Gold Mountain Blues

by Ling Zhang

  Sometime in the early hours, Ah-Lam was woken by the need to piss. Opening his eyes, he was astonished to see a will-o’-thewisp glinting by the bed. “Ah-Fat! You still not asleep, you little sod? It’s almost dawn!” The light shifted position and he heard a low, muffled voice:

  “I’m sorry, Ah-Lam. I’m going to have to do you out of your rice bowl. I’ve decided to sell the laundries, both of them. The Qing Empire can’t be saved without educated men like Kang and Liang,” Ah-Fat went on. “We can only help by giving money; we don’t have enough education to help any other way.”

  A gasp caught in Ah-Lam’s throat. But, astonished though he was, he knew that once Ah-Fat had made up his mind, nothing would make him budge.

  “Once I’ve sold them, you and I will go and get work in the fish cannery. You won’t starve while I’ve still got a mouthful to eat.”

  “I won’t starve but what about your wife and kids? Their eyes are going to pop out of their heads, waiting for your dollar letters.”

  Ah-Fat was silent. Then he said: “I won’t be able to go home for a while. Ah-Yin’ll just have to wait.”

  Two months later, Ah-Fat sold his laundry business to a greengrocer who hailed from Toi Shan for eight hundred and ninety-five dollars. He divided the money into three. The largest part he sent to the North American headquarters of the Monarchist Reform Party. The middling portion he sent to Six Fingers with one of his friends who was going home to Hoi Ping. The bit of cash that remained he kept for himself.

  After that, Ah-Fat completely lost touch with Mr. Auyung. In the years that followed, every now and then, a rumour of his whereabouts might come his way: Auyung had joined a plot to assassinate the Empress and had been betrayed to the police and beheaded at the entrance to the vegetable market in Beijing; he had secretly gone back to Guangdong and organized a militia to go to the rescue of the Emperor in Beijing but had died of a chill he caught en route; or he had gone to Japan, taken a Japanese woman as a second wife and abandoned politics, immersing himself in the study of the sages.

  Whatever the truth of it, Mr. Auyung glittered briefly in Ah-Fat’s life like a star and then vanished forever.

  Year thirty-one of the reign of Guangxu (1905) Vancouver, British Columbia

  It was only when he came within sight of the two lanterns hanging outside the gambling den that Ah-Fat felt tired. It usually took him an hour and ten minutes to get from the factory to Chinatown but today he had quickened his pace, almost breaking into a jog, and did it in three-quarters of an hour. Ah-Lam had given up trying to keep up with him after a while and let him go ahead.

  Hawkers swarmed around him like flies, carrying baskets on their arms or slung over their shoulders and offering their wares: sesame crisp, char siu dumplings, green bean cakes, sticky rice balls, chickens’ feet in briny gravy, and strips of cold, cooked pigs’ ears. He had a ten-dollar note tucked away in an inner pocket—the wages he’d just been paid. He reached inside and fingered the note, its former crispness sodden from his sweat. Tonight he could afford anything from the baskets, and not only from the baskets. He could take a very small corner of his note upstairs to a room above the gambling den screened off by a roughly nailed curtain, where a woman was desperately eager to take it off him. In the last few years, the head tax for Chinese immigrants had soared to five hundred dollars—a sum so huge that it was almost impossible to save up even if you scrimped and saved for years. Very few Chinese women came to Gold Mountain, so their prices had naturally gone up. A whole night of tenderness was beyond his means, but every now and then he could afford fifteen minutes.

  Ah-Lam was a regular customer here. There was no way Ah-Lam could raise five hundred dollars, so Ah-Lam’s wife was still stuck in her home village. But Ah-Lam did not neglect his own needs. He regularly told stories about what went on in that dark room. Ah-Lam’s descriptions set Ah-Fat on fire, and when he could not stand this fevered state any more, he went too. He did not think of Six Fingers when he entered, only when he left. Every time he pulled aside the old curtain and went in, his whole body was ablaze; then, when he let the curtain fall behind him and left, he felt a desolate chill. There was no getting away from the pain this fire and chill caused him. They both had to be borne; one could not take the place of the other.

  Ah-Fat’s eyes only gave a cursory glance at each of the baskets but his belly rebelled, crying out in shrill tones its urgent need for food. He had only had half a bowl of rice and drunk some boiled water at lunchtime. He had walked a long way since then, and now his hunger seemed to be gnawing painfully at his innards. But before he could satisfy it, he needed to find a place where he could have a piss.

  There were plenty of unlit walls around the gambling den, and passersby who needed to relieve themselves would normally pull up their jackets, undo their trousers and piss there. In the past, Ah-Fat had done that too, but today he did not want to. Holding it in, he walked a few steps through the alleyway, bright with painted signs and warmed by shop lanterns, until he finally came to a large maple tree where he stopped. Its shade enveloped him like a black cloak. Underfoot lay a pile of ancient refuse the stench from which almost knocked him backwards. Ah-Fat pulled up the front of his jacket, undid his trousers and pissed. The stream of urine hissed as it fell on the trash, raising a cloud of flies in the darkness, the buzz of their unseen wings breaking the quiet around him.

  Having relieved the pressure on his bladder, his mind was free to think of other things and he became aware of the rank smell coming from his jacket. He and Ah-Lam had started work at six o’clock in the morning and had spent the whole day washing and gutting fish. Of course they wore aprons but his knee-length jacket still got spattered in fish scales and blood. Since selling his laundry business two years previously, he had worked at the fish cannery. The workers were all Chinese and Redskins, the former all men, the latter all women. The men washed the fish and cut them up, while the women packed the cooked fish into cans of various sizes. The men’s work was very dirty, the women’s a little less so. When Ah-Fat and Ah-Lam started there, they used to wash the fishy smell off their clothes every night when they got back home. You felt like a different person once you had poured a basin of water and washed your hands and face with carbolic. But the smell of fish gradually impregnated their clothing, the pores of their skin, even seeped into their veins. Nothing could wash it off. Ah-Fat thought that even his phlegm smelt like fish.

  Still under the tree, he took off his jacket and shook it out vigorously. There was a rustling as the fish scales fell to the ground. It was midsummer and the evening breeze still held some of the warmth of the day. Ah-Fat wore a thin white cotton undergarment next to his skin. It was buttoned down the front and Six Fingers had tied a piece of red string to the button over his solar plexus. She had done the same for all his undergarments, to ward off evil. He turned the jacket inside out and folded it into a square, then tucked it under his arm and walked back to the gambling den. The light from the lanterns grew closer and the darkness of the night was left behind. Now that he had his jacket off, his arms bulged visibly, the muscles as prominent as ridges in a freshly ploughed field. He pinched his biceps between thumb and forefinger but there was no superfluous flesh. He may have been forty-two years old, he thought, but he was still in his prime.

  He bought two green bean cakes and a cup of cold tea from a peddler and wolfed it all down sitting on the steps of the gambling den.

  “Has the performance begun?” he asked the man.

  “No, the troupe has only just gone in, and they haven’t got their costumes on yet.”

  Ah-Fat relaxed.

  His belly had been empty for so long that the cakes dropped into it like pebbles into an expanse of water—they did not even ripple the surface and he could not tell when they reached the bottom. He took out a few more coins and bought a dish of chicken feet in briny gravy. With the first bite, he realized he had made a mistake. Chicken feet were for people to nibble as they sipped liquor on a full belly.
Hungry as he was, he lacked the patience for such tidbits. He bought half a roast duck and two char siu dumplings, and after downing these, finally began to feel himself once more.

  He pushed open the gambling den door and was immediately engulfed in a wave of noise. Today was payday and the place was full. A sea of dark heads crowded three deep around each of the dozen or so tables where games of mahjong and pai kao were played. Players and spectators alike were absorbed in the game. Hawkers with small baskets hung from their necks squeezed themselves through the mass of bodies with hoarse cries of “Tobacco! Candies! Pumpkin seeds! Olives!”

  Ah-Fat squirmed his way through the solid mass of bodies, making straight for the stage in the back room. A troupe had been invited to perform—though to call them a “troupe” was overstating it since there were only seven of them. One played the Chinese fiddle, another the flute and the remaining five were actors: three men and two women from San Francisco. They may have been few, and their performances scrappy, but the ticket prices were dirt cheap at fifteen cents. Even a seat so close to the stage you could see the performers’ toecaps was only twenty cents. Added to that, no players had been here for a very long time, and the troupe included women too, which explained why the audience had turned up so early.

  When Ah-Fat’s father was alive, he had taken Ah-Fat and Ah-Sin to opera performances in all the small towns surrounding their village. In those days there were no female actors. When his father had told Ah-Fat that the women onstage making graceful “orchid” gestures with their fingers and coyly hiding their faces behind long white silk “water sleeves” were actually men, he was struck dumb with astonishment. Those men playing women were more feminine than women themselves. Months before he died, his father had taken him to Shun Tak to see the Cantonese opera Testing the Wife in the Mulberry Garden at New Year. It was the first time that Ah-Fat had seen male and female actors on the same stage. The roles of Chau Wu and his wife were played by actors who were actually husband and wife. Their amorous glances and uninhibited acting enraged an army officer in the audience. There were shouts of “Shameless! Shameless!” and soldiers leapt onto the stage, tied the actors up and carried them off. They heard afterwards that the pair were condemned for outraging public morals and beheaded the same night. The incident put a stop to mixed performances, and until now Ah-Fat had not seen women on the stage.

  But tonight there was a mixed cast. And the gamblers, all single men, had only half their minds on the gambling table. They all waited for the strings to start playing to call them into the back room. The truth was that they were here to see the women rather than the play. You only had to look at the streets of Chinatown to see that they were packed with men—and only men. Every month or so, the steamship would bring a handful of Chinese women but if they were decent, they would marry and be kept at home, so they were never seen in public. If they were the sort who “sold smiles,” they would soon find themselves bundled into the back alleys behind the tea-shacks by madams. Theatrical performances offered another option. There were two female members of the opera troupe and the patrons of the gambling den would be able to ogle them to their hearts’ content. They waited in feverish excitement.

  Ah-Fat went through into the temporary theatre. A decorative gas lamp glared from each corner of the stage, and a sheet of paper was stuck on the wall to the side of the stage, bearing the hastily scribbled words:

  The Clear Spring Opera Troupe will this evening give a complete showing of The Fairy Wife Returns Her Son to Earth.

  Gold Mountain Cloud—brilliant in the male role of Tung Wan

  Gold Mountain Shadow—extraordinarily dainty as the Fairy Wife.

  A tour in Gold Mountain increased an actor’s fame back home, so they added the tag “Gold Mountain” to their names as a reminder to their audiences. Ah-Fat was happy to see that Gold Mountain Cloud still had top billing. Ah-Fat had seen Cloud and Shadow on the first evening and felt they were not bad … perhaps not absolutely heart-stopping in their performances, but original in their way. He had decided to come again.

  Ah-Fat had seen The Fairy Wife several times with his father. It was short play, about the Seventh Fairy who is forced by her father, the Jade Emperor, to return to the celestial palace, leaving her husband, Tung Wan, behind in the human world. The next year, she fulfils her promise to send her son back to Tung Wan. This opera was often used as a curtain raiser for performances. But this evening’s version followed the Anhui Opera tradition: it began with the Seventh Fairy dreaming of the earthly world and recounted how she married Tung Wan, and how the Jade Emperor forced them apart, and how she then returned to the human world to give her son to her husband. It was a full evening’s performance.

  Ah-Fat had only seen it performed with an all-male cast but tonight there would be male and female actors. In fact, they would cross-dress and play a role of the opposite gender, with the Fairy Wife played by a man, and Tung Wan by a woman. Ah-Fat had seen a man play the part of the Fairy Wife but never a woman cast as her earthly husband. He was eagerly looking forward to it.

  He flung a few coins down on the ticket table, and found himself a seat right in the middle at the front. The old man on the door came after him: “This is fifty cents. It’s enough for four to five tickets. I’ll get you the change.” “Use it to buy cups of tea for the troupe,” said Ah-Fat.

  The fiddler struck up a tune to call the audience to their seats. The gamblers duly threw down their dominoes and dice and began to stream into the “auditorium.”

  When the fiddler saw all the seats filled and people gathered in the aisle and around the door, he winked at the flute player, who blew his first note and the performance began.

  It was a new production and had obviously been put together in a hurry. The singing, supported as it was by the fiddle and the flute, was smooth. But during the dialogue, the players kept making mistakes. Apart from Tung Wan, the other roles were new and unfamiliar to the players. The attention of the audience wandered and bursts of laughter disrupted the performance.

  Ah-Fat had been told that the members of the troupe were of the same family. The man playing the Jade Emperor was the father. The fairy, Tung Wan, and the umbrella maid were played by his children. The musicians and the acrobat were his nephews. They had all originally been in other troupes, playing bit parts on tour in Gold Mountain and SouthEast Asia. Cloud was the eldest daughter. She had a broad and dignified face and a velvety voice. She had started by playing minor female roles, to no great acclaim. Then it occurred to her to try the male lead role and, quite unexpectedly, she began to make a name for herself. She changed her name to Gold Mountain Cloud, formed her own troupe entirely from family members, and began to tour from town to town all over Gold Mountain.

  It was only when the Seventh Fairy was abducted by the Jade Emperor and taken back to his palace—with her husband, Tung Wan, in hot pursuit—that everyone sat up and listened.

  Oh, my wife, your departure will kill us both with pain unspeakable

  While you, like snowflakes blown by wind,

  Fly to your celestial destination unreachable

  I pine hopelessly for your return, like pining to recover the lost moon in ocean unfathomable

  At this point Gold Mountain Cloud switched to singing in her natural voice. Ah-Fat had never before heard such tone. Chinese opera was characterized by a falsetto style, but Gold Mountain Cloud’s voice was sonorous, as if emanating from a bell fissured with cracks, each one permeated with sadness. Ah-Fat’s eyes were riveted. She seemed to him not wholly masculine but not wholly feminine either. Gold Mountain Cloud had smoothed the rough edges of a man’s body like a whetstone yet she had also brushed away the powdery softness of the female body as if with a feather duster. When she stood onstage, she was more gently refined than a man, yet more heroic than a woman. She positioned herself somewhere between the male and female, and he found the effect disturbing.

  When the performance was over, the stools were cleared away and the fl
oor was swept clean of pumpkin seed shells, cigarette ends and olive pits, raising clouds of dust. The acrobat shinnied up the columns to take the gas lamps down, one by one, and the room gradually darkened. Ah-Fat stood rooted to the spot in front of the stage. Suddenly he heard a voice behind him: “It’s late. Shouldn’t you be off home?” He looked round, to see youth standing in the shadows. The youth wore a deep blue soft brocade coat with a gown of navy blue silk underneath and a Chinese round cap. Beneath it were thick eyebrows and rosy cheeks in a large face. It was Gold Mountain Cloud with only half of her stage makeup removed.

  Ah-Fat knew that opera singers liked to indulge in this or that new fashion but did not expect to see Gold Mountain Cloud in male costume when she was offstage. She looked strikingly handsome in it. His astonishment was audible when he managed to speak:

  “Your natural voice, troupe leader, is truly big-hearted.”

  Gold Mountain Cloud said nothing, but just stared fixedly at Ah-Fat. Ah-Fat rubbed the scar on his face. “I got it years ago, when I worked on the railroad,” he said. “Don’t worry, I haven’t robbed or murdered anyone.” Gold Mountain Cloud chuckled: “I’m an opera singer. There’s nothing haven’t seen. What I’m interested in is the fact that you came yesterday too and sat in the same place.”

  Ah-Fat laughed, and then asked: “Did you study martial arts? In the scene when the Seventh Fairy weaves a length of cloth for Tung Wan, your moves were so skilfully executed.” The actress was clearly delighted that Ah-Fat knew what he was talking about. “When I studied opera as a child,” she said, “the master made everyone, no matter what role they played, learn martial arts for a year and a half. He taught us that everything was in the footwork, and that opera only carried force if you got the footwork right. He made us do somersaults every day and if you didn’t get them right, you went to bed without any dinner.”

  Ah-Fat gave a sigh. “There’s no profession that isn’t hard to learn, is there? The dialogue could have done with a bit of polishing though.” Gold Mountain Cloud sighed too. “We’ve put on ten plays in a month, there isn’t time to rehearse properly. This one is completely new and some scenes we’ve improvised. That makes it interesting. We’ll be more familiar with it by the time we get to Victoria.” “Is that where you’re stopping next, Victoria?” “New Westminster first, then Victoria. Then we’ll take the train east to Toronto and Montreal.”