Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [9]
But then Yuen Cheong’s fortunes changed. It happened one market day in Tongzhi year eleven.
He got up at the crack of dawn that day and killed a yearling pig. He had wanted to keep it until the end of the year and cure its meat but he could not wait. The family wok had seen not even a drop of lard for too long. The pig could not wait either—by now it was hardly more than skin and bones. When he had killed it, he set the head, tail and offal to one side and cut the body and legs up into several pieces to take to market. He hoped he could buy a few lotus seed paste cakes with the money; his younger son, Tak Sin, would be a year old the day after tomorrow. They could not afford a birthday banquet but at least they could share the pastries among the neighbours.
Before he set off, his wife, Mrs. Mak, laid a few lotus leaves lightly over the meat to stop the flies getting at it. Then she lit an incense stick before the statue of the bodhisattva and prayed that the sun would not get hot too quickly; fresh pork could not stand too much sitting in the hot sun. As Yuen Cheong went to the doorway, he heard her grumbling: “It’s Red Hair’s mum’s sixtieth birthday and we’re invited to the dinner but my skirt’s full of moth holes.” She wanted him to buy her a piece of material with the pig money, and suddenly he felt a rush of anger. Putting down the shoulder pole, he rounded on his wife:
“They’ve got family in Gold Mountain, but we haven’t, have we? All you do all day is try and keep up with the neighbours!”
With a wail, Mrs. Mak slumped to the ground. Fong Tak Fat went to the door, grabbed the shoulder pole and thrust it firmly into his father’s hand. His father was still glowering but he put the pole back on his shoulder and walked out, sweat beading his forehead. Ah-Fat, as everyone called his older son, was a shrimp of a nine-year-old, a child whose body had not begun to fill out. He said little but he gazed at the world with piercing eyes. His father was secretly a little afraid of him.
Shooing away some half-starved dogs, Yuen Cheong padded barefoot along the mud track out of the village. When he reached the river, he went down to the dried-up bed, where he could see that a puddle of water had collected in the crack between the rocks. Scooping up a handful, he washed his face. The little eddies distorted his reflection so that his eyes and nose appeared to jump off his face. He pursed up his thick, heavy lips as if he were going to smile, but then did not. The water ran down his forehead and gradually cooled him. His heart felt lighter. He knew why he had hit out at his wife, and it had nothing to do with her skirt. It was all to do with Red Hair.
Red Hair was a distant cousin. He got his nickname because, with his high nose and deep-set eyes, he looked a bit like one of those White foreigners who were supposed to have reddish hair on their heads. By now, few people remembered his real name. As children, the pair of them used to catch fish and shrimps in the ponds, grope for loaches in the paddy fields and steal melons from other people’s melon patches. Red Hair was older by a few years, but he was a bit of an oaf. Yuen Cheong was the smarter of the two and bossed Red Hair around. That only changed when, a few years ago, Red Hair married an Au girl in the village who had a cousin in Gold Mountain. Then, somehow, he stumbled onto the boat and off he went too.
There were lots of stories in the village about Red Hair in Gold Mountain. One went like this: he had gone to some remote mountains to pan for gold. The water he collected in a wooden bucket dried up under the fierce sun and he found solidified gold dust left. According to another story there was a plague in Gold Mountain a few years back. Red Hair stuffed his mouth with a thick cloth, carried corpses for the yeung fan3 and got a dollar a corpse. He also used to deliver gruel to the