‘I’m grumbling at somebody else,’ I said, ‘not you.’
‘If you’re angry at somebody else,’ she said, relieved, ‘don’t take it out on me. Those potatoes may have turned dark, but they’re still good.’
‘You can’t fool me,’ I said impatiently. ‘How can black potatoes be any good? Don’t you have fresh ones?’
‘All gone,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with potatoes as long as they haven’t started to sprout. Besides, you boat people aren’t the picky type.’
That was the wrong thing to say. ‘Thump your mama,’ I cursed. ‘We boat people are human too. What makes you think you can force us to eat rotten potatoes? You shore people are as rotten as your potatoes. I was grumbling at somebody else, but now I’m grumbling at you.’
In truth, she had every reason to discriminate against us boat people, since we didn’t enjoy the luxury of fresh meat and vegetables. For the most part, we bought large quantities of potatoes, cabbage, salted pig’s head — things like that, since they keep well. With this in mind, the security group staked out certain vendors, getting the men to line up to buy rice, and the women fresh produce. ‘Go on, buy it and move on,’ they urged. ‘Don’t be picky. Get what you came for and then form up again.’ But the crowd had no sooner entered the market than they dispersed like ducks on the river, way beyond anyone’s control. Short-handed to begin with, the security group was helpless to gather them together again.
The women were complaining about the supervision as they quickly made their purchases, looking daggers at the vendors and at what they were selling — rotten goods to go with rotten attitudes. The first argument broke out between Sun Ximing’s wife and a corn seller, and it grew in intensity until the two women were sparring with cobs of corn, using some as clubs and others as flying missiles. The security group rushed over to break up the fight, losing sight of the fact that, as Mao had said, a single spark can ignite a prairie fire. Before the waves of discontent had died down at the corn stall, Six-Fingers’s mother was embroiled in a tug-of-war with one of the local women over a pig’s head. The combatants began to wrestle, leaving the pig’s head in peace for the moment, but when the vendor was knocked to the ground, she screamed blue murder.
I was the first to run, but was followed outside by the other men. As always, people were coming and going on the same street, with the same rows of buildings and the same townspeople in the same blue, grey, or black tunics; but on this particular morning, Milltown seemed to hold new significance for the boat people. All that hounding by the security group made us want to recapture the joy of walking freely in town. Weren’t those free times going to return? The men looked lost and slightly fearful. ‘Run!’ I shouted. ‘Go and do whatever you want! Run!’ Which is exactly what I did. I saw that Desheng was running, too, as were Six-Fingers and Sun Ximing. To outsiders it must have looked like a jailbreak. We made it to the Ironsmith Avenue intersection, where we peeled off in different directions. Out of the corner of my eye I watched Desheng head towards the public bath, his favourite spot in town. Six-Fingers was heading towards the cultural palace, but as far as I knew, air hockey and not culture was what he had in mind. Sun Ximing ran with me for a while, until we reached Broom Alley, where he vanished. I knew where he was going: to see a widow who lived there. That was his business, not mine, so the less said the better.
And me? I wasn’t sure how I wanted to spend this precious time. With so many important things to do, I couldn’t make up my mind where to start. So I just kept running, heading for the vegetable-oil processing plant. My feet had made up my mind for me — I missed my mother. No matter how badly I had disappointed Qiao Limin, I still missed her. Why? I couldn’t say. My feet were doing the talking, so you’ll have to ask them.
I ran and I ran, my bag slung over my shoulder. At the plant I wandered through the various sections amid the roar of milling machines, enveloped in air filled with rice dust, its fragrance mixed with the smell of kerosene. Women in white uniforms were busy on the floor, but they were either too tall or too short, too heavy or too slight to be my mother. One of them spotted me and asked who I was looking for. ‘You’ll have to shout,’ she said. ‘It’s too noisy in here.’
But I refused to shout. I’m looking for Qiao Limin, I wanted to say. My mother. But I couldn’t get the words out.
I left the milling section and walked to the women’s dormitory, where I stood beneath the window. I could see Mother’s bed and desk. The bed was empty, the exposed slats covered with discarded newspapers. My heart sank. ‘She’s gone,’ I concluded, just as Father had predicted. He’d said she had aspirations and would leave this godforsaken place. ‘What was she chasing?’ I wondered. The words popped out of my mouth: ‘kongpi.’ With a sense of anger, I examined her desk, on which rested an ageing enamel mug; the little bit of tea inside was mouldy, but the mug attested to her glory: ‘AWARD OF EXCELLENCE FOR AMATEUR FEMALE CHORUS.’ ‘It’s mouldy,’ I said to myself, ‘what kind of excellence is that?’ With my face pressed against the glass, I noticed that one of the desk drawers was half open, and that a faint light glinted off something inside. I pushed the window open and slipped into the room. When I yanked the drawer open, I was greeted by a cockroach, which scared the hell out of me. A framed photograph lay in the drawer; it was a family photo — Father, Mother and me. Our faces had been touched up with colour, giving us a healthy, ruddy glow, sort of cosmetically enhanced. I couldn’t recall when it had been taken, though my parents were both much younger and I was a tiny innocent. We were huddled closely together.
So, Mother had left a family portrait behind in her drawer. What did that mean? I wavered, trying to decide if I should take it with me. My right hand, I recall, was in favour, my left opposed, preferring to smash it. So I took it out with my right hand and placed it in my left, then flung it to the floor and stamped on it. The glass shattered, some of the shards flying up and hitting me. I looked down at the broken glass and said, ‘Kongpi.’
I actually did much more than that. As I walked through the gate, my ears were assailed by loudspeakers blaring the melody ‘Commune Members Are All Sunflowers’. Mother had once performed this by dressing up as a peasant woman, a scarf over her head, an apron around her waist; she was holding a sunflower and dancing in the yard, hiding her face behind the sunflower. ‘Commune members — are all —’ her face emerged from behind the sunflower and she smiled at me, ‘sunflowers — ah!’ With these thoughts running through my mind, my eyes began to fill with tears. The tears running disobediently down my cheeks reminded me that I could not forgive my mother, that what she deserved from me were curses; and that’s what she was going to get, whether she actually heard them or not. I turned and ran back to her workplace, where I bent over, took a deep breath, and shouted at the women working there, ‘Commune members aren’t sunflowers, and Qiao Limin is a filthy cunt!’
East Wind No. 8
IN MY mind’s eye I can still see the grand ceremony that marked the beginning of the project known as East Wind No. 8. An army of labourers was mobilized in Milltown, where the town’s enormous sleeping abdomen was split open and cleaned out. Under the leadership of a provisional supervisory authority, the town was given a gullet filled with asphalt, cement intestines, a metallic stomach, and an automated beating heart. Not until later did I learn that the rumoured predictions swirling around the General Affairs Building were right on target: East Wind No. 8 was not an air-raid shelter, but the first petroleum pipeline in the Golden Sparrow River region, a secret wartime project.