Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [228]
Six Fingers now had two grandsons and two granddaughters, and considered herself lucky to have three living in the diulau with her. Kam Sau and Ah-Yuen lived in the school they ran in the local town and left their children at the diulau. Yiu Kei lived with his mother, Ah-Hsien, in her room upstairs in the diulau. Yiu Kei was of school age, but Six Fingers refused to let him study at his aunt and uncle’s school, and got a tutor in to teach him in the diulau instead. She insisted the school was too far away and the journey back and forth was too dangerous. Abductions of Gold Mountain families had decreased in recent years but Six Fingers still worried.
Or so she said. Her real reason (which she did not tell anyone) was that she was used to the clatter and chatter of three children running around the diulau. If Yiu Kei went to board at the school, she would have nothing to listen to. The quietness would be unsettling.
Ah-Lin stuck her needle into her hair to lubricate it, and asked Six Fingers: “Mrs. Kwan, how long has it been since Kam Sau’s dad last came home?” Now that she was in her sixties, Six Fingers was known respectfully as “Mrs. Kwan.”
“Years … I can’t even remember how many,” said Six Fingers with a faint smile. In fact, she remembered perfectly well. The last time Ah-Fat left for Gold Mountain she had been pregnant with Kam Sau, who was twenty-six this year. It was more than forty years since Six Fingers had married into the Fong family as an eighteen-year-old. It was more than forty years since that first night in the bridal chamber when Ah-Fat promised to take her to Gold Mountain.
And for all those years, Ah-Fat talked about coming home, but never said when. Every time he mentioned it, she scanned the calendar, looking for an auspicious date for his arrival. But every year the Dragon Boat Festival came and went without Ah-Fat. Six Fingers looked then to the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival. No sooner had they finished eating the moon cakes than she began to hope for his arrival in time for the new year. When the lanterns were taken down at the end of the New Year Festival, she finally admitted defeat. As each year passed her longings abated. She knew her husband was ashamed to come back bankrupt and broken and had convinced himself that his luck would change soon. This had been going on for more than ten years.
“He’s been away so long. Aren’t you worried he’s got another woman over there?” Ah-Lin asked.
It was nothing new for Gold Mountain men to go with prostitutes, or for them to take one as a concubine. As a young woman, Six Fingers had worried that Ah-Fat would take a “second wife” either in the village or in Gold Mountain. As the decades passed, her fears had faded and that sore place in her heart had grown a thick scab. But a rim of blood could still emerge from the old wound if Ah-Lin pressed hard enough. Ah-Fat’s letters home had become more and more infrequent.
Six Fingers forced a laugh. “He’s over seventy-five, and he never was a womanizer like your husband. He said he was coming home for good last year, but I told him not to. It’s too dangerous with the Japanese around. I told him to wait till the war’s over.”
Ah-Lin bit off the end of the thread and pulled her stool over to where Six Fingers sat. She looked at her and said hesitantly: “Mrs. Kwan, this is probably just someone’s idea of a joke, but my nephew from Wing On— he’s in Vancouver too—he came home last month. I went over to see him and he said that Ah-Fat … Ah-Fat.…”
Ah-Lin’s hesitancy infuriated Six Fingers. “Spit it out, woman!” she exclaimed. “Are you saying Ah-Fat’s taken a concubine and got another family over there?”
Ah-Lin gave a laugh. “Oh no, not that,” she