Gold Mountain Blues

by Ling Zhang

  “This is a heritage site, nearly a hundred years old. How can you bear to see it crumble to dust like this? If it’s taken into public trusteeship, it will be restored to the way it was, and will be a fitting monument to the Fongs. You won’t need to spend a cent, or put in an ounce of effort, but you retain all the rights. It’s the perfect outcome.”

  The words, constantly repeated, gradually wore down Yin Ling’s resistance. However, just as she was warming to the idea, she fell ill. She had been confined to bed for over a year now.

  Up to age seventy-nine, Yin Ling had been as unmarked by age as a tree luxuriantly covered in pristine foliage. But then overnight, it was as if she had suddenly been felled by a hurricane.

  It happened on her seventy-ninth birthday. She had invited some of her usual mahjong friends to eat at an Italian cafeteria, and then back to her house for a game of mahjong. When Yin Ling was young, she used to get annoyed watching her mum playing mahjong with her cronies, but in old age her own few friends were all mahjong players. Amy had not been there that day and, without her daughter present, Yin Ling really let her hair down, chain-smoking and knocking back the booze until she was uproariously drunk. The party did not break up until midnight. Yin Ling went to bed that night but did not get up in the morning. Overnight she suffered a stroke.

  After the stroke, Yin Ling could not speak English any more. As a child she had attended the city school, and all her boyfriends had been White Canadians, so whether at home or at work, she rattled away in English. Now, bizarrely, it was as if some tiny perverse hand had meddled in her brain, erasing it all. When she woke up in the hospital and heard the doctors and nurses talking to her, she looked completely blank. And her speech, when it came, was so garbled it was incomprehensible. At first, they thought the speech centre in her brain had been affected. It took several days for Amy to solve the mystery: Yin Ling’s squawks were actually Cantonese—the Cantonese her granddad had spoken at home when she was a child.

  Yin Ling was a different woman after her illness. She left hospital for a convalescent home and then, a few months later, was transferred to a nursing home. Every time she arrived at a new place, there were furious rows. Amy pulled out all the stops and eventually got her mother into a Chinese nursing home. Here she could make herself understood, and things seemed to calm down.

  One day, Amy was in the middle of teaching a class when she received an urgent phone call from the home. She dropped everything and rushed there—to see the old lady strapped into a wheelchair with a leather belt, her face streaming with tears. Her mother got up that morning, Amy was told, and suddenly started yelling that it would be too late, too late! When the nurse asked what would be too late, she made whooping sounds and, when this was not understood, Yin Ling picked up her walking stick and bashed the nurse in the face with it.

  “We can’t cope with a patient like this—it’s not safe for the nurses or the other patients,” the director told Amy.

  Seeing her elderly mother in the wheelchair, straining to break free of the belt and foaming at the mouth like a fish tied in twine and gasping for breath, Amy fell to her knees beside her and wailed. “Oh God, whatever do you want me to do with you!”

  Yin Ling had never seen her daughter cry like this before. The shock seemed to calm her down. Then, after a moment, she put out her hand and said to Amy: “You go.”

  In Yin Ling’s palm was a letter, crumpled and damp, and stamped with a Chinese red seal.

  Amy had to read it through a number of times before she understood what it meant. “OK,” she sighed, “I’ll go, but you have to promise not to get into fights with the nurses.” Her mother grinned, showing tobaccostained teeth.

  “And don’t ever think kicking up a fuss will make me take you home. I’ll just take you straight to a mental hospital. If I can’t keep you under control, then they will,” Amy finished fiercely.

  “Could you move her into a single room—keep her away from other patients and give her a nurse of her own?” she begged the director. “I’ll take care of the costs. Assess the situation in a month when I’m back from China and then come to a decision, OK?” She put on a brazen smile.

  Amy left the nursing home that day cursing under her breath. Spring had come to Vancouver in full force. The grass was lush after showers of rain, the climbing roses against the white walls of the home were touched with splodges of vivid scarlet and birds sang shrilly in the trees. But Amy paid absolutely no attention. Her mother, Fong Yin Ling, had looked so small and shrunken in her wheelchair that she might have been a wizened nut blown down from a tree by a gust of wind.

  The journey took much longer than Auyung said. They bumped along the potholed road, past building sites and roadworks until finally, towards evening, they arrived at the village. Amy felt as if all the bones in her body had been jolted around in the car.

  Every wall in the village was plastered with gaudy bank advertisements offering the best rates for overseas remittances. “Are they trying to hijack each other’s customers?” asked Amy.

  “When the oil flows like this, who’s not going to take advantage of it?” said Auyung. “Every dog in town has a relative overseas. In the old days it was the seabirds and the town horses with their shoulder poles who delivered the ‘dollar letters’ to the villages. Nowadays the money is wired back home. It travels in a different way but it’s the same thing.”

  Amy knitted her brows: “Is that supposed to be Chinese? I can’t make head or tail of what you’re saying. What seabirds? What horses?”

  “The seabirds were the people who carried dollar letters back by boat, the horses were the men who delivered the letters to the villagers.” Auyung glanced at her. “So you’re beginning to get interested.…” “I’m interested in any sociological phenomena,” replied Amy tartly, “whether it’s over here or back home, there’s no difference.”

  The Fongs’ diulau was some way off the road. The car set them down and they had to walk the last stretch.

  The track ran alongside an abandoned factory and was so overgrown it looked as if no one had walked it for years. The banana trees had been left to fend for themselves, and their dead leaves were strewn on the ground in a thick layer. Although the sun was still bright, the grass was full of whining mosquitoes. They bit Amy through her clothes, and she felt lumps coming up all over her.

  Auyung gave her some mosquito repellent to rub on and shouted angrily at the village cadre coming to greet them: “I told you ages ago someone was coming to visit. Why didn’t you clear the track? You’re so busy making money that you can’t spare a minute for anything else!”

  The man bit back an angry retort and gave a loud laugh instead. Then he turned and bellowed at the crowd of women with babies in arms looking on curiously from a safe distance: “What do you think you’re gawping at? Haven’t you been taught how to behave in front of foreigners?” The women giggled nervously but continued to tag along behind them.

  “It’s been so many years since Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. How come your grandfather and your mother didn’t want to come back for visit?” Auyung asked Amy.

  “Mum said that Granddad died just as China and Canada re-established diplomatic relations. Granddad had a few friends who made inquiries about getting a visa to go back but he and Mum decided they couldn’t go.”

  “Why?”

  Amy stood still and looked at Auyung levelly. “I was hoping you would tell me that.”

  After a moment’s silence, Auyung said: “Everything was crazy back then. Not just the people, even the river in the village went crazy—there was torrential rain and it rose to levels not seen in a hundred years and flooded the entire village.”

  “Haven’t you got a better explanation than that? I am a sociologist, in case you’ve forgotten,” Amy replied coolly.

  “Of course. But now isn’t the moment to talk about it. By the way, I’ve done studies of overseas Chinese too so we have quite a lot in common.”

  “Mr. Auyung’s
a professor too, Ms. Smith,” Ng the driver chipped in. “He’s made a special study of these diulau homes. That’s why the Office for Overseas Chinese Affairs contracted his service so he can deal with the preservation of these homes.”

  Amy concealed her surprise. “So then you’ll know why in a place where every inch of land is worth its weight in gold, this place is so desolate, won’t you?”

  Auyung gave a slight smile. “Do you want the textbook answer or the local tales?”

  Amy smiled back. “Both please, I’d like to hear both.”

  “The textbooks will tell you that this land suffered heavy industrial pollution, and was abandoned because crops can’t be grown on it.”

  “And the other version?”

  “The locals say that things happened here, back in the past, and there have been supernatural phenomena, so no one wants to build here. ”

  “You mean it’s haunted?”

  Auyung shook his head. “No, that’s not what I said. Of course, you’ve every right to interpret local tales just how you wish.”

  Amy burst out laughing. This old boy was certainly interesting. It might not be such a bad idea to stay a couple of nights.

  They stumbled down the track and arrived at the building. In fact, it had been clearly visible from a distance, but it was only now that they were right in front of it that it revealed its age. It was a five-storey Western-style concrete building, south-facing, with overhanging Chinese-style eaves on all sides. There were numerous windows, all very narrow and so weatherbeaten that they had lost their original shape. They looked more like cannonball holes than windows. The iron bars fitted to every window and door were heavily rusted. There were Roman-style mini-columns under the eaves, and the columns and windows were all covered in carvings now scarcely visible.

  Auyung brought a large stone over and stood on it. Extracting some sheets of newspaper from his briefcase, he began rubbing the lichen and bird droppings from the door. Eventually, a name appeared: “Tak Yin House.” The characters were carved in the Slender Gold style of the Song dynasty, and in the deeper parts traces of pink could be seen. Originally, no doubt, they would have been painted vermilion red.

  The door was narrow and covered with an iron grille with locks at the top, middle and bottom, called “heaven, earth and middle” locks, as Auyung explained. The heaven and earth locks were operated from the inside and, if not bolted, the door could simply be pushed open. Only the middle one was a real lock. Originally, it had been around four inches across but had expanded considerably with the rust. “Do you have a key?” Auyung asked the cadre.

  “No one’s been in here for years. Of course we haven’t got a key” was the reply. “Anyway now the owner’s turned up, she can break the lock herself.”

  Ng went back to the track, picked up a sharp stone and handed it to Amy. The lock was very old and broke after a couple of blows, but the door was sturdier and juddered before finally opening a crack. With a grating cry, a sooty-black bird flew out, its wings nearly grazing Amy’s head. Amy’s knees gave way and she sat down on the ground, clasping her hands tightly over her chest, her heart thudding.

  The village cadre looked uneasy. “The rites … has she performed the ancestral rites yet?” he whispered to Auyung.

  “Whatever’s the matter?” Auyung said. “Her ancestors have had a long wait for her to get here. They’ve scarcely had time to rejoice, let alone be offended. The rites can wait until tomorrow, she hasn’t been to the graves yet.”

  “I’m off outside for a smoke,” said the cadre, clearly alarmed. And he waited at the entrance as Auyung led the way into the house.

  As she stepped over the threshold, Amy heard the scrunching of dirt under her feet. The glass in the windows was broken and the evening sunshine streamed in, turning the dust particles to gold. Amy stood still. Gradually she began to make out the interior; it contained no furniture except a water barrel with a large crack down the side.

  “The kitchen and the servants’ rooms were on this level,” explained Auyung, “the Fongs’ rooms and bedrooms were all on the floors above.”

  They made their way over to the stairs.

  Its treads had collapsed in so many places that the staircase looked like a ribcage with the intestines rotted away. Auyung and Amy cautiously made their way up, testing each step as they went, until they finally arrived at the second floor. Against the wall facing them was a long wooden table, its paintwork faded. Two round objects stood on it. Amy took a closer look and realized they were copper incense burners, their elegant shapes ravaged by the thick layers of verdigris which covered them. In a small alcove in the wall stood a statue of Guan Yam, the Buddhist goddess of mercy. Her head and shoulders had been lopped off, and only the fingers holding the lotus flower remained as a reminder of her compassion. The paint had worn off the characters engraved above the statue and only a few could be made out:

  Candle … create … flower

  … incense … out … peaceful home

  Under the statue there was a wooden memorial tablet with no paint left on it at all. Rainwater had leaked in and most of the tablet had disintegrated. Only at the far right side were a couple of lines of characters still legible:

  illustrious twentieth generation … ancestors

  father, head of the family, Mr. Fong Dik Coi

  mother, Mrs. Wen, mistress of the house

  “This was where your family used to worship the spirits of the ancestors,” said Auyung.

  What looked like broken sticks of furniture lay in a heap on the floor. Amy turned them over with her foot, raising a cloud of dust which caught in her throat and made her cough. Auyung pulled out a stick and passed it to her. It looked something like a flute, but thicker and longer. A fine chain was attached to the body of the pipe and in the middle was a raised bowl with an opening. Amy blew away the dust and saw underneath a yellowish pattern, rather like vines twisting around a tree branch. She flicked it with her finger and it made a pinging sound. It was not made of bamboo.

  “This is an opium pipe. It’s carved from elephant ivory, and it’s worth a fortune,” said Auyung.

  1

  Gold Mountain Dream

  Year eleven of the reign of Tongzhi to year five of the reign of Guangxu (1872–1879)

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

  The village lay within the boundaries of the township of Wo On in Hoi Ping County. Newfangled as its name sounds, the village was actually couple of hundred years old. Legend has it that in the reign of the Qing emperor Qianlong, two brothers fled from famine-stricken Annam and settled here with their families. They cleared the land, tilled the soil, raised cattle and pigs and within a decade or so were firmly established. As he lay dying, the elder brother issued an exhortation to the whole family—they were to spur themselves on to ever-great efforts. Thus the village acquired the name Tsz Min, or Spur-On Village.

  By the reign of Tongzhi, Spur-On Village had grown into a sizeable place, with over a hundred families. There were two clans: the Fongs, the dominant family and descendants of the Annamese brothers, and the Aus, outsiders who had come from Fujian. They were almost all farmers, with the difference that the Fongs owned large, contiguous fields while the Au clan, who had arrived later, cultivated scraps of land which they cleared at the edges of the Fongs’ fields. Later the two families began to intermarry, the daughters of one with the sons of the other. As the families merged, so, gradually, did the fields, and the differences in status between the Fongs and the Aus blurred too. This did not last: events took place which sharpened edges previously blunted … but that was not until much later.

  One boundary of the village was marked by a small river, while at the other end was a low hill. The fields lay in a depression between the two landmarks; after years of intensive cultivation, they were fertile and productive and, in good years, their produce was enough to support the entire village. In times of drought and flooding, however, sons and daughters were
still sometimes sold as servants.

  Apart from growing crops, the people of Spur-On Village also reared pigs, grew vegetables, and did embroidery and weaving. They ate a little of their own produce, but most was taken to market and the cash used to buy household goods. Almost all Spur-On families had pigs and cattle, but there was only one slaughterman among them: Fong Tak Fat’s father, Fong Yuen Cheong.

  Three generations of Fong Yuen Cheong’s family had been slaughtermen. As soon he was weaned and able to toddle without falling over, Fong Tak Fat would squat bare-bottomed next to his father and watch him butcher pigs. The knife went in white and came out red but he was not the least bit scared. “The furthest I’ve been to butcher pigs is ten or twenty li,” his father boasted to the other villagers, “but our Ah-Fat will travel thousands of li to butcher pigs.” Only half of this boast was correct, the bit about thousands of li.1 He was wrong about the butchering because before the time had come for him to hand his son the knife, Fong Yuen Cheong died.

  Yuen Cheong’s branch of the Fong family had been getting poorer with every generation. His father had still owned a few mu2 of poor land, but by Yuen Cheong’s time, they were reduced to renting a few patches here and there. After the rent on the land had been paid, the yield was only enough to fill half the family rice bowl. They relied on Yuen Cheong’s butchering work for the other half. If he killed his own clan’s pigs in Spur-On Village, he received only the offal. It was when he worked for families who were not related, like the Aus, or who were from other villages, that he could earn a few coppers. So the family rice bowl sometimes stayed half-empty. It depended on the weather, the number of animals to be killed, the agricultural almanac and the cultural calendar—at propitious times when there were more weddings and more houses being built, more animals were killed.

  Beginning in year ten of the reign of Tongzhi, there were two successive years of drought. The river which ran past the village dried to a strip of ooze over which clouds of insects swarmed as the evening sun went down. The fish and shrimps were nowhere to be seen. The parched earth, like an infant mewling for the breast, longed for rain which never came. The harvests were poor and few pigs were killed. It got harder and harder for Fong Yuen Cheong to feed his family.