The shop customers peppered Old Cui with questions. ‘What’s wrong with her?’
Ignoring their questions, Old Cui muttered, ‘Me, mentor her? I’m a barber, how am I supposed to do that? Orders from the organization, he says. All we do in the barbershop is cut and wash and shave and blow-dry, what kind of mentoring is that? So she can go to Zhongnanhai to shave the heads of the Central Committee?’
Little Chen would have gone in to console Huixian if he’d known how, but all he could do was cast a perplexed look at Old Cui, who covertly gestured in the direction of the boiler room. ‘Zhao Chuntang was here to hang out Huixian,’ he said softly. ‘Starting tomorrow, the barbershop is where she’ll hang out officially. Zhao’s idea is to bring people of a kind together, so from tomorrow, we three are officially comrades-in-arms.’
Little Chen could hardly believe his ears. ‘You’re joking, right? No matter how far she’s fallen, she can’t come here to be a barber, can she?’
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Old Cui said. ‘What makes you think I’d joke about something as important as this? I didn’t believe it myself at first. Who’d have thought that the grand Little Tiemei would wind up working with us?’
News of Huixian’s downfall spread faster than a racehorse. The crews of the Sunnyside Fleet had all heard by the next day that Huixian had been hung out by Zhao Chuntang. People disregard Fate at their peril. Over the course of several years, Huixian had not been able to escape her fate. The boat people’s expectations regarding the direction her life would take had run the gamut from county to district, even to the provincial capital; as for her workplace, a broadcasting station or propaganda team had been mentioned, as had the possibility of her becoming a member of the Women’s Federation or County Committee. Not a negative thought had ever emerged, and since they had seen her heading in only one direction — up — who could have guessed that she’d wind up in the People’s Barbershop? Huixian, Huixian, the pride of the Sunnyside Fleet; her proud figure would from now on be seen only through the glass of the People’s Barbershop window, continuously under the critical gaze of men and women of all ages. Her proud hands would repay the residents of Milltown and the nurturing people of the Sunnyside Fleet. Huixian, Huixian, from now on, she would serve the people by shaving their beards and cutting their hair.
That year Huixian turned eighteen.
PART TWO
Haircut
IN MY eleven years aboard the barge I never posted a letter of my own. But I stopped by the post office every time I went ashore to post letters for my father. I was his postman.
A large wooden box had been nailed to the wall outside the Milltown Post Office, put there for the use of the boat people. Year in and year out, it remained empty, which is understandable when you consider that most of the boat people were illiterate. When their sons and daughters reached adulthood and started their own families, they continued their lives aboard the barges. If they didn’t meet on the Golden Sparrow River, they met on the piers, and so asking someone to write a letter and attach an eight-fen postage stamp was more than merely a matter of dropping one’s pants to fart, it was a waste of money and energy. For a long time, the only users of the fleet postbox were the occupants of barge number seven. Once every month or two I received a letter from Mother. In it she urged me to study hard, reminding me that though I was living in less than ideal circumstances it was my duty to work hard. She insisted that I set up long-term goals, the mere thought of which gave me a headache. Sure, I had goals, all of them were related to Huixian, but I couldn’t say so. If I did, I’d either become the butt of people’s jokes or a sinner in their eyes. How could I tell Mother? I couldn’t, so I didn’t reply to her letters, which came less and less frequently. Eventually Father’s letters were the only things that ever showed up in the postbox, where they waited for me to go ashore. Everyone knew that my father was an orphan with no siblings, no relatives and no friends. At first he wrote to the leadership of the County Party Committee, but kept going higher, to district Party and governmental offices: the civil administration, the organization bureau, the commission for inspecting discipline, the history office, the office for complaint letters and calls, even the family-planning commission. Throughout my eleven years on the barge, Father sent appeals to leading Party bureaus and offices regarding his status as the son of a martyr, demanding a definitive ruling and an official certificate that recognized his martyr-family status. Unfortunately, the red-lined envelopes I received in reply were invariably thin and light, and I never saw one of those certificates, which Father had described to me as being red with gold print. Instead they were standard-issue letters with a series of dotted lines. Sometimes Father’s name was filled in, sometimes not. ‘Comrade so-andso,’ they read, ‘your request is very important to us. At a future date we will give it careful attention and scrutiny. Revolutionary greetings to you.’
More than once he told me that the only inheritance he could leave me was one of those martyr-family certificates. I was no fool, I knew the value of one of those things, and on this matter we were in rare agreement. He diligently wrote his letters aboard the barge, and I diligently posted them for him. I never went into Milltown without performing the same task: I went into the post office, bought a stamp, pasted it on to the envelope, and dropped it into the big green postbox. It became as mechanical and as fruitless a routine as scooping ladlefuls of water into the river — not even a tiny splash was made.
On my way to the post office one day I saw a scowling, uniformed man emerge with a drawerful of keys, which clattered as he walked. He dropped the drawer on the ground in front of the green postbox, which he opened with one of the keys, releasing an avalanche of white envelopes into the drawer. I stepped up and looked at the drawer, but all I saw were envelopes piled on top of one another, with no discernible names or addresses, and, of course, no return addresses. I instinctively followed the drawer on its trip back, until the man became aware of my presence. He spun around and shouted angrily, ‘What the hell are you up to?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’m just posting a letter.’
He looked at me suspiciously. ‘You’re from the Sunnyside Fleet, aren’t you? Aren’t you Ku Wenxuan’s son?’ He shook the drawer in his hands. ‘You came at the right time. Toss your letter in here.’
I took another look at the drawer, then glanced back at him, with his gloomy face and crafty eyes, and wondered if I was being taken in. Why should I trust him, or that drawer of his? I waved him off and walked back to the postbox, whose dark, gaping mouth seemed to draw me to it. The lock on its side was still swinging back and forth. Was it taking me in too? Why should I trust that postbox? It was, after all, Milltown’s postbox, in a town where people said even the sky belonged to Zhao Chuntang. That had to include the postbox. Be careful, I told myself, be very careful. So I stuck Father’s letter into my bag; better to forgo the one close at hand in favour of the more distant one. I could go to Wufu to post my letter, or, for that matter, Phoenix. It didn’t matter where I went, but I knew I wasn’t going to commit my father’s future to the Milltown postbox.
After that, on my trips to Milltown, in addition to buying provisions, there was another thing I needed to do — some might have seen it as important, others might not have. It was something I did for myself, something I couldn’t talk about.