If they had transplanted any of his brain, as well as the eyes and skin and organs, then someone might have remembered the hidden room before this.
As it is, I am lucky that the rich man went to his death angry, never telling anybody what the rising sea would bury.
Bin finally turned toward home, fighting an ebb tide that kept trying to haul him seaward into busy shipping lanes. It was a grueling journey, squatting on the overloaded block of polystyrene while propelling his paddle in an exhausting figure eight pattern… till his trembling fingers fumbled, losing their grip and dropping the makeshift oar! Night swallowed it, but there was no use searching, or cursing his fate. Bin couldn’t rig another paddle. So, with a soft sigh, he slipped back into the greasy Huangpu and commenced dragging the raft behind him with a rope around his waist.
Several times-obsessively-he stopped to check the sacks of salvage, counting them and securing their ties.
It is fortunate that basement also proved a place to deposit my earlier load of garbage-all those pipes and chipped tiles-tucking them away from sight. Or I’d have to haul them, too.
The setting of the moon only made things harder, plunging the estuary into near blackness, except for a sprinkling of stars. And the glitter of Shanghai East, of course, a raucous galaxy of wealth, shimmering and flashing beyond the nearby seawall. And a soft glow of luminescence in the tide itself-a glimmer that proved especially valuable when Bin’s winding journey took him by some neighboring shoresteads, looming out of the night like dark, medieval castles. He kept his splashing minimal, hurrying past slumping walls and spidery tent poles with barely a sound.
This time Mei Ling will be impressed with what I found.
That hope propelled Bin till, at last, his own stead was next, its familiar tilt occulting a lopsided band of stars. In fact, so eager was he to get home that he let his guard down… and almost swam into disaster.
Even a little moonlight would have alerted him to the jellyfish swarm, a cloud of drifting, pulsating umbrella shapes that surged through the bay-just an offshoot of a vast colony that infested the East China Sea, growing bigger every year, annihilating age-old fishing grounds. Driven by the tide, one throbbing mass of filmy bodies and dangling stingers flowed directly in his path.
Frantically backpedaling, Bin barely avoided plowing into the horde. Even so, he soon discovered by the light of his failing torch that he was surrounded by outliers and stragglers. In pushing away from one cluster, he inevitably drifted toward another. Unable to avoid individual jellies altogether, he kicked with flippered feet… and inevitably felt sudden flares of pain, as a stinger-tendril brushed his left ankle.
Left no recourse, he clambered back atop the raft, praying the makeshift lashings would hold. It sank under the weight, leaving his body awash. But the tendrils couldn’t reach him. For now.
Fumbling in the dark with his knife, Xiang Bin hacked at a torn milk jug and contrived a paddle of sorts-more of a scoop-and began a hard slog forward through the morass of poisonous creatures. Waiting for the swarm to disperse was not an option. By then, currents would take him far away. With home in plain sight, a brute force approach seemed best.
These awful things will kill all the fish in the estuary and tangle my nets, he thought. Worst case? His family could go hungry. Maybe for weeks.
Didn’t someone tell me you can eat these things, if you’re careful? Cooked with sesame oil? The Cantonese are said to know all the good kinds.
It sounded yucky. They might have to try it.
The last hundred meters were pure agony. Bin’s lungs and arms felt on fire, and his right hand somehow took another painful jelly sting, before the main opening of the ruined house gaped before him at last. Of course, he took a beating as the raft crashed half sideways, into the atrium. A couple of salvage bags split, spilling glittery treasures across the old parquet floor. No matter. The things were safe now, in easy reach.
In fact, it took all of Bin’s remaining energy to drag just one bag upstairs, then to pick his way carefully across the slanted roof of broken tiles, and finally reach the tent-house where his woman and child waited.
“Stones?” Mei Ling stared at the array of objects that Xiang Bin had dropped before her. A predawn glow was spreading across the east. Still, she had to lift a lantern to peer at his little trove, shading the light and speaking in a low voice, so as not to wake the baby. Low-angled illumination made the scars on one cheek stand out, an injury she had suffered as a child, in the terrible Hunan earthquake.
“You are all excited over a bunch of stones?”
“They were on shelves, all neatly arranged with labels,” he explained. After treating the two stinger wounds, he began carefully applying small amounts of ointment to a sore on his left leg, one of several that had opened again, after long immersion. “Of course the tags were unreadable after all this time. But there used to be glass cabinets-”
“They don’t look like gems. No diamonds or rubies,” she interrupted. “Yes, some of them are pretty. But we find surf-polished pebbles everywhere.”
“You should see the ones that were on special pedestals, in the center of the room. Some of them were held in fancy boxes, made of wood and crystal. I tell you it was a collection of some sort. And it must have been valuable, for the owner to hide them all so-”
“Boxes?” Her interest was piqued, at least a little “Did you bring any of those?”
“A few. I left them on the raft. I was so tired. And hungry.” He sniffed pointedly toward the stewpot where Mei Ling was reheating last night’s meal, the one he had missed. Bin smelled some kind of fish that had been stir-fried with leeks, onions, and that reddish seaweed that she put into most of her dishes.
“Get some of those boxes, please, Xiang Bin,” she insisted. “Your food will be warm by the time you return.”
Bin would have gladly wolfed it down cold. But he sighed in resignation and gathered himself together, somehow finding the will to move quivering muscles. I am still young, but I know how it will feel to be old.
This time, at least, the spreading gray twilight helped him to cross the roof, then slide down the ladder and stairs without tripping. His hands trembled while untying two more bags of salvage, these bulging with sharply angular objects. Dragging them up and re-traversing the roof was a pure exercise in mind-over-agony.
Most of our ancestors had it at least this bad, he reminded himself. Till things got much better in China, for a generation…
… then worse again. For the poor.
Hope was a dangerous thing, of course. One heard of shoresteaders striking it rich with a great haul of salvage, now and then. But, most of the time, reality shattered promise. Perhaps, after all, it is only an amateur geologist’s private rock collection, he thought, struggling the last few meters. One man’s hobby-precious to him personally, but of little market value.
Still, after collapsing on the floor of their tent-home for a second time, he found enough curiosity and strength to lift his head, as Mei Ling’s nimble fingers worked at the tie ropes. Upending one bag, she spilled out a pile of stony objects, along with a couple of the boxes he had mentioned, made of finely carved wood, featuring windows with beveled edges that glittered too beautifully to be made of simple glass.
For the first time, he saw a bit of fire in her eyes. Or interest, at least. One by one, she lifted each piece, turning it in the lamplight… then moved to push aside a curtain, letting in sharply horizontal rays of light, as the sun poked its leading edge above the East China Sea. The baby roused then, rocking from side to side and whimpering while Bin spooned some stew from the reheating pot into a bowl.