Peter Davies - The Fortunes

The glimpse of her bathing, repeated most mornings, made him feel he knew something of her, something secret — he still watched, though he looked away whenever she gave Ng her earnings, handing them over brusquely as if she were paying for something — and it made him tender toward her, even as she continued to be surly with him, surlier, if anything, in response to his efforts at friendship. Ng didn’t allow her out — not safe for females on the streets, he claimed — and Ling figured she envied him his freedom. Not that she could have gone far on her bound feet. He tried to bring her small gifts, mooncakes or the sour plums she favored, and citrus, which he plucked from the trees. Oranges she placed on the little kitchen shrine, but lemons she especially prized (only later did he grasp that she used slices of them as a contraceptive; he could never eat lemon chicken again). In the evening, bent into the steam of a mutton broth, their faces flushed, or gnawing on fried chicken feet, he told her stories of the operas he saw and dreamed of taking her to, until she roused herself reluctantly and went in to her work.

He ironed at night, when it was cooler — she’d deemed him tolerably skilled after a few days, and he’d straightened with pride until he realized there’d be no more call for her instruction — working until the ache in his shoulders seeped into his soles. But when he still couldn’t sleep he sat up sometimes trying to fashion a kite by candlelight from the brown paper they wrapped the clean laundry in. It tore too easily, or his hands, so accustomed now to the heavy iron, were too clumsy for the delicate work. But then he hit on the idea of fitting a light frame inside an unclaimed shirt, starched for stiffness.

Little Sister watched him launch it one morning from the plank jetty behind the laundry, snorting at his efforts. But when he finally got it aloft, the breeze off the slough catching it, he was pleased to see her head tilt up to the light, her long pale neck exposed.

“Ah, the Chinese flag,” she mocked, but when he teased the line to make the kite dip, a perilous maneuver, and it almost plunged to the water, he heard her cry out. He arrested the swoop with a sharp tug and was rewarded by her relieved laugh.

He waited until it climbed high enough for the wind to fill it again, the kite pulling on the line like a fish.

“Here,” he called, and held out the reel of thread to her.

She came forward — hesitantly, he saw from the corner of his eye. They both watched the kite, the shirt dancing as if a ghost possessed it, arms streaming in the wind, and he felt her hand groping for his, taking the reel.

He’d run a stick through the hole in the center of the bobbin and she let the spool spin free, the wind taking the kite higher and higher. It shone so brightly in the sunlight he had to squint to follow it. Ling wondered if Uncle Ng, wherever he was in the city streets, staggering back from a night of gaming, might see it and guess where it came from. He imagined himself wearing the shirt, gazing down on the city from above. Further along the bank, a distant figure, no more than a shimmering silhouette against the dazzle of the water, practiced tai chi, oblivious.

And then she gave a little sigh and Ling saw that the thread had run out and snapped, the loose end swirling up into the air like a thin skein of incense. Far above, the shirt, carried away on the breeze, dwindled, its empty arms flailing against the sky.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but when he tore his eyes from the kite and looked at her she was trembling with excitement, her face alight. “Where will it fly?” she breathed, but all he could think was that it would eventually flutter into the dirt.

He lingered, reluctant to draw the morning’s water and head back into the dank fug of the laundry.

“Why do you stay?” he asked abruptly.

She shrugged. “Even if I could run, even if he didn’t send a hatchet man after me? All Chinese girls on Gold Mountain are whores. There’s nowhere to go.” She glanced at him. He was watching the turbid water lick the pilings of the pier. “The question is why you stay.”

“I’m not,” he assured her. “I’m going to find gold. As soon as I’ve made my stake.”

She made a face.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just be sure you do.”

“I will!”

“Good!”

She was still gazing intently after the kite, a hand shielding her eyes from the glare off the slough, and he stayed with her, staring, even though he could no longer pick it out against the sky.

When he answered her hungry questions about the world beyond the laundry, he told her of the city as if it were a great adventure, but in reality the streets alternately scared and enraged him. Uncle Ng had been only too glad, he noticed, to let him take over the delivery route, sending him out by himself within a few days. “You have good English,” Ng noted, which was true at least relatively: Ling was always adding to his modest (if also profane) vocabulary picked up around the flower boat’s customers, whereas Uncle Ng’s English was so poor that he still kept a sign on the counter with different-sized circles carved into it (half cent, cent, three cents, half dime, dime, quarter, half dollar), which he pointed to with the stem of his pipe to tell his customers how much they owed him. “Better you go,” the old man concluded. Ling wasn’t so sure; his English seemed good to him only for understanding the epithets hurled at him by insolent boys— Chink, heathen, Celestial, slant-eyed son of a bitch, pigtailed bastard. At least he couldn’t understand the barks of the stray dogs that chased him down the streets, snapping at his queue or the sacks of laundry hanging from his pole.

It bothered him too that he must step down off the boardwalk and into the muddy street whenever he saw a ghost coming toward him. The same street that they spat tobacco in, that their horses and mules pissed and shat in. His “thousand-layer” shoes grew spongy and clotted. He dodged buggy drivers’ whips, not knowing if their cries of “Go on!” were meant for him or their animals. He wanted to explain that he was carrying ghost laundry, he was trying to keep it clean for them. He wanted to say that his father was a ghost. But he held his tongue — at least until he got back to the laundry.

“More dirt mountain than gold mountain,” he grumbled one night as he sorted the rancid washing into piles. He knew he needed the job, at least until he had saved the price of a pick and a pan, but that might take months on his paltry wage, and his patience was wearing thin. The closest he’d come to the diggings so far was the occasional miner who paid for his laundry with a pinch of dust.

“What you think prospecting is?” Ng chuckled as he ironed. He didn’t trust anyone else with the finest linens and lace. “Ankle-deep in a cold stream, bent over like a paddy farmer, washing more dirt. At least we use warm water!” He had won at “heaven-and-nine” the night before and was still in an expansive mood.

Ng had “seen the elephant,” as the old-timers liked to say, meaning he’d seen it all, everything the mother lode had to offer. He’d been an original forty-niner, made a small fortune at placer mining near Youbet and (appropriately enough) lost it at fan-tan, made another and learned his lesson only so far as to lose it at poker (the whites had barred his entry to the saloon at first, “But once I had some gold about me they became more sociable”). By then the easy pickings were played out and the Chinese were being driven out, pushed off claims at gunpoint or by ruinous foreign miner taxes, likewise often collected at gunpoint. Ng had seen one dead Chinaman shot in the back, “the end of his queue dipped in blood like a brush in ink.” He frowned at the recollection, his middle eye beady with rage. Others, Ling had heard, had been lynched with their own queues.