Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [224]
They shared an antipathy for the marriage certificate, but for different reasons. Mark was making extortionate alimony payments to a previous wife, which consumed almost half his monthly salary. The remainder was only enough to allow him a simple bachelor lifestyle. If that half had to be split in half again, he would find himself sleeping on a park bench. As for Amy, she had never been married for reasons which, to use her own words, went back to the dim and distant past.
The women in Amy’s family seemed destined to remain unmarried. Her mother’s mother, a woman with no name, whose nickname became her only name, had lived with her man, Amy’s maternal grandfather, for lifetime without being officially married. Although the headstone on her grave read “Mrs. Chow, wife of Fong Kam Shan,” these words were inscribed at the old man’s whim. Amy had never met the woman they called “Cat Eyes” because her mother, Fong Yin Ling, had left home young. By the time Yin Ling made up her mind to go home, her mother had died.
Amy’s mother, Yin Ling, had also never married. She just went from one man to the next. At first, she had stayed with each of them for a year or two. As time passed, each “grand amour” followed ever closer on the heels of the one before. The shortest lasted two days from start to finish. Amy happened along as a result of one of these fleeting encounters, and she still did not know who her birth father really was. Judging by the colour of her hair and eyes, the man, who never visited her mother again, must have been white. Yin Ling had no intention of giving her daughter a Chinese surname, so she chose the commonest English surname, Smith, when she registered her birth.
Maybe it’s in our genes, Amy thought.
At least, that was how she explained her view of marriage to Mark.
From passive acceptance in Cat Eyes’ case to active choice in Amy’s, the three generations of Fong women had all stayed away from marriage, though each for a different reason.
Mark listened to Amy in silence. He put his arms around her and gave a small sigh. Amy had expected Mark to breathe a sigh of relief but seemed to her there was almost a trace of pity in it. Amy was surprised.
Amy had arranged with Mark that they would set off for Alaska as soon as the term was over. It would be a holiday but also a chance to study Inuit culture. She had not expected to have to take a trip to China before Alaska, nor had she expected complications to arise. Alaska would have to be postponed.
When Mark took her to the airport, he had said to a sour-faced Amy: “This is your chance to find your roots.” Amy gave a bleak smile: “When you’re someone like me with a zero for a father and a zero-point-five of a mother”—she paused—“and the roots you’ve got are in half an inch of poor soil on a rock, there’s nothing much to see. What’s the point of looking for more roots?” But since the day she sat at the foot of the stairs in Tak Yin House with a stack of letters in her hands, she had felt something changing inside her. The photo of her grandmother smiling at the camera, holding a baby in her arms by the No-Name River, caught Amy off-guard. She did have roots, after all.
Every discovery Amy had made in Hoi Ping she wrote about in her emails to Mark. Mark was lazy when it came to writing anything other than academic research, and was even less keen on phoning for a chat. Amy wrote to Mark because she needed to get all this off her chest. She did not expect him to reply to her messages, so she was surprised when he did.
I get it.
What next?
Be patient. It takes time to get at the truth.
Unbelievable.
Dig a bit deeper.
“Why not?”
As she discovered more about the Fongs, Amy’s excitement rose to fever pitch. Now she found herself moved by Mark’s comments. In the three years they had lived together, this was the first time that Amy had seen a chink in his armour of nonchalance. Where she was concerned, he was obviously genuinely