The Boat to Redemption

by Su Tong

  That sunflower brought me a strange sense of elation. So I waited at the corner as the queue in front of the general store grew shorter and eventually disappeared.

  As I walked out of the store carrying my jug of wine, I heard a voice behind me. It was Four-Eyes Ma, the store’s bookkeeper. ‘That’s powerful stuff,’ he shouted. ‘When you get home, tell Old Ku not to drink too much. Tell him Bookkeeper Ma says he’ll get even more downcast if he tries to drown his sorrows!’

  I couldn’t tell if there was some hidden meaning in his comment, but I pretended not to hear him. He and my father had once enjoyed playing chess together, and he had been good at letting Father win by a slim margin. They were on relatively good terms, but no matter how good the terms were, in the end it was nothing but kongpi. I refused to believe that Four-Eyes’ comment was well-meaning, and suspected that his soft-spoken suggestion was really a ruse to win the respect of the young woman behind the counter. I never passed on people’s greetings to Father, because I didn’t think they came from the heart. I put my trust in myself alone, his son, since I couldn’t think of a single person in Milltown who gave a damn about Ku Wenxuan.

  I carried out Father’s instruction by taking the jug of rice wine over to the chess pavilion, where a noisy crowd had gathered, and a gaggle of geese filled the air with their honking. My access to the memorial was effectively blocked. But I got as close as possible, and there I spotted the idiot Bianjin, cavorting drunkenly in front of the martyr’s memorial, protected by the geese he tended. He was calling out ‘Mama!’ to the etched likeness of Deng Shaoxiang. ‘Mama! Mama!’ he said. ‘Go and tell Zhao Chuntang to build a shed for my geese. Mama! Mama! Go and tell Little Wang at the general store to marry me. Mama! Mama! Give me five yuan so I can buy a jug for good wine. They look down on me, and won’t even drop the price by five fen.’

  People tried to stop him, but failed. ‘Even an idiot knows how to take advantage of a situation,’ someone yelled, ‘calling Deng Shaoxiang Mama. You think calling her Mama is going to help you eat and drink well, do you? We’d like to be the chosen one, too. What makes an idiot like you think you can make that claim?’

  ‘I’ll tell you why,’ Bianjin said. ‘I’ve got a fish on my ass.’

  ‘Be careful, you idiot,’ someone warned him. ‘Palming yourself off as Deng Shaoxiang’s son can get you into serious trouble. Knock it off, or the police will haul you in.’

  ‘I am Deng Shaoxiang’s son,’ Bianjin insisted. ‘The police don’t scare me. I’m the martyr’s son. I scare them!’

  ‘Empty talk!’ someone else shouted. ‘Take down your pants and show us your birthmark. We’ll see if it’s a fish or not.’

  I shouldered my way to the front in time to see Bianjin take down his pants and expose his backside to the crowd. A roar erupted from everyone – men and women, old and young – who gawked incredulously at the idiot’s backside. ‘A fish!’ came a shout of astonishment. ‘It’s a fish! A perfect little fish! Maybe he is Deng Shaoxiang’s son, after all!’ Taking the uproar as an invitation to put on a show, the idiot stuck out his rear end and danced around the memorial, only to be met with an explosion of joyous laughter. Someone went up and kicked his exposed backside. ‘Pull your pants up, idiot, and be quick about it,’ the man said. ‘If Deng Shaoxiang really was your mother, then she wasn’t hanged by the enemy, she died of humiliation over her son.’

  The pavilion was in the neighbourhood of the piers, so instead of the police, it was Scabby Five and Baldy Chen who showed up. By then, Bianjin had sobered up enough to know it was time to leave, so he ran off towards the river, followed by his geese. ‘The work team is coming back on National Day,’ he proclaimed to anyone who would listen, ‘and they’ll announce the name of Deng Shaoxiang’s son. Just you wait, especially all you people who’ve tormented me!’

  Now that the farce had ended, people became aware that I was there in their midst. They exchanged hurried glances and whispered among themselves. I could guess what they were saying. They were ridiculing or trying to humiliate me. I’d arrived at the chess pavilion like a rabbit that has landed in a hunter’s sights. The idiot Bianjin could run off, but not me. It was my turn to sprinkle wine on the memorial and tell the residents of Milltown that my father was firm in his belief. I wanted them to know that Ku Wenxuan was Deng Shaoxiang’s son, which made me her grandson.

  I carried the jug up to the memorial, but before I could open it, Scabby and Baldy walked up. Scabby put his foot on the jug cap and said, ‘Just what do you think you’re doing, Kongpi?’

  ‘I’m going to sprinkle wine on the martyr’s memorial. Isn’t that OK?’

  ‘No,’ he growled. ‘Pick that jug up and take it away from here.’

  ‘Look over there,’ Baldy said with a tap on my shoulder. He was pointing to a bulletin tacked up on one of the pavilion posts. ‘You do have eyes, don’t you? How could you miss seeing that? A new regulation. “Engaging in feudalistic and superstitious behaviours in the name of memorializing the martyr is strictly forbidden.” Sprinkling wine is feudalistic and superstitious behaviour, don’t you know that?’

  I went up close to read the bulletin. There it was, in black and white: ‘New Regulation Concerning Memorials to the Martyr Deng Shaoxiang.’

  Baldy was telling the truth. The new regulation was intended to stop people from spreading a rumour that Deng Shaoxiang’s spirit had the power to heal injuries and rescue the dying, which had been making the rounds recently. Milltown residents were expressly forbidden from devotional displays at the pavilion. There was to be no burning of spirit paper or incense, no calls to the spirits of deceased persons, and no laments by women from neighbouring villages over their mistreatment.

  But there were no strictures against sprinkling wine. ‘You people must be illiterate,’ I said. ‘This forbids people from feudalistic and superstitious activities, but says nothing about sprinkling wine. Where does it say that? Show me!’

  There was nothing Scabby Five, who was barely literate, could say, so he kept his foot on my jug and glowered at me. Baldy, on the other hand, was surer of himself. With a contemptuous grin, he traced his finger over the words ‘feudalistic’ and ‘superstitious’ and stopped at the small print, where it said ‘etc’. ‘See that? It says “etc”. You’ve been to school, Kongpi. Know what that means? It means that sprinkling wine may not be listed, but it’s included in “etc”.’

  I could only stare helplessly at the words.

  ‘Why are you wasting your breath on him?’ Scabby Five yelled at Baldy Chen. ‘No sprinkling means no sprinkling!’

  As he was bending down for the jug, Baldy glanced up and saw the hard look in my eyes. He dropped his hands and placed them on the small of his back. ‘I sprained my back yesterday,’ he said, ‘so come and pick it up.’

  ‘It’s not your back you sprained,’ Scabby said angrily. ‘It’s your guts! Are you afraid of him? I’ll pick it up if you won’t. Of all the people who scare me, he’s not one of them, not Kongpi!’

  I fought with Scabby Five over that jug, each of us trying to pull it away from the other, and we wound up outside the pavilion. A loud thud ended the struggle, as the jug fell to the ground and the lid broke, spilling the contents on the ground. The distinctive fragrance of aged wine spread quickly in the air; my feet were quickly drenched. I was enraged; there were several options available to me, and the first was to pick up the bottom half of the jug and fling it at Scabby’s head, a sure-fire way to settle scores, old and new. So I picked it up and was just about to throw it when something unexpected occurred. What remained of the wine in the broken jug was sloshing back and forth, reflecting my face, which shifted with the liquid and began to blur. But what really caught me by surprise was the familiar sound that emerged from the jug: kongpi, kongpi. Dejection overcame me and my anger dissipated. Utterly deflated, I laid the jug down on the ground and asked Scabby a shameful question: ‘If I can’t sprinkle the wine, is it OK if I drink it?’

  He
dipped his finger in the wine and tasted it. ‘Do you have all your pubic hair, Kongpi? You want to drink at your age? It’s none of my business if you do or not, but you have to do it out here. No drinking in the pavilion. Go ahead, drink it, but that’s not going to make a man out of you. You’ll still be Kongpi.’

  Well, I went ahead and did that shameful thing, which later made the rounds of Milltown: on the eve of Deng Shaoxiang’s commemoration, I laid a sheet of coloured paper on the ground, sat down, and, with everyone’s eyes on me, drank half of the wine in the jug.

  I was barely sober when Sun Ximing and Desheng passed by the pavilion; before they dragged me back to the river I told them to bring along the rest of the wine for my father. I can’t recall how I made it back aboard the boat; but I do remember how Father slapped me with the sole of his cloth shoe and roared at me. I have no idea what he said or what I said to explain myself. I’ve never been good at explaining myself when I’m perfectly clear-headed, so you can imagine what came out of me when I was half drunk. All I could say was ‘Kongpi’. How else could I explain myself?

  Most drunks sleep like pigs. I tossed and turned and had terrible dreams, one of which scared me awake. Suddenly I had the feeling that our barge wouldn’t move. The tug chugged forward, taking all the other barges with it, but not ours. A strange watery sound came to me from the stern, so I went back to take a look. Something weird was happening to our anchor: it was being held by a hand coming out of the water – not too big but not particularly small, all five nicely shaped fingers wrapped around the anchor, half of the back of the hand white, the other half – scary as hell – covered with dark-green moss. I was reminded of all the Golden Sparrow water-demon legends. Rice wine, rice wine! Heat up some rice wine to drive away the demon! I went back to get the jug. It was empty. In my dream I even recalled my mistake – I’d drunk it all. Suddenly panicked, I picked up a bamboo pole to dislodge that hand. It didn’t work. I pushed harder, madly, until the pole flew out of my hands and landed in the river. Then the dark water under our barge lit up and waves began to crash as the face of a beautiful woman rose up out of the water – a round face, with big eyes, a slightly concave nose, and old-fashioned hair cut, ear-length short; water grass woven into her black hair glistened like crystal. Her shoulders came into view next, then a basket she carried on her back. I saw water in the basket; it was silvery, and a lotus leaf was floating on top of it. The leaf moved, exposing the blurry, wet head of a baby.

  I was seeing Deng Shaoxiang, I was privileged to see her heroic spirit. I should have felt honoured, but what I actually felt was dread. Her dignified presence struck fear in me. Now that she had risen out of the water, she fixed her perceptive gaze on me, a look that told me she saw everything I did and heard everything I said. I stood on the stern of our barge trembling, waiting for her to reveal her identity. But she did not talk about herself or about her descendants. I waited for her to educate me, but she neither forgave nor criticized me. No, she raised her moss-covered hand and sternly patted the basket on her back. ‘Come down,’ she said. ‘Come down. I want you to come down here!’

  I didn’t dare. How could I jump into her basket? The thought frightened me awake. The lamp in the cabin where I slept still shone. Father was asleep on the sofa, traces of his angry outburst imprinted on his old and slightly bloated face. He had kept the lamp on, creating paper flowers that lay in profusion on his knees and on the floor, big and colourful. I picked up several of them and took them out to the stern, where the anchor rested against the side of the barge, as always. It gave off a dull glint and banged softly against the steel hull, a tranquil, felicitous sound.

  Deepening night lay over the river. The night breeze rippled the surface, with shadows cast by passing birds and water gourds floating in our wake. I could even hear them knock up against the space between the barges. But the martyr Deng Shaoxiang had come and gone, a magical spirit performing secret tasks. She had come and gone at will, leaving no trace of her clandestine visit.

  I couldn’t say if I’d had a nightmare or a sweet dream.

  Maiden

  FOR THE longest time I couldn’t wait for Huixian to grow up. That was my deepest, darkest secret.

  But I was afraid that she would develop into an adult too fast. That was a secret second only to the other.

  My unsociable traits and short fuse were linked to the conflict of those two secrets. Many people keep diaries, in which they record details of their lives. Not me. Everyone called me Kongpi, and the life of a kongpi does not deserve to be written down. It’s a waste of paper, ink and time. I had enough self-awareness to know that the only person whose life was worth recording was Huixian. I used the same kind of notebook that both my father and mother had used – a worker’s handbook with a cardboard cover. They were on sale at the general store and the stationery store for eight fen. Sturdy and durable, they had enough pages to record things for a long time if you wrote small, with concise, precise words.

  I was particularly prudent at first, sticking to the ‘dossier’ style of writing and the principle of ‘seeking truth through facts’, limiting my entries to practical and realistic considerations: how tall she was, how much she weighed, how advanced her reading skills were, how many songs she knew. But gradually, over time, I loosened up, enhancing my jottings with aspects of her life, such as who she argued with. Whatever I heard went into my diary. When she was given a bowl of chicken soup, whether it was tasty or not, thick or thin, any comment she made went into my diary. If someone made a jacket or a pair of shoes for her, how they looked and how they fitted all went into my diary. Then later, whenever someone praised Huixian or passed on gossip about her, if I heard it, it went into the diary. Finally, I began entering my own ideas and any number of chaotic, largely inarticulate thoughts, even dreamed-up code words and phrases that only I understood. To illustrate, I began referring to Huixian as Sunflower and to myself as Gourd. My father was Lumber, while the people on shore were Bandit One, Bandit Two, and so on. The boat people became chickens or ducks or cows or sheep, things like that. All this to keep my father in the dark if he tried to read my diary entries. At times, when I was writing or drawing in my notebook, I was conscious of his presence and the suspicious look in his eyes. ‘What in the world are you writing?’ he’d ask. ‘And why won’t you let me see it? Keeping a diary is a good idea, but you can get into serious trouble if you’re not careful what you put in it. Remember Teacher Zhu from the Milltown Elementary School? Well, he took out his frustrations with the Party and society in general in his diary, and they arrested him.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Dad,’ I said. ‘I’m perfectly happy with the Party and society in general. It’s me I’m not happy with. You’ve heard how people call me Kongpi, haven’t you? So that’s how you can see my diary – kongpi.’

  I was lying, of course. I could be kongpi, but not my diary. That held my greatest secrets; it was the one thing I could rely upon. By opening it I was able to see Huixian’s face and her body; I could tell what her hair smelled like and could detect the delicate fragrance only a young maiden possessed. After so many years had passed the image of Huixian as a little girl to pity existed in my head, but not in my body; I embraced a hard-to-describe love and an uncontrollable desire for her. As I flipped through my diary, my heart was filled with anxieties that weighed me down and threatened my very existence, all because of a girl’s maturation. I resisted that process. As she matured, a pair of budding breasts pushed up underneath her red blouse; as she matured, hair sprouted in armpits that were like yellow jade; as she matured, I was burdened with erections. That spelled danger. Though I resisted her maturation, what I really resisted were those erections. I was a healthy young man who could forgive himself for having erections, whether they occurred at night or during the day, whether they were caused by fancily dressed, fashionable girls and women on the shore or by the full-figured, flirtatious daughter of Six-Fingers Wang, with her daringly wild nature. But I could not forgive myse
lf for the dark, gloomy erections over which my mind and body were engaged in a bitter struggle. There were times when I triumphed over them, but I must confess that most of the time they were beyond my control; at those times my wilful genitals overpowered my will and my mind.

  Summer, it seemed to me, was the truly dangerous season, and after Huixian came aboard, summers became more dangerous than ever. Each year seemed hotter than the year before, turning our steel-hulled barge into a blast furnace. When the fleet was berthed at the piers, we lay there baked by the sun. Men and boys who knew how to swim stripped naked and dived into the river. That did not include Father and me, not because we tolerated the heat better than the others, but because we shared an aversion to the naked body. I’d stand on the bow keeping watch, not looking at the men and boys in the water but the girls on the barges. They watched the swimmers, I watched them. The other girls were green leaves, Huixian alone was an eye-catching sunflower. I watched her go ashore with a bucket in one hand and wash basin on her hip, and I wondered why she chose to wash clothes on the shore. But when I looked more closely, I figured it out. Each time she dumped a bucketful of water into the basin, a thin jacket spread out and sank to the bottom; then her flowery pants floated to the top as the water turned red. Why red? I knew why, don’t think I didn’t. I’d sneaked a look at the Barefoot Doctor’s Handbook as a youngster, from which I’d learned a thing or two about female physiology. For her it was perfectly normal; I was the abnormal one. With my eyes trained on the shore, my heart cried out with great clarity and abnormal logic, Don’t wash that, don’t! Don’t grow up, don’t!