Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [133]
Kam Shan felt completely at home in the farmers’ market of Vancouver. When the farm work got busy, he said to his father: “Let me and Loong Am go and sell the produce. You and Uncle Ah-Lam can carry on with the farm work.” Loong Am was the hired hand. Ah-Fat was not keen at first, but it soon became clear that Ah-Lam was deteriorating by the day and could not be left in charge. Kam Shan got his way.
For the first few trips, Kam Shan was up before dawn to load the cart and back by dusk to eat dinner with them. He always came back with an empty cart and a careful record of all their sales. Ah-Fat, reassured, left him to his own devices.
Later, however, things started to change. Kam Shan arrived back later and later, first by half an hour, then by one hour, then by two. One night, he didn’t get home till midnight. He said it was because there were more people keeping poultry and it was getting harder to sell the eggs. When he could not sell them in the market, he had to go house to house to get rid of the rest and it took longer. Ah-Fat was only half convinced and took Loong Am to one side. The hired hand was an honest soul. He admitted that when Kam Shan had sold the vegetables, he bought Loong Am a theatre ticket and arranged to meet him at the entrance after the performance. What Kam Shan did in the meantime, he had no idea.
Ah-Fat said nothing to this, but resolved to make a careful check of the accounts each day. The losses mounted up gradually—one day ten cents, the next, fifty cents—until finally receipts were down one or two dollars per trip compared to the earliest accounts. Those one or two dollars per trip added up to quite a considerable sum over time.
One day Kam Shan got back from Vancouver after the evening meal. He was surprised to see no lights in the shack. Usually his father waited outside for him, holding the lantern to light his arrival. Not tonight. He unloaded the empty baskets, then groped his way to the door, carrying the whip. As he opened the door, he bumped into something hard. He rubbed his sore knee, and saw a small, winking red dot before his eyes. His father stood smoking a cigarette.
He turned to run but it was too late. He felt a kick from a hobnailed boot at the back of his knee and he slumped to the ground. It struck him then that he was in the light and his father was in the shadows. His father could see him perfectly clearly, in fact had been waiting in the shadows for him for some time.
He dropped the whip, and before he could retrieve it Ah-Fat snatched it up and thrashed him ferociously. The lashes fell upon his back and shoulders, again and again, though not on his head. He felt a stinging heat, as if he had rubbed pepper in his eyes. The real pain came later.
When Kam Shan was little, his mother had beaten him for all kinds of misdemeanours. She thrashed him with the bamboo canes they dried clothes on until he rolled around on the ground in pain. Although his mother had inflicted many such punishments on him, he never feared her. His mother’s wrath had boundaries which were set by his grandmother. The current of his mother’s anger might run strong and swift, but it would always be contained within the riverbed of his blind grandmother’s authority.
The punishment inflicted by his father was a different matter. He had never experienced it before and he did not know how far his father’s anger would take him.
Kam Shan made no sound. He knew that he was kneeling at the threshold of adulthood. If he cried out, he would be denied entry. If he could endure this whipping, he might become a man.
“How dare you steal from the mouths of your mother and grandmother,” Ah-Fat yelled.
“Did you go to the gambling den?
“Did you? Tell me!”
Ah-Fat had not intended to whip his son so viciously. Kam Shan had worked