by Su Tong
Seeing that the child was about to let go, I turned my head so I didn’t have to keep looking at his rear end. Angered by the encounter, I headed towards our stern and muttered, ‘Thump! Thump your goddamned fish! Thump! Thump your goddamned birthmark!’ Just like all the sailors.
My days on the river were unrelievedly lonely, and that loneliness comprised the last thread of my self-respect. There were lots of boys in the fleet, but they were either too old and stupid or too small and disgusting, so I had no friends. How could anyone expect me to make friends with the likes of them? But they were curious about me and as friendly as could be, often dropping by barge number seven to see me, sometimes bringing gifts of mouldy peas or a toy train to tempt me into being their friend. Who did they think I was? I sent them scurrying.
I’m sort of embarrassed to describe my early days aboard the barge. Father wanted me to study, so he started teaching me things I needed to know. He’d let me sit on his favourite sofa as I read from a pile of books that included the notebook that had belonged to my mother; that one I studied on the sly. In recording Father’s lifestyle, Mother seemed to have been in a forgiving mood, since the harshest words she used were ‘did it’. I counted – she used that phrase more than sixty times – Who he ‘did it’ with, when he ‘did it’ with her, as well as where and how many times, plus who initiated it. Had they been caught in the act? As for other details, she settled for thick, heavy exclamation marks and the unhappy comment ‘I could just die, my lungs are about to explode!’
I had nothing to die about as I read what she had written, trying to figure out exactly what had gone on. I wound up wallowing in a space between reason and imagination, and was frightened by the outcome. That outcome was a chemical reaction that made a prisoner of my body – I experienced one erection after another from her words. My crotch was on fire. A shameful flame burned out of control in our cabin, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I closed the notebook, only to have Li Tiemei rekindle the fire from the notebook’s cover. I can’t tell you why, but while there was a look of revolutionary fervour in her eyes, the image of her thin, red lips, her long, straight nose and her soft, titillating ears came across to me as flirtatious. Unable to suppress this imaginary flirtatiousness, I hid the notebook in a chest, an action that settled the upheaval in my groin. But my ears remained unsettled. I thought I sensed a red image on the shore: it was my mother, running along the bank, chasing our barge and shouting angrily, ‘Give me back my notebook! Give it back! Dongliang, you’re shameful and disgusting! If the top beam is crooked, the bottom one can’t be straight. I could just die, Dongliang. Thanks to you, my lungs are about to explode!’
Father was the top beam, I was the bottom one. I couldn’t deny that the top beam controlled the bottom one, but at the same time, I was convinced that being the bottom beam is better than being the top one. It’s easy for the bottom beam to supervise the top beam. I observed Father’s lifestyle with a detached eye, centring observations on his relations with women. But even after prolonged observation, I could draw no clear conclusions. I knew that he was a crooked upper beam, but didn’t know how it was crooked, and in whose direction it bent.
The Sunnyside Fleet was the grudging home of his last few remaining adoring supporters. Even after he was banished to the river, they kept calling him Secretary Ku, and the women in the fleet felt that they bore a responsibility to come to our aid. Qiao Limin, they said, was heartless. With a wave of her hand, she had banished father and son to a river barge. How would they survive with no women aboard? So they brought their feminine sensibilities and a warmhearted nature to barge number seven, often bringing us bowls of noodles or a pot of tea. Desheng’s wife was the kindest of all. On laundry day she’d walk up to the bow of barge number five, carrying her wooden tub like a rice-sprout dancer, and call to my father, ‘Come out here, Secretary Ku. Anything you need to wash? Just toss it in my tub.’
I’d stay in the cabin to watch his reaction. Even if he went out empty-handed, courtesy – which was important to him – demanded that he engage Desheng’s wife in casual conversation. I scrutinized her carefully from inside the cabin, starting with her bare feet, with their ruddy backs and red toenails – obviously painted with balsam oil. All the boat women painted their toes in the hope that people would look at their feet. My father did not disappoint. He’d comment, ‘Desheng’s wife, I detect a look of revolutionary romanticism about you.’
She’d just giggle, missing his point altogether. ‘I spend all my time on this barge,’ she’d say, ‘so stop that nonsense about revolutionary romanticism.’ I knew this praise from him was filled with danger. I was pretty sure he had his eye on Desheng’s wife, and on Sun Ximing’s as well. My guess was, he had his eye on lots of women. With my face up against the porthole, I watched with my heart in my mouth, because the minute he got close to a woman, as soon as the two of them began talking, I’d start to worry and the word ‘thump’ would pop into my head. Based on my experience, I’d send a silent warning: Careful, be careful, don’t get any ideas, keep that thing down. Nervously, I’d glance at his trousers, not daring to breathe. Joyfully, whether he was with Desheng’s wife or Sun Ximing’s, the crotch of Father’s trousers remained as flat as a placid river. He avoided making a fool of himself, and I guessed that his years as an official had taught him that there were two ways of dealing with people – one to their face and another behind their back.
I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t control myself. Once, when he was off to one side chatting with Desheng’s wife, I stuck my head through the porthole to get a good look at them both. Spotting me, Father picked up a bamboo pole and smacked me on the head. ‘What are you looking at, you little sneak? If I tell you to study, you put your head down on your book and sleep. But now your eyes are as big as cowbells!’
I pulled my head back inside, stuck for an excuse. No excuse was possible. An unhealthy adolescence is sewn together by countless unhealthy details. I knew I annoyed people. I was empty-headed, yet weighed down with cares. Someone might assume that nothing bothered me, but I was a sneak. I really was. Father’s so-called lifestyle caused no problems on the river, but mine certainly did. I was burdened with a gaunt exterior and dark moods. That was all Father had to see to know that I had begun masturbating. During the daytime he frequently launched surprise inspections of my hands, even sniffing my palms; at night, when I was in bed, to make sure my hands and crotch were apart, he’d wake me up if necessary to keep my hands on top of the covers.
It didn’t seem fair that while I never bothered him about his lifestyle, he couldn’t stop bothering me about mine. Now that he had lost his leadership position in Milltown, the task of reforming me became his number-one priority. Like a schoolteacher, he transformed our barge into a mobile classroom, starting by cutting out four pieces of red paper and writing a commandment on each of them: UNITY, ANXIETY, SOBRIETY, ENERGY. Then he stuck them up on the cabin walls.
I had no argument with two of his commandments. Anxious? Thanks to all those surprise inspections, I was certainly that. Sober? Day in and day out, nothing good ever happened, and I felt as if the whole world owed me something. But where unity and energy were concerned, all I can say is, I found the former boring, while the latter, though not without its appeal, required certain preconditions. Activities like playing ball or practising with slingshots were things you did on land. I was on the water – how energetic could I be?
So Father handed me a chess set. ‘You spend all your time inside, anxious some of the time and energetic at other times, whatever’s called for. But you haven’t played chess in a long time, so take these outside and find someone to play with.’
‘Who? Who knows how to play chess? Tell me that?’ I pushed his hand away. ‘Barge people are stupider than pigs. All they know how to do is thump!’
‘What do you mean, thump? What’s that?’
He didn’t know what thump meant. ‘Thump their pig brains,’ I said, ‘that’s what. They could
n’t learn how to play chess if their lives depended on it.’
‘I don’t want to hear talk like that about labouring folks,’ Father said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with not knowing how to play chess. They know how to work, and that’s enough. They may not know how to play, but I do, so let’s have a game.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’d rather play against a chess manual.’
He went inside to get the chess manual for me. But the sight of all those carriages, steeds, and cannons bored me, so I laid the manual down on the table, picked up our enamel spittoon, undid my trousers and aimed a stream of urine at a peony at the bottom.
‘How many times have I told you to go outside and pee over the stern?’ Father said. ‘Why do you insist on using the spittoon? Boatmen pee over the side. Who hides in a cabin to do his business? You’re not a spoiled bourgeois young mistress, are you?’
‘Who says a boy can’t pee in his cabin?’ I argued. ‘I don’t want people to watch me peeing over the side.’
‘Who’d want to watch you? You’re not a little girl. Nobody’s interested in watching you take a leak. This is more proof of your unhealthy attitude. There you go, looking cross-eyed at me again, and for no reason.’ With that, he turned his criticism to my eyes. ‘I keep telling you to stop that. No matter what you do, having the right attitude is the most important thing. I don’t want you looking at people cross-eyed any more, especially when you’re talking to them. Only social misfits do things like that.’
To be honest, I didn’t know if I was in the habit of looking cross-eyed at people, and I didn’t have a mirror to see if he was telling the truth. But I hated the way he used that excuse to pick on me, so I mumbled, ‘So what if I’m looking cross-eyed? That dick of yours is cock-eyed, go and pick on that.’
It was a good thing he didn’t hear that last comment. If he had, he’d have known exactly what lay behind it.
I was, as I’ve said, fifteen. Like a waterlogged branch, I was carried from swell to swell on the river. The wind and water had me under their control, as did Father on a daily basis, but I had no control over myself or my secret. One morning I was startled awake – smacked awake, more like. Still half asleep, I unconsciously covered my crotch with my hands. Sure enough, I saw a little mountain peak down there, thanks to an erotic dream about Li Tiemei from the revolutionary opera. But this time I wasn’t going to be punished for having a hard-on, because my father was standing by my bed and he’d discovered my secret. He hit me – in the face – with Mother’s notebook. In the process he knocked Li Tiemei and the red lantern off the notebook and on to the floor.
His hair was uncombed and there was sleep in his eyes. His face looked weird – pale white on one side and pig’s-liver red on the other, painted anger. ‘Where did you get this?’ he roared. ‘Get up. Get on your feet and tell me why you did this!’
Still not fully awake, I stood up and covered my face. ‘I didn’t write that,’ I said, putting up the only defence that came to me. ‘Mama did. I had nothing to do with it.’
‘I know she wrote it! You stole it. What I want to know is why you didn’t give it to me. Why did you hide it? This is damning evidence against me. What were you planning to do with it?’
Maybe I had a plan and maybe I didn’t. But I didn’t know why I had hidden it, and since I didn’t know, I should have kept silent. But I was not capable of that. So I said something to prove my innocence. ‘I hid it for fun,’ I said. ‘It was just for fun.’
‘For fun?’ he screamed. ‘What kind of fun?’ That really set him off. The questions began to pile up. ‘You say it was for fun. This is evidence your mother gathered to punish me. How was that supposed to be fun?’
How was it supposed to be fun? What could I to say to that? Nothing. There were flames of anger in his eyes that I’d never seen before, and I knew I was in big trouble. So I scooped up my trousers and burst out of the cabin. He was right on my heels. ‘Go on!’ he shouted, ‘get away from me. Get the hell out of my sight! Go ashore, go and find your mother.’
The fleet was moving downriver that morning. As I stood on the bow of our barge, there was no place I could run to. My eyes roamed over the other barges, now safe havens. But I didn’t want to be there. As day was breaking, the barges began to stir, and people emerged to discover that Father had kicked me out of the cabin and up to the bow of barge number seven, where I was holding on to the cable housing for dear life. Desheng was the first to react. ‘Secretary Ku,’ he shouted, ‘what’s the matter with Dongliang? I don’t know what’s made you so angry, but you have to stop now. If you keep this up, he’ll be in the water.’
Pretending he hadn’t heard, Father pointed a coal shovel at me, like a weapon. ‘I told you to leave, you shameless brat! I want you off this barge. Go and find your mother.’
I looked down at the water and, in all truth, I was scared. But I wasn’t about to let him know that, so I said, ‘I’ll leave as soon as you tell the tugboat to stop and let me off.’
‘Just who do you think you are?’ he replied. ‘Do you really think the tug will stop just because a little bastard like you wants it to? Dream on! You won’t drown, so get in and swim ashore.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘the water’s too cold. I’ll wait till there’s a sandbar. Do you think this old rust bucket is all I’ve got? Well, I’m telling you, once I’m off it I’m not coming back. You can live on without me.’
But my threat did not work. ‘All right,’ he said as he glanced at the riverbank, the coal shovel still in his hand, ‘there’s the duck farm sandbar. You can get off now.’ Then he slipped the shovel under my feet and picked me up. By then, Six-Fingers Wang’s daughters had come out on to the deck of barge number six and were giggling stupidly over the scene in front of them. I was mortified. He could have flung me off the barge.
I wasn’t a chunk of coal, but that’s what he treated me like. With a full-throated roar, he bent at the waist, squatted down, and shovelled me on to the sandbar near the duck farm.
Words
THAT WAS the first time Father ran me off the barge. I went ashore at the duck farm, where there was no one around, just two rows of ducks waddling from side to side on a sandbar – a welcoming committee heralding my return to terra firma. I started walking towards Milltown, with the sensation that the ground beneath me was undulating like river swells, although the waters of the Golden Sparrow River were as still as a glistening roadway. At first glance, the boats’ masts looked like houses. As I neared the transformer substation several ducks met me head-on, followed by the idiot Bianjin, who was carrying a duck whistle and prancing proudly down the road. When he saw me he called out excitedly, ‘You’re Ku Wenxuan’s son, aren’t you? Want to know something? Go and tell your father that the investigative team is coming soon, and they’ll announce that I am Deng Shaoxiang’s son, her real son!’
At least I knew how to deal with an idiot. ‘Idiot,’ I said, ‘you’re the typical toad that wants to feast on a swan. What makes you think you’re worthy of being a martyr’s son? I’ll tell you something. The investigative team is coming soon, and they’ll announce that your father is a pig and your mother a duck, which means you were thumped into existence by a pig and a duck!’
He took after me with his duck whistle. He knew what ‘thumped’ meant, and cursed me angrily. ‘You’ve got a filthy mouth for someone so young. Thumped? Do you know how to thump? Well, I’ll show you. I’ll thump the shit out of you!’
We raced down the road, and I quickly left him in my dust. But even after I was well out of reach I kept running, something I hadn’t done in a long time. I ran like the wind. If I hadn’t been living on a barge, running would never have become one of life’s little pleasures. I ran until I was standing in front of Milltown’s red schoolhouse. No more wind – I was exhausted. I stood in the road, trying to catch my breath, and took a long look at the schoolhouse and playground. All of a sudden, I was struck by crippling sadness – I felt it in my belly and in my heart.
Thump. Go ahead and thump. That got me so excited I wrote the slogan on the wall with a piece of chalk I found on the ground. Below that I wanted to write my translation into the local dialect, but I couldn’t remember how to write one of the critical characters. So I wrote ‘Go out and thump’ instead. One missing character affected the whole thing. Then, in sudden inspiration, I erased the word ‘NEVER’, so that the slogan now read, ‘FORGET CLASS STRUGGLE.’ Just then a boy’s head poked out through the window. I didn’t know him, but he knew me. His eyes grew wide. ‘Ku Dongliang. What are you doing there?’