Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [219]
She lay in bed with her hands clutched over her thudding heart, then realized it was her mother and father fighting.
Yin Ling had not had a chance to talk to her mother for a long time.
Sometimes they did not see each other from one week to the next. Her mother did not get home until after midnight from her shift at the Lychee Garden Restaurant and when Yin Ling got up to go to school in the mornings, her mother was still asleep. For months, Yin Ling had wanted her mother to take her to the department store in Dupont Street to buy a new overcoat. The coat she was wearing was a cut-down one of her mother’s; the cuffs were threadbare and there was a small, black hole on the pocket where her father’s cigarette had burned it. Her mother had Mondays off. So Monday evening was the only time when they could sit down together for a meal and talk.
Today was Monday.
But at tonight’s dinner, both Yin Ling and her mother, Cat Eyes, had been preoccupied. Normally her mother ate all her meals at the restaurant. When she did eat at home, the atmosphere at the dinner table was so tense that Yin Ling found it next to impossible to break it with a conversation, especially one involving money.
Her father’s leg was still no better. He could do no physical work at all, apart from taking the odd portrait photograph. The bits of cash he made scarcely covered his cigarettes each month. Her grandfather’s café was still going, but by the time he had paid the cook and the rent, the income was only enough to buy a ticket to the Cantonese opera.
Yin Ling had often heard her mother whispering quietly in her father’s ear about the café. “How come it never goes into the red?” she would say. “If it starts losing money, he’d have to shut up shop and be done with it.” His father would shout at her to keep her mouth shut, but Yin Ling knew that her father hoped that her grandfather would close the business too, although for a different reason. Her father wanted him to go back to Hoi Ping and settle down with her grandmother, while her mother wanted him to help out more around the house in Gold Mountain.
The only person who earned a proper salary in the house was Cat Eyes. She was paid weekly and her cheque had to be split many different ways. One bit was set aside to be sent home to Granny. A letter would arrive from Yin Ling’s granny every couple of months, and every letter would say the same: the harvest was poor, they couldn’t collect the rents, there were so many mouths to feed, the cost of living had gone up. Cat Eyes could not read so Kam Shan read the letter out to his father in a loud voice which, Cat Eyes knew, was intended for her ears. Cat Eyes said nothing in front of her father-in-law but outside of his hearing, she would say to Kam Shan: “It would be cheaper to support a Buddhist monastery than your family.” Kam Shan was not pleased by such talk but he had to listen. Cat Eyes’ cheque fed, clothed and sheltered the whole family, an unpalatable fact which bowed Kam Shan’s shoulders.
Yin Ling’s mother might complain but at the end of every month, come rain or shine, she never failed to send money back to Hoi Ping. Some of what remained had to go towards paying Granddad’s debts. After the collapse of his farming business, Ah-Fat was left owing substantial amounts of money and from time to time the creditors would come calling.
Basic necessities such as food and utilities also made demands on Cat Eyes’ wages. By the time that cheque had been fought over, only a few cents remained. Cat Eyes hung on to them like grim death, and used them to buy a few nice bits and pieces for herself. If Yin Ling wanted a new overcoat, she would have to winkle the money out of her mother. To do that, she would have to catch her mother in an odd moment of generosity.
As soon as Cat Eyes sat down at the table, Yin Ling directed a sidelong glance at her. She was unable to make out what sort of mood her mother was in; those large, feline eyes, their irises overcast with green, moved so little they seemed to have been