Su Tong - The Boat to Redemption

I hardly recognized the place, though I’d only been away a few days. It had been turned into a — into a what? By nature given to confusion and disorder, and deficient at expressing my feelings, I’m incapable of describing the town that autumn. So, if you’ll bear with me, I’ll borrow a few lines from my father’s poem: ‘Come on, come on, who’s afraid of a flood? Floodwaters open up our way ahead. In this stirring autumn red flags flutter in the wind, songs of triumph rise into the air, as we move forward, forward, racing towards a workers’ paradise, a revolutionary advance guard.’

An advance guard, to be sure, but our barges, the Sunnyside Fleet, brought up the rear, so when the drums and cymbals welcomed the flotilla, we could only look on from a distance to where Young Pioneers waited in the rain: the boys lined the road, arms raised in a salute, while the girls flocked to the ships like swallows to present each honoured sailor with a red flower. As the pier-side welcoming ceremony began, a mass campaign was under way in every corner of the town; labourers with farm tools over their shoulders were everywhere, their shouts drowned out by the driving rain. While the barge crews waited to go ashore, our ears were pounded by the voice of an anxious young man coming over the loudspeaker: ‘Red Flag Fleet, come ashore, move sharply, come ashore.’ The crews made ready, but then rousing music blared from the PA system, followed by static. Then the anxious young man returned: ‘Comrade so-and-so, report to the construction site command post. An urgent matter awaits!’

Our crews were standing at the bows awaiting a command from the PA system. But our cargo appeared to be the least important of all. The Great Wall Fleet barges, with their cargo of pork, fresh produce and rice, had received their call, and we were still waiting. Sun Ximing ran to the riverbank to complain to a raincoat-clad man. ‘We’re carrying human cargo, so why are we lined up behind barges carrying pork?’

The official bellowed his response: ‘Have you forgotten what times these are? Do you see this as some sort of competition? All people and cargo coming ashore must be registered, and registering cargo is faster than registering people. With only us few working, of course we register pork first.’ That cleared things up.

I heard Desheng’s wife say to her husband, ‘We’re working as hard as anyone else. Will we get red flowers too?’

‘Revolution isn’t a dinner party,’ Desheng replied. ‘If it’s a flower you want, go and get yourself a water gourd.’

As the rain eased off, the people inside our cabin began to shout, ‘It’s suffocating in here, give us some air!’ So I raised the hatch, and was hit by a blast of sweat-sour air, mixed with the stench of cigarette smoke, urine and vomit. Then the heads of the workers started popping up, more men than women, most of them young. With bed rolls on their backs, they elbowed one another to get their first look at the legendary workers’ paradise. Mouths open, they breathed deeply and gawked at the construction scenes on the banks. One of the women shrieked, ‘They’re turning the earth upside down! They’ll work us to death!’ She could have chosen a better time to shout — someone shouted back at her: ‘What did you think we brought you here to do, loaf around? If you’re afraid of hard work you shouldn’t have come to Milltown.’ The uproar in the cabin died out quickly. A man who looked like a demobilized soldier travelling with the fleet began recording the passengers with a roll call, but he’d only managed a few people when the PA system blared out the name of the Sunnyside Fleet. He hopped down on to the deck and began issuing orders: ‘Shock Troops Three over here! Shock Troops Four over there! Gao Village Shock Troops and Li Family Crossing Shock Troops to the rear!’

So that’s what they were, shock troops! A barge-load of shock troops was on the move and our spacious forward hold emptied quickly, leaving nothing but two rows of buckets used for toilets, all filled and sending their hot stench straight into my nostrils. Some of them must have been knocked over, since the deck was soiled with puddles of a disgusting liquid. The smell was overpowering.

After changing into rubber boots, I snatched a mop and began cleaning up. But I’d barely begun when I saw that something else had been left behind — a bundle wrapped in an army raincoat had been tossed into a corner. I touched it with my broom; it moved. Then a child’s leg kicked out, scaring the hell out of me. The next thing to wriggle out of the raincoat bundle was the head of a woman with hair going every which way, and I heard her complain crisply, ‘Why’d you hit my leg with that?’

Two people had taken refuge in the army raincoat: a thirty-year-old woman and a little girl, apparently a mother and daughter. Two pairs of eyes, one dazed, the other lively, both gaped at me sleepily.

I struck the deck with my mop. ‘Up!’ I said. ‘Get up! I have to clean the cabin.’

As soon as they stood up, I saw how weary the woman was. She had a pale, unhealthy face. And there was more inside that raincoat, lots more. She opened it up to expose a bulging knapsack and a rolled-up blanket, plus a netted basket with a wash basin and rice tin, all tied together by the hood and sleeves of the raincoat, which she held in her arms. The girl’s arms were just as full: she was hugging a cloth doll and had an olive-green army canteen draped around her neck by its strap. She was also holding a little blackboard on which words had been scrawled in juvenile writing: ‘East Wind No. 8,’ it said. ‘Huixian. Mama.’

‘What are you doing here?’ I demanded. ‘How dare you sleep on while everybody else has left the boat! Who are you?’

‘Who are we? We’re not going to tell you.’ The girl glared at me and put herself between me and her mother to keep her mother from telling me. ‘He’s mean,’ she said. ‘Let’s ignore him.’

‘This is a shock-troop barge,’ I said. ‘How did you sneak aboard?’

‘We didn’t sneak aboard,’ the girl said provocatively. ‘We flew aboard, so you couldn’t see us.’

The woman combed her fingers through her tangled hair and glanced eagerly at the shore. ‘Huixian!’ she scolded. ‘Don’t talk like that! It’s rude.’ Then, turning her eyes away from the shore, she smiled, almost apologetically. But she hadn’t answered my question. She crawled out of the hold, dragging her bundle and the girl with her. Then she turned and said, ‘We’re shock troops too. I just overslept. I didn’t dare fall asleep at night. I was exhausted.’

I CAN’T SAY why, but one look at Huixian and her mother raised doubts in my mind about them.

I’d always been suspicious about people like that. If they were shock troops, my name wasn’t Ku Dongliang. I didn’t know why they’d boarded our barge and was pretty sure they’d tricked their way on. We’d received strict orders not to allow unknown persons, as well as the old, the weak, the sick and the infirm, to board the barges for the trip to Milltown, and I hadn’t seen a single child at the Horsebridge pier. I wondered if they’d slipped aboard barge number seven in all the confusion during the two days when the river was clogged with all those ships. If so, why had the former soldier turned a blind eye when they came aboard, and how had the shock troops let her get away with it? Whatever the reason, they’d made it possible for Huixian and her mother to hide inside an army raincoat for two days and two nights.

Since the woman and her daughter definitely hadn’t come to Milltown to work, they’d probably come in search of someone. Announcements of missing persons were broadcast daily, and it usually took only one to locate someone. If the announcement was repeated, the person was truly missing. The announcements for whoever this woman was looking for must have been repeated several times, but the name had made no impression on me. Stuff like that didn’t interest me. With so many people travelling, not finding someone wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. As far as I was concerned, other people’s misfortunes weren’t worth more than a tear or two, compared to what my family had gone through.