Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [80]
Ah-Fat hired a boy to help. It was his job to do the heavy work, washing and hanging up the clothes, while Ah-Fat did the ironing and mending, which required more skill and care. Every day at midday, the boy would load the tubs full of dirty washing onto the cart and drive the horse a few li to the river. Here he would fill the tubs with water and wash the clothes. By the time he had finished it would be dinnertime. If the clothes were not needed urgently, they could be left to dry slowly in the back room, after which they would be folded in neat piles. If it was a rush job, Ah-Fat would light the charcoal in the iron straightaway and iron them dry. If he had a lot of rush jobs, he might spend the whole night ironing.
One day, he did not finish the ironing till dawn. It was too much bother to go home so he stretched out on the ironing board and had a nap. He was awakened by cries of “Saw-lee, saw-lee, saw-lee.…!” He opened his eyes to see a yeung fan customer arguing with the boy. A spark from the charcoal in the iron had singed a hole in one of the garments the man had come to collect. The boy only knew the odd word of English so all the customer got was a stream of apologetic “saw-lee, saw-lees.” Ah-Fat could see the hole was at the bottom, and so small it hardly showed, so he got out his sewing kit and gestured to a stool. “I’ll fix it,” he said. “Just wait a moment.” When Ah-Fat was at home, Six Fingers had taught him some of her darning skills, though he never imagined they would come in useful so soon.
The yeung fan did not sit down, however. Instead, he stared intently at Ah-Fat. Ah-Fat knew it was the scar that had drawn his attention. He was used to that now, after all these years, but at the beginning when the scar was fresh, those looks felt like a teasel prickling his skin.
“Didn’t you work on the railroad?” the man asked hesitantly.
Ah-Fat looked up and scrutinized his customer. Although he had got to know some Whites during his years in Gold Mountain, he still found it hard to tell them apart. This one was much the same as all the others he encountered in the street: he was tall with a ruddy complexion and slickedback hair separated into strands by his comb; he wore a dark grey, three-piece suit and a fob watch in the pocket of his waistcoat. Ah-Fat made a quick mental check of all the yeung fan men he knew, but none of them cut as respectable a figure as this one. He could not place him.
“Twenty-nine. Aren’t you twenty-nine?” asked the man.
Ah-Fat was startled. Twenty-nine was his work number in the railroad construction team. They had been divided into a large number of groups of thirty men each. He was number twenty-nine in his group. The yeung fan foreman did not know his name, and did not need to. To his foreman, he was just a number on the worksheet and the payroll. His number was like a string bag which could wrap itself around him; the foreman held the drawstring and only had to tweak it with his finger for Ah-Fat’s whole life to be caught inside the bag.
During his years on the railroad, Ah-Fat used to write his name on the trees in the clearing outside their tent, over and over, in all the calligraphy styles he knew, because he was afraid of forgetting how to write his own name. But he could not help looking up now and answering to the number twenty-nine, even long after the railroad work was finished.
The yeung fan leaned over the ironing board and gripped Ah-Fat in bear hug.
“I’m Rick Henderson. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten