SIXTEEN

 

No, I didn’t care about the people in Lau Kwan, a town I’d never seen before and that might at any moment be strafed by Japanese bullets. All I had to think about was myself and three members of my family, and the packs we carried, and the map, and the cookie tin, and my tarnished belt buckle.

The road to the river was all dried mud carved by cartwheels and hooves, and our shoes scuffed over the ridges. Wei-Ming held my hand and stumbled over the ruts, so I took her backpack and carried it along with my own. She stepped carefully into the patches of sunlight that filtered through the heavy vegetation, and I played along with her until we reached the water.

Back at Tai Fo, the docks were large and built of stone, with deep steps rising up from the water to the town. The dock here was of stained timber slung here and there with oily ropes. It leaned into the river and was the colour of earth where the river darkened the soil. It extended from the water onto a simple platform, where we put our bags down. We got out our water bottles and snacks, sat on the outer side of the dock, and took our shoes off. Wei-Ming sat between Leuk and me and nibbled a rice cookie. A small cluster of the sugary dried grains fell from her snack, and a fish came up and ate them.

Wei-Ming reached out with her cookie and pointed. Another crumb fell, and another fish came up as she stood. “There’s the ferry!”

The ferryman stood at the stern of a long skiff, leaning into a bamboo pole while the motor laboured behind him. The only movement was the flutter of his loose black shirt in the wind and the slow descent of the pole into the mud. We all waved at him, and the boat drifted towards the dock.

The ferryman leaned sideways and pushed the pole at an angle to turn the skiff. He turned with a gentle motion, thickset legs and arms moving slowly like seaweed, and I had the impression of a man who went days without speaking. He angled the boat into the current with his eyes set on the dock. The motor ran harder and I watched him shift against the pole that yoked him to the riverbed.

When he was near the dock he tossed a rope out, and I caught it and started clumsily tying it to an iron ring on one of the posts. Already I wanted to impress him. He drew the boat up quietly to the dock and took the rope from me as he stepped out.

“You want to cross?”

“We want to go to Kukong,” I stammered.

“That’s too far,” he said. “This is just a ferry, and getting there on this boat would take days.”

Leuk stepped up with the map and handed it to the ferryman. He took it with his thumb over the front and fingers splayed out across the back so that it stayed flat. He looked at it upside down while he held it out to us, as if he had just drawn it.

“Wah Ying,” he said. “See it? I can get you there in a day if you pay my way back.”

The map slowly gave in to all the creases Leuk had made in it and hung limp in the ferryman’s large hand. All this walking and planning, and then all we had ahead was a town we didn’t know existed, and the only route open to us was the water. I glanced back at the road, hoping we might just get back to our original route. Yee-Lin’s face tightened, and I felt something cave in my chest. Leuk reached over and took the map back with his eyes fixed on the ground.

The ferry bumped gently against the dock as the mud-coloured water lapped its sides. The ferryman stood quietly to the side, almost silhouetted now in the falling afternoon sun.

While we hung in our indecision, a man and woman came down the road with a small cart drawn by a donkey. They moved quickly, staring at us as they approached. The woman had a baby bundled on her back and the cart was piled with their belongings. They stopped and looked us up and down before speaking.

“Did you just arrive?” the farmer asked us.

Yee-Lin and I nodded.

“We just want to cross,” the man said. He pointed at the far side of the river. I turned to look across as if to confirm it, but the river was wide and in the sunlight I saw only the broken sparkle of its reflection.

“I won’t be long,” the ferryman said to us. He stepped forward to look at the cart, sizing it up for his boat and the condition of the water. He gripped the side of the cart and tested its solidity through his arm and shoulder, maybe estimating its roll over the current, the motor’s force, the probability of cargo upsetting his boat. I imagined the family crossing with their cart, and the ferry tipping over, leaving them to the river’s mercy. My head hurt, and I sat down on the ground. My shoes were pale with dust.

The ferryman helped the farmer get the cart onto the skiff. The donkey was nervous, so they wrapped a cloth over its eyes. When everything was balanced in the middle, the ferryman started the motor again and pushed off. The woman sat on the boat’s deck with the baby in her lap.

“Five yuan to get you to Wah Ying,” he said as he left the riverbank. “That’s all. I’ll be back soon.”

In the end, it took him over two hours to get the farmer and his wife across and come back, and by then it was early evening. The ferryman said it was now too dark and he wouldn’t leave until sunrise. We would have to sleep outside again. I thought Wei-Ming would be frightened, so we rigged up the blankets we had rolled up into a kind of bird’s nest for her, and Leuk and I found a spot near the girls where the ground was comfortable, and we covered ourselves with our jackets.

I watched the ferryman in the moonlight. He rolled out a heavy blanket onto the bottom of the boat and then tested the ropes to make sure he wouldn’t drift away during the night. I was worried about thieves and animals, but before settling down, the ferryman walked the length of the path a few times with his bamboo pole and a lantern, listening carefully to the woods.

“Nothing here, kids.” And instead of climbing into his boat, he took a small brazier from it and lit a coal fire on the ground near the dock. He sat up and kept watch, and I fell asleep to the sounds of the hissing brazier and the river.

 

The fear of drowning must be born with us, but it must arrive incomplete at our birth, needing time to form. Once, when I was twenty-three and studying in California, I fell into a lake. I was at university and spending the afternoon with a girl I wanted to impress, a Chinese girl from Singapore, Yvonne. The French name appealed to me, though she was pretty, too. I first met her at a church function and invited her out at the end of it. The event was meant to show off the domestic skills of the young women taking part, by having them make lunch for everyone after the service. Yvonne was at a large table making noodles by hand, something she’d surely never done growing up and wouldn’t be expected to do in marriage. But she was managing it well. I watched her mound the flour and make a well, and then add the water from a Thermos while she gathered the wet dough with her right hand. The ball of dough built quickly, and she heaped more flour onto the board to roll it out. She pushed the rolling pin over the dough to stretch it out, her pale arms gliding over the soft white mixture like a boat over water.

I asked her out on a date, and a few days later we went to the park for a picnic. I rented a rowboat and suffered a fit of nervous laughter as I paid for it, because I suddenly remembered the stupid term pleasure craft from an old English lesson. Yvonne sat across from me. Her dress was aglow in the October sun. I rowed out to the middle of the little lake and pulled the oars in to let us drift. She had left her white hat on the shore with the picnic basket, and when she raised her arm to shield her eyes, I saw the underside of her arm. The skin tone was the same as on her upper breasts. I grew painfully erect.

I had a very expensive camera, a Rolleiflex that Sheung had given me as a going-away gift. I kept it safe in its brown leather case, and now I put it in my lap to hide my erection, and told Yvonne I’d like to take a picture of her. She was thrilled, and I started fiddling with the settings to impress her.

Let me turn the boat a little, I said, to get the light right.

This made her glow. She put her hands together.

I put the Rolleiflex down carefully and picked up an oar. I moved to get up and set the oar in the water to turn the boat, but my erection touched the inside of my pants and I crouched to hide it. The boat rocked a little and Yvonne gasped. I looked down and thought I saw the camera tipping, and then worried I’d knock it with my shoe. I stumbled to one side to avoid it, and in a second I was in the water.

I knew how to swim, but something else had taken over. I thought of the camera and Yvonne inside the little boat, neither of which could get wet. I thought of grabbing the side of the boat but saw water fly from my hands onto the camera. My pants ballooned and turned me around before quickly sucking up the water and pulling me down. I’d been nervously holding my breath in the boat; my lungs were empty.

The lake water burned in my nostrils and throat. I was cold. I scrambled upward but went nowhere until the handle of the oar appeared, dipping into the water, and I seized it. Once my head was above the water, I grabbed the edge of the boat with my right hand, and Yvonne helped me back in.