As the Earth Turns Silver by Alison Wong

world was full of curiosities – but suddenly he could not remember.
    It was she who started the conversation.
    â€˜Where’s the other man?’ she asked. ‘I haven’t seen him for weeks.’
    â€˜My brother?’ He flipped the bag of apples to twist and seal the corners. ‘He go home.’
    â€˜When does he come back?’
    â€˜A few month . . .’ Yung bit his lip. ‘He come back with . . . wife.’
    â€˜Oh . . . It must be lonely without family.’
    He wrapped her cauliflower, tried to smile as he said good day, but did not look into her eyes. He watched her walk out the door, the copper of her hair bright against the blue of her dress.
    He walked out the back, asked Cousin Gok-nam, who was washing carrots, to mind the shop. He walked up the stairs to his room, opened the sandalwood box on the dresser and took out the top letter. Read it slowly.
    He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, listening to the trams and horse-carts as they passed by on the street below, watching light fade.
    He rose and picked up a bamboo flute. He’d made it lovingly – the way his father taught him when he was a child, digging out the inner sections, cutting holes along its length, whittling a piece of cork to plug the open end. Sometimes on a Sunday, or at night after the shop closed, if his brother did not thump on the door and tell him to sleep, he’d sit on his bed and play. Sometimes the flute, sometimes the haunting notes of the erh hu , the Chinese violin. He’d play a song about love, or perhaps about leaving home, about travelling thousands of lei , about waking at night alone.
    The letter lay open on the bed. He held the flute, light in his hands, felt the sadness of its thin body. Pressed it to his lips.

Shadows
    After his brother came back, whenever he was not needed in the shop, Yung went out. There was always someone to talk to, to be with, in Tongyangai .
    He might visit a cook-shop with Fong-man and eat wontons or homemade noodles, or call into one of the gambling joints for heated debate or merely the latest gossip. He’d take the teapot from the padded basket by the door and pour himself a cup, then sit on the bench with the other men, back against the wall, sipping hot tea and watching gweilo and Tongyan alike come and go, buying and checking pakapoo tickets.
    On warm summer evenings he’d join Cousin Gok-nam, whoever happened to be sitting outside their homes. They’d sit for hours on their haunches, smoking, bragging like blowing bulls , till all they could see was the bright orange glow of cigarettes in darkness, their disembodied voices calling to each other across the narrow street.
    Sometimes he’d walk to Fong-man’s shop in Cuba Street to play cards and discuss politics or poetry.
    â€˜What’s wrong?’ Fong-man asked one night as he dealt their hands. ‘By now you should be telling me what your cousin Hung-seng’s up to. Lecturing me on the latest from the People’s Newspaper . Sun says this. Liang says that. You can be boring-to-death, but believe it or not I’ve got used to it.’
    Yung ignored him. It was strangely quiet. Only the flick as cards hit the wooden table.
    â€˜You sure you want to throw down that card? Definitely something wrong when you’re letting me win . . .’ Fong-man laid down his hand, looked Yung in the face. ‘Your brother’s woman, I hear she’s pretty . . .’
    Yung threw down his cards and stood up.
    The trams had stopped for the night, the streets peopled only by shadows. He walked past blind shop fronts towards water.
    His own wife had been pretty too . . . But how did gweilo say? More than pretty face ?
    He gazed at the darkness of Kelburne and the western hills, over the oily blackness of the harbour and across to Oriental Bay.
    What was the word Mrs McKechnie used? How had she described it? This