Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [116]
When Six Fingers had heard enough of Kam Ho’s lessons, she leaned out of the window, and saw that the clump of bamboo which grew against the wall in the corner of the courtyard had changed colour. It was no longer green and yellow but was speckled with white. When she went out to look, she realized it was covered with a fine layer of flowers. Her heart skipped a beat.
Bamboos lived from a few decades to as much as a hundred years, she knew. They were evergreen and vigorous growers. But once they flowered, they died within a short time, so country folk regarded them as a portent of disaster, like the fall of a dynasty. The Qing dynasty had indeed fallen, the Emperor had stepped down and they now had a Republic. Was this “state of the people” really of the people? In regions remote from the capital, nothing had changed—they were as bandit-ridden as ever. Last market day in Chek Ham, dozens of college students and their teachers had been kidnapped by bandits in broad daylight. If the Emperor had been unable to keep control of the regions, then neither could the Republican government. The old dynasty had gone, yet the bamboo was in flower. What did it portend? Had an accident befallen Ah-Fat or Kam Shan? Feeling alarmed, she went back into her room to write them a letter.
She spread the paper flat but the words would not come and her brush remained poised in the air. There was much on her mind yet she could not tease out the end of the thread in the tangled skein of her thoughts. Ah-Fat, Kam Shan and Kam Ho, Mrs. Mak—they were all there in her thoughts. So too was the diulau. She could write and tell him family news, skimming the surface of things like a bamboo ladle collecting duckweed from the surface of a pond. But there were other thoughts too, lying like stones at the bottom, which she could not get a grip on.
Since the day two years ago when Mak Dau had rescued her from the bandit Chu Sei, not a single member of the household had asked what happened to her during her captivity. Although they did not ask, their suspicions were writ large on their faces. Mrs. Mak spoke less and less, but she sighed more and more. She had different kinds of sighs: there was one which came from her nostrils as a kind of snort, which Six Fingers knew was meant for her ears. There was one which slid off her tongue, which was meant for the rest of the household; then there was one which lay quiescent in her heart before finally slipping between her lips, and that sigh was for Mrs. Mak’s own ears only.
Whenever Six Fingers walked in the courtyard, she felt the servants’ eyes on her back. Every corner and every room of the Fong residence seemed to be filled with chatter. But as soon as she walked into a room, the noise would cease abruptly and the world would be plunged into silence.
Taken all together, these silences were nothing compared to Ah-Fat’s. True, he had written more frequently in the last two years, but his letters were all about the petty details of the construction. From the Roman-style columns under the roof to the decorative carving at the front entrance, Ah-Fat was tireless in explaining exactly what material should be used, down to the last detail. What he never mentioned was Six Fingers’ abduction. He never even came near to touching on it in his letters. His silence on the matter was impenetrable. Six Fingers could handle the others. She would use her own steadiness to fend off their suspicions. But Ah-Fat’s silence