He was, unfortunately, right. Huixian ran to the stern of number six, but that was as far as she got. For the first time in ages, my father, who had heard the commotion, was standing on our bow, bent at the waist and smiling at her. But it was a strange, forced smile that frightened her so badly she didn’t know what to do.
‘Little comrade,’ he said, ‘do as they say. You don’t want to come to our boat. We’ve got a tiger aboard.’
‘Liar,’ she said. ‘Tigers don’t live on boats.’
‘Maybe not other boats,’ he said, ‘but they do on ours. This one comes out at night to eat up little girls.’
In a gesture that was both comical and ugly, Father pretended to be a tiger, reaching out his hands like claws, and roared. Huixian shrieked in fright and jumped back. But then she held her ground and looked hatefully into Father’s face. ‘An old man like you shouldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘You’re disgusting.’ Pointing contemptuously at him, she said, ‘I know you’re lying. You just don’t like me. Well, I don’t care. Lots of other people do. What’s so good about your boat anyway?’ With that she spun around, and ran back to where I was standing. ‘You’re disgusting, too. Who said you could take me with you? Who cares about your rotten old boat?’
I tried to block her way, but she slipped between my legs and ran back, straight into the arms of Sun Ximing’s wife.
Sighs of relief all around. I looked at my father, who was scowling at me. The anger in his eyes made me shiver, so I turned, just in time to see Huixian move from the arms of Sun’s wife into those of Desheng’s wife. They were protecting her like a galaxy of stars around the moon as they headed back to number one. I couldn’t tell if Huixian was crying or not, but they were fussing over her to make her feel better, all talking at once. There was a tiger on boat number seven. There really was. A tiger, an old tiger.
Father and I stared at each other across the water, boat to boat, exchanging angry glares. Tiger, tiger, there’s a tiger on our boat. You’re the tiger. The vague outline of a large, striped cat took form behind him. The sudden illusion took my breath away! With my head down, I boarded our boat, where I was greeted by a repeat of Six-Fingers Wang’s comment. ‘What’s in that head of yours? How old are you, and how old is she? Don’t you think it’s a bit early to be bringing her on to our boat?’
I’d never been so disgusted with my father, and that disgust found its way into a careless outburst: ‘Why’d you come outside anyway? With only half a dick, why didn’t you stay in the cabin where you belong? You shame me by showing your face!’
I turned and walked towards the cabin, with my arms over my head in anticipation of a bamboo staff raining down on me. But I made it all the way to the cabin without Father doing a thing. So I cautiously turned to look behind me, where he was sitting on a coiled hawser on the bow, trembling. They had taken Huixian away by then, and the clamour had left with them. Now all I could see was my father, sitting there trembling as if he’d been struck by lightning.
I’d used the most vicious words I knew to humiliate him, which worried and shamed me. How would he punish me when he was feeling better? I had a guilty conscience, but so did he, and his was worse than mine. I went astern to take a leak off the fantail. Then I opened the slip of paper I’d drawn and looked down at Huixian’s juvenile drawing. After folding it into the shape of an arrow, I blew on it and sent it flying, watching as it struggled to stay aloft above the river before it fell silently into the water, where it was swamped by a wave. The only way I knew to express the sense of grief and anger I felt at that moment was to roar at the river, ‘Kongpi! Kongpi!’
Mother
HUIXIAN WAS hung out aboard Sun Ximing’s boat during her early days with the fleet. Sun and his wife, her new parents, did not scrimp on food or clothing for her. She dressed better than Dafu and Erfu, and ate better food. With the eyes of people from all eleven barges on them, would they dare do less? No, they treated her like royalty. Both their burden and their glory, she was unimaginably spoiled; her moist eyes shone like diamonds some of the time and were hidden behind a curtain of dark clouds at other times. But a modest degree of happiness could not overcome a troubled heart. Everyone knew why she spent so much time with her eyes fixed on the shore. She was waiting for her mother to show up.
There was always the chance that the woman would appear on the river or in Milltown or Phoenix or Horsebridge. Unfamiliar women did, from time to time, board barges in the fleet to sell used clothing or pumpkins or leeks; there was even a young country woman who came aboard Desheng’s barge with a basket of corn over her back, who, perhaps inspired by the gun-running legend of the martyr Deng Shaoxiang, hid a baby girl in the bottom of her basket. After selling the corn, she shook the basket and the baby’s head popped into view. ‘I hear you people want a little girl, but can’t find one. Well, I don’t want this one,’ she said to Desheng. ‘You can have her for thirty yuan.’
In shocked disbelief, Desheng drove her off his boat. His wife, unable even to look at the little girl, berated the woman. ‘I’ve never seen such a hateful woman,’ she said. ‘And you call yourself a mother! You haggle over the price of your corn, but when it comes to your own flesh and blood, all you want is for someone to take her off your hands.’
The world is populated by all sorts of mothers, but none of them was Huixian’s. No matter how long she waited, the boat people — men and women, old and young — knew she was destined to be disappointed, yet no one spoke of it. The children were warned to keep such talk to themselves; the secret must be guarded. Meanwhile, the adults pooled their wisdom and experience to rescue poor Huixian from her vain dream.
To that end it was necessary to erase all traces of the memories she held of the woman who had abandoned her. Sun Ximing’s wife, who was responsible for Huixian’s day-to-day activities, agonized over how to remove the army raincoat from the girl’s life. Everyone knew she could not sleep unless she was covered by it, for, they assumed, it retained her mother’s smell. Sun’s wife racked her brains to find a way out of this dilemma. Every time she put the coat away and covered Huixian with a regular blanket instead, the girl caused a scene. Sun’s wife even bought a nice woollen blanket embroidered with peonies for her, but that failed too; Huixian demanded the return of her raincoat to use along with the blanket. ‘My little ancestor,’ Sun’s wife said in frustration, ‘you’re harder to please than the empress herself. If you keep insisting on covering yourself with that raincoat, people will talk. They’ll say that even impoverished children in the old society had tattered blankets on their beds, while a little flower of the motherland like you uses a raincoat. If you insist on covering yourself with both, the new blanket will pick up the bad smell of your raincoat. I don’t mind, but people will say your adoptive mother doesn’t care if you suffocate.’
As if that weren’t enough, a dangerous, unwarranted and virtually unstoppable trend persisted. No one was willing to shatter Huixian’s dream of seeing her mother again, so the adults made a rule for the children: if she hit them, they were not to hit back, and if she called them names, they were to keep quiet. But in the heat of an argument, children cannot be counted on to avoid saying what mustn’t be said. More to the point, in order to keep their secret, the adults and children fabricated a tale that Huixian’s mother was still alive and would return for her one day. And so when Huixian was in a bad mood, she would rail defiantly at Sun Ximing and his wife, ‘You hate me. I want to go ashore to find my mother.’