Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [66]
Auntie Cheung Tai put down a packet in her hand and sat beside the girl. The packet was wrapped in thick yellow paper with a strip of festive red paper stuck on top. Even though it was sealed, it was obvious from the grease which had seeped through that it contained cakes bought in a shop in town.
“Walnut cookies. Third Granny gave them to me. Have a bit.” Third Granny was the matchmaker in their village.
Six Fingers shook her head. “No thank you, I’m not hungry.” This was only partly true. She was not hungry because she had just had a large bowl of sweet potato porridge and felt completely full up. But she would have liked a bit of cookie. Since her elder sister died, she had rarely tasted fatty food, in fact she had not even seen much of it. Just seeing the grease mark on the packaging made her think of the shape, flavour, colour and texture of the delicacy inside it, and made her mouth water.
Auntie Cheung Tai stroked the jacket lying on the table and tut-tutted. “Silk from Three Gold Circles.… No one else in the village has anything like it. Your sister certainly knew how to shop. Why are these sleeves so short? They’ll only reach your elbows.” But Six Fingers picked the jacket up and held it up against the older woman. “They’re not short, they’re just right.” “That can’t be for me!” Auntie Cheung Tai exclaimed, flapping her hands in agitation. “It’s not the right style for an old woman like me!”
Even as she shook her head in protest, the corners of her lips curled in a moist little smile which told Six Fingers that she really liked the style. A few days before, she had been boiling up the piglets’ food and sparks from the fire had burned several large holes in her old lined jacket. She could not mend it—the jacket was too heavily patched for that.
“Did you hear what Third Granny said?” she asked as she snipped the ends of the threads for Six Fingers.
Six Fingers neither nodded nor shook her head but stayed silent.
“He’s a decent man—you’ve met him, he’s spoken to you. He’s a good man and fine-looking. It’s just a pity he has that scar on his face. Well, you’ve seen that too. Not like when I got married. My head was covered with the wedding veil so I could hardly see anything of my new home and husband. It was only when the veil came off that I saw his face was covered in pockmarks.”
Still Six Fingers said nothing. There was no sound in the room apart from the hiss of the needle and thread being pulled through the material.
“You’ve lived with me for years,” Auntie Cheung Tai went on. “And even though I’m not your birth mother, I’m almost a mother to you. I can take care of this for you. Being junior wife to a Gold Mountain man isn’t the same as with other families. There you’d have to put up with the mother-in-law and the first wife’s bad temper. But ten to one, this Gold Mountain man would take you back with him and you could be happy together in Gold Mountain, and leave the first wife to look after the family back here. That’s what all Gold Mountain men do.
“He’ll marry his first wife at the end of the first month, then two months later, he’ll marry you. After he’s spent a year or so in the village, if you both get pregnant, then he might be holding two ‘Gold Mountain babies’.”
Six Fingers’ sewing came to a halt and her fingers froze in mid-air. Only her extra finger continued to tremble like a startled dragonfly.
“They’ve prepared the betrothal gifts and they’ve been very considerate. They didn’t want to offend you so you’ll get almost the same amount as the first wife. I can see he’s really taken a fancy to you. If he hadn’t already been betrothed, you might have been his first wife. First wife, junior wife, it really doesn’t mean anything. He likes you so he’ll naturally treat you better. It’s just like with the emperors of old: whomever they really loved became the favourite concubines, and never mind the empress.”
Six Fingers put the jacket down, got up and went towards the stove. When the fire was out, it was a dark corner and the gloom swallowed