Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [4]
Amy Smith
Professor in Sociology
University of British Columbia
Auyung tapped Amy’s card lightly against the palm of his hand. “Now I understand,” he said, “no wonder.…”
“Do I really look that old?” asked Amy.
Auyung laughed. “It’s not that. I just couldn’t understand why Fong Yin Ling didn’t want to go and pay her respects at her grandmother’s grave.”
Amy looked blank for a moment, then remembered the bag her mother had pushed into her hands before she left.
Amy’s mother had been getting letters from an office in Hoi Ping for over a year. They were official letters stamped with the municipal red seal and were about her family’s home. The Fongs’ was one of the oldest diulau, or fortress homes, in the area, they said. It was currently being registered as a World Heritage Site, and was to be renovated and turned into a tourist attraction. The letters requested the Fong descendants to return and sign an agreement assigning trusteeship to the regional government.
As a small child, Yin Ling had been brought home by her parents on a visit and had lived in the diulau for two years. She was too young for it to make much of an impression on her, and the passage of some eighty years had almost completely effaced the memories. The Fong family had not lived there for many years, and besides, the use of the word “trusteeship” sounded too much like compulsory repossession. So Yin Ling had simply thrown every letter into the wastepaper bin without saying a word to anyone about them.
To her surprise, the authorities in Hoi Ping had been persistent, sending more letters and even making several international phone calls—though she had no idea how they had found her number.
“This is a heritage site, nearly a hundred years old. How can you bear to see it crumble to dust like this? If it’s taken into public trusteeship, it will be restored to the way it was, and will be a fitting monument to the Fongs. You won’t need to spend a cent, or put in an ounce of effort, but you retain all the rights. It’s the perfect outcome.”
The words, constantly repeated, gradually wore down Yin Ling’s resistance. However, just as she was warming to the idea, she fell ill. She had been confined to bed for over a year now.
Up to age seventy-nine, Yin Ling had been as unmarked by age as a tree luxuriantly covered in pristine foliage. But then overnight, it was as if she had suddenly been felled by a hurricane.
It happened on her seventy-ninth birthday. She had invited some of her usual mahjong friends to eat at an Italian cafeteria, and then back to her house for a game of mahjong. When Yin Ling was young, she used to get annoyed watching her mum playing mahjong with her cronies, but in old age her own few friends were all mahjong players. Amy had not been there that day and, without her daughter present, Yin Ling really let her hair down, chain-smoking and knocking back the booze until she was uproariously drunk. The party did not break up until midnight. Yin Ling went to bed that night but did not get up in the morning. Overnight she suffered a stroke.
After the stroke, Yin Ling could not speak English any more. As a child she had attended the city school, and all her boyfriends had been White Canadians, so whether at home or at work, she rattled away in English. Now, bizarrely, it was as if some tiny perverse hand had meddled in her brain, erasing it all. When she woke up in the hospital and heard the doctors and nurses talking to her, she looked completely blank. And her speech, when it came, was so garbled it was incomprehensible. At first, they thought the speech centre in her brain had been affected. It took several days for Amy to solve the mystery: Yin Ling’s squawks were actually Cantonese—the Cantonese her granddad had spoken at home when she was a child.
Yin Ling was a different woman after her illness. She left hospital for a convalescent home and then, a few months later, was transferred to a