The Boat to Redemption (23 page)

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.

I
N 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 allowed
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.

At times my body felt hot all over as I sat there guarding my secret, and at other times I turned cold and stiff. The barbershop
was open to the public, so why couldn’t I saunter in like everybody else? I had no answer. I was sitting there because of
Huixian, gentler than anyone could imagine, but also gloomier. For eleven years I’d fallen under the constant scrutiny of
my father, and the shore was the only place where I could escape his radar-like
vision. These were the times when I tasted true freedom, and I put this precious time to good use, keeping a supervisory eye
on Huixian – no, supervisory isn’t the right word. ‘Guarding’ is more like it, or, even better, ‘watching over’. Neither job,
of course, was by rights mine, but for some strange reason it had become second nature.

Men were always entering and leaving the barbershop, and I could easily spot those who had something other than a haircut
in mind. But was I any different? Maybe not. Probably not. I’d started going ashore wearing two pairs of underwear as a hedge
against an ill-timed erection. That proves that I did have something in mind, and it was a worrisome thought. Wearing two
pairs of underwear was proof of my sinful nature, and timidity and restlessness were a by-product of impure thoughts. Sometimes
I got a fortuitous glance through the display window of Huixian standing behind her barber’s chair. More frequently, all I
saw was her white moving image. Near her, I yet remained far away, and that was an ideal distance to lure me into dreaming
up scenarios which frightened me yet brought me great pleasure: I imagined the conversations she had with the people in the
shop, what made her frown and what made her smile; I imagined why she treated X with such warmth and Y with such aloofness;
when she was at rest, I imagined what she was thinking; on those occasions when she was moving, I imagined the shape of her
legs and buttocks; and when she was working on a client’s hair, I imagined the swift, agile movements of her fingers on the
clippers. The one thing I would not let myself imagine was her body, though that was sometimes beyond my control, and then
I limited my visualizations to the areas above her neck and below her knees. When even that was impossible, I forced myself
to go over and stare at a dustbin on which someone had written the word
kongpi
. Could that have been a warning to me? If so, it was an effective sign. I read the word aloud three times –
kongpi, kongpi, kongpi
– lowering the
temperature of my sex organ. An embarrassing sense of excitement mysteriously evaporated.

Spring arrived in May, with warm temperatures and flowers blooming at the base of the walls that lined the streets: Chinese
roses, cockscombs and evening primrose. Even the sunflowers by the entrance to the People’s Barbershop were in full bloom.
As I walked past the entrance, one of the big golden flowers actually struck me in the leg – lightly, to be sure, but it got
me thinking about the past; since it was a sunflower, I had to believe this was either a hint or an invitation. How could
I be unmoved? Unprecedented courage dropped on to me out of the sky. I got up, picked up my bag and decisively pushed open
the glass door.

Every seat in the barbershop was taken, and no one took any notice of my entrance. The men cutting hair were too busy to greet
me. Huixian, whose back was to me, was washing a client’s hair. But I could see her face in the mirror, and there our eyes
met. A light flashed in her eyes, but only for an instant before they darkened again; she turned slightly, as if to see me
clearly, but didn’t follow through as she slowly turned back again. She might have seen it was me, but she might also have
thought she was mistaken.

I spotted a newspaper rack by the door, where a days-old copy of the
People’s Daily
hung crumpled, dog-eared and enervated. Just what I needed to keep anyone from seeing my face. I sat in a corner, trying
to arrange the angle and distance between my head and the newspaper, but failed miserably. It seemed to me that Huixian kept
looking at me in the mirror, and the stronger my feelings became, the more uncomfortable they made me. To be honest, I had
no idea how to go about establishing a friendship with Huixian. I hadn’t known back then, and I still didn’t know. Hell, I
didn’t even know what I should call her. Back on the boat I’d never called her by her name, and I’d never used the word ‘sunflower’.
It was always ‘hey’. I’d yell ‘hey’ and she’d come running,
expecting to get something good to eat. But she’d changed; so had I, and I couldn’t figure out how to talk to her. I thought
hard about that, finally deciding to let nature take its course. If she spoke to me first, I’d count myself lucky. If she
chose not to speak to me, it was no big deal, since I wasn’t there to chat her up. I was there to keep watch over her.

Women love to talk, and that was especially true of the women who came to have their hair done. Curious about Huixian’s stylistic
talents, they were even more curious about her precipitous fall from grace. Dressed in a white smock, like a doctor, and wearing
rubber medical gloves, she was washing the hair of Wintersweet, the female member of the security group. Buried in the sink,
Wintersweet’s head was covered with soapy water, but that did not stop her from asking questions. ‘Huixian,’ she said, ‘I
thought you were supposed to be studying in the provincial capital. What’s our famous Little Tiemei doing in a barbershop?’