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With a sneer, Jiansu said, “Then go ask him. But you’ll have to wait until he returns from his sailing trip with Uncle Zheng He.”
The conversation ended there.
As promised, Li Zhichang did go to see Sui Buzhao, who was hesitant, and Li knew that Jiansu had already spoken with him. At that moment he understood the depth of the enmity between the two families. So long as the Zhao clan was running the factory, his gears would turn only in his mind, day and night, making sleep all but impossible. There were times when golden gears seemed to be turning just above his head, and he’d excitedly reach up to touch them. There was nothing to touch, of course. In his dreams he’d hook his finger around one of them and give it a kiss. Now all the plans he’d drawn up had been nullified on the night of the Midautumn Festival, in a scene he played out in his head over and over: He and Jiansu were standing shoulder to shoulder on the concrete platform, buffeted by cold winds. Jiansu’s hand had been so hot he had to let go, and he knew he must no longer let those gears come to him at night. And yet, the fervent images burned their way into his breast, day and night. He must keep his passions in check. The only person he had to listen to was Sui Buzhao, who could give Li a new lease on life.
Li Zhichang had mixed feelings toward the older generation. He hated them, and he loved them. His grandfather, Li Xuantong, who had not considered himself an ordinary mortal since the age of fourteen, had shaved his head and traveled to a distant mountain to become a mystic. His father, Li Qisheng, had operated machinery for a capitalist in northeast China, making his return to Wali an inglorious one. People said that no respectable man would do what he did. Though he later tried to redeen himself through good service, the townspeople refused to forgive him. In their eyes, Li’s family was synonymous with abnormality, to be neither understood nor trusted. Once the smartest boy in school, after finishing the fifth grade Zhichang was ready for middle school but was told he could not continue his education. The reasoning was convoluted, but it rested primarily on the fact that his father had operated machinery for a capitalist. An elementary school education was deemed sufficient for someone like him. He returned home burdened with unquenchable loathing for both his father and his grandfather.
In his nineteenth year something happened that left Li Zhichang with eternal regret. What he experienced that year made him realize that a man must always behave scrupulously; he must neither be slack in his work nor allow himself to get carried away with it.
Early one warm spring day, a feverish Li Zhichang walked alone on the bank of the river; never before had he felt such a need for something as he did now. He wanted it desperately. Sunset colors created a beautiful reflection on the water; budding new leaves on the floodplain willows swayed in the breeze like bashful maidens. He wanted it desperately. He strolled aimlessly for a while before crossing the floodplain to head back. But when he reached the willows, his throat turned hot and began to swell. He stopped, feeling weak, and sat down on the hot sandy ground. Time for pleasure.
Li Zhichang did not make it back home until nightfall, feeling more relaxed, his hands unusually soft. He slept well that night.
The next morning he drew curious looks when he was out for a walk. “Did you have a good time out in the willow grove?” a boy asked. With a malicious laugh, another boy went up to him and said, “In books they call that masturbating.” Li felt an explosion go off in his head. He turned and ran, heedless of everything around him. Damn it! he cursed inwardly. Goddamn it! Laughter was following him. “I saw you!” someone shouted. “I saw everything!”
The young Li Zhichang refused to go out after that. His gate remained shut, and after several days had passed, people began to sense that something was wrong. So Li Yuming, the Gaoding Street Party secretary, and a clan member tried Zhichang’s door. Not only was it locked, apparently something was blocking it; it may even have been nailed shut. With a sigh, Li Yuming left, saying that the boy would have to get through it on his own. Others tried their luck but with the same result. Sighs were heard all over town. “The Li clan, ah, the Li clan!”
Last to show up at Zhichang’s door was Sui Buzhao, possibly the only person in town who understood the Li clan, and someone who had become a friend to the young man. He asked him to come out but was rebuffed. So he pounded on the door and cursed. “Uncle Sui,” Li answered weakly from inside, “there’s no need to curse. I’m not worthy of your friendship, I’ve done a terrible thing, and all that’s left for me is to die.” Sui Buzhao pondered this for a moment before leaving. He returned with an ax, with which he easily broke down the door. By then Zhichang was skin and bones, his face ashen, his uncombed hair in tangles. He stepped unsteadily up to Sui. “Uncle,” he said, “be kind and use that thing on me.”
The blush of anger rose on Buzhao’s face. “Fine,” he said as he swung the ax handle and knocked Li Zhichang to the floor. Li struggled to his feet and was promptly knocked down again. With his hands on his hips, the older man swore, “I must have been blind to befriend such a coward!” Li hung his head and said he was too ashamed to go outside.
“What’s the big deal?” Sui growled.
After getting Li Zhichang to wash up and comb his hair, Sui Buzhao told him to step outside and walk with him, holding his head high. This time the people looked on with sober expressions; no one laughed.
In a word, what happened that day nearly destroyed Li Zhichang. But Sui Buzhao’s ax had indeed given him a new lease on life. At night, as the golden gears turned above his head, he experienced both excitement and agony. He dared not try to touch them. He knew that sooner or later he would install them in the noodle factory, but impatience lay just below the surface, the same sort of impatience that had overcome him that day when he’d sought pleasure in the willow grove. Maybe, he thought, the passion he was experiencing now was an offshoot of the same force that had nearly destroyed him. It was sheer agony, and there was nothing he could do about it. What he needed to do was join Technician Li in setting up a generator for Gaoding Street and turning Wali into a town where the lights shone brightly. Too many people had suffered as a result of insufficient lighting in town.
A resident had once gone to the Wali Emporium to buy one of Zhang-Wang’s clay tigers, and she had taken advantage of the weak light to sell him a cracked model. Then there was the fellow named Erhuai, who was responsible for maintaining the floodplain; he was known to run like the wind through the shadows, a rifle slung over his back, reminding people of Zhao Duoduo as a young man. Li hated the way the man scurried through the darkness.
Li often stood outside the old mill on the riverbank. That is where the first gears were already turning. The millstone rumbled like distant thunder. By looking through the window he could see the most taciturn member of the Sui clan inside. He too was beginning to take on the man’s disinclination to utter a sound. The man seemed to contain as much power as the millstone itself as it tirelessly ground everything in its path, smoothly, steadily. But he did not utter a sound.
On one occasion the man stood up and, with his long wooden ladle, broke up a clot of mung beans on the conveyor belt. On his return to his stool he glanced out the window and raised his ladle. Li Zhichang looked in the direction of that glance and saw Jiansu, who was walking lazily up to the mill, pipe in hand. Once inside, Baopu offered his brother the stool, but Jiansu said no. “I was afraid you were getting drunk the other night,” Baopu said, “so I waited for you in your room…”
Jiansu just smiled. Then, abruptly, the smile vanished. His face was slightly pale, much the same as that night on the platform. He hung his head and knocked the ashes out of the bowl of his pipe. In a soft voice he said, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. I was going to mention it when the idea first came to me, but I got drunk that night and had no desire to sleep the next day. People said my eyes were bloodshot. I decided I wouldn’t come see you after all. I didn’t want to tell you what I had on my mind.”
Baopu looked up at his brother, a pained look on his face. He stared at the tip of his ladle, dripping with water. “Go ahead, don’t hold back. What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Nothing. I’ve changed my mind.”
“Go ahead, let’s hear it.”
“No, not now.”
The brothers went silent. Baopu rolled a cigarette. Jiansu lit his pipe. The smoke clouded the air in the mill as, one puff after another, they created layers of smoke, all of which slowly settled onto the millstone, as it turned slowly, taking the smoke with it, until the swirls stretched into a long tube and drifted out through the window. Baopu smoked on and on, finally flipping away the butt. “Keeping it inside will only make you feel worse. As brothers we ought to be able to talk about anything. I can tell it’s something serious, and that makes it even more important to tell me.”
Jiansu paled. The hand holding the pipe began to tremble. With difficulty, he put away his pipe and uttered a single, softly spoken sentence: “I want to take the noodle factory back from Zhao Duoduo.”
From where he stood just beyond the window, Zhichang heard every word. As soon as that sentence was uttered, a crack from somewhere inside the mill gave him a start; it sounded like someone had smacked against a steel rod. He thought something might have happened to one of the gears, but the mill kept turning. Baopu stood up, his eyes lighting up beneath the heavy ridge of his brow. He nodded. “I see.”
“The noodle factory has always carried the name Sui. It should be yours and mine.” Jiansu’s eyes bore into his brother.
Baopu shook his head. “It’s nobody’s. It belongs to the town of Wali.”
“But I can take it back.”
“No, you can’t. These days no one has that power.”
“I do.”
“No, you don’t. And you shouldn’t have such thoughts. Don’t forget our father. At first he thought the mill belonged to the Sui clan. This misunderstanding ruined his health. Twice he rode his horse out to pay off debts. He returned home the first time, but the second time he threw up blood, staining the back of his horse. Our father died in a sorghum field—”
With a shout Jiansu slammed his fist down onto the stool. Then he crouched in pain, holding the stool with both hands.
“Baopu, you, you…I didn’t want to but you made me tell you! You’ve taken the fight out of me, put out the fire, like smashing your fist into my head! But I’m not afraid. Don’t worry, I won’t stay my hand on this. You want me to spend the rest of my life sitting in the mill, like you, listening to the millstone rumble tearfully in circles, is that it? Never! That’s something no member of the Sui clan ought to do. None of our ancestors was ever that gutless…I won’t listen to you. I’ve held this inside me for decades. I’m thirty-six this year and still not married. You were, but your wife died. You should have a better life than most people, but you just sit in this mill, day in and day out. I hate you! I absolutely hate you! Today I want to make this perfectly clear: I hate the way you spend your days in this old mill…”
Zhichang stood beyond the window, stunned. He saw large beads of sweat roll off of Jiansu’s forehead and cheeks.
FOUR (#ulink_4a2e2fdf-f555-5b4a-acba-d63ec17ed780)
Sui Baopu recalled how little time his father had spent at the factory during Baopu’s teen years, preferring the solitude of the pier, where he could ponder things and gaze at the reflections of ship masts in the water. He would not return home until dinnertime. His stepmother, Huizi, was in her thirties. With her lips painted red, she would sit at the dinner table eating and keeping a worried eye on her husband, while Baopu watched anxiously to see if she swallowed the color on her lips along with her food. His stepmother, the pretty daughter of a rich man from Qingdao, liked to drink coffee. Baopu was a little afraid of her. Once, when she was in a good mood, she took him in her arms and planted a kiss on his smooth forehead. Sensing her warm, heaving breast, his heart raced as he lowered his head, not daring to let his gaze linger on her snow-white neck. “Mama,” he blurted out as his face reddened. She murmured a response. That was the first and last time he called her that. But he stopped being afraid of her.
One day Baopu found Huizi crying bitterly and writhing on the kang, nearly breathless. It wasn’t until later that he learned why his stepmother had been so grief-stricken: Her father, it turned out, had been murdered in Qingdao, caught selling land and factories for gold bullion to take out of China. Baopu was at a loss for words.
After that he began spending time in the study, which held many scrolls and more books than he could count. He found a date-colored wooden ball, so red it shone, and when he held it in his hand it felt incredibly smooth and very cold. There was also a box that played a lovely tune when he touched it.
One evening, when his father was in the middle of dinner, Zhang-Wang from the eastern section of town dropped in to borrow some money. He politely invited her to sit and poured tea for her. Then he went into his study to get the money, which she tucked into her sleeve and promised to repay after she’d sold a hundred clay tigers. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Go spend it any way you like.” Huizi glowered at him; Zhang-Wang noticed.
“How’s this?” she said. “Since I feel awkward taking your money, why don’t I tell your fortune?” With a wry smile, Father nodded his approval. Huizi just snorted. Zhang-Wang sat down in front of him, so close it made his lips quiver, and reached her hand up the opposite sleeve, where she counted on her fingers. She announced that he had a pair of red moles behind his left shoulder. The soup ladle fell from Huizi’s hand. As Zhang-Wang studied his face, her eyes rolled up into her head, and all Baopu could see were the whites. “Tell me the day and time of your birth,” she intoned. By this time Father had forgotten all about the food in front of him. He told her what she wanted to know in a weak voice. She began to shake; her eyeballs dropped back into place, and she fixed them on Father’s face. “I’m leaving, I must leave,” she said, raising her arms. With a parting glance at Huizi, she walked out the door. Baopu watched as his father sat like a statue, mumbling incoherently and rubbing his knees the rest of the day.
Over the days that followed, Father seemed laden down with anxieties. He busied himself with this and that, not quite sure what he ought to be doing. Finally he dug out an abacus and began working on accounts. Baopu asked what he was doing. “We owe people,” his father replied. Baopu could not believe that the richest family in town owed money to anyone, so he asked who it was owed to and how much. Suddenly the son was interrogating the father. “All the poor, wherever they live!” his father replied. “We’ve been behind in our obligations for generations…Huizi’s father was too, but then he refused to pay, and someone beat him to death!” Breathing hard, by then he was nearly shouting. He was becoming skeletal; his face had darkened. Always nicely groomed in the past, he now let his hair turn lusterless and ignored the specks of dandruff. Baopu could only gaze at his father fearfully. “You’re still young,” his father said, “you don’t understand…”
In the wake of this conversation, Baopu vaguely felt that he too was one of the destitute poor. From time to time he strolled over to the riverbank to watch the millstone rumble along. The man tending the stone at the time kept feeding beans into the eye with his wooden ladle; white foamy liquid flowed from beneath the stone, filling two large buckets, which were carried away by women. It was the same scene he’d witnessed in his youth. After leaving the mill, he’d walk over to the factory where the noodles were made and where steam filled the air with a smell that was both sweet and sour. The workers, male and female, wore little clothing, their naked arms coated with bean starch. As they worked in the misty air, they moved rhythmically, punctuated by cadenced shouts of “Hai! Hai!” A thin layer of water invariably covered the cobblestone floor. Water was the irreplaceable element here. People were continually stirring huge vats to wash the white noodles. On one of his visits, a worker spotted him. “Don’t splash any water on the young master!” she yelled anxiously. Baopu left in a hurry. He knew that one day this would no longer be his and that he was in fact born to be one of the destitute poor.
Father continued to spend time on the riverbank, appearing to be settling into deeper nostalgia for the ships that had visited from afar. One time he brought Baopu along. “This is where Uncle Buzhao sailed from,” he said, and Baopu could tell that his father missed his brother. On their way home, his father looked over at the old mills, drenched in the colors of the sunset, and stopped.
“Time to pay off our debts,” he said lightly.
So Baopu’s father mounted the old chestnut he’d had for years and rode off. A week later he returned, his face glowing, the picture of health. He tethered the horse, brushed the dust from his clothes, and called the family together to announce that he had been repaying debts and that from that day on, the Sui clan would operate only a single noodle factory, since the others had all been given away. They could hardly believe what they were hearing. The silence was broken a moment later: They shook their heads and laughed. So he took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. A red seal appeared at the bottom of several lines of writing. Apparently a receipt. Huizi snatched it out of his hand and fainted dead away after reading it, throwing the family into a panic. They thumped her on the back, they pinched her, and they called her name. When she finally came to, she glared at Father as if he’d become her mortal enemy. Then she burst into tears, her wails interspersed with words no one could understand. In the end, she clenched her teeth and pounded the table until her fingers bled. By then she’d stopped crying and just sat there staring at the wall, her face a waxen yellow.
The incident frightened Baopu half to death. Though he still didn’t understand what lay behind his father’s actions, he knew why his father felt as if a burden had been lifted. The incident also revealed his stepmother’s stubborn streak. It was a terrifying stubbornness that eventually led to her death, one that was far crueler than her husband’s. But Baopu would not know that until much later. At the time he was too concerned with learning how his father had found the people to take over the factories. He knew that the Sui clan holdings, including factories and noodle processing rooms in several neighboring counties and a few large cities, could not have been disposed of in a week. Moreover, the money he owed was to the poor, and where would he find someone willing to accept such vast holdings in the name of the poor? Baopu pondered these questions until his head ached, but no answers came. And the millstone rumbled on, as always. But Father stopped going there. From time to time unfamiliar boats would come to town to transport the noodles, and many of the people who had helped with the work quit to go elsewhere, leaving the Sui compound quiet and cold. His stepmother’s injured hand had healed; only one finger remained crooked. No one ever saw her laugh after that. Then one day she went to see Zhang-Wang to have her fortune told. She didn’t say a word after returning home with a pair of large clay tigers. They would await the birth of Jiansu and Hanzhang, for whom they would be the first toys.
Large public meetings were held in town, one on the heels of the other. People with large land holdings or factory owners were dragged up onto a stage that had been erected on the site of the old temple. The masses flung bitter complaints at them; waves of loud accusations swept throughout Wali. Zhao Duoduo, commander of the self-protection brigade, who paced back and forth on the stage, a rifle slung over his back, was responsible for an intriguing invention: a piece of pigskin attached to a willow switch, which he waved in the air. In high spirits, he used his invention as a lash on the back of a fat old man who was the target of criticism. The old man screeched and fell on his face. The people below the stage roared their approval. Duoduo’s actions also spurred the people into climbing onto the stage to beat and kick the offenders. Three days after the first session, a man was beaten to death. Baopu’s father, Sui Yingzhi, stood between those on the stage and those below it for several days, and in the end he felt that his place was up on the stage. But members of the land reform team urged him to go back down. “We’ve been told by our superiors that you are to be considered an enlightened member of the gentry class.”
Sui Buzhao returned to Wali on the day Hanzhang was born. He had a fishing knife in his belt and he reeked of the ocean. He was much thinner than when he left and his beard was much longer. His eyes had turned gray but were keener and brighter than ever. When he heard about all the changes in the town and learned that his older brother had given the factories away, he laughed. “It ends well!” he said as he stood near the old mill. “The world is now a better place.” Then he undid his pants and relieved himself in front of Sui Yingzhi and Baopu. Yingzhi frowned in disgust.
In the days that followed, Sui Buzhao often took Baopu down to the river to bathe. The youngster was shocked to see the scars on his uncle’s body: some black and some purple, some deep and some shallow, like a web etched across the skin. He said he’d been nearly killed three times, and each time he’d survived despite the odds. He gave Baopu a small telescope he said he’d taken from a pirate, and once he sang a sailing song for him. Baopu complained it was a terrible song. “Terrible?” his uncle grunted. “It comes from a book we sailors call the Classic of the Waterway. Anyone who doesn’t memorize it is bound to die! Uncle Zheng He gave me this copy, and I couldn’t live without it.”
When they returned to town he retrieved the book, which he’d hidden behind a brick in a wall. The yellowing pages were creased and dog-eared. With great care he read several pages aloud; Baopu didn’t understand a word, so the old man shut it and placed it in a metal box for safekeeping. He spoke of his disappointment in the receding waters of the river and said that if he’d known that that was going to happen, he’d have taken Baopu to sea with him. The two of them spent most of every day together, and as time passed, the youngster began to walk like his uncle, swaying from side to side. Eventually, inevitably, this made his father so angry he swatted the palms of the boy’s hands with an ebony switch and locked him in his room. With no one to accompany him, the lonely old man hesitated for several days before wandering off to another place.
Zhao Duoduo often came by to pass the time. That was the only thing that could get Sui Yingzhi to put down his abacus. He’d come out to pour his guest some tea. “No, thanks,” Zhao would say, “you can keep working.” Yingzhi, put on edge by the visit, would return to his study.
One time Zhao came to speak to Huizi. “Do you have any chicken fat?” he asked with a smile. When she gave him some, he took his revolver out of the holster and rubbed chicken fat into the leather. “Makes it shine,” he said as he stood up to go. But when he handed the dish back he placed it upside down over her breast…Huizi spun around and picked up a pair of scissors, but Zhao was already out the door. The dish crashed to the floor, bringing Yingzhi rushing out of his room, where he saw his wife holding scissors in one hand and wiping grease from her breast with the other.
On another occasion, when Huizi was in the vegetable garden, Duoduo sprang out from behind a broad bean trellis. She turned and ran away. “What are you running for?” he called out. “It’s going to happen sooner or later. Who are you saving it for?” Huizi stopped, smiled, and waited for him to catch up. “That’s the idea,” Zhao said, gleefully slapping his hand against his hip. He walked over, and when he was right in front of her, she scowled, raised her hands as if they were claws, and scratched both sides of his face like an angry cat. Despite the pain, Zhao pulled out his revolver and fired into the ground. Huizi ran off.
A month passed before all the scratch marks had scabbed on his cheeks. Zhao Duoduo called people to a Gaoding Street meeting to discuss whether or not it was reasonable to still consider Sui Yingzhi an enlightened member of the gentry class. Yingzhi was summoned to the meeting, where a heated discussion ensued until Duoduo abruptly held his finger up to Yingzhi’s head like a pistol and said, “Bang.” Yingzhi crumpled to the ground as if he’d been shot and stopped breathing. They picked him up and rushed him home, while someone ran to get Guo Yun, the traditional healer. They did not manage to wake Sui Yingzhi until late that night. His recovery after that was slow; he walked with a slouch and was rail thin. Day in and day out Baopu heard his father’s coughs echo through the house. The meeting had sapped his vitality. He was like a different man altogether.
“We still haven’t paid off all our debts,” he said to his son one day between coughs. “Time is running out. It’s something we have to do.” His coughing fit that night lasted into the early morning, but when the family awoke the next day, he was gone. Then Baopu found bloodstains on the floor, and he knew that his father had ridden off on his chestnut horse again.
The days that followed passed slowly. After a week of torment, Sui Buzhao returned from his wanderings and laughed when he learned that his brother had ridden off again. Just before nightfall, the family heard the snorts of their horse and ran outside, happy and relieved. The horse knelt down in front of the steps and whinnied as it pawed the ground. The animal’s gaze was fixed on the doorway, not the people; its mane shifted, and a drop of liquid fell into Baopu’s hand. It was blood, fresh blood. The horse raised its head and whinnied skyward, then turned and trotted off, the family running after it. On the outskirts of town, the horse ran into a field of red sorghum and followed a path where the leaves were spattered with blood. Huizi’s jaw tightened as she ran, and when she saw the trail of blood she began to cry. The horse’s hooves pounded the ground, managing to avoid all the sorghum plants. Baopu wasn’t crying, didn’t feel sad at all, and for that, he scolded himself. The sorghum field seemed to go on forever, and the horse picked up the pace until it stopped abruptly.
Sui Yingzhi was lying in a dry furrow, his face the color of the earth beneath him. Red leaves covered the ground around him, though it wasn’t immediately clear if that was their natural color or if they were bloodstained. But one look at his face told them he’d lost a great deal of blood before falling off the horse. Sui Buzhao sprang into action, picking up Yingzhi and shouting, “Brother! My brother…” Sui Yingzhi’s mouth twitched. He searched their faces, looking for his son. Baopu knelt beside him.
“I know,” he said. “Your heart was too heavy.”
His father nodded. He coughed, and a thin stream of fresh blood seeped from his mouth. Sui Buzhao turned to Huizi. “The coughing has destroyed his lungs.” Huizi bent down and rolled up her husband’s pant leg. The flesh was flabby and nearly transparent, and she knew that he was dying from the loss of blood. “Jiansu! Hanzhang! Come see your father!” she shouted as she pushed the two younger children up in front of Baopu. Hanzhang bent down and kissed her father, and when she straightened up there was blood on her young lips. She gazed up at her mother with a frown, as if put off by the taste. Only a few minutes of life remained in Sui Yingzhi. He mumbled something and closed his eyes.
Sui Buzhao, who had been holding his brother’s wrist all this time to check his pulse, let the arm drop. Loud wails burst from his throat; his frail body was wracked with spasms of grief. Baopu, who had never seen his uncle cry, was stunned. “I’m a no-account vagabond,” his uncle said through his tears, “and I know I’ll not die well. But, you, brother, you lived an exemplary life, educated and proper, the best the Sui family had to offer, yet you bled to death out on the road. Oh, the old Sui family, our family…”
The old horse’s head drooped, its nose spotted with mud; it wasn’t moving. Holding their breath, they lifted Sui Yingzhi up and laid him across the horse’s back.
“A member of the Sui family has left us,” the old men of Wali were saying. The town’s spirit seemed to have died, and two consecutive rainfalls did nothing to change that. The streets were so deserted it felt as if most of the residents had been swept away. The old man who worked the wooden ladle in the mill by the river said, “I’ve watched the mill for the Sui family all my life. Now the old master has left us to open a noodle factory on the other side, and I should go with him. He needs my help.” He said this half a dozen times, and then, one day, as he sat on his stool, he simply stopped breathing. The old ox kept turning the millstone, uselessly, ignorant of what had happened. The town’s elders narrowed their eyes when they heard the news. Staring straight ahead, they said to anyone who would listen, “Do you still say there are no gods?”
Huizi bolted her gate and refused to open it for anyone, so Baopu opened a side door to let his uncle, whose room was on the outside, into the compound. Buzhao knew that no one could keep Baopu away from him anymore, but then he noticed a somber look on the youngster’s face. When he spoke to him of his adventures on the high seas, the boy lacked the interest he’d displayed in the past, not regaining it until the day Buzhao took the old seafaring book out of its metal box and waved it in front of him.
On days when Jiansu came to Buzhao’s room, his uncle would hoist him onto his shoulders the way he’d done with his older brother and carry him out through the side door, down to the river or into one of the lanes to buy him some candy. He could see that Jiansu was smarter than Baopu, a boy who learned fast. He decided to let Jiansu play with the telescope, and he watched as the boy focused on the girls bathing in the river. “That’s really neat,” Jiansu said with a click of his tongue as he reluctantly handed back the telescope.
Buzhao hoisted him back on his shoulders and sort of stumbled along. “We’re a team, you and me,” he said.
Jiansu spent so much time on his uncle’s shoulders that people called him the “jockey.” Sooner or later, Sui Buzhao said, he’d leave to go back to sea. That is what made his life interesting and what would make him worthy of the town. He told Jiansu to wait for that day, saying he had to find a flat-bottom boat, since the river was so shallow. Not long after that, someone actually came forward with a beat-up sampan, and Sui Buzhao could not have been happier. He fashioned a tiller, plugged up the holes with tung oil, and made a sail out of a bedsheet. People came to gawk at the boat, maybe touch it, and, of course, talk about it. Excitement was in the air. “That’s called a boat,” adults would tell their children. “Boat,” the tiny voices would repeat.
Sui Buzhao asked some of the young men to help him carry the boat over to the abandoned pier, where a crowd waited patiently, having heard that something was in the air. Sui Buzhao saw Baopu in the crowd, which further energized him, and he began to describe the boat’s functions to the crowd, stressing the use of the tiller. The people pressed him to put the boat in the water. He just rolled his eyes. “You think it’s that easy? Have you ever heard of anyone putting a boat in the water without chanting to the gods?” At that point he stopped surveying the crowd and assumed a somber expression as he offered up a chanted prayer, thanking the gods for keeping the nation and her people safe and offering up sacrifices of food and spirits to the ocean, island, earth, and kitchen gods to watch over ship and crew.
A profound silence settled over the crowd as the hazy image of a distant mist-covered ocean came into view, with bare-armed men pulling at their oars, their lives in imminent danger, or of a ship brimming with treasure that disappears in the mist. Truly, the vista is of men and ships, with fortune and misfortune giving rise to each other. The elders could still remember ships’ masts lining the old pier and the fishy smell that hung in the air. Ships old and new fighting for space, one nearly on top of the other, as far as the eye can see. Then thousand sailors breathing on myriad decks, as lewd, murky air assails the face. Commerce is king in Wali, where silver ingots roll in from everywhere. Suddenly a cloudburst, but the rivergoing ships stay put, like a swarm of locusts…
The townspeople gathered round Sui Buzhao and his boat, making hardly a sound, exchanging glances as if they were all strangers. After rubbing their eyes they saw that Sui Buzhao was already sitting aboard his boat, still on dry land, and as he sat there, he raised the telescope hanging from his belt, an invitation for Jiansu to come along with him.
With a shout, Jiansu took off toward the ship as if possessed, but Baopu grabbed him by the shirt and refused to let go, no matter how hard his brother struggled to break free.
Foul curses tore from Sui Buzhao from where he stood in the cabin. With a wave of his hand he signaled them to pick up the boat, with him in it, and carry it over to the water. Bursting with excitement, that is what they did, and the instant the hull touched the water it came to life; a welcoming sound arose from somewhere inside. The sail billowed and moved the boat swiftly away from the bank as Sui Buzhao stood up and let the wind muss his hair. The crowd saw him put his hands on his hips, then slap his thigh and make faces. The women lowered their heads and scolded softly, “Shame on him.”
The spell was broken when the boat reached the middle of the river. “A fine boat!” the people shouted. “And a fine captain!” “Good for you, Sui Buzhao!” “Come back and take me with you!”…As they shouted their encouragement, the boat began to turn with the current, moving in a slow circle, just like the millstone. Then, as it picked up speed and everyone expected it to take off, it abruptly sank beneath the surface, leaving nothing behind but a swirling eddy. If Buzhao didn’t bob up in a hurry he’d be lost, everyone knew. So they waited, but there was no sign of him as the surface smoothed out and the river returned to its original state. Wrapped in his brother’s arms, Jiansu wept. Baopu held tight, his arms trembling.
Immersed in grief and disappointment, the people were suddenly amazed to see a head burst through the surface near the bank. Who was it? Why, none other than the stubble-faced Sui Buzhao.
Back on dry land, he ignored the whoops of joy as he walked off, swaying from side to side and dripping water. Heaven willed the ship to sink, people were saying. Maybe Wali is not supposed to have boats. If it hadn’t sunk, Sui Buzhao might have left town and never returned. Yes, they all agreed, as they chided themselves for not even considering where the man might have wanted to sail off to. Their eyes were on Jiansu. How lucky you are, they said, how very lucky. But there were those who accused Buzhao of having a sinister side. How could he think of taking a mere child with him? Baopu, who would have none of that, took his brother by the hand and walked off, following the trail of water left by his uncle.
For days Sui Buzhao was too embarrassed to leave his room. Then he fell ill. When, many days later, he finally emerged from his room, he was terribly gaunt. He had tied a strip of blue cloth around his forehead, almost as if that were all that kept his head intact.
A boat had sunk out of sight, but a few years later, a large ship would see the light of day, and its appearance would rock the entire province. That event would occur at about the same time as the assault on the town wall, making it one of the most feverish years in memory.
Sui Buzhao had his head buried in his seafaring bible when he heard someone outside his window shout, “A team of irrigation repairmen has found a buried ship!” He knew that everyone in town was engaged in digging in the ground for one reason or another, so maybe someone had dug up his boat. His heart racing, he ran outside and headed for the riverbank. When he reached the old pier he saw that the whole town had turned out, forming a crowd a few hundred yards from the riverbank. He started running, stumbling and falling several times before he reached the crowd. Fortunately for him, he was thin enough to squeeze his way up front, where he saw piles of excavated mud. Dirty water was flowing down a man-made ditch; something had been moved to higher ground. “My god!” The declaration burst from his throat when he saw it.
It had once been a large wooden ship whose deck had long since rotted away, leaving a sixty- or seventy-foot keel with a pair of iron objects—the remnants of two cannons—lying athwart it. A rusty anchor lay to the side, along with other scattered, unidentifiable items, turned black by gooey mud. A pair of iron rods lay across what had been the bow of the ship, seemingly some sort of staffs that had been stuck in the deck. A strange odor rose from the pit, attracting a hawk that was circling above them. The smell turned the people’s throats dry, inducing a sense of nausea. The keel, exposed to the dry air, had already begun to turn red. Water seeped from holes in the wood, white at first, then red. Before long, people smelled blood and backed away from the sickening odor. The hawk was still circling, carried by the air currents.
The man in charge of the dig was crouching off to the side, having a cigarette. “That’s enough gawking,” he said as he stood up. “We’ve got work to do. We’ll chop it up and carry the wood back to the kitchen for kindling.”
Sui Buzhao was in motion before the man’s words had died out. Standing as close to the keel as possible, he shouted, “Don’t you dare!…” Shocked silence. “That’s my ship!” he said, pointing to the relic. “It belongs to Uncle Zheng He and me.” His words were met by laughter. Again the man in charge told his men to go on down and start working. “Hey, you!” Sui Buzhao’s gaunt white face turned purple; the blue headband went pop and fell away, like the broken string of a lute. He ran down, picked up the rusty anchor, and raised it over his head.
“Anyone who so much as touches my ship gets this!”
Baopu and Jiansu were among the onlookers. Jiansu cried out to his uncle, but Buzhao didn’t hear him. He stood firm, gnashing his teeth, his wispy beard quivering. Someone commented that the ship must have been buried for centuries and might even be a national treasure. When he recommended holding off until they could get an expert opinion, the others agreed. So the man in charge sent someone to get Li Xuantong.
The man returned to report that Li was meditating and was not to be bothered. But he had recommended his good friend, the herbalist Guo Yun. Half an hour later, Guo arrived at the site, and the crowd parted to let him through. Hoisting the hem of his robe as he negotiated the muddy ground, he walked up to the keel, knelt down, and studied it carefully. Then he circled it, like a grazing sheep. Finally, he narrowed his eyes and stretched out his arms as if feeling for something, though there was nothing within two feet of his reach. He groped the air for a moment, a series of snorts emerging from his nose as his Adam’s apple rose and fell. He pulled his arms back and gazed skyward, just as some bird droppings fell onto his upturned face. He was oblivious. Then he looked down and gazed at the ditch, staring at it for a full half hour, during which the crowd held its collective breath. The unbearable anxiety was palpable. Slowly the old healer turned to the people.
“Which direction was the bow pointing?” he asked.
No one knew. At first, all anyone had cared about was chopping the keel up to feed the kitchen stove, so they’d carried it up willy-nilly. No one could recall which way it was facing.
“Who cares which direction it was facing?” the foreman said.
The old healer’s face darkened. “That is critically important. If it was facing north, it was headed for the ocean; south, it would have wound through the mountains. And if it was facing Wali, it would have stopped at our pier.” The people exchanged glances but said nothing. “This was a warship that sailed on our Luqing River and was sunk during territorial battles in the old days. It is a true national treasure. No one is to touch it, young or old. Post a guard, day and night. We must send our fastest messenger to the capital to report this find.”
“I’ll go,” Sui Buzhao volunteered as he laid down the anchor and elbowed his way through the crowd.
Baopu took Jiansu home and went looking for his uncle. He was nowhere to be found. Then when they were crossing the path they heard weeping inside. It was, they discovered, Hanzhang, so they rushed in to see what was wrong. Their sister was lying on the kang crying. Taken aback by the sight, they asked why she was crying. She pointed to the stable. They ran outside and went to the stable, where they saw that the old chestnut was dead. Their uncle was there, too, trembling uncontrollably and muttering something incomprehensible at the dead horse. Baopu knew instinctively that his uncle had planned to ride the horse to report the finding. But now he couldn’t. Baopu and Jiansu fell to their knees at the horse’s side.
Eventually, people at the provincial capital sent a team of experts to remove the old ship, and the residents of Wali never saw it again.
FIVE (#ulink_d8f8b218-95db-5fa4-8a59-540a307c9df1)
Many years before the old ship was excavated, that is, the spring after Sui Yingzhi died, his second wife, Huizi, followed him in death. The impressive main house of the family estate burned to the ground that day, incinerating Huizi amid the cinders on the kang, a sight too gruesome to behold. Baopu, the only witness, secretly buried her. Jiansu would later ask how she had died, and Baopu would reply that she had taken poison, which was true. But there were many things he did not reveal to his younger brother. Now that the main house was gone, the foundation had been converted into a vegetable garden tended by the two brothers and their sister. Late at night, moonbeams cast their light on the bean trellises, from which crystalline drops of dew fell to the ground.
Baopu recalled how, six months after his father died, Sui Buzhao came to see Huizi. “Sister-in-law,” he said, “I think you should move out of the family home.” She said no. “Now that my brother has passed on,” he said, “you don’t have the good fortune to hold off the evil tied up in this house.” But she ignored him. Several days passed before Buzhao, his face beet red, his body trembling, returned. “Huizi!” he called out after barging into the house. “Huizi!” He fidgeted with his clothes. When she came out and saw him, her surprise was mixed with annoyance.
“What do you want?”
He pointed outside. “My room out there is neat and tidy. I even sprayed perfume on the floor.” She just stared at him, not sure what he was getting at. His chin quivered, and he blinked nervously. Finally, with a stomp of his foot, he said, “Come live with this wretched man, what do you say?” Hardly able to believe her ears, she reached out and slapped him, giving him a bloody nose. “I mean it, you should come with me,” he said, biting his lip. He was obviously not going to be easily put off, so she picked up a pair of scissors. He turned and fled.
“I’m afraid there’s no future for your stepmother,” Buzhao said to Baopu. “She tried to stab me with scissors. Instead of thanking me for my kindness, she treats me like a stranger. I’ve been a useless vagabond all my life, but I’ve never had an indecent thought where she is concerned. I may be dirt poor, but I don’t owe anyone a cent, just what she needs to get through life. Well, to hell with her! She’s never gone to sea, never seen the world. There are plenty of women down south who have moved in with their brothers-in-law after losing their husbands. But, like I say, to hell with her! She has no future!”
Sui Buzhao left and never again entered the main house as long as Huizi was alive. Before long his prediction came true. Some people came to drive her out of the house, which they said now belonged to the town. Baopu urged his stepmother to move, but she set her jaw and refused. She didn’t say a word; she just refused to move. In the end she sent the three children over to side rooms, leaving her alone in that big house. Seeing how stubborn she could be, her brow creased in an expression of strength and hostility, Baopu was reminded of how she had injured her hand by pounding on the table after his father had returned from paying off debts.
After Huizi died along with the main house, militiamen kept watch over Baopu and his siblings for a long time before letting them be. All this time Zhao Duoduo led a team of people in searching the site for hidden treasure, poking the ground with metal poles. To their enormous disappointment they came up empty.
Now that the side buildings were occupied by the brothers and their sister, Sui Buzhao often came over to where the main house had stood. Baopu tried to talk him into moving back into the compound, but he said no. So the three children occupied one of the buildings and used the others for storage. Few books were left from their library, but as political ill winds began to blow, Baopu hid what few remained in a casket. As Hanzhang grew older she more and more closely resembled her mother, but she had the temperament of her father. She moved into one of the other side rooms to be alone.
Around the time of Sui Yingzhi’s death the people who had worked for the family left, all but Guigui, who had nowhere to go. When she wasn’t cooking for the brothers and their sister she sat in the doorway of one of the buildings shelling beans. She was three years younger than Baopu, with whom she’d bathed together when they were both children. Now when she shelled beans she often looked over at him and blushed. One night, after the brothers had fallen asleep, Guigui saw that the lantern was still lit, so she went into their room; she stopped when she noticed Baopu’s muscular shoulders as he lay asleep in the red light of the room. One of his legs was sticking out from under the quilt. She had never seen so much of him uncovered. Worried that he might catch cold, she covered his legs and then his shoulders. The smell of his naked body brought tears to her eyes. She dried her eyes, but the tears kept coming. Then she bent down and kissed his shoulder. He was sleeping so soundly he did not wake up. But Jiansu did, in time to see Guigui bending over his brother’s shoulder. He sat up to see what she was doing. Only half awake, he mumbled, “Hm?” Guigui stopped and ran out of the room. Suddenly wide awake, unable to go back to sleep, Jiansu blew out the lantern and lay there smiling.
