Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [213]
“Gold Mountain soap is really nice. The honey locust pods we use at home for washing wouldn’t make much lather even if you rubbed it till all the skin came off your hands,” she said with a heartfelt sigh.
“If you like Gold Mountain so much, ask Cat Eyes if she’ll let you be Kam Shan’s second wife and take you to Gold Mountain with them,” said the daughter-in-law.
The girl flushed bright red, and Cat Eyes went pink too. After a pause she said: “Even if you were the first wife, you wouldn’t make it to Gold Mountain. The government isn’t letting any new people in.”
“Even so, she’d still be OK,” said the daughter-in-law. “She could be the junior wife and just stay in the diulau eating sticky rice all day and being waited on by servants. It would be better than the way we live, sewing and sewing till we go blind from the work, scrimping and saving every cent.”
Cat Eyes felt like saying that life was hard in Gold Mountain too, but she knew that would sound too much like a lie to them, and bit back the words. Instead she bent her head silently over her suckling baby.
The tailor’s daughter-in-law was about to go down to the water’s edge when Cat Eyes’ basket caught her eye. Squatting down, she began to rifle through all the dirty clothes. When she reached the bottom of the basket, she found something long and thin and gauzy. Picking it out, she asked Cat Eyes: “What’s this?”
Cat Eyes had finished feeding Yin Ling and was fastening her jacket. Glancing sideways she said: “Silk stockings.” “How can they be stockings? They wouldn’t keep the cold out, they’re so thin. It would be like wearing nothing on your legs.”
Cat Eyes smiled. “What do you know about stockings? Gold Mountain men like their women to wear stockings. They like it when it looks as if you’re wearing nothing on your legs.”
The other woman spread her fingers out in the stockings and, holding them up, peered through them. The sun filtered through the sheer fabric creating radiating patterns of light. Then she balled them up in her hand. “Cat Eyes, lend me them to wear for a few days so my husband can enjoy seeing them on me, please?”
“No, I can’t,” said Cat Eyes. “Kam Shan bought them for me. He’ll be angry if you go off with them.” She was about to snatch them back but the other woman gripped them so tightly in her fist that the veins stood out livid on the back of her hand.
“It’s just a pair of stockings! Why are you making such a fuss about them, Cat Eyes?” And she continued spitefully: “After all, you must have seen all there is to see in the business you do in Gold Mountain.”
Cat Eyes felt a great chasm opening up before her. No matter how hard she scrabbled to keep her footing, she knew she was going to slide into the void. In her mind she saw Six Fingers’ face cloud over when she looked at her, and it finally dawned on her: it had little to do with the fact that she could not read or write and everything to do with her past. It would dog her wherever she went. There was no escaping the dark shadow it cast over her life.
It grew suddenly overcast, the rays of sunshine expiring in the clouds before they could even fully emerge. Cat Eyes hurriedly pushed Yin Ling back into the sling, picked up her basket, still with the unwashed garments in it, and scurried back to the diulau.
She could not stay here, not for a single day more.
Year nineteen of the Republic (1930)
Spur-On Village, Hoi Ping County, China
Six Fingers was awake before the cock crowed. Something on her mind had nudged her awake. It was just a trifling thing, no bigger than a mustard seed, but as the years went by, she slept more lightly and found she could indeed be woken up by something as small as a mustard seed.
It was the thought of the pigs’ trotters braised with ginger that roused Six Fingers. She had started them the night before and they were nearly done. They just needed reheating