Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [274]
Before her grandfather had time to answer, the door burst open and her mother came in carrying two bags of shopping.
“They’ve sent all the staff home. There’s a power outage,” she said to her grandfather.
He found her a clean bowl and chopsticks and served her some chicken soup. “Sit down and eat with Amy. She’s hardly eaten anything.”
As she ate, her mother caught sight of the piece of paper and pulled it towards her. When she saw what was drawn on it, her face looked thunderous and she slammed her bowl down, spattering rice all over the table.
“How many times have I told you, Dad, not to go filling Amy’s head with that nonsense?”
Her grandfather banged down his bowl too. “How long are you going to keep lying to her? Sooner or later she’s got to know who her family is. Don’t bother ever asking for your ancestors’ blessing if you go on refusing to acknowledge them!”
Yin Ling seized Amy by the hand. She dragged her outside, pushed her into the car and banged the door shut on her.
“Blessing from them? Fat chance! Being Chinese brought me nothing but misery. I’m not going to let Amy suffer the same way I did!” she shouted furiously out of the car window as she drove off.
1971
Vancouver, British Columbia
“Rain, what a mess this rain makes.…”
Kam Shan sat at the window looking moodily out at the rain. It was the second spell of wet weather they had had this spring. As the rain met the ground, there was a gentle hissing sound. It emanated not from the rain or the earth but from the rampant growth of lush grass. Rain had shrouded the city in a sort of wet haze all week. The grass absorbed the moisture and sprang up, in no time at all reaching waist high. The dandelions, not to be outdone, were even taller, their long stems twisting up through the grass, ending in yellow flowers and fluffy white heads.
Let it grow, Kam Shan thought to himself.
He had stopped weeding and cutting the lawn long ago. He had not touched it at all last year, and the vegetation had grown so tall it almost covered the window. In the end, it was reported to the city council and one day a heavy-duty grass-cutter roared up to his front door. Of course, a hefty bill followed in the wake of the cutter.
For a lawn to thrive it needed young people to play upon it. He and his two lodgers were far too old. Children had not chased and tumbled on the lawn for a very long time. Yin Ling had sent Amy away to a Catholic girls’ boarding school, and nowadays he only saw her at Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Yin Ling was a more frequent visitor than her daughter though that depended on how hard he worked to get her there.
“I’ve made too much chicken soup and there’s some left over, Yin Ling. Come over and take it away.”
“There’s a sale on at the Hudson’s Bay department store, Yin Ling, and I bought you a coat. Come and try it on.”
“I’ve got money left over this month, Yin Ling, you can have it.”
He sometimes felt it was demeaning to be bribing his daughter like this. Time after time, he said to himself fiercely that he would give nothing more, and then he’d see if she came. But he never found out, because he always dialed her phone number first.
Rat-a-tat-tat.
Someone was at the door.
Surely it could not be the postman. He had not been by for ages. Since China turned Red he had lost touch with his family over there. There were rumours, of course, and the Overseas Chinese press published hair-raising stories every day. The stories went by a succession of different names: first it was Land Reform, then Suppression of Counter-Revolutionaries, then the Anti-Rightist Campaign. The latest was the Cultural Revolution. The names kept changing but the substance of the stories stayed the same: it was always about who was in power and who had been booted out. Of those who were booted out, some lived, others died. Living all boiled down to the same thing, hardship. But there were many ways of dying. Some years ago, people from Hoi Ping had got word to him