The Boat to Redemption by Su Tong Read Free Book Online Page A

With time and opportunity on my side, I took as long as I needed to decide
     what to do with this special notebook, and wound up making a bold decision. I’d neither hand it over to Father nor give it
     back to Mother. I’d hide it away for myself.
    To this day I can’t tell you who I hid that notebook for. Was it for Father or was it for Mother? Maybe it was for me. This
     secret most likely impacted on the rest of my life. I committed everything Mother had written in it – or should I say, every
     one of Father’s indiscretions – to memory. Even with the hatred she felt as she recorded everything, her handwriting was always
     neat and pleasing to the eye. The themes and content were unsurprising. She noted Father’s infidelities in great detail: numbers,
     times and locations. In some places she added angry comments: ‘Shameless! … Obscene! … I could die!’ To my astonishment, I
     knew the names of some of the women, including the mother of my schoolmate Li Shengli, and Zhao Chuntang’s younger sister,
     Zhao Chunmei. Even Aunty Sun, who ran the salvage station, was in there. These women had always impressed me as being proper
     and virtuous. Why were their names in Mother’s notebook?

Paradise
    H ARDLY ANYONE today can relate the history of the Sunnyside Fleet with any degree of accuracy.
    Let’s start with the tugboat. Owned by a shipping company, it ran on diesel, had twin rudders and plenty of horsepower. Seven
     or eight workers manned the tug, although they worked only when there were barges that needed to be moved. Each time out counted
     as a shift, and when that shift was over, they went back to their homes on the banks of the river. Sailors love to drink,
     and the more the younger ones drank, the meaner they got. They could be having a normal conversation when suddenly fists would
     fly. I saw one of them jump into the river with the jagged edge of a bottle stuck in his chest and swim to the riverside hospital,
     cursing the whole way. The older hands were more easy-going and not nearly as volatile when they were drunk. One of them,
     a man with a full beard, would lie out on the deck and sleep like a log. Another of the older ones – with a face like a monkey
     – was in the habit of showering on the afterdeck. Stark naked, he would work up a lather and then rinse off with cold water,
     making eyes at the women and girls on the barges. I didn’t think much of that gang.
    For that matter, I didn’t think much of anyone. The Sunnyside Fleet boasted eleven barges, manned by eleven families, most
     with shady backgrounds. In that respect, we were all pretty muchalike. Since Father’s situation was still unsettled, our background was as murky as any of the others. Taking me aboard one
     of the barges with him could hardly be called exile, nor was it some sort of banishment; rather, it was a reclassification.
    The boat people called a spot upriver named Plum Mountain their ancestral home. You can no longer find it on any Golden Sparrow
     River regional map. During the construction of a reservoir, Plum Mountain township, with its thirteen villages, was flooded,
     and now the place is marked on maps in blue – Victory Reservoir. Only an idiot would believe that Plum Mountain was really
     their ancestral home, since their speech was a mish-mash of accents and dialects, with pithy, bizarre ways of saying things.
     Let’s say we were heading upriver towards Horsebridge. They’d say we were heading ‘down’ to it. They called eating ‘nibbling’,
     and relieving themselves was ‘snapping it off’. As for sex, which people ashore seldom even mentioned, they were perfectly
     happy to talk about it any time, any place. The word they used was ‘thump’. If several men were sitting around with conspiratorial
     looks on their faces, all you heard them talking about was thump, thump, thump. Why ‘thump’? Because what most people consider
     to be a serious social issue was just an ordinary