Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [76]
Mrs. Mak told the servants to light incense, knelt down in front of her late husband’s portrait and made a trembling kowtow. Ah-Fat could not stay in the house any longer. He rushed out of the courtyard and over the road, and sat down with his back propped against a tree and his hands clamped over his ears.
After he had been sitting there an hour or so, Ah-Choi came running out of the courtyard gasping for breath. Her jacket was spattered with blood, and her lips trembled as she tried to speak. Finally, she stammered out the momentous news: “It’s a boy. A boy.…”
Ah-Fat got to his feet. It felt as if all the suns in the heavens were bathing him with light from all directions, leaving not a shadow in sight. He hurried indoors, his legs so weak he was afraid they might give way under him.
In the bedroom, Six Fingers lay in the bed, her sweaty head askew on the pillow and her lips covered in purple teeth marks. Beside her lay a cloth bundle, tightly bound, with just a head showing at the top. The face looked just like an old yam left out in the fields to get wrinkly and frosted. It was not a pretty sight, but it made his heart melt all the same. Ah-Fat picked up the bundle in his arms, carefully, awkwardly, as if he was holding delicate china that might shatter.
The baby suddenly opened his eyes, squirmed vigorously and let out a wail so ear-splitting it set the roof beams trembling and the motes of dust dancing.
Six Fingers’ eyelids were so heavy they might have been weighed down under pools of sludge. Her lips formed the question “What shall we call him?” but no sound came out.
All siblings and cousins of the same generation in the family shared a first given name. For this generation, it was Kam. Ah-Fat had been thinking about names for a few months and had settled on one name for a boy, and another for a girl.
But when he saw the teardrops rolling down his baby’s face, he suddenly changed his mind. He remembered that examination candidate from Taiwan kneeling with the petition before the Office of the Superintendent in Peking, sobbing: “Give us back our rivers and mountains!” They would call him “shan” meaning “mountains.”
“Kam Shan, that’s his name,” Ah-Fat said to Six Fingers.
Perhaps by the time Kam Shan had grown up, the rivers and mountains of the Empire of the Great Qing would no longer be in the sorry state they were in now, he thought.
When Kam Shan was a month old, Ah-Fat left for Gold Mountain again. But before he went, he took Six Fingers and the baby to pay respects to the tomb of Red Hair and Mrs. Kwan. The space for Red Hair was no longer empty—in it had been buried the Chinese fiddle and a suit of old clothes. The tomb had been sealed. After all those years, it was during this eventful springtime that the spirits of Red Hair and his wife were finally reunited.
“From now on, so long as my first-born son is alive to burn incense to me, there will always be someone to light incense at your tomb too,” said Ah-Fat, making a deep kowtow to the tombstone.
4
Gold Mountain Turmoil
2004
Hoi Ping County, Guangdong Province, China
By the time she found the shoes, Amy was almost in despair. She and Auyung had spent almost two whole days in the diulau by then.
By the afternoon of the second day, they were familiar with the complicated layout of the building, and had a rough idea what room or staircase lay behind every door and at the end of every corridor.
But they found disappointingly little.
From a distance, the building looked as if it harboured countless fusty old secrets. But once inside they very soon discovered that no secrets lay hidden beneath the dust at all, at least not the kind which they had so eagerly anticipated. Apart from the garment inside Six Fingers’ wardrobe, there was nothing else worth mentioning throughout the entire five floors. The years, like a giant hand, had