2004
Hoi Ping, Guangdong Province
A sheet of plastic. A basket of fruit. A trowel. A bunch of incense sticks.
“Shall we dig the hole?” Mr. Auyung asked Amy.
“Wait a moment. I can’t talk to the spirit of my great-grandmother through this.”
Amy removed the plastic sheet and knelt on the ground. It was still dewy, and the dampness seeped through her trousers to her knees.
Amy bowed low.
The tombstone had only been erected yesterday. It was of plain white stone with the following names carved on it:
Fong Tak Fat (1863–1945)
Kwan Suk Yin (1877–1952)
Fong Kam Sau (1913–1952)
Fong Yiu Kei (1930–1939)
Tse Wai Kwok (1934–1941)
Tse Wai Heung (1937–1952)
Erected in loving memory by their Canadian descendants, 2004
The burial ground was on top of a hill and the narrow road wound up to it through dense clumps of bamboo. The wind had scattered white flowers under their feet, probably from graves which had been swept and tidied at the Festival of Qing Ming only a month ago. The site was a hillock on which clusters of graves jostled higgledy-piggledy for space. “Are all these Gold Mountain families?” Amy asked. “All the families in these villages have relatives overseas,” Mr. Auyung said, “so I suppose you could say they’re all Gold Mountain families.”
Mr. Auyung had helped Amy choose the gravestone and the inscription. In a red cloth bag, she had the remains of Fong Tak Fat: some nail clippings wrapped in silk. Kam Shan had cut them from Ah-Fat’s hand when his body lay in its coffin before burial. Kam Shan had passed the silk wrapping and its contents to Yin Ling and she had taken it with her to each of the houses where she lived. Just before Amy left for China, Yin Ling gave it to her daughter.
Amy took the trowel and dug a small hole at the foot of the tombstone. The soil was a strange colour, it seemed to Amy, and a little shiver ran over her. She put the cloth bag into the hole, covered it with earth and firmed it down. With the bag she was burying a lifetime of secrets, now to be swallowed up by the silent earth.
Mr. Auyung sighed: “A Gold Mountain promise that in the end could not be kept. What a pity.”
“I don’t see it like that. There are some promises which are never kept but still mean more than kept ones. They’re more….”
She struggled to find the right adjective in Chinese, and finally gave up and said: “…profound.”
She used the English word, but Mr. Auyung understood anyway.
“There’s still a big gap in the Fong family history which I need to fill. You’re the only descendant of the fourth generation and I still know very little about your adult life. Can you fill me in on that?” Mr. Auyung asked.
“Ever the investigator!” said Amy with a smile. “Actually, Fong family history has become less colourful with every generation, and when it comes to mine, it is disgustingly conventional. It’s simply the story of the daughter of a Chinese single mother who was always looked down on by white people, but whose one desire was to drag her daughter out of the mud and give her a head start in the world. That mother worked in menial jobs for her whole life and spent every last cent of her earnings trying to turn her daughter into an upper-class white girl. She had lessons in piano, art and ballet, everything an upper-class child was supposed to learn. Then she was sent to a private Catholic school. Her mother wanted her to become doctor or a lawyer or an accountant. She never imagined her daughter would sneak off and study sociology at Berkeley, using the school fees her mother had sweated blood to save up, because she had absolutely no interest in anything else.
“The path that girl took through life was the precise opposite of what her mother expected. Instead of studying hard, she joined every political movement going and was present at every single demonstration. Instead of finding herself a nice man to marry—he had to be white, of course—she got involved with one useless lover after another. In an odd twist of fate, instead of leaving every vestige of her Chinese inheritance behind her, she ended up studying Chinese at university. And to cap it all, a Chinese man has just inveigled her into acknowledging to the whole world that she half Chinese.”
Mr. Auyung could not help smiling. “I’ve only tapped into an innate positive feeling that you already had.”
“Oh, my story isn’t finished yet,” said Amy, and went on: “At least in one respect, this girl—or rather, this woman—has finally fulfilled her mother’s ambitions by becoming a famous professor at a famous college.”
“Thank you,” said Mr. Auyung. “Now the Fong family story is finally complete.”
“Huh! Your story may be complete, but mine isn’t. Who are you anyway? Why do you know more about my family than I do?”
“I knew this question would come up sooner or later. It’s simple, really. My great-grandfather and my grandfather happened to teach your great-grandfather and great-uncle and great-aunt. But that’s not really the reason why I got interested. Thirty years ago, a young man called Auyung Wan On read the diary left by his grandfather, the revolutionary martyr Auyung Yuk Shan. As he did so, he came across stories of your great-grandfather, Fong Tak Fat’s family. In the mid-seventies there was a power vacuum in local politics and, on the pretext of researching a distant relative from Spur-On Village, he broke into the diulau when no one was looking, and began to pry into its secrets. He might have been doing what fashionable scholars would later call sociological research, but at the time, of course, he was just an ignorant youth and this was one of many crazy things he did to satisfy his curiosity.
“Of course, the tracks he left behind him just confirmed the villagers in their belief that the diulau was haunted.”
Mr. Auyung gave Amy a brown envelope and said: “Burn this in their honour.” Amy took out a stack of “spirit money” and, borrowing Mr. Auyung’s lighter, set it ablaze. She watched the paper burn down to a little heap and then turn into a few black charred scraps which scattered in the wind. There were more sheets of paper in the envelope which, instead of denominations, had scribbled titles such as: “Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting,” “A Copybook of Regular Calligraphy,” “300 Poems from the Tang Dynasty,” and “Conservatory of Music.”
“Your great-grandmother was a literate woman. She kept her brain working all her life,” said Mr. Auyung.
Bit by bit, Amy consigned everything in the envelope to the flames. The last thing she took out was a paper boat, folded completely flat. When she pulled it open, it was bigger than she expected. It had been made with great care, complete with decks, sails and rigging, and a lively dragon’s eye painted on the prow.
“That was the sort of boat the emigrants to Gold Mountain sailed in. The locals called them Big-Eyed Roosters.”
Amy held the boat in the palm of her hand and examined it closely before placing it on the fire at the foot of the tombstone. It was made of cardboard and burned slowly. The sails had been coated with layers of glue and made a crackling noise when the flames licked them. The boat burned to ash and only the sails were left, winking in the embers.
“Now you can board the boat for Gold Mountain at last, Greatgrandmother, and go and see Great-grandfather,” Amy murmured.
Something tickled her face. She brushed it away with the back of her hand and discovered it was a tear.
They went down the hill and Mr. Auyung told the driver to take Amy back to the hotel so she could get ready before the farewell dinner. Amy’s cell phone bleeped. It was a text message. She read it and suppressed smile. Then she looked serious. “I’m afraid I can’t attend the banquet,” she said. Mr. Auyung was startled. “But it’s all been arranged!” he protested. “Number one,” she continued, “I’m not leaving tomorrow, so you don’t need to say goodbye. Number two, if I go to the banquet, I’ll have to sign over the diulau, as you told me yourself. I’ve changed my mind. I’m not signing it over for the moment.”
Mr. Auyung stared blankly at Amy. “What on earth.…” he stammered.
“It puts you in a predicament, doesn’t it?” said Amy. “You’ll have some explaining to do to your bosses. All that time and energy wasted on me.… So I’ll tell you straight up why: I’m not signing right now because I want to use the diulau for a wedding, while it still belongs to the Fong family.”
“Whose?” asked Mr. Auyung in surprise.
“Mine,” said Amy. “There’s only one thing I want to ask of you. Will you be my witness?” Amy continued.
“Er … when?” Mr. Auyung was finding it hard to absorb all this new information.
“Mark’s plane has taken off. He’ll be here tomorrow about midday.”
“Good heavens! You haven’t given me much time to get things ready!”
Amy burst out laughing.
“That’s your problem. I’m leaving all that to you.”