Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [277]
Fong Tak Fat (1863–1945)
Kwan Suk Yin (1877–1952)
Fong Kam Sau (1913–1952)
Fong Yiu Kei (1930–1939)
Tse Wai Kwok (1934–1941)
Tse Wai Heung (1937–1952)
Erected in loving memory by their Canadian descendants, 2004
The burial ground was on top of a hill and the narrow road wound up to it through dense clumps of bamboo. The wind had scattered white flowers under their feet, probably from graves which had been swept and tidied at the Festival of Qing Ming only a month ago. The site was a hillock on which clusters of graves jostled higgledy-piggledy for space. “Are all these Gold Mountain families?” Amy asked. “All the families in these villages have relatives overseas,” Mr. Auyung said, “so I suppose you could say they’re all Gold Mountain families.”
Mr. Auyung had helped Amy choose the gravestone and the inscription. In a red cloth bag, she had the remains of Fong Tak Fat: some nail clippings wrapped in silk. Kam Shan had cut them from Ah-Fat’s hand when his body lay in its coffin before burial. Kam Shan had passed the silk wrapping and its contents to Yin Ling and she had taken it with her to each of the houses where she lived. Just before Amy left for China, Yin Ling gave it to her daughter.
Amy took the trowel and dug a small hole at the foot of the tombstone. The soil was a strange colour, it seemed to Amy, and a little shiver ran over her. She put the cloth bag into the hole, covered it with earth and firmed it down. With the bag she was burying a lifetime of secrets, now to be swallowed up by the silent earth.
Mr. Auyung sighed: “A Gold Mountain promise that in the end could not be kept. What a pity.”
“I don’t see it like that. There are some promises which are never kept but still mean more than kept ones. They’re more….”
She struggled to find the right adjective in Chinese, and finally gave up and said: “…profound.”
She used the English word, but Mr. Auyung understood anyway.
“There’s still a big gap in the Fong family history which I need to fill. You’re the only descendant of the fourth generation and I still know very little about your adult life. Can you fill me in on that?” Mr. Auyung asked.
“Ever the investigator!” said Amy with a smile. “Actually, Fong family history has become less colourful with every generation, and when it comes to mine, it is disgustingly conventional. It’s simply the story of the daughter of a Chinese single mother who was always looked down on by white people, but whose one desire was to drag her daughter out of the mud and give her a head start in the world. That mother worked in menial jobs for her whole life and spent every last cent of her earnings trying to turn her daughter into an upper-class white girl. She had lessons in piano, art and ballet, everything an upper-class child was supposed to learn. Then she was sent to a private Catholic school. Her mother wanted her to become doctor or a lawyer or an accountant. She never imagined her daughter would sneak off and study sociology at Berkeley, using the school fees her mother had sweated blood to save up, because she had absolutely no interest in anything else.
“The path that girl took through life was the precise opposite of what her mother expected. Instead of studying hard, she joined every political movement going and was present at every single demonstration. Instead of finding herself a nice man to marry—he had to be white, of course—she got involved with one useless lover after another. In an odd twist of fate, instead of leaving every vestige of her Chinese inheritance behind her, she ended up studying Chinese at university. And to cap it all, a Chinese man has just inveigled her into acknowledging to the whole world that she half Chinese.”
Mr. Auyung could not help smiling. “I’ve only tapped into an innate positive feeling that you already had.”
“Oh, my story isn’t finished yet,” said Amy, and went on: “At least in one respect, this girl—or rather, this woman—has finally fulfilled her mother’s ambitions by becoming a famous professor at a famous college.”
“Thank you,” said Mr. Auyung. “Now the