Gold Mountain Blues (9 page)

Red Hair sighed: “If only my old lady could ride over on a telegram.” Of all the men in the room, only Red Hair was newly married. The men began to tease him. “So you're thinking about that, are you? Last time you went home, how many times a day did you do it with your old lady?” Red Hair just laughed loudly. When they pressed him, he said he never counted, he just did it when he felt like it. “I go all these years without it, why shouldn't I make up for it?” The men grew more interested. “Is she bony or plump and fleshy?” they asked. “Fuck,” said Red Hair, “she doesn't have much bone or flesh, but there's plenty of juice!” There were shouts of laughter. Suddenly, Ah-Lam, who was lying next to Ah-Fat, shouted: “Hey, Ah-Fat, you little shit! You're sticking me so hard up the back, it hurts!” There was more uproarious laughter.

Red Hair banged the bed plank and shouted, “Go to sleep! It looks like there'll be snow tomorrow morning. If we get up early, we can sell a lot of charcoal.” The men gradually grew quiet. Some time later, Red Hair could be heard turning over. “We'll all contribute to one bag of charcoal,” he said, “and exchange it with the Redskins for a pair of shoes for Ah-Fat. We
always used to give eggs and sesame pancakes to the man who taught our kids and wrote the Chinese New Year couplets for us, didn't we?”

There was silent agreement.

Ah-Fat opened his eyes wide and stared into the darkness. After a long time, he could make out breaks in the gloom. Actually, he already knew these breaks well. For instance, in one corner there was a yellow glow, where a rat had gnawed its way in to steal rice. The pale area at the window was where there was a hole in the sheet which they used to block out the light. From the cracks of light he guessed there must be a full moon and he had a good idea just how cold it was too. It was his first winter in Gold Mountain and he did not know how long it would last. He only knew that the river had frozen over and the road to the mountains was impassable. There was no fishing to be done, crops to be planted or goods to be carried. That mountainous pile of charcoal had gone down considerably and if the weather went on like this for another couple of weeks, it would all be sold. How would they get work after that?

He had asked Red Hair. “You young devil, you're a worrywart. All you have to do is tag along with me. There's always a way to make a living.” But Ah-Fat knew that this time even Red Hair was stumped. That morning he had seen him take something out of the bottom of his shoe. It was a fifteendollar draft that he was about to send home, but then he put it back again. Red Hair was leaving himself a way out.

Ah-Fat had no way out. Behind Ah-Fat stood his mother, with her swollen, inflamed eyes. Those eyes gnawed away, wolf-like, at Ah-Fat's calves. Ah-Fat just had to shut his eyes, gather his strength and run forward.

Ah-Fat was running for his life.

Gradually, over recent years, Vancouver's Chinatown had shown signs of growing, across Cormorant Street, and over Douglas Street and Store Street. These were now lined with Chinese-owned stores and lodgings. There was even a scattering of Chinese living in Fisgard Street, a little to the north. Streets only in name, they were actually dirt roads with no sidewalks or gutters. In fact, even calling them dirt roads was doing them a favour because they were very narrow. In the narrowest places, the storekeepers displayed their goods in baskets which they pushed six inches or a foot into
the street. Then they sat on a stool at the front of their stall. If someone living on the other side of the street happened to come out of their house, the storekeeper could stretch out an arm and grasp a cigarette passed to him by the other. They could exchange all the gossip of Chinatown across the “street” without ever needing to raise their voices.

Chinatown was in the low-lying part of Victoria. If you thought of the city as a giant bowl, then Chinatown was the hollow at the bottom. Whenever it rained, all of the city's water collected and ran into it. Even clean water went black as it swept down into the muddy bottom.

The dirt roads were flanked by densely packed houses made of thin boards nailed together. Most were of one storey, although here and there were two-storey buildings, but they all looked like workmen's huts, with gaps of varying widths between the wooden boards. The muddy rainwater leaked in through the doors and wall cracks, adding a layer of black grime to the inner walls and the bed legs, so the men inside had to take off their shoes, roll up their trousers and go barefoot. In just a few steps their legs would be black too. When the sun shone outside and the water retreated, a layer of silt remained in the houses. Of course, this was not pure mud. It was usually mixed with vegetable leaves, fishbones, eggshells, old shoe uppers and sometimes dead rats. This rich mixture stuck to the bottom of the men's shoes, and was trodden from one room to another and from one street to another, until the whole of Chinatown was impregnated with its rich colour and smell.

Not all of Chinatown was so dilapidated, however. There was one brickbuilt house on Fisgard Street, which, although it was a low, single-storey affair, was built of good honest bricks, and tiled with real tiles. When the sun shone down, the brightness glared off it. And on Store Street there was another building, so square and flat it looked like a box of Pirate-brand cigarettes lying on its side. Most of the time, its door was closed, as if closely guarding a secret. There were no stalls in the street in front of the door, and there were never any men resting and sunning themselves in the corner against the wall. Its door did not bear even a shop sign. It was a pity that the only two remotely presentable-looking buildings in the whole of Chinatown were not lived in, at least not by the living.

The low, single-storey building on Fisgard Street was the temple of Tam Kung, who was worshipped by the people from Guangdong Province. Chinatown belonged to the people from Guangdong's Four Counties. Tam Kung's birthday was celebrated every year at the beginning of the fourth month of the lunar calendar, and on that day, Chinatown was as noisy and bustling as on market day. In the temple, offerings were made and incense burned. In front of the temple, there were lion and dragon dances, staged operas and vendors selling snacks. Even the
yeung fan
came to Chinatown. They were there not to pay their respects to Tam Kung, but because the noise and excitement was irresistible. The real reason for the hustle and bustle lay thousands of miles away and was not the slightest concern of theirs.

The square, flat building on Store Street was the morgue, though it did not contain any coffins. Instead it was piled high with small wooden caskets, each of which contained one complete set of bones. Each skeleton belonged to someone who had been dead seven years: their bones were brought from all over Gold Mountain and collected here to wait for the boat back to Hong Kong. On each casket, the following details were meticulously noted: full name, place and date of birth and date of decease, and also the number under which the death was registered. The souls of the registered lay quietly in the pitch darkness of their caskets, yearning for fair wind from the Four Counties to start the sail home. Unlike Tam Kung Temple, the morgue was a well-kept secret within Chinatown, a secret as tightly sealed from the outside world as a pearl within an oyster shell. If it had not been for a fire a few years back which bore Chinatown's secret on the winds to the rest of the city, no one would ever have guessed at the “spirit goods” inside.

Today was a half-day holiday in Chinatown so all the shops were shut. Not because of the Chinese New Year or for Tam Kung's birthday, but because today the steamship had arrived from Hong Kong. The many hundreds of souls that had waited so long in their caskets could finally begin the journey back to the Four Counties, and everyone in Chinatown would go and see them off.

This farewell was a solemn occasion because the Chinatown folk felt grief for the dead. But their grief was mixed with other, more complex
feelings too. The contents of these number-registered caskets had started out as flesh-and-blood human beings, who had disembarked at these docks and dispersed into the streets around. Chinatown had not looked after them properly and had abandoned them in these caskets. There was also a feeling that they would all share the same fate eventually. These flesh-and-blood beings had brought many stories with them and now they were going back with even more. But once the lid of each casket was shut, those stories were chopped cleanly in half—one-half in the world of the living, the other in the box. The living tales that had been passed from one person to another were eventually changed beyond recognition, while the half which lay in the casket would never be known by anyone ever again. The living who came to bid farewell to the dead grieved for these untold tales. They did not know when their own stories would be chopped in half by the shutting of the casket lid.

Ah-Fat was on holiday today. He was now helping out in the San Yuen Wash-House across from the Tsun Sing General Store. Every day he went to meet the steamship as it docked and collected the seamen's dirty clothing. He stuffed it into big sacks which he loaded onto the carrying pole and took back to the laundry. The next day, he delivered the washed and ironed clothes. Sometimes he made this trip several times a day. None of the three helpers at the laundry knew any English, but Ah-Fat could count in English so he was the one who dealt with the seamen. The sacks were stuffed so full it was like carrying two iron balls, and the pole bowed under their weight. Ah-Fat crept along all day long, bent low to the ground like a praying mantis with a rock on its back. The laundry was open seven days a week, which meant no days off. Ah-Fat's shoulders had been yearning for a rest for a very long time.

Ah-Fat was no stranger to the caskets. Ah-Sing, the owner of the Tsun Sing General Store and Ah-Fat's landlord, had a cousin who had died several years before and was buried in an out-of-town cemetery. On the day of the steamship's arrival, Ah-Sing summoned Red Hair and Ah-Fat, and asked them to go with him to the cemetery to dig up the bones. This had to be done seven years after the burial, to give time for the flesh to rot away from the skeleton. They poured cooking wine onto cloths and covered their noses and mouths. The bones, when they dug them up, were a
yellowish-brown like aged elephant ivory, but they whitened up once they had been carefully rubbed clean with the cloths dipped in the wine. Ah-Sing and Red Hair laid the cleaned bones out on the ground to make sure that they were complete, and then called Ah-Fat over to pack them one by one into the wooden casket. The big bones went at the bottom, the smaller ones on top, then finally on the very top, the pigtail, as desiccated as year-old raw-silk threads. Not a scrap of flesh clung to the bones.

As Ah-Fat was collecting the bones together, he discovered that one shin bone was thicker on one side than on the other, and on the thick side there was a black mark. Thinking he had not cleaned it properly, he scratched it with his fingernail. But however hard he scratched, he could not get the mark off. Ah-Sing told him his cousin had broken his leg and had not been able to get up for three months. “Who broke it?” asked Ah-Fat. Red Hair shot him a meaningful glance but Ah-Fat did not notice. He kept on pestering Ah-Sing with his questions until eventually Ah-Sing lost his temper: “Quit asking so many fucking questions!” Then he gulped down the last of the wine and hurled the bottle as far away from him as he could. It hit the ground and rolled off down the hill until it finally hit a rocky outcrop and shattered with a dull thud. Ah-Fat was quiet then, and nailed the casket down. He covered it with gold paint and recorded on it the details as Ah-Sing dictated: full name, place of birth, and birth and death dates. It was only when he had finished writing that he realized that the cousin had just had his twenty-second birthday when he died.

“Are you scared?” asked Red Hair. “No,” said Ah-Fat. Red Hair went on, “These bones have rotted away so clean there's fuck-all on them. Even a starving mongrel wouldn't bother licking them.” Ah-Sing sighed. “It'll be up to you to collect my bones,” he said to Red Hair. Ah-Sing, at forty-three years old, was older than the rest. “You can't tell who'll be collecting whose bones,” said Red Hair. Then he gave Ah-Fat a shove: “You can send my bones back, you little shit. I brought you out here, you send me home, then we're quits.”

“Uh-huh,” said Ah-Fat indistinctly. It sounded like he was agreeing, but it was an automatic response, one which did not come from his heart. He could not know then just how important that “uh-huh” was to be. He was very young, after all, just starting out in Gold Mountain. All this talk of
death made no more impression on him than a flat stone skimming across the surface of a pond. At the moment, all he thought about day and night was earning money. He wanted nothing more than to have three pairs of eyes and four hands so he could learn every detail about how to run a laundry. Sooner or later, he would open a laundry of his own. It would have six men to do the fetching and carrying, two horses and carts, each with a driver, and would run twenty-four hours a day. A pair of lanterns would hang from the eaves, and its name would be painted in big red letters on the doors. He had already thought of the name, Whispering Bamboos Laundry, taken from the beautiful lines by the famous classic poet Wang Wei: “Bamboos whisper of washer-girls returning home/Lotus-leaves yield before the fishing boat.” He had learned this classical poem at school with Mr. Auyung. None of the
yeung fan
customers would understand the allusion, nor would the other workers, but it was enough that he did.

That day, there was an incense table with offerings arranged in front of every lodging house and store in Chinatown. There was a big table right in the middle of Chinatown too, piled high with offerings of cakes and fruit of every sort, and chickens and ducks and roasted suckling pigs which gleamed golden. At each end of the table were two burners for the “spirit money.” From a distance, the whole street seemed to be wreathed in smoke. At midday, a propitious time chosen according to the lunar calendar, the consul gave a great shout and the orchestra struck up. There were ten master players of the Chinese fiddle, dressed in white gowns, with their instruments swathed in white cloth too. The strings trembled and an almighty wailing issued forth, the high notes ear-splitting and the low notes like dull hammer blows, overwhelming the listeners with waves of melancholy. When the first piece had finished, there was a sudden change in the weather: a chill blast of wind swept the ashes of the paper money in the burners into the air, where they spiralled upward, the column of ash getting thinner as it blew higher, until the very top formed a sharp point which lingered high in the air.