But there were no strictures against sprinkling wine. ‘You people must be illiterate,’ I said. ‘This forbids people from feudalistic and superstitious activities, but says nothing about sprinkling wine. Where does it say that? Show me!’
There was nothing Scabby Five, who was barely literate, could say, so he kept his foot on my jug and glowered at me. Baldy, on the other hand, was surer of himself. With a contemptuous grin, he traced his finger over the words ‘feudalistic’ and ‘superstitious’ and stopped at the small print, where it said ‘etc’. ‘See that? It says “etc”. You’ve been to school, Kongpi. Know what that means? It means that sprinkling wine may not be listed, but it’s included in “etc”.’
I could only stare helplessly at the words.
‘Why are you wasting your breath on him?’ Scabby Five yelled at Baldy Chen. ‘No sprinkling means no sprinkling!’
As he was bending down for the jug, Baldy glanced up and saw the hard look in my eyes. He dropped his hands and placed them on the small of his back. ‘I sprained my back yesterday,’ he said, ‘so come and pick it up.’
‘It’s not your back you sprained,’ Scabby said angrily. ‘It’s your guts! Are you afraid of him? I’ll pick it up if you won’t. Of all the people who scare me, he’s not one of them, not Kongpi!’
I fought with Scabby Five over that jug, each of us trying to pull it away from the other, and we wound up outside the pavilion. A loud thud ended the struggle, as the jug fell to the ground and the lid broke, spilling the contents on the ground. The distinctive fragrance of aged wine spread quickly in the air; my feet were quickly drenched. I was enraged; there were several options available to me, and the first was to pick up the bottom half of the jug and fling it at Scabby’s head, a sure-fire way to settle scores, old and new. So I picked it up and was just about to throw it when something unexpected occurred. What remained of the wine in the broken jug was sloshing back and forth, reflecting my face, which shifted with the liquid and began to blur. But what really caught me by surprise was the familiar sound that emerged from the jug: kongpi, kongpi. Dejection overcame me and my anger dissipated. Utterly deflated, I laid the jug down on the ground and asked Scabby a shameful question: ‘If I can’t sprinkle the wine, is it OK if I drink it?’
He dipped his finger in the wine and tasted it. ‘Do you have all your pubic hair, Kongpi? You want to drink at your age? It’s none of my business if you do or not, but you have to do it out here. No drinking in the pavilion. Go ahead, drink it, but that’s not going to make a man out of you. You’ll still be Kongpi.’
Well, I went ahead and did that shameful thing, which later made the rounds of Milltown: on the eve of Deng Shaoxiang’s commemoration, I laid a sheet of coloured paper on the ground, sat down, and, with everyone’s eyes on me, drank half of the wine in the jug.
I was barely sober when Sun Ximing and Desheng passed by the pavilion; before they dragged me back to the river I told them to bring along the rest of the wine for my father. I can’t recall how I made it back aboard the boat; but I do remember how Father slapped me with the sole of his cloth shoe and roared at me. I have no idea what he said or what I said to explain myself. I’ve never been good at explaining myself when I’m perfectly clear-headed, so you can imagine what came out of me when I was half drunk. All I could say was ‘Kongpi’. How else could I explain myself?
Most drunks sleep like pigs. I tossed and turned and had terrible dreams, one of which scared me awake. Suddenly I had the feeling that our barge wouldn’t move. The tug chugged forward, taking all the other barges with it, but not ours. A strange watery sound came to me from the stern, so I went back to take a look. Something weird was happening to our anchor: it was being held by a hand coming out of the water — not too big but not particularly small, all five nicely shaped fingers wrapped around the anchor, half of the back of the hand white, the other half — scary as hell — covered with dark-green moss. I was reminded of all the Golden Sparrow water-demon legends. Rice wine, rice wine! Heat up some rice wine to drive away the demon! I went back to get the jug. It was empty. In my dream I even recalled my mistake — I’d drunk it all. Suddenly panicked, I picked up a bamboo pole to dislodge that hand. It didn’t work. I pushed harder, madly, until the pole flew out of my hands and landed in the river. Then the dark water under our barge lit up and waves began to crash as the face of a beautiful woman rose up out of the water — a round face, with big eyes, a slightly concave nose, and old-fashioned hair cut, ear-length short; water grass woven into her black hair glistened like crystal. Her shoulders came into view next, then a basket she carried on her back. I saw water in the basket; it was silvery, and a lotus leaf was floating on top of it. The leaf moved, exposing the blurry, wet head of a baby.
I was seeing Deng Shaoxiang, I was privileged to see her heroic spirit. I should have felt honoured, but what I actually felt was dread. Her dignified presence struck fear in me. Now that she had risen out of the water, she fixed her perceptive gaze on me, a look that told me she saw everything I did and heard everything I said. I stood on the stern of our barge trembling, waiting for her to reveal her identity. But she did not talk about herself or about her descendants. I waited for her to educate me, but she neither forgave nor criticized me. No, she raised her moss-covered hand and sternly patted the basket on her back. ‘Come down,’ she said. ‘Come down. I want you to come down here!’
I didn’t dare. How could I jump into her basket? The thought frightened me awake. The lamp in the cabin where I slept still shone. Father was asleep on the sofa, traces of his angry outburst imprinted on his old and slightly bloated face. He had kept the lamp on, creating paper flowers that lay in profusion on his knees and on the floor, big and colourful. I picked up several of them and took them out to the stern, where the anchor rested against the side of the barge, as always. It gave off a dull glint and banged softly against the steel hull, a tranquil, felicitous sound.
Deepening night lay over the river. The night breeze rippled the surface, with shadows cast by passing birds and water gourds floating in our wake. I could even hear them knock up against the space between the barges. But the martyr Deng Shaoxiang had come and gone, a magical spirit performing secret tasks. She had come and gone at will, leaving no trace of her clandestine visit.
I couldn’t say if I’d had a nightmare or a sweet dream.
Maiden
FOR THE longest time I couldn’t wait for Huixian to grow up. That was my deepest, darkest secret.
But I was afraid that she would develop into an adult too fast. That was a secret second only to the other.
My unsociable traits and short fuse were linked to the conflict of those two secrets. Many people keep diaries, in which they record details of their lives. Not me. Everyone called me Kongpi, and the life of a kongpi does not deserve to be written down. It’s a waste of paper, ink and time. I had enough self-awareness to know that the only person whose life was worth recording was Huixian. I used the same kind of notebook that both my father and mother had used — a worker’s handbook with a cardboard cover. They were on sale at the general store and the stationery store for eight fen. Sturdy and durable, they had enough pages to record things for a long time if you wrote small, with concise, precise words.
I was particularly prudent at first, sticking to the ‘dossier’ style of writing and the principle of ‘seeking truth through facts’, limiting my entries to practical and realistic considerations: how tall she was, how much she weighed, how advanced her reading skills were, how many songs she knew. But gradually, over time, I loosened up, enhancing my jottings with aspects of her life, such as who she argued with. Whatever I heard went into my diary. When she was given a bowl of chicken soup, whether it was tasty or not, thick or thin, any comment she made went into my diary. If someone made a jacket or a pair of shoes for her, how they looked and how they fitted all went into my diary. Then later, whenever someone praised Huixian or passed on gossip about her, if I heard it, it went into the diary. Finally, I began entering my own ideas and any number of chaotic, largely inarticulate thoughts, even dreamed-up code words and phrases that only I understood. To illustrate, I began referring to Huixian as Sunflower and to myself as Gourd. My father was Lumber, while the people on shore were Bandit One, Bandit Two, and so on. The boat people became chickens or ducks or cows or sheep, things like that. All this to keep my father in the dark if he tried to read my diary entries. At times, when I was writing or drawing in my notebook, I was conscious of his presence and the suspicious look in his eyes. ‘What in the world are you writing?’ he’d ask. ‘And why won’t you let me see it? Keeping a diary is a good idea, but you can get into serious trouble if you’re not careful what you put in it. Remember Teacher Zhu from the Milltown Elementary School? Well, he took out his frustrations with the Party and society in general in his diary, and they arrested him.’