The Boat to Redemption (9 page)

I followed the boat people to the marketplace. This was the women’s domain, and where I too could take care of some small
matters. By now the security group had herded the men into the open-air market. ‘Do what you’ve come to do, but do it together,’
they said. ‘Form lines and don’t squabble.’

‘Why are you driving all us old men into the market?’ Sun Ximing complained. ‘What are we supposed to do here?’

‘Why can’t you boat people shed your feudal ideas?’ Baldy Chen replied. ‘Will your dicks fall off just because you’re in a
market?’ He pointed to me. ‘What about Ku Dongliang? He’s here to buy provisions, isn’t he? Has his dick fallen off?’ He laughed
at his own little joke – there was more he wanted to say, and by the way he was looking at me out of the corner of his eye,
I could guess what it was, and knew it would be about my father. The one thing I could not tolerate was people saying bad
things about my father’s injured penis. So I grabbed a knife from the pork counter, walked up to Baldy and said in a low voice
that only he could hear, ‘Say anything about me you want, I don’t care. It’s like farting in the wind. But
mention my father and this knife will go in white and come out red.’

Unnerved by what I said, he looked down and pointed his truncheon at the knife. ‘I said a dick, not half a dick. But go ahead,
stab me. We’re a martyr’s family, too, but a real one, not phoney like yours.’

Baldy Chen had a mouth fouler than mine, and even an idiot would have known what he meant by that. I raised the knife, but
didn’t have the guts to use it. All I could do was give him a dirty look as I began to shake with anger. Fortunately, Sun
Ximing and one of the meat vendors rushed up and snatched the knife out of my hand.

That, in a nutshell, was my problem: I was quick to anger, but incapable of translating that into violent action. I invariably
reacted to critical moments with fear. I grumbled as I bought my provisions – grains, vegetables and lamp oil. A potato seller
gave me a wary look and backed away, not knowing why I was acting the way I was. ‘Buy them or not, it’s up to you,’ she said.
‘But you don’t have to grumble like that.’

‘I’m grumbling at somebody else,’ I said, ‘not you.’

‘If you’re angry at somebody else,’ she said, relieved, ‘don’t take it out on me. Those potatoes may have turned dark, but
they’re still good.’

‘You can’t fool me,’ I said impatiently. ‘How can black potatoes be any good? Don’t you have fresh ones?’

‘All gone,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with potatoes as long as they haven’t started to sprout. Besides, you boat people
aren’t the picky type.’

That was the wrong thing to say. ‘Thump your mama,’ I cursed. ‘We boat people are human too. What makes you think you can
force us to eat rotten potatoes? You shore people are as rotten as your potatoes. I
was
grumbling at somebody else, but now I’m grumbling at you.’

In truth, she had every reason to discriminate against us boat people, since we didn’t enjoy the luxury of fresh meat and
vegetables. For the most part, we bought large quantities of potatoes, cabbage, salted pig’s head – things like that, since
they keep well. With this in mind, the security group staked out certain vendors, getting the men to line up to buy rice,
and the women fresh produce. ‘Go on, buy it and move on,’ they urged. ‘Don’t be picky. Get what you came for and then form
up again.’ But the crowd had no sooner entered the market than they dispersed like ducks on the river, way beyond anyone’s
control. Short-handed to begin with, the security group was helpless to gather them together again.

The women were complaining about the supervision as they quickly made their purchases, looking daggers at the vendors and
at what they were selling – rotten goods to go with rotten attitudes. The first argument broke out between Sun Ximing’s wife
and a corn seller, and it grew in intensity until the two women were sparring with cobs of corn, using some as clubs and others
as flying missiles. The security group rushed over to break up the fight, losing sight of the fact that, as Mao had said,
a single spark can ignite a prairie fire. Before the waves of discontent had died down at the corn stall, Six-Fingers’s mother
was embroiled in a tug-of-war with one of the local women over a pig’s head. The combatants began to wrestle, leaving the
pig’s head in peace for the moment, but when the vendor was knocked to the ground, she screamed blue murder.

I was the first to run, but was followed outside by the other men. As always, people were coming and going on the same street,
with the same rows of buildings and the same townspeople in the same blue, grey, or black tunics; but on this particular morning,
Milltown seemed to hold new significance for the boat people. All that hounding by the security group made us want to recapture
the joy of walking freely in town. Weren’t those free
times going to return? The men looked lost and slightly fearful. ‘Run!’ I shouted. ‘Go and do whatever you want! Run!’ Which
is exactly what I did. I saw that Desheng was running, too, as were Six-Fingers and Sun Ximing. To outsiders it must have
looked like a jailbreak. We made it to the Ironsmith Avenue intersection, where we peeled off in different directions. Out
of the corner of my eye I watched Desheng head towards the public bath, his favourite spot in town. Six-Fingers was heading
towards the cultural palace, but as far as I knew, air hockey and not culture was what he had in mind. Sun Ximing ran with
me for a while, until we reached Broom Alley, where he vanished. I knew where he was going: to see a widow who lived there.
That was his business, not mine, so the less said the better.

And me? I wasn’t sure how I wanted to spend this precious time. With so many important things to do, I couldn’t make up my
mind where to start. So I just kept running, heading for the vegetable-oil processing plant. My feet had made up my mind for
me – I missed my mother. No matter how badly I had disappointed Qiao Limin, I still missed her. Why? I couldn’t say. My feet
were doing the talking, so you’ll have to ask them.

I ran and I ran, my bag slung over my shoulder. At the plant I wandered through the various sections amid the roar of milling
machines, enveloped in air filled with rice dust, its fragrance mixed with the smell of kerosene. Women in white uniforms
were busy on the floor, but they were either too tall or too short, too heavy or too slight to be my mother. One of them spotted
me and asked who I was looking for. ‘You’ll have to shout,’ she said. ‘It’s too noisy in here.’

But I refused to shout.
I’m looking for Qiao Limin
, I wanted to say.
My mother
. But I couldn’t get the words out.

I left the milling section and walked to the women’s dormitory, where I stood beneath the window. I could see Mother’s bed
and desk. The bed was empty, the exposed slats covered with discarded
newspapers. My heart sank. ‘She’s gone,’ I concluded, just as Father had predicted. He’d said she had aspirations and would
leave this godforsaken place. ‘What was she chasing?’ I wondered. The words popped out of my mouth: ‘
kongpi
.’ With a sense of anger, I examined her desk, on which rested an ageing enamel mug; the little bit of tea inside was mouldy,
but the mug attested to her glory: ‘
AWARD OF EXCELLENCE FOR AMATEUR FEMALE CHORUS
.’ ‘It’s mouldy,’ I said to myself, ‘what kind of
excellence
is that?’ With my face pressed against the glass, I noticed that one of the desk drawers was half open, and that a faint
light glinted off something inside. I pushed the window open and slipped into the room. When I yanked the drawer open, I was
greeted by a cockroach, which scared the hell out of me. A framed photograph lay in the drawer; it was a family photo – Father,
Mother and me. Our faces had been touched up with colour, giving us a healthy, ruddy glow, sort of cosmetically enhanced.
I couldn’t recall when it had been taken, though my parents were both much younger and I was a tiny innocent. We were huddled
closely together.

So, Mother had left a family portrait behind in her drawer. What did that mean? I wavered, trying to decide if I should take
it with me. My right hand, I recall, was in favour, my left opposed, preferring to smash it. So I took it out with my right
hand and placed it in my left, then flung it to the floor and stamped on it. The glass shattered, some of the shards flying
up and hitting me. I looked down at the broken glass and said, ‘
Kongpi
.’

I actually did much more than that. As I walked through the gate, my ears were assailed by loudspeakers blaring the melody
‘Commune Members Are All Sunflowers’. Mother had once performed this by dressing up as a peasant woman, a scarf over her head,
an apron around her waist; she was holding a sunflower and dancing in the yard, hiding her face behind the sunflower. ‘Commune
members – are all –’ her face emerged from behind the sunflower and she smiled at me, ‘sunflowers – ah!’ With
these thoughts running through my mind, my eyes began to fill with tears. The tears running disobediently down my cheeks reminded
me that I could not forgive my mother, that what she deserved from me were curses; and that’s what she was going to get, whether
she actually heard them or not. I turned and ran back to her workplace, where I bent over, took a deep breath, and shouted
at the women working there, ‘Commune members aren’t sunflowers, and Qiao Limin is a filthy cunt!’

I
N MY
mind’s eye I can still see the grand ceremony that marked the beginning of the project known as East Wind No. 8. An army
of labourers was mobilized in Milltown, where the town’s enormous sleeping abdomen was split open and cleaned out. Under the
leadership of a provisional supervisory authority, the town was given a gullet filled with asphalt, cement intestines, a metallic
stomach, and an automated beating heart. Not until later did I learn that the rumoured predictions swirling around the General
Affairs Building were right on target: East Wind No. 8 was not an air-raid shelter, but the first petroleum pipeline in the
Golden Sparrow River region, a secret wartime project.

As it turned out, that autumn witnessed a hundred-year flood. It was as if someone had ripped open a hole in the sky and let
water stored up for a century come cascading down. As the river rose, the surrounding land receded abruptly. Floods began
in the mountainous upper reaches and surged downriver, drowning riverside villages on their way. Land transportation came
to a halt, leaving only waterways open. With water everywhere and as the Golden Sparrow River overflowed its banks, heroic
qualities emerged. I’d never seen so many boats and ships, all headed for Milltown, so numerous they caused a bottleneck on
the river. To
the distant eye, the masts and sails turned the river into a floating market.

The Sunnyside Fleet was detained on the river for two full days. I found the first day of this watery assembly especially
interesting. Standing on the bow of our barge, I gazed at boats in other fleets, most sporting red banners that read ‘
HONOURED TRANSPORT FLEET
’. But not ours. They not only carried cargo, but also transported PLA soldiers and militiamen. We were limited to transporting
farm labourers. I mentioned the disparity to Father. ‘What do you know?’ he said. ‘Ours is a complicated fleet politically.
The Party is showing its trust in us by letting us transport farm labourers.’

On the second day, I was surprised to see a travelling propaganda troupe. They had converted the cabin roof on one of the
barges into a stage, where colourfully dressed women representing workers, peasants, soldiers, students and merchants performed;
as rain fell around them they recited the women’s anthem, ‘Song of Struggle’. I was shocked to see Mother among them; she
was the oldest member of the troupe, but was playing the part of a young worker in blue work clothes, with a white towel tied
around her neck. The rain had washed away her make-up and obliterated her painted eyebrows to reveal a gaunt, wrinkled face.
But she was oblivious, caught up in the drama, putting everything into her role. When others shouted, ‘Fight against the heavens!’
she raised her arm, brandished a fist, and in the loudest voice she could manage shouted, ‘We welcome the fight!’

I’d been denied the chance to see her on shore, and now here she was, out on the river. Sure she was old – old and unattractive,
and totally lacking in self-awareness, surrounded as she was by a bunch of girls. I worried that people would laugh at her
presumptuousness. This accidental encounter distressed me so much that I headed back into the cabin, where Father was leaning
against the porthole, staring at the distant stage.

‘That’s your mother’s voice,’ he said. ‘It’s her voice. I can tell from here. How is she?’

‘What do you mean, how is she?’

He paused a moment. ‘Everything – no, how she acts, how she looks.’

I nearly said, ‘She’s disgusting,’ but I couldn’t. ‘About the same,’ I said. ‘No change.’

‘Did she see you?’

‘Why should anyone want her to see me? And what if she did, anyway?’

‘I haven’t seen her in a long time,’ he said. ‘With all the boats out there, I can hear her, but I can’t see her.’

‘What good would that do? She wouldn’t want to see you, even if you did.’

Lowering his head, he said unhappily, ‘“What good would that do?” Is that all you can say? What good would anything do? That’s
how nihilists talk, and it must be challenged.’ He took a straw hat down off the wall. ‘Would people recognize me if I went
out in this?’ he asked.

I knew what he was getting at. ‘What difference would it make if they did?’ I said. ‘Lying low in the cabin all day long solves
nothing. If you feel like coming out, do it. Nobody out there is going to eat you.’

Father laid down the hat, shaded his eyes with his hand and gazed over at all those boats. With a burst of excitement, he
blurted out, ‘How stirring! How incredibly stirring! No, I won’t go out there. I’ll stay here and compose a poem. I’ve already
got a title: I’ll call it “A Stirring Autumn”!’

Of course it was a stirring autumn. Hundreds of sailing vessels choked the Golden Sparrow River for two days and nights. Our
fleet had never shared the river with so many others, all close together. I’d always thought that the world’s barges somehow
belonged to the same family, until, that is, I spotted a strange fleet
out in the middle of the river. Six boats, all ‘manned’ by young women, including one at the helm. Bright-red banners fluttering
at the bows proclaimed they were the Iron Maiden Fleet, while the sterns were adorned with feminine clothing and underwear,
like an array of national flags. No one knew where this unique fleet had come from, including Desheng and his wife, who nearly
came to blows over it. She forbade him from gawking at the women on the boats, and punished him with a whack across the back
with a bamboo pole when his eyes turned in that direction. That sparked a reaction: ‘If you’re going to use that pole, try
pushing those boats out of the way, if you think you can. Well, I’ll tell you, you can’t, so don’t tell me where I can look
and where I can’t!’ My ears rang from the arguments on Desheng’s barge, which continued throughout that day and the next.
Fortunately, on the third day, the fleet began to move, slowly opening up a passage down the river. A squad of armed militiamen
jumped aboard one of the boats, rifles slung over their left shoulders and bullhorns over their right. An embarkation system
had been created, and no ships were to nestle up to the piers – we were all to sail east. The Honoured Transport Fleet led
the way, an effective manoeuvre, with as many as three hundred barges sailing downstream through rain and mist until, in the
midst of a torrential downpour, we reached the piers at Milltown.

I hardly recognized the place, though I’d only been away a few days. It had been turned into a – into a what? By nature given
to confusion and disorder, and deficient at expressing my feelings, I’m incapable of describing the town that autumn. So,
if you’ll bear with me, I’ll borrow a few lines from my father’s poem: ‘Come on, come on, who’s afraid of a flood? Floodwaters
open up our way ahead. In this stirring autumn red flags flutter in the wind, songs of triumph rise into the air, as we move
forward, forward, racing towards a workers’ paradise, a revolutionary advance guard.’

An advance guard, to be sure, but our barges, the Sunnyside Fleet, brought up the rear, so when the drums and cymbals welcomed
the flotilla, we could only look on from a distance to where Young Pioneers waited in the rain: the boys lined the road, arms
raised in a salute, while the girls flocked to the ships like swallows to present each honoured sailor with a red flower.
As the pier-side welcoming ceremony began, a mass campaign was under way in every corner of the town; labourers with farm
tools over their shoulders were everywhere, their shouts drowned out by the driving rain. While the barge crews waited to
go ashore, our ears were pounded by the voice of an anxious young man coming over the loudspeaker: ‘Red Flag Fleet, come ashore,
move sharply, come ashore.’ The crews made ready, but then rousing music blared from the PA system, followed by static. Then
the anxious young man returned: ‘Comrade so-and-so, report to the construction site command post. An urgent matter awaits!’

Our crews were standing at the bows awaiting a command from the PA system. But our cargo appeared to be the least important
of all. The Great Wall Fleet barges, with their cargo of pork, fresh produce and rice, had received their call, and we were
still waiting. Sun Ximing ran to the riverbank to complain to a raincoat-clad man. ‘We’re carrying human cargo, so why are
we lined up behind barges carrying pork?’

The official bellowed his response: ‘Have you forgotten what times these are? Do you see this as some sort of competition?
All people and cargo coming ashore must be registered, and registering cargo is faster than registering people. With only
us few working, of course we register pork first.’ That cleared things up.

I heard Desheng’s wife say to her husband, ‘We’re working as hard as anyone else. Will we get red flowers too?’

‘Revolution isn’t a dinner party,’ Desheng replied. ‘If it’s a flower you want, go and get yourself a water gourd.’

As the rain eased off, the people inside our cabin began to shout, ‘It’s suffocating in here, give us some air!’ So I raised
the hatch, and was hit by a blast of sweat-sour air, mixed with the stench of cigarette smoke, urine and vomit. Then the heads
of the workers started popping up, more men than women, most of them young. With bed rolls on their backs, they elbowed one
another to get their first look at the legendary workers’ paradise. Mouths open, they breathed deeply and gawked at the construction
scenes on the banks. One of the women shrieked, ‘They’re turning the earth upside down! They’ll work us to death!’ She could
have chosen a better time to shout – someone shouted back at her: ‘What did you think we brought you here to do, loaf around?
If you’re afraid of hard work you shouldn’t have come to Milltown.’ The uproar in the cabin died out quickly. A man who looked
like a demobilized soldier travelling with the fleet began recording the passengers with a roll call, but he’d only managed
a few people when the PA system blared out the name of the Sunnyside Fleet. He hopped down on to the deck and began issuing
orders: ‘Shock Troops Three over here! Shock Troops Four over there! Gao Village Shock Troops and Li Family Crossing Shock
Troops to the rear!’

So that’s what they were, shock troops! A barge-load of shock troops was on the move and our spacious forward hold emptied
quickly, leaving nothing but two rows of buckets used for toilets, all filled and sending their hot stench straight into my
nostrils. Some of them must have been knocked over, since the deck was soiled with puddles of a disgusting liquid. The smell
was overpowering.

After changing into rubber boots, I snatched a mop and began cleaning up. But I’d barely begun when I saw that something else
had been left behind – a bundle wrapped in an army raincoat had been tossed into a corner. I touched it with my broom; it
moved. Then a child’s leg kicked out, scaring the hell out of me. The
next thing to wriggle out of the raincoat bundle was the head of a woman with hair going every which way, and I heard her
complain crisply, ‘Why’d you hit my leg with that?’

Two people had taken refuge in the army raincoat: a thirty-year-old woman and a little girl, apparently a mother and daughter.
Two pairs of eyes, one dazed, the other lively, both gaped at me sleepily.

I struck the deck with my mop. ‘Up!’ I said. ‘Get up! I have to clean the cabin.’

As soon as they stood up, I saw how weary the woman was. She had a pale, unhealthy face. And there was more inside that raincoat,
lots more. She opened it up to expose a bulging knapsack and a rolled-up blanket, plus a netted basket with a wash basin and
rice tin, all tied together by the hood and sleeves of the raincoat, which she held in her arms. The girl’s arms were just
as full: she was hugging a cloth doll and had an olive-green army canteen draped around her neck by its strap. She was also
holding a little blackboard on which words had been scrawled in juvenile writing: ‘East Wind No. 8,’ it said. ‘Huixian. Mama.’

‘What are you doing here?’ I demanded. ‘How dare you sleep on while everybody else has left the boat! Who are you?’

‘Who are we? We’re not going to tell you.’ The girl glared at me and put herself between me and her mother to keep her mother
from telling me. ‘He’s mean,’ she said. ‘Let’s ignore him.’

‘This is a shock-troop barge,’ I said. ‘How did you sneak aboard?’

‘We didn’t sneak aboard,’ the girl said provocatively. ‘We flew aboard, so you couldn’t see us.’

The woman combed her fingers through her tangled hair and glanced eagerly at the shore. ‘Huixian!’ she scolded. ‘Don’t talk
like that! It’s rude.’ Then, turning her eyes away from the shore, she smiled, almost apologetically. But she hadn’t answered
my
question. She crawled out of the hold, dragging her bundle and the girl with her. Then she turned and said, ‘We’re shock troops
too. I just overslept. I didn’t dare fall asleep at night. I was exhausted.’