Gold Mountain Blues (76 page)

In a few moments he was back, puffing and panting, and stood leaning against the wall, unable to speak. Gold Mountain Cloud could see tears in his eyes. They spilled down over his high cheekbones and collected, glittering, in the groove of his faded old scar. Gold Mountain Cloud had never seen Ah-Fat cry. “What on earth's the matter?” she kept asking. Finally Ah-Fat got the words out: “The Japs … they've surrendered.”

They sat down at the table and resumed their interrupted lunch. Ah-Fat took a bite out of a lotus dumpling, then dropped it into his bowl, took a spring roll, bit into it and threw that down too. He could not eat. Then he blurted out:

“Cloud, I can go home now. I've never seen my daughter, or my son-in-law or my grandchildren, not once. My wife probably won't even recognize me. When she writes now, she never even asks after me. She must be really angry with me.”

He talked on, but Gold Mountain Cloud said nothing. With her chopsticks, she pinched a few remaining bean sprouts which had escaped from the spring roll, moving them around the bottom of her bowl but making no attempt to lift them to her mouth. It suddenly occurred to Ah-Fat that Gold Mountain Cloud had no family left in Guangdong, her elder brother having died in Montreal some years ago.

He looked at her and put the question carefully: “What if I take you back to Hoi Ping? Will you come?”
Her chopsticks came to a halt, and the scraps of bean sprouts trembled and dropped off.

“As your … what?” she asked.

Ah-Fat felt his mouthful of spring roll turn to grit. He worked and worked at it with his tongue and finally managed to swallow it down.

“My wife's a good woman; she'll treat you with respect. So long as you don't mind.”

Gold Mountain Cloud gave a short laugh. “I'd be treated as your second wife—at my age, with one foot in the grave. My reputation would be in shreds.”

Ah-Fat said nothing, just lit a cigarette and inhaled. Swirls of smoke came and went across his face, but there was no disguising his uneasiness.

Then he stubbed his cigarette butt out in the bowl and abruptly got to his feet. “Cloud, you're only three years younger than my wife. She can treat you as a sister. If I decide to bring my sister home to live out her old age, who's going to make a fuss? You get your things together, and I'll get Kam Shan to find out the boat times.”

And then he was gone. By the time Cloud made up her mind to go after him he had covered quite some distance. The sun was still bright and a long shadow nibbled at Ah-Fat's heels. “Wait!” she shouted. Ah-Fat turned back to see her cupping her hands around her mouth.

“Ask your wife what she thinks!”

Ah-Fat mumbled yes and hurried home to write his letter. He had not written for a long time. The materials he used for his letter-writing business had been stowed away in a corner of the attic when they cleaned up after Cat Eyes died. He brought them down and dusted off the rolls of paper. There was a crack in the ink stone, he noticed, and the paper had yellowed. But they would do.

He ground the ink, laid out the paper and wrote in shaky characters: “My dear wife.” Then he stopped. He racked his brains but for the life of him he could not think what to say. Then suddenly, lines of the classical poet Du Fu came to him, from the poem “On hearing that Imperial troops have recaptured Henan and Hebei,” and he wrote:

Word comes from the North of towns retaken

When I first hear the news, tears wet my gown

I turn to my wife and children, sorrowful no more

Rolling up our poem scrolls, we are wild with joy.

Once he had these lines from the poem down on the paper, it seemed to clear his head, and he wrote fluently. He reread up and down the page, time and again, well pleased. His brushwork was as bold as ever. He added a final line:

Like General Lian Po of ancient times, I may be old, but I can still chew my food. What do you think of my calligraphy, Ah-Yin?

He finished, sealed the envelope, went to the corner shop to buy a stamp and dropped the letter into the mailbox. When he got home, he shouted but there was no answer from Kam Shan. He went into his son's room but he was not there either. Ah-Fat sat down on the bed, and felt suddenly as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He lay down on the bed, feeling drained. As he took a breath, the smell of grease and dirt rushed headlong up his nostrils, making him sneeze. He quickly turned the pillow over. Men without women … it just didn't do, he thought to himself, and instantly fell into a deep sleep.

When he awoke, it was completely dark. Kam Shan was still not home and the only sound in the house was the ticking of the old wall clock. Ah-Fat turned over and felt something digging into his neck. He sat up and patted the pillow. It felt as if a piece of cardboard had been hidden somewhere inside it. He pushed his hand in and brought out a letter. The envelope was stamped with the British Union Jack at the top left and a shield on the right, set in a square. Ah-Fat recognized the Canadian flag. It was addressed to Frank Fong, and the postmark was dated a month ago. Ah-Fat was annoyed—how could Kam Shan have forgotten to give it to him?

The letter was neatly typed, in English. Ah-Fat's English was rudimentary at best and he had to read it a few times before he could understand anything. Even after reading it several more times, there were still bits which made no sense to him.

Dear Mr. Frank Fong, We deeply regret … your son Mr. Jimmy Fong … fallen in battle in the Republic of France. We will always … heroism … glory … defence of liberty …

As he read it for the fifth time, the words swam before his eyes and the page blurred.

“The light … turn on the light,” Ah-Fat mumbled to himself. An immense darkness came down and engulfed him.

Year thirty-four of the Republic (1945)

Spur-On Village, Hoi Ping County, Guangdong Province, China

Six Fingers saw the spider on the wall when she awoke.

It progressed in stops and starts, dragging its large iridescent abdomen until it finally reached the large photograph of Ah-Fat in a white suit with a pipe in his mouth.

A lucky spider, Six Fingers thought to herself.

Ah-Fat had had the picture taken on his last visit home, in the Chu Hoi Studio in Canton. It was the year that Kam Sau was born. She was thirtytwo now, which made Ah-Fat.…

The morning sun seemed to cling heavily to her eyelids, forcing them shut again. Six Fingers went back to sleep before she had finished the thought.

When she woke up again, the spider was still there, perched on Ah-Fat's nose, making it look from where she lay as if there was a big hole in it.

Her heart gave an anxious leap and she felt around on the bed for Wai Heung.

Wai Heung had reached school age but Six Fingers absolutely refused to let her attend classes. She even refused to get a tutor in and insisted on teaching her to read and write herself. “At least until she's completed lower primary,” Six Fingers said. “Then she can go to school.” Kam Sau and Ah-Yuen argued but Six Fingers refused to budge.

Her other grandchildren, Yiu Kei and Wai Kwok, had both died young, and Yin Ling was in Gold Mountain. Kam Shan was too old to have any more children, and who knew when Kam Ho would come back home to his wife, Ah-Hsien. After she had been raped and beaten by the Japanese soldiers, Kam Sau could no longer bear children. So Wai Heung was the only grandchild at home and Six Fingers cherished and protected her in every way she knew. Wherever Wai Heung was, Six Fingers worried about her. She even shared her bed with the little girl.

Wai Heung was awake and sitting up braiding her hair. She had such a thick rope of hair that even when it was divided into two braids, they were as thick as sugar canes. She had no mirror and the results were distinctly lopsided. Smiling, Six Fingers grabbed the ox-horn comb from Wai Heung's hand: “If you can't even braid your hair, who'll marry you when you're a big girl?” Wai Heung giggled. She was a good-natured child whom it was impossible to spoil.

When the braids were finished, Six Fingers put a basket over one arm and took Wai Heung by the hand. “Come along. Granny's going to pick cucumbers, and you can pick a bunch of flowers for me,” she said. These days, the Fongs' fields were all rented to tenant farmers; they had kept only a small plot for growing their own vegetables and fruit. As they went out, Six Fingers thought she heard a crow cawing harshly in the tree. She looked up, but it was actually a magpie peeking down cheekily from a branch. She felt a leap of happiness and her face relaxed into a smile.

First, the lucky spider, now the magpie. She felt sure they were signs which boded well for the day ahead.

It had rained overnight and the air was rinsed fresh and clean. The hibiscus by the roadside had exploded into bloom. Frogs in the ditches croaked loudly. Six Fingers picked a hibiscus flower, shook the dew off it and tucked it behind her granddaughter's ear. “And when's my little Wai Heung going to get married?” she asked.

Wai Heung giggled again and began to hum: “The moon shines bright on the ocean bay, my mum's marrying me to Gold Mountain far away!” Six Fingers was startled. “Who's been teaching you that nonsense?” she snapped. Wai Heung quailed at the sudden change in her Granny's mood. “Second Auntie,” she mumbled, meaning Kam Ho's wife, Ah-Hsien. “That
imbecile! Fancy filling your head with stuff like that! You're not going anywhere, Wai Heung. You just stick with your granny.” The girl nodded obediently and the smile gradually returned to Six Fingers' face.

They arrived at the edge of the fields. The second crop of rice had been harvested and the bare earth stretched away into the distance, dotted with a few bent figures. The tenant farmers' wives and children were busy cleaning up the field. Six Fingers and her late mother-in-law, Mrs. Mak, may have differed on many points, but they shared a passion for owning land. In Six Fingers' view, having money was all well and good but it could all vanish. The only thing that could be relied on was land: no rat could nibble it, no eagle could snatch it away, no thief could steal it. Six Fingers had a mental map of every one of their fields. Those fields had a few gaps in them at the moment because she had had to sell some during the Japanese occupation. The thought of those gaps caused Six Fingers a stab of pain.

She vowed to herself that one day she would buy that land back and fill in every one of those gaps.

The cucumbers were nearly over, and only a canopy of large leaves remained. Six Fingers and Wai Heung felt between the leaves of each plant but without success. But soon they discovered that the rainfall had knocked the remaining cucumbers off their stems. Six Fingers felt in the mud and found a few decent ones, which she put in her basket. Then they heard a distant shout: “Kam Sau's mum, where are you?”

“It's my granddad,” said Wai Heung.

Six Fingers straightened up, and saw Mak Dau stumbling, puffing and panting, across the fields holding something aloft in one hand.

“Letters … from Gold Mountain!” he shouted.

“Two of them. One from Kam Sau's dad, the other from Kam Shan.” Six Fingers was startled. It was rare for Ah-Fat to write to her in recent years. If he had something to tell her, he usually got Kam Shan to write the letter.

“You open them and read them to me,” she said. “My hands are covered in mud.”

“Which one shall I open first?” asked Mak Dau with a wicked smile on his face.

“Don't give me that nonsense! Whichever you like.”

“I know what ‘whichever you like' means,” said Mak Dau, still looking mischievous. He opened Ah-Fat's letter and began to read. It cost him considerable effort and the sweat stood out on his forehead. As a boy, he had attended Mr. Auyung's classes along with Kam Shan and Kam Ho, but only for a short time. He could not make much sense of the first lines of Ah-Fat's letter.

Word comes from the North of something, something…

When I first hear the news, tears wet something…

I turn to my wife and children, sorrowful no more,

Something … scrolls, we are wild with happiness

Six Fingers clasped her basket over her belly and laughed so hard she was almost bent double. Finally, she composed herself. “Leave the weepy poem,” she said. “Just read me the rest of the letter.”

The remainder was much more straightforward and Mak Dau's reading speeded up:

Now that I have heard that the Japanese have surrendered, I will get the boat times by tomorrow at the latest, and buy my passage home. Then we can be together. After so many years apart, my heart speeds like an arrow to yours. There is just one thing I need to tell you: I have come to know a woman here called Gold Mountain Cloud and we have enjoyed a deep friendship over the years. Cloud has no family and I cannot bear to leave her behind alone. For this reason
(Mak Dau stumbled slightly)
I am bringing her with me. I hope you will understand and will treat her as a sister, so that we can all live in … harmony.