$20.67

by Helen Sun
         

The paychecks stop coming before the letters start, and that’s how we know my dad is dead. Dead, in the land of white men and glorified fortunes. Dead, away from home, though home isn’t much to look at.

      “Mining accident,” says the letter.

     Mama crumples the paper in her fist, the date spilling out of her calloused fingertips. March 23rd, it says, 1851. Barely a year has passed since he left.

     “We’re sorry,” consoles the letter, but Mama doesn’t look consoled. Her brow pinches—she looks mad, and bitter, and she rattles the soot-stained envelope for silver dollars that don’t sound.

     The heating sputters. It has a lot lately, and the gas stove doesn’t work much either.

     “Bedtime, Xiao Jing,” she says, abrupt, corralling me into the thin mattress before grabbing an overcoat and heading into the pitch- coloured night. In the morning when I wake up, she’s already waiting with our bags.

***

     Forty-niner.

      That’s what they call people like Baba. Men from all over the world who up and leave for sunny, endless California, lured by gold lustre, fever-bright. Before he left, Baba had ruffled my hair and told me he was doing it for us. I’ll buy you a year’s worth of clementines, he’d said, grinning. So many you’ll be sick of eating them.    And so I waited, dreaming of gold ingots that would split open to reveal glistening fruit. For a whole year I tasted his promise in my sleep.

       But now I’m coming up on sunny, endless California, seeing its bones from the sea, and I try to count how many clementines would bring him back to me.

***

     Our stay in San Francisco is held captive by Baba’s ghost; namely, summer comes, and we’ve spent the compensation money we came here to collect. It’s less than we expected. It seems that a Chinese miner isn’t worth the gold he digs. Mama doesn’t tell me what job she’s found but now she disappears every night instead of every other night and on mornings when her bruises are heavy, she’ll drop a few coins in my skirt pocket and tell me to grab a treat.

      What is it worth?

      My chest burns when I think about it, so I don’t, not really—just wrap my arms tightly around her thinning waist like always and walk along Chinatown looking for the fruit vendors. A middle-aged man on the corner of the street calls me over and passes me a small, perfect clementine without prompting, staring hungrily at my coin. I press it into his soot-cracked palms.

     I wonder if he has a daughter, too. I wonder if my Mama’s dollar will be mailed to her, in a soot-stained envelope maybe. If it will be dug out by desperate fingers.

     The day is hot, so I start peeling the fruit as I walk, running my thumb along the inseam. I’m about to unstick a segment—slipping the peel into my pocket for later—when I hear shouting. My blood goes hot and then cold and I whip back around the corner before inching forward cautiously.

     There are two boys in the alleyway, cornering a girl. Their blond hair is stark against her black, and they are well-dressed, posh, like cloth dolls.

     What are rich white boys doing in Chinatown? I don’t know. I can’t stop staring at the complete whiteness of their shirts. They are the aliens here, not us; they are foreign and strange in this part of San Francisco: they are clean, they have not known work and they don’t smell of oil-smoke --and yet, barely sixteen, they are the ones with power.

     The voices increase in volume. I press closer, wishing I’d listened when Mama told me to learn English. As it stands, I only pick up a few words. Gold, is one. And Chinese, and tax. The girl looks older than I am, with hard creases around her eyes and the corners of her mouth, and less scared than I feel, even when the boys start reaching for the pockets of her skirt. She looks strong. I grip the uneaten fruit in my hand tightly enough that it bursts.

      I run into the mouth of the alleyway.

     “You want tax?” I yell. Almost immediately, three heads turn to stare incredulously, drawn without choice to my squeaky, butchered English. They look a lot taller facing me. My fist is cold and sticky with the clementine that Mama’s bruises paid for and I think: I can still have it. Pry the flesh off my flesh and suck it between my teeth like I’d dreamed of for a year and longer.

     What is it worth?

     I make a decision. “Here is tax!” I chuck the precious fruit as hard as my eight-year-old arms can in the direction of the boys and gasp a little when it lands true, splattering one of their white, white shirts with mottled orange pulp before falling to the ground with a wet thump that the alley mouth swallows.

     A beat.

     Vindictive pride seizes me, gushing up thick and hot in my throat, same as blood from a broken nose. I think I would’ve stayed rooted there in the alleyway, too mesmerized by the mess I made—I did that! Me!—to avoid their livid advancements until a rough hand seizes mine and pulls, hard.

     “Run, kid!” the girl shouts, sounding exasperated even over our pounding footsteps. Though, when I turn to look at her, she’s grinning like the devil itself has hidden gold behind her teeth.

***

     “Hong-jie, you brought another stray?”

     The flawless Mandarin belongs to a white girl. This and the fact that she’s so pretty it kind of makes me dizzy sends me scrambling behind Hong-jie—jie, as in older sister? Is the older girl who rescued me related to this foreigner? I’m careful not to dirty her clothes with my sticky fingers.

      I stare at her. She’s tall. She has short, silky gold hair that looks out of place in this dingy box apartment, too stark and rich for the cracked plaster walls, the damp laundry strung up around the cots, the gas stove on the floor and the pails of water that surround it. There’s an aged drawing on the wall of a younger Hong and a man with the same severe eyes. The hot summer wind filters through the wind chime on the open doorway, filling the air with silver noise.

     Hong shakes me off her skirt, collapsing into a rickety wooden chair that groans under her weight. Somewhere in the middle she’d shaken a cigarette out of her blouse and stuck it in her mouth.

     “You were a stray.”

     “Yeah, the only one! And I liked it that way!” the girl whines, following Hong into the living area with her arms crossed over her chest.

      I stand awkwardly by the entryway, not sure if I should impose. Hong-jie had led me through the nooks and crannies of Chinatown in our escape to a tiny apartment shoved between a telegraph office and a dead end, and I had followed, hypnotized by the strength in her tan hands. Working hands. Hong holds one out, staring impassively at the girl, who deflates and tosses her a lighter.

     “We don’t have the money,” she grumbles.

     Hong sends her a look. “Mimi.

     Mimi sticks her tongue out at her, flopping down onto a stool of her own. She drags a kettle over with her foot, fills it, fires it up on the stove, and then reaches behind herself for a clay teapot and some tea leaves. Very carefully, she shakes a miniscule amount into the pot. I finally gather up the courage to walk over, making sure not to trip on the cluttered floor, and crouch down beside her to watch.

     She squints at me. “What, never fuckin’ made tea?”

     “Yes!” I defend instinctively. “I mean, I have! And I have this.” I pass her the clementine peel from this morning. Mimi snorts at my reaction but takes the peel and shreds it between her long fingers before adding it to the pot and turning to Hong-jie. 

     “Who’s the brat, anyway?”

     “Not a brat,” I mumble. The kettle whistles.

      Scoffing, Mimi pours boiling water into the prepared teapot and replaces the lid.

     “You’re four.”

     “I’m eight!”

     Hong-jie exhales noisily, smoke puffing disjointedly out of her mouth, and pinches the bridge of her nose. “And Xiao Mimi is twelve, and I’ll be fifteen. Are we done?”

      I snap my mouth shut, ears burning. “Sorry.”  Talking back to a senior is not something Chinese girls do. Even if the senior smokes, or swears, or lives by herself with a foreigner, or—flicks my forehead?

     “None of that.” Hong says gruffly. “You don’t see that brat over there apologizing, do you?”  

     When I still don’t answer, she adds, in a softer tone: “What’re you called?”

     I blink at her. “Li Jing.” The character used in my name is common, meaning quiet, but Mimi bursts out laughing and Hong-jie wears a funny expression on her face.

    “Jing,” she repeats. “Like jing-zi.” Like gold. The feeling from earlier comes back. That swelling in my chest, like something bigger than myself is clawing its way out.

     “Like gold.” I confirm. Mimi rolls her eyes but passes me a small cup of the clementine tea. It burns my tongue and the roof of my mouth, almost insufferably hot in the July heat, but I think I like it even better than the fruit by itself. Closing my eyes against the sunlight streaming through the open door, I wonder:

      Is this what gold can be?

***

     Mimi-jie, as it turns out, also smokes. She pouts and pesters Hong-jie for cigarette money, but when she and I go out one day, she nicks one from a passing old man instead of purchasing a pack at the concession stand down the street.

     “What kinda dog-shit flavour,” she mutters, puffing her cheeks childishly against the cigarette. I sit and watch. Mimi feels as young as I am sometimes, but then the summer haze ripples her carbon breath, and she feels just as old as Hong-jie, just as out of reach.

     Because, at the end of the day I will still run back to my Mama and be her good daughter. But Mimi can’t run back to a place she ran away from, fall into the embrace of hands that clutched her gold hair like it was something to be bartered and sold. And Hong-jie can’t run at all. Hong-jie is like Mama, tied down, trying to provide for the father that brought her here and the family she found.

     “Then you should’ve bought the flavour you liked.” I tell Mimi. “Instead of stealing.”

     Mimi doesn’t react the way I thought she would, all huffy and indignant—maybe boxing me across the ears for talking back to her. Instead, she says nothing, just inhales again and tilts her head up to the blue sky. Fifteen centimetres apart on the baking asphalt, I can see her eyes: pale, too sharp to be precious. Hong-jie told me her mama was Chinese.

     “What do you use the money for, then?” I try again, only to get a puff of smoke in my face for my troubles. I bat it off with a scowl. “You shouldn’t be stealing money from Hong-jie.”

     “Your mama gives you money, doesn’t she?” Mimi asks abruptly.

     “That’s different.”

      “It’s not, loser. You ever think about saving that money instead of wasting it on your stupid oranges? Do you only think about what you want? What about what your mama wants? What about what Hong wants?”

     “I—“ I don’t. I do. I don’t want Mama to come home hurt in the mornings. I would never eat the fruit again if it meant so, but Mama—she looks happy when she gives me the money, when I go home and pour her a cup of clementine tea. And Hong-jie never likes giving cigarette money, but she’ll come back from her newspaper job with a glossy book for Mimi, or a red pellet drum for me, or chestnuts that are still piping hot from the stand. Each worth much more than a pack of smokes. I look at Mimi, and she looks back.

     “How much is a pack?” I ask, finally.

     Mimi doesn’t exactly smile, her mouth forming a divot around the smoke, but she shuffles a few coins over her knuckles and flicks the cigarette towards the ground. “I dunno, but I’ve got hundreds’ worth of ‘em at home.”

***

     Hong-jie’s baba is dying. Mimi-jie’s daddy is white.

     Hong-jie has an American accent even when she speaks Chinese. Mimi-jie curls her teeth around English like it makes her angry.

     Hong-jie can play the erhu better than the performer on the street. Mimi-jie can do figures in her head faster than the shopkeeps that hired her. One day, I swing by the store when Mimi is napping on her break and ask her my questions, and she does the math with her eyes closed and her breath still drowsy.

     How much is a pellet drum? Two or three tins of tea.

     How much is the treatment for Hong-jie’s baba? A thousand smokes, the good kind.

     How much is gold? Gold is twenty dollars and sixty-seven cents per ounce. Unsatisfied with the answer, I shake a cranky Mimi back awake and ask her again, and again, and again. How much is gold? How much is gold? How much is gold?

     And Mimi, angry and tired, says: Gold is pellet drums for a marching band, and tea for an army. Gold is fair treatment for the miners, and food instead of smoke-filled bellies. Gold is a year’s worth of clementines, but we ended up like this because gold was all they ever looked towards, never back, and a year is nothing to the years I have left and dammit, Jing-zi, won’t you go bother someone else already?

***

     Hong-jie and I are washing clothes when the apartment door slams open and then shut, Mimi pressing herself against the door with her hands behind her back. Her eyes are fever-bright—almost crazed—and she pants like she’s sprinted all the way here from Beijing.

     Hong-jie twists the shirt she’s scrubbing. “What did you do.”

     “It’s just—us, right? Nobody else?”

     “What did you—

     A soft giggle pierces the air, and then it dissolves into mounds more as Mimi slides down the door and starts to laugh and laugh, crazy with it, still clutching something in her hands like a lifeline. “My old man,” she gasps, then laughs again. “He’s—he was just so—flaunting it—I stole it, I stole it I stole it—“ She catches my eye.

     “Jing-zi, you asked me what gold’s worth, right?”

     She beckons Hong-jie and I closer, my hands still dripping soapy water, and shows us a small, cloth-bundled package in the cusp of her palm. When she unwraps it, Hong-jie inhales sharply and I can feel my mouth drop open—

     “Whaddya say we find out?”