Su Tong: The Boat to Redemption

I gazed out at the town and at the building with the black roof tiles and white wall, which I’d never seen before. ‘Memorial hall? So what!’ I said. ‘What about the coffin shop? Where’s that?’

He erupted angrily. ‘Stop that nonsense about a coffin shop. Don’t listen to people who just want to smear your grandmother. She was no coffin girl. She relied upon coffins to smuggle weapons and ammunition to serve the needs of the revolution, that’s all.’ He pointed insistently at the ruins. ‘It’s there, behind that row of buildings. Don’t tell me you can’t see it!’

Well, I couldn’t, and I said so. ‘There’s no memorial hall!’

That infuriated him. After swatting me across the face, he said, ‘Your grandmother fought a battle for that place. Now do you see it? If not, you must be blind!’

My father moved his commemoration of Deng Shaoxiang to the river. Each year, at Qingming — the fifth day of the fifth lunar month — and on the twenty-seventh day of the ninth month, he unfolded a banner on our barge with the slogan:

THE MARTYRED DENG SHAOXIANG WILL

LIVE FOR EVER IN OUR HEARTS.

Several months separated the two dates, and as I recall how the seasonal winds snapped at the red cloth on those holidays, I am visited by disparate and unreal visions: autumn winds billowing Father’s banner cover our barge with a heavy pall, as if the martyr’s ghost were weeping on the river’s surface; she reaches out a moss-covered hand and grabs our anchor. ‘Don’t go,’ she says. ‘Don’t go. Stop here!’ She is, we can tell, dispirited as she tries to prevent our barge from sailing on, so that her son and grandson can stay with her. Spring winds, on the other hand, like all spring winds, blow lightly, carefully across the water’s surface, laden with the smell of new grass, awakening the name of the martyr Deng Shaoxiang, and I invariably sense the presence of an unfamiliar ghost as it nimbly climbs aboard from the stern and, dripping with water, sits on our barge to gaze tenderly at Father.

I was perplexed. In the autumn I believed what others were saying — that my father was not Deng Shaoxiang’s son. But when spring rolled around, I believed him when he insisted he was.

Whatever the truth, Father’s one-time glory had vanished like smoke in the wind, and all he’d been left with was a sofa he’d once kept in his office. Now he sat on that sofa, a memento of the power he’d once wielded, and slowly grew accustomed to life on the water, treating the barge as if it were the shore and its cabin as his office. The second half of his life was like a rubbish heap, with no place to hide beyond the river and the barge. In his later years, he and the shore parted company, and on those rare occasions when we approached Milltown, he’d stick his head out to take a peek at the shore, but then I’d walk over and close the porthole. Other people could appreciate the sights of Milltown all they wanted, but not him. He’d get vertiginous and complain about his eyesight, saying that the land was moving, like flowing water. I knew all about his fears. The shore wasn’t moving; what moved were his shameful memories. After so many years had passed, his frail, ageing body had split into two halves, one having grudgingly fled to the water, the other remaining for ever on the riverbank, where people no longer punished him yet had forgotten to forgive him; they had tied him to a pillar of shame.

I could not free my father from that pillar of shame, and this brought him his greatest torment and me my greatest heartache.

AFTER THE incident with the investigative team, Father remained ashore for three months, the first two in the attic of the Spring Breeze Inn, where he was kept in isolation while being checked out. A metal door with three locks separated the attic from the rest of the hotel; the keys were kept by three members of the team, two men and a woman who occupied rooms on the second floor. An endless stream of problems arose for my father, beginning with his education and as much of his work history as could be verified. He gave them the names of two schoolmates who could testify on his behalf, a man and a woman. No one knew the whereabouts of the man, while the woman had suffered a nervous breakdown. As for testimonials from the White Fox Logging Camp, where he’d worked for many years, the two individuals whose names he provided had died in a forest fire. And the person who had vouched for his acceptance into the Party was particularly suspect. A man of considerable renown, his reputation was badly tainted. Known as the most notorious rightist in the provincial capital, he had been sent to a labour-reform farm, where he was generally recalcitrant until the day he mysteriously disappeared.

Even Father was surprised to learn how dubious his own personal history was. ‘Who are you?’ the investigative team asked repeatedly. ‘Just who are you anyway?’

Eventually, they managed to wear him down. ‘Is there some sort of mental illness that can cause a person to remember everything wrong?’ he asked earnestly.

They rejected the implication. ‘Don’t try to turn this into a health issue,’ they said. ‘No neurologist can solve your problems. Seeing one would be a waste of time. You need to do some serious soul-searching.’

No therapy for him. So the soul-searching began, and over time he began to see the error of his ways. It wasn’t his memory that had let him down, it was his fate. A dark path lay in front of him, one with no visible end, and he could no longer validate himself.

As rumours flew around Milltown about how my father had created a false identity to fool the Party, the wall outside our house began to fill up with angry graffiti: ‘LIAR … ENEMY AGENT … SCAB … BUFFOON.’ Someone even labelled him a secret agent for Chiang Kai-shek and the US imperialists. Mother, who seemed to be on the brink of a nervous breakdown, went to the General Affairs Building to speak with Party leaders. That had the desired effect, for they assured her that she would not be implicated, that even though she and Father shared a bed, they could take divergent political stances. So she was still on safe ground when she returned home. With uncertainty she made the necessary arrangements for my life, while deep down, she was planning her own future. I had a premonition about what her future entailed. I could not be sure if I was included in that future, but I knew that Father was not.

Without telling Mother, I went to see him, but was stopped by the metal door. I knocked, attracting the attention of one of the team members, a middle-aged man in a blue tunic who escorted me out of the hotel. ‘Is that what you call solitary confinement?’ he screamed at a hotel employee. ‘Do you people still not understand what this is all about? Unauthorized people are not allowed in here, period!’

‘But it’s Ku Wenxuan’s son,’ the employee said. ‘He’s just a boy.’

The official scrutinized my face. ‘A boy, you say? He’s got the start of a beard already. He’s unauthorized and is not allowed in!’

During the two months Father spent in the hotel attic, people reported that he began to behave bizarrely. He stubbornly dropped his trousers once a day, regardless of time or occasion, to let the team examine the fish-shaped birthmark on his backside. For humanitarian reasons, they decided to end the solitary confinement early and notified us to come and get him.

So Mother and I waited in the third-floor hallway for the green metal door to swing open. When it did, Father emerged, bent at the waist, carrying a bag in one hand and a chess set in the other. Deprived of sunlight for so long, his face was wan and slightly puffy. At first glance, he seemed relatively healthy, but on closer examination, it was obvious that he bore the look of fatigue. He cast Mother a fervent glance, but when she turned away, fear replaced the fervour in his eyes as his timid gaze fell on me. That gave me goose bumps — he was so humble, so helpless. It was as if I were the father and he the son. Having committed serious errors, he was now trying to ingratiate himself, begging for my forgiveness.