The Boat to Redemption

by Su Tong

  Zhao laughed. ‘So, the girl has learned how to play politics. You think you can put pressure on me with Chief Liu, do you? Come here, I want to show you something.’ He took a newspaper out of his drawer and opened it up to show Huixian. ‘You never read the paper and you won’t study, so you’re clueless. Your Gramps Liu suffered a heart attack and went up to report to Karl Marx.’

  Huixian saw the obituary. The familiar, white-haired old man who had once looked kindly at her across a banqueting table and had watched over her behind the scenes had been reduced to a tiny black-and-white photograph, looking up at her from the pages of a newspaper. Only the kindness and admiration in his gaze remained.

  ‘Gramps Liu, you can’t die! None of you care about me,’ she shouted. ‘What am I going to do?’ With that, she crouched down, covered her face with both hands, and wept.

  That same day she carried her chest and her red lantern over to the People’s Barbershop. Her face was still tear-stained when she walked in and hung the ‘closed’ sign on the glass door as if she ran the place. Fortunately, the work day had nearly ended and all the clients had gone, so there were no witnesses to her shabby entrance. Old Cui noticed she’d been crying, but was shocked to see that she’d brought her things along. ‘No!’ he said, waving her back with both hands. ‘You can’t do that! We don’t dare stick our noses into your arguments with the officials. You can’t move into a barbershop, not Little Tiemei. What would that look like?’

  ‘Little Tiemei, you say? I count for nothing now, only good for living in a barbershop.’

  ‘You have to control your temper, Huixian. Put your things anywhere you want, but you mustn’t move out of the General Affairs Building. If you can’t get along with Leng Qiuyun, move in with someone else. Don’t tell me they can’t find a room for you in that great big building.’

  ‘Who cares about the General Affairs Building? I don’t like anybody who lives there. They’re all terrible people. No, this is the best place for me. Don’t you want me here, Old Cui?’

  Suddenly apprehensive, Old Cui picked up Huixian’s things to take them outside. ‘People say you have an intelligent face but a foolish mind. I don’t believe that. I just think you’ve been spoiled. Everybody gets mad at people sometimes. With all your contacts, you have a bright future, but you mustn’t be wilful. Don’t throw away your future, like smashing a pot just because it’s cracked.’

  That comment from Old Cui caused the last bit of Huixian’s reserve, which she had been struggling to maintain, to crumble. She burst into tears and placed her foot on the chest on the floor. ‘Future?’ she sobbed as she dried her tears. ‘Future, you say? I’ve got no future! Gramps Liu is dead, he has been reassigned, and Zhao Chuntang is mad at me. There’s no one left. I have no one to rely on.’

  Unable to talk Huixian out of staying with him, Old Cui made space for her in the tiny boiler room at the back of the shop, which would have the added advantage of keeping her warm in cold weather. He told the young barber Little Chen to move two benches into the room and put them together to make a bed. ‘It’s only for the time being,’ he whispered to Chen. ‘She can stay here a few days, and then we’ll improvise. She’s Zhao Chuntang’s protégée, after all, and he won’t give up on her.’

  Huixian walked into the boiler room as they were getting it ready for her. The first thing she did was hang a couple of white smocks over the window. ‘What are we going to use as smocks tomorrow if you use those as curtains?’ Old Cui remarked.

  She turned and glared at him. ‘How can you be so selfish? Do you expect me to sleep in here without curtains? The situation in town is complicated, as you very well know. There are people who put up a good front but are capable of doing bad things, like peeping at me through the window.’

  For Old Cui, the arrangement was makeshift and temporary, at least at first. Everyone in town had heard about the unusual life the girl had led; to them she was a mysterious package, constantly being hung out here and there. For now, she’d been hung out at the barbershop. But a few days passed, and though she went out from time to time, no one from the General Affairs Building had a plan for her, and Old Cui knew that this was bad news. Things had changed, and her future had been revealed, which made the situation suddenly grim; Milltown’s celebrity was living in a barbershop!

  Four days later, Zhao Chuntang came to the People’s Barbershop. When he walked in, everyone, including Huixian, stood up. They wondered if he’d come for a haircut or to rescue Huixian. He sat in the barber’s chair. ‘I’ve let my hair get long,’ he said. ‘How about a trim, Master Cui?’

  With a quick glance at Huixian, Old Cui picked up his comb and scissors and walked up to the chair with a strange feeling of trepidation. ‘Has the Secretary come on official business?’ he asked Zhao.

  ‘Official and personal, I need to attend to both.’

  So, with great care, Old Cui cut Zhao’s hair, urging Huixian out of the corner of his eye to make amends with Zhao. She merely turned her head, with a look that said ‘I’d rather keep a piece of broken jade than an undamaged tile,’ and began filing her nails. Old Cui laid down his comb and picked up a razor. ‘How about a shave, Secretary Zhao?’

  Zhao made no response, but Huixian, audacious as ever, made another of her unseemly comments. ‘Hah!’ she said. ‘Zhao Chuntang doesn’t have a beard, so there’s nothing to shave.’

  Zhao tensed, and Old Cui felt it. Slightly unnerved, he barely stopped himself from holding Zhao down in the chair. But all Zhao did was turn and say, ‘Could I ask you all to give Old Cui and me a few minutes to speak in private? It’s work-related.’

  A few of the other customers, haircuts still in progress, demurred momentarily, but then followed the barbers, towels still draped around their necks, and stood outside the door. One of them, unaware of what was going on, wondered aloud, ‘What work-related issue could Zhao Chuntang have with Old Cui?’ One of the others, equally in the dark but wanting to give the impression of being well informed, said, ‘Work-related? That’s just an excuse. Huixian’s living in the barbershop these days, and I wouldn’t be surprised if something’s going on between her and Old Cui.’ Little Chen reacted to that comment by cursing, ‘If anything’s going on, it’s between Old Cui and your mother! You must have sperm swimming around your brain the way you see everything through your crotch! You really don’t get it, do you? Huixian is taking refuge here for the time being.’

  As promised, a few minutes later Old Cui opened the door to let Zhao Chuntang, whose hair reeked of Phoenix hair tonic, leave. He looked relaxed but sort of sad. The customers poured back into the shop, where they saw a red-faced Huixian with a comb in one hand and a pair of clippers in the other, banging the two together over and over and shouting, ‘Who wants their hair cut? Come on, don’t try to shame me. I’ll shave your heads, all of you!’

  Anyone could see that she was hysterical, but no one had any idea what had caused it. It was left to Old Cui to rush up, snatch the tools out of Huixian’s hands and force her into the boiler room. ‘Settle down, Huixian,’ he said loudly, before shutting the door and locking it from the outside.

  The shop customers peppered Old Cui with questions. ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  Ignoring their questions, Old Cui muttered, ‘Me, mentor her? I’m a barber, how am I supposed to do that? Orders from the organization, he says. All we do in the barbershop is cut and wash and shave and blow-dry, what kind of mentoring is that? So she can go to Zhongnanhai to shave the heads of the Central Committee?’

  Little Chen would have gone in to console Huixian if he’d known how, but all he could do was cast a perplexed look at Old Cui, who covertly gestured in the direction of the boiler room. ‘Zhao Chuntang was here to hang out Huixian,’ he said softly. ‘Starting tomorrow, the barbershop is where she’ll hang out officially. Zhao’s idea is to bring people of a kind together, so from tomorrow, we three are officially comrades-in-arms.’

  Little Chen could hardly believe his ears. �
��You’re joking, right? No matter how far she’s fallen, she can’t come here to be a barber, can she?’

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Old Cui said. ‘What makes you think I’d joke about something as important as this? I didn’t believe it myself at first. Who’d have thought that the grand Little Tiemei would wind up working with us?’

  News of Huixian’s downfall spread faster than a racehorse. The crews of the Sunnyside Fleet had all heard by the next day that Huixian had been hung out by Zhao Chuntang. People disregard Fate at their peril. Over the course of several years, Huixian had not been able to escape her fate. The boat people’s expectations regarding the direction her life would take had run the gamut from county to district, even to the provincial capital; as for her workplace, a broadcasting station or propaganda team had been mentioned, as had the possibility of her becoming a member of the Women’s Federation or County Committee. Not a negative thought had ever emerged, and since they had seen her heading in only one direction – up – who could have guessed that she’d wind up in the People’s Barbershop? Huixian, Huixian, the pride of the Sunnyside Fleet; her proud figure would from now on be seen only through the glass of the People’s Barbershop window, continuously under the critical gaze of men and women of all ages. Her proud hands would repay the residents of Milltown and the nurturing people of the Sunnyside Fleet. Huixian, Huixian, from now on, she would serve the people by shaving their beards and cutting their hair.

  That year Huixian turned eighteen.

  PART TWO

  Haircut

  IN MY eleven years aboard the barge I never posted a letter of my own. But I stopped by the post office every time I went ashore to post letters for my father. I was his postman.

  A large wooden box had been nailed to the wall outside the Milltown Post Office, put there for the use of the boat people. Year in and year out, it remained empty, which is understandable when you consider that most of the boat people were illiterate. When their sons and daughters reached adulthood and started their own families, they continued their lives aboard the barges. If they didn’t meet on the Golden Sparrow River, they met on the piers, and so asking someone to write a letter and attach an eight-fen postage stamp was more than merely a matter of dropping one’s pants to fart, it was a waste of money and energy. For a long time, the only users of the fleet postbox were the occupants of barge number seven. Once every month or two I received a letter from Mother. In it she urged me to study hard, reminding me that though I was living in less than ideal circumstances it was my duty to work hard. She insisted that I set up long-term goals, the mere thought of which gave me a headache. Sure, I had goals, all of them were related to Huixian, but I couldn’t say so. If I did, I’d either become the butt of people’s jokes or a sinner in their eyes. How could I tell Mother? I couldn’t, so I didn’t reply to her letters, which came less and less frequently. Eventually Father’s letters were the only things that ever showed up in the postbox, where they waited for me to go ashore. Everyone knew that my father was an orphan with no siblings, no relatives and no friends. At first he wrote to the leadership of the County Party Committee, but kept going higher, to district Party and governmental offices: the civil administration, the organization bureau, the commission for inspecting discipline, the history office, the office for complaint letters and calls, even the family-planning commission. Throughout my eleven years on the barge, Father sent appeals to leading Party bureaus and offices regarding his status as the son of a martyr, demanding a definitive ruling and an official certificate that recognized his martyr-family status. Unfortunately, the red-lined envelopes I received in reply were invariably thin and light, and I never saw one of those certificates, which Father had described to me as being red with gold print. Instead they were standard-issue letters with a series of dotted lines. Sometimes Father’s name was filled in, sometimes not. ‘Comrade so-andso,’ they read, ‘your request is very important to us. At a future date we will give it careful attention and scrutiny. Revolutionary greetings to you.’

  More than once he told me that the only inheritance he could leave me was one of those martyr-family certificates. I was no fool, I knew the value of one of those things, and on this matter we were in rare agreement. He diligently wrote his letters aboard the barge, and I diligently posted them for him. I never went into Milltown without performing the same task: I went into the post office, bought a stamp, pasted it on to the envelope, and dropped it into the big green postbox. It became as mechanical and as fruitless a routine as scooping ladlefuls of water into the river – not even a tiny splash was made.

  On my way to the post office one day I saw a scowling, uniformed man emerge with a drawerful of keys, which clattered as he walked. He dropped the drawer on the ground in front of the green postbox, which he opened with one of the keys, releasing an avalanche of white envelopes into the drawer. I stepped up and looked at the drawer, but all I saw were envelopes piled on top of one another, with no discernible names or addresses, and, of course, no return addresses. I instinctively followed the drawer on its trip back, until the man became aware of my presence. He spun around and shouted angrily, ‘What the hell are you up to?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’m just posting a letter.’

  He looked at me suspiciously. ‘You’re from the Sunnyside Fleet, aren’t you? Aren’t you Ku Wenxuan’s son?’ He shook the drawer in his hands. ‘You came at the right time. Toss your letter in here.’

  I took another look at the drawer, then glanced back at him, with his gloomy face and crafty eyes, and wondered if I was being taken in. Why should I trust him, or that drawer of his? I waved him off and walked back to the postbox, whose dark, gaping mouth seemed to draw me to it. The lock on its side was still swinging back and forth. Was it taking me in too? Why should I trust that postbox? It was, after all, Milltown’s postbox, in a town where people said even the sky belonged to Zhao Chuntang. That had to include the postbox. Be careful, I told myself, be very careful. So I stuck Father’s letter into my bag; better to forgo the one close at hand in favour of the more distant one. I could go to Wufu to post my letter, or, for that matter, Phoenix. It didn’t matter where I went, but I knew I wasn’t going to commit my father’s future to the Milltown postbox.

  After that, on my trips to Milltown, in addition to buying provisions, there was another thing I needed to do – some might have seen it as important, others might not have. It was something I did for myself, something I couldn’t talk about.

  I went to the People’s Barbershop, where the walls on both sides of the entrance had been opened to install display windows. Three plastic mannequin heads were arrayed in the window to the left, each adorned with a woman’s wig, and each with a sign in front that stated the wave length: long, medium and short. That threw me. This wasn’t the Golden Sparrow River, and there was no wind, so why did women want waves in their hair? I stepped over to the other window, where illustrations torn out of magazines were displayed. The print quality was poor, but good enough to see city girls from somewhere or other trying to outdo each other with their bizarre new hair-styles. One of the illustrations was both clear and familiar. It was Huixian. She did not shy from showing herself to her best advantage, letting herself be seen with the others. She was turned sideways and looking off at an angle, her eyes bright, and she wore her hair coiled weirdly on top of her head, so that it looked to me like a stack of oil fritters.

  I looked at her hair-do from every angle, and didn’t like what I saw, though I wouldn’t say it was ugly. I was reminded of something my father had said: when a sunflower turns away from the sun, it droops, bringing an end to its future. I knew that Huixian, my own sunflower, had turned away from the sun. By leaving the General Affairs Building, she was, I felt, closer to me. But that didn’t mean I’d been given a chance to get closer to her. She was now a barber, yet people continued to treat her as if she were the moon and the stars aligned around her. Local girls who wanted to look as pretty as possible were allowe
d to get close to her, Old Cui and Little Chen ate and worked alongside her every day, and drooling, audacious boys around town never missed a chance to draw up near her. I wasn’t that brazen, nor was I that audacious, and if I didn’t need a haircut, I couldn’t force myself to go inside.

  My hair, which grew slowly, still wasn’t long enough, and that was a nuisance. So I sat in the doorway of a cotton-fluffing workshop across the street from the People’s Barbershop, laying my bag next to me so people would think I was taking a rest, open and above board. The people inside were hard at work on the cotton; the clamour of the wires fluffing cotton – peng, peng, peng – echoed my heartbeat. I couldn’t pace back and forth in front of the barbershop, since that would attract the attention of the people inside, and I definitely couldn’t press my face up against one of the windows to get a good look; only an idiot would do something like that. No, I had to sit across the street and watch the people come and go, creating pangs of jealousy, whether I knew them or not.

  Xiaogai from the security group went in several times, with obvious evil intentions towards Huixian. He had a special talent for looking respectable when he walked through the door, even when he was harbouring those evil intentions. He walked out again, talking and laughing.

  Among the boat people, Desheng’s wife was the shop’s most frequent client. Her appearance was especially important to her, and her husband doted on her. The other boat people, more money conscious, had their hair done by street vendors. But for Desheng’s wife money wasn’t as important as having the latest hair-style, and she and Huixian were closer than ever. She’d sit in her chair and chat away while she was having her hair done, looking around at the local girls’ fashionable hair-styles. With so much to see and do, it’d be a while before she left. On those days when she came by, I went inside the workshop to watch the cotton being fluffed, not knowing what I’d say if the woman, a notorious busybody, asked me why I spent my days sitting outside doing nothing.