Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [27]
He had asked Red Hair. “You young devil, you’re a worrywart. All you have to do is tag along with me. There’s always a way to make a living.” But Ah-Fat knew that this time even Red Hair was stumped. That morning he had seen him take something out of the bottom of his shoe. It was a fifteendollar draft that he was about to send home, but then he put it back again. Red Hair was leaving himself a way out.
Ah-Fat had no way out. Behind Ah-Fat stood his mother, with her swollen, inflamed eyes. Those eyes gnawed away, wolf-like, at Ah-Fat’s calves. Ah-Fat just had to shut his eyes, gather his strength and run forward.
Ah-Fat was running for his life.
Gradually, over recent years, Vancouver’s Chinatown had shown signs of growing, across Cormorant Street, and over Douglas Street and Store Street. These were now lined with Chinese-owned stores and lodgings. There was even a scattering of Chinese living in Fisgard Street, a little to the north. Streets only in name, they were actually dirt roads with no sidewalks or gutters. In fact, even calling them dirt roads was doing them a favour because they were very narrow. In the narrowest places, the storekeepers displayed their goods in baskets which they pushed six inches or a foot into the street. Then they sat on a stool at the front of their stall. If someone living on the other side of the street happened to come out of their house, the storekeeper could stretch out an arm and grasp a cigarette passed to him by the other. They could exchange all the gossip of Chinatown across the “street” without ever needing to raise their voices.
Chinatown was in the low-lying part of Victoria. If you thought of the city as a giant bowl, then Chinatown was the hollow at the bottom. Whenever it rained, all of the city’s water collected and ran into it. Even clean water went black as it swept down into the muddy bottom.
The dirt roads were flanked by densely packed houses made of thin boards nailed together. Most were of one storey, although here and there were two-storey buildings, but they all looked like workmen’s huts, with gaps of varying widths between the wooden boards. The muddy rainwater leaked in through the doors and wall cracks, adding a layer of black grime to the inner walls and the bed legs, so the men inside had to take off their shoes, roll up their trousers and go barefoot. In just a few steps their legs would be black too. When the sun shone outside and the water retreated, a layer of silt remained in the houses. Of course, this was not pure mud. It was usually mixed with vegetable leaves, fishbones, eggshells, old shoe uppers and sometimes dead rats. This rich mixture stuck to the bottom of the men’s shoes, and was trodden from one room to another and from one street to another, until the whole of Chinatown was impregnated with its rich colour and smell.
Not all of Chinatown was so dilapidated, however. There was one brickbuilt house on Fisgard Street, which, although it was a low, single-storey affair, was built of good honest bricks, and tiled with real tiles. When the sun shone down, the brightness glared off it. And on Store Street there was another building, so square and flat it looked like a box of Pirate-brand cigarettes lying on its side. Most of the time, its door was closed, as if closely guarding a secret. There were no stalls in the street in front of the door, and there were never any men resting and sunning themselves in the corner against the wall. Its door did not bear even a shop sign. It was a pity that the only two remotely presentable-looking buildings in the whole of Chinatown were not lived in, at least not by the living.
The low, single-storey building on Fisgard Street was the temple of Tam Kung, who was worshipped by the people from Guangdong Province. Chinatown belonged