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 couldn’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.’