On the muddy banks of the Du Rang River, Sang Wu's mother owed eleven shi and seven dou of rice in principal. With interest compounded over three years, she could not repay it. Under the old rule of settling debts by sinking a boat in the shallows, they had to find a boat that could not make it to shore in time and sink it. Then the debt would be cleared. The people aboard were not included in the account. The bookkeeper gave her eighteen boat names and told her to choose one with a draft of at least three chi before dawn. Sang Wu had spent six years crouched on boat planks. She could draw the sandbars and channels at the river mouth from memory with her eyes closed. She first picked out the empty boats, grain boats, and stranded boats one by one. When she reached the ninth name, Zheng the Butcher's wife barged in, clutching her cleaver. "Which number did you put my family at? Which boat are you sinking?" Sang Wu said, "The account says the government takes its thirty percent first, and the remaining seventy percent is owed. That's the rule. It's the rules that devour people, not Zheng the Butcher or me." She crouched on the planks of her own old boat and pressed her face to them, listening to the water. There was a thin sandbar to the front left, a channel half a chi deep, and three chi farther on, the channel bent. A newly fallen rock lay on the riverbed. She put the Zhao family's new boat, with its three-chi-six draft, at the bottom of the list. That night, something snapped beneath the hull like dry firewood. Then the wood cracked three times, and water put out the lantern. At dawn, the boat lay upside down, buried in the sand. Four people were pulled out. Three survived. The Zhao family's old matriarch never came up. The Zhao family surrounded Sang Wu three deep. Some shouted that she had sunk the boat; others demanded that they charge her by the head and make her pay until she died. Sang Wu said, "I'll pay for the coffin. If I can't afford it, I'll pay in days of work." She turned and wrote two words on the debt-clearing receipt: "Boat sunk." She said, "From today on, we'll turn the old rule around: whoever sinks a boat clears the debt."
