As it turned out, that autumn witnessed a hundred-year flood. It was as if someone had ripped open a hole in the sky and let water stored up for a century come cascading down. As the river rose, the surrounding land receded abruptly. Floods began in the mountainous upper reaches and surged downriver, drowning riverside villages on their way. Land transportation came to a halt, leaving only waterways open. With water everywhere and as the Golden Sparrow River overflowed its banks, heroic qualities emerged. I’d never seen so many boats and ships, all headed for Milltown, so numerous they caused a bottleneck on the river. To the distant eye, the masts and sails turned the river into a floating market.
The Sunnyside Fleet was detained on the river for two full days. I found the first day of this watery assembly especially interesting. Standing on the bow of our barge, I gazed at boats in other fleets, most sporting red banners that read ‘HONOURED TRANSPORT FLEET’. But not ours. They not only carried cargo, but also transported PLA soldiers and militiamen. We were limited to transporting farm labourers. I mentioned the disparity to Father. ‘What do you know?’ he said. ‘Ours is a complicated fleet politically. The Party is showing its trust in us by letting us transport farm labourers.’
On the second day, I was surprised to see a travelling propaganda troupe. They had converted the cabin roof on one of the barges into a stage, where colourfully dressed women representing workers, peasants, soldiers, students and merchants performed; as rain fell around them they recited the women’s anthem, ‘Song of Struggle’. I was shocked to see Mother among them; she was the oldest member of the troupe, but was playing the part of a young worker in blue work clothes, with a white towel tied around her neck. The rain had washed away her make-up and obliterated her painted eyebrows to reveal a gaunt, wrinkled face. But she was oblivious, caught up in the drama, putting everything into her role. When others shouted, ‘Fight against the heavens!’ she raised her arm, brandished a fist, and in the loudest voice she could manage shouted, ‘We welcome the fight!’
I’d been denied the chance to see her on shore, and now here she was, out on the river. Sure she was old — old and unattractive, and totally lacking in self-awareness, surrounded as she was by a bunch of girls. I worried that people would laugh at her presumptuousness. This accidental encounter distressed me so much that I headed back into the cabin, where Father was leaning against the porthole, staring at the distant stage.
‘That’s your mother’s voice,’ he said. ‘It’s her voice. I can tell from here. How is she?’
‘What do you mean, how is she?’
He paused a moment. ‘Everything — no, how she acts, how she looks.’
I nearly said, ‘She’s disgusting,’ but I couldn’t. ‘About the same,’ I said. ‘No change.’
‘Did she see you?’
‘Why should anyone want her to see me? And what if she did, anyway?’
‘I haven’t seen her in a long time,’ he said. ‘With all the boats out there, I can hear her, but I can’t see her.’
‘What good would that do? She wouldn’t want to see you, even if you did.’
Lowering his head, he said unhappily, ‘“What good would that do?” Is that all you can say? What good would anything do? That’s how nihilists talk, and it must be challenged.’ He took a straw hat down off the wall. ‘Would people recognize me if I went out in this?’ he asked.
I knew what he was getting at. ‘What difference would it make if they did?’ I said. ‘Lying low in the cabin all day long solves nothing. If you feel like coming out, do it. Nobody out there is going to eat you.’
Father laid down the hat, shaded his eyes with his hand and gazed over at all those boats. With a burst of excitement, he blurted out, ‘How stirring! How incredibly stirring! No, I won’t go out there. I’ll stay here and compose a poem. I’ve already got a title: I’ll call it “A Stirring Autumn”!’
Of course it was a stirring autumn. Hundreds of sailing vessels choked the Golden Sparrow River for two days and nights. Our fleet had never shared the river with so many others, all close together. I’d always thought that the world’s barges somehow belonged to the same family, until, that is, I spotted a strange fleet out in the middle of the river. Six boats, all ‘manned’ by young women, including one at the helm. Bright-red banners fluttering at the bows proclaimed they were the Iron Maiden Fleet, while the sterns were adorned with feminine clothing and underwear, like an array of national flags. No one knew where this unique fleet had come from, including Desheng and his wife, who nearly came to blows over it. She forbade him from gawking at the women on the boats, and punished him with a whack across the back with a bamboo pole when his eyes turned in that direction. That sparked a reaction: ‘If you’re going to use that pole, try pushing those boats out of the way, if you think you can. Well, I’ll tell you, you can’t, so don’t tell me where I can look and where I can’t!’ My ears rang from the arguments on Desheng’s barge, which continued throughout that day and the next. Fortunately, on the third day, the fleet began to move, slowly opening up a passage down the river. A squad of armed militiamen jumped aboard one of the boats, rifles slung over their left shoulders and bullhorns over their right. An embarkation system had been created, and no ships were to nestle up to the piers — we were all to sail east. The Honoured Transport Fleet led the way, an effective manoeuvre, with as many as three hundred barges sailing downstream through rain and mist until, in the midst of a torrential downpour, we reached the piers at Milltown.
I hardly recognized the place, though I’d only been away a few days. It had been turned into a — into a what? By nature given to confusion and disorder, and deficient at expressing my feelings, I’m incapable of describing the town that autumn. So, if you’ll bear with me, I’ll borrow a few lines from my father’s poem: ‘Come on, come on, who’s afraid of a flood? Floodwaters open up our way ahead. In this stirring autumn red flags flutter in the wind, songs of triumph rise into the air, as we move forward, forward, racing towards a workers’ paradise, a revolutionary advance guard.’
An advance guard, to be sure, but our barges, the Sunnyside Fleet, brought up the rear, so when the drums and cymbals welcomed the flotilla, we could only look on from a distance to where Young Pioneers waited in the rain: the boys lined the road, arms raised in a salute, while the girls flocked to the ships like swallows to present each honoured sailor with a red flower. As the pier-side welcoming ceremony began, a mass campaign was under way in every corner of the town; labourers with farm tools over their shoulders were everywhere, their shouts drowned out by the driving rain. While the barge crews waited to go ashore, our ears were pounded by the voice of an anxious young man coming over the loudspeaker: ‘Red Flag Fleet, come ashore, move sharply, come ashore.’ The crews made ready, but then rousing music blared from the PA system, followed by static. Then the anxious young man returned: ‘Comrade so-and-so, report to the construction site command post. An urgent matter awaits!’
Our crews were standing at the bows awaiting a command from the PA system. But our cargo appeared to be the least important of all. The Great Wall Fleet barges, with their cargo of pork, fresh produce and rice, had received their call, and we were still waiting. Sun Ximing ran to the riverbank to complain to a raincoat-clad man. ‘We’re carrying human cargo, so why are we lined up behind barges carrying pork?’