The Boat to Redemption (18 page)

‘I’ll tell you why,’ Bianjin said. ‘I’ve got a fish on my ass.’

‘Be careful, you idiot,’ someone warned him. ‘Palming yourself off as Deng Shaoxiang’s son can get you into serious trouble.
Knock it off, or the police will haul you in.’

‘I
am
Deng Shaoxiang’s son,’ Bianjin insisted. ‘The police don’t scare me. I’m the martyr’s son. I scare
them
!’

‘Empty talk!’ someone else shouted. ‘Take down your pants and show us your birthmark. We’ll see if it’s a fish or not.’

I shouldered my way to the front in time to see Bianjin take down his pants and expose his backside to the crowd. A roar erupted
from everyone – men and women, old and young – who
gawked incredulously at the idiot’s backside. ‘A fish!’ came a shout of astonishment. ‘It’s a fish! A perfect little fish!
Maybe he
is
Deng Shaoxiang’s son, after all!’ Taking the uproar as an invitation to put on a show, the idiot stuck out his rear end and
danced around the memorial, only to be met with an explosion of joyous laughter. Someone went up and kicked his exposed backside.
‘Pull your pants up, idiot, and be quick about it,’ the man said. ‘If Deng Shaoxiang really was your mother, then she wasn’t
hanged by the enemy, she died of humiliation over her son.’

The pavilion was in the neighbourhood of the piers, so instead of the police, it was Scabby Five and Baldy Chen who showed
up. By then, Bianjin had sobered up enough to know it was time to leave, so he ran off towards the river, followed by his
geese. ‘The work team is coming back on National Day,’ he proclaimed to anyone who would listen, ‘and they’ll announce the
name of Deng Shaoxiang’s son. Just you wait, especially all you people who’ve tormented me!’

Now that the farce had ended, people became aware that I was there in their midst. They exchanged hurried glances and whispered
among themselves. I could guess what they were saying. They were ridiculing or trying to humiliate me. I’d arrived at the
chess pavilion like a rabbit that has landed in a hunter’s sights. The idiot Bianjin could run off, but not me. It was my
turn to sprinkle wine on the memorial and tell the residents of Milltown that my father was firm in his belief. I wanted them
to know that Ku Wenxuan was Deng Shaoxiang’s son, which made me her grandson.

I carried the jug up to the memorial, but before I could open it, Scabby and Baldy walked up. Scabby put his foot on the jug
cap and said, ‘Just what do you think you’re doing, Kongpi?’

‘I’m going to sprinkle wine on the martyr’s memorial. Isn’t that OK?’

‘No,’ he growled. ‘Pick that jug up and take it away from here.’

‘Look over there,’ Baldy said with a tap on my shoulder. He was pointing to a bulletin tacked up on one of the pavilion posts.
‘You do have eyes, don’t you? How could you miss seeing that? A new regulation. “Engaging in feudalistic and superstitious
behaviours in the name of memorializing the martyr is strictly forbidden.” Sprinkling wine is feudalistic and superstitious
behaviour, don’t you know that?’

I went up close to read the bulletin. There it was, in black and white: ‘New Regulation Concerning Memorials to the Martyr
Deng Shaoxiang.’

Baldy was telling the truth. The new regulation was intended to stop people from spreading a rumour that Deng Shaoxiang’s
spirit had the power to heal injuries and rescue the dying, which had been making the rounds recently. Milltown residents
were expressly forbidden from devotional displays at the pavilion. There was to be no burning of spirit paper or incense,
no calls to the spirits of deceased persons, and no laments by women from neighbouring villages over their mistreatment.

But there were no strictures against sprinkling wine. ‘You people must be illiterate,’ I said. ‘This forbids people from feudalistic
and superstitious activities, but says nothing about sprinkling wine. Where does it say that? Show me!’

There was nothing Scabby Five, who was barely literate, could say, so he kept his foot on my jug and glowered at me. Baldy,
on the other hand, was surer of himself. With a contemptuous grin, he traced his finger over the words ‘feudalistic’ and ‘superstitious’
and stopped at the small print, where it said ‘etc’. ‘See that? It says “etc”. You’ve been to school, Kongpi. Know what that
means? It means that sprinkling wine may not be listed, but it’s included in “etc”.’

I could only stare helplessly at the words.

‘Why are you wasting your breath on him?’ Scabby Five yelled at Baldy Chen. ‘No sprinkling means no sprinkling!’

As he was bending down for the jug, Baldy glanced up and saw the hard look in my eyes. He dropped his hands and placed them
on the small of his back. ‘I sprained my back yesterday,’ he said, ‘so come and pick it up.’

‘It’s not your back you sprained,’ Scabby said angrily. ‘It’s your guts! Are you afraid of him? I’ll pick it up if you won’t.
Of all the people who scare me, he’s not one of them, not Kongpi!’

I fought with Scabby Five over that jug, each of us trying to pull it away from the other, and we wound up outside the pavilion.
A loud thud ended the struggle, as the jug fell to the ground and the lid broke, spilling the contents on the ground. The
distinctive fragrance of aged wine spread quickly in the air; my feet were quickly drenched. I was enraged; there were several
options available to me, and the first was to pick up the bottom half of the jug and fling it at Scabby’s head, a sure-fire
way to settle scores, old and new. So I picked it up and was just about to throw it when something unexpected occurred. What
remained of the wine in the broken jug was sloshing back and forth, reflecting my face, which shifted with the liquid and
began to blur. But what really caught me by surprise was the familiar sound that emerged from the jug:
kongpi, kongpi
. Dejection overcame me and my anger dissipated. Utterly deflated, I laid the jug down on the ground and asked Scabby a shameful
question: ‘If I can’t sprinkle the wine, is it OK if I drink it?’

He dipped his finger in the wine and tasted it. ‘Do you have all your pubic hair, Kongpi? You want to drink at your age? It’s
none of my business if you do or not, but you have to do it out here. No drinking in the pavilion. Go ahead, drink it, but
that’s not going to make a man out of you. You’ll still be Kongpi.’

Well, I went ahead and did that shameful thing, which later made the rounds of Milltown: on the eve of Deng Shaoxiang’s commemoration,
I laid a sheet of coloured paper on the ground,
sat down, and, with everyone’s eyes on me, drank half of the wine in the jug.

I was barely sober when Sun Ximing and Desheng passed by the pavilion; before they dragged me back to the river I told them
to bring along the rest of the wine for my father. I can’t recall how I made it back aboard the boat; but I do remember how
Father slapped me with the sole of his cloth shoe and roared at me. I have no idea what he said or what I said to explain
myself. I’ve never been good at explaining myself when I’m perfectly clear-headed, so you can imagine what came out of me
when I was half drunk. All I could say was ‘Kongpi’. How else could I explain myself?

Most drunks sleep like pigs. I tossed and turned and had terrible dreams, one of which scared me awake. Suddenly I had the
feeling that our barge wouldn’t move. The tug chugged forward, taking all the other barges with it, but not ours. A strange
watery sound came to me from the stern, so I went back to take a look. Something weird was happening to our anchor: it was
being held by a hand coming out of the water – not too big but not particularly small, all five nicely shaped fingers wrapped
around the anchor, half of the back of the hand white, the other half – scary as hell – covered with dark-green moss. I was
reminded of all the Golden Sparrow water-demon legends. Rice wine, rice wine! Heat up some rice wine to drive away the demon!
I went back to get the jug. It was empty. In my dream I even recalled my mistake – I’d drunk it all. Suddenly panicked, I
picked up a bamboo pole to dislodge that hand. It didn’t work. I pushed harder, madly, until the pole flew out of my hands
and landed in the river. Then the dark water under our barge lit up and waves began to crash as the face of a beautiful woman
rose up out of the water – a round face, with big eyes, a slightly concave nose, and old-fashioned hair cut, ear-length short;
water grass woven into her black hair glistened like crystal. Her shoulders came into view next, then a basket she carried
on her back. I saw water in the basket; it was silvery, and a
lotus leaf was floating on top of it. The leaf moved, exposing the blurry, wet head of a baby.

I was seeing Deng Shaoxiang, I was privileged to see her heroic spirit. I should have felt honoured, but what I actually felt
was dread. Her dignified presence struck fear in me. Now that she had risen out of the water, she fixed her perceptive gaze
on me, a look that told me she saw everything I did and heard everything I said. I stood on the stern of our barge trembling,
waiting for her to reveal her identity. But she did not talk about herself or about her descendants. I waited for her to educate
me, but she neither forgave nor criticized me. No, she raised her moss-covered hand and sternly patted the basket on her back.
‘Come down,’ she said. ‘Come down. I want you to come down here!’

I didn’t dare. How could I jump into her basket? The thought frightened me awake. The lamp in the cabin where I slept still
shone. Father was asleep on the sofa, traces of his angry outburst imprinted on his old and slightly bloated face. He had
kept the lamp on, creating paper flowers that lay in profusion on his knees and on the floor, big and colourful. I picked
up several of them and took them out to the stern, where the anchor rested against the side of the barge, as always. It gave
off a dull glint and banged softly against the steel hull, a tranquil, felicitous sound.

Deepening night lay over the river. The night breeze rippled the surface, with shadows cast by passing birds and water gourds
floating in our wake. I could even hear them knock up against the space between the barges. But the martyr Deng Shaoxiang
had come and gone, a magical spirit performing secret tasks. She had come and gone at will, leaving no trace of her clandestine
visit.

I couldn’t say if I’d had a nightmare or a sweet dream.

F
OR THE
longest time I couldn’t wait for Huixian to grow up. That was my deepest, darkest secret.

But I was afraid that she would develop into an adult too fast. That was a secret second only to the other.

My unsociable traits and short fuse were linked to the conflict of those two secrets. Many people keep diaries, in which they
record details of their lives. Not me. Everyone called me Kongpi, and the life of a
kongpi
does not deserve to be written down. It’s a waste of paper, ink and time. I had enough self-awareness to know that the only
person whose life was worth recording was Huixian. I used the same kind of notebook that both my father and mother had used
– a worker’s handbook with a cardboard cover. They were on sale at the general store and the stationery store for eight fen.
Sturdy and durable, they had enough pages to record things for a long time if you wrote small, with concise, precise words.

I was particularly prudent at first, sticking to the ‘dossier’ style of writing and the principle of ‘seeking truth through
facts’, limiting my entries to practical and realistic considerations: how tall she was, how much she weighed, how advanced
her reading skills were, how many songs she knew. But gradually, over time, I loosened up, enhancing my jottings with aspects
of her life, such
as who she argued with. Whatever I heard went into my diary. When she was given a bowl of chicken soup, whether it was tasty
or not, thick or thin, any comment she made went into my diary. If someone made a jacket or a pair of shoes for her, how they
looked and how they fitted all went into my diary. Then later, whenever someone praised Huixian or passed on gossip about
her, if I heard it, it went into the diary. Finally, I began entering my own ideas and any number of chaotic, largely inarticulate
thoughts, even dreamed-up code words and phrases that only I understood. To illustrate, I began referring to Huixian as Sunflower
and to myself as Gourd. My father was Lumber, while the people on shore were Bandit One, Bandit Two, and so on. The boat people
became chickens or ducks or cows or sheep, things like that. All this to keep my father in the dark if he tried to read my
diary entries. At times, when I was writing or drawing in my notebook, I was conscious of his presence and the suspicious
look in his eyes. ‘What in the world are you writing?’ he’d ask. ‘And why won’t you let me see it? Keeping a diary is a good
idea, but you can get into serious trouble if you’re not careful what you put in it. Remember Teacher Zhu from the Milltown
Elementary School? Well, he took out his frustrations with the Party and society in general in his diary, and they arrested
him.’

‘Don’t worry, Dad,’ I said. ‘I’m perfectly happy with the Party and society in general. It’s me I’m not happy with. You’ve
heard how people call me Kongpi, haven’t you? So that’s how you can see my diary –
kongpi
.’

I was lying, of course. I could be
kongpi
, but not my diary. That held my greatest secrets; it was the one thing I could rely upon. By opening it I was able to see
Huixian’s face and her body; I could tell what her hair smelled like and could detect the delicate fragrance only a young
maiden possessed. After so many years had passed the image of Huixian as a little girl to pity existed in my head, but not
in my body; I embraced a hard-to-describe
love and an uncontrollable desire for her. As I flipped through my diary, my heart was filled with anxieties that weighed
me down and threatened my very existence, all because of a girl’s maturation. I resisted that process. As she matured, a pair
of budding breasts pushed up underneath her red blouse; as she matured, hair sprouted in armpits that were like yellow jade;
as she matured, I was burdened with erections. That spelled danger. Though I resisted her maturation, what I really resisted
were those erections. I was a healthy young man who could forgive himself for having erections, whether they occurred at night
or during the day, whether they were caused by fancily dressed, fashionable girls and women on the shore or by the full-figured,
flirtatious daughter of Six-Fingers Wang, with her daringly wild nature. But I could not forgive myself for the dark, gloomy
erections over which my mind and body were engaged in a bitter struggle. There were times when I triumphed over them, but
I must confess that most of the time they were beyond my control; at those times my wilful genitals overpowered my will and
my mind.

Summer, it seemed to me, was the truly dangerous season, and after Huixian came aboard, summers became more dangerous than
ever. Each year seemed hotter than the year before, turning our steel-hulled barge into a blast furnace. When the fleet was
berthed at the piers, we lay there baked by the sun. Men and boys who knew how to swim stripped naked and dived into the river.
That did not include Father and me, not because we tolerated the heat better than the others, but because we shared an aversion
to the naked body. I’d stand on the bow keeping watch, not looking at the men and boys in the water but the girls on the barges.
They watched the swimmers, I watched them. The other girls were green leaves, Huixian alone was an eye-catching sunflower.
I watched her go ashore with a bucket in one hand and wash basin on her hip, and I wondered why she chose to wash clothes
on the shore. But when I looked more closely, I figured it out.
Each time she dumped a bucketful of water into the basin, a thin jacket spread out and sank to the bottom; then her flowery
pants floated to the top as the water turned red. Why red? I knew why, don’t think I didn’t. I’d sneaked a look at the
Barefoot Doctor’s Handbook
as a youngster, from which I’d learned a thing or two about female physiology. For her it was perfectly normal; I was the
abnormal one. With my eyes trained on the shore, my heart cried out with great clarity and abnormal logic,
Don’t wash that, don’t! Don’t grow up, don’t!

Knowing that something was wrong, Father followed me with an almost spectral gaze, from the aft cabin to the forward hold,
from bow to stern. Like a trained hound, he homed in on the smell of my desire. As my physiological urges grew stronger, my
facial expressions hardened; I tried to hide them, but his gaze sharpened and became ruthless. ‘Dongliang,’ he said, ‘what
are you always sneaking looks at?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

He just sneered and looked down at the front of my trousers. ‘I know what you’re looking at,’ he said irritably, ‘and I’m
telling you to watch yourself!’

With his eyes always on me, I had nowhere to hide, so I walked back to the stern at a half crouch, feeling that my crotch
was about to catch fire. I needed water. Half the river was in shadow, the other half in sunlight; a clump of grass was spinning
mysteriously on the surface, creating a stream of bubbles. Once again I heard the river call to me:
Come down
,
come down
. The river was trying to save me with its coded message. This time I was ready to obey. Go down, why not? Go down. I stripped
off my white vest and dived into the water.

I swam over to the perfect vantage point, the space between our barge and number eight, where I held on to the anchor, which
was cold to the touch and slightly sticky. Maybe the ghost of the martyr Deng Shaoxiang had left a secret curse. I wasn’t
afraid of
the martyr’s ghost, nor of secret messages. I looked around – it was the ideal spot for me. Why, I wondered, hadn’t I understood
the water’s secret message in the past?
Come down, come
down
. Now that I was in the water, I knew what awaited me: freedom. I could not be free on the barge; I could be free only in
the river. How good it was in the water, absolutely wonderful. Finally, I’d found a spot where I could be free, a spot where
I could escape Father’s watchful eye.

I have a hard-on, Dad. I’m having one whether you want me to or not!

I’m firing my pistol, Dad. I’m firing it whether you want me to or not!

I heard Father’s anxious footsteps up on deck and experienced the joy of retaliation. In the shadows between the two barges,
I availed myself of the water’s protection to calm the tumult fomenting inside me. My body was submerged in the water, submerged
in darkness; maybe fish could see what I was doing, but they couldn’t talk, so I wasn’t worried. The men and boys in the water
might have spotted me there, but they could only see my head and shoulders, not my hand, and heads and shoulders were incapable
of firing a pistol. And even if they discovered what I was doing, I wasn’t worried that they’d say anything. The women and
girls on the shore were too far away to see me, and I wasn’t interested in seeing them, anyway. Huixian was the only one I
wanted to see. She was crouching down on the bank, painstakingly washing her clothes. From time to time her glance swept over
barge number seven, but my secret was safe. My father was watching me, while I was watching her.

She loved to dress up at that age. She wore a gardenia on her breast and had on a green skirt, which she hitched up over her
knees to keep it from getting wet. Her exposed knees were milky white, like a couple of lovely buns fresh from the oven –
no, not buns, I mustn’t use such common food items to describe any part
of Huixian. How about sweet, alluring fruit? But is there a fruit that resembles knees? I racked my brain, trying to come
up with something, when all of a sudden a beam of light passed overhead. There in the spot between the two barges, in the
narrow space I occupied, the upper half of Father’s face appeared, his staring eyes frightening me so much that I couldn’t
react before I heard him roar, ‘Dongliang, what are you doing, hiding down there? Just what are you doing? Get up here, right
this minute!’

I ducked my head under the surface. My ears were pounded by water as I tried to find a new secret message. But there was nothing.
Trying to keep one step ahead of my father was hard, and the water offered no help. It was hopeless. I could stay in the water
for ever, hold my breath until I drowned, and still I couldn’t escape Father’s watch over me.

I had to come up for air, I had no choice, like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime. I took a quick look around
me, fearful that he might spot signs of my crime. The fluids that had escaped from my body were as nothing in a riverful of
water. The surface was as before – no joys, no anxieties – nothing had changed, and I had nothing to worry about. ‘It was
hot,’ I said to him, ‘and I wanted to cool off. What’s wrong with that? How come you’re always watching me? Don’t I deserve
a little freedom?’

With a sneer, he said, ‘I know what you want to do with your freedom. Freedom is wasted on a boy like you. OK, you’ve cooled
off, now get up here.’

I pulled myself out of the water, and the moment I was on deck I was drained of energy, and felt dirty. As I sat there without
moving I discovered that I looked like one of those legendary water demons, my skin mottled, rust from the anchor on the backs
of my hands, and clumps of moss from the bottom of the boat on my thighs; a rotting leaf was tangled in my hair, plus a golden
stalk of rice straw, both of which had been floating on the surface. The really strange thing was that a snail was stuck to
my shorts;
I picked it off and tossed it back into the river, and when I looked up, Father was standing in front of me, a scowl of disgust
on his face. He was holding a bucket in his hand. ‘Go up to the bow,’ he said as he gave me a shove. ‘You’re filthy, body
and mind. After I wash you down,’ he said, ‘go into the cabin.’

I was as disgusted with myself as he was, but I couldn’t put my feelings into words. While he was washing me down I shot a
glance at the riverbank, where girls from the boats had already hung wet clothes on drying poles; colourful cottons, polyesters
and rayons sparkled in the sunlight. One bucket of water was all he needed to wash off the dirt, as I scoured the bank for
Huixian’s flowery blouse. But the boat girls all dressed pretty much alike, and many of them owned flowery blouses with sunflower
patterns, so I couldn’t tell which one was hers. The wet clothes seemed flecked with gold in the bright sunlight, and to me
it looked like a row of sunflowers in bloom, a sight that brightened my mood. But it also instilled a sense of self-reproach,
an understanding that I owed Father an apology. So I took the bucket from him. ‘That’s enough,’ I said as cordially as possible,
‘I’m clean enough.’

‘Your body, yes, but not your mind. It’s a shame I can’t clean that.’

Not daring to argue, I walked into the cabin, with him right behind me. ‘What are you thinking now?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘
Kongpi
, that’s what my head is, just
kongpi
.’ Actually, if I told him what I was thinking, he wouldn’t understand. I was pondering a perplexing matter: how can a water
gourd and a sunflower come together? Two diverse things, one at home on the water, the other on land, how could they come
together? Could they ever come together?