Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [232]
Most humbly, your son Kam Ho,
The tenth day of the fourth month of year thirty of the Republic, Paris, France
Kam Shan rapped Yin Ling’s bowl with his chopsticks. “Did you hear what your uncle said? You study hard and get into university, then you’ll understand everything and the yeung fan won’t be able to do the dirty on us ever again!”
Her mother turned around. “Huh! What does it matter what she studies? She still has to get married and have babies. It’s much more important for her to get a job and earn her living so I don’t have to carry on slogging away till I die!”
Her father grimaced and began to mutter something about “a woman’s ideas.…” but then bit back the words, clearly trying to keep his temper under control.
Dinner passed peacefully. For the first time ever, her mother drank a glass of rice wine with her father and grandfather. When she finished the wine, she had a coughing fit. The coughs got more and more violent until she made a dash for the sink and spewed everything up. Her mother had been vomiting a lot recently, Yin Ling noticed. Her father pulled a towel down from the clothesline and gave it to her to wipe her mouth. “If you can’t hold your liquor, then don’t drink,” he said. “No one’s holding a gun to your head.” Yin Ling noticed that he was speaking to her mother unusually gently today.
When Yin Ling had finished her dinner, she got up to go to her room, but her mother shouted at her.
“Can’t you wash the dishes when someone’s got the meal ready for you? A big girl of eighteen like you, can’t you do anything but hang around boys? Such a lazybones! When I was eight years old I was getting the dinner for the whole family.…”
Her mother’s words buzzed in Yin Ling’s ears like a persistent fly.
Yin Ling started to count. One, two, three, four. If her mother did not shut up by the time she reached ten, she would smash the plate in her hand to smithereens. But by the time she reached eight, her mother had gone to her room.
Her father and grandfather lit their cigarettes and the room filled with acrid, foul-smelling smoke.
She could hear her mother’s dry coughs, which sounded as if they might turn into another bout of vomiting. Suddenly the sounds stopped. Cat Eyes came out of her room, dressed up and carrying her purse.
“Are you going out in this rain?” asked Yin Ling’s father, scowling.
The only answer he got was a grunt. As Cat Eyes sat on a stool to put her shoes on, Kam Shan’s face was dark with rage.
“You won’t rest until you lose every last cent, is that it?” he shouted, thumping the table so hard with his fist that the tea mugs jumped and dark liquid trickled down from their lids.
“You can smoke and drink to your heart’s content, but you won’t let me play a few games of mahjong!” Cat Eyes retorted, and left the house without looking back.
There was a long silence in the room.
“It’s not proper for a woman to go out to work to support the whole family,” her grandfather finally said.
Ah-Fat had shut his café a couple of years ago. While it was open, at least he had a bit of pocket money, enough to keep him in cigarettes. After he shut it, he could not even afford a cheap ticket to the opera on Canton Street.
“Kam Shan, your studio business is going from bad to worse. No one wants photos of themselves in wartime. And if they do, they go to the big studios. Why don’t you go and get yourself a job, one where you can sit down, just for a few hours each day? Wouldn’t that be better than nothing?”
Kam Shan shook his head. “It’s not as if I haven’t looked. The only places hiring are munitions factories. You have to be on your feet from morning till night. I can’t do that.”
“Or we can go and buy some beans, sprout them and sell the bean sprouts in yeung fan shops, how about that?” his father tried again. “You don’t need much cash to start a business like that, and what we don’t sell we can eat at home. Ah-Tong, who lives at the end of the street, does it, and he seems to be making a bit of money.