The cannons were booming when Ah Moun got the pains of labour. Ma Qin came to our boat to help with the delivery (snapping at Ah Moun to ‘Stop your hollering. You aren’t the first to push a baby Tanka out of your muckhole.’). The labour was very short, and the baby slipped right out. I could tell by Ma Qin’s eyes that it hadn’t been born right. Ma Qin weren’t the sort to take fright easy, but she turned pale, covered her mouth and said, ‘Oh, you poor thing.’ My heart shrinking, I went round to look at my first-born child, and what I saw sickened me. Our baby had the eyes of a fish, and its legs were welded together like a tail. Our baby son gasped but, like a fish out of water, could not breathe and died.
Ah Moun changed after that, and her dimples went away because she no longer smiled. One day I came home from fishing and she wasn’t there. She didn’t return to our boat the next night or the next, and I heard from my mother-in-law that she’d gone off to work in a laundry in Macao. Fisherman Po offered to sail us over to Macao so I could ‘knock some sense into her, and see she behaves like a proper wife’. But it didn’t seem right to sail to Macao to fetch her back. Ah Moun wasn’t the only one who’d had a change of heart.
VIII
Not long after Ah Moun had left, Old Fisherman Po and I were casting our nets out at sea when the sky turned the colour of bruises and a squally wind whipped the waves up to an unruly height. Out of nowhere a pirate junk appeared, and a scrambling dragon of sea bandits came towards us with scurrying oars. As we struggled to sail our boat against the fierce wind and back to Canton, Fisherman Po shouted up to the Heavens, ‘How have we offended thee, Sea Goddess, for you to visit such calamity upon our boat?’ Fishermen Po never failed to burn a joss stick or two at her shrine before setting sail each morning. Truly, it was a mystery.
A boat hook caught the side of us, and the bandits leapt aboard, weaselly-eyed and waving cutlasses about. All we had was our basket of wriggling catch, and feeling wronged for having chased us across the waves for such little reward, the sea robbers set fire to our sails. If the bandits had left us then, Fisherman Po and I could have put out the blaze and rowed back to Canton. But they stayed aboard to beat me up. Fiery sails gusting in the wind, they kicked me to the bottom of the boat. Fearing that they’d beat me to death, Fisherman Po shouted, ‘Leave the boy! There ain’t no fairness in six against one.’
‘Life ain’t fair, old man,’ growled one of sea robbers.
Then he jerked Fisherman Po’s head back by his queue, opened his throat from ear to ear with his blade and shoved him overboard without even looking to see how he fell. Then the sea robber came for me, and I thought, Now I’m done for. I thought of Fishwife Po and Ma Qin. Who’d tell our womenfolk what had become of us?
But the sea robbers didn’t kill me. They took me aboard the pirate junk instead.
IX
Sixty men lived aboard the Scourge of the Celestial Seas, Tankas who’d turned to banditry after their property had been shipwrecked, fugitive Hakkas who’d withdrawn into the world of pirates to flee punishment for crimes on land, and captives from hijacked fishing boats, like me. Chief Yang was the head of the Scourge, and then there were the bandits, who drank grog and puffed on opium pipes, threw knives at squealing rats and bet on sparring quails they tormented in cages (so they charged at each other, beaks stabbing to the blood-spattered death when set free). The kidnapped fisherboys were deck hands or galley slaves, hoisting the sails, sculling and manning the fast boats and obeying the bandits’ orders. The sea bandits were a barbarous lot and the Scourge was rowdy with thrashing fists and spillages of tooth and blood. At night I slept on deck, preferring the wind and rain to the violence of the quarters below. But there were nights I was ordered down to Captain Yang’s cabin, and had no choice but to go.
I crawled up to the deck after the first time, torn and bleeding inside and out. I leant over the deck rail and heaved my guts up, down the side of the Scourge. I wasn’t Ah Qin any more. I was a battered piece of meat, skewered by Yang and his gang. I leant over the railing and stared out at the dark waves roaring and crashing over the depths, as the Scourge tilted this way and that, days from land. I cursed the Goddess of the Sea for luring me away from Canton to this leaky vessel of brutes.
‘My destiny is to be at sea, is it, Mazu? To be prisoner on this ship of thugs? To be raped by Chief Yang and his gang?’
The sea was silent, and I cursed Mazu again. Then I stared out over the dark, tumbling waves, tormented by the urge to leap. Thoughts of Ma Qin and my sisters were the only things that kept me on board. It was my duty as first-born son to get back to the wash boat, and there was no going back as a drowned man. So I curled up behind a coil of rope, and the waves lapped at the broadside, swaying the filthy cradle of the Scourge and sending me into a fitful sleep.
There’s a saying about Tanka sea bandits, ‘A dragon on the water, a maggot on land.’ Well, Captain Yang was a maggot on the land and water. He even looked like a maggot, with his shrunken head and weak, receded chin.
Yang was the grandson of the legendary Cheng I, who had ruled the waves fifty years back with his Red Flag Fleet and amassed a vast fortune from the vessels that trespassed upon ‘his’ waters. In the days of Cheng I, the Red Flag Fleet had over forty ships armed by cannons and guns, and a thousand-strong crew. Half a century later, all that was left of the ‘fleet’ was one ill-rigged, three-masted leaky junk, and Captain Yang had no vast fortune, because he was too scared to chase the merchant clippers for the cargoes of opium and gunpowder casks. Far from conquering the waves, the good ship Scourge had conquered only a few defenceless fishing boats.
Chief Yang was nothing but a barnacle clinging to his grandfather’s reputation, but he swaggered about in his turban and robes like Emperor of the Sea.
‘Come here, slave,’ he’d order. ‘On your knees. Open your mouth.’
If you were the ‘slave’ he was speaking to, you had better obey him. You had better go down on your knees and open your maw — or else. If you were lucky, he’d just spit in you, and have you swallow the gob of nastiness down. If you were not so lucky, he and his men would have a pissing contest, shooting streams of yellow down your throat. The Scourge was a black-hearted ship, and evil the stuff of everyday. Upon sighting a kidnapped Hakka hanging from the mast one early dawn, a noose choking his neck, Turtle Li had smirked, ‘He’d had too much of a good thing.’ They’d raped him with a broom handle the night before.
And so a year of my life went by on the Scourge of the Celestial Seas. We captives weren’t fed much, and I became thin as bones, the strength and bulk of my days of sailing with Fisherman Po wasting away. My teeth loosened and my eyesight dimmed, as though the wickedness I saw on the Scourge was slowly turning me blind. Night after night I slept up on the deck, where the sea tempted me with her dark, crashing waves.
‘Come to me, Ah Qin,’ she murmured, slapping the side of the Scourge. ‘Come swim in my depths. All of your suffering will be over in a few watery breaths. .’
I thought of Ma Qin and my sisters, and that life’s a blessing you shouldn’t throw away. But the lure of those roaring waves was harder and harder to resist. I prayed to Mazu for strength, but the Sea Goddess had deafened her ears. The Sea Goddess had turned her back on me. So I turned my back on her and became a godless man.