Gold Mountain Blues (42 page)

“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 surface 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.

“My grandfather was baptized before your father was even born” was what she might say—but did not.

Sundance's grandfather was English. He had arrived by ship several decades before, sent by the Hudson's Bay Company to open up a trading post in the Fraser River valley. He bartered goods like matches, kerosene, bedding, needles, thread and pipe tobacco with the local Indian tribes for skins and pelts. He was not the first White man to have come to the West coast to trade with the Indians. His predecessors had had dealings with the Indians too. From these White men, the tribes had quickly learned a few business tricks like mixing good and poor-quality goods, price fixing and holding back merchandise to hike up the price. So to ensure a stable supply of goods, Sundance's grandfather allied himself with a local Indian chief by marrying his daughter, even though he already had a wife in England.

Sundance's grandfather lived in British Columbia for fifteen years and had seven children with his Indian wife. When the time came for him to retire and return to England, he told her to move to the city so that their children could go to a White school and get the best possible education. The wife did as she was bid, but before many months had passed, she returned to her tribe. She could not settle in the city; the sound of drums beat in her ears day and night and she knew that her ancestors were calling her back home. So back she went.

When Sundance's grandmother returned to her tribe, after months in the city, and years in a White marriage, she discovered a large number of children who looked very much like her own. They were the children of the White men, conceived as they passed like a whirlwind over Indian territory. The mothers often gathered together to talk about their menfolk on the other side of the ocean. On these occasions, Sundance's grandmother
would say little, and would come home to impress on each of her children that they were not the same as the others. “Your father was sent by the great Hudson's Bay Company. He once had a personal audience with Queen Victoria.” The marks left on her by fifteen years of marriage could not be erased; although she had returned to her own people, she found herself a stranger among them.

She never remarried. Her English husband had left her quite comfortable and she did not need to go looking for another man, unlike the other women. He never returned once he had left British Columbia. Sundance's father, the youngest of his children, was only a toddler learning to talk when he left. He had no memory of him. But it became Sundance's grandmother's mission to keep her husband present, her words like a hatchet rigorously chipping away until he was permanently carved into her children's memories.