Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [132]
Every market day, when one of the hired hands began to load up the cart, Ah-Fat would see his son’s face transform. It started in his eyes, where a watery pearl would moisten each eyeball. This pearl of moisture would expand until it filled his eyes and flowed into the corners, up to the eyebrows and down to the mouth. By the time Ah-Fat twitched the horse’s reins and the first muffled clop-clop of its hooves sounded on the narrow lane outside their door, Kam Shan’s smile had fully bloomed.
Kam Shan’s smile, however, could ebb just as quickly as it surged up his face. After their produce had sold, and the hired hand started piling the empty baskets onto the cart, that smile shrank to nothing, like a puddle under the noonday sun. The horse plodded home through the gathering dusk and at the door of their hut, Ah-Fat could see that his son’s face had become as parched as a dried-up creek. It remained that way until the next market day.
His son belonged in crowds. His element was the hustle and bustle and the bright lights of the city. The farm was too dull, too small and too quiet. Ah-Fat wondered how he would ever anchor him there.
“Is Vancouver a big, noisy city, Dad?” Kam Shan suddenly asked Ah-Fat one day as they were sweeping the cart out ready for the journey home.
Kam Shan was not like the other Gold Mountain children who used the name “Salt Water City” as their elders did. He called the city by its proper Canadian name. Ah-Fat realized that he had never shown his son around the city which had been his home for so many years.
So one day, when they had sold all their produce, instead of setting off for the farm, Ah-Fat took his son to the newly built theatre in Vancouver’s Chinatown. The full version of The Fairy Wife Returns Her Son to Earth was showing that evening. Ah-Fat scrutinized the playbill carefully but could not see Gold Mountain Cloud’s name anywhere. He mocked himself for imagining that Gold Mountain Cloud, no doubt at the height of her fame now, would remember him.
A few weeks later, Ah-Fat took Kam Shan to have afternoon tea with some of his old friends. After, they went to look at the crowds thronging the yeung fan department store, and finally Ah-Fat showed him the house where he had lived and where he used to keep shop.
“This is the place the yeung fan destroyed. It’s been rebuilt.
“This is where me and your uncle Ah-Lam first lived. They’ve added another storey to it now.
“Italians lived here originally. In those days, no one wanted to rent to Chinese, except this old Italian. Too bad he died last year. He wasn’t even sixty.”
Kam Shan only half-listened to Ah-Fat. He was too young to feel nostalgic about the past. Instead his eyes were drawn to the newspaper stand pasted with Chinese broadsheets. Watching his son standing on tiptoe, craning to see past the mass of bodies in front of him and read the news of the overseas Chinese community, suddenly reminded Ah-Fat what it was like being sixteen. He felt close to tears.
“Any news?” he asked. His eyesight was not as good as it had been and he had trouble reading the newsprint.
“Cockfighting. That’s in the Daily News here. Over there it’s the The Chinese Times. The Monarchist Reform Party and the Revolutionary Party are at each other’s throats.”
“Rabble,” said Ah-Fat, pressing his lips together disdainfully, and Kam Shan knew he meant the Revolutionary Party.
“There’s someone called Freedom Fung who rants away and he’s quite right. Why should we Chinese be ruled over by the barbarian Manchu for centuries?”
Ah-Fat could not be bothered to argue. He pulled Kam Shan away, thinking to himself, ten or twenty years ago, I wouldn’t let you get away with talking crap like that. But Ah-Fat was no longer the hotheaded youngster he had once been.
Ah-Fat showed his son all over Chinatown though he was careful to give a wide berth to the gambling