5

Gold Mountain Tracks

Year two of the reign of Xuan Tong to year two of the Republic (1910–1913)

British Columbia

 

“How many siblings does your grandfather have?”

“He only has one younger brother.”

“How many children does his younger brother have?”

“My great-uncle has one son and two daughters.”

“What is the son called?”

“Fong Tak Hin.”

“Where does your great-uncle live?”

“He lives with us.”

“Does he live upstairs or downstairs?”

“He lives in the second courtyard.”

“How many steps are there to the courtyard?”

“Two.”

“Wrong. Last time you said five.”

“There are five steps up to the main entrance. But from the first to the second courtyard, there are only two steps.”

“Is there a river in your village?”

“There’s a little river. All the village kids swim in it in summer.”

“What’s the name of the river?”

“It hasn’t got a name, so it’s called No-Name River.”

“Whose houses do you pass if you walk from the river to your home?”

“Once you’ve gone up the steps from the river, you get to old Missus Cheung Tai’s house first, then Pigmy Fong’s house, then Au Syun Pun’s. Pigmy Fong’s house and Au Syun Pun’s houses are back to back. Then there’s the village well, and then it’s us.”

“Which way does your woodshed face?”

This question stumped Kam Shan. It was new, not one of the many his dad had prepared him for. He knew where the woodshed was—he and Kam Ho used to play hide and seek in it when they were little. And he knew that its doorway faced neither the kitchen nor the courtyard but a point somewhere in between. So did that count as north facing or west facing? He hesitated, then said doubtfully: “North, it faces north.” His interrogator and the interpreter exchanged glances and both men wrote a question mark in their notebooks. Kam Shan’s heart sank.

Kam Shan was taken back to his cell.

It was a small room, lined with upper and lower bunks on three sides. He had four roommates, two adults and two children. Only a boy of about ten was in the cell when he returned. He was from Toi Shan and had arrived a couple of days previously. He lay on his bunk bed looking utterly bored, picking at the frayed ends of his jacket cuffs. The moment Kam Shan came through the door, he vaulted to his feet in a rising handspring. “Have they finished with you? That was really quick. What did they ask?” Kam Shan sat down looking glum and said nothing.

Kam Shan had come on the same boat as Ah-Lam’s wife and they had been in Gold Mountain for five days. They had been heading for Vancouver but, just before arriving, the boat changed course and berthed at Victoria instead. Half of the several dozen Chinese passengers on board had been brought straight to detention; Kam Shan and Ah-Lam’s wife were among them.

His dad and Ah-Lam had visited once. His dad stood outside the building, with the interpreter keeping a close eye on him, shouting up at Kam Shan’s window. It was blowing a gale and Ah-Fat’s words scattered in all directions, so that his son only caught a few of them.

“Are … they … feeding you?”

“Are … you … warm enough … at night?”

Looking down from above, Kam Shan saw his father through the grille covering the window. His dad’s head looked like a melon cut in two: the front half was white with some dark bits showing through (that was the shaven bit) and the back half was dark with some white showing through (that was because his dad was going grey).

He had not seen his dad for ten years, and did not remember seeing any grey hairs, although that may have been because he had not had such commanding view from above back then. Today Ah-Fat had on a grey cotton jacket, loose black trousers tied tightly at the ankles and a pair of round-toed cotton shoes. His clothes were shabby and patched at the cuffs and knees, and made him look like an old peasant who had never left the confines of Spur-On Village.

Kam Shan knew his dad had come over from New Westminster to see him. That explained his appearance; he had been working in the fields when he got the news of his arrival and had come straight here without bothering to change or wipe the mud from his shoes. Still, he looked completely different from his last visit home, when he had worn a brandnew gown with creases still crisp from the suitcase. He had strolled confidently along, holding a folding fan in his hand for show, apparently unconcerned as to whether the day was warm or not. Back there, his dad drawled his words instead of yelling the way he did now. Now he was getting on a bit, not much to look at, a real backwoods man. Which one was his real father—this one or the one who came home to Spur-On Village? Kam Shan shouted down: “Write to Mum and tell her.…” but the last half of his sentence was blown back into his throat by the wind and he bent over in a fit of coughing. Afterwards, he realized that he had not called to him: “Dad!”

On the day that Kam Shan’s date of departure to Gold Mountain was fixed, Six Fingers cried. She never let him or anyone else see, but he could tell from her reddened, puffy eyes when she got up in the morning that she had cried every day since the news. The day she saw him off at the entrance to the village, she wept openly. “Kam Shan, the house will be empty now that you and your dad have gone,” she cried. Kam Shan replied, “But you’ve got Kam Ho, haven’t you?” The tears coursed down his mother’s face: “He’ll go too, sooner or later. Every son of mine will go. Maybe if I have a daughter, I might be able to keep her.”

“We’ll bring you to Gold Mountain one day,” was what Kam Shan wanted to say. But he knew this was an empty promise. As long as his granny was alive, his mum could not budge. Kam Shan may have been only fifteen but he already knew that certain things were better left unsaid. “When I get to Gold Mountain, I’ll write,” were his only words.

“The women are making a racket today,” the boy from Toi Shan said. He had been alone for hours, and wanted to talk. “Someone went into the women’s cells to do medical inspections but they refused to strip. They fought like wildcats to keep their clothes on.”

Kam Shan had no desire to chat and pretended to be asleep. He had said a lot in the interrogation today, enough for a whole lifetime. Before he left, his dad got someone to sketch a map of Spur-On Village, showing how it was laid out and which family lived where. He said the head tax had been going up and up over the years until now it was five hundred dollars, but that had not stopped the Chinese. When the Gold Mountain men went back home, they went for a year or maybe two. Some had children while they were there, some did not. But all of them, when they returned to Gold Mountain, made sure to register a birth with the local government. According to the register, they had all had sons, and some had had twins. In an attempt to stem the flow of Chinese immigrants, the government had built this detention centre, where they kept the new arrivals for a couple of days to several months. They gave them medical exams and compared the statements of the fathers and the sons. At the slightest discrepancy, the detainee would be ordered back to Hong Kong on the next boat. Only the fit and healthy, whose testimonies were corroborated, were permitted to make the payment of five hundred dollars in head tax.

His dad had insisted that Kam Shan learn every detail of that map. He wrote out pages of questions so that Kam Shan could memorize them and get the answers right under cross-examination. The questions were about every detail of the construction of their home, and the age of every family member. Kam Shan had been questioned several times in the last few days, and no question had tripped him up. But still his dad’s preparations had not been exhaustive enough. His dad had overlooked the woodshed. Which way does the woodshed face? Kam Shan knew every brick and tile and every corner of his home but he did not know the answer to that question.

North facing, Dad, you’ve absolutely got to say north facing, Kam Shan mouthed silently.

The boy from Toi Shan had given up his efforts at conversation, and Kam Shan stopped pretending to be asleep and opened his eyes. He was in the bottom bunk and the view was limited to a few square feet of the bed board of the upper bunk. The board was smeared with spots that looked suspiciously like snot. Kam Shan’s imagination made them into the clumps of wild bananas at the front of their house in Spur-On Village. Then they morphed into the water wheel in the fields, then the storm clouds that presaged rain. Then he got bored and stopped thinking about them.

The weather was good today and the sunlight glared on the wall beside his bunk. Someone had scratched some lines in Chinese with a knife, in tiny, cramped writing. When Kam Shan bent down and peered at them closely the day he arrived, he could only make out the characters: “Inscribed by Mr. No-name of San Wui.” Now, with the sunlight on the wall, he could begin to make sense of them. He sat and scrutinized the writing close up. The rest of it said: “The black devil is absolutely unreasonable, making me sleep on the floor. And I’m starving; they only give us two meals a day.…”

The room suddenly went dark. The kid from Toi Shan was standing in front of the window, blocking the light. He had been here two days but he had been neither visited nor interrogated. He was bored stiff and spent his time pestering the others to talk to him. Now he was counting the number of bars in the window: one, two, three, four, five, six. And backwards: six, five, four, three, two, one. Then from one to six again. Then again from six to one. Kam Shan began to feel sorry for him. “Does your dad know you’re here?” he asked. “He’s in Montreal. He can’t come, so he asked my big brother to come and get me.” “Why hasn’t he come?” The boy did not answer. He just said: “In the village, they said it was a good sign if the yeung fan put you in the cell. In the end you always get out of it. If they really don’t want you in Gold Mountain, they won’t let you off the boat.”

Kam Shan was annoyed. “Get out of my light!” he yelled. The boy snickered. “It’s gonna rain soon, that’s why it’s getting dark. It doesn’t make any difference whether I’m in your light or not.” “Huh!” said Kam Shan. “And you’re the Jade Emperor, are you, deciding whether it’s going to rain or not? You won’t get far, seeing as it’s such a nice day.” The boy pointed to the bars on the window. “If you don’t believe me, come and look.” Kam Shan crawled out of the bunk bed and went to look. The window bars were coated in a mass of ants, one piled on another so thickly that each bar had more than doubled in size. It gave him goosebumps to look at them. “Bring over the stool by the door.” “What for?” “Do what I tell you.” So the kid got the stool and put it down in front of the window.

Kam Shan stood on the stool, hitched up his jacket and put his hand down his trousers. He pulled out his penis. It grew thick in his hand, and its colour changed from brown to pink. He directed it at the window and began to squirt a stream of hot, yellow urine up and down the window bars. The ants scrambled over each other to escape. The liquid turned a muddy black from the ants, and the window bars thinned down again. The boy was taken aback at first, then burst out laughing.

They were still hooting with laughter when they heard a cry in the corridor.

It was a terrible scream, so razor sharp that it seemed to slash the heavens, drain the sunlight away and plunge everything into gloom. There was a confused patter of footsteps from the courtyard and half a dozen white-coated yeung fan rushed past their door carrying a stretcher. A body lay on it, covered from head to foot in a white sheet stained crimson. It was wrapped tightly around the body but not tightly enough, and Kam Shan saw the pointed toe of a very small shoe poking out.

It was a cloth shoe, with a pink lotus flower on the toe. Women in Spur-On Village often embroidered this sort of lotus flower on the shoes they wore for visiting.

But Kam Shan knew this particular lotus flower: it had a yellow dragonfly resting on it.

It belonged to Ah-Lam’s wife.

“She must have cut her throat,” commented the kid from Toi Shan. But it was another two weeks, when his father finally came to get Kam Shan out of the detention centre, before he found out how she died.

She had not cut her throat. She had rammed a pair of chopsticks into her ears and bled to death. Earlier that morning, they had taken her clothes off and groped her all over. They told her it was a medical examination, but Ah-Lam’s wife had never had a medical examination like this, and after it, she no longer wanted to live.

That evening, Kam Shan shone the light at the wall by the bed and scratched four words on it. He did them with his thumbnail, big and clear enough that they could be read without the need for sunlight.

“I fuck your mother,” he wrote.

After the Whispering Bamboos Laundry was looted, forcing the business to close for the third time, Ah-Fat decided to try a new tack. He had bought a piece of wasteland on the outskirts of New Westminster, about twelve miles from Vancouver, and he and Ah-Lam cleared it and went into business as market gardeners. They hired two labourers, and kept several dozen chickens and ducks, a dozen sheep and a dozen pigs. The manure fertilized the fields; they could sell the eggs and meat at the farmers’ market in town and keep back a small quantity for their own needs. They even bought a cart to carry the goods.

Ah-Lam’s family had been market gardeners in Hoi Ping and, although the varieties of vegetables in Gold Mountain were a bit different, he knew all about growing them. Ah-Fat had grown up watching his father slaughter pigs and sheep, so that part came easy too. And so Fong Yuen Cheong’s prediction that his son would “travel thousands of li to butcher pigs” came to pass, after all these years.

The two men left Vancouver’s Chinatown and began a new life. Under Ah-Fat’s management, the piece of wasteland eventually turned into a big farm, famous for miles around. But that, of course, was later. Just now Ah-Fat was thinking of turning those eggs, vegetables, fruit and meat into money, and that money into more land. After thirty years in Gold Mountain, Ah-Fat had developed a yearning for Gold Mountain land.

The day that Ah-Fat fetched Kam Shan from the detention cell at Customs and Immigration, Kam Shan had no time to become acquainted with the marvels of Vancouver. They headed straight home. It was well into autumn by then and the fruit trees had lost their leaves. All the vegetables had been harvested and the land lay bare and bleak. A small, flimsy shack stood at the edge of the field, with a rough fence erected around it. Along the fence were a number of large, upended baskets, the “pens” for a hundred or so chickens and ducks that squawked and quacked frantically. It had just rained and, at the edge of the track, piglets rootled through the muddy puddles, flicking their tails and leaving behind piles of smelly dung on the ground. The field, the hut, the track—the entire scene was bleak and desolate in a way that Spur-On Village never was.

It was not that Kam Shan knew nothing of Gold Mountain. But his expectations had been gleaned from his father’s Gold Mountain suitcases, Gold Mountain clothing and Gold Mountain habits. That was the far-distant Gold Mountain. He had not the faintest idea that the real Gold Mountain would not live up to his dreams. The truth left him dumbstruck.

Kam Shan followed Ah-Fat to the hut without speaking. They pushed open the door. An old man sat inside, lighting a pipe. There were stools in the hut but the old man was squatting on the floor, making slurping sounds—not from sucking his pipe but from the trails of snot which ran in and out of his nostrils with each breath. It was a warm day but he wore an old padded jacket, the front of which was encrusted with bits of dried rice and sauce.

“Kneel and kowtow to your uncle Ah-Lam,” said Ah-Fat to his son. Kam Shan was taken aback; he scarcely recognized the old man. It was only two weeks since Ah-Fat and Ah-Lam had come to the detention centre to visit Ah-Lam’s wife and Kam Shan. But the death of his wife had reduced him to a feeble and senile state. A man really could not live without a wife.

Ah-Fat got Kam Shan’s bundle down from the cart, then wrung out a wet towel and gave it to his son to wipe his face and neck. “Kam Shan,” he said, “I’ve been thinking I really want to send you to school before you start working. There’s a school here on the way to the farmers’ market. I can drop you off on my way.” Kam Shan shook his head. “But Mum sent me to help you. Mum said you were only a year older than me when you got here, and the moment you got off the boat you were working to support the family.”

Ah-Fat was momentarily lost for words. He could not help remembering his arrival with Red Hair all those years ago—it was like another life. Red Hair’s bones must have turned to dust by now. He sighed: “I had no choice back then. It’s different now. The children of Gold Mountain men all go to school when they get here. And you’ve got to learn some English, haven’t you? I’m hoping you’ll soon be able to do business with the yeung fan.” “I’ve studied all I need to study,” said Kam Shan. “And I know a bit of English, the missionaries taught me. I’m not going to any school.”

Ah-Lam sniffed noisily. “And if you don’t go to school, what’ll you do?” he asked. “Work the land? Look after the pigs? Slaughter the chickens? Hardly any Gold Mountain children do that kind of heavy work. Their parents mollycoddle them.” Kam Shan was silent for a minute. Then he said: “Dad, I can go to town with you and sell the vegetables. I mean, I do speak a bit of English.…”

Ah-Fat had often heard Six Fingers say how pigheaded their son was, and decided to drop the subject for now. There would be time enough to work on changing his mind. He stifled his reservations and said: “If you don’t want to go to school, I won’t force you, son. But there’s a Protestant church about fifteen minutes from here. The old pastor comes around almost every day to collect the hired hands and take them to church. You can go there and learn a bit more English.”

Kam Shan looked more cheerful at this. “I know about Protestant missionaries,” he said. “They’re nice. The ones in Yuen Kai town dressed just like Chinese, in gowns and jackets, and they wore false pigtails too. Twice a month, they prepared three big woks of rice porridge and gave it out for free in front of the church. People lined up down the street for it.”

Ah-Fat frowned unhappily at Kam Shan’s enthusiasm. “You’re not having anything to do with that religion, you’re just going there to learn English.” “What’s wrong with following their religion?” objected Kam Shan. “Everyone does in England, France, Germany and America. They’ve abolished the emperor, and poor and rich are equal.”

Ah-Fat was overcome with a rush of uncontrollable anger. He hurled Kam Shan’s bundle to the floor and shouted: “If you want to be like the foreign devils, with no emperor to rule the country, no patriarch to rule the family, then you just go ahead!” He was rigid with fury and thick, livid veins bulged from his forehead. But Ah-Lam pushed him onto a stool. “Heaven’s high and the Emperor’s far away,” he said. “What’s the point in getting on your high horse because your son’s said something against the Emperor? The porridge and pickled eggs is ready in the pot. Eat it while it’s hot. Kam Shan’ll be hungry after that long journey even if you’re not.”

Then winter was on them, and there were no vegetables to sell at the market. The eggs kept well enough, so there was no need to go to town every day. Kam Shan went to church to learn English in the evenings, but by day he had nothing to do except listen to the two men telling him everything they had picked up about farming, to which he paid little attention.

For the first few months, Kam Shan hung around on his father’s patch of land, until it came time to sow the new crops. The climate on the West Coast was so mild and humid that almost anything would grow. Ah-Fat planted all sorts of things—cucumbers, tomatoes, aubergines, broccoli, green peppers, mint and a variety of cabbages, and more besides. Some of the seeds were imported from Guangdong and these too flourished, in spite of the different soil and climate. He had fruit trees too, apples, peaches, pears and cherries he had grafted himself. Even though the fruit was not ripe for harvesting yet, they had cucumber pickles and jam left over from the previous year, and freshly killed poultry and pork and lamb and eggs to take to market. Every few days, Ah-Fat would load up the cart with their produce, go and sell it in Vancouver, or sometimes New Westminster, and bring back any household items they needed. And Ah-Fat discovered that the son who took no interest in farming had something in his favour after all—he had a very useful face.

Ah-Fat drove the cart to the farmers’ market first, and then put anything that was left over in baskets and hawked them door to door in the neighbouring streets and lanes. So long as he had his son with him, he could get rid of all the remaining produce quickly, and at a good price too.

Kam Shan would not allow anyone to knock him down on prices.

The way he stood up to people who wanted a bargain was both original and simple. He wreathed his face in a big smile. He was nothing like the other Chinese children who had just arrived in Gold Mountain, his father thought to himself with surprise. They were shy and timid, and, when in company, would huddle in the shadow of their elders. They hung their heads mutely and would not look you in the eye. They were rather expressionless—no great emotion ever crossed their faces. Everything about them recoiled from extremes so that they looked almost wooden.

Kam Shan bore no resemblance to these children.

On his first visit to the farmers’ market with Ah-Fat, a yeung fan woman twice his size tried to knock him down on a price. He beamed a smile at her that stretched from ear to ear. He could have bargained but he did not. He simply looked quietly at his customer again. His gaze needled her, but those needles were wrapped safely in the softness of his smile. Before they began to hurt, she was suddenly overcome by shame. None of the shoppers had even seen a smile like this, especially not in a young Chinese. There was no more quibbling about prices.

Every market day, when one of the hired hands began to load up the cart, Ah-Fat would see his son’s face transform. It started in his eyes, where a watery pearl would moisten each eyeball. This pearl of moisture would expand until it filled his eyes and flowed into the corners, up to the eyebrows and down to the mouth. By the time Ah-Fat twitched the horse’s reins and the first muffled clop-clop of its hooves sounded on the narrow lane outside their door, Kam Shan’s smile had fully bloomed.

Kam Shan’s smile, however, could ebb just as quickly as it surged up his face. After their produce had sold, and the hired hand started piling the empty baskets onto the cart, that smile shrank to nothing, like a puddle under the noonday sun. The horse plodded home through the gathering dusk and at the door of their hut, Ah-Fat could see that his son’s face had become as parched as a dried-up creek. It remained that way until the next market day.

His son belonged in crowds. His element was the hustle and bustle and the bright lights of the city. The farm was too dull, too small and too quiet. Ah-Fat wondered how he would ever anchor him there.

“Is Vancouver a big, noisy city, Dad?” Kam Shan suddenly asked Ah-Fat one day as they were sweeping the cart out ready for the journey home.

Kam Shan was not like the other Gold Mountain children who used the name “Salt Water City” as their elders did. He called the city by its proper Canadian name. Ah-Fat realized that he had never shown his son around the city which had been his home for so many years.

So one day, when they had sold all their produce, instead of setting off for the farm, Ah-Fat took his son to the newly built theatre in Vancouver’s Chinatown. The full version of The Fairy Wife Returns Her Son to Earth was showing that evening. Ah-Fat scrutinized the playbill carefully but could not see Gold Mountain Cloud’s name anywhere. He mocked himself for imagining that Gold Mountain Cloud, no doubt at the height of her fame now, would remember him.

A few weeks later, Ah-Fat took Kam Shan to have afternoon tea with some of his old friends. After, they went to look at the crowds thronging the yeung fan department store, and finally Ah-Fat showed him the house where he had lived and where he used to keep shop.

“This is the place the yeung fan destroyed. It’s been rebuilt.

“This is where me and your uncle Ah-Lam first lived. They’ve added another storey to it now.

“Italians lived here originally. In those days, no one wanted to rent to Chinese, except this old Italian. Too bad he died last year. He wasn’t even sixty.”

Kam Shan only half-listened to Ah-Fat. He was too young to feel nostalgic about the past. Instead his eyes were drawn to the newspaper stand pasted with Chinese broadsheets. Watching his son standing on tiptoe, craning to see past the mass of bodies in front of him and read the news of the overseas Chinese community, suddenly reminded Ah-Fat what it was like being sixteen. He felt close to tears.

“Any news?” he asked. His eyesight was not as good as it had been and he had trouble reading the newsprint.

“Cockfighting. That’s in the Daily News here. Over there it’s the The Chinese Times. The Monarchist Reform Party and the Revolutionary Party are at each other’s throats.”

“Rabble,” said Ah-Fat, pressing his lips together disdainfully, and Kam Shan knew he meant the Revolutionary Party.

“There’s someone called Freedom Fung who rants away and he’s quite right. Why should we Chinese be ruled over by the barbarian Manchu for centuries?”

Ah-Fat could not be bothered to argue. He pulled Kam Shan away, thinking to himself, ten or twenty years ago, I wouldn’t let you get away with talking crap like that. But Ah-Fat was no longer the hotheaded youngster he had once been.

Ah-Fat showed his son all over Chinatown though he was careful to give a wide berth to the gambling den and the dingy room above it. They were the heart of Chinatown, but only grown men went there. One day his son would find his own way, and his experiences there would make him a man. It was not time yet to introduce Kam Shan to what went on in these shadowy nooks and crannies.

Kam Shan felt completely at home in the farmers’ market of Vancouver. When the farm work got busy, he said to his father: “Let me and Loong Am go and sell the produce. You and Uncle Ah-Lam can carry on with the farm work.” Loong Am was the hired hand. Ah-Fat was not keen at first, but it soon became clear that Ah-Lam was deteriorating by the day and could not be left in charge. Kam Shan got his way.

For the first few trips, Kam Shan was up before dawn to load the cart and back by dusk to eat dinner with them. He always came back with an empty cart and a careful record of all their sales. Ah-Fat, reassured, left him to his own devices.

Later, however, things started to change. Kam Shan arrived back later and later, first by half an hour, then by one hour, then by two. One night, he didn’t get home till midnight. He said it was because there were more people keeping poultry and it was getting harder to sell the eggs. When he could not sell them in the market, he had to go house to house to get rid of the rest and it took longer. Ah-Fat was only half convinced and took Loong Am to one side. The hired hand was an honest soul. He admitted that when Kam Shan had sold the vegetables, he bought Loong Am a theatre ticket and arranged to meet him at the entrance after the performance. What Kam Shan did in the meantime, he had no idea.

Ah-Fat said nothing to this, but resolved to make a careful check of the accounts each day. The losses mounted up gradually—one day ten cents, the next, fifty cents—until finally receipts were down one or two dollars per trip compared to the earliest accounts. Those one or two dollars per trip added up to quite a considerable sum over time.

One day Kam Shan got back from Vancouver after the evening meal. He was surprised to see no lights in the shack. Usually his father waited outside for him, holding the lantern to light his arrival. Not tonight. He unloaded the empty baskets, then groped his way to the door, carrying the whip. As he opened the door, he bumped into something hard. He rubbed his sore knee, and saw a small, winking red dot before his eyes. His father stood smoking a cigarette.

He turned to run but it was too late. He felt a kick from a hobnailed boot at the back of his knee and he slumped to the ground. It struck him then that he was in the light and his father was in the shadows. His father could see him perfectly clearly, in fact had been waiting in the shadows for him for some time.

He dropped the whip, and before he could retrieve it Ah-Fat snatched it up and thrashed him ferociously. The lashes fell upon his back and shoulders, again and again, though not on his head. He felt a stinging heat, as if he had rubbed pepper in his eyes. The real pain came later.

When Kam Shan was little, his mother had beaten him for all kinds of misdemeanours. She thrashed him with the bamboo canes they dried clothes on until he rolled around on the ground in pain. Although his mother had inflicted many such punishments on him, he never feared her. His mother’s wrath had boundaries which were set by his grandmother. The current of his mother’s anger might run strong and swift, but it would always be contained within the riverbed of his blind grandmother’s authority.

The punishment inflicted by his father was a different matter. He had never experienced it before and he did not know how far his father’s anger would take him.

Kam Shan made no sound. He knew that he was kneeling at the threshold of adulthood. If he cried out, he would be denied entry. If he could endure this whipping, he might become a man.

“How dare you steal from the mouths of your mother and grandmother,” Ah-Fat yelled.

“Did you go to the gambling den?

“Did you? Tell me!”

Ah-Fat had not intended to whip his son so viciously. Kam Shan had worked hard since his arrival in Gold Mountain. Even though he had no particular aptitude for farm work, he ploughed, planted, collected eggs, cut up the meat, loaded up the cart and sold the goods at the market, just like the hired hands. The only difference was that he, unlike the others, received no wages, not a single cent.

The money Ah-Fat made, he carefully divided into two parts, sending one to Six Fingers and keeping the other for himself. He could not stint by a single cent on the portion he sent home because he knew that a dozen or more people waited, mouths agape, for the food he dropped into them. Their lives depended on those dollar letters. And he tried as hard as he could to limit the amount he kept for himself. This money had to stretch far, and in many directions.

He had borrowed from several people to build the diulau fortress home and the debt had to be paid back. His mother was over sixty and in poor health. When she passed on, then Six Fingers could come and join him in Gold Mountain. So he had starting saving to pay the head tax for Six Fingers.

He had something else in mind too: Kam Shan’s marriage. The boy was nearly sixteen. Back in Spur-On Village, all boys of that age would be betrothed. It’d be too late to wait until the matchmaker knocked on your door to save up for wedding presents.

He had not told anyone of these plans, not even his wife or his son. He just kept a tighter and tighter grip on the money he kept back. Every time he paid the hired hands their wages, he would turn away and try not to look at Kam Shan. His son’s eyes had a naked yearning in them. Ah-Fat could only pretend not to notice.

Ah-Fat knew that the small change his son filched from the accounts was insignificant compared with the wages he had denied him. Besides, they lived in a remote place, with no neighbours apart from a few yeung fan. Kam Shan, like any kid of that age, was filled with lively curiosity, yet he had not a single companion to amuse himself with. It was normal that he should go looking for a bit of fun in Vancouver. When Ah-Fat was Kam Shan’s age, Red Hair had taken him to explore all of Chinatown’s darkest corners.

As he whipped his son, he waited and prayed for Kam Sham to say something: a denial, an excuse, a protest, even an accusation. More than anything, he wanted Kam Shan to speak so that the beating could cease, so that he could accept his son’s plea or apology and save face. Then he would fetch the sausage-and-chicken rice he had kept warm all evening, and eat a late dinner with his son. He had had nothing to eat while he waited for Kam Shan’s return.

But Kam Shan said nothing. He did not make a single sound. The boy gave in to the gathering tide of rage which rose in his father. Kam Shan did not try to put even the smallest barrier in its way, and now that rage threatened to sweep away all before it.

“Is it daylight already? Why haven’t the cocks crowed?”

Ah-Lam emerged sleepy-eyed from inside the house carrying a small oil lamp. He was wearing a tattered old jacket which exposed his bare legs in the dim lamplight. His flaccid penis drooped between them, looking like a brown pipe begrimed by years of use.

Ah-Fat threw down the whip and frantically pushed him back into the house. Grabbing the lamp from him, he pulled a pair of trousers from the bed and threw them at him. “What’s all this nonsense? It’s still evening. You should be ashamed of yourself, parading around like that in front of Kam Shan.” Ah-Lam looked at him in a daze: “If your son’s here, why hasn’t Ah-Tak got here?”

Ah-Tak was Ah-Lam’s son. He was still in a village in Hoi Ping County. Ah-Lam had planned to scratch together the money for the head tax on Ah-Tak after his wife arrived, only he never expected his wife to die before she left the detention centre. Ah-Fat was alarmed at the dazed look in Ah-Lam’s eyes and attempted to calm him: “Put these trousers on and get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow, I’ll write to Ah-Tak for you and tell him to buy passage on the next boat.”

Ah-Lam bent over the trousers, trying unsuccessfully to get one leg in. Finally he sighed: “It’s too late for that. And if Ah-Tak doesn’t come, who’ll take my bones back home?” His lucid words saddened Ah-Fat more than his confusion. He helped the old man back to bed. “Don’t worry. If Ah-Tak doesn’t come, Kam Shan’ll take your bones and mine back home, just you see if he won’t.” It occurred to him that Kam Shan was still kneeling outside. He was dismayed by the thought that if Ah-Lam had not blundered out when he did, his wrath might have caused injury that no amount of remorse could heal. Ah-Lam was, perhaps, sent by Buddha to save his son.

Ah-Fat carried the lamp outside to where his son still knelt on the ground. The back of his jacket was shredded by the whip lashes; he could not see if he had drawn blood. Kam Shan stiffened when he heard Ah-Fat’s footsteps and did not look round. In the oppressive silence, Ah-Fat felt himself shrinking. The atmosphere was as prickly as a ball of thistles and thorns capable of stabbing you painfully wherever you touched it. He knew that he and his son were within a hair’s breadth of straining each other’s forbearance to the breaking point.

Ah-Fat turned and went into the kitchen. He got two bowls and two pairs of chopsticks and laid them on the table, then brought out the iron pot filled with the sausage-flavoured rice. He could not make up his mind whether to fill two bowls or one. His hand quivered in indecision. He served only himself and sat down.

He was ravenous and the smell of the sausage made his belly shriek with hunger. But he could not eat. The grains of rice seemed to turn to sand in his throat. He felt his son’s eyes boring into his back, needling him just enough to make it impossible for him to settle in his chair.

He slammed the bowl down on the table.

“Do you want me to spoon-feed you?” he snarled.

There was a rustling behind him as Kam Shan got up. It sounded as if the boy tottered for a moment before finding his feet. Then he came over, filled a bowl for himself and sat down silently to eat. Ah-Fat looked up and suddenly saw a thread of congealing blood in his son’s nostrils. The blood was inky-dark in colour. Ah-Fat almost retched, and felt the rice grains which had stuck in his throat wriggle upwards like maggots. He made as if to give his handkerchief to his son; his hand was already in his pocket, his thumb and forefinger had hold of the fabric. But his hand suddenly flagged. The handkerchief felt like a lead weight and he could not move it.

Oh, Ah-Yin, he groaned silently, feeling close to tears. He and Kam Shan were like two ancient, flint-hard rocks pressed together under the weight of a mountain. Six Fingers could have kept them apart, he thought, prying open a tiny crack. That little space would be life-giving; without it, he and his son would be condemned forever to a stalemate.

He suddenly missed Six Fingers terribly.

From that day on, Ah-Fat sent Loong Am with Kam Shan when he went to market and impressed on him that he was to stick with Kam Shan every step of the way. Kam Shan got up early and came home early, and the money he brought back more or less added up. Ah-Fat secretly felt that he could do with a few thrashings, it made him a man. He gradually relaxed.

He was soon to discover how wrong he was.

The patch of land he had bought two years before, through the crops it grew and the beasts it pastured, had brought him several surprisingly fat bank drafts. And when, in spring, his Italian neighbours decided to sell their property and to live with their son in the Prairie region, he was able to buy them out at the kind of knock-down price he had only dreamed of. His new purchase gave him a property several times bigger than before. He could stand at the field edge and not see the far boundary. Today he stood looking across the land; it had just rained and the leaves of the crops drooped low, covering the ground in an unbroken carpet of green. This was not last year’s green, it was the fresh green of the new year. Ah-Fat sighed comfortably. What a vast place Gold Mountain was. A piece of land this big could have fed many people back in Hoi Ping. Even the biggest landlord there did not have this much.

And there was the house too, of course. The Italians had done a good job building it. The upper floor was of wood, but the ground floor was solidly constructed of red brick. It would have been hard to find even one sturdy, well-built house like this in the whole of Chinatown. It would not stay empty for long. He would write to Six Fingers, reminding her to get the matchmaker to find a bride for Kam Shan. In the not-too-distant future, this would be Kam Shan’s new home.

But just for once, Ah-Fat did not send the money left over from buying the house and land back to Six Fingers. He put it aside for Ah-Lam, who was now a broken old man. Only the husk of the man remained; he was rotting away on the inside like a worm-infested apple. Who knew how much longer he might last? He did not want Ah-Lam to die in Gold Mountain so he planned to take him home after the coming harvest, and to get Kam Shan betrothed at the same time. He would use the leftover money for Ah-Lam’s passage and pocket money. Without it, Ah-Lam would lose the respect of his son and grandchildren forever. Ah-Lam had not had an easy life, and if he could, he would ensure that Ah-Lam died in peace and dignity.

Then, just as Ah-Fat had carefully constructed his plans, a whirlwind reduced them to a heap of sand. There was absolutely nothing Ah-Fat could do to gather them up—no matter how big his hands.

It happened a week later.

Ah-Fat went to the farmers’ market in Vancouver that day, taking a pig and a sheep and some eggs. Selling his goods was not his sole intention. He planned to take Kam Shan on a trip to Vancouver. When he was not at the market, or eating or sleeping, his son sat by the stove in their shack, scooping handfuls of pumpkin seeds into his mouth. He already had little nicks in his front teeth from cracking them. He said little to his father, and sometimes went for days at a time without uttering a single complete sentence. Ah-Fat was beginning to worry that he might be growing ill. Today’s trip was intended to give Kam Shan a day out.

Ah-Fat had planned the day carefully. They would sell what they could in the morning market, and then leave. The weather was not so hot that the meat and eggs would spoil. Any leftover meat could be salted down and the eggs pickled for them to eat at home. The market was not far from the city centre and they could be there in under half an hour. He would not bother with Chinatown; they would go and look around the yeung fan part of town instead. They were meeting Rick for lunch at a fish and chips restaurant near the Vancouver Hotel.

He had not seen Rick since he left Vancouver. According to Rick, the restaurant was run by Irish people and the food was not bad. Ah-Fat did not have much faith in this recommendation because yeung fan and Chinese tastes in food were a million miles apart. He guessed the fish would probably have cheese and onions in it, as this was the sort of ranktasting stuff that was added to all yeung fan food, and that they would get two tiny slices of fish reposing on a thick layer of greens, only enough to fill a bird’s belly. All the same, Ah-Fat was willing to eat it, however disgusting it was, because Kam Shan had not yet tried foreign food. Nor had he met Rick. Ah-Fat packed two pork ribs with a nice mixture of fat and lean, and a basket of eggs as a gift for his friend.

It did not matter if they did not get enough fish to eat. Ah-Fat was going prepared—with a bottle of tea wrapped in a thick cloth to keep it warm, and some green bean cakes, so that his son would not go hungry. After lunch, he planned to take Kam Shan to the Hudson’s Bay Company Department Store. If a couple of things took Kam Shan’s fancy, so long as they were not wildly expensive, Ah-Fat could buy them for him.

The pig and the sheep had been butchered the night before. The piteous squeals of the pig and the bleating of the sheep grated on Kam Shan’s ears as painfully as a nicked and rusty knife and he could not get back to sleep. Father and son could not have been more different: Ah-Fat, as a boy, would sit without moving a muscle, his eyes glued to the knife as his father did his butchering, but Kam Shan always refused the meat from the animals his father slaughtered.

Kam Shan smelt the reek of blood the minute he dressed and stepped outside that morning. It was no longer fresh but just as pungent, and there were suspicious patches of a dark brownish colour under the walnut tree outside the door. Kam Shan gave an almighty sneeze. Acid came up from his empty belly, and he squatted at the edge of the path, retching violently.

“If you don’t get going right now, we’ll be selling salted meat instead of fresh!” Ah-Fat shouted at him.

Ah-Fat was appalled at his own words. He had intended to say something like “Let’s go. When we’ve sold the meat, I’m taking you for a treat.” But those words died in this throat. Off his tongue rolled something completely different—strange, icy and wounding. He wanted to take it back the moment he said it. He did not know why his mouth fought his mind every time he talked to his son.

Kam Shan said nothing. He went into the house, brought out an old quilt, and threw it into the cart. Spring nights were still cold hereabouts and if by any chance a cart wheel broke on the way home, the quilt could save their lives. Kam Shan leaned against the rolled-up quilt and handed the whip to his father—every time father and son went out together, Ah-Fat took the reins. He was convinced Kam Shan was hot-headed and drove the horse too hard. It was an old horse, no longer as sure-footed as it had been, and Ah-Fat felt sorry for it.

The road was lined with silver birch, the dark trunks blurring into one another against the glazed blue of the sky, as they passed. A great flock of crows flew up, darkening the sky with their wings and cawing loudly. “The Cantonese call people who say unlucky things ‘crows’,” commented Ah-Fat. “And back home the caw of a crow is considered a bad omen. In Gold Mountain, the cities are full of crows and no one gives a shit when they caw.”

Kam Shan grunted but said nothing.

“I’ll take you to the department store after lunch, shall I? What would you like me to get you?” said Ah-Fat, keen to get the conversation going. Kam Shan was making a paper bird, a sparrow hawk, out of some scrap and, without looking up, said: “Whatever you say, Dad.” “What about if I get you a pair of leather shoes?” Ah-Fat tried again. Kam Shan had been wearing the cotton shoes Six Fingers made for him ever since he arrived. But fashionable young Chinese in Gold Mountain wore yeung fan leather shoes.

Kam Shan finished folding the bird but its wings were floppy and would not fly. He pulled it apart and folded it again. “Whatever you want, Dad” was his only reply.

“Would you like to buy Pastor Andrew a box of chocolates?” asked Ah-Fat. “He’s taught you English but you’ve never converted, have you?”

Kam Shan finally finished folding his paper bird and opened it out gently with two fingers. Its wings flapped up and down.

“Whatever you like, Dad.”

Looking at Kam Shan’s apathetic expression, Ah-Fat found his patience wearing thin. With difficulty he bit back an angry retort. He knew that if he spoke he would give his son a thorough tongue-lashing, and he was not going to quarrel today. So he swallowed the bitter words—and felt them turn to gall inside him.

Kam Shan tired of the paper bird and, with a wave of his hand, let it go. It was a fine day and the bird glided easily for some distance on the breeze.

“Dad, can we buy Mum a ring? A ‘grandmother green’ emerald one? Pastor Andrew’s wife has one. Her mother left it to her,” he said.

Ah-Fat was taken aback. The bitterness that filled him dissolved like water. His son had been apart from his mother for months. Fathers give sons courage; mothers give sons love, thought Ah-Fat. A life without motherly love was a comfortless one. Poor Kam Shan missed the old days, his home and his mum. And if he missed his mother, then he was not a lost cause. Six Fingers would come to Gold Mountain one day, and Kam Shan would have both courage and love. And he would no longer feel like a stranger to Ah-Fat.

Ah-Fat could not bring himself to say that the money he had in his pocket was not enough to buy even one corner of an emerald ring. So he just laughed and said: “One day, we will, one day.…” He suddenly felt much more cheerful. Nine suns seemed to be shining down on him, making the roadway glint and sparkle. As the cart rolled on, he found himself humming a little song. He had forgotten some of the words and sang out of tune, but his happiness gave it a rollicking rhythm.

You say words of love, but love must be sincere

Do not spread your love all around

The snares of love have fallen … ta-ta, ta-ta

You’ve got to … ta-rum, ta-rum … wake up

They arrived at the market to find business unusually brisk. Within an hour or so, they sold all their produce. They still had some time before they were due to meet Rick, so Ah-Fat took his son to Chinatown, where they could buy some pastries to take home. Ah-Fat went into the cake shop to choose. “Dad,” said Kam Shan, “I want to go and read the papers at the stand.” Ah-Fat let him go, knowing how much his son loved the newspapers. “Just don’t be long. I’ll wait for you here.”

But Kam Shan did not come back.

Kam Shan had not been to Chinatown on his own for a while. There were some new broadsheets on display on the stand. His eyes raked over every item—art and culture, wars, home and overseas news—looking for a particular name, Freedom Fung. It was not there.

Two long articles took up almost all of the politics pages—the Monarchists and the Revolutionaries were waging a rhetorical war. The article from the Revolutionaries’ perspective was by a supporter he did not know; he read it cursorily but thought little of it. It was disjointed and crudely expressed. The only person who could write a decent piece of this sort was Mr. Fung, thought Kam Shan; his articles were lucidly argued, and no matter whether he was expressing indignation or sarcasm, they were all powerful stuff.

He left the newspaper stand to return to the cake shop to meet his father. Halfway there, he passed a sign for the offices of the The Chinese Times, and found himself stepping inside. An old man who did odd jobs around the office shouted over to him: “Kam Shan! We haven’t seen you for ages! Been making your fortune, have you?” Kam Shan did not answer the question, but asked instead: “Where’s Mr. Fung?” “He’s not here today. He’s got guests.” “They must be very important guests if he’s not writing for the paper any more!” exclaimed Kam Shan. “Without his articles, the paper’s no good for anything except wiping your arse with!” The old man burst out laughing. “Don’t let the boss catch you talking like that or he’ll wallop you,” he said. Then he pulled the boy aside and whispered: “The Cudgel’s here from the States, he’s raising money for some big plan of his, and he’s taken Mr. Fung around with him on his lecture tour.” The Cudgel was boss of the Hung Mun, a Chinese secret society.

Kam Shan knew everyone at the Times. After reading Mr. Fung’s articles, Kam Shan had been filled with curiosity and admiration and had gone to pay his respects to Mr. Fung at his office. Later still, when he heard the man expound his views on the political situation in East and West, he grew to believe that Mr. Fung was the only man in Gold Mountain worthy of his respect and friendship. From that moment on, every time he went into Vancouver to sell their produce, he sent Loong Am off to the theatre and took himself to the Times to see Mr. Fung.

Mr. Fung was not only highly educated, he was eloquent and charismatic as well. As he put it, the Manchu (Qing) dynasty took resources that properly belonged to the Chinese people and used them to appease the Western powers. The dynasty’s days were numbered. According to Mr. Fung, the most important task facing them—destroying the Manchu barbarians and returning China to the Chinese—could not be accomplished without the support of overseas Chinese living all over the world. Mr. Fung’s eyes blazed like two lanterns on a dark night when he spoke, and his impassioned speeches set Kam Shan on fire.

Though Kam Shan read the newspapers, he did not fully understand Chinese national politics. He did not doubt, however, that Mr. Fung’s campaign was brilliantly clever. He started to filch small change from the proceeds of the produce to put in the collection box at the newspaper office. Mr. Fung always counted Kam Shan’s donations carefully, wrote him out a receipt for the “loan” and told him that he would get double the amount back once the revolution succeeded. Kam Shan smiled but his thoughts were not on repayment. He gave because Mr. Fung inspired him. The revolution was a far-off, hazy prospect for Kam Shan, out of sight and out of mind. Mr. Fung made him feel as if he could reach it, but the vision dimmed as soon as he stepped out of the Times office and into the street. As the sweat-stained receipts filled his jacket pocket, he wondered how he could ever explain to his dad where the money had gone.

Kam Shan knew that Mr. Fung was a Hung Mun secret society member, and that the Times was a Hung Mun newspaper. If the head of the Hung Mun, called the Cudgel, had come to Vancouver that meant something significant was going to happen. “What’s the Cudgel’s name?” he asked excitedly. “Sun Yat-sen,” said the old man. Kam Shan remembered having read the name frequently in Mr. Fung’s articles. “Where are they now?” he asked. “Giving a lecture in the theatre in Canton Street. There are thousands of people there.” All thoughts of meeting his father at the cake shop immediately went out of Kam Shan’s head, and he pushed open the door and raced off down the street.

As he hitched up his gown and ran, he did not notice the dense clouds massing like cotton wool above his head. The wind blew up eddies of dust, tickling his nostrils. But Kam Shan ran on, unaware that fate was drawing him deep into an abyss, trapping him in a predicament for which he was completely unprepared.

When he got to the door of the theatre, the sky opened. All of a sudden, it poured down so intensely that not even the most agile of passersby could avoid the deluge. One of Kam Shan’s feet was over the threshold of the theatre when the rain started, but the rain caught his back foot, and by the time it crossed the threshold to join the first, his gown was drenched. It was of rough blue cotton, stoutly sewn, but the dye was not fast and the rain made the colour run. As the rainwater dripped from it, Kam Shan left river of blue water behind him. Once inside the building, Kam Shan dropped the hem of his gown and wiped the rain from his face with one hand, smearing it a ghastly indigo as he did so.

The theatre was full to bursting with people standing in the aisles, but they all fell back as this blue apparition approached. So Kam Shan squeezed his way through, and found a place to stand near a pillar. He rested against it, and suddenly felt cold. The wet gown seemed to encase him in a layer of ice which needled him all over. Very soon, he felt an urgent need to piss.

The urge impinged on his consciousness, bluntly at first, but then gradually became more and more acute until he could stand it no longer. He was overcome by a fit of shivering—and then something seemed to snap. He felt a warm dampness in the crotch of his trousers. If I go just a tiny bit, he thought to himself, then it’ll let up and I’ll be able to hang on.

But once unlocked, the floodgates opened; all he could do was cross his legs tightly as the warm urine ran down his legs to his ankles, and then dripped from his trouser cuffs onto the floor. The cloudy yellow of the urine mixed with the indigo dye and trickled in a zigzag down the aisle. It reeked to Kam Shan, but when he looked around, he was relieved to see that none of his neighbours, engrossed in the speeches, had noticed.

He could relax now, though he was still cold. If he stood on tiptoe, he could see the whole stage. On it stood half a dozen men, all of whom were in Western dress except for one, who wore a gown and jacket. Kam Shan recognized Mr. Fung on the stage. He had never seen the others before. The man in the middle was speaking. He was a bit older, of middling height and sported a thick, black moustache. Next to him stood a strapping figure with a gun at his waist, probably his bodyguard. He spoke in Cantonese, so that everyone understood, and was giving a fiery, rabblerousing speech.

“The people long for Chinese rule. It is heaven’s wish that the barbarians should fall and the revolution should succeed. It will happen very soon.… As we make preparations now, we urgently need to raise funds so that we can carry forward the great common enterprise of returning China to the Chinese. The survival of our country depends on this. The revolutionary army will throw itself into battle.…”

With every sentence, the crowd roared in response and, as the speaker grew more and more hoarse, the crowd’s responses grew more enthusiastic. Then at the climax of the speech, the man in the Chinese gown drew a pair of scissors from the front of his gown, took off his cap and pulled up his pigtail to its full extent; the scissors snipped through it. The long rope of hair fell like a headless snake, writhed a couple of times on the ground and then unravelled. Its owner brandished the scissors at the audience below and shouted: “The revolution starts here and now! Anyone who wants to follow the revolution, take these scissors from me!”

The frenzied crowd stilled all of a sudden, as if the heart had gone out of it. Until the scissors had made their appearance, revolution had sounded like a splendid adventure, one which made men’s pulses race with excitement but which was, like a roll of thunder on the horizon, still a distant prospect. The scissors had cut away that distance and revolution was right before them. They had to take it up or run away—there was no middle ground.

The scissors wavered at the front of the stage, still a long way from where Kam Shan stood, chilled to the marrow. Then, as he sniffed, he was suddenly shaken by an enormous sneeze that reverberated like a thunderclap around the auditorium. The eyes of the speaker fell on him.

“You’re wet through, young brother, have you come far?”

Kam Shan was startled. It was only when his neighbours gave him a shove that he realized that the man called Mr. Sun was speaking to him from the stage. All eyes in the room now fell on him, their gaze as intense as the beams of hundreds of lanterns. Kam Shan’s wet gown gave off puffs of steam and his forehead beaded with drops of sweat. His lips trembled a few times but no sound came out.

“Are you in the Hung Mun?” asked Mr. Sun.

As he stammered, Mr. Fung went over to Mr. Sun and whispered something in his ear. The latter burst out laughing.

“He’s not a Hung Mun man but the donations he’s made to the revolution are just as generous as any member’s. Brother, are you willing to join the Hung Mun now?”

Kam Shan hesitated, but then saw Mr. Fung gesturing to him from the stage. Mr. Fung was gently rapping his own chest with his fist, but Kam Shan felt the fist was falling on him, and something fiery hot surged in his heart.

“Yes, I am.”

He heard himself say the words and was astonished. They seemed not to have come from inside but to have been stuffed into his mouth by someone else.

Nonetheless, they could not be taken back.

The man brandishing the scissors leapt from the stage, seized Kam Shan’s pigtail and shouted: “This young brother has started the revolution. Those who enter the Hung Mun take an oath never to join the ranks of the Qing government!” Kam Shan felt his scalp tighten, then relax. His head felt suddenly so light it might have flown from his body.

There was a collective gasp, and a yell: “Revolution! Revolution!” The single shout, like a rock falling into a shallow pond, made rippling waves which spread outwards as if they would flood and crash through the auditorium walls. The scissors were passed from one head to another, and the hall filled with the sound of chopping. No one paid any more attention to Kam Shan, who was squatting on the ground.

He clutched his severed pigtail so tightly he might have been trying to wring water from it. At that moment, he remembered that his father was waiting for him at the cake shop. When he left home with him that morning, he was a whole, complete person. He had taken one step astray and, in so doing, had lost a vitally important part of his body. If he had lost a hand or a foot, even an eye, he could have gone back to his father and owned up. But he had lost his pigtail, which was nothing less than his father’s heart and his pride. His father could not live without his heart and his pride.

Kam Shan pushed his way through the roaring crowds and stumbled into the street. The rain had stopped but the sky was still covered in a mass of heavy clouds. “Revolution … revolution.…” The cries found their way out of the theatre and were audible in the street, but they seemed to have nothing to do with him any more. Now that he had left Mr. Fung and the seething crowds inside, the revolution had once more become something vague and distant. The thing that came into sharp focus was his father’s face: the livid centipede of the scar, and the lines that appeared on his forehead when he laughed.

“Please God, make me lame or blind but give me back my pigtail!” There was something cold and wet on Kam Shan’s face. Tears, he realized. For the first time in his life, Kam Shan knew what dread was.

Duty made him want to return to his father as soon as possible, but shame took him in the opposite direction, farther and farther from the cake shop, farther and farther from Chinatown itself. The next thing he knew, he was on the riverbank.

He heard footsteps behind him at some distance, rustling as if tiptoeing across a pile of rice straw. Then they came nearer, until they almost seemed to tread on his heels. Kam Shan looked round and just had time to see a black shape, before his feet left the ground and he flew through the air.

A few days later, a short news item appeared in the local Chinese newspaper:

Mysterious disappearance of a Chinese youth last Sunday. A passerby saw two big men in black throwing the youth into the Fraser River. We understand that the youth was attending a Hung Mun fundraising event in the Canton Street Theatre in Chinatown and then fell victim to a plot by local Monarchists. A week has passed with no news and it is not expected that he has survived.

………

We have reasons to believe, as an inferior race, the Indians must make way for a race more enlightened and better fitted to perform the task of converting what is now wilderness into productive fields and happy homes.

British Columbia Colonial News, 9 June 1861

Sundance awoke feeling a great weight on her eyelids. The sunlight was as heavy as honey, and it reminded her that springtime had come. She got out of bed, put on leather boots, a sturdy linen skirt and a deerskin cloak dyed ochre yellow. She could tell it was a fine day; she could hear the river burbling past outside the window and smell the faint aroma of mallard duck droppings wafting in on the breeze. The long wilderness winter was over. It had been quite a mild one; the river had not frozen over, so her father had been able to paddle his canoe into town to make purchases any time he chose.

Her dad had learned canoe-making from the ancestors, and he was famous throughout the entire region. His canoes were hollowed out of the best redwood logs, some longer than a house. They had a flat, straight body, a deep belly and two heads raised high at prow and stern. Sometimes he would carve these into an eagle’s head, sometimes into a mallard’s beak. Her dad never allowed anyone to watch him working on his canoes, not even her mother.

Before he began a canoe, he would perform the ram’s horn dance, chant a hymn to the ancestors and give thanks to all the spirits of the heavens: the earth, the wind, the trees and the water. In tribute to his workmanship, members of the tribe would say not that he was skilful, but that he chanted well. Only he could move the spirits of his ancestors with his chanting so that the ancestors became the knife and axe in his hand. When someone wanted a canoe made, they came to him with gifts for the ancestors; game and waterfowl hung from the ceiling of their home all year round. The Chief himself would respectfully offer him three cigarettes whenever they met.

A cowhide bag hung from the tree outside their door. It was not one of theirs; her mother’s stitching was much neater. Sundance opened the bag. Inside were a bright yellow cloak and a collection of necklaces, bracelets and anklets made of cowry shells and animal bone. The cloak was made of the best deerhide and little silvery bells hung from the hem. The bell in the middle had a strawberry carved on it.

Sundance held the cloak against herself tightly. It was just the kind of cloak she liked. The little bells shook themselves free and jingled cheerfully in the morning air. It was not the first time Sundance had seen gifts like these. She’d turned fourteen this New Year and since then, a series of gifts had begun to appear outside her home. She knew which family this bag had come from, and she also knew that if she accepted it, a man would turn up one evening, walk proudly into her house and sit down at the hearth. Then he would lead her by the hand to another home.

Sundance gazed longingly at the gifts. She had no intention of accepting them because she did not want to move to anyone’s house just yet. She wanted to be left in peace to enjoy the pleasures of being fourteen. She sighed regretfully, then folded the cloak and put it back in the bag. Provided she did not take the bag into her house, it would be retrieved by its owner by the following morning. And when he and she bumped into each other in the future, they would smile and greet each other as if nothing had happened.

Waterfowl skimmed the surface of the river, the sounds of their beating wings echoing in the still air of the village. It was Sunday and most of the tribe were in church. Her mother and younger brothers and sisters had gone too. The priest was a White man. When he first arrived, none of the tribe members wanted to convert to the White man’s religion, but after the Chief was converted, the others had followed suit. It happened like this: one day his wife became possessed by demons; she rolled around on the floor of their house, foaming at the mouth, and bit off half her tongue. The tribe’s healer and the shaman tried to rid her of the demons without success. The priest then brought out a little bottle, poured a spoonful of pink liquid and forced it between her lips. Her fits stopped immediately. “What’s that magic bottle that chased the demons out of her?” asked the Chief. “It’s not the bottle that expelled her demons,” replied the priest. “It’s a spirit called Jesus.” And so the Chief was converted.

Sundance was waiting for her father to come home. That was why she had not gone to church with the others. She would help him tie up the boat and unload the things he had bought. He paddled into town to barter dried salmon and reed mats for rice and charcoal. Last year, great shoals of salmon beached themselves in the shallows. Sundance and her mother spent days drying the fish on a rock at the riverbank. The fish hung in strips from the ceiling, as crowded as dancers at a powwow. Her father had gone two days ago, and was expected back today. Sundance and her mother had asked him to buy them each a little black hat with a brim, of the sort that fashionable White women wore in the city.

The priest knew perfectly well that waiting for her father was just an excuse. Sundance did not want to spend a warm, sunny Sunday listening to the priest’s dry sermons about God. To Sundance, God was as free as the wind and the clouds and did not like being cooped up inside. She knew she was more likely to find God in a bird’s wing than in church. When she made her excuses, the priest did not try to force her; he knew that she could trounce his arguments with a single pronouncement, ready to trip off her tongue when the need arose. So the priest treated her with some caution.

“My grandfather was baptized before your father was even born” was what she might say—but did not.

Sundance’s grandfather was English. He had arrived by ship several decades before, sent by the Hudson’s Bay Company to open up a trading post in the Fraser River valley. He bartered goods like matches, kerosene, bedding, needles, thread and pipe tobacco with the local Indian tribes for skins and pelts. He was not the first White man to have come to the West coast to trade with the Indians. His predecessors had had dealings with the Indians too. From these White men, the tribes had quickly learned a few business tricks like mixing good and poor-quality goods, price fixing and holding back merchandise to hike up the price. So to ensure a stable supply of goods, Sundance’s grandfather allied himself with a local Indian chief by marrying his daughter, even though he already had a wife in England.

Sundance’s grandfather lived in British Columbia for fifteen years and had seven children with his Indian wife. When the time came for him to retire and return to England, he told her to move to the city so that their children could go to a White school and get the best possible education. The wife did as she was bid, but before many months had passed, she returned to her tribe. She could not settle in the city; the sound of drums beat in her ears day and night and she knew that her ancestors were calling her back home. So back she went.

When Sundance’s grandmother returned to her tribe, after months in the city, and years in a White marriage, she discovered a large number of children who looked very much like her own. They were the children of the White men, conceived as they passed like a whirlwind over Indian territory. The mothers often gathered together to talk about their menfolk on the other side of the ocean. On these occasions, Sundance’s grandmother would say little, and would come home to impress on each of her children that they were not the same as the others. “Your father was sent by the great Hudson’s Bay Company. He once had a personal audience with Queen Victoria.” The marks left on her by fifteen years of marriage could not be erased; although she had returned to her own people, she found herself a stranger among them.

She never remarried. Her English husband had left her quite comfortable and she did not need to go looking for another man, unlike the other women. He never returned once he had left British Columbia. Sundance’s father, the youngest of his children, was only a toddler learning to talk when he left. He had no memory of him. But it became Sundance’s grandmother’s mission to keep her husband present, her words like a hatchet rigorously chipping away until he was permanently carved into her children’s memories.

Those memories trickled gently into the bloodstreams of her grandchildren too. She lived to a great age, and even witnessed the birth of a great-grandchild. Long before that, though, she went through the money left her by her husband, and spent the rest of her life struggling, like the rest of her tribe. Still, she wore a satisfied smile, knowing that she had fulfilled her mission: her children’s children and their children would keep the memories of that man alive a hundred years.

The sun was very bright and Sundance shaded her eyes with her hand. She could see far into the distance to where the redwood trees looked no bigger than a row of nuts. There, around the riverbend at the end of the village, was where her father would emerge. She heard the sharp cry of a bird in the pine tree by her door. Though it was hidden in the gloom of the branches, Sundance knew it was a blue jay. Her father said that her hearing was sharper than an elk’s.

“What are you trying to tell me? Is my dad coming?” Sundance asked, looking upward.

The bird was silent. But the branches rustled a little. Sundance could not help chuckling. Holding her hair to one side, she lay down and pinned her ear to the ground to listen. When the canoe rounded the bend, she would be able to hear the ripple of the water on the paddle. There were members of the tribe who had bought something called a motor which they put in the belly of the boat and Sundance had heard that this made the canoe grow legs and walk in the water, but her father was unimpressed. The paddle was the spirit of the canoe; without its spirit, what could the boat do?

Sundance lay listening quietly and gradually a thread of sound came to her ears, a humming noise. She knew it was the Great Earth sighing. The Earth had been asleep for too long and needed to turn over. When that happened, the grass would green, the flowers would open, the brown bear and the elk would come out of the forests and the blue jay would no longer need to skulk amid the dark branches.

But today she was not listening for the Earth’s sounds.

She was about to stand up again, disappointed, when her ear caught another tiny sound, a sort of hushing noise, which brought with it a hint of warmth as it brushed her eardrum.

The sound of her father’s paddle in the water.

Sundance leapt to her feet in excitement, hitched up her skirts and ran towards the riverbend. Once she reached him, they would race each other home, he in the canoe, she along the riverbank.

The blue jay suddenly flew up out of the pine tree and circled low around her head. Sundance flicked one end of her belt at the bird and retreated a little, then came back to follow close behind. Sundance’s heart gave a thud. Her father had said that the day her grandmother died, a blue jay kept circling round his head.

Sundance picked up a stone and tossed it at the jay, hitting her wing. She gave a loud squawk and flew away lopsidedly. Sundance began to run fast, but the wind was a nuisance, entangling her legs in her skirt and blowing her hair in her eyes. But she knew every tree root and every stone along the way. Even without eyes, Sundance could have found the exact place where her father would round the bend in the river.

Sundance stopped and picked a withered reed to tie back her hair. In the distance, she saw the hazy shape of her father’s canoe, floating slowly towards her like a mallard duck. She cupped her hands over her mouth and shouted:

“Dad!”

The redwoods caught the sound, and sent it back in mighty echoes all around her.

She could see the canoe more clearly now. It seemed heavier than usual; the neck of the carved mallard’s head sunk low in the water, so that only the bright red beak was visible.

Sundance jumped onto a rock, and could see at a glance that there were a number of large sacks in the canoe—goods which her dad had bartered for in the city. Rice, charcoal, perhaps green vegetables, even candy. There might even be two small black hats with upturned brims.

Sundance’s gaze was caught by something else in the boat, and her brow furrowed in astonishment.

Among the sacks, dressed in a strange blue cotton gown, sprawled a body.

He was hot, so hot. From the soles of his feet to the hair on his head, his entire body was stuck to a burning hot sheet of iron and the fat was melting off him, just like the lard oozed from the pig when his mother cooked it at New Year.

Water, water…

Kam Shan opened his eyes, to see a red light in front of him—a firepit. Beside it floated something large and round. Gradually his eyes focused and he saw it was the face of a girl. High cheekbones, deep-set eye sockets, thick lips. A stranger. He could not think of anyone he knew who looked like that. The thought made his head ache. He groaned with a voice as reedy as the whine of a mosquito: “Porridge … is there any porridge?”

The girl stared at him uncomprehendingly. Kam Shan saw she was wearing a deerskin cloak, fringed at the neck and hem. A Redskin. She was a Redskin, though she looked a little like a Chinese. No wonder she could not understand what he said.

Oh God, he had fallen into the hands of Redskins!

He had heard stories of Redskins—how they scalped people, dug out their hearts, made necklaces of human teeth. His own experience of them in the market did not support these claims, but the beads of sweat on him instantly chilled and his hair stood on end.

He shut his eyes again. He did not want to die at the hands of these Redskins. It had never occurred to him when he and Ah-Lam’s wife boarded the steamship last year that they might both wind up dead in Gold Mountain. His dad had not scraped together all that money for the head tax for him to die within the year.

There was more noise in the room now, a scuffling sound which might be leather boots on the mud floor, or a knife being pulled from its sheath. There were voices too, male and female. He could not understand a word. Kam Shan knew they were gathering around him because he could feel heavy breathing on his face.

Oh help me, my Emperor … Kwan Kung … Tam Gung … merciful Kuan Yam … Jesus … Saint Paul … Saint Peter. Kam Shan summoned up all the deities he could think of. If you get me out of this, I swear I’ll make you a gold statue, I swear I won’t make Dad angry any more, I’ll write to Mum every month, I won’t steal Dad’s money ever again, I swear.…

But it was no use. He felt the knife blade on his forehead. Strangely, it did not hurt. It felt rough and scratchy, a bit like sandpaper on his skin.

If you’re going to kill me then do it with one slash, I can’t stand pain, I really can’t stand pain.…

His prayer was silent but his eyelids fluttered like moths’ wings.

“You’ve been asleep for a day. It’s time to wake up,” said a woman’s voice.

Her English was broken, but he could still understand.

His eyes sprang open. The thing that lay on his forehead was not a knife blade but a cracked and calloused hand, a woman’s hand. Her face was weathered a coppery colour, and the grime that marked its creases looked like verdigris. Next to her stood a man and the round-faced girl.

“Are you awake? I’ll bring you some water,” said the girl, not bothering to hide her excitement. When she spoke, he could see two rows of uneven, yellowed teeth, which Kam Shan somehow found calming.

She brought water and Kam Shan gulped it all down. It left a burnt, smoky taste in his mouth. He let her take the bowl back: “Is there any more?” The girl smiled. “You mustn’t drink too much at once, you’ve been dry for days. Have something to eat, then drink some more.” The girl spoke much better English than her mother, and Kam Shan had no difficulty understanding. His belly rumbled thunderously. He was so hungry he was beyond the niceties of politeness. “Is there any porridge?” was what he wanted to say, but he did not know the word in English. What he finally said was: “Can I have rice, rice with water?”

The girl looked blank but her mother gave a broad smile. “He wants porridge,” she said, using the Chinese word. “Chinese people like eating porridge with black eggs in it.” It’s pickled eggs, not black eggs, thought Kam Shan. He looked dully at her, his lips trembling, and said: “Anything’ll do.” She bent down and picked up a pair of tongs, took something from the stones in the firepit and put it in his water bowl. “It’s cooked,” she said. “Eat it up.”

Kam Shan looked at the black thing in his bowl. It smelled burnt, like roast meat. There was no salt or oil on it but he did not care. Down it went. It was fish, he realized, and it made only the smallest dent in his hunger. He remembered how his mother and grandmother impressed on him that he must never, ever, ask for second helpings when he was a guest in someone’s house, but today he did not care.

He swallowed hard a few times, enough to wet his throat and form the words “a bit more” in a parched voice. But before he could get them out, the woman had gone to the fire and came back with another piece of fish, bigger than the first, which she put into his bowl. Kam Shan ate it more slowly. There were no chopsticks so he used his fingers. His fingers felt warm, and he was aware of the girl’s eyes on them. Her gaze seemed to coat them in a layer of oil. Now that he was no longer so hungry, he began to feel clumsy and flustered.

He finished the fish, bones and all. He put down the bowl and burped loudly, filling the air around him with a strong fishy smell.

He looked around him at the Redskins’ home. It was long and narrow, built of rough timber with a mud floor. There was a large firepit in the middle of the floor, and beds—wooden planks covered with rush matting— at each end. He was lying on a wooden plank himself, near the door. By the firepit, the head of a huge elk hung from a wall. Branches stood propped against each other in front of the fire, and his gown hung drying on them. It was a dusty grey, which meant it was nearly dry. Under the gown he could see one blue trouser leg. His trouser leg.

What was he wearing? Who had taken his trousers off him? Was it the woman? Or the girl?

The thought made Kam Shan flush so hotly he could have boiled a river of water. He heard giggling. He saw several pairs of eyes peering out at him from one corner, shining a wolfish green in the lamplight. When his eyes got used to the gloom, he saw three small children sitting on a wooden bed at the end of the room, barefoot and sharing a cover between them.

“Sundance!” commanded the older woman, and the girl ran over and started to dress the children.

Sundance. The Redskin girl’s name was Sundance. Pretty name, Kam Shan thought to himself.

“Where do you live? How did you end up in the river?” The man had been silent, but now he suddenly broke in. He squatted on the ground, took a burning stick from the hearth and lit a cigarette. It must be some sort of local tobacco, thought Kam Shan. The cigarette was as thick as the Redskin’s thumb and the tobacco smoke burned his throat. Kam Shan remembered the man pulling him into his canoe and asking the same question.

“Not far from Vancouver,” Kam Shan answered vaguely.

He did not know how to answer the second question; his English was just not up to telling such a long and complicated story. About a pigtail.

But the man was not going to let him off the hook. “And how did you end up in the river?” he persisted. “You floated a long way down.”

Kam Shan’s lack of English effectively smothered his flustered hesitation. There was a long silence. Finally Kam Shan said: “Fight … someone pushed me … into river.”

“Why?” The man looked interested.

“Woman,” Kam Shan muttered.

He startled himself with this lie. As far as women were concerned, he was a blank sheet of paper. He glanced towards the shadows but could not see Sundance’s face, only her hands, busy shaking out the quilt her young siblings had been wrapped in.

The man burst out laughing and clapped Kam Shan on the shoulder. “Not much of a swimmer, are you?” he said. “I thought it was a dead seal draped over that bit of wood. Good thing your girl didn’t see you looking so hangdog!”

The man threw the remains of his cigarette into the fire and flicked ash from his finger. “Sundance can find him an animal-hide coat to wear and make sure he’s had enough to eat. In a couple of days, when I go back to town, I’ll take him along with me and give him back to his girlfriend.”

Kam Shan was horrified.

It was only many years later, when he thought back to his time with the Redskin tribe, that he realized how the casual telling of one little lie had required a whole string of lies to cover it up. It was like when his mother wrote with her brush on rice paper and accidentally spattered it with ink. To erase that almost invisible blob, you had to dilute it with so much water that it eventually covered a huge area.

At the time, Kam Shan was only sixteen, too young to think that far ahead. He was cornered and his only thought was to fight his way out as quickly as he could.

And since he could not go back on the first lie, he had to go along with it.

No way could he go home to his father, at least not now. How could he explain his bad luck? What would he say? That dark abyss, which made father and son strangers to each other, remained between them. The only thing that could help him across this abyss was a pigtail. He could only go home when that pigtail grew back.

“Thing is … I really don’t want … see that girl again,” Kam Shan said now.

“Thing is … I got no home, I just been wandering … place to place.”

The woman was feeding the fire. She brought over a pile of branches that crackled and burned fiercely in the flames, shooting sparks in all directions. The soot brought tears to her eyes, and she wiped them on the front of her jacket. “My mum told me the Chinese who built the railroad were like you. They came from so far away, but wherever the railroad ended up, they made that their home,” she said.

“Can I live with you for a bit? I can, I can work.…” said Kam Shan, not looking at the man. He was addressing the woman as he spoke. She had a soft heart; he could see that in her eyes.

The woman did not answer, just stared at the man. The man did not answer either but sat there absorbed in pulling at a callus on his palm. There was a sudden stillness at the end of the room as Sundance’s hand paused in mid-air. Kam Shan’s heart thudded so loudly he thought the whole room must have heard it.

“What can you do?” the man asked, finally looking up.

Kam Shan was stumped once more. What could he do? He could not fish, hunt, plait reeds or smoke meat. He could not do anything that the Redskin men did, or anything that the women did either. The truth was that away from his father, he could not even feed himself.

Suddenly he saw some big sacks piled against the wall. They contained the things the man had brought back from town yesterday. In the Vancouver and New Westminster farmers’ markets, he had seen Redskins bartering their produce for other things they needed. Kam Shan’s eyes lit up.

“Charcoal! I can make charcoal!” he exclaimed.

That was another lie. He had watched Mak Dau make charcoal back in Spur-On Village. But it was enough. Redskins were stupid: they had entire forests but they were willing to barter their excellent smoked fish for charcoal.

The woman did not wait for the man to reply. She jumped to her feet and yelled in the direction of the shadows at the end of the room: “Sundance, when the weather clears up, take him to the forest to cut wood.”

An odd sort of rain fell at that time of year. It did not slant down or fall in drops, or even drizzle. Still, when you were outdoors, you only had to hold out your palm for it to fill with water. As the rain fell, the earth became saturated; the trees in the forest plumped out, and the walls and mud floors grew moss. Finally one day the sun came out and, bursting with energy after its long sleep, slurped up the moisture in the air and underfoot. When the people came outside, they found everything thick with greenery.

With the coming of spring, the missionaries got busy. (The Redskins called them God’s men and God’s women because though many were taught English, they could not get their tongues around the words “priests” and “lady missionaries.”) With winter ended, God’s men started classes again and all children under fourteen had to go to school. The Chief ’s children set the example, and the other children followed it. God’s women were not idle either: they gathered the women of the village together and taught them spinning and knitting. “The men have ways of earning their living, and women need ways too. So when you don’t have a man, you can feed yourselves.”

The Redskin women did not understand. How could a woman not have a man? If you lost one, you got another. If a woman had to provide her own food, then what on earth was a man for? The Redskin women thought that God’s women were pretty daft. No wonder they could never get a man. But although they looked down on God’s women, they were entranced by their knitting. They had never before seen such colours and styles, felt such woolly softness and warmth. So God’s women were never short of students.

Sundance did not need to go to school with her younger siblings or to knitting classes with her mother. She was too old for the school and too young for the knitting, so she was free to please herself.

Today she sat on the great rock in front of their door, sharpening hatchets.

She had two of them, one short and one long, both used for cutting wood. The long one was for cutting down branches, the short one for clearing low undergrowth. For the whole winter the hatchets had lain in their animal-hide sheaths without ever seeing the light of day. Sundance had been occupied in two quite different activities: smoking strips of salmon and making jam. She used two big bagfuls of berries harvested in the autumn for the jam. She made enough to fill an oak bucket; the family skimmed off the top for themselves and her father took the rest to sell in town. So for the whole winter, Sundance—hands, hair and all—reeked alternately of smoked fish and jam. This happened every winter and she did not object. It was just the way things were—until this year, that is. Suddenly she was sick of smelling of fish. Last night, as she lay down to sleep, she had heard the humming of her hatchets in their sheaths, and knew that both she and they were missing the woods.

While she sharpened the hatchets, her father collected his fishing rods. He’d heard the call last night too. He missed the water, just like she missed the forests. Today he would paddle to the middle of the river where the water was deepest and warmest. There the trout had slept all winter and would be eager to take the bait. The men in the tribe did not know how to plant crops or rear livestock, they could only hunt and fish. They got their rice and fresh vegetables by bartering fish and game in town.

Just before her father left the house, he put some strips of smoked venison into Sundance’s leather bag. “Don’t go too far today,” he said, “just to the edge of the forest. A brown bear is at its most ferocious when it’s hungry after its winter’s sleep. If you meet one, throw it a bit of meat. If you do run, run behind it. Bears have big bellies and are too clumsy to turn round. When you’re chopping down trees, keep an eye out for birds’ and bees’ nests. Birds are nearest to the spirits of our ancestors so you must never touch their nests. And if you see any bees’ nests, keep at least fifty paces away from them too.”

Sundance interrupted him, laughing: “Dad, it’s not the first time I’ve been to the forest to cut wood.” “Yes, you know, but he doesn’t,” said her father, meaning Kam Shan.

The wakened forest still held the dampness of winter. Kam Shan put on Sundance’s father’s thin hide jacket and deerskin boots, and followed Sundance. The girl cleared a way through the undergrowth chopping down branches which had died during the winter. She left the new growth alone, knowing that with a few days’ sunshine, they would be covered in thick greenery. She threw the branches behind her so that Kam Shan could cut them into smaller pieces with the short axe. But Kam Shan struggled to wield it properly and very soon his palms were covered in blisters. Sundance gave him some twine so he could tie the sticks into bundles. But the twine cut into the blisters and became soaked with blood.

Sundance snickered. “You lied to my dad. You can’t chop wood and make charcoal.” Kam Shan threw down the hatchet and the twine and sat down on the bundles of sticks. “I can,” he said lamely. “I can make charcoal, I just can’t chop wood. When I was at home, I mean in China, all our firewood was chopped by the servants.” “What’s a servant?” asked Sundance. “People who work for you.” “Oh, I know, you mean slaves. My dad says that in the old days when our tribe fought other tribes, if the other tribe lost, they left people behind to work for us.” Kam Shan wanted to say no, it’s not that, but his English was still halting and he could not express himself. So he just nodded vaguely and said: “Pretty much like that.” “How could your mum and dad let you leave home?” asked Sundance. “Mine wouldn’t let me go far away on my own.”

Kam Shan did not know what to say.

Was his mother sorry to see him go? She never said. She just got the best tailor in the village, Mr. Au, to come and spend five days making clothes for him. But she did not sit idly by. She sewed cotton socks. As she worked, she kept her eye on the tailor, watching him so intently that she stabbed her finger with the needle, leaving a drop of blood as big as a pearl on the snowy-white cotton of the socks. Ah-Choi had said: “Wash it quickly. After it dries it won’t come out.” But his mother said: “No, I’ll leave it as a memento for Kam Shan.”

His mother had made the tailor cut every garment several sizes too big. “Kam Shan’s still growing. And after these clothes are worn out, the next ones we make for him will be a bridegroom’s clothes.” As she’d said the words, her voice cracked suddenly, like a dry branch thrown on the fire. His granny had sighed: “Too bad you’ll lose your son when you get a daughter-in-law,” she said. Kam Shan knew this remark was directed at his mother; it was the sort of thing his granny often said to her, but his mother always turned a deaf ear.

His grandmother sat with the tailor too, staring with unseeing eyes and propped against the wall, her hand-warmer clasped in one hand, the other hand holding a box of snacks. The box held green bean cakes and sweetpotato pancakes, freshly made and gently steaming. Still, she was worried they would get cold so she held the box on top of the hand-warmer and fed them to Kam Shan in the intervals when he was not trying on clothes.

“Poor boy, poor boy,” she sniffed, showing almost toothless gums every time she opened her mouth.

“You won’t get anything to eat once you’re in Gold Mountain,” she went on. His grandmother did not cry. Recently her eyes had become as desiccated as two dried-up wells, so that she could not squeeze out a tear. Instead, her tears issued from her nostrils, like leeches sliding in and out of two sepulchres.

That had been their way of showing him that they did not want him to go. But he still had to go, whether they wanted him to or not. The responsibility for their home comforts rested on one man’s shoulders, his father’s. His mother hated for him to have to bear all that responsibility and had waited all these years until he, Kam Shan, was big enough to share the burden. But before he had time to help, he had abandoned him. He felt sick when he thought of his father, frantic with worry. And did his mother know?

Kam Shan suddenly missed his parents terribly.

He buried his head between his knees and pulled fiercely on the spiky tufts of his hair as if he was trying to pull his scalp off. Sundance saw his shoulders begin to shake. The hairs sticking out from between his fingers quivered as if they hid a sparrow. She could tell he was upset, but did not understand why. She threw down her hatchets and went into the forest. A little while later, she emerged holding a bunch of grasses. By now, Kam Shan had calmed down and was staring blankly at a watery blue sky. She kneaded the grasses together into a poultice which she applied to Kam Shan’s palm. “This is a herbal remedy from the ancestors. It’s called Squirrel’s Tail and it’ll stop the bleeding.” Kam Shan felt as if a leech was crawling across his palm. The sensation was cool, moist and slippery and soon his palm did not hurt any more.

“Let’s stop chopping,” said Sundance. “We can come back tomorrow.” They picked up the hatchets, bundled the firewood and balanced the thicker branches on their shoulders. They made their way home, single file, through the forest. They were not in a hurry, and Sundance stopped frequently to pick herbs and grasses and to explain their uses to Kam Shan.

“This is called Indian carpet and it cures colds and chills.

“This is mare’s tail and it heals wounds and bleeding. Once the God man’s husky got mauled by a brown bear. It was bleeding badly but Dad cured it with mare’s tail.

“These are rosehips. Good for children when they’re constipated.

“This is red clover. It cleans out your guts, and then it revives your appetite.”

Kam Shan tired easily after his recent ordeal and they stopped talking. At the riverbank Sundance put down the bundle of firewood and kicked away a pebble with one foot to reveal a yellow flower growing underneath.

“This is St. John’s wort. We’ll take it home and I’ll make a tea for you. It’ll make you better.”

“Better from what?”

Sundance looked Kam Shan straight in the eyes, and then said: “From going around in a trance, that’s what.” Kam Shan could not help laughing. He was still laughing when something yellow flashed towards him. He put up his hand to fend it off, then realized it was Sundance’s cloak.

Sundance lifted the hem of her skirt and knotted it to her waistband, took off her short boots and went down to the river. The water was shallow here and only came halfway up her calves. Her legs had not seen the light of day for the whole winter and they were pallid. As she waded deeper in, they disappeared and only the top half of her body could be seen. Then he could only see her back—her head disappeared under water as she washed her hair.

Good heavens, these Redskin women were barbaric! How could she wash her hair in such frigid water and not worry about catching cold?

Sundance wore her hair in two plaits kept tucked away under a scarf. Now she undid them, and a thick mass of hair cascaded down her back. The sun was at its zenith and there was not a shadow anywhere to be seen. It was an almost windless day; the trees and stones were perfectly motionless and only the ripples on the river betrayed the slight breeze. The surface of the water seemed made of gleaming golden silk and when Sundance stood upright to shake the water from her hair, she released a shower of golden gems. Kam Shan was transfixed by the scene; he wished he had a camera, one like the missionaries had in his school in China, so that he could record it and take the photo out and look at it whenever he wanted.

When she had finished washing her hair, Sundance climbed up the bank, found a stone to sit on, undid the knot in her skirt and spread it around her. Her clothes and the rest of her would soon dry out in the sunshine.

“Come and braid my hair for me. I can’t see, I haven’t got a mirror,” she said, beckoning Kam Shan over.

Kam Shan felt scared. He had not touched a woman’s hair since the time when, as a child, he used to climb on his mother’s shoulders and pull her hair free of its pins. His heart thudded and he caught his breath, reluctant to obey. But he found himself walking to her anyway, just as Sundance had fastened a cord around his legs and pulled him to her.

Sundance passed him the ox bone comb in her leather bag but he was as ham-fisted with the comb as he had been with the hatchets and she gave a sharp intake of breath as he combed out the tangles. Finally it was done and he began clumsily to braid it.

“Your hair’s really black, just like my mum’s,” he said.

“My mum says we Indians can never leave our native land. Why ever did you leave your mum?”

“We Chinese can’t leave our native land either. Sooner or later, I’ll go back and see her.”

Sundance pulled a stem of sweetgrass and began chewing it. “I know. My mother’s dad went home after he got rich. He went back to your country to see his mother too.”

The comb dropped from Kam Shan’s hand to the ground.

“What? You mean your grandfather was Chinese?”

“My mother’s mother’s tribe are from Barkerville. My granny opened a cake shop in town. A Chinese gold panner came in to buy cakes and they got to know each other. After that, when he came to town every couple of weeks, he used to stay at the shop. He panned for gold for four or five years and it was only in the autumn of the last year when they were about to seal off the mountain that he found an ingot. By that time, my mum had been born. My granddad divided the ingot in two and gave half to my granny. Then he sailed back to China.”

No wonder Sundance’s mother knew how to make rice porridge, and looked Chinese. And no wonder she had softened at the sight of him.

“And your granny let your granddad go?”

“She said that wherever your ancestors are, that’s your home, and you can’t stop someone going home.”

Kam Shan was lost for words, but he thought to himself that some Redskins had big hearts after all. It was that Chinese who had been heartless and fickle.

They sat close together and Kam Shan could smell her body. She smelled good, a bit like water weed or wild grasses or cow’s milk, and there was a hint of sweetness too. Her neck was burned tawny by the sun and a fuzz of fine hairs at the nape glinted gold in the light. As his eyes followed the drops that trickled down from her hair onto her collarbone, he saw a part of her he had never seen before.

His heart began to thump and he felt himself go hard down there, rock hard. It felt as if he would burst out of his trousers. Then his hand, seemingly of its own volition, was on her neck and sliding downwards.

Two soft, warm swellings. Quite small. He could just cup his hands over them.

Sundance sprang to her feet, startled and, at first, tried to wriggle out of his grasp, then gradually settled softly against him. Those two swellings almost melted in his hands, and from the centre of each, a little pebble jutted against his palm.

They gave him the courage of a thief. Roughly he pushed Sundance to the ground and pulled up her skirt. Her legs went as soft as a filleted salmon, and when Kam Shan prodded them slightly, they parted. Here was the way into a place he had never been before. He did not know what he was doing and she did not know how to help. Yet somehow a spark of mutual tenderness arose out of their jerky, agitated movements.

Afterwards, Kam Shan stood up. The iron rod now hung soft between his legs, his heart beat at its normal rhythm and his head was clear once more. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Sundance wipe the blood off her legs and skirt with the back of her hand. He could not tell if she was happy or sad, and did not dare catch her eye. He wanted to ask if it hurt but the words grew barbs that caught in his throat.

After a little, Kam Shan picked up the cloak Sundance had dropped beside the track. Together they gathered the bundles of firewood and silently set off.

Sundance led and Kam Shan followed. She was limping slightly and the bloodstains on her skirt bounced like flares before his eyes until he saw stars. Kam Shan put down his bundle and said: “You walk behind me. It’ll be a bit easier for you.” They changed places and, with his eyes no longer full of flares, he saw more clearly. But now he was aware of her boots scuffing the stones as she followed him, her footsteps uneven. The sound grated on his ears and his heart seemed to wither inside him.

Please let her speak, just one sentence, Kam Shan begged silently.

Finally she spoke, but what she said was not at all what Kam Shan expected to hear. Her words struck him as trivial and unworthy of her, but at least they reassured him.

“Next time Dad goes to town, you go with him and buy me a present.”

“As soon as I’ve sold this charcoal,” he replied. “What would you like?”

“A round black hat with a turned-back brim, and a feather in it. I asked Dad last time he went to town but he didn’t get it.”

Kam Shan thought to himself that these Redskin girls were too easily pleased by fripperies. He found it almost unbearable. “I’ll get you a sleeveless cowboy jacket too. They’re very fashionable with city girls.”

He did not look back but he knew Sundance was smiling. He felt her brilliant smile lap in waves up his spine, soaking it with warmth.

“When you bring it back, put it in a cowhide bag and hang it on the tree in front of our door. When Mum and Dad have seen it, I’ll take inside. If I don’t do that, you can’t make a move.”

Kam Shan could not help laughing. “What a fuss about such a little present!”

Sundance laughed too. The joyous sound rose like dust in the spring sunshine, filling the air with tiny particles.

Kam Shan had just sold his first bucket of charcoal, when something happened to disrupt life in the village. The priest’s camera disappeared.

At first, only one or two people knew about it. The priest told one of the missionary women and was overheard by one of the knitters standing nearby. She went home and told her daughter who happened to be in the same class as the tribal chief’s son. Once he heard, it was not long before the whole tribe knew that someone had stolen the “black box that God’s man shuts people up in.”

When the Chief turned up at Sundance’s home, her father was about to begin hollowing out a new canoe. The tree had been felled the previous autumn. It was a redwood and, although the trunk was slender, the wood was very dense and unmarked by even a single insect hole. It had been left out in all weathers for several months; now it was properly seasoned.

First, Sundance’s father offered up prayers. Although he believed in the Jehovah of the White people, he was unwilling to forget the spirits of the ancestors his tribe had worshipped, so he left it vague as to which spirits his prayers were addressed.

Oh Great Spirit

I hear your voice in the wind

With every breath you take, ten thousand things multiply

I beg you to give me courage

Make my eyes keen

So that I may see the mystery of the rising and the setting sun Make my hands skilful

So that I can discover the wonder in every thing created by you Make my ears sharp

So that I may hear your sighs in the sound of the wind

Make my heart wise

So that I may know your true essence embodied in every stone.…

When he squatted down and prepared to strike the first blow with his axe, the Chief gave a slight cough.

“Are you carving another eagle’s head this time?” he asked, passing over a cigarette.

Sundance’s father took the cigarette and lit it with a match, but said nothing. He was not going to divulge any details of an unfinished work to anyone, not even the Chief.

The Chief took a few puffs, then casually said: “Have you heard? The priest’s camera has disappeared.”

Sundance’s father grunted. He was a man of few words. Though he had been baptized with the Christian name John, he was known to all in the village as Silent Wolf.

The Chief cleared his throat a few times then glanced towards the house. Lowering his voice, he said: “That guest of yours has been seen taking photographs of Sundance in the woods at the bend in the river.”

The other man’s eyebrows flickered. Still he said nothing, but he turned and went towards the house. At the doorway he stopped and showed the Chief in first.

“Any guest of mine is a member of my family. His reputation is my reputation. Please come and see for yourself if there’s anything here which is not ours.”

The Chief looked embarrassed. He clapped Silent Wolf on the shoulder: “It’s your family, just ask them, all right? If you say there’s nothing then there’s nothing. Even if they don’t believe me, they’ll have to believe you.”

It was quiet in the room. Sundance’s mother had gone to the knitting workshop and the children were at school. It was very bright outside and silvery dust motes floated lazily in the single brilliant sunbeam that shone through the window. It took a while for the men’s eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom, and then Silent Wolf saw his daughter sitting in the corner teaching Kam Shan to weave a sweetgrass basket.

Kam Shan stood up as soon as he saw the Chief. Silent Wolf ’s gaze swept over Kam Shan’s body but his waistline looked flat as normal. He knew what the priest’s black box looked like because the priest liked to stroll around the village with it slung over his shoulder, taking pictures. It was big, as big as his two hands put together, and would take up most of a cowhide bag.

“One day, you could teach me how to use a camera,” he said, looking at Kam Shan.

Sundance saw Kam Shan go pale at the words, but he said nothing. The atmosphere was oppressively heavy, so that the room seemed to echo with the thuds of their hearts. Sundance felt like a stranded fish opening and shutting its mouth in desperate gasps. She could not stay there any longer and fled outside.

Silent Wolf tilted Kam Shan’s chin up with one gnarled finger: “Be man and help me clear your name with the Chief.”

Kam Shan could no longer avoid the man’s eyes. Coal black, they were, cold on the surface but with a fire in their depths. Kam Shan’s own eyes, climbing to those cold black orbs, were blinded by the hidden fire. His mind went completely blank.

The Chief sighed: “When there was an outbreak of dysentery in the village last year, the priest rid us of the demons and saved us all. He has nothing to amuse himself with apart from that camera. He carries it around with him all day. If you took it, just give it back to him and that’ll be the end of it.”

Silent Wolf paid no attention to the Chief. His finger still under Kam Shan’s chin, he said deliberately: “Can you or can you not?”

Kam Shan felt as if his lips had suddenly turned into two immovable stones. No matter how hard he wanted to speak, the words could not force their way through.

Silent Wolf withdrew his finger and Kam Shan’s head suddenly dropped onto his chest.

“Get your stuff together.”

The Chief looked at the other man. “Maybe it’s not him.…” he said hesitantly.

“We’ve never had anyone in our family who couldn’t clear their name.” The words were flinty, steely. There was absolutely no doubt that he meant what he said.

Kam Shan could only go to the corner where he slept and get his things together. They were few and simple: the jacket and gown that he had on when he fell into the water, a pair of cotton socks and cloth shoes. And a cowhide bag. In it there was a belt made of pheasant quills and decorated with brightly coloured feathers. He had bought it in town two days before when he went with Silent Wolf to sell charcoal, and had not had time to give it to Sundance.

The camera was not among these things. He had hidden it in a hole in a tree on the riverbank the day he passed by the children’s school on his way back from chopping wood with Sundance. The priest had taken the children out for midday prayers and the classroom was empty apart from the black box on the teacher’s rostrum. Kam Shan knew straightaway what it was. His heart leapt wildly in his chest. He hesitated, then picked the black box up in both hands—he would just play with it for a couple of days, then put it back again. But before he had time to return it, word got around the whole tribe that there had been a theft. That black box became a heap of shit, which he had to hang onto even though he could smell its stink. If he let go of it, then the stink would get out and everyone would smell it. He was well aware that not even a whole river could wash him clean of a smell like that.

He opened out the gown, put the trousers, socks and shoes in it, bundled it and tied it with a piece of twine. Then he opened it again and rearranged the socks and shoes. He was dilly-dallying, waiting for Sundance. He could not go without seeing her. When he opened his bundle for the third time, Silent Wolf gave a heavy cough. He stood behind him, holding two pigs’ bladders tied at the neck in his hand—one with water, the other with wild rice and smoked fish. It would be something to see the boy on his way.

Kam Shan followed Silent Wolf very slowly outside. Then he stopped. Standing on tiptoe he hung the bag with the feather belt in it from the oak tree by the front door. He walked on, then turned back to check it was in a place where it would catch her eye.

At least he had left Sundance a present.

As Silent Wolf was about to launch the canoe, they heard the sound of running feet. It was Sundance, her braids flying. Trailing far behind came the fat priest, sweating profusely, clasping his bouncing belly in both hands as if to stop it from tumbling to the ground.

It was some time before the priest could catch his breath, safely release his belly and speak:

“The camera … I gave it to … this young man. I’m teaching him … to take pictures.”

His words left the Chief and Silent Wolf mute with astonishment. Silent Wolf looked hesitantly from the priest to Kam Shan, but the boy did not look up or speak. Knowing he would be unable to conceal his surprise, he avoided meeting their eyes.

“Come on, young man. Tell these two gentlemen what make of camera you’re using.”

“Kodak Brownie, Number 2 Model B,” Kam Shan muttered. “How many pictures can it take at one time?”

“One hundred and seventeen.”

“How big are the printed pictures?”

“About two inches.”

The priest nodded and clapped Kam Shan on the shoulder. “I can see you’re really keen on photography, young man. I did the right thing when I gave you the camera.” Then he turned to Silent Wolf: “You keep this young man with you. He’s got a good head on his shoulders, and he’s a quick learner.” Before Sundance’s father could respond, the Chief said with a laugh, “It’s getting late and I’m hungry. You’re all invited to my house to eat. I killed an elk yesterday, and it’ll take us all spring to eat it. Bring the boy too.”

But Sundance was paying no attention, because she had seen the bag hanging from the oak tree by her door, swaying gently in the breeze. “Oh, Dad!” she cried in a voice choked with happiness.

By the time Kam Shan walked out of the door with his cowhide bag hung from a stick over his shoulder, he could already hear the beating of the powwow drum. He had seen the elkskin-covered drum before; it was housed in the big teepee where the ancestors were worshipped. It was huge, bigger than the banqueting table they dined on when his father was home in Spur-On Village, big enough for twelve drummers to sit around it. He felt, rather than heard, its thunderous reverberations beneath the soles of his feet.

He could hear singing too. Sundance called it singing but he thought of it more as the sounds of wild beasts—the roar of a tiger or the howl of a wolf. He did not know what the singing meant; it may have been a war chant, a song of jubilation, an invocation of the spirits of heaven and earth, or an expression of anger. When he was not with Sundance, they were just ear-piercing shrieks or earth-shattering growls.

He wondered if Sundance had started to dance. At the powwow, the men sang and drummed. The women danced, although they were only allowed outside the circle. The men sang, drummed and danced in the middle.

Sundance and her mother had been eagerly waiting for the powwow. Her mother had been sewing Sundance’s dance cape for ten years, beginning the work when Sundance was just five. On her birthday every year, her mother sewed on another ten bells, making one hundred bells this year. Sundance had tried it on for the first time the evening before, filling the house with a tinkling of bells clearer than the sound of gems falling into a jade dish. Once she had her cape on, Sundance did not stop smiling all evening. Kam Shan had not slept well that night, and he knew that she had not either. He kept hearing her reed mattress creaking as she tossed and turned. When he got up to go out and piss, he found her sitting on the ground with her back against the wall, her teeth glinting in the darkness. She was still smiling.

She was happy because the cape was so beautifully made it put all the other mothers in the tribe to shame—and because this was her coming-ofage powwow. But Kam Shan knew that there was another reason why she was happy.

Yesterday evening at dinner, Sundance’s father had told her mother that he would ask the Chief to preside over Sundance’s wedding. Kam Shan started so violently in astonishment that the rice leapt out of his bowl.

“Sundance … getting married?!”

He tried to catch her eye, but she bent her head to her food, and bore his gaze silently.

“When Sundance marries, she’ll carry on living with us so she can help me with her younger brothers and sister,” said her mother.

“You won’t need to chop wood and make charcoal,” said her father. “You can keep Sundance with what you earn from taking pictures.”

It was some minutes before Kam Shan realized this remark was directed at him, and even more before he realized their import. His lips began to tremble: “M-me?” he stammered.

“Sundance accepted the belt you gave her, so of course it’s you,” laughed her mother with a glance at Silent Wolf.

Kam Shan’s head seemed to explode into tiny fragments. He could not put all the bits together though he tried all evening, and all night when he was in bed. Only with the first glimmer of light in the sky did he feel that he had got his head around this whole complicated business.

Sundance was out of bed before the cock crowed a second time. She woke the little ones. Soon afterwards, her father got up. He was not normally up this early but today he had to wear his ceremonial dress as the lead dancer at the powwow. He put on a long blue gown with bears’ paws sewn around the hem. On his chest he wore a decorative woven strip of yellow pheasant quills. He looked imposing, but the stateliest part of his outfit was yet to come; he donned a headdress of the finest eagle feathers, grey around the crown, white down his back. The feathers had dulled a little over the years, but Silent Wolf liked to wear feathers which had seen a bit of life. It was only young men who were seduced by freshly gathered feathers. The headdress was large and heavy and Silent Wolf needed help putting it on, so Sundance’s mother rose early too.

Kam Shan was up last of all. He watched Sundance’s mother paint her husband’s face. Sundance had dressed the younger ones and was now changing her own clothes. She looked at him without speaking; her words were written on her clothes, in the bells which tinkled in eager expectation when she moved.

The powwow was held half a mile or so from their village, and attracted people from all the villages around. In addition to dancing and drumming, the powwow included a marketplace. Sundance’s mother took charcoal and reed mats to sell and with the proceeds planned to buy a “hundred family quilt,” a new set of wooden bowls, two deerskin tunics and two pairs of lightweight boots. The tunics and boots were for Sundance and Kam Shan to wear at the wedding. She also wanted to buy two big pouches of the best tobacco to give the Chief, who would preside over the wedding.

The powwow did not start until midday but no one could wait that long. “When are we leaving?” asked Sundance’s father, once his face was painted. He sounded like an impatient child. “It’s too early,” her mother replied gravely after a moment’s consideration. “The sun’s not fully up yet.” But she could not keep up the severity for long. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” she said with a laugh. “What are we waiting for?”

Then she noticed Kam Shan sitting on the edge of his bed. He was neatly dressed but in his everyday clothes. And he was holding his head in his hands as if it was so heavy it might fall off. His hands hid his expression, and he had not said a word all morning.

“What’s got into you, wooden-top?” she asked.

“Don’t worry. The wooden-top will dance as soon as the drumming starts,” said Silent Wolf.

They set off with her father leading their pony in front. It was loaded up with two large sacks containing things they would sell at the powwow and three bladders full of food for their breakfast. Sundance’s mother walked beside her father, the children followed and Sundance and Kam Shan brought up the rear.

The three young ones competed to see who could throw a stone the highest. The stones startled the birds who squawked in protest. The stocky little pony had been fed before they left, and clip-clopped along the track in a spirited manner, its head held high. Even the village dogs sensed the excitement, and set up an unbroken chorus of barking which accompanied them all the way out of the village. The sights of this powwow morning were like a scroll painting unrolling itself before Kam Shan’s eyes. But he heard only one sound—the jingling of the bells on Sundance’s cape.

The bells knocked against his eardrums, and his temples began to throb. In a sudden fit of irritation, he shouted: “Sundance!” His voice sounded strange—brittle like a dead twig. She looked at him: “What’s wrong?” She had started to sweat and her forehead was beaded with drops of moisture. Kam Shan looked at her in a daze and saw that in the space of a few months she had become a beauty.

His lips trembled. “Sundance, I … I.…” But the words stuck and he could not go on. “What’s the matter?” she asked. He shook his head. “Let’s go. Your mum’s waiting.”

They walked on silently.

About fifteen minutes out of the village, Kam Shan suddenly slapped his forehead. “I’ve forgotten the camera,” he said. “I can take pictures of people in the market and charge each person a few cents.”

“Go back and get it and be quick,” said Sundance’s mother, beaming in satisfaction. “We’ll wait here.” She had known he was a smart boy from the first time she set eyes on him. But he replied: “Don’t wait. I know the way to the powwow. We’ll meet up there.”

Kam Shan tossed his straw hat to Sundance. “It’s hot, you’ll catch the sun,” he said as he started back. After a few paces, he looked back and watched as the little procession wound its way along the country track until the figures became tiny and faded into the distance. They turned a corner and disappeared from view completely, leaving only the tinkle of the bells wafting on the breeze. Kam Shan felt a great hollowness in his heart. It was only many years later, when he was middle-aged and had experienced life’s ups and downs, that he was able to put a name to his feelings that day. Desolation.

He went back to the house and retrieved his cowhide bag from under his pillow. He had not opened it since the day he was almost sent packing. He took off his leather boots and put them by Silent Wolf’s bed, then put on his old cloth shoes. He tied the bag shut, hung it from a stick over his shoulder and set off. The village was empty; everyone was at the powwow. The cloth of the shoes wrapped itself around his feet with such light weight that, strangely, he felt as if he were walking on puffs of air. By the time he got used to the feeling, the village was well behind him.

He had to hurry. The sun was well up by now and he needed to reach the nearest settlement before dark. He was not really worried; the bag still had the water and food in it that Silent Wolf had given him. And so long as he had the camera, he could beg a crust to eat and a place to sleep wherever he found himself. Now that the Whites had brought their cameras to the Redskins’ land, the latter, after some trepidation, had come to like the strange idea of having their images shut into the black box. He did not know where the next settlement was or how far he would have to walk to reach it. His hair brushed his shoulders. In another six months, he thought, just another six months, he could face his father again.

He got to the bend in the river and stopped, rooted to the spot. His bag dropped with a thud. Someone was sitting on the stone where Silent Wolf tied his canoe. The silence was shattered with a jingling of bells.

“Get into the canoe. I’ll take you,” said Sundance.

She knew. She knew everything.

Emotion flooded over Kam Shan, filling his eyes with tears. He dared not look at her, or he would not be able to hold them back. He must not cry. Redskin men never cried.

“I’m not … I’m.…” he stammered, but could not finish the sentence. She did not interrupt but when he did not say any more, she asked: “Why? Why?” She was looking upwards, as if addressing her questions to the sky.

He gave a sigh. She sighed too. The silence hung heavily between them.

“The ancestors … won’t accept you.…” he began haltingly.

Sundance untied the mooring rope and gave the paddle to him. He stepped in and reached out for her hand. She got in but still he did not let go. She did not pull free but allowed their palms to rest moistly one against the other.

“That’s what my granddad said when he left my granny,” she said quietly.

Kam Shan had been on the road more than six months before he glimpsed, far in the distance, the pair of red lanterns that hung on either side of his father’s door.

After leaving Sundance, he wandered from tribe to tribe, from town to town, for months. He took the same road his father had taken all those years before when he was building the railroad, but that he did not discover until much later. At the time, the only idea in his head was how to get to the next settlement before dark and fill his hungry belly.

As winter approached, his aimless wanderings acquired a direction— home.

The idea came to him quite suddenly. His hair was not long enough yet; in fact, he could only braid it into a stub of a pigtail. But something made him change his mind—a newspaper.

He was at a Redskin market one day when he saw a man carrying bottle of soy sauce bought in Vancouver’s Chinatown. It was a long time since he had tasted soy sauce and just the sight of the bottle made his mouth water. But what really caught his attention was the old newspaper in which the bottle was wrapped. It was so long since he had seen any Chinese characters that he paid the man a few cents for the filthy newspaper and sat down on the ground to read it.

It was several months old and had passed through many hands, each of which had left its mark on it. Kam Shan started to read it in minute detail, character by character. But then his eyes fell on one small item of news, and everything else in the newspaper receded into the background.

Chinatown’s barbers have recently been doing a roaring trade. The success of the revolution means an end to pigtails and the Chinese have wasted no time in shaving their heads in preparation for the celebrations of the first New Year of the Republic.

The Chinese Times, 12 February 1912

He put down the newspaper. His first thought was to get hold of a pair of scissors. When finally, several weeks later, he managed with some difficulty to borrow a pair from a Redskin, he hesitated. It should be his father wielding those scissors, he decided. Not him.

Dad. Oh, Dad.

The words filled Kam Shan with a sense of urgency. Home. He must go home immediately.

It was not an easy journey. It was a hard winter and the snow was deep. The cloth shoes his mother made him were soon worn through, but he had managed to buy a pair of thick deerskin boots from a Redskin. The rivers were frozen over so there were no boats; he had to make the journey on foot. Whenever he came to a market, he took photographs of people and taught the Redskins how to make charcoal. In return, he asked not for money but for food and warm clothing. His cowhide bag was sometimes stuffed to overflowing. On occasion, he could not reach a village before nightfall and had to take shelter in a hollow tree or a cave, but he kept his spirits up with the thought that every night brought him closer to home.

On the last stage of the journey, he hitched a ride on a cart going to Vancouver. When the man put him down in Chinatown, he went on impulse to the office of the The Chinese Times. All the staff were new, and only the old man on the door recognized him. “Where’s Mr. Fung?” asked Kam Shan. “Gone back to China. Been gone a long while.” “Has he got himself a job in the Republican government?” “Job? No fucking way! The Hung Mun members mortgaged their properties and gave the money to Mr. Sun to go back and seize power in China. But once the Cudgel got what he wanted, he forgot about the Hung Mun. They haven’t seen hide nor hair of him.”

Kam Shan said nothing. Mr. Fung was a raging torrent, and he, Kam Shan, was a mere grain of sand dragged along in its wake. In the process, Mr. Fung had let down the brethren of the Hung Mun, and he had let down his mum and dad.

He would not let his parents down ever again by going near that raging torrent. From now on, the revolution was not his business.

From now on, his parents would be his only concern.

These last two years, Dad, I haven’t earned a cent to send to Mum and Granny. As he walked, Kam Shan rehearsed what he would say when he saw his father. You’ve had to save every cent to pay back the debt from building the diulau. But starting today, you just watch me. Starting today, it won’t be you and Uncle Ah-Lam who do the muck-spreading, it’ll be me and Loong Am who do all the heavy, dirty, stinking jobs. Except for killing pigs, that is. I can’t kill pigs. You can be my helper from now on, and I’ll be the roof beam that holds up the family home. I’m going to make good use of my camera from now on. The Redskins give me a couple of days’ food for every photograph, and I’ve heard you can charge two dollars for picture in the city.

Oh, Dad, I promise you I’m going to earn enough money to keep Mum and Granny and my brother, and us over here as well. Do you believe me, Dad?

Kam Shan got to the outskirts of New Westminster at dusk. As he went up the cracked stone steps to the front door, he felt an ocean of pent-up tears threaten to overwhelm him. He was not in Redskin territory any more and did not try to hold them back. Yet, somehow, the anguished sobs remained locked inside him, and only a few tears blurred his vision.

The red lanterns from the year of his arrival were still there, although they had grown increasingly yellowed and tatty at the edges. But the New Year couplets were different. The old ones had been worded and written by his father:

May those back home enjoy a favourable end to the old year;

May we in Gold Mountain reap bumper crops in the new year.

And across the top, Peace to the whole family.

The lines he saw today looked as if they had been bought ready-made from Chinatown. The paper was gold-flecked and the writing was neat, but the message was trite:

Building the family with hard work; Blessing the children with longevity.

And, across the top, May the new year be auspicious.

Why had his father not written the couplets? He had never bought New Year couplets written by anyone else before—he thought no one else wrote in a decent hand. Had something happened to him?

Kam Shan went weak at the knees at the thought. He managed to prop himself against the door jamb and knock.

Please God, let it be Dad who opens the door. Please let him be all right. If he’s all right, I won’t just walk in, I’ll kneel down in the doorway and knock my head on the ground a hundred times to show how remorseful I am.

He had to wait a long time before someone finally came to the door.

It was the hired hand, Loong Am.

When Loong Am saw Kam Shan, he leapt back and slammed the door shut. Kam Shan was nonplussed. Then he realized that Loong Am must think he was a ghost. He thundered on the door, shouting: “I’m Kam Shan! I’m alive! Come and touch my hand. It’s warm. Dead people are cold!”

There was no sound from the other side of the door.

Kam Shan tried again. “Loong Am, if I was a ghost, why would I need you to open the door for me? Come and look through the window. Can’t you see my shadow? Ghosts don’t have shadows.”

After a long pause the door finally opened, and Loong Am cautiously emerged, his hair almost standing on end with fright. He looked Kam Shan very carefully up and down before asking: “Where have you been, Kam Shan? Your dad was frantic. He searched high and low; he practically went to the gates of hell for you. And why have you still got a pigtail? The Republic was set up a while ago.”

Kam Shan did not answer. “Where’s my dad?” he asked.

Loong Am sighed. “Your granny was very ill. Your dad went back to Hoi Ping. He’s not been gone a month.”

Kam Shan’s bag dropped to the floor with a thud. He stared blankly in front of him. Loong Am, alarmed at the look on his face, hastily asked: “Have you eaten? There’s some porridge in the pot. Shall I heat some for you?” Kam Shan stood rooted to the spot, still wordless. Finally, he pulled himself together and said: “Ink stone.” Loong Am did not understand until Kam Shan gestured wearily: “Get me dad’s ink stone.” Loong Am hurriedly fetched the ink stone, paper and brushes from the other room. “Good thing you’ve come back,” he said. “I haven’t had anyone to write for me since your dad left. When you’ve finished writing to your dad, you can write a letter home for me.”

“Where’s Ah-Lam?” Kam Shan asked as he ground the ink and prepared to write.

“Dead. The month after you left. He got very confused. He used to wander off into the fields without any trousers on. The yeung fan were so scared they called the police. In the end, he started to piss and shit any time, any place he felt like it.”

The brush poised in mid-air as Kam Shan fumbled for words which failed him.

Kam Shan pulled the curtain to one side.

The curtain was black. It was padded with cotton wadding, and was very thick, though lumpy and uneven. It was covered in marks and shiny grease stains. It had been used to wipe hands after shitting, mouths after eating, and noses after blowing. Every mark told a story and the curtain wore them all like a badge of shame.

Today he was seeing Chinatown in all its nakedness. Kam Shan’s heart thudded in his chest.

He had been to Vancouver’s Chinatown often since his dad fetched him from the detention centre three years before. He had got to know Mr. Fung in the newspaper office, he had been to the cake shops and the general stores, he had been to see plays at the theatre, and had eaten and drunk in all its cafés. He knew which shops had the most generous scales, which of the cafés’ cooks were the most generous with the oil, and even where the snacks were likely to be stale. But although he knew all Chinatown’s tricks of the trade, until the moment when he pulled aside the curtain, his knowledge of Chinatown was only skin deep.

The room upstairs from the gambling den was not marked by any hanging lanterns or signs. The men of Chinatown had no need of signs or lanterns. They could grope their way unerringly up its twisty, narrow staircase until they reached the curtain. On paydays and holidays the queue of men waiting in front of the curtain might be so long it trailed right back down to the front entrance. Impatient youngsters banged on the door frame until men emerged with their trousers still unfastened.

“What’s it like?” the waiting men would ask.

“Go and see for yourself” was the invariable answer.

With such a long queue, it was not unusual to bump into someone you Knew. Sometimes brothers met up, or fathers and sons. Whoever it was, you avoided their eye and kept out of the way. If you could not, you greeted them with a “You here too?”

But today was not New Year or any other holiday. It was not even payday. The weather was miserable too; the clouds were so low that if you lifted your head, you could almost touch them. Apart from the pawnbrokers who always did a brisk trade, the whole of Chinatown was almost deserted.

But Kam Shan was there.

When he got to the gambling den, he bought some Pirate brand cigarettes from a hawker. His hand shook as he tore open the packet, and it fell apart so the cigarettes dropped to the ground. He squatted down to pick them up, feeling his face grow hot. To hide his embarrassment from the hawker, he spent an inordinate amount of time retrieving the cigarettes before he stood up again and gruffly asked for a light. He pursed his lips, put a cigarette into his mouth and took a fierce drag on it. He felt as if a knife had plunged itself into his throat and he went into a fit of coughing.

Red-faced, he wiped his runny nose with the sleeve of his jacket, sidled into the doorway and began to stomp up the stairs. The hawker smirked as he watched his retreating figure. He had seen too many men going up those stairs not to know that this was a first-timer.

When Kam Shan pulled open the curtain he discovered the room was divided into two cubicles, each with its own door. He was just wondering which one to go in when the left-hand door crashed open and a swarthy figure tumbled out, clad only in underpants. The man’s jacket and trousers flew out after him and landed at the bottom of the stairs. The man stumbled to his feet and tried to put on his trousers, frantically searching with his foot for the leg hole. Onlookers swarmed around him, sticking as stubbornly as soot on sticky-rice cakes.

A heavily made-up woman came out of the room. Knotting her robe around her, she bawled down the stairs to the man:

“Don’t think I don’t recognize you because you’ve cut your pigtail off. You bring me the money this time tomorrow, not a cent short, or I’ll plaster your name all over the door of the gambling den for everyone to see!”

The man finally got his trousers on and, slinging his jacket over his shoulders, plunged out into the street. The crowd burst out laughing but the woman did not join them. She hawked and spat, and went back into the room, banging the door behind her. Kam Shan knew this was not the door he was supposed to go in. The madam had promised him a young girl who had not been here very long.

Kam Shan pushed open the door on the right. The cubicle’s tiny, wok-sized window had a piece of cloth carelessly tacked over it, and it was as gloomy inside as the landing was on the outside. A lamp in the corner provided a small circle of hazy light. It took Kam Shan a few moments to make out the only furniture: a bed and a stool. Clearly, the bed was for after you took your clothes off, the stool was for when you put them back on again.

A quilt lay coiled across the bed. From where he stood, it looked dull green, woven with a flower design. These were the only signs of colour in the room. At the end of the bed was a bundle of dull grey clothing. The bundle moved—and he realized it was the woman he had just paid to enjoy.

Kam Shan threw down the cigarette and ground it into the floor. He sat down on the edge of the rickety bed, which squealed loudly under his weight, and pulled aside the quilt. It still held a trace of warmth in it and, right in front of his eyes, there was a large stain like the juice from smashed watermelon. It looked so foul that he nearly retched. The quilt was too revolting so he shoved it onto the floor.

“What are you called?” he asked, tight-faced. But his voice betrayed him and even he could hear how green he sounded.

The greyish bundle pulled itself upright but remained silent.

He stood up and lit a match, holding it close. The light gave him courage and he spoke again, more roughly this time.

“Turn round. I asked you a question.”

The body turned towards the light and Kam Shan was surprised to see a pair of eyes so huge they almost ran off the edge of her face. The irises were like glass beads under water, their colour changing gradually in the flickering light from dark brown to dark blue. As Kam Shan raised the match, he saw in her eyes hints of greyish-green.

“Cat Eyes?” exclaimed Kam Shan in astonishment.

The girl’s irises flickered and fogged over, and the green went dark again.

“Just one, OK?”

She had stretched out her hand to beg a cigarette from him. Her fingers were wizened like sun-dried vines and there was a fuzz of fine hair on her wrists. She was so bony that her gown seemed to have nothing inside it, as if it simply hung on a bamboo frame.

She’s still a child, thought Kam Shan.

He got out his packet of cigarettes, pulled one out, lit it and gave it to her. Then he did the same for himself. He turned to look at the girl, who was dragging greedily on the cigarette as if she was half-starved. She took three pulls before puffing out any smoke, holding her breath so long her neck stretched like an egret, and ropes of livid veins stood out in her neck.

“Take it easy. No one’s going to grab it off you,” said Kam Shan.

“I’ve got bad teeth. If I smoke it makes the pain better.” The girl snickered and the sound, like the rustling of a snake in the grass, gave Kam Shan goose pimples.

“You know me, mister?” the girl asked.

She had finished her cigarette in a few puffs and obviously wanted another. Too timid to ask, she just smiled slyly at him.

“I heard them calling you Cat Eyes that day when—” The words stuck in Kam Shan’s throat and he could not finish the sentence.

The first time he had seen her was a couple of months ago. Kam Shan and Loong Am had finished selling all of their eggs in the farmers’ market, and went to Chinatown for tea. They sat down, but almost immediately Loong Am went back downstairs for a piss in the backyard toilet. When he did not come back, Kam Shan went down to look for him. There was a crowd of a dozen or more men hanging around, and a burly fellow in black guarded the entrance to the yard. Kam Shan knew the man—he was a brother of the boy whom his father had hired to do tailoring when he had the laundry—and was admitted when he said he had come to look for Loong Am.

The yard was crowded. In the middle, someone had erected a platform made of two stones and a plank of wood. A girl stood upon the plank. She was a scrawny kid and so undersized that even on her platform she was shorter than the men standing around her. She was dressed in a blue tunic and trousers, edged with a black border. The fabric was rough cotton but clean. The girl stood with her hands tucked into her sleeves, her head hanging so low that her eyes were invisible and all that could be seen was the top of her head. There was a ribbon tied to the top of her braids, which must have been bright red once, but had now gone dark and scruffy looking.

A scrawny man stood next to the girl. He was poking her with his finger and saying: “My elder brother’s child. She’s had a tough time—her dad died as soon as they got here. I can’t afford to keep her. Just give me a bit of cash and you can take her away with you.

“Take a good look then, look at that face. Of course, I’m not comparing her to Imperial ladies of old—I couldn’t do that, could I? But tell me, doesn’t she outshine any opera actress you’ve ever seen? Have you ever seen anything like those eyes? Make her your wife or your concubine and get her to wait on you. You can’t lose.”

He stretched out two claw-like fingers and tipped the girl’s chin up so that finally the face was visible. There was a hiss of astonishment from the onlookers.

She was just an ordinary Cantonese girl, of the sort so often seen in the paddy fields, by the fish ponds, or at her loom, dark-skinned with a broad forehead and high cheekbones. But her eyes were astonishing. They were like huge lakes so full they threatened to overflow their banks, and the irises were an unusual kind of black, overlaid with a faint greyish-green sheen.

“Cat eyes! She’s got cat eyes!” the cry went up.

Scrawny pursed his lips with satisfaction and said: “You can look all over Gold Mountain—Vancouver, Victoria, New Westminster—but guarantee you won’t find another one like this. If you do, you can have this one for free.”

“Is she clean?” asked a man in a short jacket, a bit older than the others.

The man cackled as if someone had poked him in the armpit: “She’s only twelve! What do you think? She hasn’t even been touched by a cockerel, let alone a man!”

There was general laughter. “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you? Why should I believe you?” said Short-Jacket. Scrawny spat a gob of green phlegm: “Come and feel if you don’t believe me. See if she’s got any pubic hair.”

So Short-Jacket went up, undid the girl’s trouser tie and, holding the trousers with one hand, reached into her crotch and had a good feel. The girl tried vainly to twist out of his grip, then shrank away as stiff and small as a wire-frame mannequin.

“Just a few hairs,” reported Short-Jacket, nodding at the onlookers. He extracted his finger and held it up to his nose to sniff. There were gusts of laughter.

“I’ll come and try,” offered someone else. Scrawny’s expression darkened. “You don’t get a free meal every day,” he said. “If you want to come and try, you’ve got to pay … two dollars a go.”

The crowd fell silent.

Short-Jacket laughed. “I’ll give you thirty dollars,” he said. “Thirty dollars and I’ll take her off your hands. My wife’s back home in Hoi Ping— this girl can be my second wife.” Scrawny swore: “Motherfucker! My brother brought her out and paid five hundred dollars in head tax—all borrowed from my savings. I’m not trying to make a profit, but at least don’t leave me out of pocket.”

“Fifty dollars then? How’s that?”

Scrawny said nothing, just tugged on the tie fastened around the girl’s trousers and made as if to lead her away.

“Two hundred and fifty,” another offer came, this time from a man standing right on the edge of the crowd, who had not spoken up till now. He was an imposing-looking figure dressed in a long, silk gown, with a big, square face.

“What about the head tax?”

“Two hundred and fifty, not a cent more.”

As Silk Gown spoke, his face hardened and every crease on it went taut as a wire. Scrawny looked disgruntled and, throwing the trouser tie back at the girl, said: “All right, two-fifty then. It’ll take me a year to pay back what I spent on this worthless bit of baggage.”

Loong Am drove the cart home that day. Kam Shan did not say a word for the whole journey. Those huge catlike eyes pursued him. Every time he shut his eyes, they lay heavy on his lids. They flared like two sparks from a charcoal fire, until his eyes smarted and his head ached.

But by the time he reached home that day, he had forgotten about the whole affair. There was so much misery in this world. He could not take it all to heart. In the last two years, he had seen a lot of things. He had grown a thick skin too, and was no longer seriously distressed by the things he witnessed.

Still, it had never occurred to him that the silk-gowned man, having paid two hundred fifty dollars for Cat Eyes, would not take her as his own concubine. Instead, he had made her many men’s concubine, allowing her to be pawed over and ground down by them. She was still Cat Eyes, but she was just not the same Cat Eyes as the first day he saw her.

“Does your uncle know you’re here?” he asked her now.

Cat Eyes gave a snort of laughter. “What uncle? My uncle hasn’t been born from my granny’s belly yet.”

“So the man who sold you wasn’t your uncle?” Kam Shan asked in surprise. Cat Eyes shook her head. “I don’t even know his name. I went to Canton with my elder sister to see the lights and we bumped into this man. He said he’d take us to the docks to see the foreign boats, then he tricked us and we ended up at sea.”

“What about the head tax? Did he pay that for you?”

“He got me in on someone’s Returning Resident Permit. The photo looked pretty much the same.”

“What about your sister?”

“Someone bought her on the boat.”

Cat Eyes stretched out a hand from under the quilt, covered her mouth and gave a yawn as long as a tangled thread. Her fingertips came away wet from her runny nose and she gave them a shake, so that the drops landed on the already besmeared wall. She did not sound sorrowful as she spoke, in fact she acted as if she was talking about someone else.

“Can you hurry up, mister, so I can sleep a bit? I didn’t sleep at all last night, with the toothache.”

She took off her top and he saw she had nothing on underneath. Her body had been covered up all winter but the traces of the field work she used to do were still visible. Scabs from sunburn had left ridges like rice weevils all over her shoulders and back. The only pallid bits of skin were those two fleshy protuberances on her chest, as small and dried up as buds withered on the branch. Kam Shan pinched them—they felt like two lumps of dough. By comparison, Sundance’s breasts were so ripe that, at the slightest touch, they melted in his hands.

Cat Eyes’ trousers were knotted loosely at the waist and the tie came undone with a slight tug. She had no underclothes on. Her legs were as loose as her trousers tie and at the slightest nudge they parted. Her pubes were swollen like a rotten peach, and a yellow fluid oozed from them. The stench was so overpowering that when it reached Kam Shan’s nostrils, he retched and his mouth filled with the foul aftertaste from his lunchtime shrimp dumplings. Instantly, he felt himself go soft.

“Are you coming?” asked Cat Eyes.

“The hell I am!” Kam Shan swore violently. “You want to infect me so I die of the pox too?”

Cat Eyes fell silent. Kam Shan stood up and felt around for his own trousers. Something was weighing on his feet. He realized that Cat Eyes was clinging on to his trouser cuffs. “Please, mister, don’t go,” she begged. “You paid for half an hour. She can’t kick you out before then. Stay here so I can sleep a bit, please?”

Kam Shan lifted the girl with his foot and dropped her on the bed. Her body was as light as a leaf. “Well, you better get a doctor to look at you,” he said, but before he had finished speaking he heard the sound of snoring. He looked round to see Cat Eyes fast asleep on the bed, her eyes tight shut. Her lashes were as exuberant as grasses growing on the riverbank. A damp curl of hair clung to her forehead. Any coquettishness she may have had dropped from her like grains of sand. She had turned into a child before his eyes. He picked up the quilt and covered her with it. Then he sat down and took out a cigarette, the third he had smoked in his life.

It was dusk by the time Kam Shan went back out into the street. The wind had risen, rattling the branches in the trees so that they made great black silhouettes against the sky. It was dinnertime but Kam Shan was not hungry. Something was choking him up. He wanted to shout out, or vomit, but no sound came. He felt drained. He felt in his pocket for the cigarette packet. It was empty, and he remembered he had left the pack with Cat Eyes.

Mum, if you give me a baby sister this time, please never let her end up like Cat Eyes, he said to himself.

He went into a café and had a bowl of porridge with pickled egg, a cup of tea and a bottle of wine. Soon the liquids were sloshing around inside him and he made trip after trip to the outhouse. When finally he got back into the cart and started the horse for home, his tongue felt like over-risen dough bunging up his mouth. He was relieved that Loong Am had not come with him. He did not feel like talking.

He fell asleep in the cart. But the horse knew the road perfectly well—it had done the trip many times before.

When he was about three miles from home, he was woken by a fierce gust of wind. The wind caught the pile of empty baskets at his feet and they rolled to the ground. He stopped to pick them up and saw a slight movement from an upside-down basket still in the cart. Thinking it was the wind, he reached out for the basket, which reared upwards. He sobered up instantly. He had loaded the baskets himself and there was nothing in any of them. But he knew that there were unmarked graves along this road, where railroad workers had been buried.

He raised the whip and cracked it in the air. It sounded like a thunderbolt in the quiet of the night sky and gave him a little courage. His voice shaking, he shouted: “Who’s there?”

Something stumbled under the basket. As it stood up, two green eyes flared in the moonlight. Cat Eyes. Kam Shan’s heart returned to his chest, and the hairs standing up on the back of his neck settled back into place.

“I saw your cart on the other side of the street. When they went off to dinner, I ran out and hid in it.”

“It’s no use coming with me. I don’t have the money to buy your freedom.”

“You don’t need to. You don’t live in Vancouver so they won’t find you.” Cat Eyes jumped down from the cart and flung herself to her knees before Kam Shan. “Mister, I saw you were a good man the minute you came in,” she implored him. “I can get medicine from a doctor to cure the pox. I’m young and strong and I can do any work anywhere—farm work, fishing, embroidery, weaving.… If you’ve got a wife, I can be your concubine and wait on you and your wife and kids day and night. If you’ve already got a concubine, I’ll be your servant, I swear.”

Kam Shan lifted one foot and pushed her away.

“You can’t come with me. If I let you, my dad would kick me out too. Forget it. I’ll take you back to town.”

Cat Eyes stood up, slowly pulled open her tunic and reached for the tie around her trousers. She pulled it free and the trousers slid down her sticklike legs. She stood on tiptoe, threw the tie over an overhanging branch and knotted it into a noose. Then she said hoarsely: “I’m absolutely not going back. You go. You’ve got your way, I’ve got mine. Forget me and I’ll forget you.”

Kam Shan pulled down the tie and flung it to the ground. “Better a live coward than a dead hero. Every cat and dog knows that, Cat Eyes. Are you stupider than a cat or a dog?”

Cat Eyes picked up the tie, made it fast around her trousers and got back in the cart. Kam Shan was silent but Cat Eyes knew that a tiny crack had opened up. She just had to keep her toe in the door and she could see the light.

For the rest of the journey, Kam Shan left Cat Eyes curled up like a sleeping cat in one of the empty baskets at the back of the cart. He did not say another word. But he kept going over things in his mind, addressing everything to his father. Ah-Fat had spent a few months back in Spur-On Village and his mother was pregnant again. His granny was much better and his dad would be booking passage and returning soon. Kam Shan dreamed up one reason after another to explain where Cat Eyes had come from. At first, each reason seemed to offer a broad and bright route but, as he pursued it, it narrowed down until he came up against a brick wall. Try as he might, he just could not find a reliable way out of his predicament.

By the time he got home, he felt as if his head was going to burst. As he jumped down, something that hung around his neck clinked against the side of the cart. It was a crucifix which Pastor Andrew had given him as a Christmas present. He was at best only half converted to the pastor’s teachings, but he wore the crucifix as a kind of amulet. The clink it made comforted him, like the striking of a match in darkness.

Tomorrow. As soon as I get up tomorrow I’ll go and ask Pastor Andrew. He’ll know what to do, Kam Shan thought.