the words, clearly trying to keep his temper under control.

Dinner passed peacefully. For the first time ever, her mother drank a glass of rice wine with her father and grandfather. When she finished the wine, she had a coughing fit. The coughs got more and more violent until she made a dash for the sink and spewed everything up. Her mother had been vomiting a lot recently, Yin Ling noticed. Her father pulled a towel down from the clothesline and gave it to her to wipe her mouth. “If you can't hold your liquor, then don't drink,” he said. “No one's holding a gun to your head.” Yin Ling noticed that he was speaking to her mother unusually gently today.

When Yin Ling had finished her dinner, she got up to go to her room, but her mother shouted at her.

“Can't you wash the dishes when someone's got the meal ready for you? A big girl of eighteen like you, can't you do anything but hang around boys? Such a lazybones! When I was eight years old I was getting the dinner for the whole family.…”

Her mother's words buzzed in Yin Ling's ears like a persistent fly.

Yin Ling started to count. One, two, three, four. If her mother did not shut up by the time she reached ten, she would smash the plate in her hand to smithereens. But by the time she reached eight, her mother had gone to her room.

Her father and grandfather lit their cigarettes and the room filled with acrid, foul-smelling smoke.

She could hear her mother's dry coughs, which sounded as if they might turn into another bout of vomiting. Suddenly the sounds stopped. Cat Eyes came out of her room, dressed up and carrying her purse.

“Are you going out in this rain?” asked Yin Ling's father, scowling.

The only answer he got was a grunt. As Cat Eyes sat on a stool to put her shoes on, Kam Shan's face was dark with rage.

“You won't rest until you lose every last cent, is that it?” he shouted, thumping the table so hard with his fist that the tea mugs jumped and dark liquid trickled down from their lids.

“You can smoke and drink to your heart's content, but you won't let me play a few games of mahjong!” Cat Eyes retorted, and left the house without looking back.

There was a long silence in the room.

“It's not proper for a woman to go out to work to support the whole family,” her grandfather finally said.

Ah-Fat had shut his café a couple of years ago. While it was open, at least he had a bit of pocket money, enough to keep him in cigarettes. After he shut it, he could not even afford a cheap ticket to the opera on Canton Street.

“Kam Shan, your studio business is going from bad to worse. No one wants photos of themselves in wartime. And if they do, they go to the big studios. Why don't you go and get yourself a job, one where you can sit down, just for a few hours each day? Wouldn't that be better than nothing?”

Kam Shan shook his head. “It's not as if I haven't looked. The only places hiring are munitions factories. You have to be on your feet from morning till night. I can't do that.”

“Or we can go and buy some beans, sprout them and sell the bean sprouts in
yeung fan
shops, how about that?” his father tried again. “You don't need much cash to start a business like that, and what we don't sell we can eat at home. Ah-Tong, who lives at the end of the street, does it, and he seems to be making a bit of money.

“Not such a bad idea. When the sprouts are ready, Yin Ling can help us sell them after school. Her English is good, the
yeung fan
understand her.”

Silence fell again.

“I've had rotten luck to end up getting old like this,” Ah-Fat said with a sigh. “Just think of that farm I had in New Westminster, and how envious it made the
yeung fan
. I don't know how your mother's managing at home now.

“At least in the village, they've got land to sell. That must have kept them going these last couple of years,” he went on. “Not like us. We just have to keep tightening our belts. That paycheque just won't stretch any further.”

Yin Ling put the last plate in the dish rack, took off her apron and ran up to her room. She shut the door and bolted it, and then blew a long, loud raspberry. This house was like a sardine tin, and she was one small fish squeezed into the crowded, suffocating darkness. The thought of carrying a basket of sopping-wet bean sprouts through the vegetable market with cries of “If ten cents is too much, eight cents will do!” made her break out in a cold sweat.

Downstairs, her grandfather heaved one sigh after another. Then there was the tinkling of boiling water—her father was replenishing her grandfather's mug of tea.

“Even a dog wouldn't go out on a night like this, but she won't stay home,” Yin Ling heard her father say angrily.

She knew her father was referring to her mother. Every Monday, come rain or shine, when her mother got the day off from the restaurant, she went out with her girlfriends for a few sessions of mahjong.

“Kam Shan, don't keep scolding her all the time,” her grandfather said. “You know, the baby in her belly might be a boy. Maybe it's the Buddha making sure my family line will carry on after all.” There was a hint of happiness in his voice.

Yin Ling was thunderstruck. It was a few moments before she could pull herself together.

Her mother, a woman old enough to be a grandmother, was pregnant.

The tiny house they shared would soon have to accommodate another. And she knew her share would not be equal to everyone else's. If the baby in her mother's belly was a boy, he would take up half the house. They'd have to split the other half between them and not into four equal parts
either. Hers would be the smallest. She was not much good at math, but this calculation was not hard to figure out.

Why didn't she just die?

Yin Ling made a fist of one hand and beat her chest. She felt the card she had hidden in her breast pocket. It was her exam results for the term. She had kept it tucked into her pocket for two days and it was beginning to smell sweaty.

The principal, Mrs. Sullivan, had called her into the office and personally given the marks to her.

“We must fix a time to have a meeting with your mother and father, and discuss retaking your courses and study plan,” Mrs. Sullivan said. She was a washed-out-looking woman, so pale that bluish veins showed faintly through the skin on her neck and forehead. The veins wriggled like worms as she went on “…if you want to graduate this year.”

Her mother and father? A man with a lame leg, teeth yellowed from smoking, speaking pidgin English? A woman reeking of cooking oil and smoke? No way was she going to have those two marching into Mrs.Sullivan's office under everyone's gaze.

“Did you see Yin Ling's Chink Chinaman mum and dad!”

“Look at them! Do they really let men that old make their wives pregnant?”

The snide comments jumped around in her head like tenacious fleas that refused to be slapped away.

She wished the ground would open up in front of her and swallow her. That way, she would not have to listen to her mother grumbling and her father and grandfather sighing ever again. Nor would she have to see the blue veins jumping on Mrs. Sullivan's neck, or face the nightmare of selling baskets of bean sprouts in the market.

Johnny.

The name suddenly popped up from the recesses of Yin Ling's mind.

To her surprise, Miss Watson
had
paired her up with Johnny for the tango classes. Johnny seemed not to notice that her sleeve cuffs were shiny from wear, and she did not faint in the crook of his arm. After the tango classes were over, they continued to talk to each other. Yin Ling discovered that Johnny's father was a drunk who was hardly ever at home. As the middle child of three, Johnny always felt left out. By the time his mother tried to take him in hand, it was too late. During the second half of grade ten, Johnny dropped out of school. He joined a band called The Bad Boys with some other kids in a higher grade and went with them to Montreal.

After Johnny left school, quite a few lovelorn girls wrote to him, Yin Ling among them. As time went by, however, they found new boys to focus their attentions on and memories of Johnny faded. Only Yin Ling kept writing. Johnny answered sporadically.

He stayed only three months in Montreal because people there spoke French and no one listened to English songs. The band followed the St. Lawrence River west, stopping for gigs in small towns. In Thunder Bay, Johnny fell out with the others and struck out for the Prairies. In the last letter, he said he had left the Prairies and had come back West. He was in the Rocky Mountains, in a town called Red Deer in Alberta, where he was singing in a tavern.

Johnny could be Yin Ling's bolthole, her means of escape. That way she need never set eyes on her mother, father, grandfather, Mrs. Sullivan or the bean sprouts again.

To wander from one town to another, to find yourself in a new place before the streets you were in had grown familiar, to sleep under a different roof every night, to wake up to a different sky every day—that was what Johnny referred to as “skating through life.” Yin Ling wanted to skate through life, too.

She made up her mind, and the fleas stopped jumping. The snide comments were silenced, and Yin Ling calmed down.

Red Deer was near Calgary. You could get an early train from Vancouver and be there by the afternoon. Her luggage was very simple, a couple of changes of clothes and a watertight pair of shoes and an umbrella. Luckily
it was not winter or she would have had to take the family's suitcase, which would have attracted attention.

Money. That was what she needed.

Yin Ling took the piggybank from the table and emptied the coins from its mouth. It was all small change and took her an age to count. It came to eight dollars and ninety-seven cents. This was what her grandfather had saved up for her. He told her it was his tobacco money, but he had not given up smoking, so although he had kept this piggy for years, it had not grown fat. Still, it was enough for her train fare and anything left over could buy her a meal or two.

She would wait until next week, until her mother got paid, and take two or three more dollars from her purse. Then she would go. She knew exactly where her mother kept her money. She had thought of leaving many times, but this time she was really going to do it.

And when the money was used up, what then? Well, she would just have to cross that bridge when she came to it.

Her mother and father were still asleep when she got up the next day. She knew her grandfather was already up because she could see the flickering red dot of his cigarette down the dark passageway. She walked past him and, in the doorway, put on her shoes.

“Yin Ling, have some soy milk, it's fresh,” she heard him call after her.

“No, thanks,” she called back. But when she got out of the door, she stopped and turned back. Her grandfather handed her the cup and she drank the milk down.

“Thanks, Granddad,” she said and felt a lump in her throat.

Red Deer was to the north and a long way from the ocean. By the time the summer sun got that far, it had almost run out of warmth.

When Yin Ling jumped down from the train with her bulky school bag, it was almost dark. Along the chilly street, the lighting was patchy and the dark gaps looked like the mouth of a toothless old woman. The wind frisked at her sleeves, making her shiver. Vancouver wind was a plump, fine-skinned hand which dipped itself into the ocean and rubbed moisture caressingly over houses and trees and people. But the wind in Red Deer was a calloused and heavy hand that felt rough on her face. Yin Ling was surprised but not
frightened by it. The fear came much later. Just now, there was too much to arouse her curiosity and nothing could dampen her good spirits.

Red Deer consisted of only a few streets. Yin Ling asked a couple of passersby for directions, and made her way down three short streets to the tavern. It was at the end of a lane, and had an illuminated sign outside which read “The Goldpanner.” Yin Ling sat down opposite the entrance, on a bench used by the townsfolk to rest their legs, read the paper or drink a coffee. As she sat in this strange town, on this strange bench, feeling strange eyes flicker over her, she felt every pore of her body come to life.

Through the window she saw the room was full of men wreathed in clouds of cigar smoke. The Goldpanner was an illicit drinking hole where the coal miners and farm workers came at the end of their shifts to drink and smoke and play poker. Occasionally women would go inside, but only the sort who could charm the sweat-soaked coins from these men into their own pockets. Yin Ling knew she would have to stay outside. She was prepared to wait on the bench until morning. She had never stayed out all night, but she was fired by a fierce longing and she did not feel afraid. As she waited, her longing blazed until her heart was as pleasurably hot as peanuts roasted in a
wok
.

Of all the men in the room, only one had anything to do with her. Even without looking she could hear he was there.

Go West, where there's endless gold

Go West, where there's land untold,

Where your horse stops, hey, goldpanner

That's where you stake your claim, so bold.

The guitar chords punched holes in the night sky like a handful of birdshot. He sang in a voice so raw the song sounded like it was clawing its way from his throat. The room stank of sweat and the men tapped out the rhythm with their dirt-encrusted boots on the rough pine floor. Yin Ling found her feet tapping along with them.