Su Tong - The Boat to Redemption

Boat people consider it taboo to look for a dead person aboard a sailing vessel. But no one on the Sunnyside barges had encountered anything quite like this before. A taboo is meaningless to a seven-or eight-year-old girl, and nothing can change that. She had her own logic: her mother had brought her to Milltown on a boat, so that’s the way she was going to leave. People tried to talk some sense into her: ‘Little girl, we bring people here, we don’t take them away. Your mother isn’t here.’ But Huixian would have none of it. Even at her young age she knew adults’ weaknesses. ‘You’re lying!’ she said through her tears. ‘If a boat can bring people somewhere, it can take them away too.’

She stamped her foot in front of Sun Ximing, convinced that her mother was hiding below deck and trying to get her to come out. Sun Ximing’s son tried to get her to stop. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said. ‘You’ll stamp a hole in our hatch, and you’ll have to pay.’ But Sun’s wife pushed her son aside and opened the hatch to let Huixian see for herself. ‘See, little girl? There’s no one in there, nothing but bricks.’

Huixian got down on her knees and stuck her head in. ‘Are you down there, Mama?’ she cried into the darkness. ‘Come out, Mama! Please come out!’

The crew exchanged glances. Desheng’s wife wiped her moist eyes and glanced at her husband.

‘Why look at me?’ he said. ‘I’m not the Dragon King.’

His wife lowered her eyes and gazed down at the water. Since she couldn’t argue with the Dragon King, she took her frustrations out on the water. ‘It’s all because of this year’s floods. Why was there so much water? It’s the damned water. Come and stand over here. See how easy it would be to jump in.’

However ridiculous the woman’s comments may have sounded, I was struck by the knowledge that she’d fathomed the river’s secrets: it sends the autumn floodwaters downstream, causing the riverbed to lose its temper. The banks slink off, leaving the murky water to rush angrily along and cover the river’s cruellest secret. I’d thought about this secret in the past, and I knew what it was. It was whispered in people’s ears, two simple words: ‘Come down, come down.’

The tugboat blew its whistle, pressing the people on the barges to do something about the little girl. But no one knew what that something should be, so they congregated on Sun Ximing’s barge. As he looked down at the tree limbs and leaves floating by, Six-Fingers made a quick calculation of the speed of flow. ‘Already past the town of Wufu,’ he announced. ‘Way past Wufu.’ At first they didn’t know what he was talking about, but only for a moment. What he meant was, if the woman had jumped into the river, her corpse would already have been carried down below the town of Wufu. No one spoke; they all turned their heads to gaze sadly in the direction of Wufu.

Sun’s wife took the girl’s hand and raised her voice in angry protest. ‘What kind of woman abandons her own daughter? With officials on land and the Dragon King in the water, someone should deal with people like that. I don’t care where she’s run to, they should tie her up and drag her back.’

Unfortunately, she hadn’t considered the effect of her angry denunciation on the girl, who yanked her hand free and began pounding Sun’s wife on the arm. ‘I’ll tie you up!’ she screamed. ‘Tie you up!’

I saw the women trying to pull the girl away, but she’d have none of it. Some of them walked up with open arms, but to no avail. She moved up next to Sun Ximing, which pleased and surprised him; he gestured for the others to watch what they said around her and had his wife go and get the girl some sweets. His normally tight-fisted wife suddenly turned generous, stuffing a sweet into the little girl’s mouth, which opened wide to accept the treat. Her eyes lit up as she sucked it, and she spotted me. ‘It’s him!’ she shouted, pointing at me. ‘My mama’s on his boat!’

Panicked, I turned and ran. But Huixian took off after me. I knew why she was chasing me, but not why I was running away. Whatever the reason, by overreacting I caused a bizarre scene, as people on all the barges started running, turning the fleet into a rocking runway. They were chasing each other up and down the sides of the barges, shouting, ‘Don’t run! Don’t run!’ But no one stopped. I kept looking back, afraid that Huixian might fall in. I needn’t have worried, for she had an astonishing sense of balance. Like an avenging demon she kept after me, her feet virtually flying on what for her were unfamiliar boats.

I calmed down once I made it back to barge number seven, where I pulled back the tarp and said to the girl, ‘Go ahead, look for yourself. Your mama won’t be hidden on our boat unless she turned into a brick. If she didn’t, she won’t be in there.’

The people who had been running after Huixian stopped when they reached our barge and watched as I jumped down into the hold and started tossing the damaged bricks up on deck, one at a time. ‘Go ahead, look,’ I shouted, ‘and tell me which one of those is your mama.’

Dodging the flying bricks, she stamped her foot and yelled, ‘Your mama is a brick!’

‘Dongliang!’ Sun Ximing called out. ‘What’s going on here? Why was she chasing you?’

By then I was getting angry. ‘How the hell should I know? She may think she knows me, but I sure don’t know her!’

Amid all the shouting, the tugboat crew ran out of patience and sounded the whistle. Slowly getting under way, the eleven barges turned into a gigantic boa that smelled the arrival of spring, heading out into the river. Startled by the movement, people aboard the barges turned and shouted, ‘Stop! The little girl’s still aboard!’ The tug crew ran into the cabin, where a burst of garbled shouts emerged from a battery bullhorn. Finally one of the men blew into the bullhorn and said impatiently, ‘What’s all the fuss? What are you afraid of? She’s just a little girl. It’s not as if you’ve taken a class enemy aboard!’

Frightened by the bullhorn, Huixian straightened up and gazed at the tugboat. She burst into tears and shrieked at me, ‘Tell me right this minute, where is my mama?’

Given her youth, I saw nothing wrong with her crying and carrying on because she’d lost her mother. But she was staring at me, wanting me to produce her mother. That was too much. As for the other crews, instead of coming to my aid, they all just gaped at me, sort of stupefied, as if to force a cruel response out of me. I looked first at the barge, then at the shore, and finally down at the water. If anything, I was more puzzled than they were, and I couldn’t help thinking about my own mother. Strangely, the name Qiao Limin popped into my head, but for the life of me, I couldn’t conjure up a picture of what my mother looked like. As I looked at Huixian’s tear-streaked face, I knew I couldn’t tell her the truth, tell her not to keep looking for her mother. My mother’s a kongpi, and it looks like yours is too . She was too young to understand, I couldn’t put it into words. But I was also unable to escape a responsibility I hadn’t asked for. Then an idea came to me. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘here’s your mama.’ I held up a finger and drew a circle in the air under her nose, then pointed mysteriously into the air. That, I figured, was a good way to get her to understand the meaning of kongpi . I didn’t care whether or not anyone else understood the meaning of my gesture.

HUIXIAN SAT on my father’s sofa in the cabin, agitated, wilful and gluttonous. She’d gone through all the snacks we had. That’s my earliest recollection of her as she began life on the river.