Gold Mountain Blues (74 page)

Kam Sau said nothing but the flush on her cheeks gradually subsided.

Six Fingers brought Mr. Auyung a bowl of iced sweetened lotus-seed soup. He drank it with relish: “I don't know when I'll get soup as good as this again.” “Are you leaving the country?” asked Ah-Yuen in surprise.
“This visit is really to say goodbye to you,” the teacher said. “Where are you going?” asked Ah-Yuen. Mr. Auyung did not answer, just put down the bundle he had been carrying with him. “I've finished with these books,” he said. “They're quite interesting. They're for you. I'll be in touch again as soon as things have settled down.”

Ah-Yuen hesitated, then posed another question: “At teacher-training college, someone said you were a member of the Communist Party, Mr. Auyung. Are you going to join the Communists now?”

Mr. Auyung looked at him. “Whether I am or not isn't important. What matters is what you think the Communist Party stands for.”

“I've read all of the
Communist Manifesto
,” said Ah-Yuen. “But surely its tenets apply to Europe. Does it have any relevance to Asia?”

Mr. Auyung smiled. “Fine ideals know no frontiers,” he said, “just as evil doesn't either. We can't just sit and wait for others to make a better future. Some of us have to make real sacrifices in order to realize those ideals.”

Ah-Yuen accompanied Mr. Auyung out of the house and down the road. He realized that his old teacher had grown much thinner since he last saw him. Against the darkening skies, his eyes blazed from deeply sunken sockets. His hair was unkempt and locks of it bounced up and down as he talked. He had the sour breath of a man who had not slept for many nights. The hem of his blue gown flapped in the wind.

“Mr. Auyung.…” he began, and then his voice cracked.

It was not just from sadness at parting with his teacher. There was something he had been mulling over for a long time but could not make up his mind to say.

It was “Take me with you.”

He did not say it. He thought of Kam Sau and Wai Heung, and the baby in Kam Sau's belly. He felt torn between his family and his country. Whichever he let go, it would hurt unbearably.

There was little news of Mr. Auyung after that. When Ah-Yuen next set eyes on him, more than a dozen years had passed. Ah-Yuen was taking a group of pupils on a visit to the Guangdong Revolutionary Martyrs Museum and discovered a portrait of Mr. Auyung on horseback in full military attire.

If he had thrown in his lot with Mr. Auyung that spring night in 1941, what course would his life have taken? That was the question Ah-Yuen repeatedly asked himself over the years. So many possibilities had presented themselves to him then. But where would they have taken him? If he had chosen differently, might his family have been spared the calamity which ultimately claimed all their lives?

He did not know.

Kam Sau was busy teaching handcrafts to the younger girls when she heard a knock at the door.

The children were making decorative lanterns for different festive occasions.

Their school had more girls in the lower primary grade than in the upper one. Kam Sau knew why: it was the extra five pounds of rice per month that persuaded families to send their girls to school. The desire to have them learn the rudiments of math so that they could manage household finances when they married was secondary. Most of the girls did not go on to upper primary classes, let alone to lower middle school. Once they had completed lower primary, they would be fetched back home to do farm work. When Kam Sau planned her teaching, she had to take all these factors into account. So in “handicrafts,” she taught the skills that the girls would need in their lives at home. She did not teach needlework. The girls could learn that from the older women at home. Instead she focused on making paper cuts, lanterns and gift boxes, and writing Spring Festival couplets.

They had prepared the bamboo frames for the lanterns in a previous class. Now she would teach them how to glue on the paper. She had bought a long roll of red tissue paper in town, and ordered two girls to hold it, one at each end. Kam Sau was just wielding the scissors when she heard the rapping at the door.

It was a polite knock, with a hint of hesitation between each rap. It certainly did not sound like a portent of danger. Kam Sau had reached crucial part in the cutting. Without looking up, she asked the girl nearest the door to open it.

It was a dazzlingly sunny day outside and at first, Kam Sau could see only a white glare. The doorway was filled with a couple of jagged shapes
silhouetted against the azure sky. She also saw that from each one rose something long and gleaming, but it was a few moments before she realized these were bayonets.

“Do you have any … any food,” mumbled one of the silhouettes in broken Chinese.

As her eyes grew accustomed to the glare, Kam Sau saw that the visitors were dressed in army uniforms brown with dust. Magazines hung on each side of their belts, and their bayonets had suspicious stains at the tips.

Kam Sau took all this in, her head in a whirl. The room seemed to grow dark and her terrified ears filled with a high-pitched hum.

The children. What about the children?

Outside on the slope in front of the school, other pupils were doing their exercises. It should have been Ah-Yuen's class but he had gone to town for an anti-Japanese teachers' meeting and another teacher was filling in for him.

How could she attract their attention?

“I'll go, go to the kitchen and get something for you,” she stammered.

But it was too late. The dark figures were already in the room, forming an impenetrable barrier in front of Kam Sau.

“She … go,” said one of them, indicating a girl standing with Kam Sau.

“There's some leftover rice in the crockery cupboard,” said Kam Sau, gripping the child's hand. She traced a message in her palm. The girl's hand twitched. She had understood.

The soldiers were Japanese and there were three of them: Sasaki, Kameta and Kobayashi. They had been separated from their unit in the Sam Ho Lei area during the march on Tan Shui Ko. They trekked through the forests and across rivers for hours until hunger had forced them to stop at the mud-brick building on the hill.

Even though they were armed to the teeth and could have slaughtered a whole village, they were well aware that hatred was a powerful weapon; a mob of unarmed Chinamen could make mincemeat of them. Their intent was to beg a meal and eat it in peace and quiet, scrounge a cigarette or two if they were in luck, and get back on the road as quickly as possible in hopes of catching up with their unit before nightfall.

But once they were inside the classroom they changed their minds.

To be precise, it was the woman they saw inside that changed their minds.

They had arrived in Hoi Ping and Toi Shan counties in early spring, under cover of a mighty bombardment. They had seen many women since then, country women with faces burned dark by the South China sun, with high cheekbones and fleshy lips, and hair full of dust and straw. In frantic haste, they stuck them with their own bodies or with bayonets. Emptying themselves into these women felt no different from relieving themselves in a toilet. These country women were not real women to them.

But the woman they saw before them now was quite different.

Her face was so fair she might never have been touched by the sun or the wind. Her skin was so velvety smooth that they were sorely tempted to reach out and touch it. Her eyes were dark and deep as the sea, with just a flicker of melancholy on the surface of the water. Her blue tunic was very plain but it was filled out by her buxom curves. Her abdomen bulged slightly, straining against her tunic and making it gape at the hem. They may have been three armed soldiers fleeing for their lives, but the sight of this woman made them aware that they were also men.

Step by step they came nearer to her. The woman said nothing, just stared fixedly at them. It was not a sharp stare—fear was written all over her face. But there was something in her gaze which hobbled their legs together like a rope.

Sasaki was in front. Her eyes met his, challenging them, and he knew that if he carried on looking he would have to declare himself beaten. So he simply averted his eyes and forced himself to stare at the wall of the classroom behind her. It was an old wall and the plaster had cracked. There were streaks of blood on the plaster from squashed mosquitoes.

Sasaki ripped the front panel of her tunic open with one downward movement, revealing a thin white vest underneath. The girl holding one end of the tissue paper roll gave a shriek of terror and Sasaki waved his finger in her face. “Shut up!” he shouted. The girl gave a shrill wail in response. Sasaki, worried that the noise might alert people outside, gestured to Kobayashi, who pulled his gun from his shoulder. A slight prick of the girl's belly with the bayonet and a gash opened. As easily as a fish spawning, coils of something white and snakelike spilled out over the floor.

Such pushovers, these Chinese, thought Kobayashi.

Kam Sau could hear her own teeth chattering violently. She addressed her pupils gravely, forcing out the words: “Shut your eyes.” The girls obeyed. The only sound to be heard in the room was a trickling, as urine dripped from the thin fabric of their trousers onto the floor.

Kam Sau shut her eyes too. The door slammed shut. She could still feel the sun, the memory of light dancing on her eyelids. She felt her feet leave the ground and she was carried to the rostrum. Someone pulled her vest off, while someone else yanked on her trousers. There was a draught coming through the cracks in the walls and she felt it brush over her naked body. Hands, so many of them, felt her all over. They were cold and covered in calluses. They were as abrasive as sandpaper.

But there was worse to come. Something was hurting her back, something icy cold and hard. The scissors she had been using to cut paper were pressing into her.

Kam Sau opened her eyes. Sasaki's face was close to hers, so close she could see the soft down which would one day grow into a moustache on his upper lip, and a pus-filled pimple on the side of his nose.

He was just a boy.

Kam Sau measured the space between herself and Sasaki. She was secretly waiting for the chance to shift her right hand and get hold of the scissors under her back. She would stick them first into his windpipe and then into her own. In five seconds, perhaps ten, certainly not more than half a minute, she could put an end to two lives.

But the chance never came.

She felt a sharp pain between her legs as something thrust violently into her, pounding until she felt as if the life was being crushed out of her. Then darkness washed over her and she lost consciousness.

By the time the girl who had gone for help returned to the classroom with a crowd of men armed with knives, staves and carrying poles, the Japanese had gone. The first man through the door lost his footing, and fell over. As he got up and rubbed his knee, he realized he had slipped on a length of human gut. In the corner of the room the pupils still huddled. They could not be persuaded to open their eyes.

Their teacher, Fong Kam Sau, lay on the rostrum.

She was fully dressed and she lay perfectly straight, her face ashen as a corpse prepared for burial. A woman went to give her a shake, then pulled back her hand as if she had seen a ghost. Kam Sau was staring blankly at the ceiling, a glassy look in her eyes. When the woman had recovered from her fright, she held her hand under Kam Sau's nose and was relieved to feel a slight warmth on her fingers.

The crotch of Kam Sau's trousers was stiff with blood. Under her lay a bloody, reeking lump of flesh.

“Her baby!” the woman shrieked.

Years thirty-three to thirty-four of the Republic (1944–1945)

Vancouver, British Columbia

Sundance: Thirty years ago, a Chinese man called Fong stayed at your home. He behaved like an ignorant fool, and begs you to forgive him. He has spent years searching for you. If you see this notice, you will find him any Saturday morning at the Burnaby vegetable market.

Classified Ads page of the
Vancouver Sun
, 5 June 1944

Kam Shan had a dream that night.

The images were crystal clear. They appeared in colour and he could even smell them.

The bristle grass was waist high, the tips of its furry spikes gleaming silver in the sunlight. There was a rustling sound as a mangy dog crept through the brush. He was behind the dog, keeping as close as he could to someone in front. He could not see the person's face, only a pair of legs under a rawhide skirt running with the agile gait of a deer, and a head of long, tawny hair which streamed in the wind. No matter how fast he ran, he could not catch up. Once he got close enough to grasp a hank of the hair, it slithered through his fingers and was gone.

He woke up with a shout, and sat up, his face covered in sweat.

“Stop it! You're kicking like a mule!” grunted Cat Eyes. It was dawn and there was a grey light coming through the curtains. Outside, the street was
waking up. This was the time when Cat Eyes most craved sleep; she would not stir from her bed till midday.