So Father handed me a chess set. ‘You spend all your time inside, anxious some of the time and energetic at other times, whatever’s
called for. But you haven’t played chess in a long time, so take these outside and find someone to play with.’
‘Who? Who knows how to play chess? Tell me that?’ I pushed his hand away. ‘Barge people are stupider than pigs. All they know
how to do is thump!’
‘What do you mean, thump? What’s that?’
He didn’t know what thump meant. ‘Thump their pig brains,’ I said, ‘that’s what. They couldn’t learn how to play chess if
their lives depended on it.’
‘I don’t want to hear talk like that about labouring folks,’ Father said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with not knowing how to play
chess. They know how to work, and that’s enough. They may not know how to play, but I do, so let’s have a game.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’d rather play against a chess manual.’
He went inside to get the chess manual for me. But the sight
of all those carriages, steeds, and cannons bored me, so I laid the manual down on the table, picked up our enamel spittoon,
undid my trousers and aimed a stream of urine at a peony at the bottom.
‘How many times have I told you to go outside and pee over the stern?’ Father said. ‘Why do you insist on using the spittoon?
Boatmen pee over the side. Who hides in a cabin to do his business? You’re not a spoiled bourgeois young mistress, are you?’
‘Who says a boy can’t pee in his cabin?’ I argued. ‘I don’t want people to watch me peeing over the side.’
‘Who’d want to watch you? You’re not a little girl. Nobody’s interested in watching you take a leak. This is more proof of
your unhealthy attitude. There you go, looking cross-eyed at me again, and for no reason.’ With that, he turned his criticism
to my eyes. ‘I keep telling you to stop that. No matter what you do, having the right attitude is the most important thing.
I don’t want you looking at people cross-eyed any more, especially when you’re talking to them. Only social misfits do things
like that.’
To be honest, I didn’t know if I was in the habit of looking cross-eyed at people, and I didn’t have a mirror to see if he
was telling the truth. But I hated the way he used that excuse to pick on me, so I mumbled, ‘So what if I’m looking cross-eyed?
That dick of yours is cock-eyed, go and pick on that.’
It was a good thing he didn’t hear that last comment. If he had, he’d have known exactly what lay behind it.
I was, as I’ve said, fifteen. Like a waterlogged branch, I was carried from swell to swell on the river. The wind and water
had me under their control, as did Father on a daily basis, but I had no control over myself or my secret. One morning I was
startled awake – smacked awake, more like. Still half asleep, I unconsciously covered my crotch with my hands. Sure enough,
I saw a little mountain peak down there, thanks to an erotic dream about Li Tiemei from the revolutionary opera. But this
time I
wasn’t going to be punished for having a hard-on, because my father was standing by my bed and he’d discovered my secret.
He hit me – in the face – with Mother’s notebook. In the process he knocked Li Tiemei and the red lantern off the notebook
and on to the floor.
His hair was uncombed and there was sleep in his eyes. His face looked weird – pale white on one side and pig’s-liver red
on the other, painted anger. ‘Where did you get this?’ he roared. ‘Get up. Get on your feet and tell me why you did this!’
Still not fully awake, I stood up and covered my face. ‘I didn’t write that,’ I said, putting up the only defence that came
to me. ‘Mama did. I had nothing to do with it.’
‘I know she wrote it! You stole it. What I want to know is why you didn’t give it to me. Why did you hide it? This is damning
evidence against me. What were you planning to do with it?’
Maybe I had a plan and maybe I didn’t. But I didn’t know why I had hidden it, and since I didn’t know, I should have kept
silent. But I was not capable of that. So I said something to prove my innocence. ‘I hid it for fun,’ I said. ‘It was just
for fun.’
‘For fun?’ he screamed. ‘What kind of fun?’ That really set him off. The questions began to pile up. ‘You say it was for fun.
This is evidence your mother gathered to punish me. How was that supposed to be fun?’
How was it supposed to be fun? What could I to say to that? Nothing. There were flames of anger in his eyes that I’d never
seen before, and I knew I was in big trouble. So I scooped up my trousers and burst out of the cabin. He was right on my heels.
‘Go on!’ he shouted, ‘get away from me. Get the hell out of my sight! Go ashore, go and find your mother.’
The fleet was moving downriver that morning. As I stood on the bow of our barge, there was no place I could run to. My eyes
roamed over the other barges, now safe havens. But I didn’t want to be there. As day was breaking, the barges began to stir,
and
people emerged to discover that Father had kicked me out of the cabin and up to the bow of barge number seven, where I was
holding on to the cable housing for dear life. Desheng was the first to react. ‘Secretary Ku,’ he shouted, ‘what’s the matter
with Dongliang? I don’t know what’s made you so angry, but you have to stop now. If you keep this up, he’ll be in the water.’
Pretending he hadn’t heard, Father pointed a coal shovel at me, like a weapon. ‘I told you to leave, you shameless brat! I
want you off this barge. Go and find your mother.’
I looked down at the water and, in all truth, I was scared. But I wasn’t about to let him know that, so I said, ‘I’ll leave
as soon as you tell the tugboat to stop and let me off.’
‘Just who do you think you are?’ he replied. ‘Do you really think the tug will stop just because a little bastard like you
wants it to? Dream on! You won’t drown, so get in and swim ashore.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘the water’s too cold. I’ll wait till there’s a sandbar. Do you think this old rust bucket is all I’ve got?
Well, I’m telling you, once I’m off it I’m not coming back. You can live on without me.’
But my threat did not work. ‘All right,’ he said as he glanced at the riverbank, the coal shovel still in his hand, ‘there’s
the duck farm sandbar. You can get off now.’ Then he slipped the shovel under my feet and picked me up. By then, Six-Fingers
Wang’s daughters had come out on to the deck of barge number six and were giggling stupidly over the scene in front of them.
I was mortified. He could have flung me off the barge.
I wasn’t a chunk of coal, but that’s what he treated me like. With a full-throated roar, he bent at the waist, squatted down,
and shovelled me on to the sandbar near the duck farm.
T
HAT WAS
the first time Father ran me off the barge. I went ashore at the duck farm, where there was no one around, just two rows
of ducks waddling from side to side on a sandbar – a welcoming committee heralding my return to terra firma. I started walking
towards Milltown, with the sensation that the ground beneath me was undulating like river swells, although the waters of the
Golden Sparrow River were as still as a glistening roadway. At first glance, the boats’ masts looked like houses. As I neared
the transformer substation several ducks met me head-on, followed by the idiot Bianjin, who was carrying a duck whistle and
prancing proudly down the road. When he saw me he called out excitedly, ‘You’re Ku Wenxuan’s son, aren’t you? Want to know
something? Go and tell your father that the investigative team is coming soon, and they’ll announce that I am Deng Shaoxiang’s
son, her real son!’
At least I knew how to deal with an idiot. ‘Idiot,’ I said, ‘you’re the typical toad that wants to feast on a swan. What makes
you think you’re worthy of being a martyr’s son? I’ll tell
you
something. The investigative team is coming soon, and they’ll announce that your father is a pig and your mother a duck,
which means you were thumped into existence by a pig and a duck!’
He took after me with his duck whistle. He knew what ‘thumped’ meant, and cursed me angrily. ‘You’ve got a filthy mouth for
someone so young. Thumped? Do you know how to thump? Well, I’ll show you. I’ll thump the shit out of you!’
We raced down the road, and I quickly left him in my dust. But even after I was well out of reach I kept running, something
I hadn’t done in a long time. I ran like the wind. If I hadn’t been living on a barge, running would never have become one
of life’s little pleasures. I ran until I was standing in front of Milltown’s red schoolhouse. No more wind – I was exhausted.
I stood in the road, trying to catch my breath, and took a long look at the schoolhouse and playground. All of a sudden, I
was struck by crippling sadness – I felt it in my belly and in my heart.
I’d spent only three months in the high-school section before leaving, and at the time I couldn’t have been happier. But now,
with the passage of time and the change in my circumstances, I discovered that I missed school after all. I skirted the wall
and walked up to my former classroom, where through the window I could see a roomful of boys and girls, their heads rising
and falling like a field of sorghum stalks. A girl in a colourful jacket was sitting in my old seat. Her lips were moving,
as if she were mumbling something. And she was picking her nose. They were repeating as best they could the foreign words
their teacher was saying, but pretty much all that came out was a jumble of sounds, none of which I recognized. By standing
on my tiptoes I could see the blackboard. They were learning English:
NEVER FORGET CLASS STRUGGLE
! was written in Chinese, and below that a line of English letters. After listening to them several times, I memorized the
sounds: Ne-fu fu-gai-te ke-la-si si-que-ge. Was that how you said ‘Never forget class struggle’ in English? Without being
aware of it, I was already translating the sounds into the local dialect, and a happy discovery nearly made me laugh out loud:
in Milltown dialect and the secret language of the Sunnyside Fleet,
the sentence meant something like ‘Go out and thump all you want.’
Thump. Go ahead and thump. That got me so excited I wrote the slogan on the wall with a piece of chalk I found on the ground.
Below that I wanted to write my translation into the local dialect, but I couldn’t remember how to write one of the critical
characters. So I wrote ‘Go out and thump’ instead. One missing character affected the whole thing. Then, in sudden inspiration,
I erased the word ‘
NEVER
’, so that the slogan now read, ‘
FORGET CLASS STRUGGLE
.’ Just then a boy’s head poked out through the window. I didn’t know him, but he knew me. His eyes grew wide. ‘Ku Dongliang.
What are you doing there?’
I threw down the chalk and ran off.
I was running again, but this time I was running away, and as I ran it dawned on me that since the slogan came from Chairman
Mao, changing even one word made it a counter-revolutionary slogan. This was bad, very bad. I ran past the burlap-sack factory
and headed towards Workers and Peasants Avenue. But when I reached the intersection, it occurred to me that my home was no
longer on that street, so I turned and headed for the Government Affairs Building, which I knew like the back of my hand;
my father had occupied an office on the fourth floor and my mother’s broadcasting studio was on the second floor. Not until
I was standing in front of the building did it dawn on me that she too no longer worked there. I vaguely recalled Father telling
me that she’d been transferred, but wasn’t sure if she’d been sent to the cooking-oil processing plant or the management office.
So I went to inquire at the reception desk, where I saw a clutch of people standing around waiting for the day’s newspaper.
I spotted several familiar faces, including some people who had been friendly to me in the past. But now they looked at me
with blank faces. ‘What are you doing here, Dongliang?’ one woman asked. ‘Your mother no longer works at the broadcasting
station.’
They told me she worked at the processing plant and described how to get there. It was far, nearly all the way to Maple Village,
and it was getting dark by the time I got there, having walked the whole way. The milling machines had shut down for the day,
but the smell of new rice and rapeseed oil hung in the air. Some workers, their shift over, gestured in my direction. I didn’t
know them. ‘Is Qiao Limin here?’ I asked.
Mysterious grins appeared on their faces. ‘Yes, of course she is. She’s waiting for you.’
So I walked inside, where I saw three people in front of a milling machine, their eyes glued to me. One was my mother, the
second was Teacher Jiang of the Milltown Middle School, and the third was a uniformed policewoman named Hong. I knew I was
in big trouble and that it would have been smart to turn tail and run. But I was too tired to take another step.
My mother walked up – rushed me like a lioness, more like – and slapped me three times – smack, smack, smack. Then she turned
to her companions and explained why. I still recall every word: ‘The first one was for him; the second for me, Qiao Limin,
who’s tried to be an upstanding citizen all my life, only to give birth to a son who doesn’t know the meaning of the word
“up-standing”; and the third was for his father, whose education of the boy has him writing counter-revolutionary slogans
after only three months!’
A
FTER ONLY
a few days in Mother’s dormitory I was ready to head back.
I don’t know if it was her doing or the fact that I’d earned a bad reputation, but the other women in the dormitory steered
clear of me. Their attitude influenced the men in the neighbouring tool-repair factory, who scowled if I was around. My only
fan was a mangy dog that gave me a fervent welcome. It was begging to be liked. Day in and day out it hung around me, sniffing
at my trouser legs and at my crotch – mainly at my crotch. I didn’t appreciate the mongrel’s attention, and was particularly
annoyed by its fascination with my crotch. Even if I had felt more unwelcome than I did, I would still have been unwilling
to make friends with a mangy cur. Finally I kicked it, and was surprised that the animal retained a measure of self-respect
– it was a good thing I could run fast, or I’d have been bitten for sure.
The dog chased me all the way to Mother’s dorm, where it set up a howl that frightened the women inside. Knowing I was the
one who’d set the dog off, Mother ran out with a wet mop and drove the barking dog off, then went back inside to tell the
women that everything was fine. But someone must have said something unpleasant, because when I went up to her room, she wore
a dark, gloomy expression. I plopped down on the bed and
began scratching my feet – the wrong thing to do, given her mood. Still holding the wet mop, she turned on me, jabbing the
mop at my legs one minute and my arms the next. ‘You wicked boy,’ she scolded. ‘You’re isolated from the masses, animals hate
you, and a mangy dog chases you! Even a shit-eating dog has no forgiveness in its heart for you!’
I was clever enough to keep my mouth shut, and just let her rant on as I pinched my nose and held my breath. Go ahead, yell
at me, I thought. Anything you say goes in one ear and out the other. It’s nothing but
kongpi
! I sat down to dinner to a chorus of scolding, and for some reason the word ‘exile’ popped into my head. Maybe that’s what
I was, an exile. But one thing I knew for sure was that Mother’s cramped dormitory was no home for me; it was just a way station.
The words ‘mother’ and ‘son’ meant nothing here. I was a guest – and an unwelcome guest at that. Mother supplied me with three
meals a day, but every grain of rice was saturated with her sadness, and every vegetable leaf was infused with her disappointment.
If I lived with her like that, either she would die and I’d go crazy, or vice versa. And I wasn’t alone in feeling that way
– she did too.
Mother was on the shore, but I had no home there, and had to head back. Note that by heading back I meant back to the barge,
back to the Sunnyside Fleet.
One morning a week later, the fleet was returning from its latest mission and I was on the pier, waiting anxiously for them.
I could not say if I was waiting for my father’s barge and his home to return to, or if I was waiting for the return of
my
barge and
my
home.
So I stood there, bag in hand. It was wet underfoot after a foggy morning, almost as if it had rained. With a bit of hesitation
the sun broke through, lighting up part of the pier and leaving the rest to fend for itself. Fog hung over the mountain of
coal,
the piled-up commodities and the many cranes. There were spots where the sunlight was nearly blinding and others so dark it
was hard to see. I waited in the darkness. Someone was moving near the embankment, but I couldn’t tell who it was. The person
was heading my way from the transport office, nearly running, and dragging a shimmering white light behind. It had to be a
stevedore. When he was close enough to hear, I shouted, ‘Do you know when the fleet is expected back?’
As soon as the words were out of my mouth I regretted them, for it was the general affairs typist, Zhao Chunmei. Ah, Zhao
Chunmei. She was Zhao Chuntang’s younger sister, and her name appeared in Mother’s notebook at least ten times. She’d been
one of my father’s lovers. Some of the words Mother had written after Father had told the truth floated into my head. They
did it! They did it on the typing desk. They did it on a window ledge. They did it again and again! The description was particularly
detailed in one spot. They were in a room where cleaning gear was kept, doing it, when the caretaker opened the door. Never
one to lose control in the face of danger, Father covered himself with a broom and a mop and held the door partially shut
with his shoulder. ‘You can take the day off,’ he said. ‘We are doing some voluntary work in here!’
I recalled seeing Zhao Chunmei in the office, and my abiding image of her was how fashionable and haughty she seemed. She
wore milky-white high-heeled shoes virtually every day of the week, a sight rarely seen in Milltown, or – rarer still – purplish-red
ones. Both made a loud click-clacking sound when she climbed the stairs. The other women in the building hated her, Mother
included. They felt that her shoes served two purposes: to show off to the women and to tempt the men. I can still see that
come-on look in her eyes, flirtatious as hell.
But no longer. She knew who I was, and the look she gave me was unusually cold, the sort of look a policeman might give a
criminal, her eyes glued to my face. Then she looked down at my bag, as if it contained evidence of some crime. At first I
was tempted to look away, but that would have been too easy. Then I recalled my father’s line about voluntary work, and felt
like laughing. Suddenly she shuddered, which surprised me. I swallowed my laughter and kept my eyes on her. She was giving
me the most hateful look I’d ever seen. ‘He’s dead!’ she cried. ‘My husband, Little Tang, is dead, and Ku Wenxuan killed him!’
That was when I noticed a white flower in Zhao Chunmei’s hair. Her shoes were also white – not high heels, but funeral shoes,
with hempen ties on the backs and heels. Her puffy cheeks distorted what she was saying. I understood that her husband was
dead and that she’d said Father had killed him. But I didn’t know why. My father had been on board our barge for a long time
now, so how could he have killed Little Tang? I’d always been fascinated with death, so I felt like asking when Little Tang
had died and whether he’d committed suicide or was killed by someone else. But Zhao Chunmei was in no mood to say more. She
just glowered at me. Finally, she gnashed her teeth and said, ‘Ku Wenxuan, you’ll repay this blood debt one of these days!’
Her menacing glare frightened me. A woman’s face, no matter how pretty, becomes a terrible sight when it shows a thirst for
vengeance. The look on Zhao Chunmei’s face was so terrifying that I instinctively stepped backwards to get away from her,
reversing all the way to the loading dock. When I passed beneath a crane, I glanced up at Master Operator Liu in his cage,
who signalled for me to climb up, as if he had something important to tell me. He didn’t. He just wasn’t a man who could mind
his own business. Pointing to Zhao Chunmei, he said, ‘Don’t upset her. She hasn’t been herself for the past few days, ever
since her husband killed himself with a pesticide.’
‘I didn’t do anything,’ I said. ‘She upset
me
. Besides, it wasn’t
me who gave her husband the pesticide, so what’s it got to do with me?’
‘It’s got nothing to do with you,’ he said, ‘but everything to do with your dad. He’s the one who made Little Tang wear a
green hat – you know, a cuckold. People say that the green hat crushed him.’
‘Crushed by a green hat – so what! She let my dad thump her, didn’t she? Nobody forced her. Besides, he wore that green hat
for years willingly enough, and no one forced him, either. My dad did it with lots of women. How come
he
decided to kill himself? Stop spreading malicious gossip!’
‘You don’t know a damned thing,’ Liu said. ‘Willing, you say? Whoever heard of a man willing to wear a green hat? It’s not
their choice to make. You’re right, Little Tang wore that hat for years, but hardly anybody knew. As long as people pretended
nothing was wrong, he could do the same. But when your dad fell from power, lots of people started talking. Then the backbiting
started, with people saying that Little Tang had handed his wife over to someone in a position of leadership for his own advancement.
Out on the street, people whispered things. Could he pretend he was deaf? When he went to the bathhouse, the old-timers laughed
at him. When he couldn’t take it any longer, he got into a fight, and wound up with a bloody nose. They offered him cotton
to stop the bleeding, but he refused. Instead, he threw on his clothes and went straight to the pharmacy, supposedly to buy
Mercurochrome. But what he actually bought was a bottle of DDT, which he drank on the way home. People who saw him thought
it was alcohol. Now I ask you, the way Little Tang died, wouldn’t you say he was crushed by that green hat?’
What Liu said made sense. It wasn’t very scientific, but since I didn’t know what it felt like to wear a green hat, my opinion
didn’t count for much. But still I said, ‘There are internal and external
causes for everything, but the internal causes are the main ones. Most of the responsibility for Little Tang’s death lies
with him. You can’t blame my father for what happened.’
‘Don’t give me any of that internal and external bullshit,’ Liu said. ‘Do you think I don’t know my Marxism-Leninism? I never
said your dad was the internal cause. If he had been, then he’d have been the one drinking the DDT.’
I’d have liked to keep the debate with Liu going, but I glanced down at the pier, where Zhao Chunmei was still looking daggers
at me. Thrown off stride, I reacted with foul language. ‘What’s that cunt up to? Her old man’s dead, so that’s the end of
it. Don’t tell me my dad has a blood debt. And even if he did, what’s that got to do with me?’
‘What kind of gutter talk is that?’ Liu said with a frown. ‘A comrade who’s just lost her husband doesn’t deserve to be spoken
about like that. Nobody’s asking your dad to repay a blood debt. She’s backed herself into a corner, and all she can do is
come down to the pier to get him to put on mourning attire and pay his respects at Little Tang’s grave.’
This was probably the only useful thing Liu said to me up there, because now the sight of Zhao Chunmei down below was more
terrifying than ever. I’d have liked to stay up there in the cage, but Liu sent me back down, saying that safety regulations
did not permit idlers, though the real reason was his unhappiness over my gutter talk.
As soon as I was back on the ground, Zhao Chunmei walked towards me, taking a strip of white cloth out of her overcoat pocket
and waving it in the air. ‘Ku Wenxuan’s whelp,’ she shouted. ‘Since your dad’s not here, you can wear this.’
I was horrified. She must be crazy to think I’d wear something like that. ‘Dream on!’ I said, before taking off and running
up the mountain of coal. She ran after me for a few steps, but when she realized she’d never catch me, she turned and headed
back to
the pier to wait for my dad, grumbling to herself and tucking the white sash back into her pocket.
I spent the rest of the morning on top of the coal, waiting for the fleet to return, while Zhao Chunmei waited down below.
Two enemies, each with their own thoughts, awaited the return of the same person – my father.
Finally, the sun got up the nerve to climb into the sky, making the piers shimmer. Off in the distance I heard the toot of
a tugboat and saw the hazy outlines of the fleet. From where I stood, the string of barges looked like an archipelago, eleven
floating islands approaching in an orderly fashion. I assumed they were carrying cargo from the town of Wufu. Goods from most
places could be shipped uncovered, making them easy to identify. But Wufu commodities were different. The barges approached
the piers, their cargo covered by dark-green tarpaulins, and I knew there would be large sealed crates with no delivery addresses
under the tarps. They’d be marked with coded Arabic numerals and foreign lettering. I knew without looking that this cargo
was destined to wind up at the Southern Combat Readiness Base.
From where I stood I could see barge number seven, and there was my father. The other barges were shrouded in green tarps,
like a secretive collective body; number seven stood out from the others by the way its decks were open to the sky. The forward
hold was packed with squirming black and white animals. At first I couldn’t tell what they were, but soon I realized it was
a boatful of pigs – our barge was transporting thirty or forty pigs! My father, bent at the waist beside the hold, was trying
to control a boatload of black, white and spotted pigs. After driving me off the barge, he’d gone off to pick up some honoured
guests. Now, days later, he was bringing a boatload of live pigs to Milltown.
It was around eight in the morning. The loudspeakers were blaring callisthenics music that drowned out the tugboat’s whistle.
The barges were ready to dock, sending water splashing in all
directions and galvanizing the crews into action – they dropped anchor and secured the boats with hawsers. I saw my father
standing in the bow, not knowing what to do until Desheng ran up and helped him drop anchor. A husky man’s voice came over
the loudspeaker – ‘Limbering exercise: one, two, three, four’ – as the boats, matching the callisthenics beat – ‘one, two,
three, four’ – nestled up to the piers.
Dockside cranes swung into action, but not before the stevedores had gathered on the embankment. A cacophony of noise rose
all around. I saw Zhao Chunmei race under the arm of a crane, heading for the boats. If I knew anything, it was that no one
would let her aboard while she was in mourning garments. Sailors are a superstitious lot, and would never allow that to happen.
As I expected, Sun Ximing and his wife came down off barge number one to stop her. Then Six-Fingers Wang and his family blocked
her way on to the gangplank. So, with a quick change of tactics, she turned and headed for barge number seven. When the people
spotted what she was doing, they grew anxious. ‘Go away!’ they shouted. ‘Don’t come any closer!’ Desheng and Old Qian even
used poles to drive her away. I watched as she ran around avoiding them.