“In my spare time ashore I drink wine,” he said. “I never fight when I get drunk. I just talk when I’m drunk and lean against a wall and go to sleep. I hate fighting, and really no one wants to fight me. I am an ‘old good.’ I don’t save money, I spend it on my friends. I buy them wine. I buy friendship. I save friendship. But some of the men on the river are no good. If they know you have money, they want you to gamble with jumping sticks or cards. If you refuse, they form a circle around you and threaten you.”

He cleared his throat and spat over the side into the Great River, and he seemed very pleased with himself.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“I have no home; my body is my home,” he said. “But I am an old good. I shall stay on boats, and there will always be someone to hire me, and when I am old, all my brothers in the boatmen’s guild and all the captains on the riverside who know me will give me a few coppers in payment for the friendship I have hoarded for them. I will have plenty. I will have a fine funeral.”

This was the way he spoke. At the time I wanted to believe him, and mostly did, though I thought him full of guile; in my Occidental complacency I then considered all Chinese liars, anyhow. I guess I wanted to believe that he was a simple, good man, but I was troubled by his obvious inner enjoyment of his account of himself; from time to time he had pursed his lips, so that his face had looked shrewd, as if he had been saying to himself, “I am the grandest liar in the world, and see how I have this stupid foreign boy on my towline!” I thought he might be dramatizing himself as a poor, pure-hearted wanderer, one of Heaven’s minstrels, to me, a foreigner who asked questions. I could not imagine that a young, vigorous, and cheerful man could live without distant goals: wealth, family, and a good name widely known.

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