Su Tong - The Boat to Redemption

Feeling restless, I stood to one side to watch the queue when I recalled that one of Huixian’s handbills about her mother had been pasted up on the wall across the way. I walked over to see if it was still there. Either sanitation workers had torn down most of what remained or the elements had worn it away; except for a tiny fragment, it was obliterated under a fresh coat of whitewash. The stubborn defiance of that fragment evoked in me a sense of mourning. With National Day, the first of October, approaching, the walls of the streets and small lanes had been whitewashed to welcome the holiday. The handbill had died a natural death. I saw no trace of Father’s calligraphy, nor of Huixian’s name. Not content to leave it at that, I patiently scraped the whitewash off the remaining scrap of paper, and there beneath my fingernail, the sunflower I’d drawn the year before came to life before my eyes, slowly blossoming as I scraped and scraped.

That sunflower brought me a strange sense of elation. So I waited at the corner as the queue in front of the general store grew shorter and eventually disappeared.

As I walked out of the store carrying my jug of wine, I heard a voice behind me. It was Four-Eyes Ma, the store’s bookkeeper. ‘That’s powerful stuff,’ he shouted. ‘When you get home, tell Old Ku not to drink too much. Tell him Bookkeeper Ma says he’ll get even more downcast if he tries to drown his sorrows!’

I couldn’t tell if there was some hidden meaning in his comment, but I pretended not to hear him. He and my father had once enjoyed playing chess together, and he had been good at letting Father win by a slim margin. They were on relatively good terms, but no matter how good the terms were, in the end it was nothing but kongpi . I refused to believe that Four-Eyes’ comment was well-meaning, and suspected that his soft-spoken suggestion was really a ruse to win the respect of the young woman behind the counter. I never passed on people’s greetings to Father, because I didn’t think they came from the heart. I put my trust in myself alone, his son, since I couldn’t think of a single person in Milltown who gave a damn about Ku Wenxuan.

I carried out Father’s instruction by taking the jug of rice wine over to the chess pavilion, where a noisy crowd had gathered, and a gaggle of geese filled the air with their honking. My access to the memorial was effectively blocked. But I got as close as possible, and there I spotted the idiot Bianjin, cavorting drunkenly in front of the martyr’s memorial, protected by the geese he tended. He was calling out ‘Mama!’ to the etched likeness of Deng Shaoxiang. ‘Mama! Mama!’ he said. ‘Go and tell Zhao Chuntang to build a shed for my geese. Mama! Mama! Go and tell Little Wang at the general store to marry me. Mama! Mama! Give me five yuan so I can buy a jug for good wine. They look down on me, and won’t even drop the price by five fen.’

People tried to stop him, but failed. ‘Even an idiot knows how to take advantage of a situation,’ someone yelled, ‘calling Deng Shaoxiang Mama. You think calling her Mama is going to help you eat and drink well, do you? We’d like to be the chosen one, too. What makes an idiot like you think you can make that claim?’

‘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.