Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [5]
One day, Amy was in the middle of teaching a class when she received an urgent phone call from the home. She dropped everything and rushed there—to see the old lady strapped into a wheelchair with a leather belt, her face streaming with tears. Her mother got up that morning, Amy was told, and suddenly started yelling that it would be too late, too late! When the nurse asked what would be too late, she made whooping sounds and, when this was not understood, Yin Ling picked up her walking stick and bashed the nurse in the face with it.
“We can’t cope with a patient like this—it’s not safe for the nurses or the other patients,” the director told Amy.
Seeing her elderly mother in the wheelchair, straining to break free of the belt and foaming at the mouth like a fish tied in twine and gasping for breath, Amy fell to her knees beside her and wailed. “Oh God, whatever do you want me to do with you!”
Yin Ling had never seen her daughter cry like this before. The shock seemed to calm her down. Then, after a moment, she put out her hand and said to Amy: “You go.”
In Yin Ling’s palm was a letter, crumpled and damp, and stamped with a Chinese red seal.
Amy had to read it through a number of times before she understood what it meant. “OK,” she sighed, “I’ll go, but you have to promise not to get into fights with the nurses.” Her mother grinned, showing tobaccostained teeth.
“And don’t ever think kicking up a fuss will make me take you home. I’ll just take you straight to a mental hospital. If I can’t keep you under control, then they will,” Amy finished fiercely.
“Could you move her into a single room—keep her away from other patients and give her a nurse of her own?” she begged the director. “I’ll take care of the costs. Assess the situation in a month when I’m back from China and then come to a decision, OK?” She put on a brazen smile.
Amy left the nursing home that day cursing under her breath. Spring had come to Vancouver in full force. The grass was lush after showers of rain, the climbing roses against the white walls of the home were touched with splodges of vivid scarlet and birds sang shrilly in the trees. But Amy paid absolutely no attention. Her mother, Fong Yin Ling, had looked so small and shrunken in her wheelchair that she might have been a wizened nut blown down from a tree by a gust of wind.
The journey took much longer than Auyung said. They bumped along the potholed road, past building sites and roadworks until finally, towards evening, they arrived at the village. Amy felt as if all the bones in her body had been jolted around in the car.
Every wall in the village was plastered with gaudy bank advertisements offering the best rates for overseas remittances. “Are they trying to hijack each other’s customers?” asked Amy.
“When the oil flows like this, who’s not going to take advantage of it?” said Auyung. “Every dog in town has a relative overseas. In the old days it was the seabirds and the town horses with their shoulder poles who delivered the ‘dollar letters’ to the villages. Nowadays the money is wired back home. It travels in a different way but it’s the same thing.”
Amy knitted her brows: “Is that supposed to be Chinese? I can’t make head or tail of what you’re saying. What seabirds? What horses?”
“The seabirds were the people who carried dollar letters back by boat, the horses were the men who delivered the letters to the villagers.” Auyung glanced at her. “So you’re beginning to get interested.…” “I’m interested in any sociological phenomena,” replied Amy tartly, “whether it’s over here or back home, there’s no difference.”
The Fongs’ diulau was some way off the road. The car set them down and they had to walk the last stretch.
The track ran alongside an abandoned factory and was so overgrown it looked as if no one had walked it for years. The banana trees