Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [141]
He clutched his severed pigtail so tightly he might have been trying to wring water from it. At that moment, he remembered that his father was waiting for him at the cake shop. When he left home with him that morning, he was a whole, complete person. He had taken one step astray and, in so doing, had lost a vitally important part of his body. If he had lost a hand or a foot, even an eye, he could have gone back to his father and owned up. But he had lost his pigtail, which was nothing less than his father’s heart and his pride. His father could not live without his heart and his pride.
Kam Shan pushed his way through the roaring crowds and stumbled into the street. The rain had stopped but the sky was still covered in a mass of heavy clouds. “Revolution … revolution.…” The cries found their way out of the theatre and were audible in the street, but they seemed to have nothing to do with him any more. Now that he had left Mr. Fung and the seething crowds inside, the revolution had once more become something vague and distant. The thing that came into sharp focus was his father’s face: the livid centipede of the scar, and the lines that appeared on his forehead when he laughed.
“Please God, make me lame or blind but give me back my pigtail!” There was something cold and wet on Kam Shan’s face. Tears, he realized. For the first time in his life, Kam Shan knew what dread was.
Duty made him want to return to his father as soon as possible, but shame took him in the opposite direction, farther and farther from the cake shop, farther and farther from Chinatown itself. The next thing he knew, he was on the riverbank.
He heard footsteps behind him at some distance, rustling as if tiptoeing across a pile of rice straw. Then they came nearer, until they almost seemed to tread on his heels. Kam Shan looked round and just had time to see a black shape, before his feet left the ground and he flew through the air.
A few days later, a short news item appeared in the local Chinese newspaper:
Mysterious disappearance of a Chinese youth last Sunday. A passerby saw two big men in black throwing the youth into the Fraser River. We understand that the youth was attending a Hung Mun fundraising event in the Canton Street Theatre in Chinatown and then fell victim to a plot by local Monarchists. A week has passed with no news and it is not expected that he has survived.
………
We have reasons to believe, as an inferior race, the Indians must make way for a race more enlightened and better fitted to perform the task of converting what is now wilderness into productive fields and happy homes.
British Columbia Colonial News, 9 June 1861
Sundance awoke feeling a great weight on her eyelids. The sunlight was as heavy as honey, and it reminded her that springtime had come. She got out of bed, put on leather boots, a sturdy linen skirt and a deerskin cloak dyed ochre yellow. She could tell it was a fine day; she could hear the river burbling past outside the window and smell the faint aroma of mallard duck droppings wafting in on the breeze. The long wilderness winter was over. It had been quite a mild one; the river had not frozen over, so her father had been able to paddle his canoe into town to make purchases any time he chose.
Her dad had learned canoe-making from the ancestors, and he was famous throughout the entire region. His canoes were hollowed out of the best redwood logs, some longer than a house. They had a flat, straight body, a deep belly and two heads raised high at prow and stern. Sometimes he would carve these into an eagle’s head, sometimes into a mallard’s beak. Her dad never allowed anyone to watch him working on his canoes, not even her mother.
Before he began a canoe, he would perform the ram’s horn dance, chant a hymn to the ancestors and give thanks to all the spirits of the heavens: the earth, the wind, the trees and the water. In tribute to his workmanship, members of the tribe would say not that he was skilful, but that he chanted well. Only he could move the spirits of his ancestors with his