Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [128]
Kam Shan had no desire to chat and pretended to be asleep. He had said a lot in the interrogation today, enough for a whole lifetime. Before he left, his dad got someone to sketch a map of Spur-On Village, showing how it was laid out and which family lived where. He said the head tax had been going up and up over the years until now it was five hundred dollars, but that had not stopped the Chinese. When the Gold Mountain men went back home, they went for a year or maybe two. Some had children while they were there, some did not. But all of them, when they returned to Gold Mountain, made sure to register a birth with the local government. According to the register, they had all had sons, and some had had twins. In an attempt to stem the flow of Chinese immigrants, the government had built this detention centre, where they kept the new arrivals for a couple of days to several months. They gave them medical exams and compared the statements of the fathers and the sons. At the slightest discrepancy, the detainee would be ordered back to Hong Kong on the next boat. Only the fit and healthy, whose testimonies were corroborated, were permitted to make the payment of five hundred dollars in head tax.
His dad had insisted that Kam Shan learn every detail of that map. He wrote out pages of questions so that Kam Shan could memorize them and get the answers right under cross-examination. The questions were about every detail of the construction of their home, and the age of every family member. Kam Shan had been questioned several times in the last few days, and no question had tripped him up. But still his dad’s preparations had not been exhaustive enough. His dad had overlooked the woodshed. Which way does the woodshed face? Kam Shan knew every brick and tile and every corner of his home but he did not know the answer to that question.
North facing, Dad, you’ve absolutely got to say north facing, Kam Shan mouthed silently.
The boy from Toi Shan had given up his efforts at conversation, and Kam Shan stopped pretending to be asleep and opened his eyes. He was in the bottom bunk and the view was limited to a few square feet of the bed board of the upper bunk. The board was smeared with spots that looked suspiciously like snot. Kam Shan’s imagination made them into the clumps of wild bananas at the front of their house in Spur-On Village. Then they morphed into the water wheel in the fields, then the storm clouds that presaged rain. Then he got bored and stopped thinking about them.
The weather was good today and the sunlight glared on the wall beside his bunk. Someone had scratched some lines in Chinese with a knife, in tiny, cramped writing. When Kam Shan bent down and peered at them closely the day he arrived, he could only make out the characters: “Inscribed by Mr. No-name of San Wui.” Now, with the sunlight on the wall, he could begin to make sense of them. He sat and scrutinized the writing close up. The rest of it said: “The black devil is absolutely unreasonable, making me sleep on the floor. And I’m starving; they only give us two meals a day.…”
The room suddenly went dark. The kid from Toi Shan was standing in front of the window, blocking the light. He had been here two days but he had been neither visited nor interrogated. He was bored stiff and spent his time pestering the others to talk to him. Now he was counting the number of bars in the window: one, two, three, four, five, six. And backwards: six, five, four, three, two, one. Then from one to six again. Then again from six to one. Kam Shan began to feel sorry for him. “Does your dad know you’re here?” he asked. “He’s in Montreal. He can’t come, so he asked my big brother to come and get me.” “Why hasn’t he come?” The boy did not answer. He just said: “In the village, they said it was a good sign if the yeung fan put you in the cell. In the end you always get out of it. If they really don’t want you in Gold Mountain, they won’t let you off the boat.”
Kam Shan was annoyed. “Get out of my light!” he yelled.