Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [223]
After a long pause, he opened his mouth again and the words that came out had been stored up so long, they nearly burned his throat:
“If you’re so keen on cars, you’d have been better off staying in the Spring Garden instead of following me home.”
Yin Ling did not know what the Spring Garden was but she saw the effect on her mother. Cat Eyes began to shrivel away like a slug from salt. Then, she suddenly reached a hand out, grabbed the tea mug from the table and hurled it at the wall. A few moments passed before Yin Ling realized that it was not the wall which had exploded, but the mug. Her mother was squatting amid the fragments, her face buried in her hands.
“I want to die, I want to die, I want to die,” she wept shrilly.
This was not the first time Yin Ling had seen her mother and father fight, nor was it the first time she had seen her mother cry. But she had never seen her cry like this. The sound set her teeth on edge and gave her goose pimples all over.
“I’m not hearing this, I’m not hearing it,” Yin Ling whispered to herself over and over, jamming her hands against her ears.
She knew that someone in the room just next door would have heard the quarrel too, and was also silently pressing his hands over his ears.
Her grandfather.
I’m not staying a minute longer in this house.
Despair settled on Yin Ling like darkness.
2004
Hoi Ping County, Guangdong Province, China
Around noon, Mr. Auyung Wan On took Amy Smith to the nursing home to visit Tse Ah-Yuen.
Amy had changed her travel plans twice. She had planned to stay for one day, sign the documents entrusting the diulau to the local government and return to Vancouver via Hong Kong.
When she arrived, places such as Canton and Hoi Ping, a diulau called Tak Yin House and an old man called Tse Ah-Yuen had meant little to Amy. The only reason she had come was to fulfill a promise made to her mother.
But somehow, one day had turned into two, and two into three. Before she knew it, she had been in Hoi Ping for five days. Mr. Auyung had doggedly worked away at her imagination until he had finally sparked her interest. She wondered if she should change her return ticket yet again and stay a whole week. The university term was over, so she did not need to rush back to teach classes. But she did need to talk to Mark about whether they should postpone their Alaska trip.
Mark was Amy’s boyfriend, though she found it faintly comical to refer to him by that term. A boyfriend should be someone in his twenties. For a woman of nearly fifty to use the word about a man approaching sixty was as inappropriate as a wrinkly old lady donning a crotch-revealing miniskirt. But for the time being, Amy could think of no better word to use. She loathed the alternatives “lover,” “partner” or “co-habitee.”
Mark was a professor at the same university as Amy. She taught sociology and he taught philosophy—different departments but both within the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Humanities. There was quite a large number of professors in the faculty, however, and at first they were only on nodding terms. Then the head of the faculty retired and there was a big farewell party. Amy carried her martini over to Mark and they had their first conversation. Amy took the initiative that evening, flirting shamelessly with Mark on the pretext of being tipsy. She had just split up with her previous boyfriend and urgently needed to fill the gap in her life.
She had not picked him out at random. As she approached him, she noticed the white circular indentation at the base of the ring finger of his left hand. There had been a wedding ring there until recently. But that did not matter. The important thing was that he had taken it off.
She succeeded brilliantly in her flirting and, after three martinis, Mark was lying in the bed in her flat. He stayed all weekend. But they did not start to live together immediately. In fact, they remained weekend lovers for some time, meeting alternately at her flat and Mark’s. This rigidly impartial arrangement carried on for a year until Mark suggested