The Boat to Redemption

by Su Tong

  Everyone knew that Zhao Chuntang was Huixian’s protective umbrella, held carefully over her head as he waited for a signal. A year went by, and though signal flares rose from time to time, no decision was forthcoming. Another year passed, and still the signals were mixed. Then a series of personnel changes at local and county level broke the chain of connection, leaving Huixian like a chess piece without a board. Where to put her now became Zhao’s dilemma. A directive came down to send Huixian to the provincial Young Female Cadre Study Team for training. But a few days later, a new directive indicated that selections for the study team had changed, thus contradicting the earlier directive. Huixian packed and unpacked her bag several times, but wound up staying put. She became a true idler, spending nearly all her time in and around the General Affairs Building porch, gazing out at the piers and nibbling melon seeds. Having nothing else to do, she had learned the skill of opening and eating melon seeds without using her hands. Compressing her lips slightly, she’d bite down, producing a cracking sound, and neatly spit out two halves of the husk, leaving a hillock of them on the ground wherever she was.

  Huixian had plenty of melon seeds, and plenty of free time. The seeds and time were her companions as she waited for her future to appear out of the haze.

  Bureau Chief Liu’s grandson, Little Liu, came to town one day, ostensibly on business, but actually to see Huixian. Tall and lanky, he had fair skin, long hair, and was wearing a checked shirt. He wasn’t very old – in his thirties, by the look of it – but he had all the airs of a fashionable young man from the big city. Huixian was drawn to him immediately. She went up to the fourth-floor meeting room to serve tea, and before she got there she straightened her hair in a small hand mirror and adjusted her clothes, even powdered her face lightly. She brought in two cups of tea, one for Zhao Chuntang, the other for Little Liu, who, instead of taking the cup, just looked at Huixian, starting with her face. She stood there holding the cup and let him look. Obviously someone used to taking liberties, Little Liu let his gaze drift downward, stopping halfway. Huixian put her hand to her chest. ‘What are you looking at?’ She raised the cup, as if she wanted to throw it at him but lacked the courage. As her face reddened, she handed the cup to Zhao and ran out of the room.

  All her preparations were wasted. She ran into the hallway, where women stuck their heads out of their offices to look, which greatly upset her. Straightening her clothes again, she turned and headed back, reaching the door in time to hear Little Liu utter a vile comment. ‘The little cunt,’ he said, ‘belongs on a boat. You don’t put dog meat on a dining table!’ Then he gave Zhao Chuntang his impression of her looks and her temperament. ‘Her face is nice enough, and she’s got a good body. But she’s vulgar and small-minded. What I find most peculiar is how her figure could have changed so much since leaving her red-lantern days behind. Why does she hunch over like that? She walks like an old woman.’

  Angry as this made Huixian, it puzzled her as well. Had she started walking like an old woman after leaving the red lantern? She’d never have thought that Bureau Chief Liu’s grandson would see her that way, so critical, as if he were talking about an animal or a toy. He hadn’t shown her a shred of respect, and she found him shameless, cocky and obscene, in a smug, superior way. She did not like him, not least because he instilled in her a strange sense of self-loathing. Her mind a tangle of emotions, Huixian ran back to her room, holding both hands over her chest.

  Little Liu’s visit was a short one. After seeing him off, Zhao Chuntang went straight to Huixian’s room, where he tossed a notebook with a plastic cover on to her bed. ‘He said you don’t put dog meat on a dining table, then he handed me this to give to you – a gift from Bureau Chief Liu. Little Liu came with an armload of gifts for you, but has taken them all back with him.’ Zhao stood in the doorway staring at her, displeasure in his eyes. ‘Aren’t you the queen!’ he said. ‘What harm can a look do? Well, you’ve done it this time. No more talk of Gramps Liu. Now that you’ve offended his grandson, he’s no longer your “gramps”.’

  Huixian opened the notebook Bureau Chief Liu had sent. There on the first page he’d written, ‘For Comrade Huixian. Wishing you progress in your studies and your work.’ Progress? A meaningless greeting, nothing more. She knew how significant Little Liu’s visit and her behaviour had been, but what she didn’t understand was why he’d said that thing about dog meat. And what about that comment about hunching over? Don’t tell me, she was thinking, that a girl’s supposed to walk with her chest thrown out as far as it’ll go!

  With Little Liu’s departure, her future had become hazier than ever. Huixian sat on her bed, wishing she could cry, but afraid that Leng Qiuyun would laugh at her. Besides, Little Liu wasn’t worth the tears. So she turned her attention to Chief Liu’s notebook, and suddenly she knew how to express her feelings about the paltry gift: she wrote ‘shit’ after the word ‘progress’. That made her feel better, good enough to try throwing her chest out and see how that looked. But all that did was rearrange the wrinkles in her blouse. But she wasn’t through. Now was a good time to examine her own breasts, so she locked the door and opened her blouse to get a good look at herself in the mirror.

  What is it about jutting breasts that makes a girl beautiful and desirable? That had always puzzled her. For small-town girls, well-developed breasts were considered shameful by most people. She’d felt the same way until today, when she saw herself in the mirror and, for the first time, thought she understood. Her breasts, she discovered, were neither especially large nor too small, but when she threw out her chest, a mysterious arc shot out in the mirror. They were so much better looking jutting out than concealed. Still looking in the mirror, she stood up and moved around, examining herself from all angles, in profile and full on, to see which was the best view of her changing figure. But having no mother or sisters to guide her, she could not judge, nothing suggested itself. That left it up to her own reckoning and imagination. Thinking back to her experiences in the public bath house, she tried to recall what the older, good-looking women’s breasts looked like, their size and shape, but failed. Then she remembered something: all those women wore brassieres. Why were her breasts so unappealing? Because she didn’t wear a brassiere. Why didn’t she own one? Because she’d grown up on a Sunnyside Fleet barge, where none of the women did. She had an idea. Opening a drawer in Director Leng’s dresser, she took out three brassieres and tried them on, one after the other. She detected the feminine smell clinging to the material as the cups gently covered her breasts. The image in the mirror, now in a brassiere, was enhanced, but at the same time produced a feeling of unease, of ferment, of coquettishness. The brassiere carried a subtle fragrance.

  Huixian decided to start wearing a brassiere. For other girls in Milltown, buying one was something that had to be kept a secret and was entrusted to mothers. But Huixian was motherless. None of her many surrogate mothers could be bothered with this task, so it was up to Huixian to buy her own. Once her mind was made up, she approached the situation with what could be termed fanaticism, an opportunity to do something for herself. She went to the department store determined to buy whatever style and colour she wanted, without a hint of embarrassment, making her selection with a hostile expression. The clerk was visibly intimidated. ‘This bra is too big,’ she said. ‘You want it to be unattractive, do you?’

  ‘What’s it to you. If it’s unattractive, that’s my business!’

  Huixian began observing the chests of other girls and women, comparing herself to them and eyeing them critically. She was guided by curiosity, not malice. But the looks created a degree of pressure, and comparisons were inevitable. Between her and me, whose breasts are fuller and more attractive?

  Back in their room, she paid particular attention to Leng Qiyun, her eyes glued to her when she got changed. Hurriedly covering her breasts, Leng demanded angrily, ‘What are you looking at?’

  Huixian stifled a laugh. ‘I’m not a man,’ she said, ‘so what’s w
rong with looking?’

  Still angry, but now somewhat embarrassed as well, Leng replied, ‘You’re not a man, but that doesn’t mean you can look at me like that. What are you thinking?’

  Huixian repeated what Zhao Chuntang had said: ‘I’m not thinking anything, but aren’t you the queen? What harm can a look do?’

  Along with Leng’s responsibility came the authority to examine Huixian’s personal belongings. So when Huixian was out of the room, Leng opened Huixian’s chest, to find a number of racy brassieres hidden at the bottom, all exuding a worrisome air of sexuality. To Leng, this was clear evidence of the girl’s degeneration, but it was not something she could go to Zhao Chuntang to lodge a complaint about. Instead, she told the female officials, some of whom openly defended Huixian. ‘So what?’ they said. ‘She can buy all the brassieres she wants. No one can see them under her clothes.’

  ‘What about her motive?’ Leng said with a derisive snort. ‘Have you thought about that? No one can see them now, but sooner or later someone will. You just wait. If you let this go on, one day you might see her in one of those decadent miniskirts. She’s an accident waiting to happen!’

  Little Liu’s visit had forced Huixian to put her disorienting girlhood behind her; she said goodbye with a brassiere, although it was a parting that brought her little joy. The decorations on Milltown’s once gaudy parade trucks had turned black in the farm tools factory warehouse, their treads missing, their wheels scattered on the floor. Teacher Song’s propaganda poster for the Red Lantern team still hung on the wall; the family in the drama now lived on a warehouse wall, three generations of revolutionaries staring down at abandoned objects, and left with nothing but cherished memories of past glory. The picture, locked away in this cold ‘palace’, attracted not the eyes of the masses, but mildew, dust and cobwebs. While Li Yuhe and Granny Li’s faces were covered with a layer of dust, Li Tiemei’s rosy cheeks and bright, staring eyes showed below her defiantly raised red lantern, which fought for space with cobwebs and struggled against the dust.

  Whenever Huixian passed the warehouse, she hoisted herself up on to a windowsill to look through the glass at the poster, focusing on the fate of the poster’s Li Tiemei as if to somehow determine her own future. She cried on her windowsill perch one day, after seeing her disfigured face on the poster, half of it obscured by soot-like dust, while her lantern was losing its battle against a small spider that had circled its gleam with a web. The more she cried, the sadder she grew, and soon she attracted the attention of the factory workers. ‘Little Tiemei,’ the surprised workers asked, ‘what are you doing up there?’ How could they understand? She hurriedly dried her eyes, hopped down from the windowsill and ran off. Her heart ached, thanks to the factory, though she in fact already knew that it had all ended, whether or not she ever looked at what was stored inside. Li Tiemei would never again put on her make-up. Her glory had come out of the blue and then evaporated. It was over, all of it.

  She was not Li Tiemei. She was Jiang Huixian, that’s all.

  What to do about her waist-length braid caused her much anxiety. First she untied it and weaved it into a pair of braids, but after a while she didn’t like the way that made her look like a country girl. So she decided to coil her hair again, but instead of wearing it the old-fashioned way, at the back, she piled it up on top. That made her taller, and somehow fashionable, and brought her plenty of scrutiny. Her new hair-style caused a stir around town. Leng Qiuyun said it looked like a pile of horse dung, but no one could deny that after shedding her Li Tiemei appearance, Huixian continued to be someone to watch. Her sudden glow and new image, while gaudy and slightly frivolous, was uniquely hers. With her new stacked hairdo, she came and went at the General Affairs Building, the freshness of youth in full view; like a peacock fanning its feathers with blatant self-assurance, she elicited sighs of admiration from some, reproaches from others, and from one segment of the population, worry and unease.

  Zhao Chuntang was particularly worried. A self-possessed man, his face never betrayed his emotions, but a good many occupants of the General Affairs Building could see that he disapproved of Huixian’s new hair-style. He had grown used to tugging on her braid. It had become a means of exercising leadership, whether in the building’s conference room or in the dining hall when he entertained guests. He made his instructions known by how he tugged the braid – to the side, downward, from the middle, or at the tip. But now that Huixian’s braid was stacked atop her head, when he reached behind her out of habit, what he held was not her braid but her lower back, an unintentionally inelegant and easily misconstrued action. Officials in the building frequently noticed a frown on Zhao’s face. ‘Take it down,’ he’d say to Huixian, pointing at her hair. ‘It looks like a pile of horse dung. You don’t really think it’s attractive, do you? It’s brazen and it’s ugly!’

  Not daring to defy Zhao in public, Huixian would unclip the braid and let it hang down her back. As soon as he wasn’t around, she’d coil it back up on top again and complain to anyone who would listen, ‘What does he know about beauty? Besides, my braid isn’t public property. I don’t need him to tell me what to do with it. That’s my business.’

  It was apparent that Zhao Chuntang was beginning to fold his protective umbrella. International and domestic conditions are in constant flux, and plans for Huixian’s cultivation were no different. Her case had become an intricate mystery, now that Zhao’s hand was growing tired of holding his umbrella. A desk that had been set up in the General Affairs Building intended for Huixian’s studies, complete with books and notebooks, was now covered with a layer of dust. The books had disappeared, and Huixian’s drawer was filled with junk: a hand mirror, face cream, a hair band, socks and toilet paper, not to mention her collection of sweet wrappers. That desk represented Huixian’s status in the building, and moving it out would signal the loss of her patron’s backing. She was in the midst of a transition that would be reflected by the descent of her desk. Transitions for some people have an upward trajectory; hers would go in the opposite direction, from the fourth floor to the ground floor. Her desk had occupied space on the fourth floor for a long time, just outside Zhao’s office door. Also on the fourth floor were an office for confidential matters, another for archives, and a small conference room. That in itself demonstrated a determination to invest heavily in Huixian’s development. When he was talking to her from his office one day, Zhao noticed that she’d stopped responding. He stepped out into the corridor. No Huixian. When he asked his typist where she had gone, she took a quick look around before saying, ‘Oh, I heard her cracking melon seeds just a moment ago, so now where’s she gone? Probably downstairs to get more.’

  Zhao went over and opened Huixian’s desk drawer, which was overflowing with seed husks, some of which fell on to his shoes. Smoke seemed to shoot from his eyes and ears. With an angry stamp of his foot, he yanked the drawer out and flung its contents to the floor. ‘The sight of this desk infuriates me!’ he barked at the typist. ‘Have someone from Logistics come up here and take it downstairs. Get it out of here!’

  First stop, the third-floor offices of the Women’s Federation. But Director Leng would not let them move it in. ‘Aren’t I supposed to be mentoring her? Well, then, wait till she’s Director of the Women’s Federation, and she can have her desk in here.’

  So the movers were standing out in the hall, not knowing what to do with the desk, when Huixian walked upstairs with a fresh bag of melon seeds, to find her way blocked by the desk. She cast an icy glare at the two removal men. Making room for them, she said, ‘What are you standing around for? Go ahead, move it downstairs. I have no quarrel with you two.’ Neither wanting to argue with the removal men nor daring to go upstairs to face Zhao Chuntang, she found an outlet for her anger when Leng Qiuyun stuck her head out of the door to see what was going on. ‘What are you peeking at?’ she said. ‘Chairman Mao tells us to be open and above board and not to plot and scheme!’ Leng pretended she hadn’t heard th
e comment, calculating the damage that would be done to her reputation by arguing with a young girl, and slammed the door shut. With a look of contempt, Huixian turned to the removal men. ‘She must think that federation of hers is something special, but she doesn’t do anything important. Disgusting! Who wants to be in that office anyway? I have to share a room in the dorm with her, but if I had to be in the same office too, she’d drive me mad. I wouldn’t work in there if she begged me to. Go ahead, move it downstairs, some place where there’s always something going on, like your rooms on the second floor.’

  So Huixian’s desk wound up in the Logistics department, the messiest, least dignified spot in the building. People were always coming and going in an office where things were strewn all over the place. The so-called officials ran errands day in and day out, which is why there was a carefree attitude throughout the section. Most of the time was spent playing chess or cards or having long conversations about everything under the sun.

  Now that her desk had been relocated, Huixian finally began to use it. It was hard to tell if she’d come to her senses or not, but there was no question that she found that the Logistics department was the place for her. In no time, she began acting as if she was in charge. She fell in love with the game of cards, though she never got good at it. The players tried to help her, telling her to stand behind them and watch and learn, but that wasn’t for her. Taking a seat and grabbing the deck, she was relentless, forcing them to coach her in the rules of the game. They had not taken her self-absorption into consideration, and she rebuffed all their good intentions, showing neither gratitude nor the slightest bit of humility. If she played the wrong card, she became hostile, blaming everyone but herself. At first they let her have her way, but over time their patience began to wear thin. No longer Little Tiemei, she had been demoted from the fourth floor to the second, so what reason did anyone have to spoil or protect her? Now, when she came up to the table, they nudged her away. ‘Get out of here,’ they said with a wave of the hand. ‘Go away. You don’t know the first thing about cards. Anyone who plays with you is in for a bad time. You’re working in the Logistics department now, so go and get us some tea!’