Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [15]
The next day, Ah-Fat went to say goodbye to his teacher. Mr. Auyung was stretched over the table doing calligraphy. When he heard Ah-Fat’s news, he threw down his weasel-hair brush, spattering the table with ink. “There’s no cure,” he said, “it’s terminal.” Ah-Fat knew he was not referring to himself.
Before Ah-Fat left, Mr. Auyung chose a few books for him to take home. “Even if I can’t teach you,” he said, “you should still read your books.” Ah-Fat shook his head. “If you have any books on farming and keeping livestock, you can give me a couple of those.” His teacher was silent.
Ah-Fat did not eat his dinner when he got home. In the middle of the night, Mrs. Mak was woken by a rustling, a noise like a rat nibbling at rice straw. She pulled her clothing around her shoulders and got up. By the light of the lamp’s tiny flame, her son was ripping up sheets of paper. She was illiterate but she knew these were the copybooks and textbooks he used at Mr. Auyung’s school. Over the years he had stored a stack of them carefully away. She nearly seized them from him, but what was the use? They had already been reduced to confetti. Mrs. Mak felt comforted too, for she could see that Ah-Fat had accepted his fate.
From that day on, Ah-Fat threw himself into farming.
Six months after Yuen Cheong died, Red Hair came home from Gold Mountain.
Ah-Fat heard about Red Hair when he was transplanting rice seedlings, with a farmhand whose help his mother’s needlework had secured for him. The other villagers had finished theirs, but he had had to wait a few days for the man to arrive. The paddy water was cold in early spring, and his feet, planted in the mud, soon went numb. He was not good at farm work. Years spent at home and at school had distanced him from the land. The land knew he was an outsider and bullied him. He felt like his calves and back were bound together with wire. Every time he bent down, the wire pulled taut and cut into his flesh, giving him sharp jabbing pains. The farmhand walked in front of him, working swiftly and planting neat rows of evenly spaced seedlings, compared to his own, which were messy and crooked. When he thought of his mother’s infected eyes and his epileptic brother, his skin crawled and terror gripped him. Above him the lowering sky pressed down on him like cotton wadding.
Even though it was overcast today, he knew that sunset was a long way off. When will it all end? he wondered, with a sigh that stirred eddies in the paddy field.
“The Gold Mountain uncle! He’s arrived!” the children’s cries went up. Ah-Fat spotted them racing excitedly along the dyke.
Behind the children came a dozen porters, each pair carrying a trunk between them. The trunks were of camphor wood, two to three feet high, and reinforced at each corner with gleaming metal bands. They hung low from the carrying poles which rested on the porters’ shoulders and creaked as they went along.
“It’s Red Hair, Ah-Sing’s relative. He’s come back to get married,” said the farmhand.
Red Hair was a widower, and this would be his second marriage.
The first was ten years ago. When his wife was three months’ pregnant, he left for Gold Mountain, but she died in childbirth, and the baby too.
His new bride came from the Kwan family. She was only fourteen, and a good-looking young woman. Red Hair had been away in Gold Mountain for a long time and his views about women were different from those of the other villagers. He did not like women with bound feet, and he wanted someone tall and buxom. He hoped she could read and write a bit too. He put all his requirements down in a letter