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By Root 1248 0

to the caskets. Ah-Sing, the owner of the Tsun Sing General Store and Ah-Fat’s landlord, had a cousin who had died several years before and was buried in an out-of-town cemetery. On the day of the steamship’s arrival, Ah-Sing summoned Red Hair and Ah-Fat, and asked them to go with him to the cemetery to dig up the bones. This had to be done seven years after the burial, to give time for the flesh to rot away from the skeleton. They poured cooking wine onto cloths and covered their noses and mouths. The bones, when they dug them up, were a yellowish-brown like aged elephant ivory, but they whitened up once they had been carefully rubbed clean with the cloths dipped in the wine. Ah-Sing and Red Hair laid the cleaned bones out on the ground to make sure that they were complete, and then called Ah-Fat over to pack them one by one into the wooden casket. The big bones went at the bottom, the smaller ones on top, then finally on the very top, the pigtail, as desiccated as year-old raw-silk threads. Not a scrap of flesh clung to the bones.

As Ah-Fat was collecting the bones together, he discovered that one shin bone was thicker on one side than on the other, and on the thick side there was a black mark. Thinking he had not cleaned it properly, he scratched it with his fingernail. But however hard he scratched, he could not get the mark off. Ah-Sing told him his cousin had broken his leg and had not been able to get up for three months. “Who broke it?” asked Ah-Fat. Red Hair shot him a meaningful glance but Ah-Fat did not notice. He kept on pestering Ah-Sing with his questions until eventually Ah-Sing lost his temper: “Quit asking so many fucking questions!” Then he gulped down the last of the wine and hurled the bottle as far away from him as he could. It hit the ground and rolled off down the hill until it finally hit a rocky outcrop and shattered with a dull thud. Ah-Fat was quiet then, and nailed the casket down. He covered it with gold paint and recorded on it the details as Ah-Sing dictated: full name, place of birth, and birth and death dates. It was only when he had finished writing that he realized that the cousin had just had his twenty-second birthday when he died.

“Are you scared?” asked Red Hair. “No,” said Ah-Fat. Red Hair went on, “These bones have rotted away so clean there’s fuck-all on them. Even a starving mongrel wouldn’t bother licking them.” Ah-Sing sighed. “It’ll be up to you to collect my bones,” he said to Red Hair. Ah-Sing, at forty-three years old, was older than the rest. “You can’t tell who’ll be collecting whose bones,” said Red Hair. Then he gave Ah-Fat a shove: “You can send my bones back, you little shit. I brought you out here, you send me home, then we’re quits.”

“Uh-huh,” said Ah-Fat indistinctly. It sounded like he was agreeing, but it was an automatic response, one which did not come from his heart. He could not know then just how important that “uh-huh” was to be. He was very young, after all, just starting out in Gold Mountain. All this talk of death made no more impression on him than a flat stone skimming across the surface of a pond. At the moment, all he thought about day and night was earning money. He wanted nothing more than to have three pairs of eyes and four hands so he could learn every detail about how to run a laundry. Sooner or later, he would open a laundry of his own. It would have six men to do the fetching and carrying, two horses and carts, each with a driver, and would run twenty-four hours a day. A pair of lanterns would hang from the eaves, and its name would be painted in big red letters on the doors. He had already thought of the name, Whispering Bamboos Laundry, taken from the beautiful lines by the famous classic poet Wang Wei: “Bamboos whisper of washer-girls returning home/Lotus-leaves yield before the fishing boat.” He had learned this classical poem at school with Mr. Auyung. None of the yeung fan customers would understand the allusion, nor would the other workers, but it was enough that he did.

That day, there was an incense table with offerings arranged