Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [159]
He had been to Vancouver’s Chinatown often since his dad fetched him from the detention centre three years before. He had got to know Mr. Fung in the newspaper office, he had been to the cake shops and the general stores, he had been to see plays at the theatre, and had eaten and drunk in all its cafés. He knew which shops had the most generous scales, which of the cafés’ cooks were the most generous with the oil, and even where the snacks were likely to be stale. But although he knew all Chinatown’s tricks of the trade, until the moment when he pulled aside the curtain, his knowledge of Chinatown was only skin deep.
The room upstairs from the gambling den was not marked by any hanging lanterns or signs. The men of Chinatown had no need of signs or lanterns. They could grope their way unerringly up its twisty, narrow staircase until they reached the curtain. On paydays and holidays the queue of men waiting in front of the curtain might be so long it trailed right back down to the front entrance. Impatient youngsters banged on the door frame until men emerged with their trousers still unfastened.
“What’s it like?” the waiting men would ask.
“Go and see for yourself” was the invariable answer.
With such a long queue, it was not unusual to bump into someone you Knew. Sometimes brothers met up, or fathers and sons. Whoever it was, you avoided their eye and kept out of the way. If you could not, you greeted them with a “You here too?”
But today was not New Year or any other holiday. It was not even payday. The weather was miserable too; the clouds were so low that if you lifted your head, you could almost touch them. Apart from the pawnbrokers who always did a brisk trade, the whole of Chinatown was almost deserted.
But Kam Shan was there.
When he got to the gambling den, he bought some Pirate brand cigarettes from a hawker. His hand shook as he tore open the packet, and it fell apart so the cigarettes dropped to the ground. He squatted down to pick them up, feeling his face grow hot. To hide his embarrassment from the hawker, he spent an inordinate amount of time retrieving the cigarettes before he stood up again and gruffly asked for a light. He pursed his lips, put a cigarette into his mouth and took a fierce drag on it. He felt as if a knife had plunged itself into his throat and he went into a fit of coughing.
Red-faced, he wiped his runny nose with the sleeve of his jacket, sidled into the doorway and began to stomp up the stairs. The hawker smirked as he watched his retreating figure. He had seen too many men going up those stairs not to know that this was a first-timer.
When Kam Shan pulled open the curtain he discovered the room was divided into two cubicles, each with its own door. He was just wondering which one to go in when the left-hand door crashed open and a swarthy figure tumbled out, clad only in underpants. The man’s jacket and trousers flew out after him and landed at the bottom of the stairs. The man stumbled to his feet and tried to put on his trousers, frantically searching with his foot for the leg hole. Onlookers swarmed around him, sticking as stubbornly as soot on sticky-rice cakes.
A heavily made-up woman came out of the room. Knotting her robe around her, she bawled down the stairs to the man:
“Don’t think I don’t recognize you because you’ve cut your pigtail off. You bring me the money this time tomorrow, not a cent short, or I’ll plaster your name all over the door of the gambling den for everyone to see!”
The man finally got his trousers on and, slinging his jacket over his shoulders, plunged out into the street. The crowd burst out laughing but the woman did not join them. She hawked and spat, and went back into the room, banging the door behind her. Kam Shan knew this was not the door he was supposed to go in. The madam had promised him a young girl who had not been here very long.
Kam Shan pushed open the door on the right. The cubicle’s tiny, wok-sized window had a piece of cloth carelessly tacked over it, and it was as gloomy inside as the landing was on the outside. A