The Boat to Redemption

by Su Tong

  ‘And how will you accomplish that?’ they asked.

  ‘I’ll no longer let you feed or clothe me,’ she said. ‘I’m going to strike out on my own.’

  ‘How do you, a mere girl, expect to do that, especially on that little bit of money? Have you got a mate in mind? Who is it?’

  Angered that her family had underestimated her future prospects, she said, ‘Who is my mate? You wouldn’t understand even if I told you. My mate is the performing stage! You may think I’m callous, but if I don’t make a break with you, you will control my future, and while you may not care about the future, I do!’

  After leaving the Horsebridge butcher’s shop, Mother’s travels took her to many places. She applied for membership of the Beijing Opera Troupe, the Armoured Corps Cultural Troupe, a Shaoxing Opera Troupe, as well as district Beijing Opera troupes. She even applied for an acrobatic troupe. But her hopes were dashed each time – in like a tiger’s head, out like a snake’s tail, as the saying goes – either because they thought her legs were stumpy or that her family background presented problems. After being refused entry into the traditional cultural troupes, she’d used up all her travel money and had become discouraged. So she lowered her expectations, setting her sights instead on the popular stage, to perform for the masses. By taking a step back, she opened up new vistas and quickly found work at the Harvest Nitrate Fertilizer Factory, which was home to the celebrated Golden Sparrow River Region Cultural Propaganda Troupe. And there she received the recognition she deserved; at last her beauty had caught someone’s attention. During the day, workers at the factory packaged fertilizer, but after hours they rehearsed for cultural performances. My mother was either the lead singer or lead dancer in the amateur troupe. When she walked out of the factory door at the end of her shift, her blue uniform reeked of ammonia, but the captivating world of the stage lived beneath her collar.

  One day, my father, who worked as a woodsman at the time, went to the factory to buy fertilizer and laid eyes on my mother for the first time. He was surprised to see a bright-red silk jacket under her work clothes, her costume for the red silk dance. He did not know what to think about her costume or how to sum up her singular charm. Their second meeting, which was arranged by a go-between, took place by the fertilizer drainage ditch; he watched as she emerged from the factory’s rear door, lithe and graceful, again with a costume under her work clothes, this one a familiar light-green dress, which, he recalled, would be worn in the tea-picker’s skit. This time he was prepared. He stirred feelings in her with the first thing he ever said to her: ‘Comrade Qiao,’ he said, ‘your body emanates the spirit of revolutionary romanticism.’

  While one could say that my parents fell in love, it would be more accurate to say that they discovered one another at the same moment. My father discovered her beauty and talent; she discovered his bloodline and future prospects. He was half a head shorter than she, which even then made their marriage a mismatch, though there were reasons for them to come together. But then in September, my father’s secrets were exposed. Someone, it’s not clear who, revealed to Mother that the first thing he habitually said in furtherance of his womanizing was ‘Comrade So-and-So, your body emanates the spirit of revolutionary romanticism.’

  My mother’s lungs felt as if they were about to explode – that was one of her favourite expressions. She once described for me the powerful reflex anger caused in her lungs: ‘I have trouble breathing,’ she said, ‘my lungs pound against my chest, and I’m sure that I lose part of them every time that happens.’ Anger and hurt led her to a new discovery about Father, that he was what is known as ‘cow dung disguised as a flower garden to trick the flowers’. She was one of those flowers, now growing in a pile of cow dung, and the reasons for them to have come together suddenly no longer existed, while reasons for them to part mounted. Mother began folding her clean autumn clothes and packing them away in a camphor chest, storing her treasured stage costumes in a suitcase that itself was a treasure, a relic from her life on the stage. A red seal on top of the suitcase said:

  AWARDED TO THE POPULAR

  ENTERTAINMENT ACTIVISTS

  OF THE HARVEST NITROGEN FERTILIZER

  FACTORY

  Towards the end, our family life became chaotic and stifling. Mother divided the household chores into three categories. One was reserved for her, and consisted mainly of preparing lunch and dinner for me and for herself. Another was reserved for me, and consisted mainly of sweeping and dusting and taking out the rubbish. The final category was the most arduous: making breakfast for all three of us, cleaning the toilet twice a day, and taking care of all aspects of Father’s daily life: food, clothing and whatever else he needed. Those were his duties. Mother said she’d lost her appetite for washing his socks and underwear, and was adamant about not cooking for him. She said she’d suffered so much humiliation she could barely keep from poisoning his food.

  My mother followed methods used by organs of the dictatorship in punishing criminals, subjecting Father to the ultimate settling of accounts. She overlooked nothing, from his labour-reform activities in the yard to special examinations in the bedroom. His last days at home were little more than house arrest, with Mother as his inquisitor, and everything centred on problems of lifestyle. Just that, his lifestyle, which of course involved only the area below the waist, not something people liked to talk about. Father, who was easily embarrassed, could not endure the questioning, so he took to keeping out of sight. The minute Mother came home from work, he hid in the toilet and stayed there as long as he could.

  Whenever I saw Mother take a pen and her worker’s notebook out of a drawer, I knew the interrogation was about to begin. ‘Go on, call your father out here.’ She wanted me to bang on the toilet door, and if I refused, she did it herself with a broom handle. Father would emerge and pass under the broom, bent at the waist, heading for the yard. But he’d barely make it to the front door before hearing Mother’s sarcastic laugh. He’d stop, turn, and come face to face with her broom, pointing at him. ‘Go ahead,’ she’d say sternly. ‘Open the door and go outside, where a crowd of people is waiting to see Ku Wenxuan embarrass himself. Go out there and give them a show. I’m betting you don’t have the guts!’

  He didn’t. After taking a turn around the yard, he’d obediently come back inside and sit opposite her, where he’d beat about the bush instead of answering her questions, or else admit minor transgressions but do whatever he could to avoid the more serious ones. To Mother, this smacked of passive resistance. They never argued in front of me and lowered the curtain to keep me from peeking in at the window, but on one occasion I heard Mother’s hysterical shouts tear through the window: ‘Ku Wenxuan, leniency to those who confess their crimes and severity to those who refuse!’ The shouts emanated from a bedroom confrontation. It sounded comical to me, but scary as well.

  The truth is, the more they argued, the less I cared. On the contrary, the quieter and more peaceful they were, the more I worried. Caution piqued my curiosity. They might be able to deceive the neighbours, but not me. One night a deadly silence descended in their room, throwing me into a panic. I climbed the date tree and had an unobstructed view through the transom window. The lamp was lit, so I could see them both. Mother was sitting at her desk, notebook in hand, her cheeks wet with tears; my father was kneeling at her feet like a dog and had pulled down his trousers to show her his honoured fish-shaped birthmark. At it again! He’d brought his sickness home with him. I saw her curse him loudly, glaring at him with contempt and disgust. But he was relentless. His trousers were round his knees, and he was crawling along the floor, moving to wherever Mother turned her face. Sharp light glinted off his pale, bony backside in the darkened room. Then his shouts tore through the night.

  ‘Look! You used to like looking at it. Why won’t you look at it now? Take a good look at my birthmark, I’m Deng Shaoxiang’s son! That’s the truth! I said look, take a good look. It’s a fish. I’m Deng Shaoxiang’s son. Don’t b
e in such a hurry to make a clean break. If you file for divorce, you’ll live to regret it!’

  I burst into tears. Was I crying for him or for her? I couldn’t say. I climbed down out of the tree and took a long look at my house, then at the blue sky. I dried my eyes and snarled into the sky, ‘Go ahead, divorce! If you don’t, you’re kongpi. And if you do, you’re still kongpi!’

  Their divorce went without a hitch. The only problem was me. If I went with him, I’d sail the river; if I went with her, I’d stay on dry land. The river had its appeal, but I was afraid to give up dry land. So I said to Father, ‘I’ll spend half the year on the barge with you and half the year with Mother. What do you say?’

  ‘Fine with me,’ he said. ‘But check with your mother. I doubt she’ll go along with it.’

  So I checked, and was met with boiling anger. ‘Absolutely not! If you want me, you can’t have him. And if you want him, you can’t have me. If the top beam is crooked, the one below can’t be straight. How am I supposed to take care of a child he’s had a hand in raising?’

  So I had to choose. Two sets of inauspicious gifts were arrayed before me. One was Father and a barge, the other was Mother and dry land. There was no way out, I had to choose one over the other. I chose Father. Even now the boat people sometimes talk about my decision. If Dongliang had stayed with his mother, they say, he’d be this or that. Or, If he’d stayed with her, Ku Wenxuan would be this or that. Even, His mother would be this or that. But I ignored all the ‘this or that’ talk. And ‘what ifs’ bored me. Kongpi, all of them. Like water that keeps flowing, or grass that keeps growing, there was no choice involved; it was all up to fate. My father’s fate was tied up with a martyr named Deng Shaoxiang, and mine was tied up with him.

  At the end of that year, a notice regarding the forced-transfer barge fleet was posted on the door of my house, spelling the end of my time in Milltown. When we boarded the barge, Mother had to move, and she did. But she was in such a hurry that she accidentally left her notebook behind. As she rushed out of the house she tossed a cloth bundle on to my bed, and when I picked it up, I found the notebook inside. She’d made a cover for her cherished notebook out of an illustrated newspaper. The front was graced with the ruddy face of Li Tiemei from the revolutionary opera The Red Lantern. The back showed Li’s hand, holding a red lantern. With time and opportunity on my side, I took as long as I needed to decide what to do with this special notebook, and wound up making a bold decision. I’d neither hand it over to Father nor give it back to Mother. I’d hide it away for myself.

  To this day I can’t tell you who I hid that notebook for. Was it for Father or was it for Mother? Maybe it was for me. This secret most likely impacted on the rest of my life. I committed everything Mother had written in it – or should I say, every one of Father’s indiscretions – to memory. Even with the hatred she felt as she recorded everything, her handwriting was always neat and pleasing to the eye. The themes and content were unsurprising. She noted Father’s infidelities in great detail: numbers, times and locations. In some places she added angry comments: ‘Shameless! … Obscene! … I could die!’ To my astonishment, I knew the names of some of the women, including the mother of my schoolmate Li Shengli, and Zhao Chuntang’s younger sister, Zhao Chunmei. Even Aunty Sun, who ran the salvage station, was in there. These women had always impressed me as being proper and virtuous. Why were their names in Mother’s notebook?

  Paradise

  HARDLY ANYONE today can relate the history of the Sunnyside Fleet with any degree of accuracy.

  Let’s start with the tugboat. Owned by a shipping company, it ran on diesel, had twin rudders and plenty of horsepower. Seven or eight workers manned the tug, although they worked only when there were barges that needed to be moved. Each time out counted as a shift, and when that shift was over, they went back to their homes on the banks of the river. Sailors love to drink, and the more the younger ones drank, the meaner they got. They could be having a normal conversation when suddenly fists would fly. I saw one of them jump into the river with the jagged edge of a bottle stuck in his chest and swim to the riverside hospital, cursing the whole way. The older hands were more easy-going and not nearly as volatile when they were drunk. One of them, a man with a full beard, would lie out on the deck and sleep like a log. Another of the older ones – with a face like a monkey – was in the habit of showering on the afterdeck. Stark naked, he would work up a lather and then rinse off with cold water, making eyes at the women and girls on the barges. I didn’t think much of that gang.

  For that matter, I didn’t think much of anyone. The Sunnyside Fleet boasted eleven barges, manned by eleven families, most with shady backgrounds. In that respect, we were all pretty much alike. Since Father’s situation was still unsettled, our background was as murky as any of the others. Taking me aboard one of the barges with him could hardly be called exile, nor was it some sort of banishment; rather, it was a reclassification.

  The boat people called a spot upriver named Plum Mountain their ancestral home. You can no longer find it on any Golden Sparrow River regional map. During the construction of a reservoir, Plum Mountain township, with its thirteen villages, was flooded, and now the place is marked on maps in blue – Victory Reservoir. Only an idiot would believe that Plum Mountain was really their ancestral home, since their speech was a mish-mash of accents and dialects, with pithy, bizarre ways of saying things. Let’s say we were heading upriver towards Horsebridge. They’d say we were heading ‘down’ to it. They called eating ‘nibbling’, and relieving themselves was ‘snapping it off’. As for sex, which people ashore seldom even mentioned, they were perfectly happy to talk about it any time, any place. The word they used was ‘thump’. If several men were sitting around with conspiratorial looks on their faces, all you heard them talking about was thump, thump, thump. Why ‘thump’? Because what most people consider to be a serious social issue was just an ordinary thumping to them.

  I was generally repelled by the way they lived. They were sloppy dressers. In cold weather they overdressed, with reds and greens and yellows and blues all thrown together and layered collars sticking up around their necks. Then when summer gave way to autumn they were underdressed, sometimes to the point of being half-naked. Barefoot and shirtless, the men were so dark that from a distance they looked like Africans. They wore coarse, homemade white shorts, the material for which came mostly from Great Harvest flour sacks. Wide in the crotch, the tops were rolled over at the waist and tied with drawstrings. The women were slightly better, in a bizarre way. Married women wore their hair in a bun, adorned with a magnolia or a gardenia. Above the waist, they sported a variety of attire: some fancied the faddish Peter Pan blouses, others wore men’s white T-shirts, and others still preferred short granny jackets. But below the waist they were more conservative and unified: they wore baggy, knee-length rayon trousers, black or dark blue, sometimes decorated with an embroidered peony on the leg. Owing to frequent childbirth and nursing, and since they were not in the habit of wearing brassieres, their breasts sagged in defeat, large and unwieldy. They swung from side to side when the women walked the decks of the barges, a grumbling badge of honour. I was not impressed. Even when they were exposed, they held no interest for me.

  The barge children usually ran around butt naked, both as an economy measure and as a sort of identification mark. There was no fear of their getting lost ashore, for anyone who found them invariably returned them to the piers. Boys, of course, were favoured over girls. They wore little pigtails, bracelets on their wrists, and long-life necklaces around their necks. The girls, on the other hand, went without jewellery, and their mothers cut their hair haphazardly and unevenly, leaving them with little haystacks on their heads. Adolescent girls covered their private parts with belly warmers made of white handkerchiefs sewn together. Older girls wore either their mother’s or their father’s hand-me-downs, which meant they never fitted. Though they were more or less unloved, that had no effect on their sense
of family duty. All day long they ran up and down the decks doing chores, hollering at their mischievous little brothers and sisters.

  The only truly pretty girl in the fleet, Yingtao, was so intent on playing the role of a mother that she carried her baby brother strapped to her back with red cloth, day in and day out, going from family to family. She once walked up to the stern of barge number six, where she watched me steely-eyed, like a sentry.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said. ‘Go away.’

  ‘I’m on barge number six,’ she said, ‘not yours, so mind your own business.’

  ‘I’m not interested in minding anybody’s business,’ I said. ‘I just don’t want you watching me.’

  ‘If you weren’t looking at me,’ she said, ‘how’d you know I was watching you?’

  ‘OK, I won’t look at you, and you don’t talk to me.’

  ‘Who said I want to talk to you?’ she replied. ‘You spoke to me first.’ She was too quick for me, so I just glared at her with the fiercest, most threatening look I could manage. It didn’t faze her. Instead, with an enigmatic smile she said, ‘Don’t act so cocky. I know all about your family. I’ll let you see my brother’s backside. He’s got a birthmark, and it’s a fish too!’ She untied the cloth holding her brother and exposed his tiny rear end to me. ‘See! See that birthmark. It looks just like a fish!’ I could hear the pride in her voice, while the boy, who was now in her arms, began to fidget. ‘Don’t you dare snap it off,’ Yingtao said, raising her voice. ‘I said, don’t you dare! You can go on the potty in a little while.’