Border Town

by Shen CongWen

  When the weather was clear and fine and there was nothing to do because no one wanted to cross, Grandpa and Cuicui would sun themselves atop the stone precipice in front of their home. Sometimes they’d throw a stick into the water from above and whistle to the yellow dog to jump down from the heights to fetch it. Or Cuicui and the dog would prick up their ears while Grandpa told them stories of war in the city many, many years ago. Other times, they’d each press a little upright bamboo flute to their lips and play the melodies of bridal processions, in which the groom went to the bride’s house and brought her home. When someone came to cross, the old ferryman would lay down his flute and ferry the person across on the boat by himself, while the girl, still on the cliff, would call out in a high-pitched voice, just as the boat took off,

  “Grandpa, Grandpa, listen to me play. You sing!”

  At midstream, Grandpa would suddenly break out in joyful song; his hoarse voice and the reedy sound of the flute pulsated in the still air, making the whole stream seem to stir. Yet the reverberating strains of song brought out the stillness all around.

  When the passengers heading for Chadong from East Sichuan included some calves, a flock of sheep, or a bridal cortege with its ornate palanquin, Cuicui would rush to do the ferrying. Standing in the boat’s prow, she’d move the craft along the cable languidly and the crossing would be quite slow. After the calves, sheep, or palanquin were ashore, Cuicui would follow, escorting the pack up the hill, and stand there on the heights, fixing her eyes on them for a long ways before she returned to the ferryboat to pull it back to the shore and home. All alone, she’d softly bleat like the lambs, low like a cow, or pick wildflowers to bind up her hair like a bride—all alone.

  The mountain town of Chadong was only a li from the ferry dock. When in town to buy oil or salt, or to celebrate the New Year, the grandfather would stop for a drink. When he stayed home, the yellow dog would accompany Cuicui as she went to town for supplies. What she would see in the general store—big piles of thin noodles made from bean starch, giant vats of sugar, firecrackers, and red candles—made a deep impression on her. When she got back to her grandfather, she’d go on about them endlessly. The many boats on the river in town were much bigger than the ferryboat and far more intriguing, quite unforgettable to Cuicui.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Chadong was built between the river and the mountains. On the land side, the city wall crept along the mountain contours like a snake. On the water side, tiny boats with awnings berthed along wharves constructed on the land between the wall and the river. Boats heading downstream carried loads of tung oil, rock salt, and nutgalls—the wasp-made swellings on oak trees used to make dyes. Those going upstream transported cotton yarn and cloth, foodstuffs, household supplies, and choice seafood. Threading through each of the wharves was River Street. Land was scarce, so most people’s houses were “dangling-foot houses,” half on land, half on stilts built over the water. When water crept up over the street during a great springtime flood, the households of River Street would extend long ladders from the eaves of their houses across to the city wall. Cursing and shouting, they’d enter the city over the ladders, carrying cloth-wrapped bundles, bedrolls, and crocks of rice, then wait for the water to recede before coming back out of the city through the gate in the wall. If one year the waters raged especially fierce, the flood might break through the row of stilt houses in one or two places. The onlookers atop the city wall could only gape. Those who suffered the harm stared right back, speechless over their loss, as if it were just one more unhappy and unavoidable act of nature.

  When the river flooded, one could watch its sudden swelling from the city wall. Within that vast surge of mountain waters from upstream, houses, oxen, sheep, and giant trees bobbed up and down. In the places where the torrent slowed, as in front of the pontoons by the customs house, people often went out in little sampans. When they spied a head of livestock, a piece of lumber, or a cargoless boat rising and falling in the waves midstream, perhaps with a crying and screaming woman or child on board, they urgently paddled out, and after meeting the object of rescue downstream, lashed it to the sampan with a long rope, then rowed back to shore. These daring souls typified the local people: they had an eye for their own gain, but also for helping other folks. They were equally joyful salvaging people and property, and they did it with such skill and bravery that onlookers felt compelled to shout hurrahs.

  The river was the famous You Shui of history, whose new name is the Bai Shui or White River. After the White River got to Chenzhou and merged with the River Yuan, it became somewhat turbid, proving the adage that spring water becomes muddy when it leaves the mountains. Trace the river back upstream, and it was so clear you could see right down to the bottom, through pools thirty or fifty feet deep. When the sun shone on the deep parts, the white pebbles and striated carnelian stones at the bottom were visible clear as could be, along with fish darting to and fro as if floating in air. High mountains came down to the river on both sides—mountains covered with slender bamboos good for making paper, in all seasons such a deep emerald color as to transfix the eyes. Households near the water appeared among peach and apricot blossoms. Come spring, one had only to look: wherever there were peach blossoms there was sure to be a home, and wherever there were people, you could stop for a drink. In the summer, purple cotton-print tunics and trousers that dazzled the eye as they dried in the sunlight became ensigns of human habitation. When autumn and winter arrived, dwellings on the cliffs and by the water came clearly into view—not one could escape notice. Walls of yellow earth and pitch-black tiles, neatly placed there for all time and in harmony with the surroundings on every side, brought the viewer a sense of extraordinary joy. A traveler with the slightest interest in poetry or painting could sail this narrow river curled up in a little boat for a whole month without ever getting tired of it. Miracles could be discovered everywhere. The boldness, the exquisiteness of nature, at every place and every time, led one inescapably into rapture.

  The source of the White River was up past the Sichuan frontier. Small boats going upstream could make it all the way on the high waters of spring to Xiushan in Sichuan. Chadong was the last river port on the Hunan side of the border. The big river broadened to half a li at Chadong, but when autumn turned to winter and the water level fell, it revealed a riverbed only two hundred feet wide. Beyond that were only shoals of black boulders. Boats arriving at this point could go no farther upstream, so all goods going in or out of East Sichuan had to be unloaded here. Products came out of the province on mulberry wood carrying poles borne on the shoulders of porters. Goods headed the other way had to be tied into bundles for transport by muscle power.

  Chadong and its environs were defended by a lone battalion of garrison troops reorganized from the Green Standard Army’s farmer-soldiers of yesteryear. They were joined by almost five hundred resident households in town. (Apart from those who owned fields up in the mountains or tung oil presses, and small-time capitalists who gave out loans for tung oil, rice, or cotton yarn, nearly all the others in town were on the military payroll, descended from households brought in to garrison the area.) There was also a likin transit-tax bureau, housed in a little temple below River Street outside the city wall. The bureau chief had lived in town for a long time. The battalion of soldiers was quartered in the yamen of the former Green Standard lieutenant-colonel. Were it not for the bugler who blew his daily calls from atop the city wall, reminding all that a garrison was here, one would hardly know that these people were soldiers. On winter days, clothes and green vegetables could be seen drying in the sun in front of every doorway. Sweet potatoes hung from the eaves by their vines. Bags made from palm-bark rain capes, stuffed with chestnuts and hazelnuts, also hung under the eaves. Chickens big and little disported themselves by every house, cackling. Here and there would be a man sitting on the high doorsill of his house or splitting logs with an ax, stacking his firewood in the courtyard in neat piles like pagodas. Middle-aged women
wore blue cotton outfits starched stiff, with embroidered white cotton aprons hanging down across their bosoms. They chatted as they worked, stooping in the sunlight. It all reflected eternal peace. Everybody passed each day in a pure quietude that is hard to imagine. This measure of tranquility allowed everyone to consider their personal affairs and also their dreams. Each and every denizen of this small town, within the days allotted by nature, nursed his or her own hopes of love and expectations of hate. But what exactly were they thinking about? That was unfathomable.

  Those who lived in the higher elevations within the city walls saw from their front doors scenes of the river and the opposite shore. When a boat approached, they could see innumerable trackers on the opposite bank pulling it upstream. Those trackers brought cakes and imported candies from downriver, which they would exchange for cash in the city after coming ashore. Whenever a boat came to town, the local children’s imaginations flew to the men who did the pulling. And the adults? If they’d hatched a nest of chicks or raised a pig or two, they’d entrust them to the towmen on the downstream voyage, to exchange for gold earrings, a few yards of superior black cloth, an earthenware jug of gift-quality soy sauce, or an especially sturdy chimney for their American Standard Oil kerosene lamp. Such thoughts preoccupied most of the housewives.

  This small town was peaceful and quiet within its walls, but its location made it the nexus for commerce with East Sichuan, so the little River Street outside the city wall was quite a different story. There were inns where merchants put up and barbers who stayed in place, not just the itinerant ones who set up their chair in the street. There were restaurants, a general store, firms dealing in tung oil and salt, and a shop selling cloth of all designs and colors—every kind of merchandise had found its place along this River Street. Still another outfit sold hardwood pulleys, bamboo cables, woks and pots, all for use onboard ships. And wharf rats made their living connecting the boatmen with their employers. Long tables in front of the little restaurants offered carp fried a crispy brown, lying in a big shallow earthenware bowl with bean curd, the fish adorned with slivers of red peppers. Next to the bowl was a big bamboo cylinder with giant red chopsticks sticking up out of it. Anyone willing to plunk down the money could edge up to that table outside the front door, take a seat, and pull out a pair of those chopsticks. A woman with a white powdered face and finely plucked eyebrows would come over and ask, “Elder Brother, Honorable Soldier, what’ll it be? Sweet wine? Clear liquor?” A male customer who was witty and wanted to get a rise out of her, or who fancied the proprietress a little, would feign anger and retort, “Sweet wine, for the likes of me? Do I look like a child? Sweet wine, you say!” Potent white spirits were then dipped out of the wine vat with a wooden ladle into an earthenware bowl set immediately upon the table. This bowl of spirits was of course strong and pungent, enough to knock out many a stout fellow, so one couldn’t drink another.

  The general store sold American kerosene, the Standard Oil lamps that burned it, incense, candles, and paper goods. The oil firm was a depot for tung oil. The salt firm stored piles of rock salt of the sort produced since ancient times in Huojing town, Sichuan. The dry goods shop sold white cotton yarn, cloth, cotton, and the black silk crepe wound around the head as a turban. The ship chandler had just about everything in its trade, sometimes even an anchor weighing a hundred catties just resting outside the door and waiting for a customer to ask its price. Boat owners clad in their dark blue sateen mandarin jackets and fidgeting boatmen went in and out of the establishment of the wharf rats who got the boatmen their work; its door, on River Street, was open all day long. It was like a teahouse that sold no tea, though you could smoke a pipe of opium there. The men all said they went there to keep up on their trade, but everybody in the crew from top to bottom, from the oarsmen on board to the trackers onshore, observed a rule: no talking about numbers. Most went there to “socialize.” With the “Dragon Head” lodge master at the center of things, they talked about local affairs, business conditions in the two provinces, and “news,” most of which came from downriver. Meetings and fund-raising generally took place here, and it was here, too, that money-savers’ circles often threw the dice to see who took home the pot this time. The trades that really held their attention were two in number: the buying and selling of boats, and of women.

  Certain kinds of big-city hangers-on follow commercial prosperity, to meet the needs of merchants and also the boatmen. Even this tiny border town had those types along its River Street; they congregated in establishments housed in the dangling-foot structures. These little dames were either brought in from the surrounding countryside or they were camp followers of the Sichuan Army when it had come foraging in Hunan. They wore jackets of faux foreign satin over cotton print trousers; they plucked their eyebrows into thin lines and drew up their hair into big topknots that gave off strong scents of cheaply perfumed oil. Unoccupied during the day, they sat outside their doorways on little square stools, making shoes to while away the time, embroidering mating phoenixes on the toes in red and green silk thread and keeping an eye out for passersby. Or they’d sit by a window along the river to watch the sailors lifting cargo and listen to them sing as they climbed up the masts. Come evening, though, they’d take their turns serving the merchants and the boatmen, earnestly doing all that it was a prostitute’s duty to do.

  Folkways in a border district are so straightforward and unsophisticated that even the prostitutes retained their everlasting honesty and simplicity. With a new customer, they got the money in advance; with business settled, they closed the door and the wild oats were sown. If they knew the customer, payment was up to him. The prostitutes depended on the Sichuan merchants for their living, but their love went to the boatmen. When the couple were sweet on each other, they’d each swear an oath when parting, biting each other on the lips and the nape of the neck, promising to stay true during their separation. The one afloat on the boat, and likewise the one staying ashore, got through the next forty, the next fifty days with their heartstrings firmly bound to the other so far away. Particularly the women, who were given to true infatuations of indescribable simplemindedness, would see their man in their dreams if he failed to return within the agreed-upon time. Often they’d envision the boat pull into shore and their man teeter on his sea legs down the gangplank, then come running directly to her side. If she’d begun to doubt him, she’d see the man up in the rigging, directing his songs toward another quarter and ignoring her. The weaker spirits would proceed to dream of drowning themselves in the river or taking an overdose of opium, whereas those made of sterner stuff would run at their man with a cleaver. Though far outside the bounds of ordinary society, when tears and laughter worked their way into these women’s lives through loves won and loves lost, they were just like women of any other time or place, ruled body and soul by love and hate, with all their chills and fevers, oblivious to all else. The only thing really setting them apart was that they were a little more given to resolve, and therefore also foolishness—just that, no more. Short-term commitments, long-term engagements, one-night stands—these transactions with women’s bodies, given the simplicity of local mores, did not feel degrading or shameful to those who did business with their bodies, nor did those on the outside use the concepts of the educated to censure them or look down on them. These women put principles before profit and they kept their promises; even if they were prostitutes, they tended to be more trustworthy than city people who knew all about “shame.”

  The man in charge of the docks was one Shunshun, a character who’d spent his time in the ranks during the Qing dynasty and then led a squad as a sergeant in the famous Forty-ninth army regiment at the time of the revolution. Others of his rank had either become famous for their revolutionary exploits or lost their heads, but he went home, though with bad feet—the result of gout from youthful carousing. He bought a simple six-man wooden boat with his modest savings and rented it out to a boat captain down on his luck to transport goods
between Chadong and Chenzhou on commission. Luck was with him; the boat sailed safely, and in six months he’d saved money enough to marry a pretty, black-haired young widow. That was his start. Several years later, he had acquired eight boats that plied the river, a wife, and two sons.

  This untrammeled and free-spending fellow, able though he was in business, liked to store up friends and give out money. Shunshun was always there for those in need, so he never became greatly rich like the tung oil merchants. He knew what it was like to live on army rations and endure the hardships of travel, and what it felt like to have one’s hopes dashed. Whenever a boat owner bankrupted by a shipwreck, a demobilized soldier on his way home, or a scholar or painter wanting to study abroad came to town for help because he’d heard of Shunshun’s generosity, he did his utmost for them, one and all. He earned his fortune from the water, and so he sprinkled that fortune all around. He could swim, even with his bad feet. His walk was uneven, but his character and judgments were straightforward, right down the middle. Things were fairly simple out on the river; everything was decided by customary practice. Which boat was at fault in a collision, which boat had harmed another’s property—usually there was an established way to decide it. But to apply all these customary laws they needed an elder of tested virtue. On an autumn day some years before, the old boss of the riverfront had passed away. Shunshun took his place. He was only fifty at the time, but he was so astute, upright, and even-tempered, so free of greed and venality, that no objections were heard on account of his youth.

  His older son was now already seventeen years old; the younger, fifteen. These young men were as strong and muscular as little bulls. They could pilot boats and they could swim and hike long distances. Anything a lad who had grown up in a country town could do, they could do, and expertly. The older was more like his father in temper—bold, unconstrained, and confident, not tied down by pettiness or convention. The younger one’s personality followed that of his pretty and delicate mother. He was not so given to talk, and his eyebrows were exquisite and forceful—one look at him and you knew he was intelligent and full of passion.