Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [103]
The next day Ah-Fat took the disk to Rick, who told him it was record. The brown dog listening to a big horn was a well-known company logo. “What’s a record?” asked Ah-Fat. “The music and singing of the opera is sealed on the disk,” explained Rick. “When you want to listen to it, you just get it out and listen. Like covering a cup of water with a lid, and opening it every time you want to drink. Except that in the end you drink the water up, but you can go on listening to the record forever.” “Is the sound still on the record when the singer dies?” “It’s still there ten years, or a hundred years afterwards.” Ah-Fat held his record in both hands and contemplated it in silence.
Much later, when Ah-Fat went back to his diulau home in Spur-On Village, he took the record with him. Then, Gold Mountain Cloud’s singing would fill Tak Yin House to the rafters, striking every stone and every board with its piercing, rending tones.
The singer left Vancouver, and Ah-Fat heard no more of her, until one day about two years after Kam Shan arrived in Gold Mountain. They had a visitor from back home, a restaurant owner in San Francisco. He mentioned that a new theatre, the Grand Stage Theatre, had just been built in the city. An opera singer called Gold Mountain Cloud leading a troupe of twenty members had made the theatre her home base. She had quite a reputation as a singer. Ah-Fat smiled to himself when he heard this. That piercing, rending voice would echo in his ears for years to come, but the longing which the singer had created in his heart had long since died away.
More time passed, and Ah-Fat saw a small item in the Overseas Chinese newspaper, The Daily News. The famous Cantonese opera singer Gold Mountain Cloud was engaged to be married to a Mr. William Huang and a very grand wedding would soon be held in Honolulu. Ah-Fat had never heard of this Huang fellow, though he later found out he was the younger son of a Honolulu property magnate.
That was not the last that Ah-Fat would see of Gold Mountain Cloud, although he did not know it. Much later, the dormant buds of their friendship were to put forth unexpected new shoots.
Year thirty-three of the reign of Guangxu (1907)
Vancouver, British Columbia
My dear Ah-Yin,
Thank you for the letter and school photographs of Kam Shan and Kam Ho which you sent at New Year. When I last saw them, Shan was just a naughty kid and Ho was still in swaddling clothes. Time flies by—who would have thought I would be gone seven years? My sons are so grown up now. Ah-Yin, do you still remember your Gold Mountain man after all these years? You, of course, are often in my dreams. How could I forget my wife’s face? I have made plans to come home several times during these years, but every time something unexpected has happened. I have not managed to raise enough for the boat passage. My dreams of us living together as husband and wife are constantly shattered. Business has been slack at the fish cannery since last autumn, and on top of that, the boss bought an American machine that can de-scale, wash and split the fish automatically, around thirty times faster than a man. The yeung fan make a mockery of us Chinese and call it the “Iron Chink.” Since the machine arrived, many of the cannery men, including me and Ah-Lam, have lost their jobs. Life has been hard, but not long ago I borrowed a bit of money from a countryman, rented a couple of rooms facing the street and opened a laundry. I hired a boy from San Wui to help out. He is a good tailor and can make Chinese- and Western-style clothes, so we can do tailoring and mending as well as laundry. I have kept the old name, Whispering Bamboos Laundry. This is my third and I hope this time round it will do better and last longer than the other two. I will probably be able to buy