Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [53]
And now Fong Tak Fat was thirty-one years old. As he trod the path to his front door in the warm spring sunshine, he had the odd sensation that he had gone back in time.
His luggage would come later.
Twenty Gold Mountain suitcases, their corners reinforced with metal strips, all made of the same wood, painted dark red, and fastened with a two-leaf lock in the shape of the lips of a lion. When the lips were closed, the secrets of each case were locked inside. The cases contained all manner of things—from food to clothing and household items. There was Canadian honey, chocolate, olive oil and corn candy; there were clothes, hats and shoes for adults and children, all of course in the Western style, as well as all kinds of Canadian-produced fabrics; for the home, there was foreign soap, matches for lighting the stove, clocks which chimed the hour, and foreign-style knives for cutting cakes and vegetables, china tea sets and dinner sets. And so on and so forth. All these goods were packed into the first nineteen cases and would be given to his mother, uncle and aunt, nephews and nieces, as well their neighbours in the village and even the servants and hired hands.
The last case, however, held things which were purely decorative: ladies’ lipsticks and nail varnish, perfume, embroidered brassieres and other underwear, linen tablecloths from Victoria in all shapes and sizes, English and French silver, gold rings and earrings. He was not going to share round the contents of this case; in fact, he would not even open the lion’s-head lock. He would give the entire case, just as it was, with all its secrets, to a woman upon whom he had never set eyes. He had only a fuzzy, thumbnailsize photograph of her, although her image often haunted his dreams.
This was the woman to whom his mother had betrothed him six months previously, and he had made this long sea trip back home in order to marry her. He did not know much about her, only that she was the eldest daughter of a family called Sito from the town of Cek Ham. She was fifteen years old. The family ran a tailoring business. The horoscopes of Ah-Fat and the girl had been cast and matched perfectly. The fortune teller said that the girl was destined to make her husband rich, and any family she married into prosper. The fortune teller also said that the girl was destined to have nine and a half sons (the half, of course, being a son-in-law). It was not only these reasons that had persuaded Ah-Fat’s mother though—she had her own as well. She knew that the parents had taught the girl to sew and she had become an excellent seamstress. Even though Mrs. Mak could no longer sew, she still stubbornly believed that a woman who could not sew and embroider was not a proper woman.
In the eyes of the villagers, these reasons for choosing a bride were perfectly acceptable. But Ah-Fat wanted to know a bit more than that. Was this girl literate? He had asked his mother this when he wrote to her. She had had the village letter-writer write back but she had not answered his question. Instead, she had simply asked, what was the point of having wife who could read and write? The proper duties of a wife were to serve her in-laws and her husband, produce children, and feed and clothe them. From this letter, Ah-Fat inferred that the girl probably could neither read nor write.
He knew there was not one in a hundred among these country girls who could read and write. Or, if