Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [52]
An elderly man seated in a wheelchair was waiting for them in the lobby. He was completely bald, and his face was seamed with wrinkles. His eyes were clouded milky-white and the rheum had dried into shiny yellow crusts at the corners. He turned when he heard their voices and tried unsuccessfully to struggle to his feet. Then he banged on his armrest and shouted in a cracked voice: “Fifty years! I can’t believe it’s really taken fifty years for just one of you Fongs to come back!” His assistant, a dark-skinned man, looked on indifferently, making no attempt to calm him down.
“Grandpa Ah-Yuen, this isn’t Fong Yin Ling. Fong family business has nothing to do with her,” said Auyung. But the old man was deaf to his words. Instead, he reached out and gripped Amy’s sleeve: “You Fongs didn’t keep your word, did you? You abandoned Kam Sau and her mum. Give me back Kam Sau and Wai Heung,” and he began to weep loudly, his tears wetting Amy’s sleeve. Auyung hastily called the security men, who dragged the old man off. He was forcibly pushed back into his wheelchair and wheeled away.
Amy was rattled. The whisky she had drunk all of a sudden got to her. She sat down on the ground and was violently sick. Finally, when there was nothing more to come up, she wiped her runny nose and streaming eyes and got trembling to her feet. “Who is Kam Sau?” she asked. “Your great-aunt. Your grandfather’s little sister.” “Who was that old man?” “That was Kam Sau’s husband.”
Amy gave a sigh. “Auyung, how many people are we going to upset doing this?”
Auyung sighed too. “If your great-grandfather had married someone else, then perhaps the Fongs would not have left so many stories. Actually, Fong Tak Fat was supposed to marry a different woman, not your great-grandmother at all.”
Years twenty to year twenty-one of the reign of Guangxu (1894–1895)
Spur-On Village, Hoi Ping County, Guangdong Province, China
At Ah-Fat’s command, the sedan chair halted at the entrance to the village. Ah-Fat wanted to do the last part on foot.
Ah-Fat could have done that walk blindfolded. To the right of the spot where the sedan had set him down, there was an ancient banyan tree. At the foot of the tree, there were the steps which led down to the river—three steps altogether. The river had no name. When the water was high, only half a step was visible. When all three steps were visible, it meant there was a drought. When he was a boy coming home from herding the cows or cutting grass, Ah-Fat would go down those steps to the river to wash off the mud and grass before going back home.
To get home, Ah-Fat did not go down to the water’s edge but walked straight along the riverbank. The path to the house was flanked by fields on one side and water on the other. The scenery on the river side was unchanging, while the fields looked different every day. The main crop planted in the two growing seasons was paddy rice, interplanted with a few green vegetables and squashes. If it rained, the paddy rice would be noticeably taller when he went home in the evening than it had been in the morning. Chickens and dogs often scratched around for things to eat among the great clumps of banana palms by the side of the road. Ah-Fat and his brother, Ah-Sin, knew every chicken along the road. The village dogs were a scatterbrained bunch and barked at every strange person or animal they saw. If the dogs at the roadside all barked in unison, then you knew that a stranger was approaching or new cattle were being herded into the village.
Ah-Fat went straight