I washed thoroughly, scrubbing every patch of myself, thinking it was possible I might never wash again. I crept back into the bunk room after the lights were out, so nobody saw me hoist into my bunk with all my clothes on, even my shoes.
I lay as quiet as a stone while the moon rose over the Tianjin rooftops. The roomful of men, worn-out kitchen men who had cooked by hot steamers and cleaned and gone finally to their beds, quieted to a soft forest of sighs and snores.
I waited hours to get up. To climb down I had to step on the bed of the man below. “I’m sorry, Comrade.” And I whispered a local slang word for the bathroom. The man snorted and returned to sleep. I hunched down the center aisle, holding my midsection as if ill, concealing my bundle. I slipped out and passed the rear of the kitchens. The last of the men were inside cleaning, and they had set racks of leftover buns in the doorway, which they would divide up later and take home. I took five dozen, wrapped them in three tight cloths in my bundle, and continued on, holding my middle, into the latrine, then out again through a back door that gave onto a Tianjin alley. We were never prisoners in our workers’ collectives, but if a man did leave, there was nowhere else to go.
I set out walking. First I cut across the city, with its silent shadows, and then through the hours of thinning buildings and finally the countryside, due east, by the stars. Later, by the sun. I walked without stopping until I came, finally, to the flats that led to the sea. The air was cold, which was good for the baozi. As a cook I was well fed, better than most people, and I had the reserves to walk a night and a day without food. I only drank, stopping when I could at farmers’ pumps.
By the time I reached the flat, fine, oily sand it was night again, and I could walk no farther. I stumbled out onto a pier crowded with boats. There were fishing boats, squat, of dark, heavy wood, and lined up in their berths, the larger craft – metal-hulled diesel-engine boats scavenged from the years of war, patched, remade, bumping the wood pilings, lines clinking. I had taken my last steps; if I did not lie down, I would collapse. So I staggered out along a wooden plank beside one of the berths, maneuvered my leg over the rail, and stepped aboard a boat. It was a large one, fourteen meters of hull at least. Three metal doors. I pulled at one; it opened. Down a ladder was a wedge-shaped space, and a bunk. I untied the baozi from my waist and collapsed.
When I awoke, a man was bending over me with a long knife, the tip of which he pressed ever so gently against my throat. I felt my eyes popping wide as I shrank away, but he followed me easily with the sharp point.
“Don’t move,” he said in the Tianjin dialect. With his free hand he checked me for weapons, feeling only my sewn-in hukou and a few unpromising coins in my pocket.
“If you want to kill me, it’s no problem,” I croaked. “I am dead already.”
He grazed me again with the knife, as if considering it. He had a wide, squat face, creased and salt-burned with thick caterpillar brows. It was impossible to tell his age. “You look alive to me.”
“Not for long.”
“Unless?” he prompted.
“Yuan zou gao fei,” I whispered, Travel far and fly high. Slip away. Disappear. Start again.
I saw in his face that he understood. “Where?”
“Anywhere,” I said. A minute ago I had been a dead man. Now my heart raced with hope.
He looked me up and down. “You don’t have anything.”
“I have that,” I said, and pointed with a look. “Open it.”
He finally pulled the knife back a few inches and reached for the bundle, still keeping his eyes on me.
He untied the first knot and I could see the change in his face when he caught a whiff of the aroma, and then he laid back the cloth and saw the baozi, cooked, in their neat, slightly compressed rows. He leaned his face close to them and breathed. In those days meat dumplings were festival food, and though a man like him was blessed that he might eat his fill of fish, a meat dumpling was something he tasted only a few times a year. And these were buns from Gou Bu Li.
He glanced back at me. He had decided. “All right,” he said. “I’m going south. I have cargo going to a work unit in Fuzhou. I can drop you near there. It’ll be eighteen days, maybe twenty. I have four men. We go out on the tide tonight. You stay here until I tell you.” He threw me a boiled-wool blanket, left, and locked the door.
It was twenty-one days to Fujian Province, around the Shandong peninsula and down the coast past the great mouth of the Yangtze. When finally we came to the first wet fingers of the Min Jiang estuary, north of Fuzhou, he said I should get off there instead of near the city. Go ashore in some quiet place. Hide for a while.
Hide where? I thought. How? But we came to a small cove and the captain took the dinghy down and put me off in calm, waist-deep water. We parted like brothers, with promises to meet again in this life or the next. I waded ashore in what felt like liquid ice, with my dry clothes over my head. They hauled up the dinghy and waited until they saw me emerge on a beach of pebbles and dry myself before they reversed their engines. Even then I stood waving until the lights of the boat had receded far out onto the water. Then I turned and walked straight inland.
The trouble was, there was no land. Once I stepped off the pebbles I was in knee-deep water. I thought if I kept going I would be out of it, but the opposite happened. I was swallowed by water. Darkness fell. Creatures awoke. I heard the calls and slithers of every kind of inhabitant. I sloshed forward. I didn’t know where I was. I was not cold; instead I burned with fever. I had to stop, lie down. I couldn’t find a dry spot big enough. The best I could do was to sit in a wet lap of roots, half in the water, half out, my head against the tree, until I lost consciousness.
When I awoke I was lying in a flat-bottomed boat, warm, heavenly, covered with a blanket, looking up into the freckled face of my mother. She was poling the boat. Surpassing Crystal, with her kind face and her strong hands; what was she doing here? Sitting behind my head with his hand on my shoulders was a young boy. It was myself. It was a dream. No. It was death. I had died. That was it.
I was not dead, I was ill, and I was taken through the sweet milk of human goodness to a rough house on stilts, where I burned and sweated with fever. The woman cared for me. Hers was the face of God to me. She rarely left me when it was at its worst. She cooled me with wet cloths. The boy, called Longshan, came and went, helping her.
I grew better. They lived in the swamp, far from their nearest neighbors in the rural commune. I sat on the porch, weakened, watching the light change over the waterweeds, which teemed, full of life, even in the approaching winter. Liuli – that was the woman’s name – was a deft hunter and trapper. Her job in the commune was trapping eels for the workers’ kitchens. This was the year when Chinese had to cease cooking at home and eat their meals in mess halls run by their work units. Luckily Liuli lived far from the village, and so from this particular social experiment she was excused. She delivered live eels twice a week and in return she received a modest quantity of rice, flour, oil, matches, and other staples.
Naturally she was able to supplement this with the skimmings from her catch, but eel was only the beginning of what Liuli managed to bring to the table. She and Longshan went out and came back with snakes, waterfowl, frogs, and all manner of waterweeds and lily bulbs and lotus roots and aromatic marsh plants. I watched them with awe and ate their good, simple food. I grew strong again.
They understood that no one should know I was there. Liuli said nothing on her trips to deliver the eels, and outside of that they saw almost no one anyway. The boy did not go to school. He had no father. What became of the man who begat him I never knew. He was a lonely child, half-wild; he attached himself to me as quickly as a water vine.