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Gold Mountain Perils

Years five to seven of the reign of Guangxu (1879–1881)

Province of British Columbia, Canada

Yesterday afternoon, citizens of Victoria, gathered at the docks, enjoyed an extraordinary spectacle: the steamship Madeley put into port at approximately 3:15 p.m., with three hundred and seventy-eight people from the Empire of the Great Qing on board. The steamship had started her journey in Hong Kong, but because cases of smallpox were suspected, she was run aground in Honolulu for more than a month before finally making her way to Victoria. This is the biggest ever wave of Chinese to arrive on these shores. The provincial legislature has on several occasions proposed levying a head tax on Chinese workers and placing restrictions on the places which employ them, and yet an ever-increasing tide of Yellow labourers continues to pour in. The journey has lasted many months for these coolies (known as “piglets” in their language). In a ship which has been described as a floating hell, they have had to endure the torments of fetid air, appalling food and storms at sea, and appear anaemic, filthy and ragged to a man. There is not a single woman or child to be seen within their ranks. However, although they are uniformly male, they have very long pigtails, some hanging straight down their backs, others worn coiled up on their heads. They all carry a flat shoulder pole made of bamboo with a basket hung from each end, into which are packed all their bundles. They look apathetic, walk unsteadily and have none of the noble bearing of “celestials.” Indeed, their weird garb is in forceful contrast to their surroundings. Amongst the crowds who came to watch the goings on, there were some children who threw stones at them, but law enforcement officers quickly put a stop to that.

Victoria Colonial News, 5 July 1879

When Fong Tak Fat emerged from the hold, a dazzling whiteness met his eyes. He had never experienced sunshine like this, sharp as a newly ground knife and stabbing him right in the eyes. Even when he closed them, he could still feel the sun’s keen edge against his eyelids. He and Red Hair had both made do with steerage tickets on the steamship. Steerage was below the water line, and day and night had been the same for a very long time. Now the sun seemed like a bullying stranger to him.

Ah-Fat guessed it must be summer by now. When he left home, the sun had still been soft and gentle—not nearly as powerful as the sun here. He was not sure how many days he’d spent at sea. Without an almanac, the only way he could mark the days was to make a scratch on his shoulder pole every night before going to sleep. As the ship came in to dock, he carefully counted the scratches. There were ninety-seven altogether. But it had actually been between one hundred and one hundred and two days since he left home. The ship had no sooner put to sea than he grew seasick. He lay prone on the cabin floor, feeling as weak as a soft-shelled crab and unable to stir. Then he was struck down with malaria which burned and chilled him by turns, and he lay comatose for days. None of the passengers reckoned he would live. Red Hair even dressed him in his new clothes to “send him on his way.” The rule on ship was that anyone who died on board had to be buried at sea. But against all odds, he pulled through. After he woke, he asked how many days he had been asleep; some said three days, some four and some five. The exact length of his passage to Gold Mountain would always be a matter of conjecture.

Before he went on shore, Ah-Fat donned the clean suit of clothes that Red Hair had dressed him in when he was so ill with malaria. His mother had got Fatty the tailor at the entrance to the village to make them for him before he left. The tailor had used homespun blue cloth with five or six layers of patches sewn into the wristbands and knees, all ready for when he needed them. Mrs. Mak was preparing clothes that he could wear for long time, right up to the day he came home. The patches were stiff and heavy, so that the clothes banged against him when he wore them, rather like a suit of armour. He cursed Fatty for wasting cloth and making the trouser legs so wide and long, but Red Hair patted him on the shoulder: “You’ve just been to the gates of hell and back, so don’t blame the tailor.” It was only then that Ah-Fat realized how thin he had become.

The ship had been docked for hours, but still they could not disembark. A rumour circulated that they were waiting for someone. Eventually, three people turned up. They were dressed in white garments, with white gloves, and wore squares of white cloth over their mouths. The masks covered more than half of their faces. Only their eyes were visible, sunk deeply into their sockets. Ah-Fat had seen Christian missionaries with eyes like these men in his hometown so their appearance did not strike him as particularly strange.

The three men divided up the crowd on the deck into two rows and ordered them all to stand straight, side by side, with their hands palm up, face to face and eye to eye with the man opposite. Red Hair shot meaningful glance at Ah-Fat, which he knew meant that he must remember to say he was eighteen years old to anyone who asked him a question. But no one asked him any questions. Instead, the shortest of the three made straight for Ah-Fat and, opening a small leather bag, took out a variety of shiny bright metal objects. His eyes were of an intense grey-blue, like “goose egg” pebble on a stream bed worn smooth over time by the waters. Shorty gripped Ah-Fat’s ear and thrust a long, icy-cold implement into it. He twizzled it around a few times as if he was stirring up night soil, then took it out. It tickled and shivers ran through Ah-Fat. Then the man pulled his eyelids up and leaned in close to peer into his eyes. They were eye to eye, and Ah-Fat could see his irises glimmering blue like two will-o’-thewisps. He finally let go but forgot to pull the lids down, and Ah-Fat had to force himself to blink a few times. They still prickled, as if a grain of sand had stuck inside, and the tears began to run.

Shorty pried open his mouth, and pressed down on the root of his tongue with a stick. Ah-Fat retched and his mouth flooded with brownish saliva. He spat it out, but his mouth still tasted foul.

The man pulled out a piece of cotton cloth and rubbed at the droplets of saliva which flecked his sleeve. Then he pulled off Ah-Fat’s jacket and pinched and tapped his chest and stomach. Ah-Fat had always been ticklish. When he was little and fought with Ah-Sin, his younger brother only had to get up close and puff a few breaths at him to reduce Ah-Fat to weak, helpless laughter. This time, of course, Ah-Fat did not dare to laugh; he just kept shrinking backward, until he had gone as stiff as a turtle. The man put his snowy-white head right in the middle of Ah-Fat’s chest. His hair was very sparse and he had a pink bald patch on the crown of his head with a black mole in the middle of it, like a woman’s nipple. Ah-Fat tried so hard not to laugh that he began to quiver violently all over.

When Shorty had finished tapping his belly, he turned Ah-Fat around, made him stand against the wall and undid Ah-Fat’s trouser string. Ah-Fat did not resist and his trousers slipped down onto the deck, revealing bare legs as skinny as sticks. Shorty pulled his buttocks apart and peered between them, and then he loosely pulled the trousers up and gave them back. Before Ah-Fat could tighten his belt, the man turned him around to face him and, reaching inside, fished out the wrinkly thing which hung between his legs. He laid it in the palm of his hand and turned it this way and that, inspecting it. The skin of Shorty’s hand was silky smooth and Ah-Fat felt his thing gradually swell like a toad, until it hardened into an iron cudgel. Ah-Fat had never seen it grow so big; he felt everyone’s eyes riveted on him until his whole body seemed to burn painfully. He was so mortified he felt close to tears.

Finally it was over, but Shorty did not tell Ah-Fat he could get dressed; he simply nodded towards a tall man at the stern of the ship. The tall man picked up a long snakelike thing from the deck and came over to Ah-Fat. Before Ah-Fat could get out of the way, a jet of icy-cold water hit him right in the middle of his torso, numbing him to the core. Ah-Fat had seen water in rivers, ponds and wells but he had certainly never seen a snake that could hold so much water in its belly. He was so astonished it did not occur to him to be afraid. Then Red Hair shouted over to him: “It’s disinfectant, to kill the bugs on you!” Ah-Fat picked up his clothes, damp as they were, and put them back on. He must remember to ask Red Hair what “disinfectant” actually meant.

A wave of passengers flowed ashore and, led by those who had come to meet them, gradually dispersed into the nearby streets and alleyways. The onlookers dispersed too. Only a few children were left, and these followed behind the new arrivals, keeping a cautious distance, with shouts of “Chink, chink, China monkey.” Ah-Fat did not understand the foreign words, but he guessed that they were rude. He staggered along at Red Hair’s heels, baskets balanced on his shoulder pole, concentrating on the road and looking straight ahead. After months at sea, he felt like he was still on the ocean waves, and he was unable to walk steadily.

The sun gradually sank and clouds like splotches of blood flecked the sky. The evening wind got up and there were hints of a chill in the air. Ah-Fat crouched down and bound the cuffs of his trousers tightly. The wind back home was not like this. The wind back home was rounded and soft, brushing gently and leaving no trace. The Gold Mountain wind had edges and corners, and if you were not careful it would take a layer of skin off as it passed.

Suddenly, a bell clanged. Ah-Fat looked up, to see a horse-drawn carriage coming towards them. The horse was a great big animal with gleaming jet-black coat and big, sturdy hooves clopping along the road. Its saddle was dark red and embroidered with gold flowers. An old man wearing a black suit with a black top hat on his head drove the carriage, and two young women sat inside. Their gowns—one was red, the other, blue— were tight-fitting and pinched in at their slender waists; the skirts were so long and wide they looked like two half-opened umbrellas. The women wore hats, with a few feathers stuck into the brims of each. Ah-Fat could not help turning back to stare after the carriage. The plumes looked like pheasants’ tail feathers, he thought to himself. Back home, if people killed a pheasant, they did not bother to keep the feathers after plucking it. Only Mr. 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 reaching down 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 money would have to grow legs and race back to make the deadline. Much later, when that was done, he wanted them to buy a field, but just now Ah-Fat did not dare to think of it. Just now, all he wanted was for his mother to have a roof over her head.

By day Ah-Fat went out to sell charcoal, and in the evening he returned to sleep at the Tsun Sing General Store on Cormorant Street. The people who lived on Cormorant Street were all Chinese, and the store was owned by a man called Kwan Tsun Sing from Chek Ham. Ah-Sing, as everyone called him, had two shacks, one behind the other. In the front one, he sold general goods, and in the rear, he had erected two long bed planks which he rented out to twelve people. Each bed plank was five feet wide, and would just fit six sleepers if they pulled their legs in and slept one against the other crossways. If one slept too soundly and stretched out straight in his sleep, his feet would dangle over the edge. If two people stretched out at the same time, then all hell would break loose. One morning, Ah-Fat awoke to find himself sleeping on the floor, squeezed off the bed by the others.

Ah-Fat and Red Hair had now been living at Ah-Sing’s store for six months. The rent, which included bed and board, was ten dollars a month. Ah-Fat only earned twenty dollars a month, and hated to spend so much. After asking around discreetly, he discovered this was the lowest rent in Chinatown, so he had to put up with it.

That evening, Ah-Fat sold all his charcoal and limped back in through the door later than usual. The cloth shoes he had brought with him had long since worn through. He stuffed them with two layers of oilcloth and bound his feet with the strips. This made the shoes tight so that they rubbed his feet sore. Everyone had already eaten; a bowl of rice gruel, a strip of salted fish and two chicken claws were left in the pan for him. Ah-Fat pulled off his shoes, sat down on the bed plank, got the gruel and drank it down. Then he started to unwind the foot cloths, but the sores had formed scabs which stuck to them. He jerked them free and found his feet covered in blood.

Ah-Sing came over with a basin of warm water and told Ah-Fat to wash his feet. He immersed them in the water, frowning with a sharp intake of breath as he did so. Ah-Sing said the leather shoes made by the Redskins were really good. “They’re lighter than a fart, with a helluva nice fur lining, warm as a charcoal burner, and they won’t wear out in a hundred years. You should barter a bag of charcoal for a pair. Otherwise, your feet won’t last a Gold Mountain winter.” Ah-Fat started to work out in his head how much a bag of charcoal would sell for, but did not say anything.

A dark mass of men were crammed onto the bed planks, some picking their teeth, some rubbing at the skin of their feet, others smoking. Only Red Hair lay in a corner, head pillowed on a broken Chinese fiddle, gazing vacantly at the ceiling. In the summer, after their arrival in port, Red Hair had been to the North to find out about gold panning. He was told that even in the North, the gold was exhausted. The sandy debris had been panned two or three times too. In the end, he turned round and returned to Victoria. On the way, he found the Chinese fiddle, which became a treasured possession. Every now and then he would pick out some Cantonese melodies to relieve the boredom.

The men began to tease him: “You know they say you were gold panning with a man in Cariboo when you found a gold nugget as big as a man’s fist. You hid it in the crotch of your trousers, and made off with it the same night. Is that true?” “Mother-fuckers!” Red Hair swore at them. “Do you think I’d still be living in this damned room of Ah-Sing’s if I had nugget as big as a fist?” “Then how did you pay for such a fancy wedding feast?” they asked him. “You had over a hundred chickens slaughtered, and that was just for starters, so we heard.” “I scrimped and saved for ten years and more,” said Red Hair. “Why shouldn’t I kill a few chickens?” But no one believed him. They crowded around and tried to pull his trousers off, shouting: “Lets see if there’s a gold nugget in your crotch!” Red Hair flailed and shoved until he finally fought his way out. He stood up, holding his trousers up and said: “Ah-Fat, write a letter for me to my old woman. She’ll run off with another man if I don’t write.”

The oil lamp was hurriedly twiddled so it gave more light. Someone ground ink in the ink stone, spread out the paper, chose a quill and handed it to Ah-Fat. Of all the men in the room, only Ah-Fat had done a year or two in a tutor school and could write a few characters, so writing everyone’s letters home fell to him. Ah-Fat took the pen, smoothed the tip to a point on the ink stone and waited for Red Hair to speak. Red Hair clutched his head and scratched his cheeks for a long time, and finally said: “Are Mum and young Loon both well?” There was an uproar in the room, and shouts of “Rubbish! You should ask your old lady if she’s all right! We all know she’s the one you miss.” But Red Hair just told Ah-Fat to get on and write, and ignored them.

“Did you get the bank draft for twenty dollars I sent with Uncle Kwan Kow from Bak Chuen village?” he continued. But before Ah-Fat had put pen to paper, Red Hair started to swear: “Fuck it, you received it and you didn’t write me a word in reply. You’re so lazy, you’ve got maggots growing under your feet.” “Is that what you want me to write?” asked Ah-Fat. “Yes! That’s what I want you to write!” Ah-Fat smiled: “You finish talking, and then I’ll write it all down at once, so you don’t change it later.”

Red Hair thought a bit more and finally continued: “‘I’m still living at Ah-Sing’s house, and I haven’t been ill. Next time I send a dollar draft back to you, look after it carefully. The streets of Gold Mountain are full of “piglets.” There are too many people and too little work, and when the winter snows come, there’s fuck-all to do. You look after Mum and young Loon at home. And don’t let your sister Six Fingers slack off. Send her out to do lots of work.’”

Ah-Fat laughed at this. “How big’s Six Fingers then? You’re not telling me a child of three can do real work!” “Pah!” Red Hair snorted: “When I was three, I used to go with my dad to catch loaches. Write this for me too, ‘Before I left, Wet Eyes from Bak Chuen village came and borrowed three measures of rice grain. Get a move on and press him to repay it. But he’s a loser with fuck-all to his name, so if you really press him and he doesn’t repay, then wait a bit. That way he won’t go throwing himself in the river or hanging himself. And for Mum’s back pain, there’s a good decoction that’s made in Gold Mountain. Next time someone goes home, they can take some. Brew it up for Mum.’”

“Finished?” asked Ah-Fat. “Yes, yes, I’ve finished!” So Ah-Fat wrote out the letter:

Dear Suk Dak:

I hope that you have no worries at home, and that all the family are at peace. I think of you a great deal. I assume you received the twenty silver dollars which Uncle Kwan Kow from Bak Chuen village took with him for you the last time he returned. I am still living at the same address as before, at ease in body and soul, so do not worry about me. The weather is gradually getting colder and it is not easy to find work, so I hope you are making careful plans for the dollars I send and spending as little as possible. Please take all possible care to look after Mum, our son Loon and Six Fingers. You do not need to press for repayment of the three measures of rice grain owed by Wet Eyes’ family in Bak Chuen village. I have found an excellent prescription for Mum’s back pain and will send some with someone in a few days. I send you my best wishes for a peaceful winter,

Your husband, Red Hair, the nineteenth day of the first month, 1880, Victoria, Canada

Ah-Fat finished writing, sealed the letter and threw down the pen. He put his hand to his mouth and gave an enormous yawn. The storekeeper, Ah-Sing, brought him some tea. “Drink a nice bowl of tea, Ah-Fat,” he said. “And use the rest of the ink to write a letter for me too. It’s been two months since I got my old mum’s letter, and I haven’t replied.” But Ah-Fat flung himself dejectedly down on the bed board without taking off his clothes. “Ask me another day,” he said. “I’m sleepy.” Red Hair swore at the boy as he gathered up the ink stone, quill and paper. “You think you can put on airs just because you know a few characters!” But before the words were out of his mouth, Ah-Fat was asleep and snoring. They all sighed. They were not surprised he was tired: he had left at five o’clock in the morning and had only just got back. He had not yet bought a pair of shoes and the sores on his feet were so deep, you could see the bone through them.

The oil lamp was extinguished and the men lay down. But they could not sleep, and a desultory conversation started up. Someone said that a few days ago a kwai mui, a young White woman, had gone into the opium den at one end of Fan Tan Alley, the street of gambling dens. She was dressed in black, with a black hat and black skirt, and was such a fine-looking woman that she gave the owner a real scare. He had no idea how to address her and could scarcely get a word out. To his surprise, she knew exactly what she was doing. She lay down on the smokers’ couch and, without waiting for anyone to attend her, faced the opium lamp, held the pipe in the palm of one hand and the bodkin in the other, let the opium bubble up, scooped it into a wad, plunged it into the eyehole in the pipe bowl and, when she had finished smoking, rose and left. She came again the next day too. It went on day after day: she came at the same time, smoked a pipe and left. Apparently, a reporter went with her and wrote an article as big as a window and published it in a Gold Mountain English-language newspaper. The men tutted in astonishment: “Find out what time she goes and we’ll go and watch how this kwai mui does it.” Then someone else said Ah-Chow from the lodging house had told him that young Chung’s case had come to court. He had been sentenced to a month in jail and fined thirty dollars. Any Chinese who went to jail had their pigtails cut off but Chung had clung to the pillars outside the courtroom and refused to go at any price. One of his teeth had even been knocked out. Young Chung was from San Wui, and sold tobacco, candies and melon seeds in front of the tea house in Fan Tan Alley. One day, he let off a firecracker and a horse belonging to a yeung fan reared and went down in the street. Chung was taken to court.

They all sighed. “Does the Emperor of China know how badly we’re being treated?” said one. “What the hell use would it be if he did know?” someone else responded. “Chinese law has nothing to do with Gold Mountain law. Besides, even if he did know, and leapt on his horse and took a ship, it would take him months to get to Gold Mountain. And young Chung will have had his pigtails cut off long before that. He can’t wait till the Emperor arrives, can he?” “I heard from Ah-Chow,” said Red Hair, “that Imperial Minister Li Hongzhang asked some smartass to make something called a telegram, which only took a few hours to get from the Empire of China to Gold Mountain.” “Did it have long legs or long wings? How did it fly faster than a bird?” they asked. “You dickheads,” said Red Hair. “A telegram goes faster than dozens of birds added together.” There was a chuckle from Ah-Fat in the darkness. “Hey, Ah-Fat, weren’t you asleep?” the men shouted. “What are you laughing at?” Ah-Fat fell silent.

Red Hair sighed: “If only my old lady could ride over on a telegram.” Of all the men in the room, only Red Hair was newly married. The men began to tease him. “So you’re thinking about that, are you? Last time you went home, how many times a day did you do it with your old lady?” Red Hair just laughed loudly. When they pressed him, he said he never counted, he just did it when he felt like it. “I go all these years without it, why shouldn’t I make up for it?” The men grew more interested. “Is she bony or plump and fleshy?” they asked. “Fuck,” said Red Hair, “she doesn’t have much bone or flesh, but there’s plenty of juice!” There were shouts of laughter. Suddenly, Ah-Lam, who was lying next to Ah-Fat, shouted: “Hey, Ah-Fat, you little shit! You’re sticking me so hard up the back, it hurts!” There was more uproarious laughter.

Red Hair banged the bed plank and shouted, “Go to sleep! It looks like there’ll be snow tomorrow morning. If we get up early, we can sell a lot of charcoal.” The men gradually grew quiet. Some time later, Red Hair could be heard turning over. “We’ll all contribute to one bag of charcoal,” he said, “and exchange it with the Redskins for a pair of shoes for Ah-Fat. We always used to give eggs and sesame pancakes to the man who taught our kids and wrote the Chinese New Year couplets for us, didn’t we?”

There was silent agreement.

Ah-Fat opened his eyes wide and stared into the darkness. After a long time, he could make out breaks in the gloom. Actually, he already knew these breaks well. For instance, in one corner there was a yellow glow, where a rat had gnawed its way in to steal rice. The pale area at the window was where there was a hole in the sheet which they used to block out the light. From the cracks of light he guessed there must be a full moon and he had a good idea just how cold it was too. It was his first winter in Gold Mountain and he did not know how long it would last. He only knew that the river had frozen over and the road to the mountains was impassable. There was no fishing to be done, crops to be planted or goods to be carried. That mountainous pile of charcoal had gone down considerably and if the weather went on like this for another couple of weeks, it would all be sold. How would they get work after that?

He had asked Red Hair. “You young devil, you’re a worrywart. All you have to do is tag along with me. There’s always a way to make a living.” But Ah-Fat knew that this time even Red Hair was stumped. That morning he had seen him take something out of the bottom of his shoe. It was a fifteendollar draft that he was about to send home, but then he put it back again. Red Hair was leaving himself a way out.

Ah-Fat had no way out. Behind Ah-Fat stood his mother, with her swollen, inflamed eyes. Those eyes gnawed away, wolf-like, at Ah-Fat’s calves. Ah-Fat just had to shut his eyes, gather his strength and run forward.

Ah-Fat was running for his life.

Gradually, over recent years, Vancouver’s Chinatown had shown signs of growing, across Cormorant Street, and over Douglas Street and Store Street. These were now lined with Chinese-owned stores and lodgings. There was even a scattering of Chinese living in Fisgard Street, a little to the north. Streets only in name, they were actually dirt roads with no sidewalks or gutters. In fact, even calling them dirt roads was doing them a favour because they were very narrow. In the narrowest places, the storekeepers displayed their goods in baskets which they pushed six inches or a foot into the street. Then they sat on a stool at the front of their stall. If someone living on the other side of the street happened to come out of their house, the storekeeper could stretch out an arm and grasp a cigarette passed to him by the other. They could exchange all the gossip of Chinatown across the “street” without ever needing to raise their voices.

Chinatown was in the low-lying part of Victoria. If you thought of the city as a giant bowl, then Chinatown was the hollow at the bottom. Whenever it rained, all of the city’s water collected and ran into it. Even clean water went black as it swept down into the muddy bottom.

The dirt roads were flanked by densely packed houses made of thin boards nailed together. Most were of one storey, although here and there were two-storey buildings, but they all looked like workmen’s huts, with gaps of varying widths between the wooden boards. The muddy rainwater leaked in through the doors and wall cracks, adding a layer of black grime to the inner walls and the bed legs, so the men inside had to take off their shoes, roll up their trousers and go barefoot. In just a few steps their legs would be black too. When the sun shone outside and the water retreated, a layer of silt remained in the houses. Of course, this was not pure mud. It was usually mixed with vegetable leaves, fishbones, eggshells, old shoe uppers and sometimes dead rats. This rich mixture stuck to the bottom of the men’s shoes, and was trodden from one room to another and from one street to another, until the whole of Chinatown was impregnated with its rich colour and smell.

Not all of Chinatown was so dilapidated, however. There was one brickbuilt house on Fisgard Street, which, although it was a low, single-storey affair, was built of good honest bricks, and tiled with real tiles. When the sun shone down, the brightness glared off it. And on Store Street there was another building, so square and flat it looked like a box of Pirate-brand cigarettes lying on its side. Most of the time, its door was closed, as if closely guarding a secret. There were no stalls in the street in front of the door, and there were never any men resting and sunning themselves in the corner against the wall. Its door did not bear even a shop sign. It was a pity that the only two remotely presentable-looking buildings in the whole of Chinatown were not lived in, at least not by the living.

The low, single-storey building on Fisgard Street was the temple of Tam Kung, who was worshipped by the people from Guangdong Province. Chinatown belonged to the people from Guangdong’s Four Counties. Tam Kung’s birthday was celebrated every year at the beginning of the fourth month of the lunar calendar, and on that day, Chinatown was as noisy and bustling as on market day. In the temple, offerings were made and incense burned. In front of the temple, there were lion and dragon dances, staged operas and vendors selling snacks. Even the yeung fan came to Chinatown. They were there not to pay their respects to Tam Kung, but because the noise and excitement was irresistible. The real reason for the hustle and bustle lay thousands of miles away and was not the slightest concern of theirs.

The square, flat building on Store Street was the morgue, though it did not contain any coffins. Instead it was piled high with small wooden caskets, each of which contained one complete set of bones. Each skeleton belonged to someone who had been dead seven years: their bones were brought from all over Gold Mountain and collected here to wait for the boat back to Hong Kong. On each casket, the following details were meticulously noted: full name, place and date of birth and date of decease, and also the number under which the death was registered. The souls of the registered lay quietly in the pitch darkness of their caskets, yearning for fair wind from the Four Counties to start the sail home. Unlike Tam Kung Temple, the morgue was a well-kept secret within Chinatown, a secret as tightly sealed from the outside world as a pearl within an oyster shell. If it had not been for a fire a few years back which bore Chinatown’s secret on the winds to the rest of the city, no one would ever have guessed at the “spirit goods” inside.

Today was a half-day holiday in Chinatown so all the shops were shut. Not because of the Chinese New Year or for Tam Kung’s birthday, but because today the steamship had arrived from Hong Kong. The many hundreds of souls that had waited so long in their caskets could finally begin the journey back to the Four Counties, and everyone in Chinatown would go and see them off.

This farewell was a solemn occasion because the Chinatown folk felt grief for the dead. But their grief was mixed with other, more complex feelings too. The contents of these number-registered caskets had started out as flesh-and-blood human beings, who had disembarked at these docks and dispersed into the streets around. Chinatown had not looked after them properly and had abandoned them in these caskets. There was also a feeling that they would all share the same fate eventually. These flesh-and-blood beings had brought many stories with them and now they were going back with even more. But once the lid of each casket was shut, those stories were chopped cleanly in half—one-half in the world of the living, the other in the box. The living tales that had been passed from one person to another were eventually changed beyond recognition, while the half which lay in the casket would never be known by anyone ever again. The living who came to bid farewell to the dead grieved for these untold tales. They did not know when their own stories would be chopped in half by the shutting of the casket lid.

Ah-Fat was on holiday today. He was now helping out in the San Yuen Wash-House across from the Tsun Sing General Store. Every day he went to meet the steamship as it docked and collected the seamen’s dirty clothing. He stuffed it into big sacks which he loaded onto the carrying pole and took back to the laundry. The next day, he delivered the washed and ironed clothes. Sometimes he made this trip several times a day. None of the three helpers at the laundry knew any English, but Ah-Fat could count in English so he was the one who dealt with the seamen. The sacks were stuffed so full it was like carrying two iron balls, and the pole bowed under their weight. Ah-Fat crept along all day long, bent low to the ground like a praying mantis with a rock on its back. The laundry was open seven days a week, which meant no days off. Ah-Fat’s shoulders had been yearning for a rest for a very long time.

Ah-Fat was no stranger to the caskets. Ah-Sing, the owner of the Tsun Sing General Store and Ah-Fat’s landlord, had a cousin who had died several years before and was buried in an out-of-town cemetery. On the day of the steamship’s arrival, Ah-Sing summoned Red Hair and Ah-Fat, and asked them to go with him to the cemetery to dig up the bones. This had to be done seven years after the burial, to give time for the flesh to rot away from the skeleton. They poured cooking wine onto cloths and covered their noses and mouths. The bones, when they dug them up, were a yellowish-brown like aged elephant ivory, but they whitened up once they had been carefully rubbed clean with the cloths dipped in the wine. Ah-Sing and Red Hair laid the cleaned bones out on the ground to make sure that they were complete, and then called Ah-Fat over to pack them one by one into the wooden casket. The big bones went at the bottom, the smaller ones on top, then finally on the very top, the pigtail, as desiccated as year-old raw-silk threads. Not a scrap of flesh clung to the bones.

As Ah-Fat was collecting the bones together, he discovered that one shin bone was thicker on one side than on the other, and on the thick side there was a black mark. Thinking he had not cleaned it properly, he scratched it with his fingernail. But however hard he scratched, he could not get the mark off. Ah-Sing told him his cousin had broken his leg and had not been able to get up for three months. “Who broke it?” asked Ah-Fat. Red Hair shot him a meaningful glance but Ah-Fat did not notice. He kept on pestering Ah-Sing with his questions until eventually Ah-Sing lost his temper: “Quit asking so many fucking questions!” Then he gulped down the last of the wine and hurled the bottle as far away from him as he could. It hit the ground and rolled off down the hill until it finally hit a rocky outcrop and shattered with a dull thud. Ah-Fat was quiet then, and nailed the casket down. He covered it with gold paint and recorded on it the details as Ah-Sing dictated: full name, place of birth, and birth and death dates. It was only when he had finished writing that he realized that the cousin had just had his twenty-second birthday when he died.

“Are you scared?” asked Red Hair. “No,” said Ah-Fat. Red Hair went on, “These bones have rotted away so clean there’s fuck-all on them. Even a starving mongrel wouldn’t bother licking them.” Ah-Sing sighed. “It’ll be up to you to collect my bones,” he said to Red Hair. Ah-Sing, at forty-three years old, was older than the rest. “You can’t tell who’ll be collecting whose bones,” said Red Hair. Then he gave Ah-Fat a shove: “You can send my bones back, you little shit. I brought you out here, you send me home, then we’re quits.”

“Uh-huh,” said Ah-Fat indistinctly. It sounded like he was agreeing, but it was an automatic response, one which did not come from his heart. He could not know then just how important that “uh-huh” was to be. He was very young, after all, just starting out in Gold Mountain. All this talk of death made no more impression on him than a flat stone skimming across the surface of a pond. At the moment, all he thought about day and night was earning money. He wanted nothing more than to have three pairs of eyes and four hands so he could learn every detail about how to run a laundry. Sooner or later, he would open a laundry of his own. It would have six men to do the fetching and carrying, two horses and carts, each with a driver, and would run twenty-four hours a day. A pair of lanterns would hang from the eaves, and its name would be painted in big red letters on the doors. He had already thought of the name, Whispering Bamboos Laundry, taken from the beautiful lines by the famous classic poet Wang Wei: “Bamboos whisper of washer-girls returning home/Lotus-leaves yield before the fishing boat.” He had learned this classical poem at school with Mr. Auyung. None of the yeung fan customers would understand the allusion, nor would the other workers, but it was enough that he did.

That day, there was an incense table with offerings arranged in front of every lodging house and store in Chinatown. There was a big table right in the middle of Chinatown too, piled high with offerings of cakes and fruit of every sort, and chickens and ducks and roasted suckling pigs which gleamed golden. At each end of the table were two burners for the “spirit money.” From a distance, the whole street seemed to be wreathed in smoke. At midday, a propitious time chosen according to the lunar calendar, the consul gave a great shout and the orchestra struck up. There were ten master players of the Chinese fiddle, dressed in white gowns, with their instruments swathed in white cloth too. The strings trembled and an almighty wailing issued forth, the high notes ear-splitting and the low notes like dull hammer blows, overwhelming the listeners with waves of melancholy. When the first piece had finished, there was a sudden change in the weather: a chill blast of wind swept the ashes of the paper money in the burners into the air, where they spiralled upward, the column of ash getting thinner as it blew higher, until the very top formed a sharp point which lingered high in the air.

There was consternation among the watching crowds. The consul, a man of mature years and experience, threw himself on his knees in front of the burners and cried loudly: “Great Buddha, our countrymen have died in foreign parts. They suffered numerous injustices, yet today, finally, they can begin the journey home. There they will pay their respects to their ancestors, and will be reunited with their earthly sons and daughters. We beg you to bless them with a fair wind and a smooth sailing. When one spirit is safely home, ten thousand spirits will rejoice.” As he finished speaking and raised his head, the ash plume dispersed and the wind dropped.

In front of the mortuary, eight horses stood harnessed to four open carriages covered in white mourning drapes. The order was given and the horses slowly set off towards the docks, heavily laden with several hundred wooden caskets. As the sound of the horses’ hooves gradually faded into the distance, and nothing remained but a faint puff of dust, some of the spectators could be seen wiping their eyes with their sleeves.

“He bartered some tea for a pair of boots from the Redskins, and gave them short measures. The Redskins beat him up,” Red Hair told Ah-Fat on the way home.

“Who?” asked Ah-Fat.

“Ah-Sing’s cousin.”

Years seven to thirteen of the reign of Guangxu (1881–1887) Province of British Columbia, Canada

This afternoon, five hundred Chinese navvies from Victoria and New Westminster boarded a steamship bound for Port Moody. They are part of the work force which will build the Pacific Railroad. After ten years of intense negotiations within the Canadian Federal Government, work can now begin on the railroad project. In order to cut costs to the minimum, Chief Engineer Andrew Onderdonk has overseen the recruitment of over five thousand navvies from Canton and California. Several thousand more will arrive over the next few months. These figures do not include a significant number of Chinese already living in Victoria who have joined the work teams.

The Pacific Railroad will extend through the precipitous Rocky Mountains of the Fraser Valley region. Here the rocks are of solid granite and all the railroad foundations will have to be hacked out by hand. Between the towns of Yale and Lytton alone, a mere seventeen miles, it will be necessary to hack out thirteen tunnels. In one mile-and-a-half section, four tunnels will be built in quick succession. The coolies will undertake the most dangerous work, pitting human flesh against hard rock.

Within these construction teams, those who blast the rock earn the highest wages, estimated to be four dollars a day. Metal-grinders earn three dollars fifty a day, bridge-building carpenters earn three dollars a day and brick-layers, two dollars fifty to three dollars a day. Wood cutters earn two dollars a day. The least skilled of the workers earn one dollar seventy five per day. Although some among them are hefty and strong, most of the workers are quite diminutive. Some appear like pre-pubescent boys, though all workers are required to show documentation stating they are at least eighteen years of age. When the navvies arrive on site, they are divided into groups of thirty men, each headed by a foreman appointed by the railroad company. Each work group includes a cook and a record keeper.

The record-keeper logs the hours of work completed and liaises between the workers and the foreman. Most of the Chinese workers understand almost no English, and the authorities are concerned about whether they can properly understand work instructions. Another safety concern is the peculiar long pigtails they wear. A representative from the railroad company explained that the Chinese regard their pigtails as sacred because they are bestowed by the Emperor and their parents. Indeed, to the Chinese, they are more important than life itself. According to the English Constitution, which enshrines the protection of basic human rights, no one can force a Chinese to cut off his absurd pigtail. And so thousands will set out on this unknown road with their pigtails and their bags of rice.

The British Columbian, New Westminster, 7 April 1881

They lived in rudimentary tents, each made of seven tree branches and covered by two tarpaulins. The trees used were either fir or silver birch. These were felled and the branches stripped off, leaving only the trunk. They were erected in two rows of three on each side, interlocking at the top, and along the three forks was laid the seventh, thicker trunk, forming the roof pole. Over this went the tarpaulins and these were sewn together with the coarse thread used for making fishing nets, by means of a needle made from an animal bone. All of this was learned from the Redskins.

Fires were kept burning all night on either side of the tent; anyone who got up for a piss in the night would add a bit more firewood to them. At daybreak, when the cook got up to make breakfast, he only needed to rake the remaining fire and add some sticks and he could make their porridge. As soon as the sleepers in the tent opened their eyes, the porridge would be ready. Making fires in the mountains served several purposes: they kept the men warm, gave light, cooked food and gave them courage. Before these men arrived, the mountains were the domain of wild beasts.

The tents were simple because the men struck camp and moved on every couple of weeks. As the building of the railroad proceeded the men moved with it, keeping pace with the construction. Striking camp meant rolling up the tents and sleeping mats, loading the rice sacks and water buckets onto the pack horses and then walking to the next camp. They did not take the branches with them. One thing the mountains had in plenty was trees, so they could fell them as they needed. Every time they struck camp, Ah-Fat sewed a cross on the corner of one of the tarpaulins. There were six crosses now.

Ah-Fat was awakened by the screeching of Red Hair’s fiddle, which seemed to be sawing right into his skull. He kicked away the leg which Ah-Lam, a fellow navvy in his team, had flung across him in his sleep, crawled out of the tent and chucked a stone at Red Hair. The fiddle screeched to a halt and Red Hair swore: “That’s a bridal tune. If you stop me playing, you’ll never get yourself a bride, ever!”

It had rained in the night and leaked into the tent, wetting Ah-Fat’s trouser bottoms. As he wrung them dry, the sun burst through. The sunlight was cut into fine-ribboned rays by the dense stands of trees, which cast damp shadows underfoot. Overnight a layer of white mushrooms had sprung up among the trees, some as small as buttons, others as big as plates. On the top of one mushroom perched a spotted squirrel, quite a young one, only a few inches long. It had a thin covering of fur and beady black eyes. Ah-Fat picked up a stick to tease it and the little creature was not afraid, it just whiffled its nose and sniffed. Ah-Fat pulled up his jacket and relieved himself with a long piss in the direction of the mushroom. Startled, the squirrel raised its tail in the air and scurried away, rustling through the undergrowth. Ah-Fat could not help laughing out loud.

Ginger woke up too, stretched lazily and emerged from behind a tree, cocking his hind leg and pissing against the tree trunk. Then he raked the ground with his claws, filling the forest with a dense musky odour.

Ginger was a stray dog that had attached himself to them when they got off the boat at Port Moody. They had tried to shake him off several times but he stuck with them. Then someone said a dog would give them courage in the mountains, and they kept him.

After she pissed, Ginger wagged his tail and, placing his wet paws firmly against Ah-Fat’s leg, licked him till the warm drool ran all over his hand. Ginger was a wolf-dog cross and stood so tall that if he stretched, he could almost reach Ah-Fat’s shoulder. Ah-Fat had to shove the dog away a few times before he finally got rid of him.

He asked the cook what was for breakfast. “Boiled potatoes, rice porridge and salt fish.”

“It’s potatoes every day,” complained Ah-Fat, “potatoes every meal. We piss potatoes … can’t we have something different?” “You don’t know how lucky you are,” said the cook. “If we ever get snowed in, there won’t be a fucking crumb to eat.” “If there’s no fucking crumb to eat, then at least there won’t be potatoes,” said Ah-Fat. The cook’s expression tightened: “Potatoes are all the supply team ever bring into the mountains. Even if you killed me off, you wouldn’t get anything different to eat.”

When they had finished breakfast, the record-keeper relayed the foreman’s instructions: “You’re breaking up stones all day today.” The stones which had been blasted out the previous two days all had to be carried up the mountainside basket by basket and tipped down into the canyon. The thirty-strong team would be divided into groups of ten, one to do the stone-breaking, another to load the baskets and the third to carry them up the mountain. Red Hair and Ah-Fat were stone-breakers; Ah-Lam was in the carrying team. “Mind your step,” said Red Hair to him as he set off. “If you miss your footing, you’ll be over that damned cliff quicker than an eagle can squawk.” “I know my way well enough,” said Ah-Lam. “Don’t go wishing bad luck on me.”

The stone-breakers had to break the stones small enough to fit into the baskets. Some of the stones could be broken up just using a sledgehammer but the bigger ones had to be split with a rock drill first, and then each piece had to be broken into smaller pieces. Red Hair and Ah-Fat worked as a team then: the boy held the drill and the older man swung the sledgehammer. The constant jarring soon made the skin between Ah-Fat’s thumb and forefinger crack and bleed. He had to rip the lining of his cotton jacket into pieces and make a bandage. The blood leaked through and formed a hard scab. He soaked his bandage in water every evening when they got back to camp, then dried it over the bonfire, ready for work again the next day. The cracks would begin to heal overnight, only to split again the next day. Gradually the cracks got bigger and would not heal over. Rock dust got in and they began to look like dirty black gullies.

Red Hair told Ah-Fat to go and buy a pair of deerskin gloves with good thick lining of animal pelt inside them, from the Redskins. When Ah-Fat heard they cost three dollars a pair, he refused. Red Hair sighed: “That’s two whole days’ wages if you don’t spend a cent on food or drink, or shell out on a woman,” he said. “Those thieving motherfuckers have hiked the price sky-high.”

Ah-Fat said nothing but he suddenly realized that he was not capable of being a carpenter, a bricklayer or a grinder. Back home, all he could do was farm work (and he had never done more than muddle along at that). If he worked himself to the bone all day breaking and carrying stones, the most he could earn was one dollar and seventy-five cents a day. But as soon as work started on the railroad, prices shot up and all his wages went on daily necessities. At this rate, how long would it take him to save up enough to buy fields and property? His mother might not last that long.

The break that Ah-Fat was hoping for came just five days later.

The group had set up camp in a new spot, but after two whole days, there was still a blank next to their names in the record-keeper’s work log. Several attempts to blast the rocks had failed, so none of the follow-up work could proceed.

The proper name for the explosive they used was nitroglycerine, but no one ever called it that. They just called it Yellow Water. When put into bottles, it looked about as harmless and innocent as lemonade, pretty even. No one could have imagined it capable of razing mountaintops. It was hotheaded stuff too, and had to be handled with the greatest care. If, by some mishap, a drop escaped and landed on hard rock, and it happened to be a hot day, the whole lot would go up in smoke in the blink of an eye.

The tunnel to be built was through a cliff face, and could only be reached by crawling across loose scree. The first man to go up was handpicked by the foreman because he had the most blasting experience. As he crossed the last bit of scree, he trod upon an overhanging rock, lost his footing and fell. There was a deafening, muffled roar—not of detonated explosives but of cascading rock which rolled with him down the mountain. Man and Yellow Water bottle alike hit the surface of the water, floated for a moment, then disappeared from sight.

The second navvy got up the steep slope without incident, but near the entrance to the tunnel twisted his ankle on a loose stone. All that could be seen was his blue cotton jacket fluttering in mid-air like a sparrow hawk with a broken wing, and then the whole cliff face shook. When the dust cleared, the men’s mouths opened and shut ludicrously, but no sound came out. They had been deafened by the blast.

The yeung fan foreman kicked angrily at a pile of loose stones by his foot. There was no need for an interpreter; the navvies knew he was swearing. But there were no more takers, no third man ready to give up his life on the mountainside.

Not that day.

Not the day after, either.

On the third day, the men awoke to find they had an extra egg with their breakfast. They gathered together afterwards, to find the foreman smoking gloomily. He sat on a low rock and the men formed a circle around him. The foreman smoked on and on, lighting the next cigarette from the butt of the one before. The pile of half-finished cigarette ends grew around him. The men were surprised to see that their young foreman’s hair was thinning on top—and he suddenly seemed vulnerable to them. This foreman was their boss, but there were still others above him. He had to answer to the foremen’s foreman. Progress had been nil the first day, nil the second day. If there was still no progress today, then he would have to figure out a way to complete four days’ work by end of day tomorrow. The men gradually began to feel that they did not want to be in his shoes.

Finally the foreman threw his cigarette away, stood up and pointing at the record-keeper said: “You tell ’em.”

The men opened a crack in their ranks and the record-keeper walked into the centre. He stared at his toecaps and, stammering slightly, said: “He … he says anyone who’s successful in getting the explosives into the hole and detonating them, can, can apply to, to get his wife over to Gold Mountain. One ticket will be paid for.”

There was a silence so absolute you could hear the wind rustling in the trees and the moths flapping their wings on the underside of the leaves. Ah-Fat’s fingertip gave a tiny quiver. He was not aware of it—but Red Hair was. Red Hair grabbed hold of his hand in a grip that was as sharp, savage and unrelenting as a crab’s pincers. Ah-Fat could hear the bones crack. “I’ve got a wife, you haven’t,” Red Hair whispered in his ear.

To the record-keeper, Red Hair said: “You tell that kwai lo (white devil) that if he doesn’t keep his word, I’ll kill his mother.”

The record-keeper relayed most, though not all, of the message. He was adept in sandpapering away the roughest edges of the words he had to translate. The frown lines on the foreman’s face gradually relaxed into something akin to a genial smile.

Red Hair set off up the mountain carrying the bottle of Yellow Water and the tin tube with the gunpowder packed in it. Ah-Lam started after him: “Mind your step, Red Hair,” he called. Red Hair turned and smiled: “Don’t pull such an ugly face,” he said. “Just you wait till my wife’s here to serve you porridge with preserved eggs.” Ah-Fat tried to say something too, but the words stuck in his throat. His eyes smarted as he watched Red Hair proceed up the slope.

Red Hair was walking very strangely, like a lame antelope, with one leg long and the other short. The short leg was clamped firmly to the ground while he stretched out the long one and made a circle. Ah-Fat realized he was testing the firmness of the terrain. Stepping slowly but surely, he made his way to the hole in the cliff face. His blue cotton jacket fluttered for moment at the entrance and then disappeared. Ah-Fat began counting to himself.

One, two, three, four, five. He should have put the bottle of Yellow Water down by now.

Six, seven, eight, nine, ten. He should have stuck the tin tube into the bottle.

Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. He should have set the tube in position inside the hole in the mountain.

Ah-Fat counted to fifty but still there was no sign of Red Hair. Some of the men began to panic. “Send the dog into the hole to look.” The words were hardly out of their mouths when there was a muffled thud, like a miserable fart, and something shot out of the hole in the cliff face. The explosives had not ignited properly.

When the dust settled, Ah-Fat and Ah-Lam raced up the mountainside and brought Red Hair back. Half of Red Hair’s face had been burned black, and there was something else odd about it too—he had lost an ear. Blood gushed out of a hole the size of a copper coin on the side of his head. Ah-Fat tore off his jacket and pressed it to the wound. In a little while, the cotton cloth was soaked through. Red Hair’s body was as limp as a rag doll.

“Get the foreman to ride for a doctor! Quick!” Ah-Fat yelled at the record-keeper. The foreman was the only one who had a horse, apart from the supply team.

The record-keeper went and spoke to the foreman. His words were brief—just one sentence. The foreman launched into a long preamble. The men grew impatient. “What the hell’s up? This is a matter of life and death!” The record-keeper came over and mumbled: “He says there’s no doctor for a hundred miles. Besides, it was arranged with the contractor that in case of illness or injury, you look after yourself, the company’s not responsible. It’s clearly laid down in the contract that.…”

The record-keeper did not finish what he was saying. He swallowed it back because Ah-Fat got to his feet and walked over to him. Ah-Fat walked up close and the record-keeper could see the axe in the boy’s hand. This was the axe Ah-Fat used for felling saplings for their tent. The axe blade had been nicked in a few places but was still an excellent tool for chopping trees.

“Down in the valley there’s a Redskin tribe with a medicine man,” said Ah-Fat. There was a gleam in his eyes which made the record-keeper tremble. The last time he had seen that kind of a look was one early spring. A brown bear had come down from the mountain after a winter of starvation—it had eyes like that.

The record-keeper went back and told the foreman what Ah-Fat had said. The foreman gave Ah-Fat a sidelong glance and launched into another long, incomprehensible speech. This the record-keeper did not translate. He knew the best he could do was take the rough edges off the man’s words, but there was no way he could blunt the knife blade. And now there were knife blades on both sides. He went back to Ah-Fat: “You do what you want. It’s none of my concern.”

Ah-Fat shoved the record-keeper aside and went up to the foreman. Gently he raised the axe, until it almost rested against the foreman’s nose. It still bore the fresh resin smell from the branches he had cut that morning. The foreman started to retreat, but too late. The crowd of men seethed around the pair, squeezing them into the centre of a circle which grew smaller and smaller. It was getting hard to breathe. The foreman’s temples began to throb and his eyes looked like they were about to pop out of their sockets.

“Doctor. Right now. You.” Ah-Fat enunciated the words one by one.

It took a few moments for the foreman to realize Ah-Fat was speaking English, albeit of a rudimentary kind.

“You’re wasting your breath, Ah-Fat,” a voice shouted from the crowd, “just cut him down. Our lives are cheap. Two and a half of ours for one of his. Fair’s fair.”

The foreman suddenly bent down and swiftly pulled something out of his boot, and put it against Ah-Fat’s middle. It felt blunt and rather heavy, not like a sharp weapon. Ah-Fat suddenly realized it was a pistol. They had no idea the foreman carried a gun. Ah-Fat dropped his axe with a thud. The atmosphere became as brittle as if it were a sheet of glass of which everyone held a corner in his hand, and dared not make a false move in case it shattered.

The foreman muttered something. Then, pushing Ah-Fat in front of him, he walked him slowly away. The ranks of men parted like water to let them through and came together again behind them. Harsh breathing could be heard but no one said a word.

It was only when the pair had gone some way off that the men found the ashen-faced record-keeper standing among some low bushes. The crotch of his trousers was wet, and urine still dripped from the bottom of one trouser leg.

“He—he said he’d go with Ah-Fat and, and get a doctor.” The record-keeper’s lips trembled so much he could hardly get the words out.

Half an hour later, the medicine man from the Redskin tribe rode up, bringing herbals to stop the bleeding and inflammation.

Ah-Fat tugged at the record-keeper’s sleeve: “Tell him to bring me the stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“The bottle of Yellow Water.”

The record-keeper looked astonished. “You mean—you’re going up?” “Tell him I don’t want a boat ticket, I want a bank draft.”

The record-keeper went over and relayed the message. This time the record-keeper spoke fluently and at length while the foreman’s answer was brief. In fact, it was a single word, which everyone understood without the need of a translation.

“Yes.”

Ah-Fat tied the Yellow Water bottle to his waist, looped the tin tube over his shoulder and then set off. As he walked past the men, he heard sighs but no one tried to stop him.

“If someone’s got to die, better for it to be someone without a wife and kids,” one man said.

As he climbed the slope, Ah-Fat copied the way Red Hair had gone up—one leg long, the other short, one in a fixed position, the other testing the ground ahead. The difference was that Ah-Fat was younger so his steps were lighter and faster. The half-moon of the cliff face had suffered repeated injuries that day and the newly exposed rock had the terrifying whiteness of a woman’s naked breast. Ah-Fat’s black shadow fluttered moth-like back and forth across the crevices between the rocks. When he reached the entrance to the hole, he turned around and waved—perhaps in greeting, perhaps in farewell.

A short while later, Ah-Fat emerged from the hole. Forgetting the measured steps he had taken on his ascent, he came down fast. There was no testing of the ground this time. Ah-Fat’s legs seemed to have left his body in their frantic flight. But he was not fast enough to outpace the gunpowder in the tin tube. He had not run more than a few steps when the cliff face collapsed.

“That’s done it,” said the foreman quietly. He did not sound as satisfied as one might have expected. Three and a half lives for one tunnel. Even when he made the usual calculations, he was still not sure the formula made sense.

Besides, he had actually started to like this shy yet rough Chinese kid.

In the middle of that night, the whole camp was woken up by frantic barking. The cook got up for a piss and shouted at Ginger, then tossed a bit of left-over rice cake in the dog’s direction. Ginger ignored it, sunk his teeth into the cook’s trouser leg and would not let go. The cook grabbed a stick and shoved him off but the dog still howled mournfully. The cook walked over to see what was out there and came across a black bundle on the ground, seven or eight paces from the tent.

He gave it a kick and the thing moaned—it was a man.

The cook lit a lantern and by its light saw a lump of blackened flesh. The flesh moved, revealing two rows of pink gums.

“The bank … the bank draft,” Ah-Fat mumbled.

When the railroad reached the town of Emory the cook’s worst fears came true.

It was almost unheard of for the Fraser River to freeze over, but that winter it was covered with a thick layer of ice. The boats of the supply teams could not get through, the camp was cut off and the rice rapidly ran out. Work on the railroad halted and several hundred navvies were trapped in their camps.

Preparing the rice each day became a time-consuming business. First a few spoonfuls of rice grain were boiled to a thin porridge. The wok with the porridge in it was put outside the tent to freeze solid, then three or four times the quantity of water was added. The porridge was boiled up and then put out to freeze again. This was repeated three times until the few spoons of rice grain had turned into a wok-ful of porridge, enough for a big bowl each. The trouble was this food would not stay put in their bellies. At first they felt full enough to burst, but as soon as they had walked a couple of paces, they farted and then felt ravenously hungry again.

The potatoes had long since been eaten up. The first two days after supplies dried up, there were a couple of slivers of salt fish to add to the rice, then there was just half a spoonful of salt. By the fourth day, that was finished too, and all that was left was one meal a day of watery rice gruel. Eventually, the cook washed out the wok, giving each man a little of the rice water. Then he threw down the ladle and said: “You’ll have to look after yourselves from now on.”

They all knew this was the last mouthful of food but no one said anything. For the starving, even a sigh is a waste of effort. They did not measure their energy in pounds and ounces any more, but in tenths of an ounce. They scrimped and saved every tiny scrap of energy they possessed for the time when the overland supply team would arrive. On the overland route, it would take the pack horses at least three days to arrive from the nearest small town. And that was their speed in summertime. When there was snow and ice on the trail, it might take four days, or five, or forever.

Ah-Fat still kept the one-hundred-dollar bank draft in the pocket of his under-jacket. He had not had a chance to send it to his mother. When he first got it, he was afraid that if he slept too soundly, someone might pull his jacket off him while he slept. So he took the jacket off, folded it very small and used it as a pillow under his head. With the constant folding and re-folding, the bank draft gradually lost its crispness, and the edges became tattered with moisture. As Ah-Fat pillowed his head on the bank draft, he dreamed over and over again that this small piece of paper turned itself into mu after mu of land, expanses of glossy black earth that would grow anything planted.

But gradually Ah-Fat’s dreams changed. He stopped dreaming about land. Now his dreams were full of banquets, with tables laid out from one end of the village to the other. When he woke up, every detail of every dish was still clear in his memory, its colour, its form, its taste, even what dish it was served in and the patterns on it. Then he stopped dreaming. He could not be bothered to keep his eye on the bank draft and just left it by his pillow. He knew perfectly well that the piece of paper which had nearly cost him his life was worthless if he starved to death. It was not even big enough to wipe his arse with.

After drinking the last of the rice water, Ah-Fat fell into a doze, but soon after he was woken by pangs of hunger, gnawing away at his belly like tiny flesh-eating creatures. He could actually hear the rustling as they scrabbled around inside his belly. If someone cut him open right then, he was sure that they would find his belly riddled with tiny holes. His whole body felt as rigid as if it was bound in a straitjacket, and every fibre of his being seemed to have shrunk several inches. He knew he was suffering the effects of the bitter cold.

He slowly crawled out of the tent. Outside it was a dull day, the sun so weak you could only tell where it was by looking at the shade. Before the snow on the trees had had time to melt, it froze again, forming icicles on the branches that swayed in the wind. They had exhausted the supply of firewood and the charcoal fire sputtered into extinction. No one had the energy to go and cut more fuel.

Ah-Fat felt something nudge the small of his back and, turning round, he saw Ginger. The dog walked soundlessly, making as little disturbance as a puff of wind. Ah-Fat reached out and felt his belly. Ginger wearily raised a hind leg, pissed a few drops of urine, then stopped. When Ah-Fat had been at work in the camp, it was so unbearably cold he used to put his hands in the urine whenever Ginger pissed, to warm them up. The dog came to understand what Ah-Fat was doing and would hold back until Ah-Fat reached out his hands. But Ginger had not eaten for many days. The dog’s belly was empty and he hardly had any urine left. There were deep cracks all over Ah-Fat’s hands and the urine hurt like hell. Ah-Fat shook his hands dry and kicked the dog away with his foot. Ginger whimpered and shook the snow off his coat. Then he crept back to Ah-Fat and pushed his head against his chest.

By now Ginger was nothing but skin and bones, and his sagging belly hung down to the ground like a wrung-out cloth bag. His ribs showed. Ah-Fat stroked her head, flattening a few stray hairs. Then his heart skipped a beat. He had an idea.

He stood up and fetched the axe he used for chopping down trees.

“Ginger, you’re gonna die anyway,” he said quietly, “you might as well save us.”

As he raised the axe to strike, he saw a flicker of fear in Ginger’s eyes. But the dog made no move to run away. Instead, he made a slight movement and sank down on the ground, as if to sleep off a good dinner.

Ah-Fat checked the axe for a moment, then struck the dog’s neck. The blood spurted out, spattering a line of drops over the snow. The dog’s eyes opened wide. In them Ah-Fat saw the mountains, the trees, the sky. He knelt down and pushed the lids down. The dog’s tongue quivered and he licked Ah-Fat’s hand one last time. The dog’s eyes had opened again but the image of the mountains, the trees and the sky gradually faded. Ah-Fat felt something prickling his face. He rubbed it with the back of his hand and was surprised to find it wet with tears.

A couple of hours later, the forest was filled with the smell of cooked meat. Ah-Fat ladled out a bowlful of soup with two slices of lean meat floating on top and carried it to Red Hair. Red Hair’s wounds had not healed and still wept blood and pus. The flesh had begun to smell. Ah-Fat propped him up and helped him eat the soup. Unsalted and without any oil in it, it tasted rank. Red Hair forced himself to swallow a mouthful but, like a hydra-headed snake, it fought its way back up and spurted out of his nose, mouth and throat. He was shaken by a violent cough which pulled at the wound on the side of his face. The excruciating pain made him howl in agony. “Ah-Fat!” he shouted suddenly. “Why’s it got dark so quickly? Light the lamp!” “It’s broad daylight! What d’you want a lamp for?” The chopsticks fell from Red Hair’s hand. “It’s got dark. I can’t see anything…” Red Hair’s eyes had a glassy stare. Ah-Fat realized that he had just gone blind.

Ah-Fat hurriedly helped Red Hair to lie back down again.

Red Hair tried to cough but was so weak that the breath caught in his throat and he seemed about to choke. Ah-Fat thumped his chest hard a few times, and his breathing eased a little.

Suddenly, Red Hair gripped Ah-Fat’s hand. “When my kid Loon gets married, will you see to the wedding as his uncle?” “You’re woozy with sleep, Uncle Red Hair,” said Ah-Fat with a smile. “Loon’s like my younger brother, he’s the same generation as me. He needs a real uncle to marry him off. Besides, he’s a little kid, just out of his nappies. Why are you worrying about getting him married?” Red Hair gave a sigh but said nothing. Ah-Fat freed his hand and noticed that all Red Hair’s fingers were swollen and club-like. He knew the reason why—the lack of fresh vegetables. What he did not know was whether Red Hair would make it through the winter.

During the night, Ah-Fat awoke to find Red Hair sitting up holding on to one of the tent struts, his eyes glittering brightly. “What’s up?” he asked in surprise. “Do you want to take a piss? Do you want me to help you outside?” Red Hair shook his head. He turned towards Ah-Fat and said something into his ear. His voice was so weak that Ah-Fat did not understand at first. Red Hair said it again: “Fiddle.” “What do you want the fiddle for?” asked Ah-Fat. “It’s the middle of the night.” “I’m giving it to you, the fiddle…” Red Hair started coughing weakly again and said nothing more.

Red Hair died that night. When they woke up the next morning, the tent stank. Red Hair had pissed on his mat. When they tried to shake him awake, they found his body was stiff.

They hurriedly wrapped Red Hair in one of the sleeping mats and carried him outside. It was snowing so heavily the sky seemed to be falling on them. Great, fat snowflakes hit them silently in their faces, almost blinding them so that they could not make out each other’s features. It was impossible to dig a hole to bury Red Hair, so they tied the bundle up with twine and laid it down under a tree, weighted down with stones.

They stumbled back to the tent. “It’s cold enough to freeze your piss today,” said someone. “Red Hair won’t start to rot in this weather for couple of weeks or more.” Ah-Lam gathered up Red Hair’s soiled clothes. “Who knows how many of us’ll live,” he said with a sigh. “Better wait a few days and bury all the bodies together. It’ll save digging a hole for each one.” This possibility had occurred to all of them but only vaguely. By speaking the thought out loud, Ah-Lam gave it a terrible clarity. It faced them squarely, and there was no getting away from it. When they lay down again, the tent felt strangely roomy. The space Red Hair’s body had been crammed into was tiny, but now that he was gone, it seemed like a yawning gap. As they listened to the thunderous drumming noise from the trees above the tent, they trembled in fear.

Their hunger had numbed them. But the dog meat soup they had gulped down yesterday aroused the hunger pangs again, acute and fierce. When they lay down to sleep, they felt terrible gnawing pains. They did not dare close their eyes for fear they would never wake up again, like Red Hair. The cook, who had lain down for a moment suddenly sat up again. “I’m going to eat snow!” he said. “I’ve heard just drinking water can keep you alive for two weeks.”

There were desperate shouts and they all sat up and crawled outside. They scraped up the snow with their bare hands and ate it. They stuffed themselves with it until they felt they would burst, stood up to piss and ate again. After three rounds of eating snow and pissing, they staggered back to the tent and lay down again, still hungry but this time with full bellies.

Finally they could not stay awake any longer and drifted into a lethargic sleep.

Ah-Fat was the first to hear it—he was awakened by a strange noise from neighbouring tents. It was a little like the wind rustling in bamboos or a rope dancing in mid-air. It was the sound of someone whistling, he realized.

“The pack horses! The pack horses!” someone screamed.

When the snow stopped, Ah-Fat took them to bury Red Hair.

When they scraped away the snow, they discovered that the twine had been gnawed through. The mat had come undone and Red Hair was missing two fingers. Another finger was broken at the joint but still attached by the skin.

Ah-Fat re-wrapped the body, bound it up tightly and told the others to start digging the grave. The ground was frozen hard as iron and their pickaxes pinged against it. The men dug until they were covered with sweat, but all they made was a shallow hole. They tipped the matting bundle in and covered it with a few clods of earth. Suddenly Ah-Fat dug the body out again and rearranged it. He pointed it in a different direction and started burying it again. The men were puzzled but Ah-Lam could see what he was doing: “It points East now, towards Tang Mountain.”

To stop wild animals digging up the body, they piled stones on top of the earthen mound and stuck a tree branch in as a marker. Ah-Fat thought the branch would blow down at the first gust of wind, so decided to carve Red Hair’s name on the trunk of a nearby fir.

He took the axe to the tree but then realized that he only knew Red Hair’s surname—Fong—but not his formal given names. No one else knew either. Finally he just carved “Red Hair Fong” in crooked characters on the tree trunk.

Ah-Fat stood looking at his handiwork in a daze. After a while he said: “Uncle Red Hair, wait seven years and I’ll be back to collect your bones.” He suddenly remembered what Red Hair had said that day when they helped Ah-Sing collect his cousin’s bones in Victoria: “I brought you out here, you send me home, then we’re quits.” Red Hair’s words had been prophetic.

“I’m sorry you’re missing a bone or two, Uncle Red Hair,” said Ah-Fat as he knelt with all the ceremony he could muster before the makeshift grave.

The Pacific Railroad wound first northward, then eastward, snaking its way along the Fraser Valley and biting a great hole in the belly of the Rocky Mountains. As this great dark snake crept forwards, inch by inch, the camps kept pace, moving along in its trail until, before Ah-Fat knew it, he had sewn more than sixty crosses in the corner of the tarpaulin.

One day, just as Ah-Fat had sewn the sixty-eighth cross, he saw the record-keeper hurrying over. “The foreman’s called a meeting,” he said. The men were squatting on the ground, slurping at their bowls of porridge. They did not move. “Could be the Lord in Heaven above, but you gotta fill your belly first,” said one. The record-keeper glanced at them. “He doesn’t want any of you, he wants him,” he said, indicating Ah-Fat. “So he wants you to make another trip with the Yellow Water bottle, does he?” said someone. “A hundred-dollar bank draft won’t be enough this time. Times have changed…” “You dickhead, there’ll be no carrying Yellow Water anywhere,” Ah-Lam retorted. “All the tunnels are finished and they’re waiting for the tracks to be joined up. There’s fuck-all blasting to do now.” “Oh, but the boss thinks Ah-Fat carried the bottle so nicely, maybe he’s going to let him enjoy his wife as a reward,” put in another man. “You’re still a virgin, Ah-Fat, aren’t you? Lucky you to have a hell of a woman for your first time around!”

Ah-Fat walked away with the men’s mocking laughter ringing in his ears, prickling him like a sticky burr clinging to his back.

The foremen’s tent was about a hundred paces away up the slope. As he looked up, Ah-Fat could see horses, already saddled and bridled, tied to trees far in the distance. He watched the horses, heads lowered, drinking from the water buckets as the record-keeper went in and reported his arrival. He recognized his foreman’s horse, a skittish black pony two to three years old, kicking out and swishing its tail. It snorted playfully as it drank from its bucket. Ah-Fat walked over to it and began making plaits all the way down its mane. The pony looked round at him. It seemed to enjoy the attention, and rubbed its neck against Ah-Fat’s hand, whinnying softly.

The record-keeper called Ah-Fat inside.

The tent was exactly the same as the one Ah-Fat lived in, except that his was shared between ten men, and this one housed only three. They were all foremen, each in charge of their own horses and men. The lamp had been turned up to its brightest and the men were playing cards in intense silence. They had no table, so two bedrolls, one on top of the other, served as a card table. The floor was littered with empty liquor bottles. Back when he lived at Ah-Sing’s store, Ah-Sing had told him that the yeung fan drank something with a strange name, “wee-skee,” and a peculiar smell. Now that Ah-Fat could smell it for himself, he thought it had a smell like mouldy cloth shoes. It tickled right inside his nostrils and nearly made him sneeze. It was still early in the morning, and the sun had only just started to brighten the tops of the trees. But the foremen had already drunk enough to turn the tips of their noses bulbous and red, and the sleeping mats were not rolled out. Ah-Fat guessed they had been up all night drinking. He knew that camp rules prohibited alcohol, so it was odd that they were flouting them today. Then his foreman brought the fanned cards in his hand together with a swish and waved at the record-keeper to get out. The record-keeper and Ah-Fat were both startled—the foreman normally communicated through the record-keeper and had never spoken directly to a navvy before.

The record-keeper made a respectful bow and exited through the tent flap, leaving Ah-Fat alone. The three foremen finished their card game. Ah-Fat’s boss appeared to have lost—he grimaced and frowned grimly. Then he stood up, brought a sack out from a corner of the tent and said something. His face formed complicated creases as he spoke and Ah-Fat was puzzled. Were they an expression of annoyance or of sadness? But he had worked for almost five years with this foreman and, if the man spoke slowly, Ah-Fat could understand about half of what he said without needing the record-keeper’s help.

“This is for you.”

Ah-Fat undid the twine tied around the sack and opened it. It held crispy rice cakes. Ever since the time when the team nearly died from starvation, food supplies consisted mostly of rice sheets imported from Hong Kong, with only small amounts of loose rice. The rice was cooked in a dry wok till crispy on the bottom, then compressed and cut into sheets a foot square. Once they were dried out, they were much lighter than rice so the supply teams could bring more supplies in one trip. Plus the rice in the rice sheets was already cooked and, at a pinch, could be eaten without further cooking. Once the men had pitched camp, the sheets could also be soaked in water and boiled up into rice or rice porridge.

Ah-Fat reckoned at a rough glance that the sack held about a hundred sheets. Generally, the supply teams would hand over supplies to the cook in each work team. They had never given them directly to the navvies. Ah-Fat thought he must have heard wrong. He pointed to the sack and then to himself. “Give … me?”

The foreman nodded. “The railroad’s soon going to be finished. We’re letting you all go. Understand? Let go. I mean…” The foreman flapped his hands dismissively and Ah-Fat suddenly understood.

“What time?”

“Now.”

The saddled horses, the card table, the liquor. Ah-Fat’s head was spinning but all these disparate fragments gradually began to make up complete picture. Like a thunderbolt, the realization came to him that all the men in the camp were being abandoned in the wilderness.

“This … each person?” he asked, pointing at the sack.

“No, just you.” The foreman pointed at Ah-Fat’s chest.

“Contract, contract…” Ah-Fat was trying to say, “What about the compensation stipulated in the contract?” but his English was not up to it. All he could do was repeat the word “contract.”

The foreman understood anyway. He started to speak, but the only words that came out were a repeated “Sorry, sorry.”

Ah-Fat ran out of the tent and said to the record-keeper, who was standing at the entrance: “Call the men, all of them, quick!”

The record-keeper looked at the foreman who had followed Ah-Fat out and dared not move.

“You afraid of that dickhead? They’re trying to dismiss us on the spot! If you don’t go, the whole camp will starve. Quick!” Ah-Fat gave the record-keeper a savage kick and the man stumbled off down the mountain.

A fierce argument broke out among the three foremen and although Ah-Fat could not understand, he hazarded a guess that the other two were pinning the blame for this new trouble on his foreman. After the shouting had continued for a bit, the three men went into the tent, rolled up the bed mats and slung them across the horses’ backs. They were about to mount, when Ah-Fat pulled a bottle from his pocket and blocked their way. “You dare make one move,” he said, “and I’ll smash this. I’ll take your three lives with my one life. Fair’s fair.”

The foremen could not understand a word Ah-Fat said, but they did not need to. Their eyes were drawn to the bottle in Ah-Fat’s hand and the yellow liquid that glinted in the early morning sunlight. They suddenly looked ashen, as if a receding tide had sucked all the blood from their faces, exposing a network of livid lines and wrinkles.

A dense black cloud started to roll up the mountainside. It was a black cloud of men, several hundred Chinese men, all from the dozen or so tents that made up the camp. They came brandishing shovels, hammers, pickaxes, rock drills, axes and sticks. They brought the brazier shovels and the ladles too. Anything that could be moved, they brought with them. The black cloud coalesced from scattered puffs of vapour, gathering speed and momentum as it surged up the slope and arrived at the foremen’s tent.

Ah-Lam was first on the scene. He was holding a knife which he had grabbed from the cook—one used for peeling potatoes and cutting up cabbage. He had torn his trousers running here and the tatters flapped in the wind like the wings of a sparrow hawk.

“You motherfucker,” he raged at the foreman. “We gave years of our lives for you, and now you think you can get rid of us just like that.” Ah-Lam grabbed hold of the foreman’s jacket and lunged at him with the knife. The foreman dodged and Ah-Lam deflected, missed his footing and tumbled down the slope, coming to rest against a sapling. The tears in Ah-Lam’s trousers caught on the branches and he had to make several attempts to stand upright. A trouser leg ripped off in the process, leaving him with one bare leg. His hair stood up like wire bristles and, his eyes blazing and almost starting from his head, he launched himself into a new attack.

Just as he was raising his knife to bring it down on the foreman’s head, he glimpsed, out of the corner of his eye, something which leapt, pantherlike, from the crowd of men. It seized his arm. Ah-Lam saw it was Ah-Fat, and his aim faltered—but too late to stop the knife on its ferocious plunge downwards.

Ah-Fat felt a smack on the face and shut his eyes involuntarily. When he opened them again, it was to see a bright red duck egg suspended over his head. After a few moments, he realized it was the sun. Gradually his vision cleared and he looked at the trees and the men standing around him. They seemed to be slowly spinning, each branch and leaf and face coloured in a single hue—the vermilion red of the print in his school books.

There were shouts of “Ah-Fat, Ah-Fat!” Some of the men rushed to pull Ah-Fat to his feet, others made to grab the foremen.

“Don’t move! Or I’ll blast you with this!” Ah-Fat leaned against a tree trunk, holding the bottle of Yellow Water in his hand. The men froze, and the shouts died in their throats, reduced to astonished gasps.

“It’s the Pacific Railroad Company who took this decision. What’s the point of killing these three? It’ll take us a month or more to walk back to the city, and if we don’t get supplies, we’ll all starve. We’ll keep two of them here and send the third down the mountain to cable for supplies. If no supplies turn up, then we’ll keep them pri—”

Ah-Fat crumpled to the ground before he finished talking.

Three days later, the supply team arrived in the camp heavily laden with sacks. There were eighty rice sheets for every navvy. Carrying the food sacks and tools over their shoulders, the motley crowd of men trailed like yellow ants down through the autumnal forests, at the start of the long trek through the wilderness to the city.

Ah-Fat dozed fitfully on the back of the foreman’s horse. His wound was long and deep—it stretched from his left temple to the right side of his mouth. He was capable of walking but the foreman insisted that he ride pillion on his horse—at least as far as the major road.

“You nearly took my life, but you nearly lost your life to save me, so that makes things even and we’re quits,” said the foreman and asked the record-keeper to translate.

“What’s his name?” Ah-Fat asked the record-keeper. He could only speak through one side of his mouth and his words came out faint and fuzzy.

“Rick Henderson.”

When they parted, the foreman took a walking stick out of his baggage and gave it to Ah-Fat. It had been made by a Redskin and was of hardwood, with a grinning eagle carved at the top. The foreman patted Ah-Fat’s shoulder. “Maybe we’ll meet again, kid.” Ah-Fat got down, holding the walking stick, and felt the weakness in his legs.

I hope I never set eyes on you again, was what he thought to himself. But he did not say it. Instead he said: “Maybe, Rick, maybe.”

Ah-Fat began to walk but he had not gone far when he heard the clopping of hooves behind him. The foreman was back again.

“Nitroglycerine is kept under lock and key. How did you get hold of it?” he asked.

Ah-Fat laughed. His lips were thickly swollen and the laugh twisted his features into a savage grin.

“That was horse piss. Your horse.”

As Ah-Fat made his way through the almost uninhabited forests towards the city, carrying on his back one long cloth bag and a smaller round one, he had no idea that the last spike had been driven into the railroad sleepers in a little town called Craigellachie. At long last, the Pacific Railroad had joined up with the Central and Eastern Railroads, creating a great artery snaking across the chest of the country. Lavish celebratory banquets were taking place, to the popping of champagne corks, and gentlemen in black tuxedos shouted and laughed in between clinking wineglasses. Newspapers and magazines flew off the printing presses, carrying photographs and news reports on their front pages.

But not a single photograph or news report made mention of the

Chinese navvies who built the railroad.

That was something else Ah-Fat did not know.

Ah-Sing got up early in the morning and, before opening up the store, shouted to the boy to come and hang up the lanterns. They had been hung up last New Year and then been put away in the attic in the intervening months. They were dusty and the boy took off his apron and gave them a rub, revealing gold lettering underneath: “Years of Plenty” on one, and “Everlasting Peace” on the other. He was too short to hang them on the nails on the wall even when he stood on a stool, so he fetched a bamboo cane and lifted them up onto the nails. A tenuous air of good cheer filtered grudgingly through the door and windows and into the street outside.

The boy shook out his apron and the air filled with clouds of grey dust.

“Uncle Ah-Sing, how much New Year stuff do you want me to get today?”

The boy was referring to gift boxes of snacks such as sesame and green bean cakes and lotus crisp, with a festive red paper cover stuck on top. Ah-Sing bought these in from the cake shop. He did not stock them or make them himself.

Ah-Sing counted up on his fingers. “Five boxes,” he said. “Just five, each kind.”

The boy was startled. “Five?” he queried. “Will that be enough for the New Year festival?” “If we sell ’em all, then you can go and light incense before your mother’s picture!” said his boss. “Haven’t you seen the railroad navvies are back and the streets are full of them? They haven’t even got rice to eat. How can they afford cakes?”

Ah-Sing watched the boy clopping off down the street, two large baskets slung from the ends of his carrying pole. Then he went back inside and opened the shop, laying the goods out on display. He looked up at the sky. A thick cloud pressed down so low, it was almost as if he could put up his hand and tweak one corner. Leaden skies like this meant snow, he knew, and it would come down with a whoosh just as soon as the wind blew an opening in the cloud. The snow might tip down for the duration of a day, or a season. You never knew.

On a cold day like this, no one would get up at such an early hour to come to his store. There was no hurry.

The truth was that it was a long time since he had had any fresh food. By the last month of the old year, fruit and vegetables were long gone, except for a few apples he had stored since the autumn, now so dried up, they were smaller than tangerines and as wrinkly as an old woman’s face. There were a few South China delicacies like dried bamboo shoots which he got in last autumn too, but they had not sold either. Even the cigarettes and tea which always sold well had gradually stopped moving off the shelves. At least the tea leaves were packed in foil in wooden boxes and would keep for a year or so. To prevent the tobacco from going mouldy Ah-Sing wrapped it in cloth bags and put it in sacks of rice which absorbed any moisture.

Business was going from bad to worse.

The Pacific Railroad had taken five years to build, stretching farther and farther into the interior. Before it had time to begin carrying goods and people, the trash it created began to surge towards the city—an army of unemployed for which absolutely no preparations had been made. They appeared overnight on the streets of Victoria’s Chinatown and scurried hither and thither like rats hunting for a corner to take shelter, searching for food and warmth in the chinks left between one man and the next.

Things were constantly being pilfered from Ah-Sing’s shop: an egg, a cucumber, a bag of rice, a potato, even a pack of needles and thread. So Ah-Sing moved all the goods displayed at the entrance back inside the shop. Then he locked the side door and back door and kept just one side of the double front door open. That way, everyone who came into the shop had to pass in front of his eyes. Even so, things kept disappearing. He simply did not see how these pilferers could use such seamless sleight-ofhand tricks. What he did not understand was that a hungry man could learn tricks in one day that someone with a full belly would never learn in a lifetime.

In recent years, the city had found itself with more and more mouths to feed, and less and less to feed them with. If you had had a full plate of food before, now you only had half. If you had only had half a plate before, now you only had a few crumbs. If you had had a few crumbs before, now you did not have a single one. The city’s inhabitants believed that it was the Chinamen with the pigtails hanging down from the back of their heads that had brought this bad luck upon them. The newspapers explained that it was the fault of the Chinamen that everyone only had half the amount of food on their plates, so a campaign was launched to prohibit doing business with them. A few young hotheads even noted the names of people who continued to buy from the Chinamen and scrawled a sign on their walls with whitewash during the night. Anyone marked with such a sign met scowls in the street or suddenly found themselves being elbowed out in business deals with other White men. Little by little, Ah-Sing’s yeung fan customers dropped off.

Today, Ah-Sing had scarcely finished arranging the baskets of produce when the first customer came in.

He was squatting down at his work and at first only saw a pair of feet. He could tell straightaway that this was a navvy from the railroad. He had on a pair of boots so worn that the uppers were coming away from the soles but the toecaps looked almost new because metal strips had been nailed over them. The trouser legs were covered in burn holes, where sparks from a fire had scorched the material. Ah-Sing gradually raised his eyes to the man’s body. He was wearing a heavily patched, double-fronted jacket. The stitches around the patches were so crude that they looked like crawling maggots. He had a bag slung over each shoulder, a long one and a smaller round one of the sort used to carry foodstuffs on long journeys. This one looked saggy. The long sack had something solid packed into it but it was impossible to tell exactly what. Then he saw the man’s face. He dropped the rice wine bottle he was holding and it shattered on the floor.

The man had a scar that stretched from his left eyebrow to the right side of his mouth. Although the scar no longer wept pus, it had not healed over either. The winter wind had dried it to a desiccated gash which looked like the furrow of a newly ploughed field.

“Give me a sup of porridge,” said the man. “I haven’t eaten for a day.” He spoke gently, even with a slight smile. But the scar refused to cooperate with the expression on his face. The smile and the scar kept falling out, and the scar turned his gentle smile into a sombre grimace.

The hand which Ah-Sing was using to collect the fragments of glass began to tremble. “You want porridge?! You can kiss my arse! ” was what he wanted to say. He had seen too many beggars in Chinatown. But this one was different and he did not dare give him the brush-off. Instead he stammered out: “Fi … Fisgard Street, at the Chi … Chinese Benevolent Association, they’ll see to you. Have you, have you paid your dues?” Ah-Sing knew that every Chinese who stepped ashore at Victoria paid two dollars towards the Association fees.

The man burst into a laugh so loud it set the window frame shaking.

“You wouldn’t know your own granddad, would you, Ah-Sing? What kind of a song-and-dance routine is this you’re giving me?”

Ah-Sing was startled. He looked up again and scrutinized the man’s face carefully. It looked vaguely familiar. “Are you that … are you that…?” he began.

The man put down the bags and with his toecap hooked out a stool from under the counter with complete familiarity. Sitting down, he said: “I’m that … that Ah-Fat.”

Ah-Sing’s mouth dropped open and stayed open.

“You were just a snot-nosed kid, Ah-Fat,” he finally managed to say. “You’ve grown so tall. And who did that gash on your face?”

“What gash? If a railroad navvy comes back alive, that’s divine protection enough, isn’t it?” “Red Hair and Ah-Lam went with you, didn’t they? What happened to them?” asked Ah-Sing. “Red Hair’s gone.” “What do you mean ‘gone’?” “How many ways of ‘going’ are there? If you didn’t fall to your death or get killed in an explosion, you got sick or starved to death. Red Hair’s luck ran out, he was killed off by all of those.” “What about Ah-Lam, is he ‘gone’ too?” “I don’t know if he’s dead or alive. We walked together from Savona to Port Moody, then we got separated. We only had a few rice sheets left. But we’d already agreed that whatever happened, we’d meet up again at Ah-Sing’s store.”

“You walked all the way from Savona?” said Ah-Sing in astonishment. “How long did that take you?” “We started out last autumn. There were one hundred and fifty-six of us. By the time we got to Port Moody, only ninety or so were left. We’d worn out three pairs of shoes. Do you rent out places to sleep still?” “Yes I do, but not at the same prices as back then. Board and lodging is four dollars a week now.” “You’re a bastard, Ah-Sing!” “Hey, prices have skyrocketed these last years, you must know that! We’re just clawless crabs—we don’t have any other skills to sell. Keeping the shop and renting out sleeping space is the only way I’ve got of earning a living!”

Ah-Fat offloaded the long bag he carried on one shoulder and handed it to Ah-Sing. “This is Red Hair’s fiddle,” he said. “You keep it here for now and I’ll take it back to China sometime. I’m going to move in here. Give me a few days to get the week’s rent together. Give me a bit of porridge and I’ll go and get work today.”

Ah-Sing scraped some rice from the bottom of the pot and heated it up in some hot water. Then he got a few pieces of pickled vegetables out of a jar. As he handed Ah-Fat the bowl, his expression tightened.

“Ah-Fat, it’s not that I don’t want to look after folks from back home,” he said, “but too many men come to me with the same story every day. Get work? What work? Just walk around and see how many out-of-work people there are. Haven’t you seen the announcements put out by the Association telling folks from the Four Counties not to come to Gold Mountain to look for work any more? The railroad is finished and there’s nothing else for ‘piglets’ to do. I can’t let you stay here. If I let you stay, we’ll just starve quicker together.”

Ah-Fat just kept eating and did not answer. He ate slowly, as if he were counting every grain of rice in the bowl. He had lived off hard rice sheets for months and had almost forgotten what porridge tasted like. He wanted the gentle warmth of the rice to last forever—but eventually the last mouthful went down. He tucked the last piece of pickled vegetable under his tongue. Its rank, salty flavour permeated his saliva and coated his tongue from root to tip. In the end, the saliva almost made him dribble and he reluctantly swallowed it.

He put down the bowl, picked up the long bag and the small one, made a deep bow to Ah-Sing and went out into the street.

The wind had got up. It whipped round every corner and gathered in the middle of the street. It penetrated every hair of Ah-Fat’s head and every bone in his body. The clouds parted, but what came down was not sunlight but snow. Fat, wet snowflakes turned into grey slush where they landed. Ah-Fat looked up. The whole sky was a dirty grey.

As he got out into the street, he heard a squelching sound as someone laboured through the slush behind him. He looked around, to see Ah-Sing running after him. When Ah-Sing caught up with him, he pulled out of his inside pocket a yellow paper packet with a red label fixed to it. “Put this into your food bag,” he said. “I sent the boy to get some in today. After all, it is the end of the old year and you should have something for the New Year. There’s no work here in Chinatown. Try your luck where the yeung fan live. When you get work, come back and I’ll let you have a place to sleep—three dollars fifty a week for you.”

Ah-Fat never imagined that this would be the way he acquired his knowledge of the city of Victoria.

Up till now, Chinatown was all he knew. It had been his whole life, providing him with a place to sleep, eat, piss and shit. While in this Gold Mountain city, he had never gone beyond Chinatown—either physically or in his imagination. He had no idea that anywhere else outside Chinatown even existed.

Now he discovered that Chinatown was only one corner of Victoria. In the time he had been away building the railroad, this Canadian town had suddenly grown from a little kid into a hale and hearty youth. In every street and alley radiating out from the steamship docks, new houses had sprung up like mushrooms after spring rain. Their walls were built of neat red or grey-black bricks. The roof tiles were more varied—terracotta red, grey, grey-green, buff, even black. There were always steps leading up to the door, at the foot of which were lawns and flowers. Once, Ah-Fat had a serious look at these gardens and came to the conclusion that they were nothing like any that he had seen before—but he knew there was an amazing variety of things on this earth. At the top of the steps were the door and windows. A wreath often hung on the door; at the windows, the linen curtains were usually drawn, revealing only shadowy figures behind them. When the lamps were lit on dark evenings, their faces shone more brightly through the curtains than in full daylight. Despite Ah-Fat’s very limited knowledge, he could see that these homes were very different from the ones in Chinatown. He wanted to describe them with words like “warmth,” “plenty” and “sweet dreams.”

Gradually Ah-Fat learned about the people who lived behind these linen-curtained windows. Every day at the time when the sun rose to the level of the forks in the tree branches, the mistress of the house would make an appearance. She came to the door to see her husband off to work and her children off to school. He watched as she came out of the front door onto the driveway. Before the horse and carriage clip-clopped away, she would bend forward from a waist nipped in so tightly that it seemed about to snap in two, and peck at the cheeks of her man and her children, in rather the same way that a hen pecks at rice grains. He learned that this pecking motion was called a “kiss.” When the sun rose to the top of the tree, it was time for lunch. This was a simple meal for the mistress of the house since her husband and children did not return: usually a slice of bread, a doughnut and a cup of tea. Things only really got busy behind the curtains when the sun started to go down—that was when the cook prepared the evening meal. Ah-Fat could guess pretty accurately by now what they would be eating and how many guests would be there.

He guessed that from the contents of their trash.

After dinner the servants threw out the household waste, and these provided rich pickings: potatoes which had sprouted, rotting tomatoes, the dirt-ingrained outer leaves of cabbage, fish heads, tails and gills, meat bones which had not been gnawed clean, a tin of caviar which still had something left at the bottom. Sometimes there would be mouldy bread. If there were guests at dinner, Ah-Fat might even find a half-empty bottle of wine.

Ah-Fat stuffed it all in the smaller of his two bags. By the time he got back to Chinatown, all the shops were shut. He would scurry through the familiar, narrow, dark streets until he got to the back door of Ah-Sing’s store. There was an overhanging roof which warded off the rain and he sat down under it, pulled out the contents of the bag and heated it all up on the stove. In all Chinatown, only Ah-Sing left his stove outdoors once he had finished cooking. The stove, once extinguished, was not hot enough for Ah-Fat to cook the food but just enough to warm it up. In any case, he never waited until it heated through to swallow it down. Nowadays, he had a cast-iron stomach which could withstand anything—hot, cold, cooked or raw.

Finishing his meal, he took off his cotton jacket, used it to cover himself, leaned against the wall and went to sleep. He could sleep through any amount of wind or rain but was instantly alert and awake at the first cockcrow. Before anyone in Chinatown was properly up, he would slink away without leaving the smallest trace that he had been there.

One night, however, Ah-Fat never made it back to Chinatown.

He had made a new discovery during his wanderings through the city, a discovery so closely connected to his belly that it was hard to say which was cause and which was effect.

He was wandering aimlessly down a small street to the west of the docks one day when he heard a slight sound. The street was stirring after its midday rest, but the slight sound which Ah-Fat suddenly caught was something different, something which he had been familiar with as a child, something which had seared itself into his childhood memories so deeply that nothing in the intervening years could efface it.

It was the sound of a hen scurrying around in search of food.

With its constant diet of rotten vegetables, Ah-Fat’s belly had grown ascetic. But the sound awoke in him fierce longings for meat. And those fierce longings wriggled, as lively as hordes of worms, through his scarred and pitted guts, until every fibre of his being was seized with an uncontrollable trembling. He had always been able to keep his desires at the trembling stage. On any other day except this, he would have shouldered his bag full of rotten vegetables and made his way back to Ah-Sing’s unlit back entrance, with its stinking puddles of filth, to fall asleep and dream, perhaps, of chicken meat. But today something completely unexpected occurred to upset his normal routine.

He saw a fine, fat tawny hen squeeze through a hole in its pen and skip away in the direction of the street.

Ah-Fat’s hand seemed to function independently of his brain. His hand deftly grasped the hen and folded its wings back. The hen went limp and he stuffed it into his bag. He had used this neat trick as a child to persuade his mother’s chickens back into their coops. He was surprised that he could remember so well how to do it.

As he shouldered his bag, he suddenly saw two eyes watching him from behind the pen. A pair of eyes thickly fringed with lashes the colour of clear blue lake water. The eyes watched him for a few moments, then they fluttered and the lake water darkened.

“Mummy! Thief!”

Ah-Fat heard the child’s shrill cry, and the door flew open. A man and a woman rushed out.

He could have made a run for it. His years of climbing the wilderness trails had given him the sure-footedness of a deer. But he stood rooted to the spot, as helpless as the captured hen that was struggling in his bag, because he had seen the long metal thing, glinting black in the sunlight, which the man held in his hand.

A bear hunter’s gun.

The couple came closer and he could clearly hear them talking. He did not understand everything they were saying but he caught the gist. The woman said something about “police.” The man replied, “No, no need … lesson.…” The man waved the woman back into the house. She reappeared after a few moments holding a water jug in one hand and a basket in the other.

The couple marched him along the street, which had begun to fill with afternoon shoppers. He did not need to look around to know that an evergrowing crowd was tailing him. “Yellow monkey! Yellow monkey!” That was the children; their elders did not join in but did not stop them either. The adults remained silent but it was an oppressive silence, which seemed to conceal many different feelings.

They came to a halt by a wooden pole, from the top of which hung a gaslight. The man put down his gun and took the rope which the woman had been carrying in the basket. He pushed Ah-Fat to the ground and bound him to the pole—or rather, bound his pigtail to the pole. He fastened the rope tightly with a secure running knot, then felt around in the basket.

The basket was full of bits and pieces and it took some time for him to find what he was looking for—a tin containing nails. He spat in his palm and began to hammer a nail through the rope into the pole. He used all of his strength, and the rope and the pole began to complain under the force of the hammer blows. Then he tugged on Ah-Fat’s pigtail. It did not budge. At that point, he picked up his gun and nodded to the woman.

The woman came up and got an old wooden bowl out of the basket. She put it in front of Ah-Fat and filled it to the brim with water. Then, paying no attention to the crowd of onlookers, the pair walked away. They had not gone more than a couple of paces when the woman ran back and threw down a pair of scissors.

After a moment, Ah-Fat and the onlookers realized what was happening.

What stood between Ah-Fat and his liberty was nothing more, nothing less, than his pigtail. There was only one way for him to escape, and that was to use the scissors to cut it off.

The water in the bowl only offered a temporary respite.

A sigh rose up from the crowd. It was a sigh which expressed many things, and astonishment was only one of them.

The night, like a wolf-hair brush laden with ink, slowly daubed the trees, streets and houses until they faded from sight. The air was heavy with moisture—you could almost wring the water from it. The rain, when it came, fell first as a fine drizzle, then as spattering drops, then in steady columns, then finally as sheets which slashed the ground like a knife leaving great gashes everywhere.

The rain fell on Ah-Fat, but, at first, he did not find it painful. That came later. In fact, he longed for it to come down harder—and harder still—because it put the crowd to flight like startled birds. The street filled with the pattering of retreating footsteps. Ah-Fat sat on the ground and, screened by the rainfall, relieved himself with a long piss. He had wanted to hang on until he got back to Chinatown. When he was captured, his first thought was to wonder how he was going to deal with his bursting need to piss.

Now the rain had unexpectedly come to his rescue.

The warm urine leaked from his trousers and formed a rank-smelling puddle. His body was relaxed now and, since he had been tied up for some time, he began to feel hungry. During the whole of the previous day, he had only eaten a couple of rotting potatoes the size of hens’ eggs. He was racked by almost overwhelming hunger pangs. Even if he had eaten that fine, fat hen, he thought, it would only have filled a small corner of his belly. He could not think of anything which was capable of filling up that yawning cavity.

The rain poured down now. The whole of his body felt as if it was covered with nothing more than a thin membrane into which the rain drilled little holes. Every time he took a slight breath, each of the holes hissed with pain.

When he could not stand the pain any more he kneeled and faced east. He wanted to kowtow but his pigtail was tightly bound to the post and threatened to pull his scalp off. So he just placed his palms together and raised his face to the heavens.

“Oh, my emperor, my ancestors,” he muttered, “I, Fong Tak Fat, am forced to live in degradation.…”

Then he reached for the scissors.

A long howl echoed down the street.

The sound startled even those men of the neighbourhood who were seasoned hunters; they had only ever heard a starving wolf make such sound. It was so ear-splitting the city streets vibrated. The rain abruptly ceased, and the clouds cleared away to reveal a firmament full of stars.

Ah-Fat threw down the scissors and got to his feet. Far in the distance, he could hear a pitter-pattering noise brought to him by the wind. When there was a strong gust, it was as sharp and clear as corn popping; when the wind dropped, the sound was muffled, like toads blowing bubbles under water.

It was the sound of firecrackers welcoming in the Chinese New Year.

Ah-Fat slunk quietly off to the back door of the Tsun Sing General Store and sat down under the overhanging roof. His jacket ran with so much water it hung on him like a stiff board. He took it off, wrung it out and put it back on again. He trembled like a leaf in the wind. It was a good thing Ah-Sing’s stove was still giving out a few miserable dregs of heat. He huddled close to it. It was at that point he discovered that he had dropped the small bag. He still had the long bag, though the fiddle inside was wet through. The snakeskin had blown up and split open with the soaking, and the sound box was full of water.

Ah-Fat upended the fiddle to empty the water out and heard a clunk, as if something had fallen out of it. He felt around and picked it up. It was a stone.

Ah-Fat’s heart gave a wild leap and began to hammer so hard the whole street could have heard it.

As soon as he felt the veins which streaked the stone, he knew exactly what it was.

It was a nugget of gold.

It was the nugget which Red Hair had hidden when he was panning for gold.

No wonder Red Hair had not let the fiddle out of his sight. That was how he had kept it hidden all those years. In fact, he had told Ah-Fat about it that evening in the camp, but Ah-Fat had not been paying attention.

That morning the sleepers in the Tsun Sing General Store were awoken by a strange noise. Ah-Sing pulled on some clothes, got out of bed, lit the lamp and went to open the back door. There he found a man, his clothes soaked through and his head covered with a cloth bag, sitting on his woodpile, sawing away at a broken fiddle and making blood-curdling screeching sounds.

“It’s New Year’s Day, so you won’t refuse me a bowl of rice porridge, will you? And I’d like it hot.” Ah-Fat gave Ah-Sing a broad grin although his teeth chattered audibly.

In year thirteen of the reign of Guangxu (1887), on Dragon Boat Festival Day, a new laundry opened up in the city of Victoria. It was right on the edge of Chinatown, with one foot on yeung fan turf.

It was a lot different from the city’s other laundries.

It had a different sort of name, for starters. The city’s laundries were usually named after the owner. For instance there was “Ah-Hung’s Wash House” and “Wong Ah-Yuen’s Laundry” and “Loon Yee’s Washing and Ironing.” But this laundry had a strange name. It was called the “Whispering Bamboos Laundry Company.”

It was furnished and decorated differently too. Outside, there hung from the wall two hexagonal lanterns, each face of which was covered in delicate flower and bird designs. Unlit, the lanterns were an unassuming, restrained shade of red. But lit up, that red illuminated the whole street with an intense glow of colour. If you pushed open the door and went inside, scrolls hung to the left and right. On the west wall, there was watercolour of the beautiful Xi-Shi washing gauze. On the east wall, there was a calligraphy scroll with a poem written in a flowing cursive hand:

 

Bamboos whisper of washer-girls returning home,

Lotus-leaves yield before the fishing boat.

 

If it were not for the mountainous pile of clothes on the counter and the coal-fired iron on the wooden ironing board, the customers might have thought they were entering a tutor school or a shop selling paintings.

The laundry was registered under the name of Frank Fong.

A month before the laundry opened, Mrs. Mak, of Spur-On Village, Hoi Ping County in Guangdong Province, China, received a long-awaited dollar letter from one of the “town horse” couriers. In the envelope, there was a cheque for three hundred dollars. The letter was short and was full of smudges. Mrs. Mak was illiterate so she took it to Mr. Ding, who ran the village tutor school, and he read it out loud to her:

My most esteemed mother,

Your son had a very hard year in Gold Mountain last year and had no money to send home. My hard-working mother must have been anxiously waiting. But this year, I came into a bit of money and am sending you three hundred American dollars. Please write to me as soon as you receive them so that I do not worry. One hundred and fifty dollars belong to Uncle Red Hair’s wife and I hope you will immediately give it to her so that she can use it to send his boy Loon to school. The rest is for you to spend. Your son in Gold Mountain is fine, please do not worry yourself.

This was the largest amount of money Ah-Fat had ever sent Mrs. Mak. She used it to redeem the parts of their courtyard residence which had been pawned for Ah-Fat’s passage to Gold Mountain. Then she got Ah-Fat’s uncle to buy a few mu of land and hire labourers to cultivate it.