Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [129]
Kam Shan stood on the stool, hitched up his jacket and put his hand down his trousers. He pulled out his penis. It grew thick in his hand, and its colour changed from brown to pink. He directed it at the window and began to squirt a stream of hot, yellow urine up and down the window bars. The ants scrambled over each other to escape. The liquid turned a muddy black from the ants, and the window bars thinned down again. The boy was taken aback at first, then burst out laughing.
They were still hooting with laughter when they heard a cry in the corridor.
It was a terrible scream, so razor sharp that it seemed to slash the heavens, drain the sunlight away and plunge everything into gloom. There was a confused patter of footsteps from the courtyard and half a dozen white-coated yeung fan rushed past their door carrying a stretcher. A body lay on it, covered from head to foot in a white sheet stained crimson. It was wrapped tightly around the body but not tightly enough, and Kam Shan saw the pointed toe of a very small shoe poking out.
It was a cloth shoe, with a pink lotus flower on the toe. Women in Spur-On Village often embroidered this sort of lotus flower on the shoes they wore for visiting.
But Kam Shan knew this particular lotus flower: it had a yellow dragonfly resting on it.
It belonged to Ah-Lam’s wife.
“She must have cut her throat,” commented the kid from Toi Shan. But it was another two weeks, when his father finally came to get Kam Shan out of the detention centre, before he found out how she died.
She had not cut her throat. She had rammed a pair of chopsticks into her ears and bled to death. Earlier that morning, they had taken her clothes off and groped her all over. They told her it was a medical examination, but Ah-Lam’s wife had never had a medical examination like this, and after it, she no longer wanted to live.
That evening, Kam Shan shone the light at the wall by the bed and scratched four words on it. He did them with his thumbnail, big and clear enough that they could be read without the need for sunlight.
“I fuck your mother,” he wrote.
After the Whispering Bamboos Laundry was looted, forcing the business to close for the third time, Ah-Fat decided to try a new tack. He had bought a piece of wasteland on the outskirts of New Westminster, about twelve miles from Vancouver, and he and Ah-Lam cleared it and went into business as market gardeners. They hired two labourers, and kept several dozen chickens and ducks, a dozen sheep and a dozen pigs. The manure fertilized the fields; they could sell the eggs and meat at the farmers’ market in town and keep back a small quantity for their own needs. They even bought a cart to carry the goods.
Ah-Lam’s family had been market gardeners in Hoi Ping and, although the varieties of vegetables in Gold Mountain were a bit different, he knew all about growing them. Ah-Fat had grown up watching his father slaughter pigs and sheep, so that part came easy too. And so Fong Yuen Cheong’s prediction that his son would “travel thousands of li to butcher pigs” came to pass, after all these years.
The two men left Vancouver’s Chinatown and began a new life. Under Ah-Fat’s management, the piece of wasteland eventually turned into a big farm, famous for miles around. But that, of course, was later. Just now Ah-Fat was thinking of turning those eggs,