Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [170]
She put the egg back and made a circular motion with her two hands in the air, enunciating:
“Ca … ke.”
Once she had done this, she pointed to a photograph of Mr. Henderson on the side table, then to her mouth to indicate eating.
Kam Ho had been at the Hendersons’ for two weeks, and this was the method Mrs. Henderson had adopted for speaking to him. He did not understand in the beginning, and he did not understand now. When he first arrived, his inability to understand was like a great black cowl; now, though the cowl was still in place, glimmers of light seeped through here and there.
He understood that Mrs. Henderson wanted to make her husband a fried egg. Actually, what she really wanted was to make him a cake, a birthday cake.
Mrs. Henderson took an egg, tapped it lightly on the edge of the bowl until the yolk and the white slipped glistening out of the shell. She did the same with the second. The yolk of the third egg was broken and she threw it into the rubbish bin. She picked up the fourth egg, then suddenly changed her mind. Putting it back in the basket, she took Kam Ho’s hand and pronounced slowly: “You do it.”
Kam Ho guessed that she wanted him to do as she had done. He took hold of an egg and cracked it on the edge of the bowl. The contents shot into the bowl, taking with them some of the eggshell. With the second, he knew to tap it lightly. The yolk and the white slid into the bowl. When it came to the third, he tapped it lightly and threw it into the rubbish bin.
Mrs. Henderson started, then burst out laughing. She laughed so hard that her forehead came up in a bump.
Mrs. Henderson was severely arthritic, and the pain was so bad that it seemed to crawl through every artery and vein of her body. At night when she went to sleep, it was in her fingers, but when she got up in the morning, the pain had travelled to her shoulders. When she drank her coffee, the pain was down in her back and when she stood up, it was in her knees. Her face usually bore a frown of pain and she rarely smiled. But since Kam Ho had come to live with them, she had laughed several times—laughed until she cried.
The first time was the day of Kam Ho’s arrival. In the afternoon, she decided to take him through the sweeping of the sitting room and the kitchen. She took a feather duster and showed him how to pass it over the tables and walls. When they got as far as the dining table, Kam Ho suddenly saw something sticking out of the wall next to it, and gave it a poke. There was a click and the room flooded with light. Kam Ho gave a shocked cry and sat down on the floor, covering his ears with his hands. She realized that the boy had never seen a high-wattage electric light before. He thought he had been struck by lightning. In Hoi Ping, they still used oil lamps and even in his New Westminster house, his father only had two ten-watt light bulbs, a bit brighter than oil lamps but still nowhere near as bright as these.
The next morning, when Mr. Henderson was in the bathroom brushing his teeth and Kam Ho was boiling water in the kitchen, there was a sudden shrieking from the living room. After much searching, Kam Ho discovered the noise was coming from a black box on the side table. Mr. Henderson came running out of the bathroom with the toothbrush sticking out of his froth-covered mouth, and gestured to the black box. Kam Ho bundled up a tablecloth and muffled the box as best he could. It rang more quietly but he could still hear it. So he fetched cushions from the sofa and pressed them on top of the box. Still it rang. Mr. Henderson related the incident to his wife at breakfast and she laughed until she shook. Poor child, she said, he’s never seen a telephone. How come his father never told him about telephones?
When she finally stopped laughing, and wiped the tears from her eyes, she picked the cracked egg out of the rubbish and brought it back to the table. As she broke it into the bowl, she could not suppress a sigh. Oh Lord, how often must I explain to this Mongol