The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies Page A

staunchest faith was in manifest domesticity,” Crocker had grumbled after her departure. “Let the Fenians have their home rule, by all means, just not in my home!”
    It was more women’s work, but Ling felt a modest thrill in knowing that he was preferred to a white woman. That might have seemed like faint praise, to be the lesser (and cheaper) of two evils—on his arrival he’d overheard Crocker murmur to his wife, “The best difference between your Chink and your Cat-lick is that one doesn’t have enough English to back-talk” (indeed, it had taken Ling a moment to gather that Crocker meant
Catholic
)—except that on his second day, trussed into an apron, duster in hand, Bridey had shown him into the parlor, her braying voice falling to a hush in the presence of such polished solidity, while Ling had found himself, as if transported, at home. The Crockers, he saw, were followers of the modish fad for chinoiserie: rosewood furniture and tall silk screens filled the room, which was dominated by an ornately carved altar. Big Uncle had a much smaller though still sumptuous altar in his cabin on the flower boat, a shrine on which to burn incense and leave offerings of fruit to the ancestors and before which the old gangster would bow, as he did before no living man. The Crockers’ was used as a breakfront of sorts, displaying ornaments and silverware, the only venerable dead on show vases of dried flowers and a stuffed songbird in a vitrine. And yet something of the altar’s dignity clung to it. To Ling it suggested the value the Crockers put on things Chinese, and he felt touched, if also a little homesick, as if he had been “collected” in the same spirit of connoisseurship, as if he too might be polished to a high gloss in their home (even if he did the polishing himself).
    When he took the job—not that Crocker’s vast certainty had allowed any room to decline it, in retrospect—Ling told himself it would be temporary. He was still bound for the mother lode to make his fortune. Yet after three months, when he had enough to buy a pan and even a burro, he closed his fist around the money. He knew all about a Chinaman’s chance in the goldfields—as thin and wispy as a lucky hair—from Uncle Ng. But around Crocker he saw how even ghosts were disappointed, drifting back to town hungry and hollow-eyed, the only gold on them their rotted teeth. Crocker liked to watch such wrecks from his office, men he’d once outfitted at his store, their ragged clothes faded to the color of the dust in the street hanging loose around them. “One in a thousand strikes it rich,” Crocker told him when Ling shyly revealed his own plans. “But every man jack needs a shovel, a winter coat, good boots. You’ve heard of fool’s gold—pyrites?” Ling nodded. “Here’s the secret, son: it’s all fool’s gold.”
    And so Ling had stayed, struck by how much his new employer sounded like his last. He didn’t like being called a fool—though he felt a strange shiver when Crocker called him
son
—and suspected that Crocker simply didn’t want to trouble himself with finding another new servant, but it had already occurred to him that Mister Charley might be the next best thing to gold. He knew from the way Crocker’s chest swelled tautly at the sight of the defeated that the man had his own designs on striking it rich. Once, he’d grasped Ling’s arm and pointed out the wagon ruts crisscrossing the dusty street: “Someday there’ll be rail lines covering this whole land like that.” And then who knew what wealth might not roll down the mountain?
    Without a room to rent or food to buy, and even discounting what he spent on Little Sister (for he continued to visit her weekly), Ling was able for the first time to send money home, hoping that by making good on his vow to Big Uncle he might