The Incarnations

by Susan Barker

  There were many things I wondered about the gweilo. Was it true that your land was ruled by a little girl called Victoria? Were you barbarians bunged up from all the roast beef you eat? Could you smell as well as a dog, with that large nose? But I came over very stump-tongued and shy. On your desk was a photo frame. Silver ovals with black and white photographs of two foreign she-devils. Seeing what had caught my gaze you smiled. ‘My wife and daughter.’

  The she-devils looked like barbarian men in wigs and dresses, but you looked at them fondly. Then you smiled at me. ‘Ah Qin, can you come back tomorrow and tell me more tales? Hour of the monkey?’

  You handed me some coins, and I nodded. Then I ran home from Fanqui Town, my head jangling with the strange happenings of the day.

  III

  Ma Qin was sat in our sampan, tangled up in the briny, seaweedy nets the fishermen brought her to fix. Her nimble fingers picked through the knotted string, fish-scaly and slimy from the day’s catch, finding and mending holes. First and Second Daughters were hard at work too, scrubbing up to their elbows in the wash tubs. Every morning the Qin family washerwomen rowed up and down the Pearl River, calling up to the crew of junks for clothing to be washed, and by afternoon the bamboo airing racks were spread with cotton for the sun and wind to dry. My ma and sisters hardly ever set foot on the shore. The wash boat was where they did their living, cooking meals on a stove at the back and sleeping under the rattan shelter at night. Ma Qin walked splay-footed on land, she was so used to the wobbliness of the waves.

  ‘Ma,’ I said, ‘I earned four coppers today.’

  She squinted up from her fishing nets. ‘Whose pocket did you pick?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘I didn’t steal it.’ I scowled. ‘A Red-haired Devil called Ah Tom gave it to me. He wanted to know about the Tanka. He says I can go back tomorrow. He’ll pay me again.’

  The boat swayed as Ma threw down her nets and stood up. Tanka womenfolk aren’t the bound-footed, painted dolls that Han women are. Tanka women are tough as men, with the strength to row far out to sea and steer a boat through stormy, choppy waters. Ma Qin was a handsome and sturdy woman with braids thick as rope. She was twenty-four, but her knuckles, knobbly from the wash tubs, looked more than a hundred years old.

  ‘Give me those coins.’

  I handed them over, and watched miserably as she threw them overboard, so they splashed and sank to the muddy riverbed. The boat then lurched from side to side as Ma Qin threw me over her knee for a spanking. My sisters giggled in the suds.

  ‘Idiot!’ she panted. ‘The foreign devils are our enemies! Pa Qin would be alive today if it weren’t for the gweilo and their foreign mud. Now, go over there and don’t speak. Betray your family again, and you are off this boat.’

  She cuffed me one last time, then got back to repairing the fishing nets, muttering, ‘Aya! Why has Heaven cursed me with such a fool for a son? What did I do to offend thee, Lord Buddha? Barrenness is what I wish for in my next life. Barrenness and blessed childlessness . . .’

  IV

  I lived with Ma Qin and my sisters in a city of ten thousand boats, swaying at anchor, to and fro. A city that every sweep of tide, or gust of wind, jiggled about. A city so crowded, if you saw it from dry land you’d be tricked into thinking it a forest of rigging and masts.

  Those who lived in the walled city of Canton looked down on us low-caste Tanka people, but there was nothing on land that we lacked for on the water. Hawkers of every kind rowed up and down the Pearl River, banging drums and gongs and trading their wares, bone-setters and tooth-pullers, cobblers and ironmongers, and sellers of pigs and geese. There were school boats and theatre boats, opium barges and floating whorehouses. Up and down the Pearl River they rowed.

  The law forbade us Tankas from building a home on the land, but that was no hardship in my mind. Being stuck on the same plot of land day after day, now that’s hardship. When we wanted a change of scenery we’d thrust a barge pole into the riverbed and glide our boat to somewhere new. We may have been dirt poor and infested with water lice, but any time we wanted we could weigh anchor and sail away.

  V

  Pa Qin had lived with us on the wash boat before he died. When I was a baby, he worked as a porter in Canton harbour. Then he saved enough for a duck boat and a hundred ducks and became Duck-breeder Qin. Every morning he rowed the ducks out to a mudflat island in the Pearl River Bay so they could waddle and peck at the grass. Then every evening he herded the ducks up again and rowed them back to the floating city. Duck-breeder Qin spent several years in this way, in the restful, mindless company of quacking ducks, earning a living from selling the eggs. He was fond of the ducks, and liked to stroke their feathery down, but he wasn’t too fond to wring their necks for the cooking pot when his children’s bellies growled.

  Then one day the ducks caught a bird sickness and started dying. Pa Qin spent the last of his savings on herbal medicine he forced down their beaks, but he couldn’t stop the duck boat becoming a graveyard of corpses with webbed feet. Pa Qin had lost his living. Grieving over this, he went on to an opium barge to drown his sorrows with wine and ended up having his first ever puff on an opium hookah. And it was that first puff, that first clack of teeth on the ivory mouthpiece, and burbling of opium smoke through water and into his lungs, that marked the death of my father, and the birth of Three Pipes Qin.

  I’ve never had any foreign mud before, so don’t know it first-hand. But once, when he’d had a few pipes, Pa Qin told me what it was like.

  ‘She’s like a lover,’ he murmured, ‘cradling you in her arms . . . Or a mother . . . protecting you in her womb . . .’

  Well, if opium’s a lover or a mother, she’s the kind hell-bent on destroying you; on tricking you into thinking you’ve gone to heaven, while your body withers away. The fate of most opium smokers is the fate of drowning, and Three Pipes Qin was no exception to this. Every puff of the opium pipe brought him closer to death. But still he wouldn’t quit.

  Three Pipes Qin made promises, of course, but couldn’t bear the fever and chills for more than a day before scurrying back to the opium barges. He stole Ma Qin’s earnings from washing and mending. He sold the few sticks of furniture we had on the wash boat, and our cooking pots and stove. Three Pipes Qin wasn’t ever sorry, not even when Ma Qin wept and raged. Eventually, at her wits’ end, Ma Qin went at him with a boat oar. She chased him off the boat and shouted that he was banned until he was sober. He staggered ashore that night and never returned.

  The last time I saw Three Pipes Qin was on Noise of the Tide Street. Scrag and bone, he was shaking his begging bowl at the Manchu-queued commoners. I stooped my head, but he saw me and limped over, rattling his wooden bowl.

  ‘First-born son,’ he said, ‘spare your old pa some change?’

  I handed over what I had. Three Pipes Qin grinned at me and looked so much like a grinning skull I turned and fled.

  ‘Tell your ma that I’m on the mend,’ he called after me, ‘and I’ll be back on the wash boat soon.’

  Three Pipes Qin had no pride. He cared for nothing but opium. That night he’d go to one of the floating opium dens and exchange his beggings for the blackened, once-smoked scrapings from a rich man’s pipe. Just enough to ease Three Pipe Qin’s cravings and allow him a few winks of sleep.

  Pa Qin hadn’t been lying about coming back to Ma Qin’s wash boat, though. The day after I saw him on Noise of the Tide Street, two servants from one of the opium barges brought him in a wheelbarrow to the Qin family boat. They’d dragged him out of the Pearl River after he’d fallen in. Ma Qin checked to make sure the drowned man was the father of her three children. Then she told the servants to take Three Pipes Qin away again.

  ‘Do what you like with him,’ she said. ‘He’s no husband of mine.’

  VI

  Though Ma Qin had spanked me and warned me not to ‘betray our family’, I still planned to go back to the British factory to see you the next day. You’d saved my throat
from being slashed, and I didn’t want to break my word. And, anyway, how would Ma Qin find out? Like most Tanka washerwomen, she never left the Pearl River.

  But returning to Fanqui Town wasn’t to be my fate. That night as Ma Qin and my sisters were sleeping, the Goddess of the Sea came and the boat became bright as day. Behind Mazu stood her guards, Ears that Hear the Wind and Eyes that See across the Waves, protecting her from any threat.

  ‘Ah Qin,’ Mazu said, ‘your fate is to be at sea, not on land. You will meet that gweilo Ah Tom again one day, but first you must go to sea. The sea, remember, is your destiny.’

  Then the goddess vanished and the wash boat was in darkness once more. I lay awake for a while, thinking on what the Sea Goddess had said, then drifted back to sleep. Early the next morning I was woken by the sun-and-wind-grizzled Fisherman Po, who’d come by our wash boat. He was in need of a fisherboy, and would Ma Qin offer up her young lad for the job?

  So off I went in Fisherman Po’s leaky, two-masted fishing boat, to plough the waters and harvest our crop of fish. Just as Mazu had said.

  VII

  For the next five years I worked as a fisherboy, sailing out to sea at daybreak and sailing back at sundown. Out on the waves, Fisherman Po handed down to me the wisdom of his thirty years of sea fishing. He taught me how to steer the boat on stormy waters, and where to cast the nets out and trawl for the finest catch. He taught me how to spot a pirate junk from far away, and how to pray to the Gods of wind and rain to ward off typhoons. I soon became a skilled seafarer, sculling and manning the boat, my sea-legs used to the pitch and roll of the roughest waves.

  I grew taller, stronger and broader, and had my head shaved and plaited in the Manchu style. I became fond of a cheeky dimpled Tanka girl called Ah Moun, who rowed a sampan up and down the river, selling baskets of fruit. She’d smile and toss me an orange or banana when she passed us by, or splash me with her oar, and when I asked her to marry me she laughed and said, ‘About time, Ah Qin. I thought I’d be throwing oranges at you until we were old and grey.’ We soon had our own boat and within a year her belly swelled with our first child. We had enough money to live on from our fishing and fruit selling, and were happy. By then I was coming up to sixteen years old.

  It was around then that war broke out over the foreign mud, and iron-clad British warships, propelled by cartwheels and steam, charged into the Pearl River Bay. Our Emperor’s fleet of ‘avenging dragons’ had colourful streamers flying from the masts, and noisy gongs and bells, but lacking proper guns didn’t stand a chance. The thundering of cannons shook the hills surrounding the Pearl River Bay as the British warships blew our Emperor’s fleet to bits. Smoky blazes poured forth into the sullen darkness of night, and panicking survivors trod water and clung to the shattered fragments of their blown-up junks.

  I prayed to Mazu to protect our men and wreck the British men-o’-war. But I didn’t join the Anti-barbarian Army with their pitchforks, scythes and rusty farming tools – useless against the double-barrelled guns of the red-coated barbarians. Why should we low-caste Tankas fight to defend the land we’re forbidden to live on? I was soon to be a father, and wasn’t going to risk my life.

  The cannons were booming when Ah Moun got the pains of labour. Ma Qin came to our boat to help with the delivery (snapping at Ah Moun to ‘Stop your hollering. You aren’t the first to push a baby Tanka out of your muckhole.’). The labour was very short, and the baby slipped right out. I could tell by Ma Qin’s eyes that it hadn’t been born right. Ma Qin weren’t the sort to take fright easy, but she turned pale, covered her mouth and said, ‘Oh, you poor thing.’ My heart shrinking, I went round to look at my first-born child, and what I saw sickened me. Our baby had the eyes of a fish, and its legs were welded together like a tail. Our baby son gasped but, like a fish out of water, could not breathe and died.

  Ah Moun changed after that, and her dimples went away because she no longer smiled. One day I came home from fishing and she wasn’t there. She didn’t return to our boat the next night or the next, and I heard from my mother-in-law that she’d gone off to work in a laundry in Macao. Fisherman Po offered to sail us over to Macao so I could ‘knock some sense into her, and see she behaves like a proper wife’. But it didn’t seem right to sail to Macao to fetch her back. Ah Moun wasn’t the only one who’d had a change of heart.

  VIII

  Not long after Ah Moun had left, Old Fisherman Po and I were casting our nets out at sea when the sky turned the colour of bruises and a squally wind whipped the waves up to an unruly height. Out of nowhere a pirate junk appeared, and a scrambling dragon of sea bandits came towards us with scurrying oars. As we struggled to sail our boat against the fierce wind and back to Canton, Fisherman Po shouted up to the Heavens, ‘How have we offended thee, Sea Goddess, for you to visit such calamity upon our boat?’ Fishermen Po never failed to burn a joss stick or two at her shrine before setting sail each morning. Truly, it was a mystery.

  A boat hook caught the side of us, and the bandits leapt aboard, weaselly-eyed and waving cutlasses about. All we had was our basket of wriggling catch, and feeling wronged for having chased us across the waves for such little reward, the sea robbers set fire to our sails. If the bandits had left us then, Fisherman Po and I could have put out the blaze and rowed back to Canton. But they stayed aboard to beat me up. Fiery sails gusting in the wind, they kicked me to the bottom of the boat. Fearing that they’d beat me to death, Fisherman Po shouted, ‘Leave the boy! There ain’t no fairness in six against one.’

  ‘Life ain’t fair, old man,’ growled one of sea robbers.

  Then he jerked Fisherman Po’s head back by his queue, opened his throat from ear to ear with his blade and shoved him overboard without even looking to see how he fell. Then the sea robber came for me, and I thought, Now I’m done for. I thought of Fishwife Po and Ma Qin. Who’d tell our womenfolk what had become of us?

  But the sea robbers didn’t kill me. They took me aboard the pirate junk instead.

  IX

  Sixty men lived aboard the Scourge of the Celestial Seas, Tankas who’d turned to banditry after their property had been shipwrecked, fugitive Hakkas who’d withdrawn into the world of pirates to flee punishment for crimes on land, and captives from hijacked fishing boats, like me. Chief Yang was the head of the Scourge, and then there were the bandits, who drank grog and puffed on opium pipes, threw knives at squealing rats and bet on sparring quails they tormented in cages (so they charged at each other, beaks stabbing to the blood-spattered death when set free). The kidnapped fisherboys were deck hands or galley slaves, hoisting the sails, sculling and manning the fast boats and obeying the bandits’ orders. The sea bandits were a barbarous lot and the Scourge was rowdy with thrashing fists and spillages of tooth and blood. At night I slept on deck, preferring the wind and rain to the violence of the quarters below. But there were nights I was ordered down to Captain Yang’s cabin, and had no choice but to go.

  I crawled up to the deck after the first time, torn and bleeding inside and out. I leant over the deck rail and heaved my guts up, down the side of the Scourge. I wasn’t Ah Qin any more. I was a battered piece of meat, skewered by Yang and his gang. I leant over the railing and stared out at the dark waves roaring and crashing over the depths, as the Scourge tilted this way and that, days from land. I cursed the Goddess of the Sea for luring me away from Canton to this leaky vessel of brutes.

  ‘My destiny is to be at sea, is it, Mazu? To be prisoner on this ship of thugs? To be raped by Chief Yang and his gang?’

  The sea was silent, and I cursed Mazu again. Then I stared out over the dark, tumbling waves, tormented by the urge to leap. Thoughts of Ma Qin and my sisters were the only things that kept me on board. It was my duty as first-born son to get back to the wash boat, and there was no going back as a drowned man. So I curled up behind a coil of rope, and the waves lapped at the broadside, swaying the filthy cradle of the Scourge and sending me into a fitful sleep.

  There’s a
saying about Tanka sea bandits, ‘A dragon on the water, a maggot on land.’ Well, Captain Yang was a maggot on the land and water. He even looked like a maggot, with his shrunken head and weak, receded chin.

  Yang was the grandson of the legendary Cheng I, who had ruled the waves fifty years back with his Red Flag Fleet and amassed a vast fortune from the vessels that trespassed upon ‘his’ waters. In the days of Cheng I, the Red Flag Fleet had over forty ships armed by cannons and guns, and a thousand-strong crew. Half a century later, all that was left of the ‘fleet’ was one ill-rigged, three-masted leaky junk, and Captain Yang had no vast fortune, because he was too scared to chase the merchant clippers for the cargoes of opium and gunpowder casks. Far from conquering the waves, the good ship Scourge had conquered only a few defenceless fishing boats.

  Chief Yang was nothing but a barnacle clinging to his grandfather’s reputation, but he swaggered about in his turban and robes like Emperor of the Sea.

  ‘Come here, slave,’ he’d order. ‘On your knees. Open your mouth.’

  If you were the ‘slave’ he was speaking to, you had better obey him. You had better go down on your knees and open your maw – or else. If you were lucky, he’d just spit in you, and have you swallow the gob of nastiness down. If you were not so lucky, he and his men would have a pissing contest, shooting streams of yellow down your throat. The Scourge was a black-hearted ship, and evil the stuff of everyday. Upon sighting a kidnapped Hakka hanging from the mast one early dawn, a noose choking his neck, Turtle Li had smirked, ‘He’d had too much of a good thing.’ They’d raped him with a broom handle the night before.