Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [45]
Ah-Fat just kept eating and did not answer. He ate slowly, as if he were counting every grain of rice in the bowl. He had lived off hard rice sheets for months and had almost forgotten what porridge tasted like. He wanted the gentle warmth of the rice to last forever—but eventually the last mouthful went down. He tucked the last piece of pickled vegetable under his tongue. Its rank, salty flavour permeated his saliva and coated his tongue from root to tip. In the end, the saliva almost made him dribble and he reluctantly swallowed it.
He put down the bowl, picked up the long bag and the small one, made a deep bow to Ah-Sing and went out into the street.
The wind had got up. It whipped round every corner and gathered in the middle of the street. It penetrated every hair of Ah-Fat’s head and every bone in his body. The clouds parted, but what came down was not sunlight but snow. Fat, wet snowflakes turned into grey slush where they landed. Ah-Fat looked up. The whole sky was a dirty grey.
As he got out into the street, he heard a squelching sound as someone laboured through the slush behind him. He looked around, to see Ah-Sing running after him. When Ah-Sing caught up with him, he pulled out of his inside pocket a yellow paper packet with a red label fixed to it. “Put this into your food bag,” he said. “I sent the boy to get some in today. After all, it is the end of the old year and you should have something for the New Year. There’s no work here in Chinatown. Try your luck where the yeung fan live. When you get work, come back and I’ll let you have a place to sleep—three dollars fifty a week for you.”
Ah-Fat never imagined that this would be the way he acquired his knowledge of the city of Victoria.
Up till now, Chinatown was all he knew. It had been his whole life, providing him with a place to sleep, eat, piss and shit. While in this Gold Mountain city, he had never gone beyond Chinatown—either physically or in his imagination. He had no idea that anywhere else outside Chinatown even existed.
Now he discovered that Chinatown was only one corner of Victoria. In the time he had been away building the railroad, this Canadian town had suddenly grown from a little kid into a hale and hearty youth. In every street and alley radiating out from the steamship docks, new houses had sprung up like mushrooms after spring rain. Their walls were built of neat red or grey-black bricks. The roof tiles were more varied—terracotta red, grey, grey-green, buff, even black. There were always steps leading up to the door, at the foot of which were lawns and flowers. Once, Ah-Fat had a serious look at these gardens and came to the conclusion that they were nothing like any that he had seen before—but he knew there was an amazing variety of things on this earth. At the top of the steps were the door and windows. A wreath often hung on the door; at the windows, the linen curtains were usually drawn, revealing only shadowy figures behind them. When the lamps were lit on dark evenings, their faces shone more brightly through the curtains than in full daylight. Despite Ah-Fat’s very limited knowledge, he could see that these homes were very different from the ones in Chinatown. He wanted to describe them with words like “warmth,” “plenty” and “sweet dreams.”
Gradually Ah-Fat learned about the people who lived behind these linen-curtained windows. Every day at the time when the sun rose to the level of the forks in the tree branches, the mistress of the house would make an appearance. She came to the door to see her husband off to work and her children off to school. He watched as she came out of the front door onto the driveway. Before the horse and carriage clip-clopped away, she would bend forward