Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [258]
When the braids were finished, Six Fingers put a basket over one arm and took Wai Heung by the hand. “Come along. Granny’s going to pick cucumbers, and you can pick a bunch of flowers for me,” she said. These days, the Fongs’ fields were all rented to tenant farmers; they had kept only a small plot for growing their own vegetables and fruit. As they went out, Six Fingers thought she heard a crow cawing harshly in the tree. She looked up, but it was actually a magpie peeking down cheekily from a branch. She felt a leap of happiness and her face relaxed into a smile.
First, the lucky spider, now the magpie. She felt sure they were signs which boded well for the day ahead.
It had rained overnight and the air was rinsed fresh and clean. The hibiscus by the roadside had exploded into bloom. Frogs in the ditches croaked loudly. Six Fingers picked a hibiscus flower, shook the dew off it and tucked it behind her granddaughter’s ear. “And when’s my little Wai Heung going to get married?” she asked.
Wai Heung giggled again and began to hum: “The moon shines bright on the ocean bay, my mum’s marrying me to Gold Mountain far away!” Six Fingers was startled. “Who’s been teaching you that nonsense?” she snapped. Wai Heung quailed at the sudden change in her Granny’s mood. “Second Auntie,” she mumbled, meaning Kam Ho’s wife, Ah-Hsien. “That imbecile! Fancy filling your head with stuff like that! You’re not going anywhere, Wai Heung. You just stick with your granny.” The girl nodded obediently and the smile gradually returned to Six Fingers’ face.
They arrived at the edge of the fields. The second crop of rice had been harvested and the bare earth stretched away into the distance, dotted with a few bent figures. The tenant farmers’ wives and children were busy cleaning up the field. Six Fingers and her late mother-in-law, Mrs. Mak, may have differed on many points, but they shared a passion for owning land. In Six Fingers’ view, having money was all well and good but it could all vanish. The only thing that could be relied on was land: no rat could nibble it, no eagle could snatch it away, no thief could steal it. Six Fingers had a mental map of every one of their fields. Those fields had a few gaps in them at the moment because she had had to sell some during the Japanese occupation. The thought of those gaps caused Six Fingers a stab of pain.
She vowed to herself that one day she would buy that land back and fill in every one of those gaps.
The cucumbers were nearly over, and only a canopy of large leaves remained. Six Fingers and Wai Heung felt between the leaves of each plant but without success. But soon they discovered that the rainfall had knocked the remaining cucumbers off their stems. Six Fingers felt in the mud and found a few decent ones, which she put in her basket. Then they heard a distant shout: “Kam Sau’s mum, where are you?”
“It’s my granddad,” said Wai Heung.
Six Fingers straightened up, and saw Mak Dau stumbling, puffing and panting, across the fields holding something aloft in one hand.
“Letters … from Gold Mountain!” he shouted.
“Two of them. One from Kam Sau’s dad, the other from Kam Shan.” Six Fingers was startled. It was rare for Ah-Fat to write to her in recent years. If he had something to tell her, he usually got Kam Shan to write the letter.
“You open them and read them to me,” she said. “My hands are covered in mud.”
“Which one shall I open first?” asked Mak Dau with a wicked smile on his face.
“Don’t give me that nonsense! Whichever you like.”
“I know what ‘whichever you like’ means,” said Mak Dau, still looking mischievous. He opened Ah-Fat’s letter and began to read. It cost him considerable effort and the sweat stood out on his forehead. As a boy, he had attended Mr. Auyung’s classes along with Kam Shan and Kam Ho, but only for a short time. He could not make much sense of the first lines of Ah-Fat’s letter.
Word comes from the North of something, something…
When I first hear the news, tears wet something…
I turn to my wife and children, sorrowful no more,
Something