Daughter of the River

Grove Press

Chapter One

1

I never bring up the subject of my birthday, not with myfamily and not with my closest friends. At first an intentionalomission, eventually I truly forgot. No one remembered mybirthday for my first eighteen years, and after that I simplyavoided the issue. No mistake about it, it all happened in myeighteenth year.

The potholed street outside the school gate sloped to one side.As I crossed the street a shiver ran down my spine; someonewas staring at me again, I could feel it.

    Not daring to turn around, I glanced to the left and right,but saw nothing out of the ordinary. I forced myself to keepwalking until I was standing next to an old lady who sold icelollies, then took a quick look behind me, just as a Liberation-modeltruck whizzed past, splattering mud in its wake. Acouple of youngsters buying ice lollies stamped their feet andhurled curses at the speeding truck for muddying their shortsand bare legs. The old lady dragged her box of ice lollies overto the base of the wall. Who the hell drives like that? shegrumbled. Scurvy people like you would be turned away bythe Four-Mile Crematorium.

    Once the disturbance was past, quiet returned, and I stoodin the middle of the muddy, rutted street wondering if I wasimagining things because I'd talked so much today.

    At some point as I was growing up, these shivers became aregular occurrence in my life, always caused by a pair ofstaring eyes. More than once I nearly spotted whoever wasbehind those eyes, but only for a fleeting moment. The manwith nondescript features and messy hair never came closeenough for me to get a good look at him, which was probablyhow he planned it. He only appeared near the schoolyardbefore and after school, and never actually followed me, as ifhe knew where I'd be from one minute to the next. All he hadto do was wait.

    We heard all sorts of frightening rumours about rapes, but Iwas never afraid that was what the man had in mind.

    I never told my father or mother. What was there to tell?They might think I'd done something shameful and give mehell. So I kept this a secret for years, until eventually my fearsvanished and there was no more mystery. Perhaps being staredat is a normal part of life that everyone experiences at sometime or other, and shouldn't be seen as frightening orloathsome. It would be difficult to get through life withoutever suffering irksome looks, and I could easily have pretendedI wasn't bothered by them, particularly since so fewpeople back then were willing even to look my way.

    Every time I tried to capture that stare, it escaped somehow,and so, to prove to myself I wasn't imagining things, Imoved as cautiously as if I were stalking a bright greendragonfly. But sometimes, when one strains to bring somethinghazy into focus, success only invites disaster.

    But I tried not to think about this, since that was the yearmy world turned upside-down. So much happened to methat I felt tied up in knots, like the green moss hanging fromthe stone wall beside the street, which resembled tangled locksof devil's hair.

2

My house was on the southern bank of the Yangtze.

    The South Bank District of Chongqing consists of lowrolling hills that form a series of gullies. In the event of athousand-year flood, should the entire city be swallowed up,our hillside would stand stubbornly, the last island to gounder. From early childhood, this was a strangely comfortingthought for me.

    If you ferried over from the Dock on the opposite bank,Heaven's Gate, you could reach either of the two landingsnearest my house: Alley Cat Stream and Slingshot Pellet. Bothrequired a climb up the bank and a twenty-minute walk alonga rutted street to reach my house halfway up the hill.

    By standing on the ridge in front of my house, I could seewhere the Yangtze and Jialing Rivers merge at Heaven'sGate, the gateway to the city. The peninsula created by thetwo rivers is the heart of Chongqing. A motley assortment ofbuildings on the surrounding hills looks like a jumble ofchildren's building blocks. Pontoon quays dot the riverbanks,steamships tie up beside the quays, and cable cars, drippingrust, crawl slowly up and down the slopes. Dark cloudsblanket the rivers at dawn, raising scaly red ripples; atdusk, when the sun's rays slant down on the water beforesettling behind the hills to the north, a few bursts of sunlightemerge from the dark mist. That is when lamps lighting up thehills are reflected on the surface of the water, pushing thedarkness along. And when sheets of fine rain cover the rivers,you can hear riverboat horns wail like grieving widows; thecity, caught day and night between two fast-flowing rivers,with its myriad scenic changes, is always sad and enigmatic.

The hills in South Bank teem with simple wooden thatchedsheds made of asphalt felt and asbestos board. Rickety anddarkened by weather, they have something sinister aboutthem. When you enter the dark, misshapen courtyards offtwisting little lanes, it is all but impossible to find your wayback out; these are home to millions of people engaged incoolie labour. Along the meandering lanes of South Bankthere are hardly any sewers or garbage-collecting facilities, sothe accumulated filth spills out into roadside ditches and runsdown the hills. The ground is invariably littered with refuse,to be carried into the Yangtze by the next rainfall or turnedinto rotting mud under the blazing sun.

    The garbage piles up, with fresh layers covering theirfetid predecessors to produce an astonishing mixture ofstrange odours. A ten-minute walk on any mountain pathin South Bank treats you to hundreds of different smells, auniverse of olfactory creations. I've walked the streets ofmany cities with garbage heaps, but I've never beensurrounded by so many smells. I sometimes wonder whythe people of South Bank, living amid all that stench andwalking among such filth, are punished by having noses ontheir faces.

    People said that unexploded Japanese bombs from WorldWar II lay buried in gullies on the hills, and that before theKuomintang forces abandoned the city by the end of 1949,they buried thousands of tons of explosives. They also leftbehind, it was reported, over a hundred thousand undergroundagents — that is to say, every adult in the city was apotential spy, and even after the grand suppression movementsand the mass executions of the Communist purges ofthe early 1950s, plenty of spies could have slipped through thenet. That could even have included people who joined theParty after Liberation, but were plants who came out at nightto do their dirty work — murder, arson, rape, you name it.You wouldn't find them among the tall buildings or wideavenues on the opposite bank, for they preferred to operatesecretly amid the eternal foul odours of South Bank. A spotlike this, so alien to the socialist image, is a perfect place foranti-socialist elements to come and go in secret.

    If you walk out the compound gate, hugging the damp walland listening carefully, you can hear the echoes of formernight watchmen in the darkness. That cobweb-covereddoorway might reveal quite mysteriously an old-style...