Gold Mountain Blues

by Ling Zhang

  But Kam Shan did not come back.

  Kam Shan had not been to Chinatown on his own for a while. There were some new broadsheets on display on the stand. His eyes raked over every item—art and culture, wars, home and overseas news—looking for a particular name, Freedom Fung. It was not there.

  Two long articles took up almost all of the politics pages—the Monarchists and the Revolutionaries were waging a rhetorical war. The article from the Revolutionaries’ perspective was by a supporter he did not know; he read it cursorily but thought little of it. It was disjointed and crudely expressed. The only person who could write a decent piece of this sort was Mr. Fung, thought Kam Shan; his articles were lucidly argued, and no matter whether he was expressing indignation or sarcasm, they were all powerful stuff.

  He left the newspaper stand to return to the cake shop to meet his father. Halfway there, he passed a sign for the offices of the The Chinese Times, and found himself stepping inside. An old man who did odd jobs around the office shouted over to him: “Kam Shan! We haven’t seen you for ages! Been making your fortune, have you?” Kam Shan did not answer the question, but asked instead: “Where’s Mr. Fung?” “He’s not here today. He’s got guests.” “They must be very important guests if he’s not writing for the paper any more!” exclaimed Kam Shan. “Without his articles, the paper’s no good for anything except wiping your arse with!” The old man burst out laughing. “Don’t let the boss catch you talking like that or he’ll wallop you,” he said. Then he pulled the boy aside and whispered: “The Cudgel’s here from the States, he’s raising money for some big plan of his, and he’s taken Mr. Fung around with him on his lecture tour.” The Cudgel was boss of the Hung Mun, a Chinese secret society.

  Kam Shan knew everyone at the Times. After reading Mr. Fung’s articles, Kam Shan had been filled with curiosity and admiration and had gone to pay his respects to Mr. Fung at his office. Later still, when he heard the man expound his views on the political situation in East and West, he grew to believe that Mr. Fung was the only man in Gold Mountain worthy of his respect and friendship. From that moment on, every time he went into Vancouver to sell their produce, he sent Loong Am off to the theatre and took himself to the Times to see Mr. Fung.

  Mr. Fung was not only highly educated, he was eloquent and charismatic as well. As he put it, the Manchu (Qing) dynasty took resources that properly belonged to the Chinese people and used them to appease the Western powers. The dynasty’s days were numbered. According to Mr. Fung, the most important task facing them—destroying the Manchu barbarians and returning China to the Chinese—could not be accomplished without the support of overseas Chinese living all over the world. Mr. Fung’s eyes blazed like two lanterns on a dark night when he spoke, and his impassioned speeches set Kam Shan on fire.

  Though Kam Shan read the newspapers, he did not fully understand Chinese national politics. He did not doubt, however, that Mr. Fung’s campaign was brilliantly clever. He started to filch small change from the proceeds of the produce to put in the collection box at the newspaper office. Mr. Fung always counted Kam Shan’s donations carefully, wrote him out a receipt for the “loan” and told him that he would get double the amount back once the revolution succeeded. Kam Shan smiled but his thoughts were not on repayment. He gave because Mr. Fung inspired him. The revolution was a far-off, hazy prospect for Kam Shan, out of sight and out of mind. Mr. Fung made him feel as if he could reach it, but the vision dimmed as soon as he stepped out of the Times office and into the street. As the sweat-stained receipts filled his jacket pocket, he wondered how he could ever explain to his dad where the money had gone.

  Kam Shan knew that Mr. Fung was a Hung Mun secret society member, and that the Times was a Hung Mun newspaper. If the head of the Hung Mun, called the Cudgel, had come to Vancouver that meant something significant was going to happen. “What’s the Cudgel’s name?” he asked excitedly. “Sun Yat-sen,” said the old man. Kam Shan remembered having read the name frequently in Mr. Fung’s articles. “Where are they now?” he asked. “Giving a lecture in the theatre in Canton Street. There are thousands of people there.” All thoughts of meeting his father at the cake shop immediately went out of Kam Shan’s head, and he pushed open the door and raced off down the street.

  As he hitched up his gown and ran, he did not notice the dense clouds massing like cotton wool above his head. The wind blew up eddies of dust, tickling his nostrils. But Kam Shan ran on, unaware that fate was drawing him deep into an abyss, trapping him in a predicament for which he was completely unprepared.

  When he got to the door of the theatre, the sky opened. All of a sudden, it poured down so intensely that not even the most agile of passersby could avoid the deluge. One of Kam Shan’s feet was over the threshold of the theatre when the rain started, but the rain caught his back foot, and by the time it crossed the threshold to join the first, his gown was drenched. It was of rough blue cotton, stoutly sewn, but the dye was not fast and the rain made the colour run. As the rainwater dripped from it, Kam Shan left river of blue water behind him. Once inside the building, Kam Shan dropped the hem of his gown and wiped the rain from his face with one hand, smearing it a ghastly indigo as he did so.

  The theatre was full to bursting with people standing in the aisles, but they all fell back as this blue apparition approached. So Kam Shan squeezed his way through, and found a place to stand near a pillar. He rested against it, and suddenly felt cold. The wet gown seemed to encase him in a layer of ice which needled him all over. Very soon, he felt an urgent need to piss.

  The urge impinged on his consciousness, bluntly at first, but then gradually became more and more acute until he could stand it no longer. He was overcome by a fit of shivering—and then something seemed to snap. He felt a warm dampness in the crotch of his trousers. If I go just a tiny bit, he thought to himself, then it’ll let up and I’ll be able to hang on.

  But once unlocked, the floodgates opened; all he could do was cross his legs tightly as the warm urine ran down his legs to his ankles, and then dripped from his trouser cuffs onto the floor. The cloudy yellow of the urine mixed with the indigo dye and trickled in a zigzag down the aisle. It reeked to Kam Shan, but when he looked around, he was relieved to see that none of his neighbours, engrossed in the speeches, had noticed.

  He could relax now, though he was still cold. If he stood on tiptoe, he could see the whole stage. On it stood half a dozen men, all of whom were in Western dress except for one, who wore a gown and jacket. Kam Shan recognized Mr. Fung on the stage. He had never seen the others before. The man in the middle was speaking. He was a bit older, of middling height and sported a thick, black moustache. Next to him stood a strapping figure with a gun at his waist, probably his bodyguard. He spoke in Cantonese, so that everyone understood, and was giving a fiery, rabblerousing speech.

  “The people long for Chinese rule. It is heaven’s wish that the barbarians should fall and the revolution should succeed. It will happen very soon.… As we make preparations now, we urgently need to raise funds so that we can carry forward the great common enterprise of returning China to the Chinese. The survival of our country depends on this. The revolutionary army will throw itself into battle.…”

  With every sentence, the crowd roared in response and, as the speaker grew more and more hoarse, the crowd’s responses grew more enthusiastic. Then at the climax of the speech, the man in the Chinese gown drew a pair of scissors from the front of his gown, took off his cap and pulled up his pigtail to its full extent; the scissors snipped through it. The long rope of hair fell like a headless snake, writhed a couple of times on the ground and then unravelled. Its owner brandished the scissors at the audience below and shouted: “The revolution starts here and now! Anyone who wants to follow the revolution, take these scissors from me!”

  The frenzied crowd stilled all of a sudden, as if the heart had gone out of it. Until the scissors had made their appearance, revolution had sounded like a splendid adventure, one which made
men’s pulses race with excitement but which was, like a roll of thunder on the horizon, still a distant prospect. The scissors had cut away that distance and revolution was right before them. They had to take it up or run away—there was no middle ground.

  The scissors wavered at the front of the stage, still a long way from where Kam Shan stood, chilled to the marrow. Then, as he sniffed, he was suddenly shaken by an enormous sneeze that reverberated like a thunderclap around the auditorium. The eyes of the speaker fell on him.

  “You’re wet through, young brother, have you come far?”

  Kam Shan was startled. It was only when his neighbours gave him a shove that he realized that the man called Mr. Sun was speaking to him from the stage. All eyes in the room now fell on him, their gaze as intense as the beams of hundreds of lanterns. Kam Shan’s wet gown gave off puffs of steam and his forehead beaded with drops of sweat. His lips trembled a few times but no sound came out.

  “Are you in the Hung Mun?” asked Mr. Sun.

  As he stammered, Mr. Fung went over to Mr. Sun and whispered something in his ear. The latter burst out laughing.

  “He’s not a Hung Mun man but the donations he’s made to the revolution are just as generous as any member’s. Brother, are you willing to join the Hung Mun now?”

  Kam Shan hesitated, but then saw Mr. Fung gesturing to him from the stage. Mr. Fung was gently rapping his own chest with his fist, but Kam Shan felt the fist was falling on him, and something fiery hot surged in his heart.

  “Yes, I am.”

  He heard himself say the words and was astonished. They seemed not to have come from inside but to have been stuffed into his mouth by someone else.

  Nonetheless, they could not be taken back.

  The man brandishing the scissors leapt from the stage, seized Kam Shan’s pigtail and shouted: “This young brother has started the revolution. Those who enter the Hung Mun take an oath never to join the ranks of the Qing government!” Kam Shan felt his scalp tighten, then relax. His head felt suddenly so light it might have flown from his body.

  There was a collective gasp, and a yell: “Revolution! Revolution!” The single shout, like a rock falling into a shallow pond, made rippling waves which spread outwards as if they would flood and crash through the auditorium walls. The scissors were passed from one head to another, and the hall filled with the sound of chopping. No one paid any more attention to Kam Shan, who was squatting on the ground.

  He clutched his severed pigtail so tightly he might have been trying to wring water from it. At that moment, he remembered that his father was waiting for him at the cake shop. When he left home with him that morning, he was a whole, complete person. He had taken one step astray and, in so doing, had lost a vitally important part of his body. If he had lost a hand or a foot, even an eye, he could have gone back to his father and owned up. But he had lost his pigtail, which was nothing less than his father’s heart and his pride. His father could not live without his heart and his pride.

  Kam Shan pushed his way through the roaring crowds and stumbled into the street. The rain had stopped but the sky was still covered in a mass of heavy clouds. “Revolution … revolution.…” The cries found their way out of the theatre and were audible in the street, but they seemed to have nothing to do with him any more. Now that he had left Mr. Fung and the seething crowds inside, the revolution had once more become something vague and distant. The thing that came into sharp focus was his father’s face: the livid centipede of the scar, and the lines that appeared on his forehead when he laughed.

  “Please God, make me lame or blind but give me back my pigtail!” There was something cold and wet on Kam Shan’s face. Tears, he realized. For the first time in his life, Kam Shan knew what dread was.

  Duty made him want to return to his father as soon as possible, but shame took him in the opposite direction, farther and farther from the cake shop, farther and farther from Chinatown itself. The next thing he knew, he was on the riverbank.

  He heard footsteps behind him at some distance, rustling as if tiptoeing across a pile of rice straw. Then they came nearer, until they almost seemed to tread on his heels. Kam Shan looked round and just had time to see a black shape, before his feet left the ground and he flew through the air.

  A few days later, a short news item appeared in the local Chinese newspaper:

  Mysterious disappearance of a Chinese youth last Sunday. A passerby saw two big men in black throwing the youth into the Fraser River. We understand that the youth was attending a Hung Mun fundraising event in the Canton Street Theatre in Chinatown and then fell victim to a plot by local Monarchists. A week has passed with no news and it is not expected that he has survived.

  ………

  We have reasons to believe, as an inferior race, the Indians must make way for a race more enlightened and better fitted to perform the task of converting what is now wilderness into productive fields and happy homes.

  British Columbia Colonial News, 9 June 1861

  Sundance awoke feeling a great weight on her eyelids. The sunlight was as heavy as honey, and it reminded her that springtime had come. She got out of bed, put on leather boots, a sturdy linen skirt and a deerskin cloak dyed ochre yellow. She could tell it was a fine day; she could hear the river burbling past outside the window and smell the faint aroma of mallard duck droppings wafting in on the breeze. The long wilderness winter was over. It had been quite a mild one; the river had not frozen over, so her father had been able to paddle his canoe into town to make purchases any time he chose.

  Her dad had learned canoe-making from the ancestors, and he was famous throughout the entire region. His canoes were hollowed out of the best redwood logs, some longer than a house. They had a flat, straight body, a deep belly and two heads raised high at prow and stern. Sometimes he would carve these into an eagle’s head, sometimes into a mallard’s beak. Her dad never allowed anyone to watch him working on his canoes, not even her mother.

  Before he began a canoe, he would perform the ram’s horn dance, chant a hymn to the ancestors and give thanks to all the spirits of the heavens: the earth, the wind, the trees and the water. In tribute to his workmanship, members of the tribe would say not that he was skilful, but that he chanted well. Only he could move the spirits of his ancestors with his chanting so that the ancestors became the knife and axe in his hand. When someone wanted a canoe made, they came to him with gifts for the ancestors; game and waterfowl hung from the ceiling of their home all year round. The Chief himself would respectfully offer him three cigarettes whenever they met.

  A cowhide bag hung from the tree outside their door. It was not one of theirs; her mother’s stitching was much neater. Sundance opened the bag. Inside were a bright yellow cloak and a collection of necklaces, bracelets and anklets made of cowry shells and animal bone. The cloak was made of the best deerhide and little silvery bells hung from the hem. The bell in the middle had a strawberry carved on it.

  Sundance held the cloak against herself tightly. It was just the kind of cloak she liked. The little bells shook themselves free and jingled cheerfully in the morning air. It was not the first time Sundance had seen gifts like these. She’d turned fourteen this New Year and since then, a series of gifts had begun to appear outside her home. She knew which family this bag had come from, and she also knew that if she accepted it, a man would turn up one evening, walk proudly into her house and sit down at the hearth. Then he would lead her by the hand to another home.

  Sundance gazed longingly at the gifts. She had no intention of accepting them because she did not want to move to anyone’s house just yet. She wanted to be left in peace to enjoy the pleasures of being fourteen. She sighed regretfully, then folded the cloak and put it back in the bag. Provided she did not take the bag into her house, it would be retrieved by its owner by the following morning. And when he and she bumped into each other in the future, they would smile and greet each other as if nothing had happened.

  Waterfowl skimmed the surfac
e of the river, the sounds of their beating wings echoing in the still air of the village. It was Sunday and most of the tribe were in church. Her mother and younger brothers and sisters had gone too. The priest was a White man. When he first arrived, none of the tribe members wanted to convert to the White man’s religion, but after the Chief was converted, the others had followed suit. It happened like this: one day his wife became possessed by demons; she rolled around on the floor of their house, foaming at the mouth, and bit off half her tongue. The tribe’s healer and the shaman tried to rid her of the demons without success. The priest then brought out a little bottle, poured a spoonful of pink liquid and forced it between her lips. Her fits stopped immediately. “What’s that magic bottle that chased the demons out of her?” asked the Chief. “It’s not the bottle that expelled her demons,” replied the priest. “It’s a spirit called Jesus.” And so the Chief was converted.

  Sundance was waiting for her father to come home. That was why she had not gone to church with the others. She would help him tie up the boat and unload the things he had bought. He paddled into town to barter dried salmon and reed mats for rice and charcoal. Last year, great shoals of salmon beached themselves in the shallows. Sundance and her mother spent days drying the fish on a rock at the riverbank. The fish hung in strips from the ceiling, as crowded as dancers at a powwow. Her father had gone two days ago, and was expected back today. Sundance and her mother had asked him to buy them each a little black hat with a brim, of the sort that fashionable White women wore in the city.

  The priest knew perfectly well that waiting for her father was just an excuse. Sundance did not want to spend a warm, sunny Sunday listening to the priest’s dry sermons about God. To Sundance, God was as free as the wind and the clouds and did not like being cooped up inside. She knew she was more likely to find God in a bird’s wing than in church. When she made her excuses, the priest did not try to force her; he knew that she could trounce his arguments with a single pronouncement, ready to trip off her tongue when the need arose. So the priest treated her with some caution.