Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [254]
As he held the bag in his hands, Kam Shan was overwhelmed with sadness.
The next day, Kam Shan went to the funeral home to order a gravestone for Cat Eyes. When it came to the inscription, Kam Shan realized that in all their years together, he had never asked Cat Eyes’ formal given name, so he decided on “Mrs. Chow, wife of Fong Kam Shan.” Cat Eyes could never have imagined that in death, she would be given the title she longed for all her life.
Ah-Fat and Kam Shan went to market to sell their bean sprouts once week.
After their work was finished, they went to Shanghai Street or Canton Street for a bowl of jellied bean curd and pan-fried dumplings, and browse through the Chinese newspapers, which the owner laid out on the table. They were up early on market days and there was no time for breakfast, so this meal was breakfast and lunch combined. They ate in leisurely fashion, reading the papers as they did so.
Today they were in the Lei King Restaurant. They had a bowl of soy milk each to start and then Ah-Fat ordered a portion of lotus dumplings and one of char siu dumplings, four spring rolls, two portions of pan-fried dumplings, a bowl of shrimp soup and finally, a bowl of trotters in ginger. “However will you eat all that, Dad?” exclaimed Kam Shan. “What we don’t eat we can take away,” said Ah-Fat.
Although summer was nearly over, the weather was still warm and the hot soy milk made Ah-Fat break out in a sweat. He reached into his pocket for a handkerchief to wipe his face, and felt a letter in there. It was from Six Fingers. Since the fall of Hong Kong, the mail routes had been disrupted and hardly any letters got through—only two in the last couple of years.
It was a short letter, only a few lines, addressed to Kam Shan.
My dear son,
A year has passed since your last letter. We are under constant bombardment so the rare letters which arrive are worth their weight in gold. There is tumult throughout the countryside and terrible things, too numerous to mention, have happened. I will tell you more when we meet. Fortunately, your sister Kam Sau survived the calamity that befell her, and I hope that things will be better for her in the future. Are you all right in Gold Mountain, Kam Shan? Is there any news of Kam Ho? Yin Ling must be so grown up by now that I would hardly recognize her. I burn incense and pray to the Bodhisattva every day that you are all safe and well and that we will meet again after this war is over.
Ah-Fat had had the letter in his pocket for a few days. Every day he took it out and scanned it again, and the paper was beginning to fray at the edges. There was something odd about the letter that puzzled him; it was short, but still asked for news of family members—except Cat Eyes and himself. Six Fingers never asked about Cat Eyes, as if there was no such person in the Fong family. For their part, they had not told her of Cat Eyes’ death and Yin Ling’s disappearance. But now, in this letter, Six Fingers had made no mention of Ah-Fat either. It struck him as odd. It occurred to him he ought to sit down one day and write her a letter to ask for an explanation, but he did not know if the letter would ever arrive.
Kam Shan was starving. He wolfed down a pan-fried dumpling, the meat juices leaving his chin shiny with oil. Ah-Fat noticed that his son’s shirt cuffs were frayed and worn and he thought to himself that it certainly made a difference when there was no woman at home. They may have been poor when Cat Eyes was alive, but at least the men of the house went out looking neat and tidy. Kam Shan started to look dishevelled almost immediately following her death. Ah-Fat sighed: “Kam Shan, when things settle down and the war is over, you and me are going back to Hoi Ping so we can fix you up with another wife.” Kam Shan turned one page after another until his fingers were covered in newsprint. Then he picked