Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [178]
Kam Ho gave Jenny’s chin a wipe with the bib. “Go and watch the ants moving house,” he said. He was not paying attention to the toddler, or indeed to the chicken. His mind was elsewhere. Kam Ho’s ears were erect and quivering like rabbits, straining to hear a clanging sound from the street outside. It was not Saturday, and he was not waiting for his father. He was waiting for a different cart.
A vegetable cart.
The war in Europe was finally over. And now that it was done, the Gold
Mountain soil had its farmers back. Almost overnight, the streets and alleyways of Gold Mountain towns teemed with vegetable and fruit sellers. They came knocking, sometimes several times a day, laden with baskets of fresh produce carried on shoulder poles or packed into horse-drawn carts.
The Hendersons’ house was a stone’s throw from the vegetable market which stocked everything they needed. But Kam Ho preferred to buy from the hawker who came to their own front door. It was fresh, cheap and convenient. At least, that was what he said to Mrs. Henderson, to whom he could not explain the real reason.
He had been with the Hendersons for seven years. The first two years he longed to go home but his father would not have him back. His father owed the Hendersons a debt of gratitude that could never be repaid. By the third year, Kam Ho had lost interest in moving. The job was a meal ticket after all, one which he was used to, and a lot less bother than looking for a new one. Later on, Ah-Fat’s farm failed and he needed his son’s wages to support the whole family, so even if Kam Ho wanted to leave, he could not.
The men came home from the battlefields, swapped their army uniforms for civvy clothes and looked around to discover that others had grown rich from their absence. Ah-Fat had used this time to secure the title deeds of neighbouring fields. Before everything went wrong, he owned the biggest farm for hundreds of miles around. He had long given up selling door to door. He had a team of nine horse-drawn carts to distribute his vegetables and fruit, meat and eggs to the markets.
Ah-Fat had paid back the debts on the diulau and had saved up enough to pay the head tax for his wife and daughter. But he was in no hurry to bring them over to Gold Mountain. He decided he would save up for one more season and then sell the farm and go home to live out a peaceful retirement. They would all go, and he would marry both his sons to decent girls—he still refused to acknowledge the woman Kam Shan lived with.
But that season was the ruin of Ah-Fat. His cleverness did him in.
His cleverness was like a candle which lit only the road before him. He had no idea that behind him, the skies had darkened. He had no inkling that his wealth had fanned the flames of jealousy among his competitors. He naively believed that hard work and prudent saving would be enough.
The year before, an American businessman had come to Vancouver to open a different kind of market: the produce was laid out on shelves and the customers could select for themselves, like in a department store. Ah-Fat was fired with enthusiasm and adamant that, by hook or by crook, he would sell his own produce direct to the supermarket. It would save such a lot of time and bother. And by dint of cutting his profit margins to the bare minimum, he finally succeeded in getting his produce on the supermarket shelves.
But, unbeknownst to him, someone was watching his every move.
The meat and vegetables bearing the label of Ah-Fat’s farm had only been in the supermarket two weeks when disaster struck.
Ah-Fat was taken to court over allegations that his chicken meat was contaminated and had given several customers serious food poisoning.
The supermarket owner saved his own skin by dumping all Ah-Fat’s produce and suing him in court.
The government blocked all Ah-Fat’s bank accounts and carried out an investigation.
In the years since he set up his first laundry, Ah-Fat had been taken to court many times. He used to say he was in and out of Gold Mountain courts more frequently than his own