Gold Mountain Blues Read Online Free PDF Page A

went to the door, grabbed the shoulder pole and thrust it firmly into his father’s hand. His father was still glowering but he put the pole back on his shoulder and walked out, sweat beading his forehead. Ah-Fat, as everyone called his older son, was a shrimp of a nine-year-old, a child whose body had not begun to fill out. He said little but he gazed at the world with piercing eyes. His father was secretly a little afraid of him.
    Shooing away some half-starved dogs, Yuen Cheong padded barefoot along the mud track out of the village. When he reached the river, he went down to the dried-up bed, where he could see that a puddle of water had collected in the crack between the rocks. Scooping up a handful, he washed his face. The little eddies distorted his reflection so that his eyes and nose appeared to jump off his face. He pursed up his thick, heavy lips as if he were going to smile, but then did not. The water ran down his forehead and gradually cooled him. His heart felt lighter. He knew why he had hit out at his wife, and it had nothing to do with her skirt. It was all to do with Red Hair.
    Red Hair was a distant cousin. He got his nickname because, with his high nose and deep-set eyes, he looked a bit like one of those White foreigners who were supposed to have reddish hair on their heads. By now, few people remembered his real name. As children, the pair of them used to catch fish and shrimps in the ponds, grope for loaches in the paddy fields and steal melons from other people’s melon patches. Red Hair was older by a few years, but he was a bit of an oaf. Yuen Cheong was the smarter of the two and bossed Red Hair around. That only changed when, a few years ago, Red Hair married an Au girl in the village who had a cousin in Gold Mountain. Then, somehow, he stumbled onto the boat and off he went too.
    There were lots of stories in the village about Red Hair in Gold Mountain. One went like this: he had gone to some remote mountains to pan for gold. The water he collected in a wooden bucket dried up underthe fierce sun and he found solidified gold dust left. According to another story there was a plague in Gold Mountain a few years back. Red Hair stuffed his mouth with a thick cloth, carried corpses for the yeung fan 3 and got a dollar a corpse. He also used to deliver gruel to the leprosy hospital for three coppers a bowl. People asked his mother whether these stories were true, but she just gave a smile and would not say yes or no. No one really knew what it was that Red Hair did in Gold Mountain, but they did know that he had made a lot of money and sent dollar letters home every month. In fact, every time his mother got one of these letters, she was on cloud nine. No one else cared one way or the other, but Yuen Cheong was furious. He knew Red Hair inside out. He was too stupid even to wipe his own arse properly.
    But Red Hair had become a rich man while Yuen Cheong still slaved away at that half-a-rice-bowl work.
    As Yuen Cheong carried the pork meat to market that day he had no idea of the extraordinary turn his life was going to take. Fate had something completely different in store for the simple, impecunious slaughterman— and his family were to find themselves transported from a life of abject poverty to the heights of riches along with him.
    Yuen Cheong meandered on his way and finally arrived in town—to find all quiet and hardly anyone around. This being a market day, the streets should have been jammed with people so tightly packed that they stepped on each other’s toes. He eventually came upon a couple of hawkers, and discovered that the town had been attacked by bandits the night before. They had swept through the house of one of the richest families like a hurricane, plundering and killing two people. Government troops were now patrolling the town but its inhabitants were too frightened to stir out of doors.
    Yuen Cheong had come all this way and could not turn back now, so he put