Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [127]
Kam Shan had come on the same boat as Ah-Lam’s wife and they had been in Gold Mountain for five days. They had been heading for Vancouver but, just before arriving, the boat changed course and berthed at Victoria instead. Half of the several dozen Chinese passengers on board had been brought straight to detention; Kam Shan and Ah-Lam’s wife were among them.
His dad and Ah-Lam had visited once. His dad stood outside the building, with the interpreter keeping a close eye on him, shouting up at Kam Shan’s window. It was blowing a gale and Ah-Fat’s words scattered in all directions, so that his son only caught a few of them.
“Are … they … feeding you?”
“Are … you … warm enough … at night?”
Looking down from above, Kam Shan saw his father through the grille covering the window. His dad’s head looked like a melon cut in two: the front half was white with some dark bits showing through (that was the shaven bit) and the back half was dark with some white showing through (that was because his dad was going grey).
He had not seen his dad for ten years, and did not remember seeing any grey hairs, although that may have been because he had not had such commanding view from above back then. Today Ah-Fat had on a grey cotton jacket, loose black trousers tied tightly at the ankles and a pair of round-toed cotton shoes. His clothes were shabby and patched at the cuffs and knees, and made him look like an old peasant who had never left the confines of Spur-On Village.
Kam Shan knew his dad had come over from New Westminster to see him. That explained his appearance; he had been working in the fields when he got the news of his arrival and had come straight here without bothering to change or wipe the mud from his shoes. Still, he looked completely different from his last visit home, when he had worn a brandnew gown with creases still crisp from the suitcase. He had strolled confidently along, holding a folding fan in his hand for show, apparently unconcerned as to whether the day was warm or not. Back there, his dad drawled his words instead of yelling the way he did now. Now he was getting on a bit, not much to look at, a real backwoods man. Which one was his real father—this one or the one who came home to Spur-On Village? Kam Shan shouted down: “Write to Mum and tell her.…” but the last half of his sentence was blown back into his throat by the wind and he bent over in a fit of coughing. Afterwards, he realized that he had not called to him: “Dad!”
On the day that Kam Shan’s date of departure to Gold Mountain was fixed, Six Fingers cried. She never let him or anyone else see, but he could tell from her reddened, puffy eyes when she got up in the morning that she had cried every day since the news. The day she saw him off at the entrance to the village, she wept openly. “Kam Shan, the house will be empty now that you and your dad have gone,” she cried. Kam Shan replied, “But you’ve got Kam Ho, haven’t you?” The tears coursed down his mother’s face: “He’ll go too, sooner or later. Every son of mine will go. Maybe if I have a daughter, I might be able to keep her.”
“We’ll bring you to Gold Mountain one day,” was what Kam Shan wanted to say. But he knew this was an empty promise. As long as his granny was alive, his mum could not budge. Kam Shan may have been only fifteen but he already knew that certain things were better left unsaid. “When I get to Gold Mountain, I’ll write,” were his only words.
“The women are making a racket today,” the boy from Toi Shan said. He had been alone for hours, and wanted to talk. “Someone went into the women’s cells to do medical inspections but they refused