God of Luck Read Online Free Page B

giant of a foreign devil. He was so tall that his swarthy, beak-nosed face rose above the heads of all the men milling in the thirty or more feet between us!
    Behind him, a door swung open, and a sallow-faced creature hurried in. While the giant was in some sort of uniform boasting shiny gold buttons and countless loops of gleaming braid, this creature wore a crumpled, ill-fitting, black western suit, and he scuttled across the polished wood floor like a spider.
    Halting beside the giant, who acknowledged his arrival with a magisterial nod, the spider threw back his shoulders, thrust out his chest, and reeled off an endless string of Saang Wah in a voice that was unexpectedly rich and deep. Soon multiple translations were rippling among the forty, fifty men in the room.
    To my surprise, the giant made no effort to silence the talkers. Nor did the spider, and the distraction from this buzz coupled with the spider’s speed made me unsure whether I understood him correctly.
    I was fairly certain of the beginning: the spider had declared himself the right hand of the giant, who was an official, a very important mandarin of Macao, a Portuguese settlement at the mouth of the Pearl River. But was the spider now saying that this mandarin, like the famous iron-faced Magistrate Bau, was impartial and honest, that his presence was a guarantee we’d be treated fairly in this room, which was a hiring hall?
    Men in every direction started calling out, and from what I could catch, they were begging for work. The giant—iron-faced like Magistrate Bau—did not so much as flick an eyelash. The spider, aided by wild gesticulations, launched into a glowing account of pay: four silver dollars per month above and beyond free room and board as well as two suits of clothing, one flannel shirt, and a new blanket every year.
    At these generous terms, some men grew nearly as animated as the spider. But no amount of riches could tempt me from returning to my family and village, everything familiar, as soon as I could.
    Skeptics shouted:
    “Where is this work?”
    “What is it?”
    “What if I don’t like it?”
    The spider, raising his voice above theirs, boomed,
    “This work is not far away but in Peru, a country of much gold and silver that can be reached in a few days sail. So if you don’t like the work, you can easily quit and go home using the dollars you receive for signing on.”
    Extracting a little sack from a pants’ pocket, he jiggled it, creating a happy clink of coins. “The advance is eight silver dollars, one for each year of the contract, each foreign year, which has just six months to our twelve.”
    He snapped his fingers. “Your time will be up that quick!”
    Men ran towards him, clamoring:
    “Give me a contract!”
    “I’ll sign!”
    “I’ll give you my thumbprint!”
    Caught in the stampede, I was thrown against those ahead, pressed from behind, jammed in so tightly that my every attempt to wriggle free failed. Still I persisted, and those I jostled muttered incomprehensibly, cursed, demanded I wait my turn.
    “I don’t want a contract,” I spluttered in my dialect, then in Saang Wah. “Let me out.”
    “What a muk tau, woodenhead!”
    “You want the silver dollars, don’t you?”
    I hesitated. Since I’d been brought here through deceit, why shouldn’t I sign falsely? Then I’d get the advance, which would not only buy my passage home but leave me with a small windfall to give Ba.
    He had named me Yuet Lung, Moon Dragon, and my sister Yuet Fung, Moon Phoenix, to commemorate our birth during a full moon and to express his hope that we’d prove the saying, “Dragon and phoenix twins bring their families luck.”
    Ma said we had; Ba agreed. But I’d not needed the teasing of my brothers and sisters-in-law to recognize it had been Moongirl’s money that had brought us my wife, and it was Bo See’s extraordinary skill in raising silkworms that made it possible for our family to continue eating twice a