Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [260]
Looking at himself in the cloudy old mirror that hung on the wall, he could not help smiling in satisfaction. Even a suit which did not fit properly was still a suit. He needed to do something about his hair though. He went to the kitchen, poured a few drops of peanut oil into the palm of his hands, rubbed them on his hair and ran a comb through it. When he next looked in the mirror, his hair was slicked back in neatly separated strands, and now it was the suit that looked shabby.
Well, it could not be helped. He would just have to go as he was.
He looked at the old wall clock. It was only half past five. He wasn’t due at the Chinese Benevolent Association until seven o’clock, and the film started at eight, but, even so, he could not wait that long. His feet itched to get going. He picked up the bag he had prepared the night before and hastily left the house.
It was early spring. As he walked through the streets of Vancouver lined with cherry trees covered in blossom, he attracted more than a few curious looks. The reason was not the ill-fitting suit, or the limping gait, or even the strange-looking bag he carried in his arms, but the fact that he was muttering to himself as he went along.
He addressed a few words to the bag at every street corner.
“At the next corner, we turn east.”
“A few yards from this junction is where Yin Ling used to go to school.
“This street runs at a diagonal. When we get to the post office, we have to turn left.
“We come back the same way. If we do that, then we won’t get lost.”
When he approached the Association office it was still not six o’clock, but before he even crossed the street, he could see the group of young Chinese men gathered outside.
One. Two. Three … Ten. Eleven. Counting himself, that made twelve.
They had all arrived early.
These eleven men were demobbed soldiers in uniforms and peaked caps. He could not help noticing what a uniform did to a man—it made him looking dashing, taller, and straighter, it even put a glow in his face. An irrepressible pride brimmed in the eyes of every one of them.
He had never seen Kam Ho in uniform. He did not even have one photograph, he thought with regret. When Kam Ho joined up, he was already forty years old, old enough to be the father of all these men. Had the uniform imbued his brother with the same spirit? he wondered.
The soldiers who had come back safe and sound were big news in Vancouver. Every day the newspapers carried their pictures and the radio broadcast their voices. They went from talk to talk and interview to interview. From the moment they disembarked, they were borne along on clouds, and nothing had brought them down to earth yet.
All they’d fucking done was survive, Kam Shan thought bitterly.
By comparison with these fine young men, Kam Shan felt like a bedraggled, miserable specimen.
Today they were off to a film show at the Orpheum Theatre in Granville Street. Tickets cost thirty cents if you sat in the back or to the side. If he was going to the Canton Street theatre, he would not have parted with even twenty cents, but today was different. He would have happily spent three dollars on today’s show if he had to. Besides, it was Kam Ho’s money.
He’d divided the lump sum payout he received after Kam Ho’s death into two. He sent the larger portion to Hoi Ping. He had not told them of Kam Ho’s death so his mother still did not know that what she was spending was her son’s blood money. With Kam Ho and Cat Eyes both dead, there were no wage earners in the family and it would be a long time before Six Fingers received any more cheques from Gold Mountain.
The smaller portion he kept for himself. He had let the room after his father died and the rent, together with the cash he earned from selling bean sprouts, was enough to keep him. So he put his share of the money aside for a rainy day. And for something else as well, though he did not dare admit it.
It