Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [28]
The square, flat building on Store Street was the morgue, though it did not contain any coffins. Instead it was piled high with small wooden caskets, each of which contained one complete set of bones. Each skeleton belonged to someone who had been dead seven years: their bones were brought from all over Gold Mountain and collected here to wait for the boat back to Hong Kong. On each casket, the following details were meticulously noted: full name, place and date of birth and date of decease, and also the number under which the death was registered. The souls of the registered lay quietly in the pitch darkness of their caskets, yearning for fair wind from the Four Counties to start the sail home. Unlike Tam Kung Temple, the morgue was a well-kept secret within Chinatown, a secret as tightly sealed from the outside world as a pearl within an oyster shell. If it had not been for a fire a few years back which bore Chinatown’s secret on the winds to the rest of the city, no one would ever have guessed at the “spirit goods” inside.
Today was a half-day holiday in Chinatown so all the shops were shut. Not because of the Chinese New Year or for Tam Kung’s birthday, but because today the steamship had arrived from Hong Kong. The many hundreds of souls that had waited so long in their caskets could finally begin the journey back to the Four Counties, and everyone in Chinatown would go and see them off.
This farewell was a solemn occasion because the Chinatown folk felt grief for the dead. But their grief was mixed with other, more complex feelings too. The contents of these number-registered caskets had started out as flesh-and-blood human beings, who had disembarked at these docks and dispersed into the streets around. Chinatown had not looked after them properly and had abandoned them in these caskets. There was also a feeling that they would all share the same fate eventually. These flesh-and-blood beings had brought many stories with them and now they were going back with even more. But once the lid of each casket was shut, those stories were chopped cleanly in half—one-half in the world of the living, the other in the box. The living tales that had been passed from one person to another were eventually changed beyond recognition, while the half which lay in the casket would never be known by anyone ever again. The living who came to bid farewell to the dead grieved for these untold tales. They did not know when their own stories would be chopped in half by the shutting of the casket lid.
Ah-Fat was on holiday today. He was now helping out in the San Yuen Wash-House across from the Tsun Sing General Store. Every day he went to meet the steamship as it docked and collected the seamen’s dirty clothing. He stuffed it into big sacks which he loaded onto the carrying pole and took back to the laundry. The next day, he delivered the washed and ironed clothes. Sometimes he made this trip several times a day. None of the three helpers at the laundry knew any English, but Ah-Fat could count in English so he was the one who dealt with the seamen. The sacks were stuffed so full it was like carrying two iron balls, and the pole bowed under their weight. Ah-Fat crept along all day long, bent low to the ground like a praying mantis with a rock on its back. The laundry was open seven days a week, which meant no days off. Ah-Fat’s shoulders had been yearning for a rest for a very long time.
Ah-Fat was no stranger