Su Tong - The Boat to Redemption

Everyone knew that Zhao Chuntang was Huixian’s protective umbrella, held carefully over her head as he waited for a signal. A year went by, and though signal flares rose from time to time, no decision was forthcoming. Another year passed, and still the signals were mixed. Then a series of personnel changes at local and county level broke the chain of connection, leaving Huixian like a chess piece without a board. Where to put her now became Zhao’s dilemma. A directive came down to send Huixian to the provincial Young Female Cadre Study Team for training. But a few days later, a new directive indicated that selections for the study team had changed, thus contradicting the earlier directive. Huixian packed and unpacked her bag several times, but wound up staying put. She became a true idler, spending nearly all her time in and around the General Affairs Building porch, gazing out at the piers and nibbling melon seeds. Having nothing else to do, she had learned the skill of opening and eating melon seeds without using her hands. Compressing her lips slightly, she’d bite down, producing a cracking sound, and neatly spit out two halves of the husk, leaving a hillock of them on the ground wherever she was.

Huixian had plenty of melon seeds, and plenty of free time. The seeds and time were her companions as she waited for her future to appear out of the haze.

Bureau Chief Liu’s grandson, Little Liu, came to town one day, ostensibly on business, but actually to see Huixian. Tall and lanky, he had fair skin, long hair, and was wearing a checked shirt. He wasn’t very old — in his thirties, by the look of it — but he had all the airs of a fashionable young man from the big city. Huixian was drawn to him immediately. She went up to the fourth-floor meeting room to serve tea, and before she got there she straightened her hair in a small hand mirror and adjusted her clothes, even powdered her face lightly. She brought in two cups of tea, one for Zhao Chuntang, the other for Little Liu, who, instead of taking the cup, just looked at Huixian, starting with her face. She stood there holding the cup and let him look. Obviously someone used to taking liberties, Little Liu let his gaze drift downward, stopping halfway. Huixian put her hand to her chest. ‘What are you looking at?’ She raised the cup, as if she wanted to throw it at him but lacked the courage. As her face reddened, she handed the cup to Zhao and ran out of the room.

All her preparations were wasted. She ran into the hallway, where women stuck their heads out of their offices to look, which greatly upset her. Straightening her clothes again, she turned and headed back, reaching the door in time to hear Little Liu utter a vile comment. ‘The little cunt,’ he said, ‘belongs on a boat. You don’t put dog meat on a dining table!’ Then he gave Zhao Chuntang his impression of her looks and her temperament. ‘Her face is nice enough, and she’s got a good body. But she’s vulgar and small-minded. What I find most peculiar is how her figure could have changed so much since leaving her red-lantern days behind. Why does she hunch over like that? She walks like an old woman.’

Angry as this made Huixian, it puzzled her as well. Had she started walking like an old woman after leaving the red lantern? She’d never have thought that Bureau Chief Liu’s grandson would see her that way, so critical, as if he were talking about an animal or a toy. He hadn’t shown her a shred of respect, and she found him shameless, cocky and obscene, in a smug, superior way. She did not like him, not least because he instilled in her a strange sense of self-loathing. Her mind a tangle of emotions, Huixian ran back to her room, holding both hands over her chest.

Little Liu’s visit was a short one. After seeing him off, Zhao Chuntang went straight to Huixian’s room, where he tossed a notebook with a plastic cover on to her bed. ‘He said you don’t put dog meat on a dining table, then he handed me this to give to you — a gift from Bureau Chief Liu. Little Liu came with an armload of gifts for you, but has taken them all back with him.’ Zhao stood in the doorway staring at her, displeasure in his eyes. ‘Aren’t you the queen!’ he said. ‘What harm can a look do? Well, you’ve done it this time. No more talk of Gramps Liu. Now that you’ve offended his grandson, he’s no longer your “gramps”.’

Huixian opened the notebook Bureau Chief Liu had sent. There on the first page he’d written, ‘For Comrade Huixian. Wishing you progress in your studies and your work.’ Progress? A meaningless greeting, nothing more. She knew how significant Little Liu’s visit and her behaviour had been, but what she didn’t understand was why he’d said that thing about dog meat. And what about that comment about hunching over? Don’t tell me, she was thinking, that a girl’s supposed to walk with her chest thrown out as far as it’ll go!

With Little Liu’s departure, her future had become hazier than ever. Huixian sat on her bed, wishing she could cry, but afraid that Leng Qiuyun would laugh at her. Besides, Little Liu wasn’t worth the tears. So she turned her attention to Chief Liu’s notebook, and suddenly she knew how to express her feelings about the paltry gift: she wrote ‘shit’ after the word ‘progress’. That made her feel better, good enough to try throwing her chest out and see how that looked. But all that did was rearrange the wrinkles in her blouse. But she wasn’t through. Now was a good time to examine her own breasts, so she locked the door and opened her blouse to get a good look at herself in the mirror.

What is it about jutting breasts that makes a girl beautiful and desirable? That had always puzzled her. For small-town girls, well-developed breasts were considered shameful by most people. She’d felt the same way until today, when she saw herself in the mirror and, for the first time, thought she understood. Her breasts, she discovered, were neither especially large nor too small, but when she threw out her chest, a mysterious arc shot out in the mirror. They were so much better looking jutting out than concealed. Still looking in the mirror, she stood up and moved around, examining herself from all angles, in profile and full on, to see which was the best view of her changing figure. But having no mother or sisters to guide her, she could not judge, nothing suggested itself. That left it up to her own reckoning and imagination. Thinking back to her experiences in the public bath house, she tried to recall what the older, good-looking women’s breasts looked like, their size and shape, but failed. Then she remembered something: all those women wore brassieres. Why were her breasts so unappealing? Because she didn’t wear a brassiere. Why didn’t she own one? Because she’d grown up on a Sunnyside Fleet barge, where none of the women did. She had an idea. Opening a drawer in Director Leng’s dresser, she took out three brassieres and tried them on, one after the other. She detected the feminine smell clinging to the material as the cups gently covered her breasts. The image in the mirror, now in a brassiere, was enhanced, but at the same time produced a feeling of unease, of ferment, of coquettishness. The brassiere carried a subtle fragrance.

Huixian decided to start wearing a brassiere. For other girls in Milltown, buying one was something that had to be kept a secret and was entrusted to mothers. But Huixian was motherless. None of her many surrogate mothers could be bothered with this task, so it was up to Huixian to buy her own. Once her mind was made up, she approached the situation with what could be termed fanaticism, an opportunity to do something for herself. She went to the department store determined to buy whatever style and colour she wanted, without a hint of embarrassment, making her selection with a hostile expression. The clerk was visibly intimidated. ‘This bra is too big,’ she said. ‘You want it to be unattractive, do you?’