Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [212]
The neighbours and family who crammed the diulau hall roared with laughter at Kam Shan’s words. Cat Eyes knew that everyone in the Fong household, right down to the plough oxen, could read and write—they had all been taught by Six Fingers. She also knew that the Fongs would scoff at her now they knew she was illiterate. Her own man had thrown the first insult and now everyone would follow suit. Her mother-in-law gave a little laugh, but Cat Eyes did not notice. She was too busy looking for a wall against which she could knock herself. The brothel should have killed her, she thought ruefully, but instead she would be consigned to misery and humiliation in Hoi Ping.
Kam Shan took Yin Ling from her arms and gave the baby to his mother. As he did so, he whispered audibly in her ear:
“She may be illiterate but she earns good money. Half the fields you bought these last few years came from her wages.”
Cat Eyes was grateful for the lifeline. Her man had exposed her shortcomings, though it could just as well have been someone else. But now he extolled her worth, and that could only come from him. The trip had been overshadowed with anxiety. Now finally the sun had come out and her heart was set at rest.
Yin Ling woke up and began to thrash about restlessly in her sling. The cross-straps tightened around Cat Eyes’ breasts and she felt a warm gush of milk wet her jacket front. She quickly unfastened the sling and took the baby in her arms. After several months in the village, she had finally learned how to breastfeed in broad daylight as the village women did. But unlike them, she held the baby high against her exposed breast so that Yin Ling’s head concealed it like a large, round winter melon.
It was early and the cocks were still crowing in the village. The women, who got up early, were letting their chickens out and driving them onto the threshing floor. The dogs followed, wagging their tails and licking up the dew-wet chicken droppings which littered the ground. Cat Eyes breathed in the damp air through every pore of her body. It was peaceful if you got up early enough, she thought.
As she yawned lazily, the daughter and daughter-in-law of Mr. Au, the village tailor, appeared on the riverbank. As soon as Kam Shan had arrived in the village, Six Fingers got the tailor to come to the house and make them suits of clothes for summer and winter. The young women came with him to help make the buttonholes, so Cat Eyes knew them by sight. The Au clan may have been looked down on by the Fongs, but the tailor was one of its more prominent members; he and his daughters were tolerated at the diulau insofar as their services were required.
The daughter was just a girl of twelve. As she walked past Cat Eyes carrying the laundry basket and the baton for beating the dirty clothes, she saw the bar of soap in her basket and stopped to pick it up. Soap was a foreign curiosity to the villagers, and the girl rubbed it generously all over the clothes and her hands until she formed a rich lather. Cat Eyes was secretly annoyed; every time she came to the river and met the other women, her soap passed from hand to hand until it was reduced to a sliver. She started to cut the soap bar into smaller pieces with a knife when she went to wash clothes but the result was that by the time they had finished with it, not even a sliver remained.
“Cat Eyes, have your eyes always been like that?” asked the daughter-in-law.
“My mum told me that I woke up with them like this one morning when I was four or five.”
The young woman leaned up close and peered into Cat Eyes’ eyes. “Were your ancestors hairy yeung fan?” Cat Eyes grunted. “Not as hairy as your mother!” The other woman