Gold Mountain Blues (23 page)

The candidates' topic of conversation had nothing to do with the outcome of the exams and everything to do with a war and a treaty. The war cost the Empire of the Great Qing its entire Beiyang fleet. The treaty cost two hundred million ounces of silver in war reparations and the peninsulas of Shandong and Liaoning, as well as the island of Taiwan and the Penghu Archipelago.

This was the First Sino-Japanese War, and the Treaty of Shimonoseki.

Gradually, the candidates calmed down and they drew up a petition ten thousand characters long. Several thousands of them congregated before the Office of the Superintendent and requested permission to present their petition to His Imperial Majesty. Their demands: the treaty should be rejected, the capital should be relocated, a new army should be trained and constitutional reform should be implemented.

The tumult in Peking reached Ah-Fat's ears through Mr. Auyung Ming.

Since Ah-Fat's return from Gold Mountain, he had become firm friends with his old teacher. Mr. Auyung had been left a small family inheritance which was enough to support all the members of his household and he did not need to bother much with his tutor school. He only had a very few
students, but his house was filled from morning till night with visiting friends and acquaintances. They were a motley crew: private tutors like himself, petty officials, rickshaw-pullers and Cantonese opera singers, as well as hangers-on around local government offices. They did not come empty-handed to eat and drink at Mr. Auyung's table—they brought the latest news and gossip which they had picked up in the streets and markets. Most of it was about events at the Imperial Court in Peking, and this was precisely the kind of news that their host was most interested in.

Inevitably they were introduced to Ah-Fat during these dinners, and when they heard he was from Gold Mountain and was literate, they plied him with questions: What kind of constitution did Gold Mountain have? Did the common people live decently and in peace? There was a queen, Ah-Fat told them, but she did not govern. The country was governed by Parliament, whose members did not depend on passing the Imperial examinations, or on the Queen's favour. They were elected by the common people. A member of Parliament had to curry favour with the common people so that they would vote for him. “You're one of the common people,” said the other guests. “Do they try and curry favour with you?” Ah-Fat sighed: “The likes of us are just coolies. The Gold Mountain government doesn't give us the right to vote.”

Mr. Auyung thumped the table with his fist so hard that the rice grains jumped out of the bowls onto the floor. “Our emperor has studied Western sciences, and he knows what's good about the West. If it wasn't for that person who gets in his way, we'd have had a new government like a Western government long ago.”

Everyone knew who he was referring to, and they lowered their voices. The rickshaw-puller got up to shut the door firmly before saying quietly into Mr. Auyung's ear: “Over in Sanwui, they've just set up a new party and they're armed with weapons. They say they're going to raise money and send hired assassins to Peking to kill that old woman and clear the way for the young emperor.”

Ah-Fat was horrified when he heard this. He pulled at Mr. Auyung's sleeve: “Aren't you afraid of being killed yourself, if you allow this kind of wild talk?” But his friend just roared with laughter: “Her days are numbered, can't you see? Who knows who'll die first?”

Just as Ah-Fat was seeing off Mr. Auyung, who had come to visit him that day, Six Fingers went into labour.

The midwife hung a large red curtain over the door. No one was allowed in except Ah-Choi, the servant. Behind the curtain, Six Fingers moaned and groaned. Her moans at first sound stifled as if she had stopped her mouth with cotton wool. Later they turned into hoarse, pitiful wails. Ah-Choi came out of the room carrying a wooden bowl and emptied into the gutter. The water in the bowl was red with blood. A vision of his father butchering pigs suddenly came into Ah-Fat's mind and he made dash for the bedroom door. His way was blocked by his mother.

“It's what every woman goes through in childbirth. She's just got to put up with it. It'll soon be over. And if you get sight of her blood, it'll bring disaster on all of us. There's no way you're going in there.”

Mrs. Mak told the servants to light incense, knelt down in front of her late husband's portrait and made a trembling kowtow. Ah-Fat could not stay in the house any longer. He rushed out of the courtyard and over the road, and sat down with his back propped against a tree and his hands clamped over his ears.

After he had been sitting there an hour or so, Ah-Choi came running out of the courtyard gasping for breath. Her jacket was spattered with blood, and her lips trembled as she tried to speak. Finally, she stammered out the momentous news: “It's a boy. A boy.…”

Ah-Fat got to his feet. It felt as if all the suns in the heavens were bathing him with light from all directions, leaving not a shadow in sight. He hurried indoors, his legs so weak he was afraid they might give way under him.

In the bedroom, Six Fingers lay in the bed, her sweaty head askew on the pillow and her lips covered in purple teeth marks. Beside her lay a cloth bundle, tightly bound, with just a head showing at the top. The face looked just like an old yam left out in the fields to get wrinkly and frosted. It was not a pretty sight, but it made his heart melt all the same. Ah-Fat picked up the bundle in his arms, carefully, awkwardly, as if he was holding delicate china that might shatter.

The baby suddenly opened his eyes, squirmed vigorously and let out a wail so ear-splitting it set the roof beams trembling and the motes of dust dancing.

Six Fingers' eyelids were so heavy they might have been weighed down under pools of sludge. Her lips formed the question “What shall we call him?” but no sound came out.

All siblings and cousins of the same generation in the family shared a first given name. For this generation, it was Kam. Ah-Fat had been thinking about names for a few months and had settled on one name for a boy, and another for a girl.

But when he saw the teardrops rolling down his baby's face, he suddenly changed his mind. He remembered that examination candidate from Taiwan kneeling with the petition before the Office of the Superintendent in Peking, sobbing: “Give us back our rivers and mountains!” They would call him “shan” meaning “mountains.”

“Kam Shan, that's his name,” Ah-Fat said to Six Fingers.

Perhaps by the time Kam Shan had grown up, the rivers and mountains of the Empire of the Great Qing would no longer be in the sorry state they were in now, he thought.

When Kam Shan was a month old, Ah-Fat left for Gold Mountain again. But before he went, he took Six Fingers and the baby to pay respects to the tomb of Red Hair and Mrs. Kwan. The space for Red Hair was no longer empty—in it had been buried the Chinese fiddle and a suit of old clothes. The tomb had been sealed. After all those years, it was during this eventful springtime that the spirits of Red Hair and his wife were finally reunited.

“From now on, so long as my first-born son is alive to burn incense to me, there will always be someone to light incense at your tomb too,” said Ah-Fat, making a deep kowtow to the tombstone.

4

Gold Mountain Turmoil

2004

Hoi Ping County, Guangdong Province, China

By the time she found the shoes, Amy was almost in despair. She and Auyung had spent almost two whole days in the
diulau
by then.

By the afternoon of the second day, they were familiar with the complicated layout of the building, and had a rough idea what room or staircase lay behind every door and at the end of every corridor.

But they found disappointingly little.

From a distance, the building looked as if it harboured countless fusty old secrets. But once inside they very soon discovered that no secrets lay hidden beneath the dust at all, at least not the kind which they had so eagerly anticipated. Apart from the garment inside Six Fingers' wardrobe, there was nothing else worth mentioning throughout the entire five floors. The years, like a giant hand, had laid down layer upon layer of dust, filling and levelling smooth every crack which had marked the traces of human existence. It was as if no one and nothing had ever been here.

Of course, the building was not completely empty. On the balcony under the roof, they found a child's tricycle, although its three wheels had rotted away. Auyung opened the little paring knife which hung from his key ring, and scratched away a patch of rust on the frame until a maker's mark was dimly visible. They both studied it carefully and were finally able to make out the words in English: “Made in Manchester, England, 1906.”

They also found a silver teapot in the corner of a room on the third floor, its metal tarnished with the passage of many years. The body of the pot was engraved with an exuberant creeper design and words in English were entwined like flowers on the base. This was a Western teapot, probably once part of a set, now separated from its brothers and sisters and living out its days in this long-forgotten corner. Amy took off the lid and found black specks like mouse droppings stuck to the bottom of the pot. She found it odd that a mouse should have been able to get inside a teapot with the lid on but Auyung said thoughtfully: “These are tea leaves left behind after the tea was brewed—they must be decades old.” Amy was struck by the sudden thought that Six Fingers might have been the last person to drink tea from the pot. Did she put it down and leave, never to come back again? Could those crumbs of tea come back to life if you poured hot water on them, unfurling to reveal their veins after all this time?

The teapot was mute, as were the tea leaves.

On the wall of a room on the third floor they discovered strange wallpaper. Saturated by decades of humidity, the paper was covered in mould and a latticework of moth holes. The mould and the holes covered the entire surface so almost nothing of the original pattern and colours was visible. Auyung ran his magnifying glass over the wall, and discovered the number “20” written in the outermost corner. He called to Amy, who took a good look and exclaimed: “They're American dollars! The wall has been papered with dollar bills! There's writing up there … the words ‘God … trust.' It must say ‘In God we trust,' which appears on the back of every American banknote.”

“During the Republican period, Chinese currency lost value on a daily basis, so Gold Mountain families around here only recognized American and Hong Kong currency. They called dollars ‘top bills.' Your family actually papered their walls with them!”

“Only someone who really loved, or really hated, U.S. dollars, could have done that with them,” Amy mused aloud.

Auyung was silent for a moment, then said: “There's a third possibility, Amy. Maybe the person who did this neither loved nor hated dollars, but was simply indifferent to them.”

Amy looked startled for a moment and then burst out laughing. She put her arms round him and planted a kiss on his cheek. “You're such smartass!”

Auyung froze. His face assumed a wooden expression. Then his wrinkles began to make random jerks, and finally resolved themselves into something resembling a smile. Auyung looked strange, Amy thought— then she realized he was going red! The colour surged upward, and then drained away again. Amy stared so intently she seemed to be pinning him to the wall.

“I never knew that a man of your age could blush.”

“You mean, how could a pathetic old man like me have such a thin skin?”

“No, that's not what I meant.” Amy shook her head. Suddenly she nodded. “Yes, you're right, that is what I meant. You've surely been hugged and kissed by a woman before … I mean, what about your wife?”

There was a long silence. Finally Auyung said: “My wife passed away in 1981. Back then, hugging and kissing existed only as words in foreignlanguage dictionaries.”

“I'm sorry,” Amy said hesitantly, suddenly abashed at her uninhibited behaviour.

They sat on the ground in silence, looking around at the empty room.

Why, in a household which had once been abundantly wealthy, had only a few knick-knacks remained? It was as if Six Fingers had known that her end was coming and had quietly picked up and put away every vestige of her existence. Yet she also seemed to have been taken by surprise, because her last mouthful of tea had remained undrunk at the bottom of that foreign teapot.

The objects they found in their search revealed only the hazy beginnings of a story. It was as if they had taken the first steps into a deep cave and were blanketed in dense, unfathomable darkness. What they had
found might be of some interest to folklorists but Amy needed something more than that.

What she wanted was history. A sentence. A piece of paper. A letter which could nail their conjectures by providing incontrovertible proof. A photograph that could quell doubts and turn them into solid reality.