Su Tong - The Boat to Redemption

A large wooden box had been nailed to the wall outside the Milltown Post Office, put there for the use of the boat people. Year in and year out, it remained empty, which is understandable when you consider that most of the boat people were illiterate. When their sons and daughters reached adulthood and started their own families, they continued their lives aboard the barges. If they didn’t meet on the Golden Sparrow River, they met on the piers, and so asking someone to write a letter and attach an eight-fen postage stamp was more than merely a matter of dropping one’s pants to fart, it was a waste of money and energy. For a long time, the only users of the fleet postbox were the occupants of barge number seven. Once every month or two I received a letter from Mother. In it she urged me to study hard, reminding me that though I was living in less than ideal circumstances it was my duty to work hard. She insisted that I set up long-term goals, the mere thought of which gave me a headache. Sure, I had goals, all of them were related to Huixian, but I couldn’t say so. If I did, I’d either become the butt of people’s jokes or a sinner in their eyes. How could I tell Mother? I couldn’t, so I didn’t reply to her letters, which came less and less frequently. Eventually Father’s letters were the only things that ever showed up in the postbox, where they waited for me to go ashore. Everyone knew that my father was an orphan with no siblings, no relatives and no friends. At first he wrote to the leadership of the County Party Committee, but kept going higher, to district Party and governmental offices: the civil administration, the organization bureau, the commission for inspecting discipline, the history office, the office for complaint letters and calls, even the family-planning commission. Throughout my eleven years on the barge, Father sent appeals to leading Party bureaus and offices regarding his status as the son of a martyr, demanding a definitive ruling and an official certificate that recognized his martyr-family status. Unfortunately, the red-lined envelopes I received in reply were invariably thin and light, and I never saw one of those certificates, which Father had described to me as being red with gold print. Instead they were standard-issue letters with a series of dotted lines. Sometimes Father’s name was filled in, sometimes not. ‘Comrade so-andso,’ they read, ‘your request is very important to us. At a future date we will give it careful attention and scrutiny. Revolutionary greetings to you.’

More than once he told me that the only inheritance he could leave me was one of those martyr-family certificates. I was no fool, I knew the value of one of those things, and on this matter we were in rare agreement. He diligently wrote his letters aboard the barge, and I diligently posted them for him. I never went into Milltown without performing the same task: I went into the post office, bought a stamp, pasted it on to the envelope, and dropped it into the big green postbox. It became as mechanical and as fruitless a routine as scooping ladlefuls of water into the river — not even a tiny splash was made.

On my way to the post office one day I saw a scowling, uniformed man emerge with a drawerful of keys, which clattered as he walked. He dropped the drawer on the ground in front of the green postbox, which he opened with one of the keys, releasing an avalanche of white envelopes into the drawer. I stepped up and looked at the drawer, but all I saw were envelopes piled on top of one another, with no discernible names or addresses, and, of course, no return addresses. I instinctively followed the drawer on its trip back, until the man became aware of my presence. He spun around and shouted angrily, ‘What the hell are you up to?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’m just posting a letter.’

He looked at me suspiciously. ‘You’re from the Sunnyside Fleet, aren’t you? Aren’t you Ku Wenxuan’s son?’ He shook the drawer in his hands. ‘You came at the right time. Toss your letter in here.’

I took another look at the drawer, then glanced back at him, with his gloomy face and crafty eyes, and wondered if I was being taken in. Why should I trust him, or that drawer of his? I waved him off and walked back to the postbox, whose dark, gaping mouth seemed to draw me to it. The lock on its side was still swinging back and forth. Was it taking me in too? Why should I trust that postbox? It was, after all, Milltown’s postbox, in a town where people said even the sky belonged to Zhao Chuntang. That had to include the postbox. Be careful, I told myself, be very careful. So I stuck Father’s letter into my bag; better to forgo the one close at hand in favour of the more distant one. I could go to Wufu to post my letter, or, for that matter, Phoenix. It didn’t matter where I went, but I knew I wasn’t going to commit my father’s future to the Milltown postbox.

After that, on my trips to Milltown, in addition to buying provisions, there was another thing I needed to do — some might have seen it as important, others might not have. It was something I did for myself, something I couldn’t talk about.

I went to the People’s Barbershop, where the walls on both sides of the entrance had been opened to install display windows. Three plastic mannequin heads were arrayed in the window to the left, each adorned with a woman’s wig, and each with a sign in front that stated the wave length: long, medium and short. That threw me. This wasn’t the Golden Sparrow River, and there was no wind, so why did women want waves in their hair? I stepped over to the other window, where illustrations torn out of magazines were displayed. The print quality was poor, but good enough to see city girls from somewhere or other trying to outdo each other with their bizarre new hair-styles. One of the illustrations was both clear and familiar. It was Huixian. She did not shy from showing herself to her best advantage, letting herself be seen with the others. She was turned sideways and looking off at an angle, her eyes bright, and she wore her hair coiled weirdly on top of her head, so that it looked to me like a stack of oil fritters.

I looked at her hair-do from every angle, and didn’t like what I saw, though I wouldn’t say it was ugly. I was reminded of something my father had said: when a sunflower turns away from the sun, it droops, bringing an end to its future. I knew that Huixian, my own sunflower, had turned away from the sun. By leaving the General Affairs Building, she was, I felt, closer to me. But that didn’t mean I’d been given a chance to get closer to her. She was now a barber, yet people continued to treat her as if she were the moon and the stars aligned around her. Local girls who wanted to look as pretty as possible were allowed to get close to her, Old Cui and Little Chen ate and worked alongside her every day, and drooling, audacious boys around town never missed a chance to draw up near her. I wasn’t that brazen, nor was I that audacious, and if I didn’t need a haircut, I couldn’t force myself to go inside.

My hair, which grew slowly, still wasn’t long enough, and that was a nuisance. So I sat in the doorway of a cotton-fluffing workshop across the street from the People’s Barbershop, laying my bag next to me so people would think I was taking a rest, open and above board. The people inside were hard at work on the cotton; the clamour of the wires fluffing cotton — peng, peng, peng — echoed my heartbeat. I couldn’t pace back and forth in front of the barbershop, since that would attract the attention of the people inside, and I definitely couldn’t press my face up against one of the windows to get a good look; only an idiot would do something like that. No, I had to sit across the street and watch the people come and go, creating pangs of jealousy, whether I knew them or not.