The Fortunes (9 page)

“Look rich.” Ng nodded. “Look proud.”

“Why not? Should I be proud to be poor?”

Ng shook his head like a dog. “Money doesn't make you proud. They pay you
for
your pride, I think.” He took a long wet draw on his pipe. “Only, what if you don't have enough pride? Eh? What if you sell it all and are still not rich? What then?”

He scattered a handful of salt on the counter before him, scraped an iron back and forth across it to clean the metal.

“Or perhaps you're too proud to be Chinese,” he murmured. “So proud you need to be white.”

Ling had been thinking of doing the old man a favor, bringing him some business. Now that Crocker had dressed him, he liked to have Ling with him, in attendance, which meant Ling had less time for work around the home. A new cook had already been hired and the household laundry was to be sent out once more. But now he saw that he couldn't come back here again, that he'd only thought of using the laundry as an excuse to impress Ng.

“And to think,” the old man sneered, “you were nothing but a pair of empty hands when you came.”

“She told me what you did,” Ling hissed.

“So?” Ng jerked his bony shoulders. “This is normal for poor girls. How else you think they live? It could be worse.”

Ling tried to ignore the echo of Little Sister. “How worse?”

Ng's eyes clouded. “You know,
I
had a little sister. Not now, but once. Baby sister. In the time of big famine in Guangdong, before you were born. Lucky boy. No rice, no taro, no meat. People dying in the streets. With my own eyes, I've seen that. I and my brothers would have died for sure.”

“What are you saying?” Ling frowned. “Are you saying you . . . ? Your own
sister
?”

“
No!
Who could do that?” Ng hung his head. “But my baba, he knew another family, also starving, also with a baby. And so the families . . . helped each other.”

“But that's—”

“
What?
” Ng roared. “Worse than being whore? Yes, I think so. I think so very much.”

Ling found his eyes drawn reluctantly to a skinny string of Chinese sausages, even more desiccated than the old man, hanging from the rafters like a shorn queue.

“I don't believe it,” he managed, looking away.

“You think no one could be so desperate? Yet all around you, thousands of Chinese come so far from home to risk everything. To get rich, you think, for gold? No! For
food,
for life. It's not hungry spirits you should pray for, it's the hungry living.”

“But no father would do that!”

“What do
you
know of fathers? He did it so the family would
live.
”

“Wasn't she family too?” Ling began, but Ng was shouting over him: “If you'd ever had a family, you'd understand.”

They were the old man's last words to him, spoken like a curse, and flecked with so much spit that Ling had backed away, expecting the iron to follow. Only after he left did he realize the lucky hair from Ng's mole was neither plastered to his brow nor waving silkily in the air before him, but plucked or fallen out. Little Sister, Ling remembered, had always promised to snip the loose thread on that button one day.

Months later—Uncle Ng dead of an overdose or debts, it wasn't clear which, and the laundry under new management (a fellow called Two Nose on account of a fleshy mole on one nostril, who seemed to have converted the lean-to into an opium den)—he heard a rumor that Little Sister was dead: by her own hand, a chopstick thrust through her ear, someone said; in childbirth another. He refused to believe it, and yet his eyes stung as if from the lye of the laundry.

In his bed that night he dreamt of a secret hoard of coins, hundreds and thousands of bits, a veritable treasure. He could see them—gold, of course, with an elephant embossed on one side—but not grasp one. All those lost coins! He woke with his hands balled so tightly his palms bled.

He'd not been back to Chinatown since, but a few months later he'd spied a headline in the newspaper he was ironing for Crocker: “The Chinese Question.” As far as he could make out, it was an announcement for a meeting. He knew the place from his delivery rounds—a stockyard near the river. Something compelled him to go. He didn't know the question and yet it felt asked of him personally. He might even speak, he imagined, show himself as an example, doffing his hat and bowing with a flourish. If there was a Chinese question, was he not perhaps the embodied answer?

His Western clothes, he concluded later, must have saved him, for by the time he understood what kind of a meeting he'd joined, he'd already insinuated himself far into the crowd, too far to exit swiftly. Or rather the crowd had congealed around him; when he'd arrived it had seemed looser, knots of Irish here, English there, French by their accents to one side, Deutsch by their build to another. There were no other Chinese, and he felt a flash of irritation that none had bothered to appear, vindicated that he had. Of course, he should have known by their absence, but he lingered in the vicinity of some Portugeezers (he recognized their language from the flower boat with a pang of nostalgia—sailors who'd jumped ship and turned miners, he guessed), and gradually the spaces between the groups had filled, the knots of men tautening, until leaving would have required him to draw attention, elbowing his way out of the mass, until finally the crowd closed tight as the speaker—a liverish redhead in a fustian jacket—climbed up onto a splintery buckboard and called out over the corral in his broad brogue.

“They're a plague on us, a
blight
indeed! For have they not blighted our prospects, those of my Fenian brothers and our brave sisters of Erin? They take our jobs on the iron road and their jobs at the hob and hearth.” An answering buzz rose from the corral, along with the dusty stench of aged manure. “And how is it natural that they can do both a man's
and
a woman's work? What species of creature are they to upend the order of things? Cipher that if ye can. They work harder than us, some say. Oh, really? Who thinks they're stronger 'an me?” He had shrugged his jacket off and pushed up his sleeves as he warmed to his theme. Now he flexed his arm mightily until the rolled cuff seemed to tighten on it like a tourniquet and the pale flesh swelled red. “So why are they hired? Because they work for
less
—less pay, less food, less dignity. And what does that make 'em? Less
men!
Lesser to be sure, but heed me, also
more
—in their poised and waiting
millions,
so many more. And I tell ye”—he jabbed a stubby finger at the crowd—“they won't stop with me and mine. Nay! They'll come for
your
work—Dutchman, Swede, native-born, yea, even you English—and your pay afore long. Can ye doubt it? Can ye
afford
it?” And the crowd bayed as one, some throwing their hats in the air so it seemed as if the roar had blown them off. To Ling it seemed the mass of men had come to a rolling boil.

“Exclusion!” the speaker was bawling, as if into a gale. “Exclusion by act of law, or
expulsion
by strength of arms!”

Ling felt himself crushed in the fist of the throng, his breath coming in shallow pants. He wormed a hand up between himself and his neighbor to keep his hat tugged tight to his head—to lose one would be to lose the other, he feared. He kept being thrust into the back of the sour-smelling fellow before him, his collar so wilted and greasy it seemed embroidered with filth. A man, he thought pityingly, who couldn't even afford laundry—another to his left, one more to his right, men whose shirts he itched to boil—and then it came to him that they were boycotting the laundries. Only when the crowd dispersed, bumping and jostling him as they drained down the alleys toward the slough to smash windows and set fires, did he feel he could breathe again, as if he'd been held underwater. From behind, watching them go, all he could make out was the pallid skin of their napes in the gloaming, cleaner than their grimy linens.

8.

And all that was two years ago. Two years and eighty miles of track, Ling thought as the train pressed forward, engine thudding like a heart, as if into the future. By now ten thousand Chinese were working on Crocker's “Celestial Railroad,” as the papers were calling it. And they owed it all to him (even if now, in line behind other Chinese, he'd learned to wait in silence as they struggled with the language, only making sure, when it was his turn, to speak as distinctly as possible).

It was as if, like the Monkey King, he'd plucked the very hairs from his head and created an army. Though he still sometimes imagined his queue attached, reached back instinctively to sweep it aside when he sat, waited for it to bump his back when he halted.

But now they were striking. Crocker had told him the news two days earlier, his face wrung tight with consternation. “Chinese don't strike; they
break
strikes.” He stared at Ling, as if expecting him to contradict the provoking telegram in his fist, but Ling kept his eyes down. It came to him that he was the only Chinese Crocker knew, to the extent that he knew him at all. All those thousands were judged by his standard—not just the strength of his back but his loyalty. For he was loyal to Crocker. Not just because Crocker was his employer, his route to riches and a comfortable life, but out of pride. (He
was
proud; Ng had been right.) He had been proud that Crocker had backed him against his partners that day in the yard. That was why he held fast as they stacked him higher and higher with firewood. He'd been proud to prove himself better than the ghosts' opinions, to prove the Chinese better than they thought. Proud that they should all be measured by his standard. Except now, before Crocker's affronted gaze, the measure was reversed—
he
was being judged according to
their
worth.

He felt a momentary instinct to protect Crocker, as if his faith, his naive trust in the Chinese was in danger. Or perhaps he just didn't want Crocker's look of astonishment to become one of recrimination:
You deceived me.
And in turn he felt his own anger at the Chinese, for letting down not Crocker but himself, Ling.
Ingrates,
he thought, almost before he knew it.

How he yearned, then, to tell Crocker he was half white. He'd even imagined it: the look of perplexity, followed by one of gratified recognition, lighting up the big man's face like a paper lantern. He never had, of course—out of shame, at first, about his sordid origins—but now it came to him that he never could, not after that day in the yard, for fear that Crocker would think he had gulled him, misrepresented himself as Chinese.

The train had paused to take on water. The shouts of the engineers as they went about their work seemed thin and distant compared to the deep throbbing of the engine itself. In the stillness, Crocker began to stir.

“Where are we?”

Ling eyed his map. “Colfax?”

Crocker nodded, pulled out his watch, big as a saucer, and studied it owlishly.

“Good time.” He looked at Ling. “You've been partaking of the scenery.”

“Yessir.” As if it were an order.

“Wait'll you see this.” Crocker beckoned.

He led him out to the rear platform, open to the sky. Ling could smell the sappy scent of the pines around them, mixed with hot oil and singed air.

“There,” Crocker was saying. He was at the edge of the platform, looking up along the train and the track to come. “See it?”

He caught Ling's arm and drew him close. The platform was narrow and the iron rail low, and for a moment Ling feared being jostled off it by Crocker's bulk. A curl of steam swam past overhead, dizzying him.

“Cape Horn,” Crocker said, pointing to a buttress of rock. “They said we couldn't lay track there, sheer as it was. But your boys did it.” He slapped Ling's back as if he'd carved the way himself, making him clutch the filigree railing.

The train gave a lurch and Ling felt himself stagger into Crocker's girth, and then the big man righted him. “Luncheon, I think,” Crocker declared, as if reminded by the pressure on his stomach, and Ling followed him back inside, grateful to be of service.

He busied himself in the cramped galley among the victuals packed by Cook that morning—half a dozen baskets of cold meats, bread, cheese, one composed entirely of apples, shiny as shoes, and a bucket filled with bobbing, jostling beer bottles.

When he went back in to set the table, Crocker was nowhere to be seen. Taking the air, Ling guessed, but when he peered out he saw his employer on the rear platform, sighting along a rifle, hunting, Ling supposed, his body tensing for the report. Yet by the time he returned with food Crocker hadn't fired a shot, and the big man was at the table, tucking a napkin into his shirt collar, the rifle stowed.

Ling himself ate standing up in the galley, and when he went in to clear Crocker was asleep again, hands laced over his stomach, mouth ajar.

Outside, the narrow walls of Bloomer Cut closed in—the engine's hammering echoing back off the stone—then receded, and the train seemed to climb into the air. Ahead the hillsides, speckled with snow, looked piebald. Steam from the locomotive—
The Governor Stanford,
Ling had noted with a sanctimonious thrill as they'd boarded—whipped past the windows, and it was as if they were entering the very clouds. The track snaked along a precipice, and when he looked down there was only air between him and the distant bristling treetops, the silver wink of a river far below. It made him giddy, but if he stared ahead the sensation was of flying, or rather of riding a bird, one of those—were they eagles?—lazily circling the updrafts before him. So this was the famous Cape Horn. Men had been lowered in woven baskets to blast out this ledge, so the papers said, the wind spinning them like tops, then swatting them against the rockface. It was one of the most celebrated achievements of the Chinese on the line, and Ling had expected to feel pride, had imagined fatuously bursting into applause, but instead he felt his heart filling with fear. How many times had he built this very scene playing with the Crocker boys, getting down on the floor of the nursery with them to lay the track for their tin train up inclines of primers and three-volume novels, all under Crocker's indulgent eye, only for the boys to stage gleeful, clattering wrecks? Ling pressed himself back into the plush upholstery now and stared at Crocker, counting his breaths until the track curved like a slow brushstroke into a tunnel, and he sat in darkness for so long he felt the damp chill penetrating his bones. When they did finally emerge it was to the searing brightness of snow all around.