Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [43]
On a cold day like this, no one would get up at such an early hour to come to his store. There was no hurry.
The truth was that it was a long time since he had had any fresh food. By the last month of the old year, fruit and vegetables were long gone, except for a few apples he had stored since the autumn, now so dried up, they were smaller than tangerines and as wrinkly as an old woman’s face. There were a few South China delicacies like dried bamboo shoots which he got in last autumn too, but they had not sold either. Even the cigarettes and tea which always sold well had gradually stopped moving off the shelves. At least the tea leaves were packed in foil in wooden boxes and would keep for a year or so. To prevent the tobacco from going mouldy Ah-Sing wrapped it in cloth bags and put it in sacks of rice which absorbed any moisture.
Business was going from bad to worse.
The Pacific Railroad had taken five years to build, stretching farther and farther into the interior. Before it had time to begin carrying goods and people, the trash it created began to surge towards the city—an army of unemployed for which absolutely no preparations had been made. They appeared overnight on the streets of Victoria’s Chinatown and scurried hither and thither like rats hunting for a corner to take shelter, searching for food and warmth in the chinks left between one man and the next.
Things were constantly being pilfered from Ah-Sing’s shop: an egg, a cucumber, a bag of rice, a potato, even a pack of needles and thread. So Ah-Sing moved all the goods displayed at the entrance back inside the shop. Then he locked the side door and back door and kept just one side of the double front door open. That way, everyone who came into the shop had to pass in front of his eyes. Even so, things kept disappearing. He simply did not see how these pilferers could use such seamless sleight-ofhand tricks. What he did not understand was that a hungry man could learn tricks in one day that someone with a full belly would never learn in a lifetime.
In recent years, the city had found itself with more and more mouths to feed, and less and less to feed them with. If you had had a full plate of food before, now you only had half. If you had only had half a plate before, now you only had a few crumbs. If you had had a few crumbs before, now you did not have a single one. The city’s inhabitants believed that it was the Chinamen with the pigtails hanging down from the back of their heads that had brought this bad luck upon them. The newspapers explained that it was the fault of the Chinamen that everyone only had half the amount of food on their plates, so a campaign was launched to prohibit doing business with them. A few young hotheads even noted the names of people who continued to buy from the Chinamen and scrawled a sign on their walls with whitewash during the night. Anyone marked with such a sign met scowls in the street or suddenly found themselves being elbowed out in business deals with other White men. Little by little, Ah-Sing’s yeung fan customers dropped off.
Today, Ah-Sing had scarcely finished arranging the baskets of produce when the first customer came in.
He was squatting down at his work and at first only saw a pair of feet. He could tell straightaway that this was a navvy from the railroad. He had on a pair of boots so worn that the uppers were coming away from the soles but the toecaps looked almost new because metal strips had been nailed over them. The trouser legs were covered in burn holes, where sparks from a fire had scorched the material. Ah-Sing gradually raised his eyes to the man’s body. He was wearing a heavily patched, double-fronted jacket. The stitches around the patches were so crude that they looked like crawling maggots. He had a bag slung over each shoulder, a long one and a smaller round one of the sort used to carry foodstuffs