Mountain Girl River Girl Read online

  PUFFIN CANADA

  MOUNTAIN GIRL, RIVER GIRL

  TING-XING YE, born in Shanghai in 1952, was an English interpreter for the Chinese government before leaving China in 1987. Her memoir, A Leaf in the Bitter Wind, has been published in nine countries. She is also the author of Throwaway Daughter and the award-winning White Lily. She lives in Orillia, Ontario.

  Also by Ting-xing Ye

  A Leaf in the Bitter Wind

  My Name Is Number Four

  Throwaway Daughter

  White Lily

  Three Monks, No Water

  Weighing the Elephant

  Share the Sky

  Mountain Girl,

  River Girl

  a novel

  Ting-xing Ye

  PUFFIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Published in Puffin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2008

  Published in this edition, 2009

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (OPM)

  Copyright © Ting-xing Ye, 2008

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part

  of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,

  or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

  recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright

  owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available

  upon request to the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-0-14-316813-3

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that

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  A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

  AND USAGE

  The standard pin-yin notation is used through-out. Most letters in pin-yin are pronounced more or less the same as in English.

  Pan-pan is pronounced as in English.

  Shui-lian is pronounced “shway lee-an.”

  The words Lao (old, venerable) and Xiao (young) when used with a surname are common terms of respect in China.

  For Bill, who calls China his second home.

  Shan chong shui fu yi wu lu

  Liu an hua ming you yi cun

  Mountain folds into mountain,

  river flows into river,

  with no path in sight.

  In the shadow of a willow

  wildflowers glow.

  A village comes in view.

  —FROM “TOURING SHANXI VILLAGE”

  BY SONG DYNASTY POET LU YOU, 1125–1210

  Chapter One

  Pan-pan

  “Give the back of your neck a good scrub.”

  Startled, her heart pounding in her throat, Pan-pan gripped the rim of the enamel washbasin to contain her irritation. “Yes, Ah-Po,” she murmured.

  “And behind your ears.”

  “Yes, Ah-Po.”

  “Good Heavens! They’re a whole shade darker than the rest of your skin,” the old woman rattled on. “You should know they’re also part of your face.”

  “Are they really?” Pan-pan muttered, slowly turning away from the stone sink. Blinking and squeezing soapy water out of her eyes, she looked up to find that the tip of her nose was only an inch away from her grandmother’s.

  “Yes, Ah-Po,” she said again.

  “And—”

  “And,” Pan-pan cut her off, lifting her chin and staring into her grandmother’s eyes, “give my armpits a good wash and dust them with the talcum powder you so kindly bought for me.”

  “Aiya, Pan-er,” Ah-Po exclaimed, her voice rising. “Did you eat gunpowder for supper last night? Fine, then. Do whatever you want! I’m leaving. Why do I care so much?” she lamented, reaching to brush soapy water off Pan-pan’s bare shoulder with her open palm before she turned and shuffled toward the door. There she raised her plump arms in surrender and called out, “I give up. It’s your face, after all. And your body.”

  “You’ll never give up!” Pan-pan shot back angrily, but not until the kitchen door had shut behind her grandmother. “As for today, my face and my body are all yours.” She paused, making sure that Ah-Po was gone, and yelled, “And don’t call me Pan-er. I’m not a boy. My name is Pan-pan!”

  Pan-pan had told Ah-Po time after time that she didn’t like to be sneaked up on, particularly when she was washing herself. That was why for months she had been getting up each morning before anyone else in the house. Now, two weeks before her fifteenth birthday, Pan-pan enjoyed having the tiny kitchen to herself. She cherished the quiet moments and solitude, or her “privacy,” a word she had heard Xin-Ma—new mother—use a lot lately.

  Rubbing her neck with a rough cloth, Pan-pan held back another surge of fury as she realized that even the hinges on the door had betrayed her, letting her grandmother come into the kitchen unheard. For as long as she could remember, the warped wooden door had squeaked each time it was pushed open. Didn’t Mom use to say that when a person is feeling low or struck by bad luck, she can be bullied by her own shadow?

  Thinking about her mother brought tears to Pan-pan’s eyes, and, overcome with frustration, she wiped them away with the back of her hand more forcefully than necessary. Today’s grand ceremony would mark the third anniversary of Mom’s death. Her father had remarried, and over a year ago Xin-Ma had given birth to Gui-yang, Pan-pan’s half-brother. No matter how hard she tried, Pan-pan couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for the coming rituals.

  No one in the family had ever explained to Pan-pan why her mother had died so unexpectedly at the age of thirty-six. People are not supposed to die so young, and Mom hadn’t even been sick. Many times Pan-pan had begged her father for an answer, but each time he hemmed and hawed as if he had sud
denly lost his voice. He would fidget, rubbing the back of his neck or repeatedly wiping his face with his hand. His pain and agony were so hard to watch that eventually Pan-pan stopped asking him questions altogether.

  Trying to get information out of Ah-Po posed a different challenge; she simply ignored Pan-pan, playing deaf and dumb, using her favourite evasion, “I’m an old bag of bones who should be treated with respect, not pestered with questions.” Pan-pan had concluded long ago that it would be easier to find a three-legged chicken than the truth about her own mother’s death.

  Pan-pan could still vividly recall the morning she and her father had seen Mom off at the local donkey-cart depot. Mom planned to ride the cart to the long-distance bus station and board the bus for the fifty-kilometre trip northwest to the city of Tongren, where Auntie Cai-fei, Mom’s older sister, lived with her family.

  It was an unusually cold spring morning and Mom had insisted Pan-pan wear the wool hat that Ah-Po had knitted for her. Mom promised Pan-pan she was going to buy her the best birthday present anyone in the village had ever seen. “That’s why I have to go alone,” she had said mysteriously, “or the gift won’t be a surprise.”

  “It’s not fair,” Pan-pan had whined, plucking at her hat. “First you won’t take me, now you want me to look like a turtle. Why do I have to cover my hair? I want to look like you,” she added, pointing to her mom’s new perm. Earlier that morning Ah-Po had remarked that Mom’s short and curly hair resembled a duck’s behind.

  “It’s a new millennium next year, dear Po-Po,” Mom had responded, smiling happily and showing the dimples at the corners of her mouth. “Catch up with the trend, will you?”

  It was Dad who had insisted that he and Pan-pan walk Mom all the way to the depot in the neighbouring village, despite Mom’s objection that it was too far for Pan-pan and the mountain road too winding and steep. Pan-pan knew what she meant. The road was called the “Trail of Sheep’s Intestines” because of its many twists and turns, abrupt rises and perilous descents, and its narrow, uneven surface. As the three of them slowly made their way, Mom chatted and laughed with Pan-pan, but Dad stayed quiet most of the time, trudging ahead of them with Mom’s woven bamboo basket, heavy with dried beans, dates, and sunflower seeds for Auntie Cai-fei’s family, strapped to his back.

  At the depot, before climbing into the wagon pulled by a donkey, Mom had thrown her arms around Dad and pressed her lips against his. Dad blushed, amid the laughter of farmers waiting for a ride. But he’d smiled for the first time since they left home. Mom then took Pan-pan in her arms and kissed her on her forehead. As the cart rumbled away, she called out again that she would bring back a wonderful gift for Pan-pan’s twelfth birthday.

  That was the last time Pan-pan saw her mother laugh. A week later she was brought home on a stretcher. There was no birthday present. Ten days later, her mother died.

  In the days following her mother’s death, Pan-pan lay on her back on the bed she shared with Ah-Po, staring at the criss-crossed bamboo poles that supported the thatched roof. From time to time, her eyes were drawn to the corner of the room where, on top of the chest of drawers, her mother’s picture stood, now wrapped in black ribbons. Pan-pan found no peace anywhere she looked, particularly at night. Each time she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep, she was startled awake by the sound of her own sobbing. She wondered if she would ever be able to sleep again.

  “Are you still awake?” Ah-Po’s voice rose beside her one night. “Be strong my child,” she added softly, almost pleading.

  “Yes, Ah-Po,” said Pan-pan, drying her tears before she turned onto her side. Ah-Po’s words reminded her of the happy years when she was doted on by three grown-ups and enjoyed an endless share of their love and care. It was when she earned her reputation as a strong-willed child, or to use her teacher’s words, someone with a “high tolerance for pain.” Mom had laughed good-naturedly at the comment. During a school outing, on a narrow path in the mountains, Pan-pan had badly scraped both knees as she held onto the harness of a sliding donkey that had lost its footing. The blood had oozed through her pant legs, yet she hadn’t uttered one complaint until the donkey was safely pulled back up the slope. Ah-Po ought to know that there was a big difference between losing some blood and losing one’s mother, Pan-pan thought as she lay in the dark. She worried that with Mom forever gone, she’d never be strong again.

  Now, three years later, Pan-pan couldn’t remember the details of the funeral, the burial of her mother’s ashes, or the disappearance of her father. And she recalled only vaguely his turning up a few days later in the back of a police car, smelly and drunk, his hands wrapped in dirty bandages. He had stumbled into the house with Ah-Po’s sharp words ringing in his ears.

  Shortly after his hands had healed, Dad decided to follow the lead of other villagers and quit the life of a farmer. Taking with him a small bag and a bedroll, he headed out to the cities to take on jobs that urban dwellers declined to do.

  How ironic it is, Pan-pan thought bitterly as she carefully powdered her armpits and buttoned up her shirt. Mom had once told her that she and Dad had named her Pan-pan—Hope—because they wanted their daughter to be free to wish for anything she liked. Yet Pan-pan couldn’t even find the answer to the question that had plagued her for the past three years—Why had her mother been taken from her so suddenly? It was obvious that something unexpected, even horrible, had happened in Tongren, but no one would tell her what it was.

  Her parents, Pan-pan thought, should have called her Hopeless.

  Chapter Two

  Shui-lian

  The rain came first, then fog swept in before darkness descended on the bay like a lid on a wok. At the bow of her family’s riverboat, which was tied alongside a jetty, Shui-lian stood stretching her legs, numb from squatting on her heels. She tossed the dishwater into the river and gazed into the distance toward the city’s main wharf, where, once again, a cluster of giant boats was moored, as if floating on top of one another. All were wider, longer, and taller than the sheds and warehouses that huddled along the bank. The area was so brightly lit that the glare seemed to have burned a large hole in the thick mist, illuminating the starless sky and coating the surrounding water with a golden finish. Cruise ships, they are called, not boats, Shui-lian reminded herself as a file of buses pulled up to the quay, like fish swimming upriver.

  Spring was well under way in this part of the country and so was the popular cruise down the Long River, or the Yangtze, as it was called by the foreign tourists, whose glamour and lavish behaviour had once again turned Chongqing, City of Fog, into a sleepless port. The daily voyages customarily took off at the crack of dawn, leaving the locals to wake up to an abandoned dock.

  Standing on the scarred wooden deck, Shui-lian tried to imagine what it would be like to sleep inside such grand and spacious vessels. Yet she found it equally difficult to understand the appeal of floating on water, something she had been doing since she had come into this world—a curse she was about to end once and for all in a matter of hours. Zai-jian—see you again—she whispered to the inky water before she walked back to the small cabin. “What’s wrong with you!” she grumbled, slapping the side of her head with annoyance. “No. I don’t want to see this river ever again.”

  Early next morning Shui-lian quietly slipped off her canvas cot. She tiptoed past the raised platform where her mother lay snoring softly beside Shui-lian’s younger sister and out onto the deck. The air was like a damp, heavy blanket cast over the bay. She paused to listen, her eyes on the tiny wheelhouse at the stern where her older brother, Shui-shen, slept with his new bride. Holding her shoes in one hand and a small shoulder bag in another, she crept down the gangplank. The boards of the jetty felt slippery and cool against her bare soles. Inside her bag was a plastic pouch containing fifty yuan and some coins—all her savings—and a pair of new socks, the kind that stretched nicely to fit. Even though she couldn’t remember the last time she had worn socks, she was clearly aware of
the significance of putting them on for the big event ahead. No one would laugh at her the way Shui-shen had when he caught her trying them on.

  “Light a candle for a blind man,” he’d chuckled. “We are boat people. Socks to us are like giving a comb to a monk.”

  At one time, Shui-lian would have shut her older brother up quickly before he drew another breath. “Who died and went to Western Heaven and left you in charge?” she would snap, using one of her favourite expressions. It wasn’t just her words that silenced her brother or anyone else who tried to put her down but the way her lips curled up at the corner and her eyes flared like wildfire. Her mother had long declared that Shui-lian’s tongue and manner were like the local cuisine, so spicy and peppery it left diners speechless by the end of a meal. Shui-lian had admitted to her friend Jin-lin that the first time she spat out the words she had no idea what they meant, not even the reference to Western Heaven. She had overheard bickering boaters say it and liked the sound of it. The times she used it were among the few occasions she was able to make herself noticed. “Little Sichuan,” her mother called her because of her feisty and quick temper—the province of Sichuan being famously mutinous: “The first to rebel and the last to submit.”

  Shui-lian’s father had been a river ku-li—coolie—like his father, and his father’s father. She too had been born on a boat and raised on the water. For generations, her family had made their living by pulling cargo boats on the four rivers that gave Sichuan its name. From the day she was able to sit up on her own, Shui-lian had watched her father up ahead on the riverbanks, sometimes with other men, hauling a row of boats loaded with coal, grain, logs, or bags of cement and other material through the surging water. With thick ropes made of hemp taut across his shoulders, her father leaned head down into the strain, bent double, pushing into the sun, fog, wind, and storm, passing through gorges and scuffling on rock-strewn banks. Guiding the boats downstream was equally difficult and dangerous. Each step was an agony and every trip a misery. Both her father and brother had leathery calluses on the soles of their feet and fearsome scars on their backs.