Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [0]
MOUNTAIN
BLUES
GOLD
MOUNTAIN
BLUES
LING ZHANG
translation by
NICKY HARMAN
VIKING CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,
Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in China by Beijing October Literature and Arts Publishing House, 2009
Published in Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2011
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)
Copyright © Ling Zhang, 2009
Translation copyright © Nicky Harman, 2011
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data
available upon request to the publisher.
ISBN: 978-0-670-06513-4
Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca
Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 2477
This book is dedicated to the ONE who sheds perpetual light on my path when darkness seems to prevail and engulf me;to a man whose shoulders and arms are a safe harbour for my restless soul; and to a mother and a father who have taught me, through means I may not have understood in my youth, how to labour, to achieve, and to wait.
Ling Zhang
PREFACE
The idea did not occur to me last year. Nor the year before.
The idea came to me in my very first fall in Canada, when I arrived in Calgary from Beijing, China, in September 1986.
It was a sunny afternoon. Leaves were turning a prism of colours for a final desperate show of life before winter killed them. We, my friends and I, were driving around the outskirts of the city to catch a last glimpse of autumn, when we had a flat tire. While waiting for assistance, I started to explore the surroundings. It was then that I noticed them, the tombstones, scattered among the knee-high grass and covered by moss and bird droppings. Most of them had Chinese names carved on them, some with fading pictures revealing the young but weathered faces with harsh cheekbones and hardly any smiles. Dates on the stones ranged from the second part of nineteenth century to the first part of twentieth century. These people died very young, possibly of unnatural causes. It didn’t take long for me to realize that they were early Chinese settlers, or coolies, as they had once been called.
What kind of lives did they lead in their villages in southern China? Whom did they leave behind when they decided to come to the “Gold Mountain,” a term they used to describe the wilderness of North America where gold deposits were discovered? What kind of dreams did they hold when they embarked on the