Gold Mountain Blues (72 page)

When Kam Shan heard the news, he squatted on the floor and burst into floods of tears. Ah-Fat had never seen his son cry in his life. If he kept it up, Ah-Fat thought, he would cry the heavens into bits and the earth into a bottomless pit. But Ah-Fat felt that it was not wholly grief that moved his son; it was also as if a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders.

The next day, Kam Shan took himself off somewhere where he could be alone and burned a sheet of paper he had kept hidden in his pocket.

It was a deed of contract.

It read as follows:

I, Fong Kam Shan, of Spur-On Village, Hoi Ping County, Guangdong Province, China, now resident in Vancouver, British Columbia, together with my wife, Mrs. Chow, agree to sell the baby which Mrs. Chow is carrying, whether it is a girl or a boy, to Mr. and Mrs. Tseng Yiu Nam of Toi Shan, for the sum of seventy dollars, this sum to be donated to the anti-Japanese war effort fund in its entirety. This document is a permanent record of this agreement.

Third day of the eighth month of year thirty of the Republic

Up till now, Ah-Fat had never thought of himself as old.

His hair had gone grey long ago and his eyes had deteriorated, but if he wore his glasses, he could still read books and newspapers. He had lost a few teeth but was still capable of chewing his rice and peanuts. His knees were a bit crooked but could carry him along the road on his walks well enough. True, his hand shook when he held his writing brush, but he could still form the characters if he wanted to write. They all said he was an old man—Kam Shan, Kam Ho, Cat Eyes, Gold Mountain Cloud—and he accepted their comments with a smile. But although he could not be bothered to argue, in his heart of hearts he was not convinced. What other people said did not count. The only thing that counted was what he felt in himself.

When he came back from seeing Rick Henderson, he was not so sure.

Since Kam Ho had left the Hendersons, Ah-Fat had not been back to see Rick. Time went by, and one day he found himself on the street where the Hendersons lived. As he drew closer, he saw a For Sale sign stuck into the lawn in front of their house. He was surprised, and went up the steps to knock on the door. There was no answer but a neighbour came out to tell him that Rick had died.

It was about a month ago, but no one knew exactly which day it had happened. Rick had not been taking the dog out for its usual walk, the neighbour told Ah-Fat, and one day they heard the dog barking and barking. Finally the neighbour banged on the door and, when there was no answer, broke in and found Rick lying dead on the kitchen floor. He had been dead for some days and the rats had gnawed out his eyes. The dog lay dead next to him.

The next day, Ah-Fat bought a bunch of flowers and took them up the mountain to pay his respects to Rick.

It was not the first time he had been up the mountain.

There was the occasion when Jenny, Rick's daughter, had died, then another occasion when Rick's wife, Phyllis, died. This visit was his third. He put down the bunch of white chrysanthemums, a little withered from the frost, and took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. He put one cigarette on the gravestone, lit the other and squatted on the ground to smoke it.

You had rotten luck, Rick. You bought this plot for your wife and daughter to bury you here. But you ended up burying them first and there was no one to bury you.

“You've gone, you bastard, and I'm the only one left,” Ah-Fat muttered to himself.

Out of all those who built the railroad, was what he meant.

There were thirty-one of them in the team, including their foreman, Rick. Many of them died as they blasted their way through the Rockies, Red Hair among them. And many more were lost trying to get home when the work was finished and they were sacked. Some starved to death later, in Victoria, and of those who did not, some went back to Guangdong. Only four remained in Vancouver. Ah-Lam had died thirty years ago, and
another died the year before last. Now Rick was dead and only Ah-Fat remained.

There were so many stories from the railroad-building days. Why had he never thought of recording them? Now, even though he could still remember, he could not write them down any more, and he would take them to his grave. Those untold tales would be trapped in his casket, waiting for weeds and moss to obscure them permanently.

As he went down the mountain, he suddenly felt as if a muscle was missing from his leg and he could not stand straight. Just like that, his whole body had suddenly shrunk.

Maybe I really am old, he thought. I suppose I must be—I'm getting close to eighty.

He hobbled down the road on his way home. From a distance, he could see the lights of Chinatown coming on, faint spots of good cheer dotted here and there in the gathering darkness. However grim life was, you had to celebrate New Year, he thought. When he got home, he would bring the festive lanterns down from the attic, dust them off and hang them up.

He thought about the family in China, in the village in Hoi Ping. There had been no letters from home for a long time, since Hong Kong fell to the Japanese. How was Six Fingers getting on? He had not seen her in more than twenty years, and if it were not for the photographs, her face would have faded from his memory.

He was trying to find his key when he stubbed his foot on a bundle lying by his front door. Why was his family so lazy they could not be bothered to take the rubbish out, he mumbled angrily. The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the bundle moved and got to its feet. “Granddad!” Ah-Fat nearly buckled at the knees in fright. He took a closer look. This was clearly no ghost; he could see the breath coming from its nostrils in the cold air. Without bothering with his key, he rapped thunderously on the door. “Yin Ling's back!” he shouted.

A moment later, Cat Eyes opened the door, Kam Shan behind her. They turned on the lights to see a figure covered in dirt and enveloped in an overcoat so impregnated with dust it was impossible to tell the original colour. In the half-light, the grey lips cracked open to reveal flesh-pink
gums. “Mum, Dad!” Cat Eyes' legs gave way under her and she sat down on the ground.

“So we're still your mum and dad, are we? We spent months posting missing persons notices on the radio and in the newspapers for you. So now you've spent all the cash you took from the house, you're back, eh?”

Kam Shan pulled Cat Eyes back. “Keep your trap shut, woman. Go and heat some water so she can wash.”

Yin Ling took a bath and put on some clean clothes borrowed from Cat Eyes. Glowing from the hot water, she finally looked human. Dinner was on the table. She wasn't surprised to see what she assumed was yesterday's leftovers from the Lychee Garden Restaurant. She sat down, then looked around and asked: “Where's the baby?” Her mother's belly was flat now so she was clearly not pregnant any more.

There was silence at the table.

After a moment, Ah-Fat asked: “Where did you go, Yin Ling? Your mum and dad have been tearing their hair out with worry.” “Lots of places,” said Yin Ling, and looked down at her bowl. She scooped the rice into her mouth but was careful not to take any of the meat and vegetables until her elders had served themselves. She's finally learned some manners, thought her grandfather.

Cat Eyes looked coldly at her daughter and noticed how thin her face was, her cheekbones sticking out knifelike above her freckly cheeks. Yin Ling got up to serve herself more rice. There was something odd in the way she walked. Cat Eyes could not ignore her growing suspicions. Without bothering to finish her food, she jumped up and dragged Yin Ling up to her room.

She shut the door behind her and gripped Yin Ling by the scruff of the neck. “When did you last come on?” she demanded. Yin Ling looked down at her shoes and said nothing. Cat Eyes asked again, this time gripping her more tightly until Yin Ling could hardly breathe. Her mouth opened and shut like a fish gasping for air, and she finally stammered: “Oct … October.”

Cat Eyes let go and stood looking at her without speaking. Her eyes sunk into their sockets as if they were two dried-up pits. “I knew it … knew it!” she repeated. Yin Ling was terrified. She grabbed her mother's
sleeve and cried piteously: “Mum! Mum!” Cat Eyes shook her off and flew down the stairs.

The two men had just finished eating and were lighting their first afterdinner cigarette. The price of tobacco had gone sky-high but men needed to smoke so the quality of cigarettes got worse and worse. Cat Eyes cut through the cloud of smoke, grabbed the cigarette out of Kam Shan's mouth and threw it in the sink. “Have you gone completely crazy, you stupid woman?” Kam Shan fished it out but it was sodden. He tore open the paper and spread the tobacco out to dry, cursing as he did so.

Cat Eyes spat a gob of green phlegm. “That little slut you've been spoiling all her life has just gone and got herself pregnant! Three or four months now and who knows who the father is!”

Kam Shan was so taken aback, his hands convulsed and the tobacco scattered over the floor.

Cat Eyes pointed a finger in Kam Shan's face. “Did she ever listen to me? Not with a father like you, and what did you ever manage to teach her? She can go to hell, I'm having nothing to do with her.”

Kam Shan grasped the finger Cat Eyes was waving at him and bent it brutally. Cat Eyes squealed like a stuck pig.

“Like daughter, like mother. It's no wonder she's a slut with a slut like you for a mother.”

This was a knife in Cat Eyes' chest. She pressed her hands against it as if she wanted to pull the knife out, but her heart sucked the blade in and would not let it go. “When I was in the brothel, the whole town knew I was a slut,” she said between clenched teeth. “But I didn't go running around town looking for a man, you came to me. If I'm a slut, what does that make you?”

Ah-Fat could not take any more. He thumped his fist on the table so hard the skin between thumb and finger split and bled.

“If you two want to fight, then go outside and fight, and tell the whole town about it, why don't you? Then every man in town will want Yin Ling as a wife, that's for sure.”

Kam Shan and Cat Eyes fell silent.

“Go to the Fat Kei Herbalists with a bag of walnut and red bean cookies,” he ordered, “and talk to the herbalist's mother. Get her to give
you some medicine to get rid of it. Tell her you've fallen pregnant but you're too old to bring up a baby. The herbalist's a good son. He'll do what his mother tells him.”

When Cat Eyes understood what Ah-Fat was saying, a look of embarrassment crossed her face. “What are you waiting for, woman?” Ah-Fat shouted. “There's no time to lose. If it's too late to get rid of it, who's going to marry her?”

Cat Eyes turned the house upside down before she finally found some paper to wrap the cookies.

The mixture the herbalist gave her was effective. Yin Ling began to bleed, and for weeks on end, the blood continued to trickle out.

When the bleeding finally stopped, Kam Shan tried to persuade Yin Ling to go back to school and finish her studies. But Yin Ling was adamant. “I'd rather kill myself” was her response. Kam Shan was afraid she might be as good as her word if he pushed her too hard, so instead Yin Ling started work at the Lychee Garden Restaurant as a waitress like her mother.

She did not stay long. In fact, she had scarcely had time to learn the names of the drinks on the wine list and the dishes on the menu when she was gone again. This time she went off with a
yeung fan
called John, regular customer who had taken a fancy to her the moment he set eyes on her. It happened right under Cat Eyes' nose, but she never noticed. And so, four months after she came home, Yin Ling left again.

This time, she was gone for more than ten years. When she came back again, her grandfather and mother had both died, and only her father remained.

This time, she brought with her a daughter, whose name was Amy.

One day in early summer, 2004, a Canadian woman named Amy Smith, accompanied by a government official, Mr. Auyung, went to pay her respects at the Fong ancestral hall. In the records of the Fong Tak Fat family, she found the following text:

Fong Tak Fat's younger son, Fong Kam Ho, married a woman of the Au family, of Wai Yeung Village, in year eighteen of the Republic; they had one son, Yiu Kei, who died aged nine years. In year twenty-nine of the Republic, Fong Kam Ho donated four thousand Canadian dollars to the Nationalist government in Guangdong to buy planes to fight the Japanese, in recognition of which he was awarded a commemorative medal for his patriotism. In the same year, Fong Kam Ho enlisted in the Canadian army and worked as a special agent in a small town in the southwest of France, gathering intelligence and training members of the Resistance. He was betrayed in year thirty-four of the Republic on the eve of the Allied victory and was killed. A bridge in the town was renamed Jimmy Fong Bridge in his honour. (Jimmy Fong was Fong Kam Ho's English name.)

8

Gold Mountain Blues