Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [263]
That night, the League took an emergency decision to send its members back to their schools. They were to travel through the night and have their teachers and students make a new national flag to be hoisted over the school for the next morning.
It was after midnight by the time Ah-Yuen arrived in Sam Ho Lei Village and felt his way through the pitch dark to the school gate. A League member had given him a ride on the back of his bicycle to the entrance to the village.
There was not a sound to be heard except for the slashing of his bamboo cane in the undergrowth. He used it to ward off snakes, which were a common hazard if you were out and about in the countryside at night. But he was also using it to beat time as he hummed out of tune:
Onward, ever onward,
To the sun we are marching forth,
Treading on our dear mother earth.
The nation’s hopes to bear on our shoulders,
We are an army of undefeated strength.
Ah-Yuen had learned the new anthem this evening, one of many things he had just heard and seen and studied for the first time in his life during the League’s meeting in Canton. Some of the leaders were underground Communist Party members, but Ah-Yuen did not discover this until later.
The villages of Sam Ho Lei and Spur-On were mere waterholes compared to the ocean that was Canton. And Ah-Yuen was a little frog at the bottom. He did not want to go home, he really did not. The more he learned, the more he wanted to go on learning. But he could not get out of this nighttime trip to Sam Ho Lei because the League had given him a task to perform.
The gates to Ah-Yuen’s school were shut for the night and he did not want to wake the old gatekeeper, so he climbed over the wall into the schoolyard. He went to Kam Sau’s room and knocked gently on the window. “Open up…!” A light came on before he had finished speaking; with her husband away, Kam Sau slept so lightly that the smallest sound wakened her.
She opened the door. At the sight of his heavily bandaged head, her knees almost buckled under her. “What … what…?” she gasped, her lips trembling in terror.
“It’s nothing!” Ah-Yuen was quick to reassure her. “I got hit by a stone.” He went straight to their rattan trunk, opened the lid, and began to turn out its contents.
“Have we got any red material?” he asked.
“What do you want red material for at this time of night?”
“To make a flag. For the New China. Canton’s been liberated.”
“So quickly?” Kam Sau’s eyes were like saucers, astonishment and joy mingling on her face.
Then she went on: “You won’t find any in here. There’s some at the diulau. We used it when we got married, and Mum put it away afterwards.”
“There’s no time. By eight in the morning, we’ve got to raise the flag along with all the other schools.”
Kam Sau sat down on the bed, and considered waking the other teachers to ask for red cloth. Ah-Yuen looked at the quilt which Kam Sau had hurriedly thrown aside. “Get some scissors!” he said. “The quilt cover will do. It’s red. There’s a bit of red embroidery on it but no one will notice.”
As they tore up the quilt cover and made the flag, Kam Sau said: “We’ve had a letter from Kam Shan. The papers in Gold Mountain are full of news about riots and massacres here. He asked if we want to sneak out to Hong Kong. Then we could go from there to Canada. The Canadian government is allowing Chinese in now.”
“Huh!” said Ah-Yuen scornfully. “Imperialist propaganda. Tell your brother not to believe a word of it.”
They finally had the quilt cover opened out flat on the table. It made a big red square which gave the room a warm glow. Stuck in his waistband, Ah-Yuen had a copy of the Chinese Business News which some members of the Teachers’ League had brought in from Hong Kong last month. He took a look at the Chinese flag on the front page. They did not have any yellow fabric but they had some yellow paper left over from the craft class.