The Boat to Redemption (21 page)

Angry as this made Huixian, it puzzled her as well. Had she started walking like an old woman after leaving the red lantern?
She’d never have thought that Bureau Chief Liu’s grandson would see her that way, so critical, as if he were talking about
an animal or a toy. He hadn’t shown her a shred of respect, and she found him shameless, cocky and obscene, in a smug, superior
way. She did not like him, not least because he instilled in her a strange sense of self-loathing. Her mind a tangle of emotions,
Huixian ran back to her room, holding both hands over her chest.

Little Liu’s visit was a short one. After seeing him off, Zhao Chuntang went straight to Huixian’s room, where he tossed a
notebook with a plastic cover on to her bed. ‘He said you don’t put dog meat on a dining table, then he handed me this to
give to you – a gift from Bureau Chief Liu. Little Liu came with an
armload of gifts for you, but has taken them all back with him.’ Zhao stood in the doorway staring at her, displeasure in
his eyes. ‘Aren’t you the queen!’ he said. ‘What harm can a look do? Well, you’ve done it this time. No more talk of Gramps
Liu. Now that you’ve offended his grandson, he’s no longer your “gramps”.’

Huixian opened the notebook Bureau Chief Liu had sent. There on the first page he’d written, ‘For Comrade Huixian. Wishing
you progress in your studies and your work.’ Progress? A meaningless greeting, nothing more. She knew how significant Little
Liu’s visit and her behaviour had been, but what she didn’t understand was why he’d said that thing about dog meat. And what
about that comment about hunching over? Don’t tell me, she was thinking, that a girl’s supposed to walk with her chest thrown
out as far as it’ll go!

With Little Liu’s departure, her future had become hazier than ever. Huixian sat on her bed, wishing she could cry, but afraid
that Leng Qiuyun would laugh at her. Besides, Little Liu wasn’t worth the tears. So she turned her attention to Chief Liu’s
notebook, and suddenly she knew how to express her feelings about the paltry gift: she wrote ‘shit’ after the word ‘progress’.
That made her feel better, good enough to try throwing her chest out and see how that looked. But all that did was rearrange
the wrinkles in her blouse. But she wasn’t through. Now was a good time to examine her own breasts, so she locked the door
and opened her blouse to get a good look at herself in the mirror.

What is it about jutting breasts that makes a girl beautiful and desirable? That had always puzzled her. For small-town girls,
well-developed breasts were considered shameful by most people. She’d felt the same way until today, when she saw herself
in the mirror and, for the first time, thought she understood. Her breasts, she discovered, were neither especially large
nor too small, but when she threw out her chest, a mysterious arc shot out in the mirror. They were so much better looking
jutting
out than concealed. Still looking in the mirror, she stood up and moved around, examining herself from all angles, in profile
and full on, to see which was the best view of her changing figure. But having no mother or sisters to guide her, she could
not judge, nothing suggested itself. That left it up to her own reckoning and imagination. Thinking back to her experiences
in the public bath house, she tried to recall what the older, good-looking women’s breasts looked like, their size and shape,
but failed. Then she remembered something: all those women wore brassieres. Why were her breasts so unappealing? Because she
didn’t wear a brassiere. Why didn’t she own one? Because she’d grown up on a Sunnyside Fleet barge, where none of the women
did. She had an idea. Opening a drawer in Director Leng’s dresser, she took out three brassieres and tried them on, one after
the other. She detected the feminine smell clinging to the material as the cups gently covered her breasts. The image in the
mirror, now in a brassiere, was enhanced, but at the same time produced a feeling of unease, of ferment, of coquettishness.
The brassiere carried a subtle fragrance.

Huixian decided to start wearing a brassiere. For other girls in Milltown, buying one was something that had to be kept a
secret and was entrusted to mothers. But Huixian was motherless. None of her many surrogate mothers could be bothered with
this task, so it was up to Huixian to buy her own. Once her mind was made up, she approached the situation with what could
be termed fanaticism, an opportunity to do something for herself. She went to the department store determined to buy whatever
style and colour she wanted, without a hint of embarrassment, making her selection with a hostile expression. The clerk was
visibly intimidated. ‘This bra is too big,’ she said. ‘You want it to be unattractive, do you?’

‘What’s it to you. If it’s unattractive, that’s my business!’

Huixian began observing the chests of other girls and women,
comparing herself to them and eyeing them critically. She was guided by curiosity, not malice. But the looks created a degree
of pressure, and comparisons were inevitable. Between her and me, whose breasts are fuller and more attractive?

Back in their room, she paid particular attention to Leng Qiyun, her eyes glued to her when she got changed. Hurriedly covering
her breasts, Leng demanded angrily, ‘What are you looking at?’

Huixian stifled a laugh. ‘I’m not a man,’ she said, ‘so what’s wrong with looking?’

Still angry, but now somewhat embarrassed as well, Leng replied, ‘You’re not a man, but that doesn’t mean you can look at
me like that. What are you thinking?’

Huixian repeated what Zhao Chuntang had said: ‘I’m not thinking anything, but aren’t you the queen? What harm can a look do?’

Along with Leng’s responsibility came the authority to examine Huixian’s personal belongings. So when Huixian was out of the
room, Leng opened Huixian’s chest, to find a number of racy brassieres hidden at the bottom, all exuding a worrisome air of
sexuality. To Leng, this was clear evidence of the girl’s degeneration, but it was not something she could go to Zhao Chuntang
to lodge a complaint about. Instead, she told the female officials, some of whom openly defended Huixian. ‘So what?’ they
said. ‘She can buy all the brassieres she wants. No one can see them under her clothes.’

‘What about her motive?’ Leng said with a derisive snort. ‘Have you thought about that? No one can see them now, but sooner
or later someone will. You just wait. If you let this go on, one day you might see her in one of those decadent miniskirts.
She’s an accident waiting to happen!’

Little Liu’s visit had forced Huixian to put her disorienting girlhood behind her; she said goodbye with a brassiere, although
it was a parting that brought her little joy. The decorations on
Milltown’s once gaudy parade trucks had turned black in the farm tools factory warehouse, their treads missing, their wheels
scattered on the floor. Teacher Song’s propaganda poster for the
Red Lantern
team still hung on the wall; the family in the drama now lived on a warehouse wall, three generations of revolutionaries
staring down at abandoned objects, and left with nothing but cherished memories of past glory. The picture, locked away in
this cold ‘palace’, attracted not the eyes of the masses, but mildew, dust and cobwebs. While Li Yuhe and Granny Li’s faces
were covered with a layer of dust, Li Tiemei’s rosy cheeks and bright, staring eyes showed below her defiantly raised red
lantern, which fought for space with cobwebs and struggled against the dust.

Whenever Huixian passed the warehouse, she hoisted herself up on to a windowsill to look through the glass at the poster,
focusing on the fate of the poster’s Li Tiemei as if to somehow determine her own future. She cried on her windowsill perch
one day, after seeing her disfigured face on the poster, half of it obscured by soot-like dust, while her lantern was losing
its battle against a small spider that had circled its gleam with a web. The more she cried, the sadder she grew, and soon
she attracted the attention of the factory workers. ‘Little Tiemei,’ the surprised workers asked, ‘what are you doing up there?’
How could they understand? She hurriedly dried her eyes, hopped down from the windowsill and ran off. Her heart ached, thanks
to the factory, though she in fact already knew that it had all ended, whether or not she ever looked at what was stored inside.
Li Tiemei would never again put on her make-up. Her glory had come out of the blue and then evaporated. It was over, all of
it.

She was not Li Tiemei. She was Jiang Huixian, that’s all.

What to do about her waist-length braid caused her much anxiety. First she untied it and weaved it into a pair of braids,
but after a while she didn’t like the way that made her look like a country girl. So she decided to coil her hair again, but
instead of
wearing it the old-fashioned way, at the back, she piled it up on top. That made her taller, and somehow fashionable, and
brought her plenty of scrutiny. Her new hair-style caused a stir around town. Leng Qiuyun said it looked like a pile of horse
dung, but no one could deny that after shedding her Li Tiemei appearance, Huixian continued to be someone to watch. Her sudden
glow and new image, while gaudy and slightly frivolous, was uniquely hers. With her new stacked hairdo, she came and went
at the General Affairs Building, the freshness of youth in full view; like a peacock fanning its feathers with blatant self-assurance,
she elicited sighs of admiration from some, reproaches from others, and from one segment of the population, worry and unease.

Zhao Chuntang was particularly worried. A self-possessed man, his face never betrayed his emotions, but a good many occupants
of the General Affairs Building could see that he disapproved of Huixian’s new hair-style. He had grown used to tugging on
her braid. It had become a means of exercising leadership, whether in the building’s conference room or in the dining hall
when he entertained guests. He made his instructions known by how he tugged the braid – to the side, downward, from the middle,
or at the tip. But now that Huixian’s braid was stacked atop her head, when he reached behind her out of habit, what he held
was not her braid but her lower back, an unintentionally inelegant and easily misconstrued action. Officials in the building
frequently noticed a frown on Zhao’s face. ‘Take it down,’ he’d say to Huixian, pointing at her hair. ‘It looks like a pile
of horse dung. You don’t really think it’s attractive, do you? It’s brazen and it’s ugly!’

Not daring to defy Zhao in public, Huixian would unclip the braid and let it hang down her back. As soon as he wasn’t around,
she’d coil it back up on top again and complain to anyone who would listen, ‘What does he know about beauty? Besides, my braid
isn’t public property. I don’t need him to tell me what to do with it. That’s my business.’

It was apparent that Zhao Chuntang was beginning to fold his protective umbrella. International and domestic conditions are
in constant flux, and plans for Huixian’s cultivation were no different. Her case had become an intricate mystery, now that
Zhao’s hand was growing tired of holding his umbrella. A desk that had been set up in the General Affairs Building intended
for Huixian’s studies, complete with books and notebooks, was now covered with a layer of dust. The books had disappeared,
and Huixian’s drawer was filled with junk: a hand mirror, face cream, a hair band, socks and toilet paper, not to mention
her collection of sweet wrappers. That desk represented Huixian’s status in the building, and moving it out would signal the
loss of her patron’s backing. She was in the midst of a transition that would be reflected by the descent of her desk. Transitions
for some people have an upward trajectory; hers would go in the opposite direction, from the fourth floor to the ground floor.
Her desk had occupied space on the fourth floor for a long time, just outside Zhao’s office door. Also on the fourth floor
were an office for confidential matters, another for archives, and a small conference room. That in itself demonstrated a
determination to invest heavily in Huixian’s development. When he was talking to her from his office one day, Zhao noticed
that she’d stopped responding. He stepped out into the corridor. No Huixian. When he asked his typist where she had gone,
she took a quick look around before saying, ‘Oh, I heard her cracking melon seeds just a moment ago, so now where’s she gone?
Probably downstairs to get more.’

Zhao went over and opened Huixian’s desk drawer, which was overflowing with seed husks, some of which fell on to his shoes.
Smoke seemed to shoot from his eyes and ears. With an angry stamp of his foot, he yanked the drawer out and flung its contents
to the floor. ‘The sight of this desk infuriates me!’ he barked at the typist. ‘Have someone from Logistics come up here and
take it downstairs. Get it out of here!’

First stop, the third-floor offices of the Women’s Federation. But Director Leng would not let them move it in. ‘Aren’t I
supposed to be mentoring her? Well, then, wait till she’s Director of the Women’s Federation, and she can have her desk in
here.’

So the movers were standing out in the hall, not knowing what to do with the desk, when Huixian walked upstairs with a fresh
bag of melon seeds, to find her way blocked by the desk. She cast an icy glare at the two removal men. Making room for them,
she said, ‘What are you standing around for? Go ahead, move it downstairs. I have no quarrel with you two.’ Neither wanting
to argue with the removal men nor daring to go upstairs to face Zhao Chuntang, she found an outlet for her anger when Leng
Qiuyun stuck her head out of the door to see what was going on. ‘What are you peeking at?’ she said. ‘Chairman Mao tells us
to be open and above board and not to plot and scheme!’ Leng pretended she hadn’t heard the comment, calculating the damage
that would be done to her reputation by arguing with a young girl, and slammed the door shut. With a look of contempt, Huixian
turned to the removal men. ‘She must think that federation of hers is something special, but she doesn’t do anything important.
Disgusting! Who wants to be in that office anyway? I have to share a room in the dorm with her, but if I had to be in the
same office too, she’d drive me mad. I wouldn’t work in there if she begged me to. Go ahead, move it downstairs, some place
where there’s always something going on, like your rooms on the second floor.’