Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [46]
He guessed that from the contents of their trash.
After dinner the servants threw out the household waste, and these provided rich pickings: potatoes which had sprouted, rotting tomatoes, the dirt-ingrained outer leaves of cabbage, fish heads, tails and gills, meat bones which had not been gnawed clean, a tin of caviar which still had something left at the bottom. Sometimes there would be mouldy bread. If there were guests at dinner, Ah-Fat might even find a half-empty bottle of wine.
Ah-Fat stuffed it all in the smaller of his two bags. By the time he got back to Chinatown, all the shops were shut. He would scurry through the familiar, narrow, dark streets until he got to the back door of Ah-Sing’s store. There was an overhanging roof which warded off the rain and he sat down under it, pulled out the contents of the bag and heated it all up on the stove. In all Chinatown, only Ah-Sing left his stove outdoors once he had finished cooking. The stove, once extinguished, was not hot enough for Ah-Fat to cook the food but just enough to warm it up. In any case, he never waited until it heated through to swallow it down. Nowadays, he had a cast-iron stomach which could withstand anything—hot, cold, cooked or raw.
Finishing his meal, he took off his cotton jacket, used it to cover himself, leaned against the wall and went to sleep. He could sleep through any amount of wind or rain but was instantly alert and awake at the first cockcrow. Before anyone in Chinatown was properly up, he would slink away without leaving the smallest trace that he had been there.
One night, however, Ah-Fat never made it back to Chinatown.
He had made a new discovery during his wanderings through the city, a discovery so closely connected to his belly that it was hard to say which was cause and which was effect.
He was wandering aimlessly down a small street to the west of the docks one day when he heard a slight sound. The street was stirring after its midday rest, but the slight sound which Ah-Fat suddenly caught was something different, something which he had been familiar with as a child, something which had seared itself into his childhood memories so deeply that nothing in the intervening years could efface it.
It was the sound of a hen scurrying around in search of food.
With its constant diet of rotten vegetables, Ah-Fat’s belly had grown ascetic. But the sound awoke in him fierce longings for meat. And those fierce longings wriggled, as lively as hordes of worms, through his scarred and pitted guts, until every fibre of his being was seized with an uncontrollable trembling. He had always been able to keep his desires at the trembling stage. On any other day except this, he would have shouldered his bag full of rotten vegetables and made his way back to Ah-Sing’s unlit back entrance, with its stinking puddles of filth, to fall asleep and dream, perhaps, of chicken meat. But today something completely unexpected occurred to upset his normal routine.
He saw a fine, fat tawny hen squeeze through a hole in its pen and skip away in the direction of the street.
Ah-Fat’s hand seemed to function independently of his brain. His hand deftly grasped the hen and folded its wings back. The hen went limp and he stuffed it into his bag. He had used this neat trick as a child to persuade his mother’s chickens back into their coops. He was surprised that he could remember