The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies Page B

negate Ng’s claim. Even if it was true, he thought the old gangster might yet embrace him if he proved his worth. He found a round-shouldered scribe in Chinatown to write a letter for him. Something, though, warned him not to confess his new line of work; he had promised Big Uncle to make his fortune in gold, not as a servant. They knew about servants at home, it turned out. Her sons all had them now, Aunty Bao wrote back gaily, and then complained about one in particular, Ah Poy, his insolence, his laziness. Never mind being a son; by the time he’d read her letter over, Ling felt stung, not to be a servant but that he might be a bad one. He redoubled his efforts at work, and only occasionally as he held a frock coat for Crocker, or knelt to button his boots, or bowed to fasten the fob of his watch (an action that felt like chaining a gate against a herd) did he feel as if he were serving his family.
    They couldn’t notice such efforts, of course, but Crocker did.
    Six months after he’d hired Ling, Crocker had fallen into a black mood, his railroad enterprise stalled, the tracks not much farther than the outskirts of town. Part of Crocker’s disdain for the failed miners was that they made such lousy workers. He’d hire them on at the start of the month, and by the end half of them would have defected, riding the rails to the end of the line for free and then lighting out for the diggings again. “And those that don’t spend their wage on new rigs spend it on drink, so that I’m left with the worser half!” he thundered. Now these fellows had had the temerity to demand a pay raise.
    It had happened once before, three months earlier. Then Crocker had duped them—called their leaders to the office over his store and, once they were spotted coming down the street, ordered Ling to walk in the front door, hustle out back, down the alley, then hell-for-leather it round the front again. “Over and over, mind,” Crocker had instructed. “As many times as you can before those fellows arrive. And see here, take your hat on and off betimes,” he called after him.
    Ling had managed a half-dozen breathless circuits before Crocker welcomed the delegation on the boardwalk.
    â€œWhat’s all the palaver?” he heard a mutton-chopped Irishman ask Crocker as they shook hands. “You running an opium den, is it now, Captain?”
    â€œHiring,” Crocker told him serenely, nodding curtly to Ling as he led the men upstairs to his office. “Plenty more where he came from too, so I hear.”
    The men had been back to work within the day. “Credulous bog-trotters!” Crocker had guffawed, watching them go, his chain and fob jiggling with mirth. Ling had allowed himself to join the laughter, marveling that anyone could be so stupid as to mistake one man for a multitude, delighted by the thought of the men’s ignorance, their inability to tell one Chinaman in his bamboo hat and baggy cotton suit from another, being turned against them. He thought he’d be able to smile now whenever a ghost called him John (though shortly he’d start to hear a new epithet in the streets:
scab
).
    And then Crocker had added, clapping him heartily across the back, “As if you little Chinaboys could undertake such hard labor.” Ling had staggered a little under his meaty paw, making Crocker bark with laughter.
    But now these same fellows were calling Crocker’s bluff.
    One morning a few days after the new year, Crocker had come prowling into the kitchen before sunup. Ling had been preoccupied, thinking of the long-ago cricket the old gangster had given him, the dry rattle of it in its bamboo cage after it died. Big Uncle was a spirit, Aunty Bao had written, “dead of a curse,” and then reminded him of the outstanding debt be owed for his passage. Ling had immediately dispatched a sum—asking for a paper servant to be burnt at Qingming so that