The Boat to Redemption

by Su Tong

  Chairman Mao once said that persistence triumphs. Huixian persisted with her work in the troupe for some time, but in the end, a single blossom stands no chance against the jealousy of a garden of flowers. She persisted, but triumph eluded her in the end.

  Snow fell during the New Year’s Festival of the third year. A thin layer of ice formed in the shallows of the river, and the air turned cold on the barges. Piles of snow kept the temperature low on the banks. Huixian returned. She was wearing her hair in the style of dancers in the city, with a round bun tied with a sky-blue satin band. An army overcoat hid her developing body from view. Though it was too big for her, it gave her a unique look; it was obvious that the red sweater and white scarf underneath were what she wanted people to notice. The way she was dressed reminded me a little of my mother. Was that the style of revolutionary romanticism? I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not, whether it pleased or concerned me. One thing I was sure of was that it was too early for her to have such an affected look.

  The impressive manner in which Huixian came home masked the frustration, the dashed hopes we’d heard about. Zhao Chuntang himself went to fetch her in a newly purchased Jeep. She arrived in town not via the piers but via the highway. She stepped down off the Jeep, a girl proudly returning home in glory. But there was an inside story, a behind-the-scenes detail, which became a hot topic of discussion among the population. I heard lots of stories, the most believable of which was that the authorities were especially fond of this Milltown Little Tiemei, who was regularly invited to attend banquets and such. Older comrades doted on her and were reluctant to see her go. But she was simply too young for many of the things required of her, and too inexperienced. Better to send her home to grow and to train out of the limelight. Many of the leading officials, including Bureau Chief Liu, spoke on her behalf, informing people in the General Affairs Building that Huixian had a bright future, and entrusting the grassroots organization not only to look after her, but to mentor and educate her.

  So Huixian returned, but not to the Sunnyside Fleet. Milltown was her new home.

  I was no fool, I didn’t expect her to come back on the barges. But I hoped for the best. No one knew for sure what her plans for the future might be. Maybe Sun Ximing and his wife knew, since they had been her surrogate parents, but I could not get up the nerve to ask them. I went instead to their youngest son, Xiaofu. ‘Have you taken down Huixian’s bed?’ I asked him.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘My mother wants to, but my father won’t let her.’

  ‘Are her things still on your barge?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t want them.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t she want all that stuff?’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ he said. ‘Why would she want to hold on to junk when she can wear nice sweaters and leather shoes?’

  I couldn’t bring myself to ask around about Huixian. Better to seek answers from myself than from anyone else. I experimented with a deck of playing cards. Father watched me from the sofa. ‘Fortune-telling?’ he asked. ‘When did you start believing in that stuff?’

  ‘Not my fortune,’ I said. ‘The future.’

  ‘Whose future? How can you expect to have any kind of future the way you loaf around all day?’

  ‘Not my future,’ I blurted out. ‘I’m Kongpi, I can’t have a future. But a sunflower can.’

  He just stared at me, as if pondering something. Then it dawned on him. ‘What sunflower are you talking about? Don’t think you’re clever enough to play with words with me. Sunflower – you mean Huixian!’ He turned and looked ashore, first at the sky, then at the land, and then uttered a wise comment. ‘You’re wasting your time trying to figure out the sunflower’s future. As long as a sunflower keeps its face turned to the sun, it’s got a future. But the minute it drops its head and turns away from the sun, it’s done for.’

  I’ll never forget what he said that day, not till the day I die: a sunflower must keep facing the sun. For years after that, whenever I saw Huixian, out of habit I surveyed the scene around her, including the sky overhead and the ground beneath her feet. Huixian, Huixian, who is your sun? Who do you want to face?

  I once spent an entire afternoon at the General Affairs Building waiting for Huixian, but could not screw up the courage to go inside and ask for her. It was during the New Year’s Festival, so the building was quieter than usual. Gimpy Gu had gone back to his home in the countryside for the holidays, and a young man who had taken his place in the foyer was engrossed in a newspaper. I wasn’t worried, since he didn’t know who I was. Seeing the Jeep parked next to the flowerbed, I decided to hang around. As long as the Jeep was there, so was Huixian.

  At around noon, I heard noise coming from a small room off the dining hall, so I tiptoed up to the window and looked inside, where I saw Huixian surrounded by a bunch of officials. Like a peacock fanning its tail for their entertainment, she was wearing Li Tiemei’s Chinese jacket with buttons down the front and had let her hair down so that her jet-black braid rested on her shoulder. She seemed uncomfortable, shifting in her chair, first to one side and then the other, in a slightly sloppy way. But her broad smile told me she was happy; it was the smile of a spoiled little girl. She’d grown up since I’d last seen her, and seemed almost like a stranger. The men were drinking the whole time. All of a sudden I saw something shocking. Zhao Chuntang, who was sitting next to Huixian, grabbed her braid and gave it a tug. She stood up, held out her glass of orange juice, and toasted her admirers, one after the other. When she’d finished, Zhao tugged her braid a second time and she sat down. To my astonishment, in the short time since she’d returned, Huixian had become Zhao Chuntang’s marionette, and that thick braid, of which she had once been so proud, was now the string he pulled to control her.

  In that instant I recalled what Father had said about a sunflower. Huixian, what kind of sunflower have you become? Is Zhao Chuntang now your sun? Do you let him order you around these days? You’re no longer a sunflower, you’re a blade of grass on a wall, bending whichever way the wind blows. Flames of anger burned in my breast. I bent down, picked up a broken brick and stood at the window taking aim, first at Zhao Chuntang. How can I describe my feelings towards Zhao? I hated him with all my heart, but I was too afraid of him to throw that brick. So I took aim at my sunflower, Huixian! All the officials in the dining hall were her suns; she’d smile at one of them, then bow to another, her cheeks flushed as she glanced round the room. But she was my secret sunflower! No matter how many mistakes she made or how badly she acted, I couldn’t harm her. So what could I do? In the end, I decided to let words be my weapon. Using the brick as my writing instrument, I wrote on the wall: ‘ZHAO CHUNTANG IS AN ALIEN CLASS ELEMENT’.

  That same line. But was he? How should I know?

  I wondered why I was obsessed with that line. Maybe because it was the most perplexing slogan I’d ever seen on the banks of the Golden Sparrow River, and I was obsessed with its confounding nature, and maybe there was nothing strange about that. My hatred of Zhao itself was confounding, and I was perfectly willing to display it openly. I was not, however, willing to display my love openly. That was the love of a water gourd for a sunflower. It was a love far more confounding than hate, and more bizarre, the sort of love I was incapable of bringing out into the open.

  Celebrity

  THE TEENAGED Huixian took up residence in Milltown with her tinplate red lantern.

  For the first two years after returning, she kept her Li Tiemei-style braid, ready at a moment’s notice to join a parade. Word from the General Affairs Building had it that she usually wore it coiled at the back of her head, both on account of how it looked and to protect the braid itself. Some of the women who were close to her reported that she’d often had nightmares in which she was chased by someone with scissors who wanted to snip off her braid. When they asked who that someone was, she wouldn’t say. But then the tears would flow, and she’d say, ‘Lots of people, like Yingtao, and Chunhua and her sister …
all the girls on the boats are jealous of me, and they chase me with scissors to cut off my braid. I nearly die of fright!’

  Eventually, there were more parades, but now there were changes, in China and around the world. The biggest change was in the number of trucks and their appearance: there were now five festooned trucks with fifteen actors, presenting a unified front of workers, peasants, soldiers, students and merchants – workers carrying hammers, peasants holding wheat stalks, soldiers with rifles on their shoulders, students reading books, and merchants fingering abacuses. Teacher Song brought some of the young directors from the cultural centre to Milltown to search for actors and actresses. No matter which class they were to represent, they all had to exude a commanding presence, the boys with heavy features, the girls displaying a valiant air that made the enemy tremble with fear. Huixian, of course, was a natural. Teacher Song had planned for her to be on the fifth truck, representing a student in the prime of life. He even gave her a pair of non-prescription glasses. But after several rehearsals, although her body was acting the role, her mind was elsewhere, feeling that she’d been given a supporting role as a student. She wanted to be on the first truck. ‘The first truck is for a member of the working class,’ Song said, ‘who holds a hammer. If you had a hammer in your hand, people would mistake it for a comb.’

  ‘I want to be on the first truck,’ she replied, ‘or no truck at all.’

  Song recognized her attitude as the typical vanity of a young girl, and was determined to stick to his guns. He was confident he could talk her round, never anticipating that she would forget the debt of gratitude she owed him and turn wilful. She refused to participate.

  Ordinarily, Huixian would have been a student at Milltown’s middle school. She did attend for several days, but her mind wandered when she was sitting in class. At first the teachers and the other students treated her like a myriad of stars circling the moon. But it only took a few days for the novelty to wear off. She was well suited to play the part of Li Tiemei, but ill suited to student life; she was much too deeply immersed in the ambience of the stage, feeling that everyone else was a member of her audience. Once the attention wore off, she decided to stop going. But she needed an excuse to do so, and found one in her braid. Combing it out in the morning was so much work she could never make it to school on time. Besides, she said, some of the other girls were so jealous of her that they tucked scissors into their school bags and hoped that one of the boys would be bold enough to cut it off. There was no evidence of this, but people did feel that she had the right to protect her braid, since it was Li Tiemei’s mark of distinction. Owing to her unique status in town, there was a consensus among local officials that maybe she should not be in school, after all. If their superiors came to town and wanted Little Tiemei to accompany them during their visit, to banquets, for instance, having to call her out of school didn’t seem quite right.

  She was Milltown’s celebrity. The visits of senior officials were a busy time for her. Dressed in her Li Tiemei costume and holding her prominent braid, she rode around town in a Jeep in the company of the out-of-towners. But most of the time she had no commitments and was not inclined to look for something to do. She could usually be found in or around the offices, wherever there was any activity. She’d blink her eyes as she listened to whoever was talking, and when a senior official’s name came up, she’d smile enigmatically and add her voice to the conversation. ‘Are you talking about Gramps Li? Is that Uncle Huang? I know them, I’ve been to their homes.’

  Huixian had grown up as a child of the barges. To her no one was a stranger, and she did as she pleased. No door in the General Affairs Building was left unopened by her hand. Not a single drawer escaped her attention. That was especially true of drawers belonging to the women, which she treated like a scavenger. She ate their snacks, she primped in their mirrors, and she dabbed her fingers in their face creams. Some of the less charitable among them kept their drawers locked; if Huixian could not open them, she shook them and complained, ‘How stingy can you be! Who’d want to steal your stuff?’

  Zhao Chuntang was responsible for seeing that Huixian’s demands were met. She ate her meals in the public dining hall, and was free to enjoy her favourites, but had to also have some things she didn’t like. One of the cooks, the one responsible for preparing her meals, was not permitted to throw any of her food into the slops bucket. Except on summer days, Huixian wore her Li Tiemei costume – red jacket with white flowers over dark-blue trousers – on Zhao Chuntang’s orders. At first she was happy to oblige, but over time she came to realize that the glorious days on festooned trucks had come to an end. She waited and waited, but Teacher Song stayed away; with no news and no summons, she grew impatient, even irritable. How to vent her unhappiness, and to whom, was the question. She settled on her attire. ‘Wearing this stuff doesn’t make me look like Li Tiemei, it makes me look stupid.’ She was too young to have any sexual awareness, but her body was awakening. Most of her costume jackets had split seams or missing buttons and had become tight-fitting in places. So she packed them up and deposited them on the desk at the propaganda section.

  ‘What’s this all about, my Little Tiemei?’ the surprised official asked. ‘What are you going to wear if you don’t keep these?’

  ‘Who says I have to wear this stuff?’ she said. ‘I have plenty to wear.’ She reached up and fingered the collar of her pink blouse to show it off. ‘Have you seen this blouse? Notice the embroidered plum flower on the collar? It’s from Shanghai. Granny Liu at District Headquarters gave it to me.’ After showing off her blouse, she rested her foot on a chair so they could see her shoe. ‘Know what this is? It’s what they call a T-strap. You can’t buy them anywhere in Milltown. Guess who gave them to me. They were a gift from Gramps Liu.’

  She was not an indifferent, heartless girl. Often, when she heard the sound of the tugboat whistle, she ran down to the piers to see the people who had cared for her as a child. But they found her behaviour hard to accept: she tossed fruit drops to each of the barges, and when they were gone, she turned and ran off, disregarding all the questions about her health and ignoring her childhood playmates. They could not decide whether she had thrown the sweets as a charitable act, as an expression of gratitude, or in an attempt to maintain ties of friendship. Some of the children looked forward to the sweets and nothing more; others refused to be swayed by her sugar-coated assault. Yingtao, for instance, grabbed the treats out of her little brother’s hand and flung them hatefully into the river. ‘What’s so wonderful about that?’ she’d ask. ‘We don’t eat her stinking candy!’

  Everyone knew that Yingtao was jealous of Huixian. But so was her mother, who regularly reminded anyone who would listen that her daughter too had had a chance to ride in one of the festooned trucks, but had let her obstinacy deprive her of a bright future. While bemoaning Yingtao’s shyness, she did not hesitate to criticize Huixian maliciously. ‘How can a girl like her know how to deal with grown men?’ she wondered aloud. ‘A little seductress is what she is.’

  That was more than Desheng’s wife could take. ‘Not everybody can be a seductress,’ she said pointedly. ‘Every girl has her fate, so there’s no need to compete. Your Yingtao doesn’t have what it takes to seduce anybody.’

  Sun Ximing’s wife used bloodlines in her defence of Huixian. ‘Dragons beget dragons,’ she said to Yingtao’s mother, ‘and phoenixes bear phoenixes. It’s Yingtao’s bad luck to have emerged from your womb. Huixian, on the other hand, is graced with a better fate. She came to us from the shore, and her return to the shore was preordained. She spent time with us because she had no choice. It’s what they call falling on hard times. You know what that means, don’t you? Did you really think that our golden phoenix was going to spend the rest of her life in this chicken coop?’

  These women’s exchange might have seemed laden with feudal ideas and superstitions, even a degree of prejudice, but that did nothing to contradict the truth in their arguments. Huixian ha
d not only returned to the shore, but was now living in the General Affairs Building.

  The authorities had arranged for her to share a room with the Director of the Women’s Federation, Leng Qiuyun, who, by mutual agreement, became her surrogate mother. Leng was told to look after and mentor their Little Tiemei. Leng Qiuyun, a military dependant with no children of her own, looked after the young orphan with motherly passion – at first. She threw herself into the assigned task, laying out a regimen of study that included reading the daily newspaper to Huixian. But she had an inattentive listener, who nibbled on melon seeds throughout the reading. That infuriated Leng, who complained that Huixian ignored even the fundamental principle of respect for one’s elders. ‘I’m listening,’ Huixian defended herself. ‘I listen with my ears, not my mouth. Cracking a few melon seeds doesn’t affect your reading, so how can that be disrespectful?’ It was clear to Leng that she had her hands full with this girl. Given her background, she ought not to be so wilful. But she was. And there was no reason for her to be haughty. But she was. She could be more mature than other girls her age, but she could also be ridiculously juvenile. Before too long, Leng could not stand the sight of Huixian, as hostility triumphed over reason. She could only look askance at her charge. When she reached breaking point, she went to see Zhao Chuntang, to whom she reported Huixian’s behaviour and gave her opinion of the girl. She wanted nothing more than to bow out of her assignment and leave Huixian to someone else. But Zhao had other ideas. ‘You must do it,’ he said. ‘My superiors have made that clear. Can’t you see that she’s a valuable piece of baggage that’s being kept in Milltown for safekeeping until it’s delivered to higher authority?’ The more people exaggerated the promising future awaiting Huixian, the more Director Leng tried to refute the idea. ‘You male comrades only see the girl’s exterior. All she wants to do is eat and lie around. How am I supposed to mentor someone who has so little political consciousness? And why should I try? I tell you, heed my words, this girl has no future!’