Read Online Gold Mountain Blues by Ling Zhang - Free Book Online Page B

himself. Back home, if people killed a pheasant, they did not bother to keep the feathers after plucking it. OnlyMr. Auyung, his teacher, would collect them and put them in a pen pot as a decoration. Actually, the feathers stuck in the Gold Mountain ladies’ hats looked quite pretty.
    He turned back again, saw Red Hair in the far distance waiting for him at the roadside, and hurried to catch up. Red Hair glanced at him. “Pretty, aren’t they, Gold Mountain ladies?” But Ah-Fat was still angry because of Shorty on the boat, and refused to answer. Red Hair laughed and said: “You just get an eyeful of all the marvellous things in this town. In a couple of days’ time you might be up the mountain working, and then there’ll be fuck-all to see.”
    Red Hair referred to the place where they got off the ship as “the town,” and Ah-Fat did the same. It was only a long time afterwards that he learned its proper name, which was almost unpronounceable: Victoria, named for the Queen of England.
    That day, Ah-Fat, Red Hair and a dozen other men from neighbouring villages headed off to a lodging house run by a man from Hoi Ping. The Chinese in Gold Mountain went to such lodgings to relax, eat, and exchange news. Red Hair went there to find out about earning money in town or in the mountains. But that was not why Ah-Fat was going. Finding a way of earning money was Red Hair’s business, and all Ah-Fat needed to do was just stick close behind him. Ah-Fat was going for a very simple reason: he wanted to drink hot water, eat his fill, and then find someone to shave the whiskers on his face. He had spent three months on board ship; when he went on board, he was just a smooth-cheeked kid. But by the time he disembarked, he had become a man, with a face covered in black whiskers. He had missed out on a whole season, the one in which the gradual, orderly process of becoming an adult should have happened.
    In no time at all, the weather cooled down. Victoria was on the coast so the days cooled gradually, starting from either end: morning and evening. At first, the middle of the day was as warm as before, but slowly, the middle was swallowed up as the cool of morning, and evening lasted longer and longer, until the days turned really cold.
    Ah-Fat had brought only unlined trousers with him and when he went outside into the wind, they felt as thin as paper. It was only by reachingdown and pinching the material that he knew he was wearing trousers at all. Red Hair hunted out a ragged cotton jacket full of holes, tore it into strips and, with a thick needle, sewed the pieces into lengths. He showed Ah-Fat how to wrap them round his legs and feet, starting from the tips of his toes right up to his knees. When he got up in the morning, he wound the cloths round and round his legs, and when he went to bed at night, he unwound them. They smelt foul, like the cloths his mother, Mrs. Mak, used to bind her feet, but at least they kept him warm.
    Although the days were unbearably cold, Ah-Fat longed for them to get even colder. During the summer, he and Red Hair, together with a score of fellow villagers, had spent a few months clearing a patch of land for the owner. It was several dozen acres of wasteland and they chopped down the trees, cleared the undergrowth and levelled it, in preparation for the following year when a factory would be built on it. There was a mountainous pile of chopped-down timber which the owner could not be bothered to move off the site. He gave it all to the labourers, who made it into charcoal, bundled it up into sacks and went door-to-door selling it. No one wanted to buy it when the weather was hot, so they waited until it grew cold and they could get a good price for it. Ah-Fat sent home every cent of his earnings from this job, keeping back only money for his rent and food. His mother was waiting for the money to redeem their home. The mortgage term was one year, and Ah-Fat’s