Mountain Girl River Girl Read online

  Three years ago, when Shui-lian was twelve, she watched, horrified, as her father lost his footing on the slippery clay of a towpath, fell into the Jialing River, and was quickly swept away by the turbulent green water. His body was never found. From time to time Shui-lian couldn’t help but wonder superstitiously if her mouthiness had tempted the river devils to bring about her father’s early death, leaving her mother a widow and her brother head of the family. She had tried to make up for her wrongs, offering to help her brother, yet each time she went near the stout rope her brother used for towing someone yelled at her. Tradition asserted that the mere touch of a female hand on the rope would cause the boats to capsize and sink, and bring bad luck to the family.

  “How can our luck be any worse than losing a father?” Shui-lian would snap back in frustration, only to be boxed on the ears by her mother for insolence.

  With four mouths to feed, her mother and brother had been trying for several months to marry her off to a boatman. Shui-lian had refused. Even if the man were not fifteen years older than her and as ugly as a carp, she wouldn’t have agreed. Her mind had been made up, long before her father’s death. If she ever did marry, her husband must have a piece of land for her to stand on and a place to bury her ashes when she died.

  But her mother would not listen. “He owns two boats,” she pointed out. “He has some money, and he’s willing to take you without a dowry. Get those nonsense dreams out of your head once and for all. You’re a river girl, and seven months from now, once you turn sixteen, whether you like or not, you’ll be a river wife!”

  So the previous morning, when Jin-lin had come to tell Shui-lian about the recruiting team, Shui-lian decided it was her only chance to escape. What choice do I have? she asked herself. Married or single, I’ll still live on a boat for the rest of my life.

  “I heard it’ll be at Sandbar Village tomorrow,” Jin-lin whispered to her as they sat beneath the awning of her family’s boat, eating rice porridge. “They’re looking for young women to work in clothing factories in Shanghai.”

  “Factory? Shanghai?” Shui-lian exclaimed, her eyes brightening.

  “Yes,” Jin-lin giggled, revealing a toothy smile. “Can you imagine? Not only will we earn a salary and have our own money, we’ll be surrounded by tall buildings, instead of mountains, and wide asphalt boulevards, not endless waterways. Everyone there is rich and beautiful, and even the air is scented! Better still,” she paused to take a mouthful of air before continuing, “because the water level is unusually low this spring, the cargo freighters can’t enter Chongqing harbour, which means our boats will be stranded here for a few more days, which also means that you and I can easily slip away without much notice and fuss. We’ve got to be at Sandbar Village before everyone else. I don’t want to miss the boat.”

  “Neither do I,” said Shui-lian, looking over the rim of her rice bowl at Jin-lin, wondering if her friend had made the pun on purpose.

  Jin-lin was eighteen, three years older than Shui-lian. They had met as young girls at a “floating school” created for families of fishers and boat ku-lis as part of the government campaign to eliminate illiteracy. The school had been set up on a cement barge that moved from one dock to another, thus earning its name. The square-bowed vessel had an open, flat deck on which rows of small desks were placed, with low stools behind them. A blackboard hung on the wall of the engine cabin. The pupils had a different teacher each trip, depending on whether the boat travelled upstream or down, and he or she welcomed anyone who was willing to learn to read, write, and do math. It was a fair-weather operation, as it turned out. There was no school if it rained, no classes when the temperature dropped too low or soared too high. Yet on fine days, few students showed up because most were needed by their families as extra hands. Bored most of the time by the monotonous drills in Chinese and arithmetic, Shui-lian didn’t mind missing classes.

  “It reminds me of the lyric about a lazy fisher,” Shui-lian once joked, “who goes out fishing for two days and stays at home to mend his net for the rest of the week.” Her remark didn’t sit well with her classmates, who were either fishers themselves or the children of fishers.

  After two years, Shui-lian and Jin-lin had stopped going to the school but remained friends, managing to see each other whenever their boats anchored at the same port. At those times they were as inseparable as a body and its shadow.

  Jin-lin’s problem at home, she confided to Shui-lian as they ate, wasn’t that her parents wanted to find her a husband. “It’s my father. He’s been attempting to get wifely duties from me ever since my mother became ill after giving birth to another baby girl.”

  “He what?” Shui-lian exclaimed, her chopsticks frozen in midair.

  “Keep your voice down. I don’t want to cause any trouble for my family,” Jin-lin whispered.

  “Does your mother know about this?” Shui-lian hissed.

  “I’m not sure. If she does, she’s never said one word about it, at least not to me,” Jin-lin answered, shaking her head. “But I know he won’t give up until he gets what he wants,” she said sadly, gazing at the raindrops as they hit the water, creating ripple after ripple. “Where is the iron fist of the government when you really need it?” she grumbled, spitting into the water and startling a team of ducks paddling near the riverbank.

  “The government is more interested in enforcing its one-child-per-family policy. It should be protecting people like you!” Shui-lian said angrily.

  “You’re right. But it’s not very successful, is it? Look at my family, three girls already, and still no end to it.” Jin-lin laughed bitterly. “All I can do is to leave, put these troubles behind and start a new life in Shanghai or some other city.”

  Like many of the river people, Shui-lian had never set foot in a big city, not even Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital. She’d seen it many times in the distance, when her family boat passed the city’s waterfront, and lately tall buildings had appeared, replacing the old houses. There was talk about reforms and progress, new words she’d heard more and more in the wharf markets around Sichuan. There she’d also learned that travelling from place to place was allowed, that private ownership was encouraged, and that foreigners, once driven out of the country, had returned to the government’s open-armed welcome. The latest gossip was that hundreds of thousands of peasants were heading toward urban areas to earn ready cash, leaving behind their families, unplanted seeds, and farmland. The most capable had made their way to China’s coveted coastal cities, like Shanghai and Guangzhou. Shui-lian often wondered what it would be like to visit such places—or even live there, with dry land under her feet.

  “One thing is sure,” Jin-lin said as she slurped up the last of her porridge, “if we stay here any longer, we’ll end up living the life of our mothers, and we’ll never get the rotten river smell off our skin. We must grab this chance to get out.”

  And now, only one day later, Shui-lian was doing just that. She turned her back on the river and ran toward the spot where she and Jin-lin had planned to meet.

  Chapter Three

  Pan-pan

  Pan-pan stood before the brick stove, which took up half of the kitchen, waiting for the millet porridge to boil in the big iron wok. Gazing out the window at the mountains to the north that tumbled away into purple distance, she wondered what lay beyond. No matter what, she assured herself as she stirred the porridge, it must be more exciting and adventurous than life in this rocky village.

  “Lai-le, lai-le—It’s coming! It’s coming!”

  Pan-pan’s thought was cut off by the chatter of animated voices and pounding footsteps on the path outside the house. She looked up and saw a group of children scurrying past the window like frightened ducks. A slow-moving tractor, snorting puffs of smoke into the crispy morning air, seemed to be chasing them. In the wagon hitched to the tractor a dozen black-robed men sat serenely, their shaved heads reflecting the pale sunlight like mirrors, their sandalled feet dangling over the wagon’s
edge.

  “Dad,” Pan-pan called out, “the monks are here.”

  “It’s a good omen. They’re here on time.” Her stepmother, holding Gui-yang on one hip, rushed into the kitchen. “Look, Pan-pan,” Xin-Ma cried out, her free hand pointing out the window and up at the hill. “The truck! The house! Oh my goodness, everything has arrived at once!”

  Pan-pan dropped her wooden spoon and removed the pot from the burner. Craning her neck, she could see an old blue truck slowly picking its way down the steep, bumpy road that led to her village, horn blaring, brakes screeching and panting. When the vehicle made a tight turn, it revealed a nearly full-size house made of paper pasted over a bamboo stick frame, with a black roof and gold-coloured walls.

  “It even has a chimney!” Xin-Ma exclaimed, shifting her son to the other hip.

  When the truck finally clattered past the kitchen window, Pan-pan found herself eye to eye with one of three chickens standing in front of double vermilion doors. The stiff, glass-eyed birds—but with real feathers—were going nowhere. Their golden feet were glued onto a large green piece of cardboard.

  “Your mother was a very lucky woman,” Xin-Ma murmured, sounding almost envious. “All this cost your father a fortune. The monks, the ceremony, and of course this grand paper house and everything in it,” she continued, without looking at Pan-pan, “all the money he’s saved from hauling rocks down from the mountain on his back.”

  “I know,” Pan-pan answered, moving away from the window and picking up the spoon. Yet she wondered, as she ladled the gruel into a large bowl and set it on the stove, how Xin-Ma could talk about death and luck in one breath. Oh, she means well, Pan-pan told herself, she’s just trying to cheer me up.

  “Breakfast is ready,” Pan-pan announced.

  PAN-PAN’S FATHER had met Xin-Ma in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou Province, at a highway construction site. By then he’d been working there for six months, along with thousands of other men and women, building a “freeway,” as he called it, using the English word. “Three lanes each way,” he’d said to Ah-Po and Pan-pan during his first visit home. “And when it’s completed, the motor cars will be able to go the speed of a bullet—at least one hundred kilometres an hour!”

  Pan-pan had little concept of a hundred kilometres. In her mountain village, Yunxi—Western Clouds—all the houses were built on various levels of a slope. The terraced fields were hand-dug into the shoulders of hills. Their narrow widths and irregular lengths were measured in chi—a third of a metre—and in metres. According to a local folk song, each road turned behind a hill every three metres and a sunny sky never lasted more than three days.

  Xin-Ma’s home village had been in the path of the new freeway, so when the government order came for a new road to be put through, all the inhabitants were relocated, scattered like sand across the province. Many, like Xin-Ma, tempted by steady cash wages and freedom from field work, had been hired as unskilled labourers, lugging stones on their backs in bamboo baskets or, as in Xin-Ma’s case, breaking up large rocks with a sledgehammer.

  Ah-Po blamed Xin-Ma for tarnishing her family’s reputation by marrying her widowed son and thereby breaking the local tradition of a three-year mourning period. “We’re bound to be punished,” she had repeatedly predicted when Pan-pan’s father brought Xin-Ma home for the New Year’s celebration only one year after the death of his first wife. Ever since, nothing about Xin-Ma would satisfy Ah-Po: not the way she walked, sat, or talked. “Too saucy, too shrieky,” the old woman constantly complained, grinding the few teeth she had left. “And too blunt.”

  “This is the voice I was born with,” Xin-Ma would say behind Ah-Po’s back, stamping her foot. “And I’m not blunt. I’m straightforward. It just happens that my guts have fewer twists than others,” meaning that she wasn’t phoney.

  It wasn’t the broken tradition that saddened Pan-pan. She didn’t want a new mother. Who did this stranger with the high-pitched voice—Ah-Po was right about that!—think she was, marching into Pan-pan’s home and into her life, as though she owned both?

  After the New Year’s visit, Dad had returned to the construction site, leaving Xin-Ma with Pan-pan and her grandmother. Seven months later, along came Pan-pan’s half-brother, Gui-yang—Precious Sunshine—named after the provincial capital. On the day Gui-yang was born, Ah-Po ceased bickering and whining about her new daughter-in-law. She even started to tell her neighbours and anyone else who would listen that the arrival of a grandson was the result of her persistence in calling her granddaughter “Pan-er”—Hope for a son. “It worked,” she crowed. “It paid off!”

  “I gave birth to this boy,” Xin-Ma would say, lifting her chin, her eyes flashing. “It’s all my doing, damn it, not hers.” She would then turn to Pan-pan. “I suppose if the old woman kept calling you ‘Empress Dowager’ you’d someday become an emperor’s mother!”

  Pan-pan hated being dragged into a fight she had nothing to do with. And she was equally annoyed at being compared to the infamous Empress Dowager, who, according to the stories Pan-pan had heard, was as evil and ugly as a poisonous snake. Worse, the nasty empress had been dead for over a hundred years. Everyone knew that comparing the living to the dead would bring bad luck. No wonder Ah-Po said Xin-Ma should hire a soldier to guard her mouth.

  Eventually, Pan-pan’s bitterness toward Xin-Ma, or hou-niang—later mother—as the villagers called her, faded. Xin-Ma was all right, Pan-pan admitted, even kind and generous, but as long as Pan-pan lived she would never refer to Xin-Ma as good. That would be betraying her own mother. At the same time, Pan-pan realized she would never again feel completely secure and at ease in her own home, the way she’d felt when her mother was alive. Now the family was Ah-Po, Dad, Xin-Ma, and Gui-yang—and Pan-pan was an add-on, more like a temporary guest than a daughter.

  Xin-Ma, meanwhile, had told Pan-pan over and over that she was fond of her, and assured her that so long as Pan-pan didn’t cause her any trouble, they would get along just fine. Once, she’d even suggested that if it would make Pan-pan feel better, Pan-pan could call her Jie-Jie—Elder Sister—instead. “Let’s face it,” said Xin-Ma with a ringing giggle, “I’m only twelve years older than you, which means we both were born in the year of the rabbit. In other words, we face the same fate.”

  In the past two years they had gotten along well, just as Xin-Ma had predicted, even after Pan-pan confided to her that no matter how nicely she treated Pan-pan, she could never replace her real mother. Xin-Ma had frowned but then shrugged, saying she understood. Nevertheless, in the days after the wedding, there had been no shortage of people in the village who seemed to enjoy telling Pan-pan tales of cruel stepmothers, some even calling up legends from the time before Emperor Qin reunited China. How badly those wicked women mistreated the children who were not their own! How evil and ferocious they were! “Better to live with a widowed mother who’s a beggar than with a remarried father who is rich and holds a high position,” a couple of elders had recited to Pan-pan, quoting an old expression, shaking their heads sadly.

  Yet it was Xin-Ma herself who had related to Pan-pan a strange story of an evil stepmother. She claimed that she had heard it at the construction site before she met Pan-pan’s father. “I might have missed a few bits here and there,” she warned Pan-pan before beginning the tale of how an unlucky girl who had lost her mother was mistreated by her stepmother and jealous older stepsisters. The girl was forced to cook and clean the house all day and was given only leftovers to eat and hand-me-downs to wear. “Yet somehow,” Xin-Ma stopped, scratching her head and peering up at the ceiling as if that would help her recall more details, “somehow one day she was asked to try on a pair of glass shoes.”

  “Are you sure that’s what they were made of? Glass?”

  “Certainly, young lady,” Xin-Ma asserted, letting Pan-pan know that she didn’t appreciate being interrupted, let alone questioned. “Never mind. I for one would call it a mean trick. And cruel. How could the poor child walk i
n glass shoes? Or dance?”

  “Dance?” Pan-pan interrupted again.

  “Now what?”

  “Why would the girl want to dance? She must have been heartbroken, with her mother dead and mean women to live with. Sad people don’t dance—or sing.”

  “How on earth do I know?” Xin-Ma sniffed loudly. “Does it matter? Why do you have to question every detail? It’s a story. A tale. The girl put the glass shoes on and went out dancing, and met a prince. End of story. On the other hand,” she paused, letting her words linger, “if the poor child had refused to try on the glass shoes, she’d probably still be at home cleaning and cooking instead of marrying a charming prince and living happily ever after in a big palace with lots of servants and,” she paused again, laughing, “giving birth to a boy named Sunshine!”

  “You made up that last part!” Pan-pan protested, smiling despite herself. “I guess you’re right. If the girl hadn’t gone out, her life wouldn’t have changed. Maybe leaving home and looking for adventure isn’t a bad idea. I’ve been wondering myself whether I should give it a try, like Dad and some of the other villagers.”

  “Listen, stop talking nonsense.” Xin-Ma was serious now. “All I’m saying is that you don’t have to worry about me mistreating you. That’s my point. There’s nothing to gain for me. I’m happy for what I have now. A son of my own, a husband who loves me, a roof over my head, and plenty food on the table. And, of course, you,” she quickly added, pinching Pan-pan’s cheek. “You’re a pretty girl. Your skin is so pale and smooth. To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t mind having a girl child myself. Since your father is a Miao, I could, couldn’t I? The government allows minority families to have a second child. Your mother could have.”