They found themselves living alongside twelve other Chinese. None of the others had been with them on the ship. San assumed Wang preferred to mix the newly arrived labourers with those who had been working on the railway for some time and would be able to tell the newcomers about the rules and routines. The single tent was small; when everyone had gone to bed they were squashed up against one another. That helped them to keep warm, but it also created a distressing feeling of not being able to move, of being tied up.
The man in charge of the tent was Xu. He was thin and had bad teeth but was regarded with great respect. Xu showed San and Guo Si where they could sleep. He asked where they came from, which ship they had sailed on, but he said nothing about himself. Sleeping next to San was Hao, who told him that Xu had been involved in building the railway from the very start. He had come to America at the beginning of the 1850s and started working in gold mines. According to rumour he had failed to pan gold in the rivers, but he had bought a decrepit old wooden hut where several successful gold prospectors had lived. Nobody could understand how Xu could be so stupid as to pay twenty-five dollars for a shack that nobody could live in now. But Xu carefully swept up all the dirt lying on the floor; then he removed the rotten floorboards and swept up all the dust and dirt underneath. In the end he filtered out so much gold dust that he was able to return to San Francisco with a small fortune. He decided to go back to Canton and even bought a ticket for the journey. But while he was waiting for his ship to sail, he visited one of the gambling dens where the Chinese spent so much of their time. He gambled and lost. He even ended up gambling away his ticket. That was when he contacted Central Pacific and became one of the first Chinese to be employed.
How Hao had found out all this without Xu himself ever having said anything about his past, San could never work out. But Hao insisted that every word was true.
Xu could speak English. Through him the brothers discovered what was being shouted over the stream separating the two camps. Xu spoke contemptuously of the men on the other side.
‘They call us Chinks,’ he said. ‘That is a very disparaging term for us. When the Irishmen are drunk, they sometimes call us pigs, which means that we are gau.’
‘Why don’t they like us?’ wondered San.
‘We are better workers,’ said Xu. ‘We work harder, we don’t drink, we don’t dodge and shirk. And we look different — our skin and eyes. They don’t like people who don’t look like they do.’
Every morning San and Guo Si clambered up the steep path leading out of the ravine, each carrying a lantern. It sometimes happened that one of the gang would slip on the icy surface and tumble all the way down to the bottom. Two men whose legs had been broken helped to prepare the food the brothers ate when they came back after their long working day. The Chinese and the labourers living on the other side of the stream worked a long way apart. Each group had its own path up to the top of the ravine and its own workplace. Foremen were constantly on the lookout to make sure they didn’t come too close. Sometimes fights would break out in the middle of the stream between Chinese with cudgels and Irishmen with knives. When that happened, the bearded guards would come racing up on horseback and separate them. Occasionally somebody would be so badly injured that he died. A Chinese who smashed the skull of an Irishman was shot; an Irishman who stabbed a Chinese was dragged away in chains. Xu urged everybody in his tent not to become involved in fights or stone throwing. He kept reminding them that they were guests in this foreign country.
‘We must wait,’ said Xu. ‘One of these days they’ll realise that there will never be a railway if we Chinese don’t build it. One day everything will change.’
Later that evening, when they were lying in the tent, Guo Si whispered to his brother and asked what Xu had meant, but San had no satisfactory answer to give him.
They had travelled from the coast inland towards the desert where the sun became colder and colder. When they were woken up by Xu’s loud shouts, they had to hurry in order to make sure the foremen wouldn’t be annoyed and force them to work longer than the usual twelve hours. The cold was bitter. It snowed almost every day.
They occasionally caught sight of the feared Wang, who had said that he owned them. He would suddenly appear out of nowhere, then vanish again just as quickly.
The brothers’ job was to prepare the embankment on which the rails and sleepers would be fastened down. There were fires burning everywhere, partly to enable them to see what they were doing but also to thaw out the frozen ground. They were constantly watched over by foremen on horseback, white men carrying rifles and wearing wolf-skin coats with scarves tied over their hats to keep the cold at bay. Xu had taught them always to say ‘Yes, boss’ when they were spoken to, even if they didn’t understand what had been said.
Fires could be seen burning several miles away. That was where the Irish were fixing sleepers and rails. They could sometimes hear the hooting of locomotives releasing steam. San and Guo Si regarded these enormous black beasts of burden as dragons. Even if the fire-breathing monsters their mother had told them about were colourful, these black, glittering monsters must have been what she was referring to.
Their toil was never-ending. When the long days were over they had barely enough strength left to drag themselves back to the bottom of the ravine, eat their food and then collapse in their tent. Over and over again San tried to make Guo Si wash in the cold water. San felt disgusted by his own body when he was dirty. To his surprise he was almost always on his own by the stream, half naked and shivering. The only others who washed regularly were the new arrivals. The will to keep himself clean was worn down by the heavy work. The day eventually came when he too collapsed into bed without washing. San lay in the tent amid the stench from their filthy bodies. It was as if he were slowly being transformed into a being without dignity, without dreams or longings. He could picture his mother and father as he dozed off, and he had the feeling that he had swapped the hell that had been his home for a hell that was different but even worse. They were now forced to work as slaves, in conditions worse than anything their mother and father had endured. Was this what they had hoped to achieve when they had run away and headed for Canton? Was there no way out for the poverty-stricken?
That evening, just before he fell asleep, San made up his mind that their only chance of surviving was to escape. Every day he saw one of the undernourished workers collapse and be carried away.
The following day he discussed his plans with Hao, who lay beside him listening attentively to what San had to say.
‘America is a big country,’ said Hao, ‘but not so big that a Chinese like you or your brother could simply disappear. If you really mean what you say, you must flee all the way back to China. Otherwise they’ll catch up with you sooner or later. I don’t need to tell you what will happen then.’
San thought long and hard about what Hao said. The time was not yet ripe for running away, nor even for telling Guo Si about his plan.
Late in March a violent snowstorm covered the Nevada desert. More than three feet of snow fell in less than twelve hours. When the storm had passed over, the temperature dropped. The next morning, they had to dig themselves out of their tent. The Irishmen on the other side of the frozen stream had fared better, as their tent had been on the lee side of the storm. Now they stood there laughing at the Chinese as they struggled to dig away the snow from the tents and paths leading up to the top of the ravine.
We get nothing for free, San thought. Not even the snow is shared fairly.