Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [171]
Mrs. Henderson took a wooden spoon and lightly beat the eggs in the bowl, then gave the spoon to Kam Ho and made him do the same. He cut a comical figure, his shoulders hunched and his hands beating ferociously as if using a brickbat to smash a fly. It was the same every time he learned some new household skill—he learned to go through the motions but never seemed to understand why.
Mrs. Henderson watched as a tuft of hair on the back of his head bounced up and down in time with his movements. She suppressed a smile. It occurred to her that if she did not tell him to stop, this hare-brained Chinese boy would just carry on beating until he shattered the bowl. She looked for a semblance of expression on his bent face. It was as if a cloth were drawn taut over his features, masking them completely. In fact, his whole body seemed to be enveloped from top to bottom in an impenetrable suit of armour. She sometimes felt as if she wanted to pierce a hole in it, just to see what kind of blood would flow out.
But there was no need for that. On the first Saturday after his arrival, as he washed the vegetables in the kitchen, he began to look as if he was losing his wits. His ears quivered like those of a guard dog, straining to hear movement outside the front door. He was desperate for his father to turn up and take him home. Finally, she had found the chink in his armour— and it told her that he hated being at her house.
Her knees began to hurt and she had to sit down on a chair. Kam Ho’s eyes were fixed on the eggs he was beating. They looked strange, these Mongols, she thought: flat, open faces, eyes that looked like two fine slits slashed in a sheet of pastry. Their clothes were peculiar too. On top, they wore what looked like long coats fastened not up the front but at the side up to the armpits. Only a short length of trouser leg was visible, the cuffs tied with string around each ankle. Their shoes and socks were made of cloth. What a performance it must be to go to the toilet wearing an outfit like that!
What they ate was as peculiar as what they wore. A few days before, she had smelled something strange, and had walked all around the house to trace its source. It was coming from Kam Ho’s room. There she found Kam Ho chewing on a piece of dried fish, which he hastily stuffed into a drawer as soon as he saw her. It looked and smelled like a piece of rotting garbage. She had noticed that he ate very little at the table, and reasoned that he must have been getting hungry. His stomach was not used to the Hendersons’ food. She threw away his bag of salted fish, though to touch it nearly made her vomit. She expected that he would protest. But he did not. His face remained as tightly masked as always, with not a shadow of expression showing through.
The next day at dinner, she served him a piece of fish steamed in the French way, pouring melted butter all over it. He took it to the kitchen to eat—he never sat down with them. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him eat it all, though with difficulty and frequent pauses.
Many years ago, her husband, Rick, had worked with some Chinese railroad navvies and could still tell stories that sounded as fantastic as the tales from the Thousand and One Nights. Of course, that was before their marriage. She was the daughter of a Manchester cloth merchant and had come to Vancouver when she married Rick. She had had no close contact with any Chinese apart from the man who ran the Chinese grocery. When Rick suggested that they take on Kam Ho as a houseboy, she had been without her English maid for a week. This was the third maid to depart in the last few years. A properly trained maid was the greatest gift that the Lord could bestow on a British housewife. But all great gifts were hard to find and harder to keep hold of. A young maid who had crossed the Atlantic to Canada would be sure to meet in her mistress’s drawing room some decent young man desperate for a wife. Love and marriage quickly followed. It was rare to find a European