Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [222]
Yin Ling’s temples began to throb as if praying mantises were battling inside her head, and her eyes bulged from their sockets. She crumpled her letter and threw it in the wastebasket. She lay down on the bed and stared hard at a dirty brown water stain on the ceiling until its edges blurred and she eventually fell asleep.
The crash that woke her up was the sound of the door slamming. Her mother had come home and her father, who had been waiting in the passage, shut it quickly behind her. In the silence of the night when even the alley cats were asleep in doorways, the sound echoed alarmingly up and down the road, making the doors and windows shake.
Yin Ling put her slippers on, shuffled to the door of her bedroom and opened it. Then she tiptoed to the top of the stairs. She could see her mother, a small leather bag in her hand, making straight for the kitchen. She dropped her bag on top of the stove and took a towel from the clothesline. Then she bent over the basin and began to wash her face.
Her father picked up her bag and weighed it in his hand. He lowered his voice: “How much did you lose?”
Her mother snatched back the bag, hung it over her shoulder and carried on washing her face. She was scrubbing it as if it was engrained with dirt and a whole river full of water would never wash it off. Finally her father lost patience. He grabbed her by the collar of her dress and hauled her back from the sink as if he was holding a chicken by the scruff of the neck.
“You haven’t got the money to buy Yin Ling a coat but you’ve got the money to throw away at mahjong.”
Her mother flung his hand away, rubbed at her eyes with a corner of the towel and, without looking up, retorted: “Buy her a coat? What’s a little squirt like that doing making eyes at the boys anyway? Are you trying to encourage her to behave like a slut? And, besides, you’re happy to give all that money to that bunch of lazybones and you try and stop me spending a cent of it on myself! That’s money I’ve earned, I’ll have you know!”
The “lazybones” her mother was referring to was the Chinese Benevolent Association. Her father spent a lot of time there during the day; he had no work to go to and Ah-Lai, the secretary, was a good friend of his. He knew its business inside out—in fact, he liked to get involved, so any money he had never stayed long in his pocket. Whether the Chinese School needed renovating, they were taking the government to court, raising money for disaster relief, or building a school or a hospital, her father only had to hear about it for the small change in his pocket to make its way into the Association coffers. It made her mother furious. She nagged him endlessly about not throwing money around as if he was a lord, but it was all water off a duck’s back as far as her father was concerned.
Now he retorted: “And who knows how you earn your money, eh?”
Cat Eyes’ face went scarlet, then white. She flushed and paled a few more times, then she lashed out at him with the towel and said furiously: “Just you tell me, Fong Kam Shan, how I earn that money!” The wet towel hit him on the cheek, raising a red welt, and drops of water trickled down his face. It seemed to Yin Ling as if her father’s hair was actually standing on end.
Kam Shan snatched the towel from Cat Eyes’ hand and flung it on the ground where it lay sodden and soft like a filleted fish.
“You think I didn’t see who brought you home that day?” he demanded.
Her mother sneered. “Oh, that’s what this is all about, is it? There was a snowstorm that day and I wanted you to come and fetch me, but could you be bothered?”
Her mother’s words stung, and her father fell silent. Fashionable folk in Vancouver all had cars nowadays and drove around town tooting their horns all the time. Not only had he no car, her father was lame and could not walk far either. It did not matter if it was blowing a blizzard, there was no way he could have fetched