by Yu Hua
The tallest boy in my class had legs densely covered with dark hairs but walked around casually all the same, flaunting them to the whole world. I went through a phase when I often felt anxious on his account, and if I noticed girls’ eyes fixed on his legs my concern for him only accentuated my own sense of unease.
Shortly before the start of the summer vacation, I came back to school early after lunch, but was deterred from entering by the sound of girls talking and laughing loudly inside. (Even now, if it is all women or all strangers in a room, I find it an intimidating experience to go in on my own. With so many eyes resting on me all at once, I am nervous and flustered.) I meant to walk away immediately, but I heard Cao Li's voice and her laughter kept me rooted to the spot. Next thing, I heard the others ask her which boy she liked most, a question that startled me with its boldness. What surprised me even more was that Cao Li was not the least embarrassed. There was a clear note of relish in her voice when she told them to guess the answer.
So tense was I that my breathing became labored. The girls came out with a whole string of potential candidates, including Su Hang and Lin Wen, but my name was conspicuously absent and I was mortified at having been overlooked. At the same time, Cao Li's total rejection of these possibilities gave me some fleeting hope. But soon a voice named the classmate with the hairy legs and Cao Li immediately responded in the affirmative. The girls greeted her admission with simultaneous peals of laughter, and amid the hilarity one voice chipped in, “I know what it is you like about him.”
“What's that?”
“The hair on his legs.”
For a long time I would puzzle in vain over the explanation Cao Li herself gave. She said that of all the boys in the school he looked the most grown-up.
I quietly edged away from the classroom door and Cao Li's wanton laughter pursued me all the way down the corridor. What I had just heard did not sadden me as much as shock me. In that moment, as never before, life had revealed to me a state of affairs that seemed utterly counterintuitive. The lanky schoolboy who couldn't care less about the hair on his legs would hand in essays littered with miswritten characters and there wasn't one teacher who didn't single him out for ridicule, but this very same student had gotten the thumbs-up from Cao Li. Precisely what I regarded as ugly was alluring to her. I walked all the way to the pond next to the school and stood there for a long time watching the sunlight and the foliage that floated on the water's surface, and my deep disappointment with Cao Li slowly evolved into self-pity. For the first time in my life a beautiful dream had been shattered.
A second disillusionment was brought home to me by Su Yu, and involved the secrets of the female body. By now I had a longstanding desire for the opposite sex, but I was still in the dark about women's anatomy. I had specially earmarked my purest notions, using them to construct in a vacuum my image of Woman. This specter had appeared at night in the shape of Cao Li but never emerged as a genuinely sexual being, and in the evenings I would content myself with glimpsing female figures of matchless beauty who were dancing in the dark.
It all started with that hardback volume on Su Yu's father's shelves. Su Yu was quite familiar with his father's library, but it was through Su Hang that he became aware of this particular title. Ever since leaving Southgate the Su family had lived in one of the apartment blocks for hospital staff, with Su Yu and Su Hang on the first floor and their parents on the second; the one chore the brothers were assigned was to mop the floors each day. In the first few years Su Hang took responsibility for mopping downstairs, for he was unwilling to carry the mop up to the second floor, with all the extra work that would entail. But later on Su Hang abruptly told Su Yu that he would take charge of cleaning upstairs. He did not provide any explanation, for he was already accustomed to ordering his older brother about. Su Yu accepted Su Hang's suggestion without comment, this minor change striking him as of no consequence. After Su Hang took charge of the second floor, two or three classmates would drop in every day and help Su Hang with the mopping. So it was that Su Yu downstairs would often hear a flurry of furtive comments from upstairs, as well as a puzzling assortment of whistles and sighs. Su Yu burst in on them one time and thereby learned their secret.
After this, when Su Yu and I met, there was often a morose look on his face. Like mine, his conception of women was constructed around fantasy, and he was thrown off balance when suddenly confronted by the banality of real life. I remember that one particular evening we strolled quietly along the road and later stood on the newly completed concrete bridge. Su Yu, deep in thought, stared at the moonlight and lamplight on the water and then said to me awkwardly, “There's something you need to know.”
That night I gave a little shiver under the moonlight, for I knew what I was about to see. My examination of the color photograph had been delayed until now; how bitterly I had regretted my offer to stand guard that day.
The following morning, I sat upstairs in the Sus’ house in a dilapidated rattan chair and watched as Su Yu picked the book off the shelf. He showed me the color plate.
My first reaction was, How lurid and gross! Once confronted with this photograph, the image of femininity that had formed in my mind collapsed in ruins. Instead of the beauty I had so anticipated, a grotesque sight met my eyes; there was something malignant about this tasteless illustration. Su Yu stood beside me, his face just as pale as mine. He closed the book, saying, “I shouldn't have shown it to you.”
The color plate had the same effect on me as it had on Su Yu, severing my attachment to an illusory perfection and thrusting me headlong into unvarnished reality. Although I persisted with my beautiful visions for a little longer, I was conscious that they were vaporizing.
When I started thinking about girls again, I found I had lost my original innocence, for the color plate had reoriented me toward practical physiology. I started to have all kinds of fantasies. Though I had a dreadful feeling that I was rapidly becoming decadent, raw desire made my resistance crumble. As I grew older the way I looked at girls changed drastically, for I began to pay attentionto their buttocks and breasts, no longer susceptible only to winsome eyes or a cute expression.
The autumn when I was sixteen, the film projection team from town visited Southgate for the first time in six months. In those days it was a big event for country folk to watch a movie in the evening and people from adjacent villages came hurrying over before dark, clutching stools in their hands. For years now the production team leader had been accustomed to planting his seat firmly in the center of the drying ground. I will never forget how he used to make his entrance. Just as night fell he would appear, brandishing the kind of long bamboo pole normally used for hanging out laundry, and swagger across the drying ground. After he sat down, he would lean the pole against his shoulder and if anyone in front of him obstructed his line of vision he would hold out the pole and give that person a tap on the head, to preserve his unimpeded view.
Children generally sat on the other side of the screen and watched the characters fire guns or write letters with their left hands. When I was little, my place had been in this juvenile section, but I ruled out such a viewing position now that I was sixteen. On this occasion the person immediately in front of me was a young woman from a nearby village, whose name I never knew.
It was so packed that I had to squeeze in behind her and peer over her head to see the screen. At the beginning I was quite relaxed, but the smell of her hair kept wafting over me, making me more and more unsettled. As people behind us pressed forward, my hand brushed against her buttocks; this brief contact electrified me. Temptation, when it comes one's way, is hard to resist: suppressing my inhibitions, I gave her a second little pat. When she did not react, this strengthened my nerve and I pressed my palm against her buttocks, ready to take to my heels should she begin to stir. But she stood as stiff and still as if she were carved out of wood. My hand could feel her warmth, and the part of her that I was touching seemed to get hotter and hotter. When I gently a
djusted my position, she still made no response. I turned my head to look around and saw that the man behind me was a good bit taller than me. Emboldened, I pinched the young woman on the bottom, making her giggle. This sound was particularly noticeable, as it was emitted during the film's most tedious sequence, and it instantly deflated my courage. I squeezed my way out of the crowd, trying to assume a pose of nonchalance. But panic took over before I had gone very far and I bolted for home, where my heart continued to thump even after I had thrown myself down on my bed. Whenever steps approached our house I trembled all over, convinced that she must be coming with a backup to apprehend her molester. After the movie was over, the random patter of feet made me more agitated still, and long after my parents and my older brother had gone to bed I worried that the young woman might yet track me down. Only sleep rescued me in the end.
I could find no outlet for my desires, and Su Yu was in the same boat. The difference was that Su Yu's sexual frustrations at least distracted him from the anxieties that beset him during his stay at Southgate. Now, when I look back, the happy childhood that I associated with Su Yu from my pond-side observation point was actually just as unreliable as the breezes that blew across the water. I was vaguely aware at the time of his father's entanglement with the widow, but I had no idea of the full extent to which Su Yu was affected. In fact, just as my family's antipathy to me was growing daily more obvious, Su Yu had begun to suffer insecurities of his own following that act of his father's.
When the Sus moved to Southgate the widow was still in full flower, and she made no effort to conceal her interest in Dr. Su. For it was at this stage, before her vigorous appetite began to wane, that she developed a tendency one associates more with men—a taste for novelty. The guests she had received previously were all peasants with mud on their legs, and the appearance on the scene of Dr. Su struck her as a refreshing change. With his glasses and the whiff of ethyl alcohol that clung to him, this man of culture was an utter revelation, making her realize that however many visitors had honored her carved bed with their presence, they had all been patterned from a single mold. The doctor's arrival in the village excited her no end, and she would say to everyone she met, “These intellectuals are so adorable!”
To be fair, one has to point out that during those days she was so infatuated with the doctor she must have observed at least two weeks of celibacy, no longer accepting every volunteer who came along. She knew that doctors are particular about hygiene and didn't want to make things difficult. Her faked illness provided the occasion for seducing him. As he walked to her house to perform the examination, he had no idea that he was headed for a trap, and even when he stood by her bed and she looked doe-eyed up at him he failed to note the warning signs. In his usual even tone he inquired about the nature of her malady, and was told she had a bellyache. He asked her to pull back a corner of the quilt so that he could take a look at the problem area. Instead she kicked the quilt to one side, offering herself for his inspection in her birthday suit. This unexpected move took him completely by surprise. He found himself gazing at a female body in impressive physical condition. His wife's figure was not at all in the same league.
“You didn't…,” he stammered, “you didn't need to take it all off.”
“Come to me,” she said in an imperious tone.
The doctor could have taken to his heels, but instead he slowly backed away and shuffled toward the door. It was hard to say no to the widow's lusty body.
She jumped to her feet, and between her strength and his lack of resistance she found it an easy matter to maneuver him onto her bed. During the act that followed she heard him muttering again and again, “I am letting my wife down. I am letting the boys down.”
The doctor's incessant self-reproaches did not hinder his participation in their activity, and everything took its normal course. Afterward the widow told people, “You have no idea how bashful he is. What a sweet man!”
Nothing else happened between them, but for a long time afterward the villagers often saw the widow made up like some girl from Xinjiang, her hair twisted into little braids, pacing back and forth near the doctor's house playing the coquette. The doctor's wife would sometimes come out and look at her, then go back inside, without any words being exchanged. A few times she managed to intercept the doctor as he came down the road, and the villagers would see the doctor flee in embarrassment before her doting smile.
One evening in my second year at junior high, Su Yu pensively related to me the events of one other evening. His father's brief lapse had not created such a big stir as to seriously disrupt family life, but something untoward did ensue. One day their parents came home unusually late. Their mother was the first to return, well after dark, but when he and his brother went to greet her she ignored them. Instead she rummaged around in a trunk for some clothes, put them in a bag, and went off carrying the bag. Their father returned soon afterward. He asked them if their mother had come home at all. Told that she had, he went out again. They waited till midnight on empty stomachs, but with no sign of their parents’ return had no choice but to go to bed. When they woke up the next morning, their parents were in the kitchen preparing breakfast, just like any other day.
I could detect uneasiness in Su Yu's voice that night. In the aftermath of his father's escapade, Su Yu, sensitive and impressionable as he was, was easily thrown off balance simply by witnessing, say, a man and a woman having a personal conversation. Even though his parents had been careful to cover up his father's indiscretion, the facts of the matter gradually had become plain to him. Observing the carefree manner of his classmates, he would feel envy of them and esteem for their parents. It never crossed his mind that their parents might also be involved in some hanky-panky, and he was convinced that only his family could generate such a scandal. On occasion he even indicated that he felt a little jealous of me, although he was well aware of my miserable status in my family. As he looked at me with admiration, he did not know that my father, Sun Kwangtsai, was that very moment marching triumphantly into the widow's house with the foot basin that my grandmother once used slung over his shoulder. In the face of Su Yu's benign envy, I could only blush with shame.
In his last year in high school, as Su Yu approached full physical maturity, it became difficult for him to resist his burgeoning desires, urges whose intensity I was to feel to much the same degree when I entered high school. One summer lunchtime this yearning for the opposite sex led him on the path toward what we regarded at the time as fearful ruin. He happened to be walking along a quiet alleyway when he saw a full-breasted young woman approaching. He gave an involuntary shiver and in that moment his self-control was vanquished by the sheer force of his sexual need. As he walked in a daze toward her, he had no idea that he would end up putting his arms around her, and only when she shrieked in terror, pulled herself away, and ran off did he gradually realize what he had done.
Su Yu paid a heavy price, sentenced to a year of reform through labor. The day before his departure, he was led onto the rostrum next to the school playground with a wooden placard suspended from his neck, on which was written “Su Yu, Hooligan.” I watched as several classmates I knew well strode onto the rostrum, each clutching a sheet of writing paper, and delivered stern condemnations of Su Yu's crime.
I learned what had happened very late in the game. At morning recess on the day after the incident, I was on my way to Su Yu's classroom as usual when some older boys called out, “When are you making your first prison visit?”
I had no idea what they meant. When I got to the window and glanced toward Su Yu's desk, Zheng Liang saw me and signaled grimly. He came out and said, “Su Yu's in trouble.”
That's when I heard the whole story. Zheng Liang asked me tentatively, “Do you hate Su Yu?”
Tears spilled from my eyes, for my heart went out to my friend. “I could never hate Su Yu,” I told him.
I felt Zheng Liang's hand on my shoulder. As we began to walk, the boys who had jeered
at me earlier yelled again, “When are you guys off for your prison visit?”
“Just ignore them,” Zheng Liang murmured.
At the west end of the playground I saw Su Hang. Together with Lin Wen he was busily sharing his worldly wisdom with other boys my age. Su Hang was unperturbed by his brother's disgrace and loudly declared, “I don't know what we've been fucking doing all this time! While we were fooling around, my brother goes off without a word and feels a woman up. I'm going to cop a feel myself tomorrow.”
Lin Wen chipped in, “Su Yu has shown what he's made of now. We're novices by comparison.”
Two weeks later, Su Yu stood on the stage, his head shaved. Those tight, short clothes of his clung to his puny frame, and under an overcast sky he looked too weak to withstand a gust of wind. Even though I knew this was coming, I was still shocked to see Su Yu reduced so quickly to such a pitiful state. The way he stood there, head bowed, threw me into a welter of confused thoughts. I peered through a crowd of heads in an effort to catch Zheng Liang's eye and I noticed that he likewise was looking over his shoulder to see how I was reacting. At this moment only Zheng Liang felt my anguish, and our eyes were seeking out each other's support. When the denunciation session ended, he made a sign and I ran over. “Let's go,” Zheng Liang said.
Su Yu had been led off the stage in preparation for being frog-marched around the town. Many of our classmates followed in his wake, laughing and joking, excited by all the drama. I noticed Su Hang, who not long before had been so impervious to his brother's misfortune. Now he walked by himself, a hangdog look on his face, clearly upset by what had happened at the denunciation meeting. When the parade turned onto the main street, Zheng Liang and I pushed our way to the front of the crowd. Zheng Liang cried, “Su Yu!”
Su Yu walked on unhearing, his head down. Zheng Liang flushed and a look of distress crossed his face. I called out too, “Su Yu!”