Gold Mountain Blues

by Ling Zhang

A scrawny man stood next to the girl. He was poking her with his finger and saying: “My elder brother’s child. She’s had a tough time—her dad died as soon as they got here. I can’t afford to keep her. Just give me a bit of cash and you can take her away with you.

  “Take a good look then, look at that face. Of course, I’m not comparing her to Imperial ladies of old—I couldn’t do that, could I? But tell me, doesn’t she outshine any opera actress you’ve ever seen? Have you ever seen anything like those eyes? Make her your wife or your concubine and get her to wait on you. You can’t lose.”

  He stretched out two claw-like fingers and tipped the girl’s chin up so that finally the face was visible. There was a hiss of astonishment from the onlookers.

  She was just an ordinary Cantonese girl, of the sort so often seen in the paddy fields, by the fish ponds, or at her loom, dark-skinned with a broad forehead and high cheekbones. But her eyes were astonishing. They were like huge lakes so full they threatened to overflow their banks, and the irises were an unusual kind of black, overlaid with a faint greyish-green sheen.

  “Cat eyes! She’s got cat eyes!” the cry went up.

  Scrawny pursed his lips with satisfaction and said: “You can look all over Gold Mountain—Vancouver, Victoria, New Westminster—but guarantee you won’t find another one like this. If you do, you can have this one for free.”

  “Is she clean?” asked a man in a short jacket, a bit older than the others.

  The man cackled as if someone had poked him in the armpit: “She’s only twelve! What do you think? She hasn’t even been touched by a cockerel, let alone a man!”

  There was general laughter. “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you? Why should I believe you?” said Short-Jacket. Scrawny spat a gob of green phlegm: “Come and feel if you don’t believe me. See if she’s got any pubic hair.”

  So Short-Jacket went up, undid the girl’s trouser tie and, holding the trousers with one hand, reached into her crotch and had a good feel. The girl tried vainly to twist out of his grip, then shrank away as stiff and small as a wire-frame mannequin.

  “Just a few hairs,” reported Short-Jacket, nodding at the onlookers. He extracted his finger and held it up to his nose to sniff. There were gusts of laughter.

  “I’ll come and try,” offered someone else. Scrawny’s expression darkened. “You don’t get a free meal every day,” he said. “If you want to come and try, you’ve got to pay … two dollars a go.”

  The crowd fell silent.

  Short-Jacket laughed. “I’ll give you thirty dollars,” he said. “Thirty dollars and I’ll take her off your hands. My wife’s back home in Hoi Ping— this girl can be my second wife.” Scrawny swore: “Motherfucker! My brother brought her out and paid five hundred dollars in head tax—all borrowed from my savings. I’m not trying to make a profit, but at least don’t leave me out of pocket.”

  “Fifty dollars then? How’s that?”

  Scrawny said nothing, just tugged on the tie fastened around the girl’s trousers and made as if to lead her away.

  “Two hundred and fifty,” another offer came, this time from a man standing right on the edge of the crowd, who had not spoken up till now. He was an imposing-looking figure dressed in a long, silk gown, with a big, square face.

  “What about the head tax?”

  “Two hundred and fifty, not a cent more.”

  As Silk Gown spoke, his face hardened and every crease on it went taut as a wire. Scrawny looked disgruntled and, throwing the trouser tie back at the girl, said: “All right, two-fifty then. It’ll take me a year to pay back what I spent on this worthless bit of baggage.”

  Loong Am drove the cart home that day. Kam Shan did not say a word for the whole journey. Those huge catlike eyes pursued him. Every time he shut his eyes, they lay heavy on his lids. They flared like two sparks from a charcoal fire, until his eyes smarted and his head ached.

  But by the time he reached home that day, he had forgotten about the whole affair. There was so much misery in this world. He could not take it all to heart. In the last two years, he had seen a lot of things. He had grown a thick skin too, and was no longer seriously distressed by the things he witnessed.

  Still, it had never occurred to him that the silk-gowned man, having paid two hundred fifty dollars for Cat Eyes, would not take her as his own concubine. Instead, he had made her many men’s concubine, allowing her to be pawed over and ground down by them. She was still Cat Eyes, but she was just not the same Cat Eyes as the first day he saw her.

  “Does your uncle know you’re here?” he asked her now.

  Cat Eyes gave a snort of laughter. “What uncle? My uncle hasn’t been born from my granny’s belly yet.”

  “So the man who sold you wasn’t your uncle?” Kam Shan asked in surprise. Cat Eyes shook her head. “I don’t even know his name. I went to Canton with my elder sister to see the lights and we bumped into this man. He said he’d take us to the docks to see the foreign boats, then he tricked us and we ended up at sea.”

  “What about the head tax? Did he pay that for you?”

  “He got me in on someone’s Returning Resident Permit. The photo looked pretty much the same.”

  “What about your sister?”

  “Someone bought her on the boat.”

  Cat Eyes stretched out a hand from under the quilt, covered her mouth and gave a yawn as long as a tangled thread. Her fingertips came away wet from her runny nose and she gave them a shake, so that the drops landed on the already besmeared wall. She did not sound sorrowful as she spoke, in fact she acted as if she was talking about someone else.

  “Can you hurry up, mister, so I can sleep a bit? I didn’t sleep at all last night, with the toothache.”

  She took off her top and he saw she had nothing on underneath. Her body had been covered up all winter but the traces of the field work she used to do were still visible. Scabs from sunburn had left ridges like rice weevils all over her shoulders and back. The only pallid bits of skin were those two fleshy protuberances on her chest, as small and dried up as buds withered on the branch. Kam Shan pinched them—they felt like two lumps of dough. By comparison, Sundance’s breasts were so ripe that, at the slightest touch, they melted in his hands.

  Cat Eyes’ trousers were knotted loosely at the waist and the tie came undone with a slight tug. She had no underclothes on. Her legs were as loose as her trousers tie and at the slightest nudge they parted. Her pubes were swollen like a rotten peach, and a yellow fluid oozed from them. The stench was so overpowering that when it reached Kam Shan’s nostrils, he retched and his mouth filled with the foul aftertaste from his lunchtime shrimp dumplings. Instantly, he felt himself go soft.

  “Are you coming?” asked Cat Eyes.

  “The hell I am!” Kam Shan swore violently. “You want to infect me so I die of the pox too?”

  Cat Eyes fell silent. Kam Shan stood up and felt around for his own trousers. Something was weighing on his feet. He realized that Cat Eyes was clinging on to his trouser cuffs. “Please, mister, don’t go,” she begged. “You paid for half an hour. She can’t kick you out before then. Stay here so I can sleep a bit, please?”

  Kam Shan lifted the girl with his foot and dropped her on the bed. Her body was as light as a leaf. “Well, you better get a doctor to look at you,” he said, but before he had finished speaking he heard the sound of snoring. He looked round to see Cat Eyes fast asleep on the bed, her eyes tight shut. Her lashes were as exuberant as grasses growing on the riverbank. A damp curl of hair clung to her forehead. Any coquettishness she may have had dropped from her like grains of sand. She had turned into a child before his eyes. He picked up the quilt and covered her with it. Then he sat down and took out a cigarette, the third he had smoked in his life.

  It was dusk by the time Kam Shan went back out into the street. The wind had risen, rattling the branches in the trees so that they made great black silhouettes against the sky. It was dinnertime but Kam Shan was not hungry. Something was c
hoking him up. He wanted to shout out, or vomit, but no sound came. He felt drained. He felt in his pocket for the cigarette packet. It was empty, and he remembered he had left the pack with Cat Eyes.

  Mum, if you give me a baby sister this time, please never let her end up like Cat Eyes, he said to himself.

  He went into a café and had a bowl of porridge with pickled egg, a cup of tea and a bottle of wine. Soon the liquids were sloshing around inside him and he made trip after trip to the outhouse. When finally he got back into the cart and started the horse for home, his tongue felt like over-risen dough bunging up his mouth. He was relieved that Loong Am had not come with him. He did not feel like talking.

  He fell asleep in the cart. But the horse knew the road perfectly well—it had done the trip many times before.

  When he was about three miles from home, he was woken by a fierce gust of wind. The wind caught the pile of empty baskets at his feet and they rolled to the ground. He stopped to pick them up and saw a slight movement from an upside-down basket still in the cart. Thinking it was the wind, he reached out for the basket, which reared upwards. He sobered up instantly. He had loaded the baskets himself and there was nothing in any of them. But he knew that there were unmarked graves along this road, where railroad workers had been buried.

  He raised the whip and cracked it in the air. It sounded like a thunderbolt in the quiet of the night sky and gave him a little courage. His voice shaking, he shouted: “Who’s there?”

  Something stumbled under the basket. As it stood up, two green eyes flared in the moonlight. Cat Eyes. Kam Shan’s heart returned to his chest, and the hairs standing up on the back of his neck settled back into place.

  “I saw your cart on the other side of the street. When they went off to dinner, I ran out and hid in it.”

  “It’s no use coming with me. I don’t have the money to buy your freedom.”

  “You don’t need to. You don’t live in Vancouver so they won’t find you.” Cat Eyes jumped down from the cart and flung herself to her knees before Kam Shan. “Mister, I saw you were a good man the minute you came in,” she implored him. “I can get medicine from a doctor to cure the pox. I’m young and strong and I can do any work anywhere—farm work, fishing, embroidery, weaving.… If you’ve got a wife, I can be your concubine and wait on you and your wife and kids day and night. If you’ve already got a concubine, I’ll be your servant, I swear.”

  Kam Shan lifted one foot and pushed her away.

  “You can’t come with me. If I let you, my dad would kick me out too. Forget it. I’ll take you back to town.”

  Cat Eyes stood up, slowly pulled open her tunic and reached for the tie around her trousers. She pulled it free and the trousers slid down her sticklike legs. She stood on tiptoe, threw the tie over an overhanging branch and knotted it into a noose. Then she said hoarsely: “I’m absolutely not going back. You go. You’ve got your way, I’ve got mine. Forget me and I’ll forget you.”

  Kam Shan pulled down the tie and flung it to the ground. “Better a live coward than a dead hero. Every cat and dog knows that, Cat Eyes. Are you stupider than a cat or a dog?”

  Cat Eyes picked up the tie, made it fast around her trousers and got back in the cart. Kam Shan was silent but Cat Eyes knew that a tiny crack had opened up. She just had to keep her toe in the door and she could see the light.

  For the rest of the journey, Kam Shan left Cat Eyes curled up like a sleeping cat in one of the empty baskets at the back of the cart. He did not say another word. But he kept going over things in his mind, addressing everything to his father. Ah-Fat had spent a few months back in Spur-On Village and his mother was pregnant again. His granny was much better and his dad would be booking passage and returning soon. Kam Shan dreamed up one reason after another to explain where Cat Eyes had come from. At first, each reason seemed to offer a broad and bright route but, as he pursued it, it narrowed down until he came up against a brick wall. Try as he might, he just could not find a reliable way out of his predicament.

  By the time he got home, he felt as if his head was going to burst. As he jumped down, something that hung around his neck clinked against the side of the cart. It was a crucifix which Pastor Andrew had given him as a Christmas present. He was at best only half converted to the pastor’s teachings, but he wore the crucifix as a kind of amulet. The clink it made comforted him, like the striking of a match in darkness.

  Tomorrow. As soon as I get up tomorrow I’ll go and ask Pastor Andrew. He’ll know what to do, Kam Shan thought.

  6

  Gold Mountain Affair

  Years four to eleven of the Republic (1915–1922) Vancouver and New Westminster, British Columbia

  Dear Ah-Yin,

  I have been back in Gold Mountain for more than a month but I have been worried about many things, and it is only now that I can pick up my pen to write and tell you that I am fine. During the months that I spent at home with you, I left the hired hand in charge of the farm here. There was a drought last year so the crops were poor, the livestock suffered from disease and income from the farm slumped. I have been using manure as fertilizer for years but recently my yeung fan neighbours took me to court saying it stank and contravened public hygiene regulations. This incurs heavy fines but luckily an old friend from my railroad days, Rick Henderson, was good enough to help by engaging an excellent defence lawyer for me.

  But what weighs most heavily on me is Kam Shan. After he came back from the Redskin tribe at the beginning of the year, there was a big change in him. He learned all he could about farming and livestock, and threw himself into the work. It was wonderful—the prodigal son returned. But to my dismay I have just learned that he has been secretly sheltering a whorehouse girl with the connivance of a church pastor, and sneaking valuables and money out of our house to keep her. That boy has always been pigheaded and ungovernable. Finally, yesterday, I felt I had no option but to kick him out. My dearest wish is to get the farm income up again, and save enough to bring you over to Gold Mountain. Kam Shan has always been close to you and, who knows, you may be able to bring him into line. My uncle and aunt can look after my mother. I have given them a home for many years, and looking after Mum will be a small way for them to show their gratitude, and will set my mind to rest. Kam Ho is thirteen now, and when he is old enough, we can find him a suitable bride to settle down with in Hoi Ping. It won’t be long before you give birth and, whether it is a boy or a girl, you can leave the baby with my uncle and aunt to look after for the time being. My most urgent task is to get you here as soon as possible. You and I have spent so little time together, and so much time apart. I miss you very much and feel guilty that I have not been able to fulfil the promise I made you all those years ago.

  Your husband, Fong Tak Fat, New Westminster, the sixth day of the eighth month, 1915

  Ah-Fat was up early, washed and dressed. In the southeast corner of the room, he lit a stick of incense and knelt down. The corner held a statue of Tam Kung which he had brought back on his last trip home. He had been kowtowing to the statue every day since he heard that Six Fingers was on her way. Tam Kung was the god of seafarers and Six Fingers was journeying across the ocean on her way to Gold Mountain. Ah-Fat was on tenterhooks. He had not forgotten how, five years before, Kam Shan had been put in the port detention centre on his arrival and Ah-Lam’s wife had killed herself there. It was only by putting his worries in the hands of Tam Kung that he could settle to his daily work.

  Six Fingers, his wife, would be finally reunited with him in Gold Mountain.

  He made his decision on the very day of his departure from Hoi Ping. Twenty-one years. He and Six Fingers had been married for twenty-one years.

  For twenty-one years, he and his mother, Mrs. Mak, had been in tug-of-war, and Six Fingers was the handkerchief tied at the midpoint. Both he and his mother wanted her. His mother’s way of showing this was to nag him to get a concubine, either from Gold Mountain or Hoi Ping. She did not know the market conditions in Gol
d Mountain but she knew that in Hoi Ping girls would go with a Gold Mountain man for next to nothing. Ah-Fat refused and let the whole thing drag on as the days, and years, went by.

  His mother knew that when Ah-Fat came back from a day’s work in the fields, he cooked his own dinner, or ate cold leftovers. If ever his jacket got caught on the cart, there was no nimble-fingered woman to mend it for him. If Ah-Fat had a headache or a fever, there was no one to administer home treatments or mop his brow. When Ah-Fat was young, Mrs. Mak steeled herself to this, but he was getting on in years, and now she could not bear it.

  Mrs. Mak was blind and no longer able to see his face but she could still hear her son perfectly well. He only had to call “Mum!” in a low voice as he stepped over the threshold for her to tell instantly that he had changed. His voice sounded as hollow as a worm-eaten hazelnut. He had supported family that had as many members as a tree had branches, yet he had been reduced to a desiccated nut. Ever since her son left for Gold Mountain at sixteen, every ounce of his energy had gone into transforming his labour into dollar letters to send home.

  The morning Ah-Fat left Hoi Ping, the porter carrying his suitcases led the way. Behind came blind Mrs. Mak, supported on either side by Six Fingers and Kam Ho. All three were going with him as far as the entrance to the village. Kam Ho looked at his father: “You’ve put on weight, Dad,” he said. “Your jacket won’t button up.” His father smiled. “It’s all the soups your mother’s been giving me. She’s been trying to fatten me up like a soft-shelled turtle. Don’t envy me. Once I get back to Gold Mountain, all this fat’ll soon be gone—there’s no soup for me there.” Six Fingers turned her face away and said nothing. She knew that if she opened her mouth to speak, the tears would flow. Her belly was showing now and she walked more heavily than usual. She took a few more slow steps and managed to swallow the lump in her throat. “Don’t listen to your father’s teasing, Kam Ho,” she said. “There’s plenty of fancy things to eat in Gold Mountain. How could they miss homemade soup?”