Free The Boat to Redemption by Su Tong Page A

ever seen. ‘He’s dead!’ she cried. ‘My husband, Little Tang, is dead, and Ku Wenxuan killed him!’
    That was when I noticed a white flower in Zhao Chunmei’s hair. Her shoes were also white – not high heels, but funeral shoes,
     with hempen ties on the backs and heels. Her puffy cheeks distorted what she was saying. I understood that her husband was
     dead and that she’d said Father had killed him. But I didn’t know why. My father had been on board our barge for a long time
     now, so how could he have killed Little Tang? I’d always been fascinated with death, so I felt like asking when Little Tang
     had died and whether he’d committed suicide or was killed by someone else. But Zhao Chunmei was in no mood to say more. She
     just glowered at me. Finally, she gnashed her teeth and said, ‘Ku Wenxuan, you’ll repay this blood debt one of these days!’
    Her menacing glare frightened me. A woman’s face, no matter how pretty, becomes a terrible sight when it shows a thirst for
     vengeance. The look on Zhao Chunmei’s face was so terrifying that I instinctively stepped backwards to get away from her,
     reversing all the way to the loading dock. When I passed beneath a crane, I glanced up at Master Operator Liu in his cage,
     who signalled for me to climb up, as if he had something important to tell me. He didn’t. He just wasn’t a man who could mind
     his own business. Pointing to Zhao Chunmei, he said, ‘Don’t upset her. She hasn’t been herself for the past few days, ever
     since her husband killed himself with a pesticide.’
    ‘I didn’t do anything,’ I said. ‘She upset
me
. Besides, it wasn’tme who gave her husband the pesticide, so what’s it got to do with me?’
    ‘It’s got nothing to do with you,’ he said, ‘but everything to do with your dad. He’s the one who made Little Tang wear a
     green hat – you know, a cuckold. People say that the green hat crushed him.’
    ‘Crushed by a green hat – so what! She let my dad thump her, didn’t she? Nobody forced her. Besides, he wore that green hat
     for years willingly enough, and no one forced him, either. My dad did it with lots of women. How come
he
decided to kill himself? Stop spreading malicious gossip!’
    ‘You don’t know a damned thing,’ Liu said. ‘Willing, you say? Whoever heard of a man willing to wear a green hat? It’s not
     their choice to make. You’re right, Little Tang wore that hat for years, but hardly anybody knew. As long as people pretended
     nothing was wrong, he could do the same. But when your dad fell from power, lots of people started talking. Then the backbiting
     started, with people saying that Little Tang had handed his wife over to someone in a position of leadership for his own advancement.
     Out on the street, people whispered things. Could he pretend he was deaf? When he went to the bathhouse, the old-timers laughed
     at him. When he couldn’t take it any longer, he got into a fight, and wound up with a bloody nose. They offered him cotton
     to stop the bleeding, but he refused. Instead, he threw on his clothes and went straight to the pharmacy, supposedly to buy
     Mercurochrome. But what he actually bought was a bottle of DDT, which he drank on the way home. People who saw him thought
     it was alcohol. Now I ask you, the way Little Tang died, wouldn’t you say he was crushed by that green hat?’
    What Liu said made sense. It wasn’t very scientific, but since I didn’t know what it felt like to wear a green hat, my opinion
     didn’t count for much. But still I said, ‘There are internal and externalcauses for everything, but the internal causes are the main ones. Most of the responsibility for Little Tang’s death lies
     with him. You can’t blame my father for what happened.’
    ‘Don’t give me any of that internal and external bullshit,’ Liu said. ‘Do you think I don’t know my Marxism-Leninism? I never
     said your dad was the internal cause. If he had been, then