The Boat to Redemption

by Su Tong

  I threw down the chalk and ran off.

  I was running again, but this time I was running away, and as I ran it dawned on me that since the slogan came from Chairman Mao, changing even one word made it a counter-revolutionary slogan. This was bad, very bad. I ran past the burlap-sack factory and headed towards Workers and Peasants Avenue. But when I reached the intersection, it occurred to me that my home was no longer on that street, so I turned and headed for the Government Affairs Building, which I knew like the back of my hand; my father had occupied an office on the fourth floor and my mother’s broadcasting studio was on the second floor. Not until I was standing in front of the building did it dawn on me that she too no longer worked there. I vaguely recalled Father telling me that she’d been transferred, but wasn’t sure if she’d been sent to the cooking-oil processing plant or the management office. So I went to inquire at the reception desk, where I saw a clutch of people standing around waiting for the day’s newspaper. I spotted several familiar faces, including some people who had been friendly to me in the past. But now they looked at me with blank faces. ‘What are you doing here, Dongliang?’ one woman asked. ‘Your mother no longer works at the broadcasting station.’

  They told me she worked at the processing plant and described how to get there. It was far, nearly all the way to Maple Village, and it was getting dark by the time I got there, having walked the whole way. The milling machines had shut down for the day, but the smell of new rice and rapeseed oil hung in the air. Some workers, their shift over, gestured in my direction. I didn’t know them. ‘Is Qiao Limin here?’ I asked.

  Mysterious grins appeared on their faces. ‘Yes, of course she is. She’s waiting for you.’

  So I walked inside, where I saw three people in front of a milling machine, their eyes glued to me. One was my mother, the second was Teacher Jiang of the Milltown Middle School, and the third was a uniformed policewoman named Hong. I knew I was in big trouble and that it would have been smart to turn tail and run. But I was too tired to take another step.

  My mother walked up – rushed me like a lioness, more like – and slapped me three times – smack, smack, smack. Then she turned to her companions and explained why. I still recall every word: ‘The first one was for him; the second for me, Qiao Limin, who’s tried to be an upstanding citizen all my life, only to give birth to a son who doesn’t know the meaning of the word “up-standing”; and the third was for his father, whose education of the boy has him writing counter-revolutionary slogans after only three months!’

  The Pier

  AFTER ONLY a few days in Mother’s dormitory I was ready to head back.

  I don’t know if it was her doing or the fact that I’d earned a bad reputation, but the other women in the dormitory steered clear of me. Their attitude influenced the men in the neighbouring tool-repair factory, who scowled if I was around. My only fan was a mangy dog that gave me a fervent welcome. It was begging to be liked. Day in and day out it hung around me, sniffing at my trouser legs and at my crotch – mainly at my crotch. I didn’t appreciate the mongrel’s attention, and was particularly annoyed by its fascination with my crotch. Even if I had felt more unwelcome than I did, I would still have been unwilling to make friends with a mangy cur. Finally I kicked it, and was surprised that the animal retained a measure of self-respect – it was a good thing I could run fast, or I’d have been bitten for sure.

  The dog chased me all the way to Mother’s dorm, where it set up a howl that frightened the women inside. Knowing I was the one who’d set the dog off, Mother ran out with a wet mop and drove the barking dog off, then went back inside to tell the women that everything was fine. But someone must have said something unpleasant, because when I went up to her room, she wore a dark, gloomy expression. I plopped down on the bed and began scratching my feet – the wrong thing to do, given her mood. Still holding the wet mop, she turned on me, jabbing the mop at my legs one minute and my arms the next. ‘You wicked boy,’ she scolded. ‘You’re isolated from the masses, animals hate you, and a mangy dog chases you! Even a shit-eating dog has no forgiveness in its heart for you!’

  I was clever enough to keep my mouth shut, and just let her rant on as I pinched my nose and held my breath. Go ahead, yell at me, I thought. Anything you say goes in one ear and out the other. It’s nothing but kongpi! I sat down to dinner to a chorus of scolding, and for some reason the word ‘exile’ popped into my head. Maybe that’s what I was, an exile. But one thing I knew for sure was that Mother’s cramped dormitory was no home for me; it was just a way station. The words ‘mother’ and ‘son’ meant nothing here. I was a guest – and an unwelcome guest at that. Mother supplied me with three meals a day, but every grain of rice was saturated with her sadness, and every vegetable leaf was infused with her disappointment. If I lived with her like that, either she would die and I’d go crazy, or vice versa. And I wasn’t alone in feeling that way – she did too.

  Mother was on the shore, but I had no home there, and had to head back. Note that by heading back I meant back to the barge, back to the Sunnyside Fleet.

  One morning a week later, the fleet was returning from its latest mission and I was on the pier, waiting anxiously for them. I could not say if I was waiting for my father’s barge and his home to return to, or if I was waiting for the return of my barge and my home.

  So I stood there, bag in hand. It was wet underfoot after a foggy morning, almost as if it had rained. With a bit of hesitation the sun broke through, lighting up part of the pier and leaving the rest to fend for itself. Fog hung over the mountain of coal, the piled-up commodities and the many cranes. There were spots where the sunlight was nearly blinding and others so dark it was hard to see. I waited in the darkness. Someone was moving near the embankment, but I couldn’t tell who it was. The person was heading my way from the transport office, nearly running, and dragging a shimmering white light behind. It had to be a stevedore. When he was close enough to hear, I shouted, ‘Do you know when the fleet is expected back?’

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth I regretted them, for it was the general affairs typist, Zhao Chunmei. Ah, Zhao Chunmei. She was Zhao Chuntang’s younger sister, and her name appeared in Mother’s notebook at least ten times. She’d been one of my father’s lovers. Some of the words Mother had written after Father had told the truth floated into my head. They did it! They did it on the typing desk. They did it on a window ledge. They did it again and again! The description was particularly detailed in one spot. They were in a room where cleaning gear was kept, doing it, when the caretaker opened the door. Never one to lose control in the face of danger, Father covered himself with a broom and a mop and held the door partially shut with his shoulder. ‘You can take the day off,’ he said. ‘We are doing some voluntary work in here!’

  I recalled seeing Zhao Chunmei in the office, and my abiding image of her was how fashionable and haughty she seemed. She wore milky-white high-heeled shoes virtually every day of the week, a sight rarely seen in Milltown, or – rarer still – purplish-red ones. Both made a loud click-clacking sound when she climbed the stairs. The other women in the building hated her, Mother included. They felt that her shoes served two purposes: to show off to the women and to tempt the men. I can still see that come-on look in her eyes, flirtatious as hell.

  But no longer. She knew who I was, and the look she gave me was unusually cold, the sort of look a policeman might give a criminal, her eyes glued to my face. Then she looked down at my bag, as if it contained evidence of some crime. At first I was tempted to look away, but that would have been too easy. Then I recalled my father’s line about voluntary work, and felt like laughing. Suddenly she shuddered, which surprised me. I swallowed my laughter and kept my eyes on her. She was giving me the most hateful look I’d ever seen. ‘He’s dead!’ she cried. ‘My husband, Little Tang, is dead, and Ku Wenxuan killed him!’

  That was when I noticed a white flower in Zhao Chunmei’s hair. Her shoes were also white – not high heels
, but funeral shoes, with hempen ties on the backs and heels. Her puffy cheeks distorted what she was saying. I understood that her husband was dead and that she’d said Father had killed him. But I didn’t know why. My father had been on board our barge for a long time now, so how could he have killed Little Tang? I’d always been fascinated with death, so I felt like asking when Little Tang had died and whether he’d committed suicide or was killed by someone else. But Zhao Chunmei was in no mood to say more. She just glowered at me. Finally, she gnashed her teeth and said, ‘Ku Wenxuan, you’ll repay this blood debt one of these days!’

  Her menacing glare frightened me. A woman’s face, no matter how pretty, becomes a terrible sight when it shows a thirst for vengeance. The look on Zhao Chunmei’s face was so terrifying that I instinctively stepped backwards to get away from her, reversing all the way to the loading dock. When I passed beneath a crane, I glanced up at Master Operator Liu in his cage, who signalled for me to climb up, as if he had something important to tell me. He didn’t. He just wasn’t a man who could mind his own business. Pointing to Zhao Chunmei, he said, ‘Don’t upset her. She hasn’t been herself for the past few days, ever since her husband killed himself with a pesticide.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ I said. ‘She upset me. Besides, it wasn’t me who gave her husband the pesticide, so what’s it got to do with me?’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with you,’ he said, ‘but everything to do with your dad. He’s the one who made Little Tang wear a green hat – you know, a cuckold. People say that the green hat crushed him.’

  ‘Crushed by a green hat – so what! She let my dad thump her, didn’t she? Nobody forced her. Besides, he wore that green hat for years willingly enough, and no one forced him, either. My dad did it with lots of women. How come he decided to kill himself? Stop spreading malicious gossip!’

  ‘You don’t know a damned thing,’ Liu said. ‘Willing, you say? Whoever heard of a man willing to wear a green hat? It’s not their choice to make. You’re right, Little Tang wore that hat for years, but hardly anybody knew. As long as people pretended nothing was wrong, he could do the same. But when your dad fell from power, lots of people started talking. Then the backbiting started, with people saying that Little Tang had handed his wife over to someone in a position of leadership for his own advancement. Out on the street, people whispered things. Could he pretend he was deaf? When he went to the bathhouse, the old-timers laughed at him. When he couldn’t take it any longer, he got into a fight, and wound up with a bloody nose. They offered him cotton to stop the bleeding, but he refused. Instead, he threw on his clothes and went straight to the pharmacy, supposedly to buy Mercurochrome. But what he actually bought was a bottle of DDT, which he drank on the way home. People who saw him thought it was alcohol. Now I ask you, the way Little Tang died, wouldn’t you say he was crushed by that green hat?’

  What Liu said made sense. It wasn’t very scientific, but since I didn’t know what it felt like to wear a green hat, my opinion didn’t count for much. But still I said, ‘There are internal and external causes for everything, but the internal causes are the main ones. Most of the responsibility for Little Tang’s death lies with him. You can’t blame my father for what happened.’

  ‘Don’t give me any of that internal and external bullshit,’ Liu said. ‘Do you think I don’t know my Marxism-Leninism? I never said your dad was the internal cause. If he had been, then he’d have been the one drinking the DDT.’

  I’d have liked to keep the debate with Liu going, but I glanced down at the pier, where Zhao Chunmei was still looking daggers at me. Thrown off stride, I reacted with foul language. ‘What’s that cunt up to? Her old man’s dead, so that’s the end of it. Don’t tell me my dad has a blood debt. And even if he did, what’s that got to do with me?’

  ‘What kind of gutter talk is that?’ Liu said with a frown. ‘A comrade who’s just lost her husband doesn’t deserve to be spoken about like that. Nobody’s asking your dad to repay a blood debt. She’s backed herself into a corner, and all she can do is come down to the pier to get him to put on mourning attire and pay his respects at Little Tang’s grave.’

  This was probably the only useful thing Liu said to me up there, because now the sight of Zhao Chunmei down below was more terrifying than ever. I’d have liked to stay up there in the cage, but Liu sent me back down, saying that safety regulations did not permit idlers, though the real reason was his unhappiness over my gutter talk.

  As soon as I was back on the ground, Zhao Chunmei walked towards me, taking a strip of white cloth out of her overcoat pocket and waving it in the air. ‘Ku Wenxuan’s whelp,’ she shouted. ‘Since your dad’s not here, you can wear this.’

  I was horrified. She must be crazy to think I’d wear something like that. ‘Dream on!’ I said, before taking off and running up the mountain of coal. She ran after me for a few steps, but when she realized she’d never catch me, she turned and headed back to the pier to wait for my dad, grumbling to herself and tucking the white sash back into her pocket.

  I spent the rest of the morning on top of the coal, waiting for the fleet to return, while Zhao Chunmei waited down below. Two enemies, each with their own thoughts, awaited the return of the same person – my father.

  Finally, the sun got up the nerve to climb into the sky, making the piers shimmer. Off in the distance I heard the toot of a tugboat and saw the hazy outlines of the fleet. From where I stood, the string of barges looked like an archipelago, eleven floating islands approaching in an orderly fashion. I assumed they were carrying cargo from the town of Wufu. Goods from most places could be shipped uncovered, making them easy to identify. But Wufu commodities were different. The barges approached the piers, their cargo covered by dark-green tarpaulins, and I knew there would be large sealed crates with no delivery addresses under the tarps. They’d be marked with coded Arabic numerals and foreign lettering. I knew without looking that this cargo was destined to wind up at the Southern Combat Readiness Base.

  From where I stood I could see barge number seven, and there was my father. The other barges were shrouded in green tarps, like a secretive collective body; number seven stood out from the others by the way its decks were open to the sky. The forward hold was packed with squirming black and white animals. At first I couldn’t tell what they were, but soon I realized it was a boatful of pigs – our barge was transporting thirty or forty pigs! My father, bent at the waist beside the hold, was trying to control a boatload of black, white and spotted pigs. After driving me off the barge, he’d gone off to pick up some honoured guests. Now, days later, he was bringing a boatload of live pigs to Milltown.

  It was around eight in the morning. The loudspeakers were blaring callisthenics music that drowned out the tugboat’s whistle. The barges were ready to dock, sending water splashing in all directions and galvanizing the crews into action – they dropped anchor and secured the boats with hawsers. I saw my father standing in the bow, not knowing what to do until Desheng ran up and helped him drop anchor. A husky man’s voice came over the loudspeaker – ‘Limbering exercise: one, two, three, four’ – as the boats, matching the callisthenics beat – ‘one, two, three, four’ – nestled up to the piers.

  Dockside cranes swung into action, but not before the stevedores had gathered on the embankment. A cacophony of noise rose all around. I saw Zhao Chunmei race under the arm of a crane, heading for the boats. If I knew anything, it was that no one would let her aboard while she was in mourning garments. Sailors are a superstitious lot, and would never allow that to happen. As I expected, Sun Ximing and his wife came down off barge number one to stop her. Then Six-Fingers Wang and his family blocked her way on to the gangplank. So, with a quick change of tactics, she turned and headed for barge number seven. When the people spotted what she was doing, they grew anxious. ‘Go away!’ they shouted. ‘Don’t come any closer!’ Desheng and Old Qian even used poles to drive her away. I watched as she ran around avoiding them.

  In
the end, she gave up. ‘Ku Wenxuan, get off that boat!’ she shouted, before crumpling to the ground.

  Anticipating something like this, I ran down the mountain of coal and saw a crowd of people heading from the General Affairs Building towards the piers. We all reached Zhao Chunmei at the same time. Obviously, they’d been sent by her brother Zhao Chuntang, and they started to carry Chunmei away. She was crying – not keening, but sobbing her heart out. ‘I’m not crazy,’ she insisted. ‘Why are you doing this? I haven’t done anything wrong, and you don’t have to worry that I’ll humiliate you.’ She struggled in their arms; first a defiant leg kicked out, then an angry arm flailed in the air. She was desperately trying to get back to the pier, by crawling if necessary, twisting her head to keep the boats in sight. We passed each other, going in opposite directions, and when she spotted me, she turned to get a better look. Glaring at me hatefully through tear-filled eyes, she cried out shrilly, in a desolate tone, ‘Go and tell your dad that I don’t care about the blood debt. I just want him to visit Little Tang’s grave in funeral garb!’

  I stood on the pier, bag in hand, and watched them carry Zhao Chunmei away. One of the white sashes fell from around her waist and skimmed the ground behind her. As soon as she was out of sight, my fears were replaced by curiosity. Do it, do it, thump, thump! How had she and my father managed so well, and Little Tang wound up dead? I struggled to conjure up an image of the now dead Little Tang, and what came to mind was a fair-skinned, bespectacled man with a kindly face, one of the most cultured men in town. He was in the habit of saying sorry. Always ‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’ He’d played chess at our house, and each time he took one of Father’s men, he’d say sorry. I pondered the relationship between my father and the two of them, and couldn’t help feeling that it was all tied up with cheating and ugly schemes. Father did what he did with Zhao Chunmei in the caretaker’s cupboard during the day and then invited Little Tang over for a game of chess at night. Was that supposed to be some sort of consolation for the cuckolded man, or was it shitting on his head? Then, for some strange reason, two words Mother used a lot in her notebook – ‘active’ and ‘passive’ – came to mind. Who had been the active participant in all this, and who had been the passive one? I couldn’t work out how passive Zhao Chunmei had been, or how active Father had been. But my mind was clear on one thing: Little Tang had been totally passive. Seen from this angle, Master Liu had hit the nail on the head: Father had secretly placed a green hat on Little Tang’s head, and that hat had crushed him to death.