The Fortunes Read Online Free PDF

there weren’t even enough women in the state to take in washing.”
    â€œOr anything else,” Little Sister scoffed.
    â€œHong Kong,” Ng sighed, laying his iron down more gently this time, seemingly transfixed by the oily curls of hot air swimming over the stove. “How I used to envy that laundry in my homesickness.”
    â€œBut what about the game?”
    â€œOh.” Ng blinked. “Lost.”
    Afterward he understood that the Frog had only accepted the bet because he was sure he would win, as he duly did with a full house, yet the loss had been the making of Ng. It had cleaned him out, but Philippe had so enjoyed strutting around camp in his pressed and gleaming shirt and telling the story of the bet that Uncle Ng’s services were soon in high demand. He’d set up shop using a couple of long toms, or sluice boxes: “And that’s how I got my start.”
    â€œBut you never found gold again!”
    â€œI did so! All those miners, see here, they’d not washed for months—years, some of them. What did they care with no women for fifty miles? The stink on them.” He wrinkled his nose. “But when I drained that dirty water, why, there was flake caught in the riffles of the sluice like carp in a paddy field, gold dust from out the cuffs and pockets and seams of all those reeking clothes! How do you think I bought my own business? I gathered up all those pinches and drifts of color until those boys were
picked clean
!” He delivered the pun in English with a toothy grimace, and sat back teasing the hair from his mole as if to confirm his luck. But he must have seen the disappointment in Ling’s face.
    â€œGold is gold, however you make it,” he said, holding up a coin and clenching it between his teeth as if it were a clinker he’d just plucked from a pan. “Man swills it out of the mud, he gets dirty, gives you some to wash his clothes.”
    â€œAnd then you gamble it on ‘white pigeon ticket,’” Little Sister added tartly.
    â€œBut he makes so much
more
money if he finds gold,” Ling insisted, eyes on the coin. He had caught his first glimpse of gold by then, flashing from the corner of a sailor’s grin on the voyage out like a hook in a fish’s lip.
So that was gold,
he’d thought as the ship plowed through the waves: a sharp tug in the flesh, hauling you toward land. But this was the first gold coin he’d seen, and he felt a pang of lust. Ng was turning it in his puckered fingers, balancing the glint between his thumb and forefinger. They called it a yellow eagle in Chinese, and Ling could see the wings of the embossed bird beating gently as the light slid back and forth.
    Then Ng’s hand dropped, his long sleeve covering it. “One in ten finds gold, all ten get dirty.”
    Ling nodded, but he felt cheated somehow.
    And yet he liked that phrase
See the elephant.
Felt an affinity for the beast.
    His mother had left him nothing excepting a child’s cap. He’d seen children, children rich with parents, wearing them at New Year’s, caps sewn with eyes and ears, teeth and tongues, to look like tigers or lions, dragons, or pigs or rabbits.
    â€œYou had one of those,” Aunty Bao had told him once. “Only thing you came with. Shape of an elephant.”
    â€œWhat happened to it?” he asked.
    â€œWhat?” She’d already forgotten him. “Pah! Who knows?”
    He might have felt robbed of his birthright, but in fact he felt buoyed up. It didn’t matter that it was gone, that he’d never seen it. He already knew he had nothing. But that his mother had given him something once, imagined him wearing it, felt like a gift (it never occurred to him that it might have come from his father). He didn’t know if she’d bought it or received it as an offering, but either way, he resolved, the elephant must have meant something to her, not merely to ward