Su Tong - The Boat to Redemption

So Huixian returned, but not to the Sunnyside Fleet. Milltown was her new home.

I was no fool, I didn’t expect her to come back on the barges. But I hoped for the best. No one knew for sure what her plans for the future might be. Maybe Sun Ximing and his wife knew, since they had been her surrogate parents, but I could not get up the nerve to ask them. I went instead to their youngest son, Xiaofu. ‘Have you taken down Huixian’s bed?’ I asked him.

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘My mother wants to, but my father won’t let her.’

‘Are her things still on your barge?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t want them.’

‘Why wouldn’t she want all that stuff?’

‘Are you crazy?’ he said. ‘Why would she want to hold on to junk when she can wear nice sweaters and leather shoes?’

I couldn’t bring myself to ask around about Huixian. Better to seek answers from myself than from anyone else. I experimented with a deck of playing cards. Father watched me from the sofa. ‘Fortune-telling?’ he asked. ‘When did you start believing in that stuff?’

‘Not my fortune,’ I said. ‘The future.’

‘Whose future? How can you expect to have any kind of future the way you loaf around all day?’

‘Not my future,’ I blurted out. ‘I’m Kongpi, I can’t have a future. But a sunflower can.’

He just stared at me, as if pondering something. Then it dawned on him. ‘What sunflower are you talking about? Don’t think you’re clever enough to play with words with me. Sunflower — you mean Huixian!’ He turned and looked ashore, first at the sky, then at the land, and then uttered a wise comment. ‘You’re wasting your time trying to figure out the sunflower’s future. As long as a sunflower keeps its face turned to the sun, it’s got a future. But the minute it drops its head and turns away from the sun, it’s done for.’

I’ll never forget what he said that day, not till the day I die: a sunflower must keep facing the sun. For years after that, whenever I saw Huixian, out of habit I surveyed the scene around her, including the sky overhead and the ground beneath her feet. Huixian, Huixian, who is your sun? Who do you want to face?

I once spent an entire afternoon at the General Affairs Building waiting for Huixian, but could not screw up the courage to go inside and ask for her. It was during the New Year’s Festival, so the building was quieter than usual. Gimpy Gu had gone back to his home in the countryside for the holidays, and a young man who had taken his place in the foyer was engrossed in a newspaper. I wasn’t worried, since he didn’t know who I was. Seeing the Jeep parked next to the flowerbed, I decided to hang around. As long as the Jeep was there, so was Huixian.

At around noon, I heard noise coming from a small room off the dining hall, so I tiptoed up to the window and looked inside, where I saw Huixian surrounded by a bunch of officials. Like a peacock fanning its tail for their entertainment, she was wearing Li Tiemei’s Chinese jacket with buttons down the front and had let her hair down so that her jet-black braid rested on her shoulder. She seemed uncomfortable, shifting in her chair, first to one side and then the other, in a slightly sloppy way. But her broad smile told me she was happy; it was the smile of a spoiled little girl. She’d grown up since I’d last seen her, and seemed almost like a stranger. The men were drinking the whole time. All of a sudden I saw something shocking. Zhao Chuntang, who was sitting next to Huixian, grabbed her braid and gave it a tug. She stood up, held out her glass of orange juice, and toasted her admirers, one after the other. When she’d finished, Zhao tugged her braid a second time and she sat down. To my astonishment, in the short time since she’d returned, Huixian had become Zhao Chuntang’s marionette, and that thick braid, of which she had once been so proud, was now the string he pulled to control her.

In that instant I recalled what Father had said about a sunflower. Huixian, what kind of sunflower have you become? Is Zhao Chuntang now your sun? Do you let him order you around these days? You’re no longer a sunflower, you’re a blade of grass on a wall, bending whichever way the wind blows. Flames of anger burned in my breast. I bent down, picked up a broken brick and stood at the window taking aim, first at Zhao Chuntang. How can I describe my feelings towards Zhao? I hated him with all my heart, but I was too afraid of him to throw that brick. So I took aim at my sunflower, Huixian! All the officials in the dining hall were her suns; she’d smile at one of them, then bow to another, her cheeks flushed as she glanced round the room. But she was my secret sunflower! No matter how many mistakes she made or how badly she acted, I couldn’t harm her. So what could I do? In the end, I decided to let words be my weapon. Using the brick as my writing instrument, I wrote on the wall: ‘ZHAO CHUNTANG IS AN ALIEN CLASS ELEMENT’.

That same line. But was he? How should I know?

I wondered why I was obsessed with that line. Maybe because it was the most perplexing slogan I’d ever seen on the banks of the Golden Sparrow River, and I was obsessed with its confounding nature, and maybe there was nothing strange about that. My hatred of Zhao itself was confounding, and I was perfectly willing to display it openly. I was not, however, willing to display my love openly. That was the love of a water gourd for a sunflower. It was a love far more confounding than hate, and more bizarre, the sort of love I was incapable of bringing out into the open.

THE TEENAGED Huixian took up residence in Milltown with her tinplate red lantern.

For the first two years after returning, she kept her Li Tiemei-style braid, ready at a moment’s notice to join a parade. Word from the General Affairs Building had it that she usually wore it coiled at the back of her head, both on account of how it looked and to protect the braid itself. Some of the women who were close to her reported that she’d often had nightmares in which she was chased by someone with scissors who wanted to snip off her braid. When they asked who that someone was, she wouldn’t say. But then the tears would flow, and she’d say, ‘Lots of people, like Yingtao, and Chunhua and her sister … all the girls on the boats are jealous of me, and they chase me with scissors to cut off my braid. I nearly die of fright!’

Eventually, there were more parades, but now there were changes, in China and around the world. The biggest change was in the number of trucks and their appearance: there were now five festooned trucks with fifteen actors, presenting a unified front of workers, peasants, soldiers, students and merchants — workers carrying hammers, peasants holding wheat stalks, soldiers with rifles on their shoulders, students reading books, and merchants fingering abacuses. Teacher Song brought some of the young directors from the cultural centre to Milltown to search for actors and actresses. No matter which class they were to represent, they all had to exude a commanding presence, the boys with heavy features, the girls displaying a valiant air that made the enemy tremble with fear. Huixian, of course, was a natural. Teacher Song had planned for her to be on the fifth truck, representing a student in the prime of life. He even gave her a pair of non-prescription glasses. But after several rehearsals, although her body was acting the role, her mind was elsewhere, feeling that she’d been given a supporting role as a student. She wanted to be on the first truck. ‘The first truck is for a member of the working class,’ Song said, ‘who holds a hammer. If you had a hammer in your hand, people would mistake it for a comb.’

‘I want to be on the first truck,’ she replied, ‘or no truck at all.’