While one could say that my parents fell in love, it would be more accurate to say that they discovered one another at the
same moment. My father discovered her beauty and talent; she discovered his bloodline and future prospects. He was half a
head shorter than she, which even then made their marriage a mismatch, though there were reasons for them to come together.
But then in September, my father’s secrets were exposed. Someone, it’s not clear who, revealed to Mother that the first thing
he habitually said in furtherance of his womanizing was ‘Comrade So-and-So, your body emanates the spirit of revolutionary
romanticism.’
My mother’s lungs felt as if they were about to explode – that was one of
her
favourite expressions. She once described for me the powerful reflex anger caused in her lungs: ‘I have trouble breathing,’
she said, ‘my lungs pound against my chest, and I’m sure that I lose part of them every time that happens.’ Anger and hurt
led her to a new discovery about Father, that he was what is known as ‘cow dung disguised as a flower garden to trick the
flowers’. She was one of those flowers, now growing in a pile of cow dung, and the reasons for them to have come together
suddenly no longer existed, while reasons for them to part mounted. Mother began folding her clean autumn clothes and packing
them away in a camphor chest, storing her treasured stage costumes in a suitcase that itself was a treasure, a relic from
her life on the stage. A red seal on top of the suitcase said:
AWARDED TO THE POPULAR
ENTERTAINMENT ACTIVISTS
OF THE HARVEST NITROGEN FERTILIZER
FACTORY
Towards the end, our family life became chaotic and stifling. Mother divided the household chores into three categories. One
was reserved for her, and consisted mainly of preparing lunch and dinner for me and for herself. Another was reserved for
me, and consisted mainly of sweeping and dusting and taking out the
rubbish. The final category was the most arduous: making breakfast for all three of us, cleaning the toilet twice a day, and
taking care of all aspects of Father’s daily life: food, clothing and whatever else he needed. Those were his duties. Mother
said she’d lost her appetite for washing his socks and underwear, and was adamant about not cooking for him. She said she’d
suffered so much humiliation she could barely keep from poisoning his food.
My mother followed methods used by organs of the dictatorship in punishing criminals, subjecting Father to the ultimate settling
of accounts. She overlooked nothing, from his labour-reform activities in the yard to special examinations in the bedroom.
His last days at home were little more than house arrest, with Mother as his inquisitor, and everything centred on problems
of lifestyle. Just that, his lifestyle, which of course involved only the area below the waist, not something people liked
to talk about. Father, who was easily embarrassed, could not endure the questioning, so he took to keeping out of sight. The
minute Mother came home from work, he hid in the toilet and stayed there as long as he could.
Whenever I saw Mother take a pen and her worker’s notebook out of a drawer, I knew the interrogation was about to begin. ‘Go
on, call your father out here.’ She wanted me to bang on the toilet door, and if I refused, she did it herself with a broom
handle. Father would emerge and pass under the broom, bent at the waist, heading for the yard. But he’d barely make it to
the front door before hearing Mother’s sarcastic laugh. He’d stop, turn, and come face to face with her broom, pointing at
him. ‘Go ahead,’ she’d say sternly. ‘Open the door and go outside, where a crowd of people is waiting to see Ku Wenxuan embarrass
himself. Go out there and give them a show. I’m betting you don’t have the guts!’
He didn’t. After taking a turn around the yard, he’d obediently come back inside and sit opposite her, where he’d beat about
the
bush instead of answering her questions, or else admit minor transgressions but do whatever he could to avoid the more serious
ones. To Mother, this smacked of passive resistance. They never argued in front of me and lowered the curtain to keep me from
peeking in at the window, but on one occasion I heard Mother’s hysterical shouts tear through the window: ‘Ku Wenxuan, leniency
to those who confess their crimes and severity to those who refuse!’ The shouts emanated from a bedroom confrontation. It
sounded comical to me, but scary as well.
The truth is, the more they argued, the less I cared. On the contrary, the quieter and more peaceful they were, the more I
worried. Caution piqued my curiosity. They might be able to deceive the neighbours, but not me. One night a deadly silence
descended in their room, throwing me into a panic. I climbed the date tree and had an unobstructed view through the transom
window. The lamp was lit, so I could see them both. Mother was sitting at her desk, notebook in hand, her cheeks wet with
tears; my father was kneeling at her feet like a dog and had pulled down his trousers to show her his honoured fish-shaped
birthmark. At it again! He’d brought his sickness home with him. I saw her curse him loudly, glaring at him with contempt
and disgust. But he was relentless. His trousers were round his knees, and he was crawling along the floor, moving to wherever
Mother turned her face. Sharp light glinted off his pale, bony backside in the darkened room. Then his shouts tore through
the night.
‘Look! You used to like looking at it. Why won’t you look at it now? Take a good look at my birthmark, I’m Deng Shaoxiang’s
son! That’s the truth! I said look, take a good look. It’s a fish. I’m Deng Shaoxiang’s son. Don’t be in such a hurry to make
a clean break. If you file for divorce, you’ll live to regret it!’
I burst into tears. Was I crying for him or for her? I couldn’t say. I climbed down out of the tree and took a long look at
my house, then at the blue sky. I dried my eyes and snarled into the sky, ‘Go
ahead, divorce! If you don’t, you’re
kongpi
. And if you do, you’re still
kongpi
!’
Their divorce went without a hitch. The only problem was me. If I went with him, I’d sail the river; if I went with her, I’d
stay on dry land. The river had its appeal, but I was afraid to give up dry land. So I said to Father, ‘I’ll spend half the
year on the barge with you and half the year with Mother. What do you say?’
‘Fine with me,’ he said. ‘But check with your mother. I doubt she’ll go along with it.’
So I checked, and was met with boiling anger. ‘Absolutely not! If you want me, you can’t have him. And if you want him, you
can’t have me. If the top beam is crooked, the one below can’t be straight. How am I supposed to take care of a child he’s
had a hand in raising?’
So I had to choose. Two sets of inauspicious gifts were arrayed before me. One was Father and a barge, the other was Mother
and dry land. There was no way out, I had to choose one over the other. I chose Father. Even now the boat people sometimes
talk about my decision.
If Dongliang had stayed with his mother
, they say,
he’d be this or that
. Or,
If he’d stayed with her, Ku Wenxuan would be this or that
. Even,
His mother would
be this or that
. But I ignored all the ‘this or that’ talk. And ‘what ifs’ bored me.
Kongpi
, all of them. Like water that keeps flowing, or grass that keeps growing, there was no choice involved; it was all up to
fate. My father’s fate was tied up with a martyr named Deng Shaoxiang, and mine was tied up with him.
At the end of that year, a notice regarding the forced-transfer barge fleet was posted on the door of my house, spelling the
end of my time in Milltown. When we boarded the barge, Mother had to move, and she did. But she was in such a hurry that she
accidentally left her notebook behind. As she rushed out of the house she tossed a cloth bundle on to my bed, and when I picked
it up, I found the notebook inside. She’d made a cover for her cherished notebook out of an illustrated newspaper. The front
was graced with the ruddy face of Li Tiemei from the revolutionary opera
The Red Lantern
. The back showed Li’s hand, holding a red lantern. With time and opportunity on my side, I took as long as I needed to decide
what to do with this special notebook, and wound up making a bold decision. I’d neither hand it over to Father nor give it
back to Mother. I’d hide it away for myself.
To this day I can’t tell you who I hid that notebook for. Was it for Father or was it for Mother? Maybe it was for me. This
secret most likely impacted on the rest of my life. I committed everything Mother had written in it – or should I say, every
one of Father’s indiscretions – to memory. Even with the hatred she felt as she recorded everything, her handwriting was always
neat and pleasing to the eye. The themes and content were unsurprising. She noted Father’s infidelities in great detail: numbers,
times and locations. In some places she added angry comments: ‘Shameless! … Obscene! … I could die!’ To my astonishment, I
knew the names of some of the women, including the mother of my schoolmate Li Shengli, and Zhao Chuntang’s younger sister,
Zhao Chunmei. Even Aunty Sun, who ran the salvage station, was in there. These women had always impressed me as being proper
and virtuous. Why were their names in Mother’s notebook?
H
ARDLY ANYONE
today can relate the history of the Sunnyside Fleet with any degree of accuracy.
Let’s start with the tugboat. Owned by a shipping company, it ran on diesel, had twin rudders and plenty of horsepower. Seven
or eight workers manned the tug, although they worked only when there were barges that needed to be moved. Each time out counted
as a shift, and when that shift was over, they went back to their homes on the banks of the river. Sailors love to drink,
and the more the younger ones drank, the meaner they got. They could be having a normal conversation when suddenly fists would
fly. I saw one of them jump into the river with the jagged edge of a bottle stuck in his chest and swim to the riverside hospital,
cursing the whole way. The older hands were more easy-going and not nearly as volatile when they were drunk. One of them,
a man with a full beard, would lie out on the deck and sleep like a log. Another of the older ones – with a face like a monkey
– was in the habit of showering on the afterdeck. Stark naked, he would work up a lather and then rinse off with cold water,
making eyes at the women and girls on the barges. I didn’t think much of that gang.
For that matter, I didn’t think much of anyone. The Sunnyside Fleet boasted eleven barges, manned by eleven families, most
with shady backgrounds. In that respect, we were all pretty much
alike. Since Father’s situation was still unsettled, our background was as murky as any of the others. Taking me aboard one
of the barges with him could hardly be called exile, nor was it some sort of banishment; rather, it was a reclassification.
The boat people called a spot upriver named Plum Mountain their ancestral home. You can no longer find it on any Golden Sparrow
River regional map. During the construction of a reservoir, Plum Mountain township, with its thirteen villages, was flooded,
and now the place is marked on maps in blue – Victory Reservoir. Only an idiot would believe that Plum Mountain was really
their ancestral home, since their speech was a mish-mash of accents and dialects, with pithy, bizarre ways of saying things.
Let’s say we were heading upriver towards Horsebridge. They’d say we were heading ‘down’ to it. They called eating ‘nibbling’,
and relieving themselves was ‘snapping it off’. As for sex, which people ashore seldom even mentioned, they were perfectly
happy to talk about it any time, any place. The word they used was ‘thump’. If several men were sitting around with conspiratorial
looks on their faces, all you heard them talking about was thump, thump, thump. Why ‘thump’? Because what most people consider
to be a serious social issue was just an ordinary thumping to them.
I was generally repelled by the way they lived. They were sloppy dressers. In cold weather they overdressed, with reds and
greens and yellows and blues all thrown together and layered collars sticking up around their necks. Then when summer gave
way to autumn they were underdressed, sometimes to the point of being half-naked. Barefoot and shirtless, the men were so
dark that from a distance they looked like Africans. They wore coarse, homemade white shorts, the material for which came
mostly from Great Harvest flour sacks. Wide in the crotch, the tops were rolled over at the waist and tied with drawstrings.
The women were slightly better, in a bizarre way. Married women wore their hair in a bun, adorned with a magnolia or a gardenia.
Above the
waist, they sported a variety of attire: some fancied the faddish Peter Pan blouses, others wore men’s white T-shirts, and
others still preferred short granny jackets. But below the waist they were more conservative and unified: they wore baggy,
knee-length rayon trousers, black or dark blue, sometimes decorated with an embroidered peony on the leg. Owing to frequent
childbirth and nursing, and since they were not in the habit of wearing brassieres, their breasts sagged in defeat, large
and unwieldy. They swung from side to side when the women walked the decks of the barges, a grumbling badge of honour. I was
not impressed. Even when they were exposed, they held no interest for me.
The barge children usually ran around butt naked, both as an economy measure and as a sort of identification mark. There was
no fear of their getting lost ashore, for anyone who found them invariably returned them to the piers. Boys, of course, were
favoured over girls. They wore little pigtails, bracelets on their wrists, and long-life necklaces around their necks. The
girls, on the other hand, went without jewellery, and their mothers cut their hair haphazardly and unevenly, leaving them
with little haystacks on their heads. Adolescent girls covered their private parts with belly warmers made of white handkerchiefs
sewn together. Older girls wore either their mother’s or their father’s hand-me-downs, which meant they never fitted. Though
they were more or less unloved, that had no effect on their sense of family duty. All day long they ran up and down the decks
doing chores, hollering at their mischievous little brothers and sisters.
The only truly pretty girl in the fleet, Yingtao, was so intent on playing the role of a mother that she carried her baby
brother strapped to her back with red cloth, day in and day out, going from family to family. She once walked up to the stern
of barge number six, where she watched me steely-eyed, like a sentry.
‘What are you doing here?’ I said. ‘Go away.’
‘I’m on barge number six,’ she said, ‘not yours, so mind your own business.’
‘I’m not interested in minding anybody’s business,’ I said. ‘I just don’t want you watching me.’
‘If you weren’t looking at me,’ she said, ‘how’d you know I was watching you?’
‘OK, I won’t look at you, and you don’t talk to me.’
‘Who said I want to talk to you?’ she replied. ‘You spoke to me first.’ She was too quick for me, so I just glared at her
with the fiercest, most threatening look I could manage. It didn’t faze her. Instead, with an enigmatic smile she said, ‘Don’t
act so cocky. I know all about your family. I’ll let you see my brother’s backside. He’s got a birthmark, and it’s a fish
too!’ She untied the cloth holding her brother and exposed his tiny rear end to me. ‘See! See that birthmark. It looks just
like a fish!’ I could hear the pride in her voice, while the boy, who was now in her arms, began to fidget. ‘Don’t you dare
snap it off,’ Yingtao said, raising her voice. ‘I said, don’t you dare! You can go on the potty in a little while.’
Seeing that the child was about to let go, I turned my head so I didn’t have to keep looking at his rear end. Angered by the
encounter, I headed towards our stern and muttered, ‘Thump! Thump your goddamned fish! Thump! Thump your goddamned birthmark!’
Just like all the sailors.
My days on the river were unrelievedly lonely, and that loneliness comprised the last thread of my self-respect. There were
lots of boys in the fleet, but they were either too old and stupid or too small and disgusting, so I had no friends. How could
anyone expect me to make friends with the likes of them? But they were curious about me and as friendly as could be, often
dropping by barge number seven to see me, sometimes bringing gifts of mouldy peas or a toy train to tempt me into being their
friend. Who did they think I was? I sent them scurrying.
I’m sort of embarrassed to describe my early days aboard the
barge. Father wanted me to study, so he started teaching me things I needed to know. He’d let me sit on his favourite sofa
as I read from a pile of books that included the notebook that had belonged to my mother; that one I studied on the sly. In
recording Father’s lifestyle, Mother seemed to have been in a forgiving mood, since the harshest words she used were ‘did
it’. I counted – she used that phrase more than sixty times – Who he ‘did it’ with, when he ‘did it’ with her, as well as
where and how many times, plus who initiated it. Had they been caught in the act? As for other details, she settled for thick,
heavy exclamation marks and the unhappy comment ‘I could just die, my lungs are about to explode!’
I had nothing to die about as I read what she had written, trying to figure out exactly what had gone on. I wound up wallowing
in a space between reason and imagination, and was frightened by the outcome. That outcome was a chemical reaction that made
a prisoner of my body – I experienced one erection after another from her words. My crotch was on fire. A shameful flame burned
out of control in our cabin, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I closed the notebook, only to have Li Tiemei rekindle
the fire from the notebook’s cover. I can’t tell you why, but while there was a look of revolutionary fervour in her eyes,
the image of her thin, red lips, her long, straight nose and her soft, titillating ears came across to me as flirtatious.
Unable to suppress this imaginary flirtatiousness, I hid the notebook in a chest, an action that settled the upheaval in my
groin. But my ears remained unsettled. I thought I sensed a red image on the shore: it was my mother, running along the bank,
chasing our barge and shouting angrily, ‘Give me back my notebook! Give it back! Dongliang, you’re shameful and disgusting!
If the top beam is crooked, the bottom one can’t be straight. I could just die, Dongliang. Thanks to you, my lungs are about
to explode!’
Father was the top beam, I was the bottom one. I couldn’t deny that the top beam controlled the bottom one, but at the same
time, I was convinced that being the bottom beam is better than being the top one. It’s easy for the bottom beam to supervise
the top beam. I observed Father’s lifestyle with a detached eye, centring observations on his relations with women. But even
after prolonged observation, I could draw no clear conclusions. I knew that he was a crooked upper beam, but didn’t know how
it was crooked, and in whose direction it bent.
The Sunnyside Fleet was the grudging home of his last few remaining adoring supporters. Even after he was banished to the
river, they kept calling him Secretary Ku, and the women in the fleet felt that they bore a responsibility to come to our
aid. Qiao Limin, they said, was heartless. With a wave of her hand, she had banished father and son to a river barge. How
would they survive with no women aboard? So they brought their feminine sensibilities and a warmhearted nature to barge number
seven, often bringing us bowls of noodles or a pot of tea. Desheng’s wife was the kindest of all. On laundry day she’d walk
up to the bow of barge number five, carrying her wooden tub like a rice-sprout dancer, and call to my father, ‘Come out here,
Secretary Ku. Anything you need to wash? Just toss it in my tub.’
I’d stay in the cabin to watch his reaction. Even if he went out empty-handed, courtesy – which was important to him – demanded
that he engage Desheng’s wife in casual conversation. I scrutinized her carefully from inside the cabin, starting with her
bare feet, with their ruddy backs and red toenails – obviously painted with balsam oil. All the boat women painted their toes
in the hope that people would look at their feet. My father did not disappoint. He’d comment, ‘Desheng’s wife, I detect a
look of revolutionary romanticism about you.’
She’d just giggle, missing his point altogether. ‘I spend all my time on this barge,’ she’d say, ‘so stop that nonsense about
revolutionary romanticism.’ I knew this praise from him was filled with danger. I was pretty sure he had his eye on Desheng’s
wife,
and on Sun Ximing’s as well. My guess was, he had his eye on lots of women. With my face up against the porthole, I watched
with my heart in my mouth, because the minute he got close to a woman, as soon as the two of them began talking, I’d start
to worry and the word ‘thump’ would pop into my head. Based on my experience, I’d send a silent warning:
Careful, be careful, don’t get any ideas, keep that thing down
. Nervously, I’d glance at his trousers, not daring to breathe. Joyfully, whether he was with Desheng’s wife or Sun Ximing’s,
the crotch of Father’s trousers remained as flat as a placid river. He avoided making a fool of himself, and I guessed that
his years as an official had taught him that there were two ways of dealing with people – one to their face and another behind
their back.
I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t control myself. Once, when he was off to one side chatting with Desheng’s wife, I stuck my
head through the porthole to get a good look at them both. Spotting me, Father picked up a bamboo pole and smacked me on the
head. ‘What are you looking at, you little sneak? If I tell you to study, you put your head down on your book and sleep. But
now your eyes are as big as cowbells!’
I pulled my head back inside, stuck for an excuse. No excuse was possible. An unhealthy adolescence is sewn together by countless
unhealthy details. I knew I annoyed people. I was empty-headed, yet weighed down with cares. Someone might assume that nothing
bothered me, but I was a sneak. I really was. Father’s so-called lifestyle caused no problems on the river, but mine certainly
did. I was burdened with a gaunt exterior and dark moods. That was all Father had to see to know that I had begun masturbating.
During the daytime he frequently launched surprise inspections of my hands, even sniffing my palms; at night, when I was in
bed, to make sure my hands and crotch were apart, he’d wake me up if necessary to keep my hands on top of the covers.
It didn’t seem fair that while I never bothered him about his
lifestyle, he couldn’t stop bothering me about mine. Now that he had lost his leadership position in Milltown, the task of
reforming me became his number-one priority. Like a schoolteacher, he transformed our barge into a mobile classroom, starting
by cutting out four pieces of red paper and writing a commandment on each of them:
UNITY, ANXIETY, SOBRIETY, ENERGY
. Then he stuck them up on the cabin walls.
I had no argument with two of his commandments. Anxious? Thanks to all those surprise inspections, I was certainly that. Sober?
Day in and day out, nothing good ever happened, and I felt as if the whole world owed me something. But where unity and energy
were concerned, all I can say is, I found the former boring, while the latter, though not without its appeal, required certain
preconditions. Activities like playing ball or practising with slingshots were things you did on land. I was on the water
– how energetic could I be?