The Ancient Ship. Zhang Wei
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