Gold Mountain Blues (10 page)

There was consternation among the watching crowds. The consul, a man of mature years and experience, threw himself on his knees in front of the burners and cried loudly: “Great Buddha, our countrymen have died in foreign parts. They suffered numerous injustices, yet today, finally, they can
begin the journey home. There they will pay their respects to their ancestors, and will be reunited with their earthly sons and daughters. We beg you to bless them with a fair wind and a smooth sailing. When one spirit is safely home, ten thousand spirits will rejoice.” As he finished speaking and raised his head, the ash plume dispersed and the wind dropped.

In front of the mortuary, eight horses stood harnessed to four open carriages covered in white mourning drapes. The order was given and the horses slowly set off towards the docks, heavily laden with several hundred wooden caskets. As the sound of the horses' hooves gradually faded into the distance, and nothing remained but a faint puff of dust, some of the spectators could be seen wiping their eyes with their sleeves.

“He bartered some tea for a pair of boots from the Redskins, and gave them short measures. The Redskins beat him up,” Red Hair told Ah-Fat on the way home.

“Who?” asked Ah-Fat.

“Ah-Sing's cousin.”

Years seven to thirteen of the reign of Guangxu (1881–1887) Province of British Columbia, Canada

This afternoon, five hundred Chinese navvies from Victoria and New Westminster boarded a steamship bound for Port Moody. They are part of the work force which will build the Pacific Railroad. After ten years of intense negotiations within the Canadian Federal Government, work can now begin on the railroad project. In order to cut costs to the minimum, Chief Engineer Andrew Onderdonk has overseen the recruitment of over five thousand navvies from Canton and California. Several thousand more will arrive over the next few months. These figures do not include a significant number of Chinese already living in Victoria who have joined the work teams.

The Pacific Railroad will extend through the precipitous Rocky Mountains
of the Fraser Valley region. Here the rocks are of solid granite and all the railroad foundations will have to be hacked out by hand.
Between the towns of Yale and Lytton alone, a mere seventeen miles, it will be necessary to hack out thirteen tunnels. In one mile-and-a-half section, four tunnels will be built in quick succession. The coolies will undertake the most dangerous work, pitting human flesh against hard rock.

Within these construction teams, those who blast the rock earn the highest wages, estimated to be four dollars a day. Metal-grinders earn three dollars fifty a day, bridge-building carpenters earn three dollars a day and brick-layers, two dollars fifty to three dollars a day. Wood cutters earn two dollars a day. The least skilled of the workers earn one dollar seventy five per day. Although some among them are hefty and strong, most of the workers are quite diminutive. Some appear like pre-pubescent boys, though all workers are required to show documentation stating they are at least eighteen years of age. When the navvies arrive on site, they are divided into groups of thirty men, each headed by a foreman appointed by the railroad company. Each work group includes a cook and a record keeper.

The record-keeper logs the hours of work completed and liaises between the workers and the foreman. Most of the Chinese workers understand almost no English, and the authorities are concerned about whether they can properly understand work instructions. Another safety concern is the peculiar long pigtails they wear. A representative from the railroad company explained that the Chinese regard their pigtails as sacred because they are bestowed by the Emperor and their parents. Indeed, to the Chinese, they are more important than life itself. According to the English Constitution, which enshrines the protection of basic human rights, no one can force a Chinese to cut off his absurd pigtail. And so thousands will set out on this unknown road with their pigtails and their bags of rice.

The British Columbian
, New Westminster, 7 April 1881

They lived in rudimentary tents, each made of seven tree branches and covered by two tarpaulins. The trees used were either fir or silver birch. These were felled and the branches stripped off, leaving only the trunk. They were erected in two rows of three on each side, interlocking at the
top, and along the three forks was laid the seventh, thicker trunk, forming the roof pole. Over this went the tarpaulins and these were sewn together with the coarse thread used for making fishing nets, by means of a needle made from an animal bone. All of this was learned from the Redskins.

Fires were kept burning all night on either side of the tent; anyone who got up for a piss in the night would add a bit more firewood to them. At daybreak, when the cook got up to make breakfast, he only needed to rake the remaining fire and add some sticks and he could make their porridge. As soon as the sleepers in the tent opened their eyes, the porridge would be ready. Making fires in the mountains served several purposes: they kept the men warm, gave light, cooked food and gave them courage. Before these men arrived, the mountains were the domain of wild beasts.

The tents were simple because the men struck camp and moved on every couple of weeks. As the building of the railroad proceeded the men moved with it, keeping pace with the construction. Striking camp meant rolling up the tents and sleeping mats, loading the rice sacks and water buckets onto the pack horses and then walking to the next camp. They did not take the branches with them. One thing the mountains had in plenty was trees, so they could fell them as they needed. Every time they struck camp, Ah-Fat sewed a cross on the corner of one of the tarpaulins. There were six crosses now.

Ah-Fat was awakened by the screeching of Red Hair's fiddle, which seemed to be sawing right into his skull. He kicked away the leg which Ah-Lam, a fellow navvy in his team, had flung across him in his sleep, crawled out of the tent and chucked a stone at Red Hair. The fiddle screeched to a halt and Red Hair swore: “That's a bridal tune. If you stop me playing, you'll never get yourself a bride, ever!”

It had rained in the night and leaked into the tent, wetting Ah-Fat's trouser bottoms. As he wrung them dry, the sun burst through. The sunlight was cut into fine-ribboned rays by the dense stands of trees, which cast damp shadows underfoot. Overnight a layer of white mushrooms had sprung up among the trees, some as small as buttons, others as big as plates. On the top of one mushroom perched a spotted squirrel, quite a young one, only a few inches long. It had a thin covering of fur and beady black eyes. Ah-Fat picked up a stick to tease it and the little creature was not
afraid, it just whiffled its nose and sniffed. Ah-Fat pulled up his jacket and relieved himself with a long piss in the direction of the mushroom. Startled, the squirrel raised its tail in the air and scurried away, rustling through the undergrowth. Ah-Fat could not help laughing out loud.

Ginger woke up too, stretched lazily and emerged from behind a tree, cocking his hind leg and pissing against the tree trunk. Then he raked the ground with his claws, filling the forest with a dense musky odour.

Ginger was a stray dog that had attached himself to them when they got off the boat at Port Moody. They had tried to shake him off several times but he stuck with them. Then someone said a dog would give them courage in the mountains, and they kept him.

After she pissed, Ginger wagged his tail and, placing his wet paws firmly against Ah-Fat's leg, licked him till the warm drool ran all over his hand. Ginger was a wolf-dog cross and stood so tall that if he stretched, he could almost reach Ah-Fat's shoulder. Ah-Fat had to shove the dog away a few times before he finally got rid of him.

He asked the cook what was for breakfast. “Boiled potatoes, rice porridge and salt fish.”

“It's potatoes every day,” complained Ah-Fat, “potatoes every meal. We piss potatoes … can't we have something different?” “You don't know how lucky you are,” said the cook. “If we ever get snowed in, there won't be a fucking crumb to eat.” “If there's no fucking crumb to eat, then at least there won't be potatoes,” said Ah-Fat. The cook's expression tightened: “Potatoes are all the supply team ever bring into the mountains. Even if you killed me off, you wouldn't get anything different to eat.”

When they had finished breakfast, the record-keeper relayed the foreman's instructions: “You're breaking up stones all day today.” The stones which had been blasted out the previous two days all had to be carried up the mountainside basket by basket and tipped down into the canyon. The thirty-strong team would be divided into groups of ten, one to do the stone-breaking, another to load the baskets and the third to carry them up the mountain. Red Hair and Ah-Fat were stone-breakers; Ah-Lam was in the carrying team. “Mind your step,” said Red Hair to him as he set off. “If you miss your footing, you'll be over that damned cliff quicker than
an eagle can squawk.” “I know my way well enough,” said Ah-Lam. “Don't go wishing bad luck on me.”

The stone-breakers had to break the stones small enough to fit into the baskets. Some of the stones could be broken up just using a sledgehammer but the bigger ones had to be split with a rock drill first, and then each piece had to be broken into smaller pieces. Red Hair and Ah-Fat worked as a team then: the boy held the drill and the older man swung the sledgehammer. The constant jarring soon made the skin between Ah-Fat's thumb and forefinger crack and bleed. He had to rip the lining of his cotton jacket into pieces and make a bandage. The blood leaked through and formed a hard scab. He soaked his bandage in water every evening when they got back to camp, then dried it over the bonfire, ready for work again the next day. The cracks would begin to heal overnight, only to split again the next day. Gradually the cracks got bigger and would not heal over. Rock dust got in and they began to look like dirty black gullies.

Red Hair told Ah-Fat to go and buy a pair of deerskin gloves with good thick lining of animal pelt inside them, from the Redskins. When Ah-Fat heard they cost three dollars a pair, he refused. Red Hair sighed: “That's two whole days' wages if you don't spend a cent on food or drink, or shell out on a woman,” he said. “Those thieving motherfuckers have hiked the price sky-high.”

Ah-Fat said nothing but he suddenly realized that he was not capable of being a carpenter, a bricklayer or a grinder. Back home, all he could do was farm work (and he had never done more than muddle along at that). If he worked himself to the bone all day breaking and carrying stones, the most he could earn was one dollar and seventy-five cents a day. But as soon as work started on the railroad, prices shot up and all his wages went on daily necessities. At this rate, how long would it take him to save up enough to buy fields and property? His mother might not last that long.

The break that Ah-Fat was hoping for came just five days later.

The group had set up camp in a new spot, but after two whole days, there was still a blank next to their names in the record-keeper's work log. Several attempts to blast the rocks had failed, so none of the follow-up work could proceed.

The proper name for the explosive they used was nitroglycerine, but no one ever called it that. They just called it Yellow Water. When put into bottles, it looked about as harmless and innocent as lemonade, pretty even. No one could have imagined it capable of razing mountaintops. It was hotheaded stuff too, and had to be handled with the greatest care. If, by some mishap, a drop escaped and landed on hard rock, and it happened to be a hot day, the whole lot would go up in smoke in the blink of an eye.

The tunnel to be built was through a cliff face, and could only be reached by crawling across loose scree. The first man to go up was handpicked by the foreman because he had the most blasting experience. As he crossed the last bit of scree, he trod upon an overhanging rock, lost his footing and fell. There was a deafening, muffled roar—not of detonated explosives but of cascading rock which rolled with him down the mountain. Man and Yellow Water bottle alike hit the surface of the water, floated for a moment, then disappeared from sight.

The second navvy got up the steep slope without incident, but near the entrance to the tunnel twisted his ankle on a loose stone. All that could be seen was his blue cotton jacket fluttering in mid-air like a sparrow hawk with a broken wing, and then the whole cliff face shook. When the dust cleared, the men's mouths opened and shut ludicrously, but no sound came out. They had been deafened by the blast.

The
yeung fan
foreman kicked angrily at a pile of loose stones by his foot. There was no need for an interpreter; the navvies knew he was swearing. But there were no more takers, no third man ready to give up his life on the mountainside.

Not that day.

Not the day after, either.

On the third day, the men awoke to find they had an extra egg with their breakfast. They gathered together afterwards, to find the foreman smoking gloomily. He sat on a low rock and the men formed a circle around him. The foreman smoked on and on, lighting the next cigarette from the butt of the one before. The pile of half-finished cigarette ends grew around him. The men were surprised to see that their young foreman's hair was thinning on top—and he suddenly seemed vulnerable to them. This foreman was their boss, but there were still others above him. He had
to answer to the foremen's foreman. Progress had been nil the first day, nil the second day. If there was still no progress today, then he would have to figure out a way to complete four days' work by end of day tomorrow. The men gradually began to feel that they did not want to be in his shoes.