Boy in the Twilight

by Yu Hua

  “All of us can,” they said. “How come you’re the only one who can’t?”

  “If I fall, I might break my neck,” I told them.

  They stood in a line in the water and Lü Qianjin said, “One, two, three, shout …”

  They shouted out in unison, “There’s a phrase ‘timid as a mouse,’ and who is it about?”

  “Me,” I murmured.

  “We didn’t hear that,” Lü Qianjin shouted.

  So I said again, “It refers to me.”

  After hearing this, they no longer stood in a line but went back into the water, and the water again began to roil and seethe. I sat down in front of a tree and went on watching as they fooled around in the river and sold those white pumpkins of theirs.

  I am a biddable boy. That’s not my word—that’s what my mother says. She often sings her son’s praises to other people: “Our Yang Gao is just the most biddable boy. He’s so obedient, and such a hard worker. He’ll do whatever you tell him to do. He’s never got in trouble outside the house and never got into fights with people. Why, I’ve never heard him say any dirty words …”

  My mother’s right. I never curse people and never pick a fight with anybody. But there are always people who like to come over and curse me or pick a fight. They roll their sleeves up above their elbows and their pants up above their knees, block my path, and poke me on the nose, spit in my face and say, “Yang Gao, have you got the guts to fight with us?”

  “No, I don’t,” I tell them.

  “In that case,” they say, “do you have the guts to curse us?”

  “No, I don’t have the guts for that either,” I tell them.

  “In that case,” they say, “we’re going to curse you. Listen up! You cretin! Cretin! Cretin! Cretin, and asshole too!”

  Even girls—girls like Lin Lili and Sun Hongmei—give me a hard time. Once I heard other girls say to them, “You only know how to bully us girls. If you’re so tough, why don’t you go pick a fight with a boy?”

  “Who said we’re afraid of boys?” they replied.

  They came over and stood on either side of me, sandwiching me between them. “Yang Gao,” they said, “we want to pick a fight with a boy, so how about if we pick a fight with you? We won’t both fight with you, we’ll fight one to one. So pick between us, Lin Lili or Sun Hongmei.”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m not going to pick between you. I’m not going to fight with you.”

  I wanted to get away, but Lin Lili stretched out an arm and held me back. “You don’t want to fight with us?” she said. “Or you don’t have the guts to fight with us?”

  “I don’t have the guts to fight with you,” I said.

  Lin Lili let me go, but then Sun Hongmei grabbed me. “We can’t let him off that easy,” she said. “We need to have him say ‘timid as a mouse.’ ”

  So Lin Lili put it to me, “There’s a phrase ‘timid as a mouse.’ Who does it refer to?”

  “It refers to me,” I said.

  3

  When my father was alive, he would say to my mother, “This boy Yang Gao is too much of a sissy. Even when he was six, he didn’t dare talk to people. When he was eight, he was too scared to sleep by himself. Even when he was ten, he couldn’t summon up the courage to lean against the parapet on the bridge. Now he’s twelve, and geese still scare him.”

  My dad was right. When I ran into a flock of geese, my legs would turn to jelly and there was nothing I could do about it. What frightened me the most was when they charged toward me, stretching out their necks and flapping their wings. I was forced to keep going in the other direction, past Lü Qianjin’s house. Past Song Hai’s house I went, and Fang Dawei’s and Lin Lili’s, but those geese just kept on chasing me, honk honk honk, in full cry all the way. Once they pursued me right out of Yang Family Lane and kept on my tail the full length of Liberation Road, right up to the school. As they followed me across the playground, still honking away, people gathered to watch and I heard Lü Qianjin shout, “Yang Gao, give them a kick!”

  So I swiveled around, took aim at a goose in the middle of the pack, and gave it a little kick. But that just made them honk more fiercely and lunge toward me more aggressively. I turned right round and kept on going.

  “Kick them!” Lü Qianjin and the others were shouting. “Yang Gao, kick them!”

  I kept on moving as fast as I could, and as I went I shook my head. “They’re not afraid of my kicks.”

  “Throw stones at them!” Lü Qianjin and the others shouted.

  “I don’t have any stones,” I said.

  They laughed uproariously. “Then you’d better run for your life!” they shouted.

  I shook my head again. “I can’t run. As soon as I do, you’ll laugh at me.”

  “We’re laughing at you already!” they said.

  I took a good look at them. They were laughing so hard their mouths were open and their eyes were closed and their bodies were bent double. I thought to myself, it’s true, they are laughing at me, so I began to run.

  “Geese’s eyes are the problem,” my mother explained to me later. “Geese see everything as smaller than it really is, and that’s why they’re so bold.

  “Seen through a goose’s eye,” she went on, “our front door is like a hollow in the wall, our window is like the opening in the crotch of your pants, our house is as small as a hen’s nest …”

  What about me, then? That evening, when I lay in bed, I kept wondering how big I was in the eyes of a goose. I decided the biggest I could possibly be was only as big as another goose.

  4

  When I was little, I often heard them talking about how timid I was. By “them” I mean Lü Qianjin’s mother and Song Hai’s mother, also Lin Lili’s mother and Fang Dawei’s mother. In the summer they would sit in the shade under the trees and gossip about other people’s affairs. They would chatter away, even louder than the cicadas in the tree above, they’d yak and yak until the conversation came round to me. They would talk about how often I’d been a coward, and once they talked about my father too and said he was just as much of a coward as I was.

  I was upset when I heard that, and went and sat down by myself on the doorsill. I’d just heard something I didn’t know before. They said my father was the slowest driver in the world. They said nobody wanted to ride in his truck, because a trip that would take other drivers three hours my father wouldn’t manage to complete in five. Why? They said it was because my father was too timid. They said he got scared if he drove at all fast. Scared of what? Scared he’d crash and die.

  Lü Qianjin and the others saw me sitting alone on the doorsill. They came over, stood in front of me, and said with a laugh: “Your father is a coward, just like you. Your cowardice is genetic. You got it from your dad, and he got it from your granddad, and your granddad got it from your granddad’s granddad …”

  They went through a whole dozen or so of my ancestors’ granddads and then asked, “Does your father have the guts to drive with his eyes closed?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never asked him.”

  Lü Qianjin said his father could swallow a whole Yorkshire pig in one go. Lü Qianjin’s father slaughtered pigs. “You’ve got eyes in your head,” Lü Qianjin said. “You can see for yourself my father is even stouter than a Yorkshire pig.”

  Song Hai’s father was a surgeon. Song Hai said his father regularly operated on himself. “I often wake up in the middle of the night and see my father sitting by the dining table, his head down, a flashlight gripped between his teeth so that the light shines on his belly. He’s stitching himself up.”

  Then there’s Fang Dawei’s father. Fang Dawei says his father can knock a hole through a wall with just one punch. Even Liu Jisheng’s father—who’s so thin there’s no flesh on his bones, who spends half the year in a hospital bed—Liu Jisheng says he can snap nails in half with his teeth.

  “So how about your dad?” they ask. “What is it he can do? Does h
e have the guts to drive with his eyes closed?”

  I shook my head again. “I don’t know.”

  “Then hurry up and ask him.”

  After they left, I went on sitting on the doorsill, waiting for my father to return. In the late afternoon, my mother came home and saw me sitting there in a daze. “Yang Gao, what are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m sitting on the doorsill,” I said.

  “I can see that,” she said. “What I want to know is, what are you doing sitting there?”

  “I’m waiting for Father to come home,” I said.

  Mother started to prepare dinner. As she ladled water out of the vat to sieve the rice, she said, “Come inside and help me wash the vegetables.”

  I didn’t go in. I stayed sitting on the doorsill, and though my mother called me time and again, I went on sitting there, right until nightfall, when my father came home. His heavy footsteps sounded slowly on the darkened street, and then he appeared at the corner, carrying that shabby old bag of his. As his black shadow approached, the light from the house shone on his foot, then climbed his legs. When it reached his chest, he stopped and bent down. His head was still in shadow as he asked, “Yang Gao, what are you doing here?”

  “I was waiting for you to come home,” I said. I stood up and followed him inside. He sat down in a chair and put his arms on the table. He looked at me, and that was when I asked, “Do you dare to drive with your eyes closed?”

  My father smiled and shook his head. “You can’t drive with your eyes closed.”

  “Why not?” I said. “Why can’t you drive with your eyes closed?”

  “If I was to drive with my eyes closed,” my father said, “I’d crash and die.”

  5

  My mother is right—I’m biddable. I’ve got a fine job now, on the janitorial staff at the machine plant. I am in the same factory and the same shop as Lü Qianjin. He’s a fitter, so he’s got oil all over his hands and all over his clothes, but he’s perfectly happy. He says he’s got a skilled job and he looks down on the work I do, saying my job is unskilled. It’s true there’s no skill involved in my job—all I have to do is take a broom and sweep the shop’s concrete floor. So I don’t have any skill, but I also don’t have any oil on my hands or clothes, while Lü Qianjin’s fingernails are dirty black. His nails have been like that ever since he came to the factory.

  Actually, when we just started, it was Lü Qianjin who was the janitor and me who was the fitter. Lü Qianjin refused to be janitor and went off to see the manager, a chisel in his hand. He stuck the chisel in the manager’s desk and said he would not be janitor, he insisted on being reassigned. So that’s how Lü Qianjin and I came to exchange positions, with him becoming a fitter and me becoming janitor. After he became a fitter, he handed me the chisel and told me to stick it in the manager’s desk just as he had. I asked him why.

  “If you stick it in his desk,” he said, “you won’t have to be janitor anymore.”

  “What’s wrong with being janitor?” I asked.

  “Damn it, you’re such a blockhead,” he said. “Being janitor is the most demeaning job of all—don’t you realize that yet?”

  “Yes, I realize that. I know none of you are willing to be janitor.”

  He put his hands on my shoulders and started pushing me. “If you’re clear on that, that’s fine then,” he said. “Off you go.”

  He pushed me out of the shop. I took a few steps forward, and then I turned around and went back in. Lü Qianjin blocked my path. “What are you doing back here?” he asked.

  “If I stick the chisel in the manager’s desk, but he still wants me to be janitor,” I said, “what do I do then?”

  “That’s not what’s going to happen!” said Lü Qianjin. “All you need to do is stick the chisel in the desk and the manager will be scared. If he’s scared, he will let you go back to being a fitter again.”

  I shook my head. “The manager won’t get scared so easily.”

  “What do you mean?” said Lü Qianjin. He started pushing me again. “I scared him, didn’t I?”

  “You scared him,” I said, “but I wouldn’t scare him.”

  Lü Qianjin looked at me intently for a moment and then withdrew his hands. “You’re right,” he said. “You wouldn’t scare the manager. You wouldn’t fucking scare anybody. You were fucking born to sweep the floor.”

  Lü Qianjin is right. I was born to sweep floors. I like sweeping floors. I like sweeping the shop floor until it’s squeaky clean. I like walking back and forth in the shop with the broom in my hand, and even when I sit down to take a break I like to hold the broom. The guys in the shop say, “Yang Gao, the way you hug that broom of yours, it’s like you’re feeling a woman up.”

  I know they are having a joke at my expense, but I pay them no mind, because they are always making fun. I have no idea why they love to laugh at me so much. If I’m sweeping the floor, they watch me and roar with laughter; if I’m walking along, they point at me and laugh fit to burst. When I clock in before them, they think this a great joke, and when I finish work later than them, they think that a great joke too. Actually, I start and finish just at the proper time, at the time fixed by the factory, but they make fun of me all the same, because they always start late and knock off early. “Yang Gao,” Lü Qianjin once said, “everybody else starts late and finishes early, so why do you start on time and finish on time?”

  “That’s because I’m biddable,” I told him.

  He looked at me and shook his head. “No, it’s because you’re timid.”

  I feel it isn’t that I am timid, it’s because I like this job of mine. Lü Qianjin doesn’t like his job, doesn’t like this skilled fitter’s job that he got with the chisel, so he comes to work late every day. Not only does he turn up late, but he often drags an old mat over to a corner of the workshop and takes a nap there. Sometimes Song Hai and Fang Dawei come over to socialize, slipping away from their posts during work hours, and when they see Lü Qianjin snoring away on that old mat of his, they shout at him to wake up. “Damn, you really know how to make yourself comfortable, don’t you? Here you are, sleeping on the job. You might as well fetch your bed from home and move it right in.”

  At moments like these, Lü Qianjin rubs his eyes and chuckles. “You guys not working today?” he’ll say.

  “We’re working all right,” Fang Dawei and company say, “but we slipped out for a breather.”

  “Well, aren’t you doing the same thing as me?” Lü Qianjin says. “You guys are pretty damn comfortable yourselves.”

  Then Fang Dawei and the others call me over. “Yang Gao, every time we come over here we see you sweeping the floor. Why don’t you take a leaf out of Lü Qianjin’s book and take a nap on that old mat?”

  I shake my head. “I never take a nap.”

  “Why not?” they ask.

  “I like my work,” I reply, broom in hand.

  Hearing this, they roared with laughter. They find this very strange. “Can you believe it?” they say. “There’s still someone in the world who likes sweeping floors.”

  It’s not strange to me, because I really do like sweeping the workshop till it’s spick-and-span. I wipe all the machinery in the shop until it is squeaky clean too. Because of me, our workshop has become the cleanest in the whole plant. The people in the other shops wish they could have me working for them, but the people in our workshop won’t let me go. Everybody knows that—in the plant, and outside too. Even my old classmates Lin Lili and Sun Hongmei know, because once they said, “Yang Gao, you’re the best worker in your factory, but every time they award raises or assign housing, you’re always left out … Look at that Lü Qianjin—he’s always napping on the job, but he gets a raise, he gets an apartment. He does no work, but he has his finger in every pie.”

  “I’m not in his league,” I said to them. “Lü Qianjin has ways of getting things done. But not me. I have no way of getting anything done.”

  “What are Lü Qianji
n’s ways of getting things done? What else is there to it but threatening the factory manager with a knife?”

  They got that wrong. Lü Qianjin never used a knife to threaten the manager. He did use a chisel when he first got his job assignment, but later he didn’t even use that. When he heard some workers were going to get raises, he went off empty-handed, went off to the manager’s office every morning as though that was his workplace, not our workshop. He would go into the manager’s office, sit down in one of the manager’s chairs, drinking the manager’s tea and smoking the manager’s cigarettes, talking to the manager for hours on end. That carried on until one day the manager said to him, “Lü Qianjin, the list of those getting raises has now been approved, and your name is on it.”

  Lü Qianjin then returned to our workshop to work. Ever since, the old mat in the corner of the shop has never gone unoccupied—you can see a body stretched out there at all hours of the day.

  Lü Qianjin’s wages keep on rising, while mine never change. Lü Qianjin has tried to educate me. “Yang Gao,” he said, “just think—when we first came to the plant, we had exactly the same pay. Years have passed, and I keep on napping every day and you keep on slaving away, and yet I’m paid more than you are. Do you know why that is?”

  “Why?” I said.

  “It’s because misery is the lot of the timid, and fortune favors the bold.”

  I didn’t agree. I shook my head. “I didn’t go and see the manager, not because I’m timid, but because I feel I make enough money. So it doesn’t bother me that I make less than you.”

  Lü Qianjin had a good long chuckle after hearing that. “You’re incredible,” he said.

  Lü Qianjin is a good friend. He’s always got my interests at heart. After the factory built a new block of housing, he came to give me more advice. “Yang Gao, have you seen? That new apartment building is finally completed. It took a full three years to build it, damn it. We need to go and see the manager and demand that he assigns us new housing. What you have to realize is that after this housing is allocated there won’t be any new construction for another ten years, so we have to get our hands on an apartment now, no matter what it takes.”