Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [97]
After that, Ah-Fat completely lost touch with Mr. Auyung. In the years that followed, every now and then, a rumour of his whereabouts might come his way: Auyung had joined a plot to assassinate the Empress and had been betrayed to the police and beheaded at the entrance to the vegetable market in Beijing; he had secretly gone back to Guangdong and organized a militia to go to the rescue of the Emperor in Beijing but had died of a chill he caught en route; or he had gone to Japan, taken a Japanese woman as a second wife and abandoned politics, immersing himself in the study of the sages.
Whatever the truth of it, Mr. Auyung glittered briefly in Ah-Fat’s life like a star and then vanished forever.
Year thirty-one of the reign of Guangxu (1905) Vancouver, British Columbia
It was only when he came within sight of the two lanterns hanging outside the gambling den that Ah-Fat felt tired. It usually took him an hour and ten minutes to get from the factory to Chinatown but today he had quickened his pace, almost breaking into a jog, and did it in three-quarters of an hour. Ah-Lam had given up trying to keep up with him after a while and let him go ahead.
Hawkers swarmed around him like flies, carrying baskets on their arms or slung over their shoulders and offering their wares: sesame crisp, char siu dumplings, green bean cakes, sticky rice balls, chickens’ feet in briny gravy, and strips of cold, cooked pigs’ ears. He had a ten-dollar note tucked away in an inner pocket—the wages he’d just been paid. He reached inside and fingered the note, its former crispness sodden from his sweat. Tonight he could afford anything from the baskets, and not only from the baskets. He could take a very small corner of his note upstairs to a room above the gambling den screened off by a roughly nailed curtain, where a woman was desperately eager to take it off him. In the last few years, the head tax for Chinese immigrants had soared to five hundred dollars—a sum so huge that it was almost impossible to save up even if you scrimped and saved for years. Very few Chinese women came to Gold Mountain, so their prices had naturally gone up. A whole night of tenderness was beyond his means, but every now and then he could afford fifteen minutes.
Ah-Lam was a regular customer here. There was no way Ah-Lam could raise five hundred dollars, so Ah-Lam’s wife was still stuck in her home village. But Ah-Lam did not neglect his own needs. He regularly told stories about what went on in that dark room. Ah-Lam’s descriptions set Ah-Fat on fire, and when he could not stand this fevered state any more, he went too. He did not think of Six Fingers when he entered, only when he left. Every time he pulled aside the old curtain and went in, his whole body was ablaze; then, when he let the curtain fall behind him and left, he felt a desolate chill. There was no getting away from the pain this fire and chill caused him. They both had to be borne; one could not take the place of the other.
Ah-Fat’s eyes only gave a cursory glance at each of the baskets but his belly rebelled, crying out in shrill tones its urgent need for food. He had only had half a bowl of rice and drunk some boiled water at lunchtime. He had walked a long way since then, and now his hunger seemed to be gnawing painfully at his innards. But before he could satisfy it, he needed to find a place where he could have a piss.
There were plenty of unlit walls around the gambling den, and passersby who needed to relieve themselves would normally pull up their jackets, undo their trousers and piss there. In the past, Ah-Fat had done that too, but today he did not want to. Holding it in, he walked a few steps through the alleyway, bright with painted signs and warmed