Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [68]
“That is not true,” Francie said earnestly. “You can be a great man, Lai Tsin, greater than your village lord. You can be a scholar. I will teach you myself to read and write.”
He smiled sadly at her across the guttering candle. “I was like you when I was young,” he said gently, “full of foolish hopes. Now I am older and wiser and I tell myself I am Lai Tsin, the unscholared gambler. It is my destiny.”
He sat opposite her on the floor and said, “I am not like the other San Francisco Chinese, who come from Toishan. My village is in the province of Anhwei on the banks of the Yangtze, called by us ‘Ta Chiang, The Great River,’ because it is the highway of China. It rises in Tibet and circles around high mountains and through deep gorges, flowing eastward over the great plains to Shanghai and the China Sea. Each year after the monsoon rains, Ta Chiang rises and overflows its banks. Sometimes it would penetrate our village and ruin our crops and those years would be bad for everyone, for there would be no food and no money.
“My village was very poor. The village lord owned the land and the peasants farmed it. Our houses were made of yellow mud baked into bricks. There was a courtyard with wooden galleries linking the rooms and a cookroom on the ground floor where the women would gather to prepare food, and a deep well where they drew water. At each end of the roof were placed two carved wooden bats, lacquered red. They said they warded off misfortune, though why anyone still believed it after so many bad years I did not understand.”
Lai Tsin paused. He took his waterpipe from the corner and lit it with a spill from the candle, inhaling luxuriously, while Francie waited for him to go on.
“The windows were made of thick rice paper,” he said at last, “and I remember how they trembled in the ice winds of winter, blowing over us as we huddled on our bedmats around the little charcoal stove. And in summer we could barely breathe in the stillness and the moist heat. My family was large: there was my father and his Number Two wife, and also his concubine and ten children, though three of them died young. Two were infants who had barely breathed, but Little Chen, my younger brother, was three years old and my favorite. He had a face as round and flat as a pancake, with twinkling dark eyes, and he was always making me laugh. It was I who looked after him; I took him to the rice fields with me, I shared my food with him because he always had a hungry mouth and I was the one who snuggled up to him at night to keep warm. Then suddenly he fell ill with the fever that comes from the swamp lands near the river and within a day he lay dead.
My father informed the village elders, and the next night when it was still dark they came with a basket and took him away. It was forbidden, but I followed them. The tears for my beloved little brother were streaming down my face, though I dare not cry my sorrow out loud. Because Little Chen was so young they said his spirit was too unformed for a funeral and we were not allowed to mourn him. They left him in his little basket at the foot of a tree in the sacred fung-shui grove for the birds and the dogs to take.
“I knew the elders must be home before dawn and I waited until they had hurried away. Then I went to his basket, opened it, and kissed his sweet little face and said good-bye to him. I could hear the whirring of the wings of the big birds overhead and then the stirring in the reeds as the hungry dogs came in search of him, and I ran terrified back to the village. As was the custom, my family never spoke of him again.”
Lai Tsin fell silent. He blew a long spur of ash from his pipe