The official bellowed his response: ‘Have you forgotten what times these are? Do you see this as some sort of competition? All people and cargo coming ashore must be registered, and registering cargo is faster than registering people. With only us few working, of course we register pork first.’ That cleared things up.
I heard Desheng’s wife say to her husband, ‘We’re working as hard as anyone else. Will we get red flowers too?’
‘Revolution isn’t a dinner party,’ Desheng replied. ‘If it’s a flower you want, go and get yourself a water gourd.’
As the rain eased off, the people inside our cabin began to shout, ‘It’s suffocating in here, give us some air!’ So I raised the hatch, and was hit by a blast of sweat-sour air, mixed with the stench of cigarette smoke, urine and vomit. Then the heads of the workers started popping up, more men than women, most of them young. With bed rolls on their backs, they elbowed one another to get their first look at the legendary workers’ paradise. Mouths open, they breathed deeply and gawked at the construction scenes on the banks. One of the women shrieked, ‘They’re turning the earth upside down! They’ll work us to death!’ She could have chosen a better time to shout — someone shouted back at her: ‘What did you think we brought you here to do, loaf around? If you’re afraid of hard work you shouldn’t have come to Milltown.’ The uproar in the cabin died out quickly. A man who looked like a demobilized soldier travelling with the fleet began recording the passengers with a roll call, but he’d only managed a few people when the PA system blared out the name of the Sunnyside Fleet. He hopped down on to the deck and began issuing orders: ‘Shock Troops Three over here! Shock Troops Four over there! Gao Village Shock Troops and Li Family Crossing Shock Troops to the rear!’
So that’s what they were, shock troops! A barge-load of shock troops was on the move and our spacious forward hold emptied quickly, leaving nothing but two rows of buckets used for toilets, all filled and sending their hot stench straight into my nostrils. Some of them must have been knocked over, since the deck was soiled with puddles of a disgusting liquid. The smell was overpowering.
After changing into rubber boots, I snatched a mop and began cleaning up. But I’d barely begun when I saw that something else had been left behind — a bundle wrapped in an army raincoat had been tossed into a corner. I touched it with my broom; it moved. Then a child’s leg kicked out, scaring the hell out of me. The next thing to wriggle out of the raincoat bundle was the head of a woman with hair going every which way, and I heard her complain crisply, ‘Why’d you hit my leg with that?’
Two people had taken refuge in the army raincoat: a thirty-year-old woman and a little girl, apparently a mother and daughter. Two pairs of eyes, one dazed, the other lively, both gaped at me sleepily.
I struck the deck with my mop. ‘Up!’ I said. ‘Get up! I have to clean the cabin.’
As soon as they stood up, I saw how weary the woman was. She had a pale, unhealthy face. And there was more inside that raincoat, lots more. She opened it up to expose a bulging knapsack and a rolled-up blanket, plus a netted basket with a wash basin and rice tin, all tied together by the hood and sleeves of the raincoat, which she held in her arms. The girl’s arms were just as fulclass="underline" she was hugging a cloth doll and had an olive-green army canteen draped around her neck by its strap. She was also holding a little blackboard on which words had been scrawled in juvenile writing: ‘East Wind No. 8,’ it said. ‘Huixian. Mama.’
‘What are you doing here?’ I demanded. ‘How dare you sleep on while everybody else has left the boat! Who are you?’
‘Who are we? We’re not going to tell you.’ The girl glared at me and put herself between me and her mother to keep her mother from telling me. ‘He’s mean,’ she said. ‘Let’s ignore him.’
‘This is a shock-troop barge,’ I said. ‘How did you sneak aboard?’
‘We didn’t sneak aboard,’ the girl said provocatively. ‘We flew aboard, so you couldn’t see us.’
The woman combed her fingers through her tangled hair and glanced eagerly at the shore. ‘Huixian!’ she scolded. ‘Don’t talk like that! It’s rude.’ Then, turning her eyes away from the shore, she smiled, almost apologetically. But she hadn’t answered my question. She crawled out of the hold, dragging her bundle and the girl with her. Then she turned and said, ‘We’re shock troops too. I just overslept. I didn’t dare fall asleep at night. I was exhausted.’
From Inside an Army Coat
I CAN’T SAY why, but one look at Huixian and her mother raised doubts in my mind about them.
I’d always been suspicious about people like that. If they were shock troops, my name wasn’t Ku Dongliang. I didn’t know why they’d boarded our barge and was pretty sure they’d tricked their way on. We’d received strict orders not to allow unknown persons, as well as the old, the weak, the sick and the infirm, to board the barges for the trip to Milltown, and I hadn’t seen a single child at the Horsebridge pier. I wondered if they’d slipped aboard barge number seven in all the confusion during the two days when the river was clogged with all those ships. If so, why had the former soldier turned a blind eye when they came aboard, and how had the shock troops let her get away with it? Whatever the reason, they’d made it possible for Huixian and her mother to hide inside an army raincoat for two days and two nights.
Since the woman and her daughter definitely hadn’t come to Milltown to work, they’d probably come in search of someone. Announcements of missing persons were broadcast daily, and it usually took only one to locate someone. If the announcement was repeated, the person was truly missing. The announcements for whoever this woman was looking for must have been repeated several times, but the name had made no impression on me. Stuff like that didn’t interest me. With so many people travelling, not finding someone wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. As far as I was concerned, other people’s misfortunes weren’t worth more than a tear or two, compared to what my family had gone through.
I had no idea where these two were from. In Milltown, food was supplied at the work sites, and when ration cards were handed out, personal information was dutifully recorded. So if Huixian and her mother had eaten at a public canteen, their details should have been recorded. But there was so much going on at East Wind No. 8 that no one had checked up on Huixian and her mother. Even if they had, who could say whether the data was reliable or not, since it was even rumoured that a murderer had managed to pass himself off as belonging to the shock troops? That made a mockery of recording personal details in the first place.
I watched Huixian and her mother closely, mainly because they must have had a shady background, but also — I forgot to tell you this — because the woman resembled my mother. I know it sounds strange, but I wondered if she might have been my aunt, a Horsebridge woman I’d never met. For three days the Sunnyside Fleet waited at the piers for orders. I had time on my hands while everyone else was busily running around; everything I needed to do had to wait till I was ashore. Until then, I was on my own. So I stood on the bow, hands on my hips, coolly watching the construction work at the piers.
The heavens opened and the sound of rain rose around us. Rudimentary tents popped up, occupied by labourers from the surrounding areas. Some ran up to our barge to borrow firewood or a bucket or bowl. I said no, but Father invariably overruled me, and I had to lend them whatever they wanted. But the borrowed items never made it back to us, and before long we were down to a single bowl, which Father and I were forced to share at mealtimes. When I complained, he criticized me for being small-minded. ‘A few bowls, what does that amount to?’ he said. ‘Sharing a bowl can be our contribution to the success of East Wind No. 8. You’re young enough to make a real contribution, so why don’t you go ashore instead of standing around looking down at what’s going on, as if it’s got nothing to do with you? That kind of behaviour will get you into trouble.’