Su Tong - The Boat to Redemption

At the end of that year, a notice regarding the forced-transfer barge fleet was posted on the door of my house, spelling the end of my time in Milltown. When we boarded the barge, Mother had to move, and she did. But she was in such a hurry that she accidentally left her notebook behind. As she rushed out of the house she tossed a cloth bundle on to my bed, and when I picked it up, I found the notebook inside. She’d made a cover for her cherished notebook out of an illustrated newspaper. The front was graced with the ruddy face of Li Tiemei from the revolutionary opera The Red Lantern . The back showed Li’s hand, holding a red lantern. With time and opportunity on my side, I took as long as I needed to decide what to do with this special notebook, and wound up making a bold decision. I’d neither hand it over to Father nor give it back to Mother. I’d hide it away for myself.

To this day I can’t tell you who I hid that notebook for. Was it for Father or was it for Mother? Maybe it was for me. This secret most likely impacted on the rest of my life. I committed everything Mother had written in it — or should I say, every one of Father’s indiscretions — to memory. Even with the hatred she felt as she recorded everything, her handwriting was always neat and pleasing to the eye. The themes and content were unsurprising. She noted Father’s infidelities in great detail: numbers, times and locations. In some places she added angry comments: ‘Shameless! … Obscene! … I could die!’ To my astonishment, I knew the names of some of the women, including the mother of my schoolmate Li Shengli, and Zhao Chuntang’s younger sister, Zhao Chunmei. Even Aunty Sun, who ran the salvage station, was in there. These women had always impressed me as being proper and virtuous. Why were their names in Mother’s notebook?

HARDLY ANYONE today can relate the history of the Sunnyside Fleet with any degree of accuracy.

Let’s start with the tugboat. Owned by a shipping company, it ran on diesel, had twin rudders and plenty of horsepower. Seven or eight workers manned the tug, although they worked only when there were barges that needed to be moved. Each time out counted as a shift, and when that shift was over, they went back to their homes on the banks of the river. Sailors love to drink, and the more the younger ones drank, the meaner they got. They could be having a normal conversation when suddenly fists would fly. I saw one of them jump into the river with the jagged edge of a bottle stuck in his chest and swim to the riverside hospital, cursing the whole way. The older hands were more easy-going and not nearly as volatile when they were drunk. One of them, a man with a full beard, would lie out on the deck and sleep like a log. Another of the older ones — with a face like a monkey — was in the habit of showering on the afterdeck. Stark naked, he would work up a lather and then rinse off with cold water, making eyes at the women and girls on the barges. I didn’t think much of that gang.

For that matter, I didn’t think much of anyone. The Sunnyside Fleet boasted eleven barges, manned by eleven families, most with shady backgrounds. In that respect, we were all pretty much alike. Since Father’s situation was still unsettled, our background was as murky as any of the others. Taking me aboard one of the barges with him could hardly be called exile, nor was it some sort of banishment; rather, it was a reclassification.

The boat people called a spot upriver named Plum Mountain their ancestral home. You can no longer find it on any Golden Sparrow River regional map. During the construction of a reservoir, Plum Mountain township, with its thirteen villages, was flooded, and now the place is marked on maps in blue — Victory Reservoir. Only an idiot would believe that Plum Mountain was really their ancestral home, since their speech was a mish-mash of accents and dialects, with pithy, bizarre ways of saying things. Let’s say we were heading upriver towards Horsebridge. They’d say we were heading ‘down’ to it. They called eating ‘nibbling’, and relieving themselves was ‘snapping it off’. As for sex, which people ashore seldom even mentioned, they were perfectly happy to talk about it any time, any place. The word they used was ‘thump’. If several men were sitting around with conspiratorial looks on their faces, all you heard them talking about was thump, thump, thump. Why ‘thump’? Because what most people consider to be a serious social issue was just an ordinary thumping to them.

I was generally repelled by the way they lived. They were sloppy dressers. In cold weather they overdressed, with reds and greens and yellows and blues all thrown together and layered collars sticking up around their necks. Then when summer gave way to autumn they were underdressed, sometimes to the point of being half-naked. Barefoot and shirtless, the men were so dark that from a distance they looked like Africans. They wore coarse, homemade white shorts, the material for which came mostly from Great Harvest flour sacks. Wide in the crotch, the tops were rolled over at the waist and tied with drawstrings. The women were slightly better, in a bizarre way. Married women wore their hair in a bun, adorned with a magnolia or a gardenia. Above the waist, they sported a variety of attire: some fancied the faddish Peter Pan blouses, others wore men’s white T-shirts, and others still preferred short granny jackets. But below the waist they were more conservative and unified: they wore baggy, knee-length rayon trousers, black or dark blue, sometimes decorated with an embroidered peony on the leg. Owing to frequent childbirth and nursing, and since they were not in the habit of wearing brassieres, their breasts sagged in defeat, large and unwieldy. They swung from side to side when the women walked the decks of the barges, a grumbling badge of honour. I was not impressed. Even when they were exposed, they held no interest for me.

The barge children usually ran around butt naked, both as an economy measure and as a sort of identification mark. There was no fear of their getting lost ashore, for anyone who found them invariably returned them to the piers. Boys, of course, were favoured over girls. They wore little pigtails, bracelets on their wrists, and long-life necklaces around their necks. The girls, on the other hand, went without jewellery, and their mothers cut their hair haphazardly and unevenly, leaving them with little haystacks on their heads. Adolescent girls covered their private parts with belly warmers made of white handkerchiefs sewn together. Older girls wore either their mother’s or their father’s hand-me-downs, which meant they never fitted. Though they were more or less unloved, that had no effect on their sense of family duty. All day long they ran up and down the decks doing chores, hollering at their mischievous little brothers and sisters.

The only truly pretty girl in the fleet, Yingtao, was so intent on playing the role of a mother that she carried her baby brother strapped to her back with red cloth, day in and day out, going from family to family. She once walked up to the stern of barge number six, where she watched me steely-eyed, like a sentry.

‘What are you doing here?’ I said. ‘Go away.’

‘I’m on barge number six,’ she said, ‘not yours, so mind your own business.’

‘I’m not interested in minding anybody’s business,’ I said. ‘I just don’t want you watching me.’

‘If you weren’t looking at me,’ she said, ‘how’d you know I was watching you?’

‘OK, I won’t look at you, and you don’t talk to me.’

‘Who said I want to talk to you?’ she replied. ‘You spoke to me first.’ She was too quick for me, so I just glared at her with the fiercest, most threatening look I could manage. It didn’t faze her. Instead, with an enigmatic smile she said, ‘Don’t act so cocky. I know all about your family. I’ll let you see my brother’s backside. He’s got a birthmark, and it’s a fish too!’ She untied the cloth holding her brother and exposed his tiny rear end to me. ‘See! See that birthmark. It looks just like a fish!’ I could hear the pride in her voice, while the boy, who was now in her arms, began to fidget. ‘Don’t you dare snap it off,’ Yingtao said, raising her voice. ‘I said, don’t you dare! You can go on the potty in a little while.’