Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [256]
Ah-Fat, still barefoot, leapt for the door. Gold Mountain Cloud followed and threw his shoes after him: “Such a child!” she said.
In a few moments he was back, puffing and panting, and stood leaning against the wall, unable to speak. Gold Mountain Cloud could see tears in his eyes. They spilled down over his high cheekbones and collected, glittering, in the groove of his faded old scar. Gold Mountain Cloud had never seen Ah-Fat cry. “What on earth’s the matter?” she kept asking. Finally Ah-Fat got the words out: “The Japs … they’ve surrendered.”
They sat down at the table and resumed their interrupted lunch. Ah-Fat took a bite out of a lotus dumpling, then dropped it into his bowl, took a spring roll, bit into it and threw that down too. He could not eat. Then he blurted out:
“Cloud, I can go home now. I’ve never seen my daughter, or my son-in-law or my grandchildren, not once. My wife probably won’t even recognize me. When she writes now, she never even asks after me. She must be really angry with me.”
He talked on, but Gold Mountain Cloud said nothing. With her chopsticks, she pinched a few remaining bean sprouts which had escaped from the spring roll, moving them around the bottom of her bowl but making no attempt to lift them to her mouth. It suddenly occurred to Ah-Fat that Gold Mountain Cloud had no family left in Guangdong, her elder brother having died in Montreal some years ago.
He looked at her and put the question carefully: “What if I take you back to Hoi Ping? Will you come?” Her chopsticks came to a halt, and the scraps of bean sprouts trembled and dropped off.
“As your … what?” she asked.
Ah-Fat felt his mouthful of spring roll turn to grit. He worked and worked at it with his tongue and finally managed to swallow it down.
“My wife’s a good woman; she’ll treat you with respect. So long as you don’t mind.”
Gold Mountain Cloud gave a short laugh. “I’d be treated as your second wife—at my age, with one foot in the grave. My reputation would be in shreds.”
Ah-Fat said nothing, just lit a cigarette and inhaled. Swirls of smoke came and went across his face, but there was no disguising his uneasiness.
Then he stubbed his cigarette butt out in the bowl and abruptly got to his feet. “Cloud, you’re only three years younger than my wife. She can treat you as a sister. If I decide to bring my sister home to live out her old age, who’s going to make a fuss? You get your things together, and I’ll get Kam Shan to find out the boat times.”
And then he was gone. By the time Cloud made up her mind to go after him he had covered quite some distance. The sun was still bright and a long shadow nibbled at Ah-Fat’s heels. “Wait!” she shouted. Ah-Fat turned back to see her cupping her hands around her mouth.
“Ask your wife what she thinks!”
Ah-Fat mumbled yes and hurried home to write his letter. He had not written for a long time. The materials he used for his letter-writing business had been stowed away in a corner of the attic when they cleaned up after Cat Eyes died. He brought them down and dusted off the rolls of paper. There was a crack in the ink stone, he noticed, and the paper had yellowed. But they would do.
He ground the ink, laid out the paper and wrote in shaky characters: “My dear wife.” Then he stopped. He racked his brains but for the life of him he could not think what to say. Then suddenly, lines of the classical poet Du Fu came to him, from the poem “On hearing that Imperial troops have recaptured Henan and Hebei,” and he wrote:
Word comes from the North of towns retaken
When I first hear the news, tears wet my gown
I turn to my wife and children, sorrowful no more
Rolling up our poem scrolls, we are wild with joy.
Once he had these lines from the poem down on the paper, it seemed to clear his head, and he wrote fluently. He reread up and down the page, time and again, well pleased. His brushwork was as bold as ever. He added a final line:
Like General Lian Po of ancient times, I may be old, but I can still chew my food. What do you think of my calligraphy, Ah-Yin?
He finished, sealed the