Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [63]
As Ah-Fat walked into his house, he smelled grass burning fragrantly in the stove. A servant was busy preparing the midday meal. Mrs. Mak sat in the front room, podding peas. She may have been blind but she had “eyes” in her fingers which unerringly saw the two ridges running down the length of the pod. With her thumb she pressed at one end, and the pod split down its length, dropping plump peas in a steady stream into her bamboo basket.
Mrs. Mak had extra eyes not only in her fingers but in her ears too. These “eyes” gave a light blink and saw the hem of Ah-Fat’s new gown brush the door sill, a moist hen dropping sticking to it, and float across to where she sat.
“Mum, take a break and sit in the sun for a bit. Ah-Choi can do that.”
Mrs. Mak continued to bend her head to her work. However, a crease at each corner of her mouth trembled slightly.
Ah-Fat knew that meant she was struggling with two conflicting feelings—indignation working its way up from her heart and resignation, which crept down from her head. The two conflicting feelings came to blows at the corners of her mouth; Ah-Fat had been familiar with this expression of his mother’s ever since he was a child. He saw it every time his father got into a fight or smoked opium or he or Ah-Sin failed to collect enough grass for the pigs.
“All morning they waited for you,” she said.
Ah-Fat suddenly remembered that today was the day he was supposed to meet the family of his betrothed.
“What a dope I am. When I got up this morning, it went clean out of my head!” He clapped his forehead in exasperation.
“It’s nearly twenty li so they had to set off while it was still dark. Then they just turned around and went straight home, and refused even a bite to eat.”
Ah-Fat fetched a stool and sat down beside his mother to help her with the peas. They were small and he had big hands. Without the advantage of Mrs. Mak’s deft fingertips, he groped blindly at the pod and felt the peas squeeze through the cracks between his fingers and shoot off in all directions.
The creases at the corners of his mother’s mouth gradually began to soften.
Ah-Fat’s hands suddenly slowed and she heard a sigh—or rather, to put it more accurately, she saw the sigh. The “eyes” in her ears strained to see where, in her son’s heart, this sigh had emanated from. Then it gradually rose to his eyebrows where a tiny knot formed at the spot where the eyebrows met. Finally, it fell heavily into the basket, scattering the peas.
“Such a pity,” sighed Ah-Fat.
Mrs. Mak suppressed a smile—her son might have been away in Gold Mountain living with those devils of White people for all those years, but he was still as good-hearted as ever.
“It’s not the end of the world. Get Ha Kau to take you over tomorrow. You can go and see them and say sorry, and that’ll be the end of it. They’re reasonable people.”
She had misunderstood but Ah-Fat did nothing to enlighten her. He carried on podding the peas in a desultory fashion. After a moment, he said: “That sister-in-law of Uncle Red Hair, she’s such a talented girl. Too bad she’s had such a hard life.”
Mrs. Mak shook her head. “Six Fingers certainly is talented,” she agreed. “But respectable families don’t care two hoots whether their daughters are talented or not, since they’re going to marry out, come what may. The only girls who get taught properly how to read and write are the pipa players in Guk Fau.” (She was referring to the child prostitutes in a high-class brothel.)
“But Mum, in Gold Mountain, boys and girls all go to school,” Ah-Fat