SUN 3. Gold Mountain, Part 2
Staring into the Sun
This is a serialization of short story collection, Staring into the Sun. Start here for more info and the full index.
Previous installment: Things My Dad Told Me, Part 2 / Gold Mountain, Part 1
Long Tow Wan, Chung Shan County, 1895
Song rapped on the wooden doors that guarded his uncle’s front courtyard and said in a strong, deep voice, “It’s Song. I’m here to see Chowlin.” They wouldn’t answer to a stranger—it could be a bandit or, worse yet, a kidnapper after the jewelry and silver dollars Chowlin would have brought home.
Chowlin himself opened the door. “Song!” His hair was Manchu-style like Song’s, scalp mostly shaved, leaving only a disc with a queue sprouting from it at the crown of his head. He looked older, a grown man whose experiences were leaving signs on his face: worry on his forehead and joy in the crinkles at the corners of his eyes.
“Welcome home. You’re looking even more handsome than the rooster.” Song grinned to soften up the delivery of the line he had just thought up, unsure if Chowlin would still allow himself to be teased. His cousin was his favorite relative among the multitude of Zhous—aunts, uncles, cousins—in the village.
“You scoundrel, you haven’t changed, just older and uglier,” said Chowlin.
Song realized he had been holding his breath. He exhaled. Chowlin’s wife was peeping at him from inside the house. What did Chowlin think of her, this woman he had just met upon his return home?
In chronic ill health, Chowlin’s mother couldn’t wait for her eldest son to return from Gold Mountain to acquire a daughter-in-law to look after her. Chowlin’s brothers had joined him in America and his sisters had been married off, bringing their parents some money but taking away extra hands in the house. So Chowlin agreed to marry a local Long Du woman from a distance, a rooster standing in for him at the ceremony. The bird got some extra scraps and everyone seemed happy apart from the bride, who had just become a servant for life to her new in-laws. Song feasted so much at the celebration banquet at the Zhou family temple that he got stomach cramps. He saw the wife regularly when he came to sell eggs to her. His aunt was always in the back room and his uncle was out in the fields, near his parents.
“Come in,” said Chowlin. “We have so much to catch up on.”
Inside, in the dim light, Song set his basket on the floor. The packed dirt had been upgraded to stone a couple of years earlier, thanks to money sent by Chowlin and his brothers. Song reached into the basket and said, “These are for you.”
Chowlin’s wife materialized and handed an empty bowl to her husband, then retreated to the back room. Song put six eggs into the bowl. Chowlin reached into the folds of his loose black coat (it was a style Song had seen on other men who had returned from America, foreign-looking and Chinese at the same time) and pulled out some coins.
“No, they’re a gift,” protested Song. “A welcome home gift.”
“Take the money, please. It’s not right for me to accept this.” Chowlin didn’t need to say, because you’re practically dying from hunger, since they both knew the dire situation facing Song’s family and everyone around them. He grabbed Song’s hand and pressed the coins into his palm.
Wordlessly, Song put the money into a cloth bag within his jacket. Without looking, he could tell that it was far too much for the eggs, maybe double or triple the usual price. With any luck, Chowlin would offer him some pomelos or almond cookies.
“Sit!” Chowlin said, palm open toward a pair of new, dark wood chairs which were arranged side by side. They displayed fine workmanship with sinuous arms and yoke backs, each with a carved dragon coiled under a tree. The dragons faced each other, waiting.
Chowlin asked, “When are you going to join me in Gold Mountain?”
There appeared to be no fruit or cookies forthcoming. Even with money, there was little food to be had. Chowlin was probably squirreling away whatever he could find for his wife and parents. Song sighed, “I don’t know.”
“What’s stopping you? You’ll have to come eventually,” said Chowlin.
“I don’t know.” Everything was stopping him. The unknowns were like a tidal wave that threatened to obliterate him. “How long are you staying?” Song asked, stalling. He knew the answer: until the belly of Chowlin’s wife started to swell.
“A few months, probably. Then I’ll go back. You could come with me. I’ve been asking around and there are some men in Vallejo who could use your help.”
“Vell-ay-ho,” Song sounded out. “What about the ticket? I don’t have enough for it.” That was an understatement. He had nothing.
“I’ll pay for it, and you’ll pay me back. You’ll work it off. Even if I didn’t have the money, the Long Du Association in San Francisco would get you over there, and you’d pay them back.”
I knew that, Song thought. The logistics of leaving China weren’t a secret, but it seemed more like a theory than connected steps, one after the other, that actually led somewhere. Though it seemed like all the men Song knew were leaving, he couldn’t picture himself as one of the travelers, then a settler and foreign worker. He didn’t feel foreign.
“What about the language? I don’t know any English.” So many men like Chowlin had returned to start families or stay for good (a few with Chinese women they had married abroad, or even round-eyed wives who were as pale as jasmine flowers), that it wasn’t unusual to hear English and Hawaiian spoken in the villages. Song had already picked up a phrase here and there: “How are you,” “My name is Zhou Song,” “I am from China.” He knew that there were American and Australian varieties of English, but had no idea how to tell them apart.
Chowlin said, “So many excuses. I’ll teach you while I’m here. You’re a fast learner, and it’s not too hard.”
“What’s it like over there?” Song wanted some tendril he could grasp.
“When you’re in Chinatown, you can dream that you’re at home. Same smells, same food. It’s chillier than here, sometimes foggy, but not so humid. So many Long Du people speaking our language, others from Chung Shan, other provinces and languages too.”
But Chowlin had mentioned another place. Song asked, “What about in Vell-ay-ho?”
“See?” his cousin said. “You pronounced it perfectly. You’ll learn quickly. Vallejo has quite a few people from Long Tow Wan, some Zhous too. They’re expecting you. You’ll recognize them. It’s a short boat ride across the bay from San Francisco.”
“And my papers? The documents? Isn’t it hard to get in with the exclusion laws?”
“I’ll take care of that. You’ll say you’re a merchant, list the names of the people in Vallejo, and they’ll ask you details about the village, maybe make you draw a map of it. It’s easy.”
“How do they know about our village?” Song found that unlikely.
“They know about every village, to check for paper sons.”
Song was glad to hear he could go as a merchant instead of a paper son. People like Chowlin, who had become United States citizens, could bring their children back to America. Or they could sell a child’s slot to another family whose son would take their last name and, Song presumed, claim to come from the same place.
“So if you had a paper son from another village, he’d have to know all about Long Tow Wan?” asked Song.
“Exactly.”
A glint caught Song’s eye. The bangles on the arm of Chowlin’s wife, who was listening from the shadows. He’d never seen this much jewelry on her. He caught himself staring at the shimmering gold and forced his eyes back to his cousin.
Chowlin extracted a silver dollar from his coat and showed it to Song. There was an eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its beak, and two words arced like a monochrome rainbow above its head. Chowlin read, “Republica Mexicana.” He flipped it to the other face which had a cap with beams radiating from it. “Libertad,” Chowlin said. “Freedom. Guess how many of these I make every month at my laundry.”
“Four?” Double what Song’s parents would earn in a month working in the fields.
“Multiply that by ten. Forty, even fifty,” Chowlin smiled in triumph.
Song’s eyes widened and he felt his heart thumping. Every beat said, “Go.”
“Okay, you win. I’ll go with you,” he declared.
To be continued on 23 August 2025.