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This appears in a pre-2010 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine.
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Down in the Dirt v067



Order this writing
in the 2009 book


Crawling
Through the Dirt



Crawling Through the Dirt
The Suzhou Boat Girl

Richard Vaughn

    Longley gazed in rapturous curiosity as the sampan poled past their excursion boat. The shock of the hauntingly familiar face shook him from a tourist stupor, sending shivers across his humidity-sheened skin. They were in Suzhou on the optional closing side trip of the three week visit to China. He felt numb with excess novelty—too many multi-course Chinese dinners reeking of peanut oil, ginger, sesame, noodles and green tea. But—there she stared again—the girl! This time in dun pants and a thin jacket, the bamboo pole clenched in her fists as she eased the sampan in the canal. Her black hair was pulled into a beaver tail on her neck.
    Their eyes met for no more than an instant. It undid him even more than the face he’d seen along the Daning River earlier, or the ethereal passenger aboard the Li River cruise. On both occasions his memory sank into paralysis trying to connect present and past—without closure. This lasted only five or ten seconds before the vessels passed. He turned to glimpse her again but got only an oblique look at the sinewy body.
    What the hell obsessed him? About her—that face with soy brown eyes piercing his soul? He detected a mournful throbbing in his brain as the tour guide explained that boat girls took such drudgery jobs because they were what uneducated girls could get. It reminded Longley that leisure travel in exotic lands always revealed comely and sluttish girls enduring endless, hopeless, struggle.
    “Look at me,” their eyes appeared to suggest, especially the young girl no more than twelve or so along the Daning River. She hustled along the pebbled shore with an infant bundled on her frail back as she offered glistening stones polished by the river to indolent tourists aboard the tour launch. “Look-look, plitty stone,” she gasped trying to keep pace without losing her balance. “You likee, much likee!”
    He thought at the time, was it only last week, or the week before? Yes, two weeks behind this resonant now: God, what a goddamned life to have with nothing in it but each day harder than the day before! Her face, youthful with pending age, tormented him the rest of that day, along with the vacuous gaze of the babe on her back. He drifted between guilt in having so much more, and irresistible thrill that he did. Traveling in less opulent and affluent places was not an unalloyed pleasure but, rather, one of vast emptiness and deprivation. It wasn’t just abject poverty, but the despair veiled behind surfaces.
    That thin, almost gaunt young woman on the Li River cruise, in her flowing silk flower-print dress and patent leather pumps. She kept stroking fashion-bobbed hair while admiring the classic peaks that reminded him of floating mountain Chinese paintings. He loitered at the rail to sneak looks. She caught him staring with her black agate eyes. But, there was no hauteur, only a well-groomed complexion that betrayed deep, worldly-wise wariness. “What you see,” her gaze conveyed, “is the beauty masking grim reality.”
    When the Suzhou Canal excursion reached the end of it’s outward journey and reversed, Longley realized he might have another opportunity to view the sampan girl, perhaps get a better look if they passed slow while she poled her life away. He leaned forward in his seat, pressed against the rail as the boat surged back along the fetid canal past mildewed mortar and crumbling docks. He saw women washing clothes using rank water, girls scampering on ledges by the hovels, and a boy peeing into the opaque flood. Sampans with boat girls passed, but none with the girl he needed to view.
    Peering ahead he noticed what must be the one he hungered to see. It sluggishly churned the surface like a torpid beast. Longley searched for the girl, hoping she wasn’t on the side behind the bamboo-slatted cabin. He held his breath as she came into view, poling deftly to keep the boat in mid-canal. Loose strands of hair undulated around each ear like black silk. As his tour eased alongside, she walked forward to drop her bamboo pole into the water three arm-lengths from him. He started to speak when she looked his way, but waited till he could only wave, as if to say: “My heart goes out to you!”
    What he received instead of a friendly smile was a grimace as tourist cameras all around him snapped and popped, causing her to shrug away their trivial lives as she went on with the rough business of surviving another day. He wasn’t disappointed so much as thrust back onto another waterway, in a fearful time when he was no older than the girl—who up close now looked like a worn-out adolescent.
    He was undone by a Korean girl clinging in icy water to the steel remnants of a blasted Han River bridge. Chinese artillery shells blasted geysers of shrapnel, mud and ice, shuddering the embankment where Longley and scared soldiers fired a machine gun covering a retreat from fanatical Asian hordes. The girl clung for an hour, wailing as the current tugged at her padded clothing. Two GIs tried to get her ashore by tossing a rope, but Chinese snipers kept everybody pinned down as her cries faded. Every time Longley looked, her fear-wracked eyes pierced him, so close and beyond help. At dusk her voice diminished to the futile squeal of a dying bird. To end her ordeal, he aimed his M-1 with great care and shot her in the head.
    The Suzhou boat girl poled away; he could not save her either.



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