‘Look! You used to like looking at it. Why won’t you look at it now? Take a good look at my birthmark, I’m Deng Shaoxiang’s son! That’s the truth! I said look, take a good look. It’s a fish. I’m Deng Shaoxiang’s son. Don’t be in such a hurry to make a clean break. If you file for divorce, you’ll live to regret it!’
I burst into tears. Was I crying for him or for her? I couldn’t say. I climbed down out of the tree and took a long look at my house, then at the blue sky. I dried my eyes and snarled into the sky, ‘Go ahead, divorce! If you don’t, you’re kongpi. And if you do, you’re still kongpi!’
Their divorce went without a hitch. The only problem was me. If I went with him, I’d sail the river; if I went with her, I’d stay on dry land. The river had its appeal, but I was afraid to give up dry land. So I said to Father, ‘I’ll spend half the year on the barge with you and half the year with Mother. What do you say?’
‘Fine with me,’ he said. ‘But check with your mother. I doubt she’ll go along with it.’
So I checked, and was met with boiling anger. ‘Absolutely not! If you want me, you can’t have him. And if you want him, you can’t have me. If the top beam is crooked, the one below can’t be straight. How am I supposed to take care of a child he’s had a hand in raising?’
So I had to choose. Two sets of inauspicious gifts were arrayed before me. One was Father and a barge, the other was Mother and dry land. There was no way out, I had to choose one over the other. I chose Father. Even now the boat people sometimes talk about my decision. If Dongliang had stayed with his mother, they say, he’d be this or that. Or, If he’d stayed with her, Ku Wenxuan would be this or that. Even, His mother would be this or that. But I ignored all the ‘this or that’ talk. And ‘what ifs’ bored me. Kongpi, all of them. Like water that keeps flowing, or grass that keeps growing, there was no choice involved; it was all up to fate. My father’s fate was tied up with a martyr named Deng Shaoxiang, and mine was tied up with him.
At the end of that year, a notice regarding the forced-transfer barge fleet was posted on the door of my house, spelling the end of my time in Milltown. When we boarded the barge, Mother had to move, and she did. But she was in such a hurry that she accidentally left her notebook behind. As she rushed out of the house she tossed a cloth bundle on to my bed, and when I picked it up, I found the notebook inside. She’d made a cover for her cherished notebook out of an illustrated newspaper. The front was graced with the ruddy face of Li Tiemei from the revolutionary opera The Red Lantern. The back showed Li’s hand, holding a red lantern. With time and opportunity on my side, I took as long as I needed to decide what to do with this special notebook, and wound up making a bold decision. I’d neither hand it over to Father nor give it back to Mother. I’d hide it away for myself.
To this day I can’t tell you who I hid that notebook for. Was it for Father or was it for Mother? Maybe it was for me. This secret most likely impacted on the rest of my life. I committed everything Mother had written in it — or should I say, every one of Father’s indiscretions — to memory. Even with the hatred she felt as she recorded everything, her handwriting was always neat and pleasing to the eye. The themes and content were unsurprising. She noted Father’s infidelities in great detaiclass="underline" numbers, times and locations. In some places she added angry comments: ‘Shameless! … Obscene! … I could die!’ To my astonishment, I knew the names of some of the women, including the mother of my schoolmate Li Shengli, and Zhao Chuntang’s younger sister, Zhao Chunmei. Even Aunty Sun, who ran the salvage station, was in there. These women had always impressed me as being proper and virtuous. Why were their names in Mother’s notebook?
Paradise
HARDLY ANYONE today can relate the history of the Sunnyside Fleet with any degree of accuracy.
Let’s start with the tugboat. Owned by a shipping company, it ran on diesel, had twin rudders and plenty of horsepower. Seven or eight workers manned the tug, although they worked only when there were barges that needed to be moved. Each time out counted as a shift, and when that shift was over, they went back to their homes on the banks of the river. Sailors love to drink, and the more the younger ones drank, the meaner they got. They could be having a normal conversation when suddenly fists would fly. I saw one of them jump into the river with the jagged edge of a bottle stuck in his chest and swim to the riverside hospital, cursing the whole way. The older hands were more easy-going and not nearly as volatile when they were drunk. One of them, a man with a full beard, would lie out on the deck and sleep like a log. Another of the older ones — with a face like a monkey — was in the habit of showering on the afterdeck. Stark naked, he would work up a lather and then rinse off with cold water, making eyes at the women and girls on the barges. I didn’t think much of that gang.
For that matter, I didn’t think much of anyone. The Sunnyside Fleet boasted eleven barges, manned by eleven families, most with shady backgrounds. In that respect, we were all pretty much alike. Since Father’s situation was still unsettled, our background was as murky as any of the others. Taking me aboard one of the barges with him could hardly be called exile, nor was it some sort of banishment; rather, it was a reclassification.
The boat people called a spot upriver named Plum Mountain their ancestral home. You can no longer find it on any Golden Sparrow River regional map. During the construction of a reservoir, Plum Mountain township, with its thirteen villages, was flooded, and now the place is marked on maps in blue — Victory Reservoir. Only an idiot would believe that Plum Mountain was really their ancestral home, since their speech was a mish-mash of accents and dialects, with pithy, bizarre ways of saying things. Let’s say we were heading upriver towards Horsebridge. They’d say we were heading ‘down’ to it. They called eating ‘nibbling’, and relieving themselves was ‘snapping it off’. As for sex, which people ashore seldom even mentioned, they were perfectly happy to talk about it any time, any place. The word they used was ‘thump’. If several men were sitting around with conspiratorial looks on their faces, all you heard them talking about was thump, thump, thump. Why ‘thump’? Because what most people consider to be a serious social issue was just an ordinary thumping to them.
I was generally repelled by the way they lived. They were sloppy dressers. In cold weather they overdressed, with reds and greens and yellows and blues all thrown together and layered collars sticking up around their necks. Then when summer gave way to autumn they were underdressed, sometimes to the point of being half-naked. Barefoot and shirtless, the men were so dark that from a distance they looked like Africans. They wore coarse, homemade white shorts, the material for which came mostly from Great Harvest flour sacks. Wide in the crotch, the tops were rolled over at the waist and tied with drawstrings. The women were slightly better, in a bizarre way. Married women wore their hair in a bun, adorned with a magnolia or a gardenia. Above the waist, they sported a variety of attire: some fancied the faddish Peter Pan blouses, others wore men’s white T-shirts, and others still preferred short granny jackets. But below the waist they were more conservative and unified: they wore baggy, knee-length rayon trousers, black or dark blue, sometimes decorated with an embroidered peony on the leg. Owing to frequent childbirth and nursing, and since they were not in the habit of wearing brassieres, their breasts sagged in defeat, large and unwieldy. They swung from side to side when the women walked the decks of the barges, a grumbling badge of honour. I was not impressed. Even when they were exposed, they held no interest for me.