Su Tong - The Boat to Redemption

‘Whatever you say. Start with me,’ said Sun Ximing. Careful not to take this too lightly, he turned to the delegation. ‘Give him your names,’ he said with a wave of his hand.

‘I don’t need you to tell me. We know all about you people.’ Xiaogai looked at his watch. ‘Take out your family register, Baldy,’ he said. ‘The following boat people came ashore at ten-forty a.m.: Sun Ximing and his wife, Gu Desheng and his wife, Six-Fingers, your name is Wang Jinliu, right? Wang Jinliu, and Ku Dongliang. Write that down.’

They missed Huixian, who was in the arms of Desheng’s wife, yawning sleepily. Only the sharp-eyed Wintersweet had noticed her. She walked up to get a good look at Huixian, then sniffed her neck. ‘Hold it!’ she cried. ‘There’s a stranger among them! This little girl doesn’t belong on a barge. I can tell by the smell. She doesn’t stink, she’s had a bath. Find out where she’s from.’

Suddenly wary, Xiaogai and Scabby Five went over to get a good look at Huixian and reached the same conclusion: the girl definitely did not live on a boat. Their eyes lit up. ‘Where’s this little girl come from?’ they said at almost the same time. ‘So this is your new trend in class struggle. Where’d you snatch that kid?’

‘Trust you people to resort to slander!’ Sun Ximing complained. ‘What good would it do us to snatch a little girl? We barely have enough to feed our own kids. What would we do with somebody else’s — feed her river water?’

‘Don’t twist things around!’ Xiaogai demanded shrilly. ‘We’re not interested in your stomachs. Our job is to register people. Tell me, whose child is she?’

‘Now that’s a question we can answer.’ Sun scratched his head. ‘She came aboard on her own. Her mother … what can I say? … has disappeared. We want to hand her over to the authorities.’

Scabby Five glared impatiently at Sun. ‘You’re in charge of this fleet, so I expect straight talk from you. What’s the story with her mother? And no lies.’

That’s when the girl spoke up. ‘I don’t know where my mama is. She’s gone.’

‘What do you mean, gone?’ Not sure he’d heard her right, Scabby Five turned back to Sun Ximing. ‘For the last time, where’s her mother?’

Glancing over at the little girl, Sun swallowed noisily, determined not to say what everyone thought. As Scabby Five’s anger mounted, Desheng’s wife made a gesture of slapping his face. ‘We all know what’s in that head of yours, Scabby Five. Talking to you is like serenading a cow with a lute. We’re not going to tell you, and that’s that.’ Now that she’d dealt with him, she turned, took Wintersweet by the arm, and whispered something to her.

Eventually the security group began to get a sense of what had happened to the girl’s mother. Lacking experience in situations like this, they huddled together, three concerned men and one woman. Finally, it was Wintersweet who took charge. ‘This girl,’ she announced, ‘is a mystery child.’

Baldy Chen took out his register. ‘Should we record her name?’ he asked Xiaogai, unsure what to do.

Xiaogai took the book and read out the instructions on the back cover. ‘Here it is,’ he said. ‘Item eight. “Pre-school children need not be entered.”’ Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

But Wintersweet wasn’t satisfied. She bent down and asked Huixian, ‘Have you started school, little girl?’

Ignoring the frantic head-shaking from the delegation, she announced proudly, ‘Yes, I have. I know how to write, but I lost my blackboard.’

‘That means she’s not pre-school,’ Baldy Chen said with a frown. ‘She’s old enough to register.’

Wintersweet took the register from Baldy, pointed to the words on the cover and said to Huixian, ‘I know you’re a smart little girl. Tell Aunty which of these words you can read.’

Huixian leaned closer and confidently studied the red printed words. Recognizing the words ‘people’, ‘coming’, and ‘ashore’, she read them aloud. ‘What does that mean?’ she asked.

Her question went unanswered. A simple enough question, its answer was significant. Regardless of how cute and bright she might have been, she was still one of the ‘people coming ashore’, and had to be registered as such.

The security group and boat people crowded around Huixian, combining all their efforts to help record the girl’s information. It was hard work.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Huixian.’

‘Your family name?’

She muttered something in a child-like stammer, impossible to understand.

‘Is it Zhang, written like this or this?’ Baldy asked her. ‘Or maybe it’s Qiang, like in rifle. Which one is it?’

‘I’m not a rifle, you are. I’ll write it for you.’ She squatted down, picked up a lump of coal and wrote her name on the ground. It was Jiang.

‘Ah!’ those who could read exclaimed. ‘Her name is Jiang.’

‘Do you remember your date of birth, little comrade?’

‘What’s that?’

‘You don’t understand. OK, how old are you? That way we’ll know the year you were born.’

‘I’m nine. I was eight last year, and I’ll be ten next year.’

‘I know you’re a smart little girl, but you don’t need to tell us all that. You’re nine, that’s enough. Do you know your parents’ names? What do they do for a living?’

‘My father’s name is Jiang Yongsheng, my mother’s name is Cui Xia. But they’re gone.’

‘How’d that happen? Where’d your father go?’

‘My mother said he was accused of something he didn’t do and some bad people dragged him out of his office.’

‘Bad people? Who were the bad people who took him away? And where did they take him?’

‘I don’t know. Mother said she’d take me to see him, some place with a steel fence and soldiers. But I didn’t get to see him, and the soldiers said he’s missing. Now my mama’s missing too. Have you seen her?’

Everyone who heard her tensed. Not everything she said sounded believable, but they couldn’t dismiss it out of hand. The boat people, always alert to such things, assumed that the girl’s father had been locked up, either as a criminal or as a counter-revolutionary. Desheng’s wife whispered to him, ‘I’m telling you, don’t let them register her. Nothing good can come of it. Look at their faces. You’d think they’d captured one of Chiang Kai-shek’s agents.’

The security group exchanged knowing looks. ‘Write down what she said,’ Xiaogai said to Baldy. ‘All of it, every word.’

Baldy nodded. ‘I’ve got it all, every word.’

Wintersweet took a long, proud look at her colleagues. ‘I told you there’s a problem with this girl, didn’t I?’ Her eyes flashed. But then she breathed a sorrowful sigh. ‘Too bad it turns out to be a little girl.’

The comment deflated Baldy Chen, who had been writing furiously. ‘Are we going to let her come ashore,’ he asked Xiaogai, ‘with a blot on her record?’

Xiaogai wasn’t sure. He looked at the girl, then turned to Baldy. ‘Go ahead, register her,’ he said as he scratched his head. ‘That’s what the regulations say.’

The boat people were all talking at once, voicing their doubts about the whole process, as the questioning recommenced. Baldy Chen cleared his throat and, trying his best to sound agreeable, said, ‘Don’t listen to them, little girl. Pay attention to my questions and you’ll be fine. Just be sure to give me straight answers. Now I want you to tell me your address. What is your address? You don’t understand that? All right, where’s your home?’

‘By the railroad tracks. Upstairs. There’s a peach tree in the yard. Lots of peaches.’

‘That’s not an address. An address means the city or town or district or county, things like that. What’s the district called? What street? Which commune or production brigade?’