The Boat to Redemption (15 page)

Disgusted by their attitude, I said, ‘What makes you think we can’t? I’m drawing, whether you want me to or not.’

Sun’s wife stepped up to smooth things over. ‘Dongliang,’ she said, ‘don’t bite the hand that feeds you. We’re only thinking
of what’s best for you.’

‘Will it count if I draw the winning lot?’ I asked.

Placed in an awkward situation, she stared at the box. ‘What are the chances, anyway?’ she remarked. ‘Go ahead, give it a
try, since you’re here.’

I rolled up my sleeves and thrust my hand into the box. You can guess what happened. To everyone’s astonishment, I pulled
out
a coloured slip with a drawing of a little girl with dark eyes and pigtails tied up with big ribbons. It was signed in a juvenile
scrawl: ‘Huixian.’ I’d won.

I held it high and stared at Sun Ximing. ‘Well?’ I said excitedly. ‘I got it. Now what?’

There was a long moment of silence before someone shouted out, ‘No deal! Put it back and let the rest of us draw.’

‘Put it back? What kind of lottery is that? I won’t do it.’

Everyone stared at me, wondering if I meant what I said. ‘You’re not serious, Dongliang, are you? Keeping it means you have
to take her back to your boat. Is that really what you want?’

I didn’t know what to say. For some reason my face felt burning hot. Still holding the slip up in the air, I didn’t want to
give in, but lacked the courage to proceed. Then I heard some of the women laugh strangely, while the men made their opinions
known in a confusion of noise.

Covering his ears with his hands, Sun bellowed, ‘Stop the bickering! You’re giving me a headache.’ Then he looked at me. ‘Dongliang,’
he said warily, ‘why don’t you put that back in and draw again.’ He made as if to take the slip from me, but I pushed his
hand away. He stumbled backward, clearly embarrassed. ‘Dongliang,’ he said angrily, ‘you’re holding on to that like it was
ten goddamn yuan. This is not something to be taken lightly. In case you haven’t noticed, the masses are opposed to your keeping
this slip. Besides, the girl deserves a chance to say if she wants to live on your boat.’

So now it was up to Huixian. I recall that she was playing cat’s cradle with Xiaofu the whole time. She twirled the thread
in her hands, forming beautiful, complicated shapes in the air. ‘I don’t care,’ she announced. ‘It makes no difference to
me.’ The nonchalant manner in which she said it belied her young age, and everyone stopped, even me. I hadn’t expected that.

Sun Ximing’s wife was the first to gather her wits about
her. ‘That’s no answer, my little ancestor,’ she said. ‘This is too important for you to say you don’t care.’

Then Desheng’s wife sidled up to her, anxiously hoping the girl would prefer her. She held a finger up to her face and rolled
her eyes as a sign to the girl. Then I heard Yingtao’s mother gloat sarcastically, sensing an opportunity to provoke Sun’s
wife. ‘Now can you tell which boat is a good one,’ she pressed her, ‘and which one is bad? You thought the girl liked you
best because you have a good boat. Well, she doesn’t think so, and that makes your boat a bad one.’

A hue and cry erupted on barge number one. The lines were drawn between them and me, and I stood there, half muddleheaded
and half alert. I felt a deep sense of gratitude towards the girl, since, sofa or not, she seemed to be the only person in
the world who actually liked the people who lived on number seven – the only one. Noting my hesitation, the others began whispering
among themselves, trying to figure out what to do.

Sun’s wife decided to up the ante. ‘If you won’t draw a second lot, then go ahead, take her with you. You’ll be responsible
for bringing her up – food, clothing, hygiene, everything. We’ll see how you and your father handle that.’

‘Dongliang,’ Desheng said, ‘this is a time for cool heads. You know how to play chess, don’t you? Well, once you move a piece
you can’t take it back, and if you lose a game you have only yourself to blame.’

As for sly old Six-Fingers Wang, he gave me a friendly slap on the shoulder and said something that was totally out of place:
‘I don’t know what you have in mind, but it is too soon to take the girl over to your boat. Wait another ten years or so,
and we’ll happily give our approval.’

People laughed. I pushed Six-Fingers’s hand away and waved my slip in the air. ‘I drew it, it’s mine. Who cares if you approve
or not? I’m going to take her with me.’ I reached for Huixian’s
hand and said – commanded, actually – ‘Come on, we’re going to our boat.’

Huixian, who was by then standing in front of me, put both hands behind her back, but there was a smile on her face, and I
knew she was egging me on. It wasn’t an overt look of encouragement, but it betrayed a sense of reservation and caution. Then
her foot moved towards me, and that told me what was in her heart. She wanted me to take her to number seven.

‘Let’s go, off to number seven, to the sofa!’ I said. It was another command, and this time she obeyed me. She scooted over
to the deck and the women knew she’d made up her mind; there was nothing they could do about it now. I watched as she flew
across the gangplank like a bird freed from a cage, while the people behind us could only gape at our perfect harmony. Some
of them snapped out of it and ran up in surprise. ‘Don’t go, Huixian! You mustn’t go to number seven!’

I turned and shouted, ‘Why not? What’s wrong with number seven, tell me that!’

By now they’d lined up behind me, tall and short, edgy and fearful. My shout had hit them like a blast of cold air, rendering
them speechless. Why not? They didn’t have an answer. Desheng was more familiar with our boat than the others were, and for
that reason he was relatively calm. ‘Don’t go after them,’ he said. ‘Dongliang’s just a boy, it’s not his boat. It’s Secretary
Ku’s. You can believe me or not, but hear me out. Old Ku is not about to take this girl aboard his boat.’

He was, unfortunately, right. Huixian ran to the stern of number six, but that was as far as she got. For the first time in
ages, my father, who had heard the commotion, was standing on our bow, bent at the waist and smiling at her. But it was a
strange, forced smile that frightened her so badly she didn’t know what to do.

‘Little comrade,’ he said, ‘do as they say. You don’t want to come to our boat. We’ve got a tiger aboard.’

‘Liar,’ she said. ‘Tigers don’t live on boats.’

‘Maybe not other boats,’ he said, ‘but they do on ours. This one comes out at night to eat up little girls.’

In a gesture that was both comical and ugly, Father pretended to be a tiger, reaching out his hands like claws, and roared.
Huixian shrieked in fright and jumped back. But then she held her ground and looked hatefully into Father’s face. ‘An old
man like you shouldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘You’re disgusting.’ Pointing contemptuously at him, she said, ‘I know you’re lying.
You just don’t like me. Well, I don’t care. Lots of other people do. What’s so good about your boat anyway?’ With that she
spun around, and ran back to where I was standing. ‘You’re disgusting, too. Who said you could take me with you? Who cares
about your rotten old boat?’

I tried to block her way, but she slipped between my legs and ran back, straight into the arms of Sun Ximing’s wife.

Sighs of relief all around. I looked at my father, who was scowling at me. The anger in his eyes made me shiver, so I turned,
just in time to see Huixian move from the arms of Sun’s wife into those of Desheng’s wife. They were protecting her like a
galaxy of stars around the moon as they headed back to number one. I couldn’t tell if Huixian was crying or not, but they
were fussing over her to make her feel better, all talking at once. There was a tiger on boat number seven. There really was.
A tiger, an old tiger.

Father and I stared at each other across the water, boat to boat, exchanging angry glares.
Tiger, tiger, there’s a tiger on our boat. You’re the tiger
. The vague outline of a large, striped cat took form behind him. The sudden illusion took my breath away! With my head down,
I boarded our boat, where I was greeted by a repeat of Six-Fingers Wang’s comment. ‘What’s in that head of yours? How old
are you, and how old is she? Don’t you think it’s a bit early to be bringing her on to our boat?’

I’d never been so disgusted with my father, and that disgust
found its way into a careless outburst: ‘Why’d you come outside anyway? With only half a dick, why didn’t you stay in the
cabin where you belong? You shame me by showing your face!’

I turned and walked towards the cabin, with my arms over my head in anticipation of a bamboo staff raining down on me. But
I made it all the way to the cabin without Father doing a thing. So I cautiously turned to look behind me, where he was sitting
on a coiled hawser on the bow, trembling. They had taken Huixian away by then, and the clamour had left with them. Now all
I could see was my father, sitting there trembling as if he’d been struck by lightning.

I’d used the most vicious words I knew to humiliate him, which worried and shamed me. How would he punish me when he was feeling
better? I had a guilty conscience, but so did he, and his was worse than mine. I went astern to take a leak off the fantail.
Then I opened the slip of paper I’d drawn and looked down at Huixian’s juvenile drawing. After folding it into the shape of
an arrow, I blew on it and sent it flying, watching as it struggled to stay aloft above the river before it fell silently
into the water, where it was swamped by a wave. The only way I knew to express the sense of grief and anger I felt at that
moment was to roar at the river, ‘
Kongpi! Kongpi!
’

H
UIXIAN WAS
hung out aboard Sun Ximing’s boat during her early days with the fleet. Sun and his wife, her new parents, did not scrimp
on food or clothing for her. She dressed better than Dafu and Erfu, and ate better food. With the eyes of people from all
eleven barges on them, would they dare do less? No, they treated her like royalty. Both their burden and their glory, she
was unimaginably spoiled; her moist eyes shone like diamonds some of the time and were hidden behind a curtain of dark clouds
at other times. But a modest degree of happiness could not overcome a troubled heart. Everyone knew why she spent so much
time with her eyes fixed on the shore. She was waiting for her mother to show up.

There was always the chance that the woman would appear on the river or in Milltown or Phoenix or Horsebridge. Unfamiliar
women did, from time to time, board barges in the fleet to sell used clothing or pumpkins or leeks; there was even a young
country woman who came aboard Desheng’s barge with a basket of corn over her back, who, perhaps inspired by the gun-running
legend of the martyr Deng Shaoxiang, hid a baby girl in the bottom of her basket. After selling the corn, she shook the basket
and the baby’s head popped into view. ‘I hear you people want a little girl, but can’t find one. Well, I don’t want
this one,’ she said to Desheng. ‘You can have her for thirty yuan.’

In shocked disbelief, Desheng drove her off his boat. His wife, unable even to look at the little girl, berated the woman.
‘I’ve never seen such a hateful woman,’ she said. ‘And you call yourself a mother! You haggle over the price of your corn,
but when it comes to your own flesh and blood, all you want is for someone to take her off your hands.’

The world is populated by all sorts of mothers, but none of them was Huixian’s. No matter how long she waited, the boat people
– men and women, old and young – knew she was destined to be disappointed, yet no one spoke of it. The children were warned
to keep such talk to themselves; the secret must be guarded. Meanwhile, the adults pooled their wisdom and experience to rescue
poor Huixian from her vain dream.

To that end it was necessary to erase all traces of the memories she held of the woman who had abandoned her. Sun Ximing’s
wife, who was responsible for Huixian’s day-to-day activities, agonized over how to remove the army raincoat from the girl’s
life. Everyone knew she could not sleep unless she was covered by it, for, they assumed, it retained her mother’s smell. Sun’s
wife racked her brains to find a way out of this dilemma. Every time she put the coat away and covered Huixian with a regular
blanket instead, the girl caused a scene. Sun’s wife even bought a nice woollen blanket embroidered with peonies for her,
but that failed too; Huixian demanded the return of her raincoat to use along with the blanket. ‘My little ancestor,’ Sun’s
wife said in frustration, ‘you’re harder to please than the empress herself. If you keep insisting on covering yourself with
that raincoat, people will talk. They’ll say that even impoverished children in the old society had tattered blankets on their
beds, while a little flower of the motherland like you uses a raincoat. If you insist on covering yourself with both, the
new blanket will pick up the bad smell
of your raincoat. I don’t mind, but people will say your adoptive mother doesn’t care if you suffocate.’

As if that weren’t enough, a dangerous, unwarranted and virtually unstoppable trend persisted. No one was willing to shatter
Huixian’s dream of seeing her mother again, so the adults made a rule for the children: if she hit them, they were not to
hit back, and if she called them names, they were to keep quiet. But in the heat of an argument, children cannot be counted
on to avoid saying what mustn’t be said. More to the point, in order to keep their secret, the adults and children fabricated
a tale that Huixian’s mother was still alive and would return for her one day. And so when Huixian was in a bad mood, she
would rail defiantly at Sun Ximing and his wife, ‘You hate me. I want to go ashore to find my mother.’

The couple willingly took the girl on a pretend search for her mother whenever they went ashore; it was something they had
to do, though it was hard to keep the story up. They came to our barge with old newspapers and asked my father to write missing-persons
posters, which they then pasted up on street corners, with Dafu responsible for pasting and Erfu for putting them up. Once
that was done, they inquired at government offices. If they forgot, Huixian quickly reminded them. ‘We can’t go back until
we’ve checked with the authorities, can we? Maybe my mother is waiting for me in one of those offices.’

The ruse was hard to maintain, and it was exhausting. But the alternative was never considered. They were afraid Huixian would
go ashore on her own and cause trouble, so for some reason they thought of me. One day they brought her over to number seven
and said to her, ‘How about letting Dongliang take you this time? He can read and knows the bureaucratic ins and outs better
than anybody. Since we haven’t been able to find your mother, let’s give him a try.’ Sun Ximing reddened and signalled me
not to give anything away.

Having no idea what was in my heart, they wrote me off as hateful and cruel behind my back, and yet the warm feelings I felt
towards Huixian never left me. I’d cleverly masked my fondness for her. I welcomed the thought of doing something for her,
but Sun must have taken me for an idiot, asking me to go ashore to find a ghost. Not only was it stupid, it was a blow to
my self-respect, and I was just about to tell him so when Huixian reached out and took me by the arm. Her little hand was
pink and plump, its nails painted a pretty red, thanks to the women, and it looked like a flower blossoming on my arm. Her
dark eyes turned to me, not in a pleading fashion, but sort of charitable and proud. ‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘You can relax
with me.’ Then, assuming the wise, knowing tone of an adult, she said, ‘We don’t need to rush. It’s OK if we don’t find her
right away.’

Knowing I could not refuse that outstretched hand, I took her to Milltown, a trip that gave me the chance to toughen myself
up emotionally. It was important to keep that well-intentioned lie fresh in my mind, and to learn how to look after a little
girl. Though younger than I was, Huixian was more cunning and more wilful. She was also a lot worse off. Those were my reasons
for wanting to look after her.

All sorts of little problems cropped up on our way from the barge to the shore. First of all, I needed to avoid her hand.
She’d got used to holding people’s hands, and now she wanted to hold mine. But how was I supposed to walk on shore hand-in-hand
with a girl? I started by walking ahead of her, telling her to stay close behind me. Then I thought about what my father always
told me, which was to take pleasure in helping others. My primary concern, of course, was her safety. The piers were congested
with commodities and crowds of people, and I was afraid she might get lost. So I let her go ahead. ‘Turn left, go straight
on, halt.’ I sounded like a drill sergeant. At first she couldn’t distinguish between left and right, but she wasn’t stupid,
and she got the
idea after a few false starts, which made her happy. When we came to a junction, she’d halt, turn to look at me and ask, ‘Left
or right?’

The sky above Milltown was clear and bright. The ‘critical times’ seemed to have come to an end, and East Wind No. 8 had apparently
been completed, since the trench had been filled in and all the stacked pipes were now buried deep in the ground, along with
their accompanying legends and secrets. The grand, seemingly endless construction project had produced early results: red
banners flapped in the wind, proclaiming the vigour of the East, and the familiar Milltown now had the air of a boomtown,
tinged with a sense of grandeur that infused its residents with veneration. A circular steel tower had been erected near the
embankment, like a steel colossus holding up the sky; protected by a chain-link fence, it gave off an acrid odour of tar and
metallic paint. I had no idea what it was for, whether it was intended for storing oil or in preparation for battle, but I
instinctively knew that it was important. Xiaogai and Wulaizi of the security group no longer cared whether we came ashore
or not. Now they stood guard on either side of the single gate in the fence, like a pair of faithful stone lions. A large,
prominent sign affixed to the gate read: ‘
HEIGHTEN VIGILANCE, PROTECT THE MOTHERLAND
.’

Handbills for Huixian’s lost mother, at odds with their surroundings, were still posted where crowds congregated:

If you have any information regarding the missing mother of Jiang Huixian please leave your contact information here or contact
the Sunnyside Fleet.

Some were on propaganda leaflets, others on old newsprint, and all were in my father’s handwriting. Huixian knew better than
I where they had been posted, so she ignored any commands
that would have led her away from those spots, and kept running from place to place. If you’re no good at tending cattle,
your only choice is to chase after them. I was forced to chase after her. When she walked up to the noticeboard outside the
General Affairs Building she shrieked, ‘It’s gone! My mother must have taken it!’ I was still digesting this news when Gimpy
Gu emerged from the gatehouse and said to Huixian, ‘Go and play somewhere else. This is a government building, not a playground.
The officials demand quiet.’

‘My mama took the handbill that was here,’ Huixian said. ‘You’re in your guardhouse every day, have you seen her?’

‘Your mother didn’t take it,’ Gu said. ‘I did. This is a notice-board reserved for socialist announcements, not to help you
find your mother.’

‘But what if she’s really lost?’ Huixian asked Gimpy Gu.

‘How should I know?’ he said. ‘I lost my mother at the age of five and I’m still here. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have
a mother. All you really need is the Party.’ Gimpy was obviously unhappy with the look in my eyes. ‘Did I say something wrong?’
he demanded. ‘How dare you stand there rolling your eyes at me! I know you hate the socialist system. You’re forever up to
no good. What did you hope to gain by writing on the fourth-floor wall that time? By attacking Secretary Zhao you attacked
the Party leadership. Understand? I’d have hauled you up for that long ago if you weren’t Qiao Limin’s son.’

We had to move on. I had a job to do, and it did not include arguing with Gimpy Gu. ‘About turn!’ I ordered Huixian. ‘Forward
march!’ But she kept turning back again. ‘Hurry up,’ I said. ‘What do you keep looking at? The old guy said your mama didn’t
take it, he did.’

With a scowl, she said, ‘He makes me so mad I could die! Why’s he so mean?’ What could I say? But then her thoughts took another
leap. And this time she handed me a real hot potato.
‘The old man said something about Sister Qiao Li, Qiao Limei. Who’s she?’

‘There’s no Qiao Limei. It’s Qiao Limin – my mother.’

With a surprised shriek, she said, ‘You’ve got a mama too? Everybody said you do, but I didn’t believe them.’

My head buzzed. ‘Why wouldn’t I have a mama?’ I demanded. ‘Did you think I slithered out from between some rocks?’

She knew she’d said the wrong thing. With a wounded look, she whined, ‘I never said that. But if you’re not trying to find
her, that makes you a bad person. Why aren’t you looking for her?’

Huixian might have been small, but she was no stranger to resentment. The minute I blew up at her, she stopped obeying my
commands. When I told her to start walking, she stopped to rest, and when I told her to speed up, she slowed down. Somehow,
we managed to make it to People’s Avenue and walked up to the general store, at the entrance to the marketplace, where there
was always lots of traffic; that meant plenty of wear and tear. Half of her missing-persons poster was missing, the other
half had been covered with writing. Someone had written ‘Three Cheers for the Revolutionary Committee’, another had written
‘Li Caixia is a tattered shoe, a whore’, and someone else had written ‘Down with Liu Shaoqi’, to which someone else had added
Scabby Five’s name. None of these scrawled comments surprised me; what struck me as odd was that someone had drawn a fish
– a very realistic fish – on the poster in chalk. Huixian gawked at the fish in alarm and asked, ‘What does that mean? Why
did they draw a fish?’

‘Some kid,’ I said casually. ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Liar!’ she said. ‘It has to mean something. I think it’s telling me that my mama has turned into a fish!’

Huixian was a lot smarter than I gave her credit for. Thanks to what she’d said, I really did start to wonder what significance
that fish held. It must have been hinting at something. Fish live in the
water; her mother was in the river and had turned into a fish. I took a long look at the drawing and had a premonition of
imminent danger. The truth, which the boat people had conspired to hide, was not mine to reveal. Then I had a flash of inspiration.
This was the perfect time for me to apply my skill at altering words and pictures. Reaching into my bag, I took out a ballpoint
pen, leaned up against the wall and redrew the picture, neatly turning the fish into a sunflower.

‘That’s a sunflower!’ she shrieked. ‘What does it mean?’

‘A sunflower brings happiness.’

‘What does that mean?’

Never imagining she would ask me what happiness meant, I was stumped for a response. I realized that she was smart only some
of the time, and dense the rest. Since I lacked the patience of a schoolteacher and the wisdom of a dictionary, a strange
sense of dejection came over me. ‘You’re driving me crazy,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you what unhappiness is, and you’ll know its
opposite. You don’t have happiness, and neither do I. Now do you understand?’

That earned me a blank stare. Not feeling like describing happiness in detail, or willing to sully the word, I put it in the
simplest terms I knew. ‘Happiness is something that will come later; it’s what you’ll have when you find your mama.’ As soon
as that comment left my mouth, my heart sank. What a damned lie. I avoided the puzzled look in her eyes, secretly regretting
the cruel web of deceit I’d spun for her. Where had her mother gone? Where was her happiness? How could I even have said the
word? What nonsense! Here were the two of us, Ku Dongliang and Jiang Huixian, actually discussing happiness!