Gold Mountain Blues

by Ling Zhang

  “Let me have this money, son,” he said.

  He spoke in his usual peremptory tones, but Kam Ho saw a hint of an entreaty in his father’s eyes. His father had never begged for anything in his life. A wave of bitterness flooded over Kam Ho, that his father had been so reduced.

  “Dad, you do whatever you want with the money.”

  His father’s dull gaze suddenly came to life. “I’m going to divide it in two—the bigger portion I’ll give Kam Shan so he can take you and Yin Ling back to see your mother and get his leg treated by a decent doctor at the same time. And while he’s there, he can get your mother to find you a bride. The rest of the money is to keep me. You and Kam Shan stay in China for two years and I’ll stay here and work for two years. I can’t believe my luck’s completely run out yet.”

  Ah-Fat’s eyes reddened like a gambler’s at the fan-tan table as he spoke. “Dad, you shouldn’t need to work at your age. Kam Shan and I’ll look after you.”

  Ah-Fat stiffened. “Just give me two years.… When you and Kam Shan get back, I’ll give every cent back to you. I can’t go home looking like disgraceful old tramp.”

  The baby, Yin Ling, had cried herself to exhaustion and only choked whimpers came from the bed. Kam Ho went to pick her up and saw blister the size of a pebble on her forehead.

  He sighed. “I can’t go. Kam Shan will have to take his family without me. I promised to stay with Mrs. Henderson—it’s vital for me to stay.”

  Year seventeen of the Republic (1928)

  Vancouver, British Columbia

  Opium juice was getting harder and harder to find. The police raided the Kwong Cheong General Store so often that the terror-stricken owner squirrelled his stocks away in the darkest corner he could find. Kam Ho could always be relied upon to sniff out a supply, but the price had gone sky-high. By the time Mr. Henderson discovered that astronomical sums of housekeeping were being spent on “Chinese herbals,” his wife was in the throes of opium addiction. Mr. Henderson did not say anything. He just tightened his grip on his purse. Mrs. Henderson’s efforts to extract money from him were fruitless.

  She was forced to find other ways to subdue her pain.

  This morning, she had just seen Jenny off to school when excruciating pains began to attack her knees. It felt as if they hid a nest of hungry, restless rats that gnawed at her every movement. She was defenceless against pain this acute. Kam Ho’s acupressure techniques had no effect any more.

  She had hardly had time to cry out before the rats were on her again, taking her breath away. She lay upon the sofa, staring at her husband as he turned away, put his brown-and-white King Charles spaniel on the leash, and went out for a walk. Although he was a senior adviser at the chamber of commerce, he went to the office only a couple of times a week—for meetings or to put his signature on a few documents. He found himself with a great deal of leisure time on his hands these days; one way of divesting himself of it was to take the dog for a walk. He took it out after every meal. His invariable habit gave him the greatest pleasure, and was postponed or interrupted only if some major event intervened. His wife’s arthritis did not count as a major event.

  This was the Hendersons’ third dog. The first two were golden retrievers. The first died of old age, and the second was lost off leash while they were out walking. The dog had chased after a pretty feral bitch and never returned. Mr. Henderson had been inconsolable.

  He had grown vague about people in the years since he retired, but he remembered everything about his dogs. They were his reference points. If he could not remember the year in which something happened, he would describe it as “the spring when Spotty arrived,” or “the time when Leggy chewed up my Italian shoes,” or “the time when Ruben got mange.”

  When Mr. Henderson left the house with Ruben, Kam Ho was in the kitchen washing up. Breakfast was simple and Kam Ho had only a few coffee cups and side plates to wash, but he was in no hurry to finish. In his pocket there was a letter from his mother, sent to him via his father. There was a photo in the envelope, a very small one, showing the round face of a young girl. She looked no different from the average village girl—high cheekbones, thick lips and an expression so wooden that it was hard to tell whether she was happy or sad.

  Her name was Au Hsien Wan and she lived in Wai Yeong Village; she was distantly related to the Au family in their village. So his mother’s letter had said.

  His mother wrote that the girl was eighteen years old, that she had had a few years of primary school, that she could read and write and do math. Their horoscopes had been done and matched perfectly.

  It was not the first time Kam Ho had looked at such a photograph. When Kam Shan came back from his visit home three years ago, his mother had sent him with half a dozen pictures for Kam Ho. The matchmaker had given her many more to choose from but she had rejected any who had not been to school; she liked women to be literate. Six Fingers had not got on with Cat Eyes for the whole two years that she spent in Hoi Ping with Kam Shan and Yin Ling because Cat Eyes could not even write her own name. Kam Ho kept the photographs his mother sent him over the years and looked at them every now and then. He would spread them out on the bed as if he had suddenly become the Yellow Emperor of old in the Forbidden City, selecting his empress and concubines from a bevy of beauties.

  Kam Ho’s head may have been in the clouds, but his feet were firmly on the ground. He knew he could not marry any of the girls in the photographs because anyone he chose to marry would be condemned to live life apart from him while he toiled in Gold Mountain. He did not want marriage like that of his mother and father. He would rather be a lonely bachelor than pine for a wife he could never see.

  Some Gold Mountain men felt the same as Kam Ho but were not as stoical, and shacked up with Redskin women. These unions produced children, but no marriage documents were exchanged and they did not ask for the ancestors’ blessings. When well-meaning friends suggested that Ah-Fat should get his son a Redskin woman, he grimaced. “He might as well marry a sow.” When he heard this, Kam Shan laughed. “Lots of Redskin women are good-looking and hard-working, and lots of Chinese women are ugly and lazy. Don’t tar them all with the same brush!” “And what about when they have children, whose ancestors do they pay their respects to?” retorted Ah-Fat. “Any grandson of mine may not be royalty but he’ll be every bit a Chinese and not a barbarian.” Since Kam Shan’s woman had been unable to give the Fongs a grandson, he had nothing to say to this.

  Kam Ho had plans of his own. He was secretly saving money to take his father back to China for good. With the money he had borrowed from his son a few years back, Ah-Fat had opened a small café. Since he knew nothing about preparing restaurant food, he was dependent on a cook. The cook had slovenly habits but there was nothing Ah-Fat could do about it. The café brought in so little money that after he had paid the man’s wages there was almost nothing left. The business limped along for a few years and even though his sons urged him to give it up, he insisted on keeping it going. He had borrowed money from his son and was duty bound to pay it all back. But Kam Ho knew that his father was secretly hoping that he could make enough money to put on a show of respectability when he went back home to his wife. With increasing age, Ah-Fat did not swagger as he once had, but he still had some pride. He would not let Six Fingers down.

  The truth was, however, that Kam Ho was not as desperate for a woman as Chinatown’s other bachelors. Kam Ho had a secret that he guarded so closely that no one could have dragged it out of him.

  Working for the Hendersons had changed him. Under Mrs. Henderson’s watchful eye, Kam Ho had grown from a sapling to a great tree that thrived in the dew and the sunlight. He’d matured from a skinny whippet of a kid into a strapping young man. Without her, those well-developed biceps would have hung on him like useless flesh. But Mrs. Henderson offered him forbidden fruit, fed herself to him until every fibre of his being hungered for her. Kam Ho was choosy and was loath to accept a less tasty dish.

&nbs
p; Till now, Kam Ho had been content to disregard the letters and photographs his mother sent him, but today was different. Something his mother said needled him, not painfully, but perceptibly. It disturbed his peace of mind.

  “If you don’t come home and get married, your father will never live to see a Fong grandson.”

  It was a reminder to Kam Ho that his father would be sixty-five this year. That was the yeung fan way of reckoning it; they lopped off the beginning and the end of life. Back in Spur-On Village, people included both ends in their tabulation; by their reckoning, Ah-Fat was sixty-seven, only three years off an age almost unheard of in the countryside. Kam Ho shivered involuntarily. He dried his hands on his apron and took the photograph from the envelope, put it in his pocket and went to the living room.

  He could not wait any longer. He had to tell her. Today.

  He walked in to find Mrs. Henderson curled up on the floor, her forehead beaded with sweat. She was having an arthritic attack. He was about to help her up when she stretched out a hand and pointed to the kitchen. He knew that meant the opium juice. He had bought some last week but only the dregs remained. He could not buy more for another three days when Mr. Henderson gave him the housekeeping money. He got the bottle and rinsed it out with water, adding half a teaspoon of brown sugar to the diluted mixture. Then he poured it into a black cup to disguise its pale colour and handed it to Mrs. Henderson.

  She took a mouthful. “Jimmy, you’re as big a cheat as the rest of them!” she wailed, and smashed the cup down. It shattered, and the opium and water mixture trickled across the floor. Kam Ho looked at the claw-like hand that still held the handle; Mrs. Henderson’s bones looked as if they had been bored by locusts. The opium juice acted as an insecticide, but no sooner had it killed one swarm than another took its place. They plagued her bones, and the opium could not kill them all.

  Kam Ho squatted down to clean up the broken china. He was doing sums in his head, wondering if he ought to dig into his own savings to buy her some juice. He picked her up and carried her to her bed. He got a towel to wipe the sweat from her forehead. She reached out one hand and gripped him fiercely by the front of his shirt. He struggled to free himself and some of his buttons came off. His mind was on other matters today but Mrs. Henderson was not going to take no for an answer. Her hand followed the familiar route through the opening of his shirt, but today it was as if her hand had scales. Her touch irritated him.

  Suddenly Kam Ho had had enough. He shrugged off her hand, pulled up her dress and, forcing open her legs, thrust himself into her. It was the first time he had ever taken the initiative. Now, he took her without ceremony, like a rough-mannered peasant. Mrs. Henderson was so startled that she struggled to sit up—then realized that the pains in her joints had disappeared.

  It was not the first time she had felt the pain ebb away when he was with her. The locusts had not the slightest compunction in what they did to her aging body. They had no fear of her but they did fear him. His vigour swept them away like sand carried down by a stream in spate.

  Kam Ho was covered in sweat, and worry tugged at him. He turned his head to look at her. Mrs. Henderson lay pink-cheeked, sweat-soaked tendrils of hair clinging to her forehead and a faint smile playing at the corners of her mouth. She was not displeased. He relaxed.

  Starting from when they first became intimate, he gradually gained confidence. She hesitated about giving him money but, all the same, insistently pushed small sums under his pillow, which he accepted. Kam Ho began to enjoy what they did and missed it terribly when for a few days she did not come to him. After that, he refused the money, even crumpling up a two-dollar bill and flushing it down the toilet in front of her. From that day on, she did not give him money. Kam Ho stopped feeling that he was at her beck and call and started to feel that she should do things to please him. Every Christmas, when Mr. Henderson gave him a Christmas gift, he would clap him on the shoulder and say: “I don’t know how you’ve managed to mellow my wife’s character but she’s been so much sweeter these last years. You’ve saved me a lot of trouble.”

  Kam Ho, weighing the fat envelope stuffed with notes in his hand, felt brazen but also proud.

  He helped her into fresh clothes, feeling how relaxed her body was compared to its rigidity just a quarter of an hour ago. She had got thinner this summer, her breasts slacker, like a Buddha’s hand fruit desiccated in the sun. It occurred to him that she had once been plump with juices; he had leached her dry. He felt a spasm of misery. But, miserable or not, there was no time to lose. He had to speak.

  He pulled the photograph of the girl out of his pocket and gave it to Mrs. Henderson.

  “I want to take a trip back home, ma’am, and marry this girl.”

  Mrs. Henderson said nothing in reply and did not look at the picture. He could almost hear her heart plummet. She stared at the wall through eyes that appeared like deep, dark, dried-up wells, with crumbling stones lying at the bottom.

  Kam Ho did not dare look at Mrs. Henderson. He stared at his hands, feeling himself grow hot. Finally, he stammered:

  “I can’t … can’t not go. My d-dad, grandson.”

  Still there was no reply. Then he heard the sound of stones grinding against each other in the well’s arid depths. A frail, reedy voice emerged.

  “Six months,” Mrs. Henderson whispered. “I’ll give you six months.”

  Dear Ah-Fat,

  Kam Ho arrived home about five days ago, and because he has so little time before he has to leave, we held the wedding yesterday. The situation is very volatile here. There are bandits everywhere and we have had to be very discreet about the wedding presents. We sent all the gifts under cover of darkness to the Au family and they did the same. Fortunately, Mak Dau was able to accompany them, armed, which was reassuring. In a troubled world, it is only guns that can assure our safety, so we may buy more next year. The wedding banquet was very simple, only a dozen or so tables and family guests. Kam Ho was such a little boy when he left for Gold Mountain, only fourteen years old. He is so different now I would not recognize him in the street.

  Last time you left, Kam Sau was still in my belly. Now she is sixteen and has never met her father. She has graduated from high school and is preparing to take the entrance exams for the provincial teacher-training college. The college is in the city and I am worried it is not safe for her to travel there alone, so I am thinking of betrothing her to Mak Dau’s son, Ah-Yuen. Although they are not of the same rank as our family, Ah-Yuen is very bright and has done exceptionally well in his school exams. He is a young man with a promising future. Kam Sau and Ah-Yuen have been brought up together and are genuinely fond of each other. What do you think? If you agree, they could become engaged this autumn and get married when she graduates from college. You should come back and preside over the ceremonies.

  Kam Ho says you are reluctant to come home because you want to earn more money. You know the Fong family properties and fields bring in enough income to sustain us for years to come. Besides, you are getting on in years and should be home with our family where you belong. I do hope you will make a decision as soon as possible. Even the tallest trees belong to their roots. The grass grows tall on your mother’s grave and, although I go regularly and keep it neat, she needs her son to come and pay his respects. Has Kam Shan’s leg improved? Has Yin Ling started school yet? There is a wealth of knowledge for her to learn in foreign schools but she should not forget the glories of her own language. I will finish here and hope you are in good health,

  Most humbly, your wife, Ah-Yin, ninth day of the first month, eighteenth year of the Republic, Spur-On Village

  Year nineteen of the Republic (1930)

  Vancouver, British Columbia

  Business was dismal at Ah-Fat’s café that day, no more than four or five customers, ordering just small portions of sausage-flavoured rice. The cook spent all afternoon propped against the stove asleep. He woke up, crammed down a large bowlful of sausage-flavoured rice, wiped th
e grease from his mouth, then cut himself a fat slice of cooked pork and wrapped it in a lotus leaf to take home with him. Ah-Fat had it on the tip of his tongue to tell him to put the meat back in the fridge, that it would do for tomorrow too, but he felt that would sound too harsh. He was silent for a long moment and finally pretended he had not noticed. Instead he turned his anger on himself for being so feeble.

  Ah-Fat cleared away the remaining food, then went to hang a yellow silk flower in the doorway. Tomorrow was Dominion Day in Canada. It was also the seventh anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Benevolent Association had instructed all Chinese immigrants not to mark Dominion Day with the Canadian flag, since that would be humiliating, but had distributed badges with the character for China on it. Ah-Fat always wore the badge and made his sons do the same. But nothing ever changed, though the Association held protest meetings every year and articles appeared regularly about the exclusion of Chinese.

  Ah-Fat was losing heart.

  Just as he was about to put up the shutters, a woman came in and ordered roast-duck noodles. Ah-Fat pulled out the meat and noodles again and prepared her order. The woman looked around for a place to sit and eat. Ah-Fat’s café was small and most customers took their orders away, so there were only two small tables and four rickety wooden chairs. She chose a clean chair, sat down and, taking a handkerchief from her pocket, wiped the table clean.

  She wore a black skirt and a grey blouse, faded with much washing, and fraying at the cuffs, but still neat and clean. She appeared to be in her forties and her hair was streaked with grey. The sleek bun at the nape of her neck was adorned with a sprig of jasmine. She was extremely thin and sat perfectly straight. She wore a Benevolent Association “China” badge on her blouse. But she looked different from the usual regulars in Chinatown— and since there were very few new arrivals now, Ah-Fat knew all the women by sight. He did not recognize her.

  He took the bowl of noodles and a cup of soy milk to her. “Have you just arrived in Vancouver?” he asked her politely. The woman nodded but did not speak. She wiped the chopsticks with her handkerchief and began to eat. She ate slowly, picking up the individual noodles as carefully as if she were doing embroidery. She seemed preoccupied and her ears trembled like a startled rabbit.