Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [221]
He took something out of his pocket and put it on her table. “A good thing it didn’t break,” he said. It was a pottery pig with a big mouth and big ears and a small slit in its head, the kind of moneybox Chinese New Year lucky money was kept in.
Then he got a few dimes from his pocket, letting them drop into the belly of the pig with a tinkle. “I’ve given up smoking,” he said. “I’m saving up to get my granddaughter an overcoat. Today I’ve only saved enough for a button, but in a couple of days it’ll be enough for a sleeve.”
Yin Ling pulled a face and did not speak. Bitter words festered inside her, and they went something like this: “It’s no good. What’s the point? I can’t wait. By the time the piggy’s full up, the etiquette class will be over.”
I can’t dance the tango with Johnny wearing that coat, she thought.
I’ll get sick, that’s it, I’ll get sick. Dizziness, tummyache, a cold—any excuse will do!
She started to work out how to avoid Miss Watson’s class if the teacher paired her up with Johnny for the tango.
“You know, your mum’s job is hard on her,” said her grandfather.
Yin Ling was thinking she ought to get up and give his leg a rub for
him, but her body felt like a lead weight and she could not move. Even as she watched him hobble out of the room and downstairs, she still could not move.
Later, she heard the front door open and then click shut. Her mother must have gone out. That left just the two men in the room. They did not talk, and silence filled the house. Then gradually an acrid smell filtered from the room where they sat, through the cracks under the doors, into every room and up the stairs. She smelled it in her nostrils and it caught in her throat.
Her father and grandfather were smoking.
Give up smoking? Like hell! she said fiercely to herself.
Yin Ling tore a page from her school exercise book, sprawled on the bed and got ready to write a letter. She wrote the characters for “grandmother” in Chinese, then paused. It was not that she did not know what to say, it was that she did not know how to say it in Chinese. She spoke Cantonese at home with her family, but she still laboured under a handicap; she could neither read nor write Chinese.
In fact, when she started her third year in primary school, her grandfather had wanted to send her to classes at the Overseas Chinese School on East Pender Street. Yin Ling was always finding reasons not to go—it was too windy, it was raining, it was too hot or too cold. And of course she could always wheel out the excuse of a headache or a temperature. When she ran out of excuses and had to go, the only thing that she enjoyed was making paper cuts and dragon lanterns. Learning the strokes of Chinese characters bored her rigid. At the end of two years at the school, she could still only make out the characters in the lunar calendar.
Yin Ling wrote her first sentence.
The sentence should have had three words in it, but Yin Ling could not write the middle word. She left a big space between the “I” and the “you,” because the middle word should have been huge. She racked her brains but could not think how to write the character. Eventually, she stuck in an English word.
“I HATE you.”
That was just the beginning. Yin Ling had many sentences queuing up to follow the first. Like “Granny and Auntie Kam Sau, why don’t you earn your own money? You’re always so well-dressed in your photographs, but I don’t even get a new overcoat because my mum sends all the leftover money to you every month.” Like “My classmates always tell jokes about ‘Chinks trying to make a dollar out of ten cents’ but in our family, every single cent has to make a dollar. And it’s all because of you.”
Yin Ling had been storing up all these resentments for years and now they were like a river in spate, crested waves tumbling by, one after