Susan Barker - The Incarnations

You led me to a chamber of leather-bound books and sat at the desk behind the abacus, ink pot and quills and stuffed the bowl of a long-stemmed pipe with tobacco. A servant boy poured us tea and, puffing on your pipe, you told me you were a book-keeper for the British factory.

‘I am a writer too,’ you said, ‘writing a book about the people of China.’

In the leather chair by the desk, I was ready to bolt. I hadn’t seen a Red-haired Devil up close before, and I stared at the red bristling from your head and chin. Were those orange freckles a skin disease? Could I catch them? What a hiding Ma Qin would give me if I went back to the wash boat with orange freckles caught off a gweilo. You cleared your throat.

‘I want to write about the Tanka,’ you said, ‘but, as foreigners aren’t allowed in the floating city, I can’t find out much. Can you tell me about your people, Ah Qin? What are your customs? How do you marry, for instance? How do you bury your dead?’

Back then, I was ten years old. What did I know about ‘customs’? What did I know about marrying, or burying the dead? But you dipped your quill in an ink pot and gazed at me, feather poised over the blank page. So I opened my ten-year-old mouth, and this is what came out.

‘The Tanka come from the sea,’ I said. ‘We were fish people long ago and lived in the ocean. Then we learnt to breathe the air, and walk on legs, and came out of the sea to live on boats. .’

You nodded and wrote this down.

‘Some Tanka are born with fish scales,’ I went on. ‘When a Tanka baby is born more fish than Tanka, it is thrown into the Pearl River and swims away to live in the sea.’

‘ Born with fish scales . .’ you murmured, your feather spilling ink on the page. ‘ Swims to live in the sea . .’

Where had I heard such strange things? Pa Qin had told me before he died, back when I was small and waddled about the boat with a wooden float strapped to my back. Whether Pa Qin’s tales were true or not, I had no idea. But you asked more questions about the Tanka people, and for another hour or so I told you what I could remember of my father’s tales. And you listened, and wrote everything down with a seriousness that made me feel very important in that leather chair.

‘What about Mazu, Goddess of the Sea, and rescuer of ships in distress?’ you asked. ‘Does your boat have a shrine to Mazu? Do you burn joss sticks for her?’

‘I know Mazu,’ I said. ‘She came to our boat when I was little. She came with her two guards, Ears that Hear the Wind and Eyes that See across the Waves. She came in the night and the ship was bright as day. Ma and Pa didn’t wake up.’

‘Did the Sea Goddess speak to you?’ you asked.

I nodded. ‘She said that one day I would go to sea. Then she went away.’

This was no Pa Qin story, but the truth. Ever since I was little, Mazu has been coming to tell me I will go to sea. That the sea is my destiny. You wrote this down, but had no more questions about Mazu. Then the British factory clock chimed five times, and you asked, ‘Do you have any questions for me, Ah Qin?’

There were many things I wondered about the gweilo. Was it true that your land was ruled by a little girl called Victoria? Were you barbarians bunged up from all the roast beef you eat? Could you smell as well as a dog, with that large nose? But I came over very stump-tongued and shy. On your desk was a photo frame. Silver ovals with black and white photographs of two foreign she-devils. Seeing what had caught my gaze you smiled. ‘My wife and daughter.’

The she-devils looked like barbarian men in wigs and dresses, but you looked at them fondly. Then you smiled at me. ‘Ah Qin, can you come back tomorrow and tell me more tales? Hour of the monkey?’

You handed me some coins, and I nodded. Then I ran home from Fanqui Town, my head jangling with the strange happenings of the day.

III

Ma Qin was sat in our sampan, tangled up in the briny, seaweedy nets the fishermen brought her to fix. Her nimble fingers picked through the knotted string, fish-scaly and slimy from the day’s catch, finding and mending holes. First and Second Daughters were hard at work too, scrubbing up to their elbows in the wash tubs. Every morning the Qin family washerwomen rowed up and down the Pearl River, calling up to the crew of junks for clothing to be washed, and by afternoon the bamboo airing racks were spread with cotton for the sun and wind to dry. My ma and sisters hardly ever set foot on the shore. The wash boat was where they did their living, cooking meals on a stove at the back and sleeping under the rattan shelter at night. Ma Qin walked splay-footed on land, she was so used to the wobbliness of the waves.

‘Ma,’ I said, ‘I earned four coppers today.’

She squinted up from her fishing nets. ‘Whose pocket did you pick?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘I didn’t steal it.’ I scowled. ‘A Red-haired Devil called Ah Tom gave it to me. He wanted to know about the Tanka. He says I can go back tomorrow. He’ll pay me again.’

The boat swayed as Ma threw down her nets and stood up. Tanka womenfolk aren’t the bound-footed, painted dolls that Han women are. Tanka women are tough as men, with the strength to row far out to sea and steer a boat through stormy, choppy waters. Ma Qin was a handsome and sturdy woman with braids thick as rope. She was twenty-four, but her knuckles, knobbly from the wash tubs, looked more than a hundred years old.

‘Give me those coins.’

I handed them over, and watched miserably as she threw them overboard, so they splashed and sank to the muddy riverbed. The boat then lurched from side to side as Ma Qin threw me over her knee for a spanking. My sisters giggled in the suds.

‘Idiot!’ she panted. ‘The foreign devils are our enemies! Pa Qin would be alive today if it weren’t for the gweilo and their foreign mud. Now, go over there and don’t speak. Betray your family again, and you are off this boat.’

She cuffed me one last time, then got back to repairing the fishing nets, muttering, ‘Aya! Why has Heaven cursed me with such a fool for a son? What did I do to offend thee, Lord Buddha? Barrenness is what I wish for in my next life. Barrenness and blessed childlessness. .’

IV

I lived with Ma Qin and my sisters in a city of ten thousand boats, swaying at anchor, to and fro. A city that every sweep of tide, or gust of wind, jiggled about. A city so crowded, if you saw it from dry land you’d be tricked into thinking it a forest of rigging and masts.

Those who lived in the walled city of Canton looked down on us low-caste Tanka people, but there was nothing on land that we lacked for on the water. Hawkers of every kind rowed up and down the Pearl River, banging drums and gongs and trading their wares, bone-setters and tooth-pullers, cobblers and ironmongers, and sellers of pigs and geese. There were school boats and theatre boats, opium barges and floating whorehouses. Up and down the Pearl River they rowed.

The law forbade us Tankas from building a home on the land, but that was no hardship in my mind. Being stuck on the same plot of land day after day, now that’s hardship. When we wanted a change of scenery we’d thrust a barge pole into the riverbed and glide our boat to somewhere new. We may have been dirt poor and infested with water lice, but any time we wanted we could weigh anchor and sail away.

V

Pa Qin had lived with us on the wash boat before he died. When I was a baby, he worked as a porter in Canton harbour. Then he saved enough for a duck boat and a hundred ducks and became Duck-breeder Qin. Every morning he rowed the ducks out to a mudflat island in the Pearl River Bay so they could waddle and peck at the grass. Then every evening he herded the ducks up again and rowed them back to the floating city. Duck-breeder Qin spent several years in this way, in the restful, mindless company of quacking ducks, earning a living from selling the eggs. He was fond of the ducks, and liked to stroke their feathery down, but he wasn’t too fond to wring their necks for the cooking pot when his children’s bellies growled.