Cries in the Drizzle

by Yu Hua

They noticed he was drinking spirits nonchalantly in the widow's house all afternoon. But later, in the middle of the night, the locals heard a piteous wailing coming from outside the village. My brother recognized the sound as that of my father grieving by Mother's grave. After the widow fell asleep he had surreptitiously made his way to the burial site, and grief made him forget how loudly he was wailing. Not long afterward my brother heard the widows voice. Her scolding was followed by a clear order: “Get back here!”

  Father, sobbing, tramped back to the widow's house, his steps as hesitant as those of a lost child. Now that her once unquenchable libido had dissipated, the widow recognized Sun Kwangtsai as her official sleeping partner.

  In the last year of his life Sun Kwangtsai exhibited a limitless devotion to liquor. Every afternoon, rain or shine, he would go into town to buy a bottle and by the time he got home it would already be completely drained. I can imagine what a romantic figure my father must have cut as he walked along the lane, swigging spirits. Whether making his way through clouds of dust or squelching his way through mud puddles, encouraged by the alcohol, my father, stooped and bent though he was, was as exhilarated as a boy who sees his sweetheart's hair waving in the breeze.

  It was his limitless devotion to liquor that did my father in. On that particular day he changed his normal routine and instead chose to do his drinking in a small tavern in town. Walking back home in the moonlight, completely sozzled, he stumbled into the cesspit at the entrance to the village. As he fell, he did not give a shout of alarm but only muttered, “Don't push.”

  When he was discovered the next morning, he was lying facedown in the muck, covered with little white maggots. He could not have chosen a filthier place in which to lay himself to rest, but he was quite unaware of that in his final moments and had every reason to wear a contented expression, given that he died in such a painless fashion.

  After Sun Kwangtsai had fallen into the cesspit that night, Old Luo, another famous drunkard, passed that way in a besotted haze. When, by the light of the moon, his eyes rested blearily on Sun Kwangtsai, he failed to realize that it was a dead man floating on the manure soup. He squatted down beside the cesspit for a few moments and asked himself, “Whose pig is this?”

  He stood up and shouted, “Whose pig has fallen into … ?”

  Old Luo clapped his hand over his mouth and said to himself conspiratorially, “No shouting. I'll fish it out and keep it for myself.”

  Still completely in alcohol's grip, Old Luo nipped home as effortlessly as if treading on air, fetched a rope and a bamboo laundry pole, and just as briskly returned. First he used the pole to steer the corpse to the opposite side of the pit; then he made his way over there, got down on his knees, and tied the rope around Sun Kwangtsai's neck. He said to himself, “Such a skinny pig! Whose can it be? Its neck's no thicker than a man's.”

  He stood up, coiled the rope over his shoulder, and began to pull. “It seems on the lean side when you poke it,” he said with a chuckle. “But it's plump enough when you have to drag the thing.”

  It was only after Old Luo had hauled the body up on the bank and bent down to untie the rope that he realized what he had retrieved. Sun Kwangtsai lay there grinning at him. Old Luo was startled at first, but then he was so angry that he punched him on the face several times and let loose a string of curses. “Sun Kwangtsai! Sun Kwangtsai, you old dog! Even when you die, you try to fool me into thinking you're a pig.”

  Then with one swing of his leg Old Luo kicked Sun Kwangtsai back into the cesspit. The impact of the body's entry spattered him with filth. As Old Luo mopped his face he said, “Fuck! No end to your tricks.”

  BIRTH

  In the autumn of 1958, on the way to Southgate, a young Sun Kwangtsai ran into Zheng Yuda, future director of the commerce bureau. Late in life, Zheng Yuda described the scene to his son Zheng Liang. He was in the throes of lung cancer then and his lungs wheezed as he told the story, but even so Zheng Yuda was moved to throaty laughter by the memory of what had happened.

  As a member of a rural supervisory team, Zheng Yuda was going to Southgate to check how things were being done. The young Zheng Yuda was dressed in a gray Mao suit, with a pair of Liberation gym shoes on his feet; his hair, parted in the middle, rippled in the breeze that blew over the open fields. My father was wearing a traditional-style jacket; his canvas shoes were Mother's handiwork, made by the light of their oil lamp.

  A couple of weeks earlier Sun Kwangtsai had transported a boatload of vegetables to a neighboring county for sale. Then, in a flash of inspiration, he decided that a bus ride was an experience he deserved to enjoy, so he returned that way on his own, leaving two other villagers to scull the empty boat back.

  Approaching Southgate, ruddy-faced Sun Kwangtsai caught sight of Zheng Yuda in his formal wear. The town official struck up a conversation with the farmer.

  In the fields random and chaotic signs of prosperity were emerging. Small furnaces constructed out of dark bricks dotted the rice paddies. Zheng Yuda asked, “Are the People's Communes a good thing?”

  “You bet,” said Sun Kwangtsai. “Meals are free.”

  Zheng Yuda's eyes narrowed. “What a thing to say!”

  Then Sun Kwangtsai asked Zheng Yuda, “Do you have a wife?”

  “Of course.”

  “Slept with her last night, did you?”

  Zheng Yuda was unaccustomed to fielding this kind of inquiry. His face stiffened and he said sternly, “Don't talk nonsense.”

  Sun Kwangtsai continued blithely, “It's been two weeks since I last slept with my wife.” Pointing at his crotch, he said, “This fellow here is mad as hell!”

  Zheng Yuda turned his head away and paid him no more mind.

  They parted company at the entrance to the village. Zheng Yuda carried on toward the houses in the center while my father headed for the vegetable plots around the edge, picking up speed as he went. My mother, along with a few other women, was hacking at weeds with a hoe. Her young face glowed with health, like a red apple, and her blue kerchief was spotless. The breeze carried her silvery laugh to Sun Kwangtsai's ears, stoking the fire in his loins. He spotted her now, her back swinging rhythmically as she hoed, and hailed her with an eager shout. “Hey!”

  My mother turned around and saw her randy husband standing on the path. She returned his greeting. “Hi!”

  “Come over here.”

  Blushing, Mother removed her scarf. As she began to walk in his direction, she patted dust off her jacket. Her unhurried movements infuriated my father, who yelled, “I am dying for it! Run, can't you?”

  Amid the laughter of the other women, Mother ran toward him, her body swaying.

  My father's patience could not possibly last as far as their house, and as soon as they reached Old Luo's place at the entrance to the village, its door ajar, he called inside, “Anyone home?”

  Having established that the house was unoccupied, he slipped in. Mother, however, stayed outside. My father found this maddening, “Come on in!” he cried.

  Mother hesitated, “This is somebody else's house.”

  “Come in, will you?”

  Once she had entered, my father quickly closed the door and moved a bench from a corner into the center of the room. “Get your pants off,” he said.

  My mother bowed her head, lifted the hem of her jacket, and began to unfasten her belt. But after some time she said apologetically, “There's a knot I can't untie.”

  My father stamped his foot. “You're driving me crazy.”

  She bent her head again and tried once more to loosen the knot, her face filled with contrition.

  “Okay, okay, let me do it.”

  My father squatted down and tugged at the belt with all his might. He succeeded in ripping off the belt, but in doing so pulled a muscle in his neck. Though in a paroxysm of lust, he still found time to clutch his neck and yelp with pain. My mother hurriedly started to massage the sprain, but he yelled in rage, “Lie down, damn it.”


  She lay down meekly, raising one leg and letting it dangle in the autumn air as her eyes continued to rest uneasily on his neck.Still rubbing the injured spot, he clambered on top of her, intent on performing his lubricious mission right there on the bench. Some of Old Luo's hens clucked enthusiastically, as though eager to be part of the action and resenting Sun Kwangtsai's monopoly of the goodies. They congregated around his feet and pecked at his toes. At this moment, when he would normally be focusing all his attention on one thing, my father was forced to expend effort on waving his feet to drive away these pesky fowl. Once knocked aside, the chickens rapidly regrouped and continued to peck at his toes. He vainly shook his feet and, as the critical moment approached, he cried in exasperation, “To hell with them!”

  A series of ecstatic moans ensued, followed by uncontrollable giggles.

  After it was all over, my father left Old Luo's house and went in search of Zheng Yuda. Mother went home, clutching the top of her pants, in need of a new belt.

  When my father found Zheng Yuda, he was sitting in the party committee office listening to reports. My father beckoned him mysteriously. When Zheng Yuda came out, my father asked him, “Quick, wasn't it?”

  Zheng Yuda did not understand. “What was quick?”

  My father said, “I already had it off with her.”

  Communist Party cadre Zheng Yuda immediately assumed a severe expression and reprimanded him in a low voice. “Get out of here!”

  It was only when he retold this story late in life that Zheng Yuda realized its comic aspects, and he expressed a tolerant, understanding attitude to my father's behavior that day. “What can you do?” he said to Zheng Liang, “That's peasants for you.”

  My parents’ coupling on the bench that day marked the starting point of my life.

  I came into the world during the busy season, when the rice was being harvested. My delivery happened to coincide with a time when hunger had driven my father, toiling away in the rice paddies, into a desperate fury. He later forgot about his stomach pangs, but he could clearly recall how angry he had been. My earliest knowledge of the circumstances of my birth came courtesy of my father's drink-soaked mouth. One evening when I was six years old he recounted the details without the slightest embarrassment. Pointing at a chicken that was strutting about nearby, he said, “Your ma squeezed you out as easily as that hen lays an egg.”

  Because my mother was nine months pregnant by then, she did not go out to harvest the rice, even though it was the busy period when everybody was up at the crack of dawn. As she was to put it later, “It wasn't that I didn't have the energy, it was just that I couldn't bend down.”

  But Mother did take on the responsibility of taking my father's lunch out to him. Under the dazzling sunlight Mother would waddle along, a basket under her arm, blue-checked scarf around her head, arriving in the fields at noon. To me, the thought of my mother trudging slowly toward my father with a smile on her face is very touching.

  The lunchtime when I was born, Sun Kwangtsai wearily raised himself up dozens of times to scan the path, but my full-breasted, big-bellied mother just never appeared. Seeing the other villagers finish their lunch and pick up their work where they had left off, Sun Kwangtsai, tormented by hunger, stood at the edge of the field, furiously spewing obscenities.

  Mother did not make her appearance until after two that afternoon. The blue-checked scarf was still wound around her head, but her complexion was pale and her body wobbled under the basket's weight.

  My father, by now practically fainting, may have been vaguely aware that there was something different about my mother as she edged toward him, but he was in no mood to think about that, and as she came closer he bellowed at her, “You like to see me starve, don't you?”

  “It's not that,” said Mother weakly. “I had the baby.”

  It was only then that my father noticed that her rotund belly had shriveled.

  Mother could bend at the waist now, and although this cost her fragile body a high price in pain she still managed to take the food out of the basket with a smile, at the same time saying to him softly, “The scissors were a long way away and it wasn't easy to pick them up. After the baby was born it needed a wash. I was going to bring you lunch ages ago, but I started getting cramps even before I left the house. I knew I was about to deliver and tried to fetch the scissors, but I was in such pain I couldn't get over there and—”

  My father had heard enough of this tiresome recital and cut her off in midstream. “Boy or girl?”

  “It's a boy,” Mother said.

  Chapter 2

  FRIENDSHIP

  After the Su family moved away from Southgate, I saw little of Su Yu and Su Hang until I entered high school, when we resumed contact once again. I found to my surprise that the two brothers, bosom friends during their Southgate days, were as remote from each other at school as I was from Sun Guangping, and not at all alike.

  Though on the frail side, Su Yu behaved very much like an adult. He had outgrown his blue cotton clothes and once, when he was not wearing socks, his trouser legs were so short that I could clearly see his ankles when he moved. Like the other boys, Su Yu did not bother taking a satchel to school but simply tucked his textbooks under his arm. Where he differed from his classmates was that he never swaggered along in the middle of the road but instead walked circumspectly off to one side, his head lowered.

  At the beginning it was not Su Yu who caught my attention but rather Su Hang, with his glossy well-groomed hair. When he whistled at female classmates, his hands in his trouser pockets, I was captivated by his debonair style. He would sometimes hold up a yellowing volume and softly read to us from it. “Do you want a girl? The price is very reasonable.” To us other schoolboys, so poorly informed about sex, he embodied a style we associated more with unemployed youths.

  At that point I had a particular dread of being alone and hated having to stand around on my own in some corner during the break between classes. When I saw Su Hang laughing loudly amid a bunch of classmates in the middle of the playground, I moved in his direction, but with some diffidence, country boy that I was. I hoped desperately that Su Hang would greet me with a holler: “Hey, I know you!”

  When I went up to him he made no effort to recall our association in Southgate, but neither did he tell me to go away, so with a glow of pleasure I understood this as his accepting me. And he did accept me to the extent that he let me hang around with him and his friends as they joked and shouted in the playground. In the evenings, on the darkened streets, he would share his cigarette with us. We roamed restlessly through the town, and when a girl appeared we would join him in a chorus of groans, which although uttered seemingly in pain actually gave us a lot of pleasure. “Hey sister, why are you ignoring me?” we would say.

  As I nervously delivered this greeting, overwhelmed by a sense of impending doom, I experienced at the same time an excitement I had never known before.

  What we learned from Su Hang was that to go out after dinner was more fun than staying home, no matter how severely we might be punished at the end of the evening. He also educated us about the kind of girl that we should admire, emphasizing that we could not judge girls in terms of their academic achievements, but should base our selection of love interests on the size of their breasts and buttocks.

  Although these were his criteria for evaluating the local talent, he himself was smitten with the skinniest girl in the class. She had a round face and two perky little pigtails, but apart from her dark eyes we could not for the life of us see what was so attractive about her. Su Hang's infatuation left us bemused, and one of us was moved to question his choice: “But what about her chest? There's nothing there! And she's got no tush to speak of, either.”

  Su Hang responded in the voice of experience. “You need to think ahead. Within the next year her boobs and her butt will fill out nicely, and then she'll be the prettiest girl in the whole school.”

  Su Hang's approach to courtship was simple an
d direct. He wrote a note full of compliments and endearments and slipped it inside the girl's English textbook. In English class that morning, she suddenly gave a yelp that made us quake and then burst into a long wail that hung in the air, like a note played on the organ. Su Hang, whom I thought bold and dauntless, turned white as a corpse.

  But after leaving the classroom Su Hang quickly recovered his customary cool. When we got out of school that morning, he walked over to the girl, whistling nonchalantly, and accompanied her out the gate, making faces at us as he did this. The poor girl was again reduced to tears. At this point one of her friends, a well-built girl, came to her defense. She thrust her way in between them, quietly but indignantly cursing him. “You lowlife!”

  Su Hang spun around and blocked her way, not so much angry as excited that she had provided an opportunity to show his mettle. We heard him cry menacingly, “Say that again!”

  She was not intimidated, and said, “Lowlife, that's what you are!”

  We would never have guessed that Su Hang would raise his fist and hit her right between her ample breasts. She wailed in anguish, then ran off crying, her face in her hands.

  When we joined Su Hang, he was gleefully rubbing the index and middle fingers of his right hand. He told us that when he punched the girl those two fingers felt something silky soft, a marvelous sensation denied the other three digits, which was why he was not bothering to rub them. “An unexpected bonus, really an unexpected bonus,” he sighed.

  I owed to Su Hang's teachings my earliest conceptions of female anatomy. One evening in early spring a bunch of us were walking with him through the streets. He told us that his parents had a large hardbound volume in which there was a color picture of a woman's pudenda.

  “They have three holes,” he said to us.

  His tone evoked an air of mystery that was heightened by the occasional pounding of footsteps farther down the street, and I found myself short of breath. I was both frightened and attracted by the unfamiliar knowledge that he was imparting.