Cries in the Drizzle

by Yu Hua

  “Well, he was the first to start hitting.”

  Lulu looked at me again with his dark eyes. It seemed never to have occurred to him that he needed to tell his side of the story, as though what the other boys said was of absolutely no interest to him. All he did was look at me.

  The middle-aged woman gave them a push. “I don't want you fighting in front of my shop. Clear off, the lot of you.”

  The pinioned boy began, with great difficulty, to edge forward; Lulu hung to him grimly, his feet scraping along the ground. The other boy brought up the rear, with their two satchels in his hand. Lulu was no longer looking at me but was craning his neck around to look at his own satchel, which lay in the pastry shop doorway. When they'd gone some ten yards or so, the pinioned boy came to a halt, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and said to his buddy in annoyance, “Come on, get him off me, will you?”

  “There's no way. Try biting his hand.”

  The boy bent down and bit Lulu's hand. Lulu's dark eyes closed and I knew he had to be in a lot of pain because he pressed his head tightly against his adversary's back.

  After a few moments the pinioned boy raised his head and continued to threaten him feebly with some unnamed reprisal. “Are you going to let go or not?”

  Lulu opened his eyes and twisted his head to check on his satchel.

  “Shit, this kid is too much!” The other boy raised his foot and gave Lulu a fierce kick in the buttocks.

  The pinioned boy said, “Squeeze his balls. That should do it.”

  His buddy looked around and, noticing me, he muttered, “No, I can't do that.”

  Lulu was still looking back and when a man approached the pastry shop, he shouted, “Don't step on my satchel!”

  This was the first time I heard Lulu speak. His piping voice made me think of the gaily colored butterfly bows in a young girl's hair. The pinioned boy said to his buddy, “Throw his satchel into the river.”

  The other boy went over to the shop doorway, picked up the satchel, and crossed the street to the concrete balustrade next to the river. Lulu watched him anxiously. The boy laid the satchel on the balustrade and said, “Are you going to let go or not? If you don't, I'm going to toss it in.”

  Lulu released his hands at last, and then he stood there with his eyes fixed on his satchel, unsure what to do. The freed boy picked up their two satchels from the ground and said to his friend, “Give his back to him.”

  The boy flung the satchel on the ground and gave it a kick for good measure before running to join his friend.

  Lulu shouted at them, “I'm going to tell my big brother! He'll settle accounts with you.”

  Then he went to fetch his satchel. I could see that he had fine, delicate features, but the blood dripping from his nose left a trail of red spots down the front of his white T-shirt. He squatted down next to his bag, took out his textbooks and pencil case, and placed them back in proper order. As he squatted there in the twilight, his small figure made a touching sight. After rearranging things to his satisfaction, he stood up, clutching his satchel to his chest, and with a corner of his shirt rubbed away the dust that had settled on it. I heard him muttering to himself, “My big brother's going to settle accounts with you.”

  He raised his hand to wipe away his tears and then went off, sobbing quietly.

  After Su Yu's death, I once more was alone. Sometimes when I ran into Zheng Liang we would stand about and exchange a few words. But I knew that the sole connection between him and me— Su Yu—had disappeared, and so our relationship was expendable. When I saw Zheng Liang walking around in high spirits with his new pals from the factory, this only confirmed my assessment.

  I often recalled how Su Yu would wait for me by the riverside, his head bowed, lost in thought. His death had transformed friendship from a wonderful anticipation of what would soon be to something fixed in place by what had been. I started to cultivate a stoop, slouching along the riverbank just as Su Yu did when he was alive, and I began to enjoy the action of walking, a love he had bequeathed to me. As I strolled along, I could reach back into the past and exchange a knowing smile with the Su Yu who once was.

  That was how I spent my last year at home, and that was my inner life as I approached adulthood. It was the year that I met Lulu.

  It was three days after that fight that I found his name. I was walking down a street in town when I saw him dashing across the sidewalk, his satchel clasped to his chest, with five or six boys about the same age in hot pursuit, crying, “Lulu, Lulu” and “You stupid idiot!”

  Lulu turned around and yelled, “I hate you!”

  After that, he ignored their shouts and stalked off. His rage was so out of proportion to his size that his body seemed to teeter under its weight, and his little bottom swayed as he disappeared among the pedestrians.

  At the time I did not realize that a close friendship could develop between Lulu and me, despite the impression he had made. But that changed when I witnessed Lulu's next face-off. This time Lulu was up against seven or eight boys his age who were shouting madly, like a bunch of excited flies, as they rained blows down on him. The result once again was Lulu's defeat, but this did not stop him from shouting at them with a victors confidence: “Be careful my big brother doesn't beat you all up!”

  The boy's antagonism to everybody and his friendless isolation struck a chord within me. From that time on I began to pay real attention to him. As I watched his boyish gait, a warm feeling coursed through my veins. It was as though I was seeing my own childhood self unrolling before me.

  One day as Lulu came out of the school gate and headed off down the sidewalk, I couldn't help but call him back. “Lulu.”

  He stopped, turned around, and studied me carefully, then asked, “Did you call me?”

  Smiling, I nodded.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  This abrupt inquiry took me by surprise; my being older did me no good at all. He walked away and I heard him muttering, “Why are you calling me, if you don't know me?”

  The failure of this first approach was discouraging, and after this I began to be more circumspect when I watched Lulu leaving the school. At the same time I sensed with pleasure that I had provoked his interest, and he would often turn around and throw me a glance as he walked.

  This impasse before we became friends seemed like a replay of the situation between Su Yu and me a couple of years earlier. We would both be surreptitiously watching each other, but neither of us would say a word. But one afternoon Lulu walked straight up to me, his dark eyes glowing with a winsome sparkle, and hailed me. “Uncle.”

  The sudden greeting startled me. He went on, “Do you have anything for a kid to eat?”

  Before this, it had seemed so difficult for us to have any kind of genuine interaction, but Lulu's question made this become a reality in no time at all. Hunger, you could say, was what initiated our friendship. But I was embarrassed, because although now almost eighteen years old—old enough to count in his eyes as an “uncle ”—I had not a penny in my pocket. I could only ruffle his hair with my hand and ask, “You haven't had lunch?”

  The boy saw that I could not help him stave off his hunger pangs, and he bowed his head and said softly, “No.”

  “Why haven't you eaten?”

  “My mom wouldn't let me.”

  He said this with no tone of reproaching his mother, just as a dispassionate fact.

  Without realizing it, we had begun to walk, I with my hand on his shoulder. I thought of Su Yu, now so far away, and how he would put his hand on my shoulder as we started one of our intimate rambles. Now I was treating Lulu with the same affection that Su Yu had extended to me. We strolled down the street, next to people who had no interest in us.

  Later Lulu raised his head and asked me, “Where are you going?”

  “Where are you going?” I asked him.

  “I'm going home.”

  “I'll walk you there,” I said.

  He put up no objection. My eyes
began to mist, for I glimpsed the phantom of Su Yu standing on the wooden bridge that led to Southgate, waving his hand in farewell. What I experienced at that moment must have been the feeling that Su Yu had when he saw me home.

  We entered a long, narrow alley. When we reached a rundown two-story house, Lulu's shoulder slipped from my grasp, and he climbed the staircase, his whole body swaying. Halfway up he looked back at me and waved just as an adult would do, saying, “Thanks, see you.”

  I waved back as I watched him go up the stairs. Soon after he disappeared from view, I heard a female voice raised in anger, and there was the sound of something hitting the floor. Lulu reemerged on the landing and ran back down the stairwell, pursued by a woman who hurled a shoe at his retreating back. It missed him and rolled down by my feet instead. On seeing me, the woman adjusted her hair, which had worked itself loose in all the uproar, and stormed back inside.

  I was taken aback by the sight of the woman upstairs, because I had seen her before. Her features, though cruelly altered by the passage of years, were unmistakably those of Feng Yuqing. The shy young girl was now a mother, self-assured and unconstrained.

  Lulu, who just a minute ago had been fleeing his mother's onslaught, to my surprise came over to retrieve the shoe and then went upstairs again to return it. He clutched it tightly against his chest, the same way he would hold his satchel, and walked toward his punishment, his little body swaying. Feng Yuqing could be heard yelling, “Get out of my sight!”

  He came downstairs with head bowed, looking hard done by. I went over and ruffled his hair, but he brushed aside my gesture of sympathy. With tears in his eyes he stomped off toward a clump of bamboo.

  Our friendship quickly blossomed. Two years earlier, I had experienced the warmth of friendship thanks to Su Yu, my senior in years, and now when I was with little Lulu I often felt as though I were Su Yu, gazing at me as I once was.

  I enjoyed my talks with Lulu, and even if he didn't fully understand a lot of what I said, the way he looked at me so attentively, his dark eyes gleaming with admiration, made me feel that I enjoyed the complete, unconditional trust of another human being. After I had finished saying something and shot him a smile, Lulu would open a mouth yet to accumulate a full set of teeth and beam at me with equal pleasure, no matter whether he had really taken in what I told him.

  Only later did I realize that Lulu in fact had no siblings, but I kept quiet about that so that he would not feel I had noticed his invention. In forlorn, friendless moments, he turned to a fictitious brother for support. I understood how much he needed imagination and hope, for they were equally vital to me.

  Just as I had been jealous of Zheng Liang on Su Yu's account, Lulu was jealous of him on mine. In fact, that time when Zheng Liang greeted me in the street he did not look so delighted to see me as to give Lulu much cause for complaint. Never having been more than a casual acquaintance, he simply came over to say a few words of greeting, and now that he had so many new pals his own age he made no effort to conceal his astonishment that I was with such a small boy as Lulu. While we chatted, Lulu was left out in the cold, and he soon announced in a loud voice, “I've got to go.”

  He went off by himself, obviously nettled. I brought my conversation with Zheng Liang to an abrupt close and caught up with him. But his displeasure continued for at least another twenty yards, for he turned a deaf ear to what I was saying and then delivered a warning in his crisp little voice, “I don't like you talking with him.”

  Lulu's exclusive and high-handed attitude to friendship threw me off balance any time we ran into Zheng Liang after that, and often I would pretend not to have seen him and hurry off. I did not find this confining, for I knew very well that Zheng Liang and I had no claims on each other; his friends were young factory workers who wore fashionable clothes and had cigarettes dangling from their mouths, talking loudly as they walked down the street. Lulu was my only companion.

  Practically every day, when classes finished I would stand outside Lulu's primary school and wait for him to emerge. Despite his tender age, he was perfectly able to keep his feelings in check, and he never seemed overly excited to see me but would greet me with a composed smile. Only on one occasion—when I did not stand in my usual place—did Lulu betray some emotion: a look of anxiety appeared on his face as he came out the gate and failed to see me right away. He stood rooted to the ground, as though transfixed by shock, and with disappointment and uneasiness written all over him he looked around in every direction but toward where I was standing. Even as he dejectedly headed my way, he kept craning his neck to scan the crowd. Finally he saw me watching him with a smile on my face, and he cast restraint to the winds and ran to my side. When he clasped my hand in his, I found that his palm was damp with sweat.

  But my friendship with Lulu did not last very long. He was always at odds with other children, and now, for the third time, I saw him in a ferocious fight. As he walked toward me from the school gate, a group of boys were making fun of him. “Lulu, where s your big brother? You don't have a big brother, do you? A big smelly fart is all you have.” And they waved their hands in front of their noses, grimacing as though they smelled something nasty. I watched as Lulu, livid, walked toward me, his thin shoulders shaking with rage. He had almost reached me when he suddenly turned around and charged the pack of boys, crying shrilly, “I'm going to teach you!”

  He threw himself on them, hands and feet flailing. At first I could see him laying into a couple of boys, but then the others joined in and there was a general melee. When I next saw Lulu, the other boys were no longer beating him. He scrambled to his feet, his face covered in dust, bruises all over, and ran at them again, fists flying, so they all surged around and he became a punching bag once more. Shocked by the sight of Lulu's dirty, blood-streaked face, I rushed forward, giving one boy a good kick in the rear and grabbing another by the collar and pushing him away. These two boys quickly took to their heels when they saw I was getting involved, and the rest soon followed. After running off to a safe distance, they shouted at me indignantly, “What do you think you're doing, hitting us little kids?”

  I ignored them and went over to Lulu (on his feet now), heedless of whatever protests other spectators might make, and said to him loudly, “Just tell them I'm your big brother.”

  But Lulu looked so shocked that my feeling of noble munificence was immediately deflated. His face reddened and he went off by himself, head lowered. I watched in confusion as his diminutive figure disappeared into the distance; he never once looked back at me. The following afternoon I waited outside his school entrance for a long time, but he never appeared; he left through a side gate. Later, if I happened to see Lulu, he would nervously avoid me.

  So I understood at last that in Lulu's mind his big brother had a very special place. I remembered a story that I had told him, randomly cobbled together by my threadbare imagination, a tale of how Daddy Rabbit battled fearlessly with a wolf in order to protect his son Little Rabbit, but in the end was killed. Lulu listened raptly, and when he later asked me to tell him another story I came out with much the same yarn, but replaced Daddy Rabbit with Mommy Rabbit. Once again he was entranced. Later still I changed the would-be protector to Brother Rabbit, but before I'd finished telling the story, Lulu, knowing that it would end with the brother's destruction, jumped up, tears streaming down his face, and rushed off crying, “I don't want to hear this!”

  After I saw Feng Yuqing, I often recalled that time when she clung to Wang Yuejin on the wooden bridge, showing the same stubborn determination that I saw in Lulu when he held that older boy in his viselike grip. In that respect, mother and son had so much in common.

  A sizable portion of Feng Yuqings life—from that moonlit evening when she vanished from Southgate until the day she appeared anew before my eyes—for me will always remain unknown. With Lulu, when I cautiously broached the topic of his father, he would look away and excitedly point out something quite boring, like ants or sparrows. I co
uld not tell whether he truly knew nothing at all or was deliberately evading the issue. In the search for Lulu s father, I could only go back to a distant memory, the middle-aged man with the unfamiliar accent, sitting on the steps outside Feng Yuqings house.

  Later I heard that Feng Yuqing had returned on a concrete boat, along with some peasants from out of town. At dusk one day, carrying a worn old duffel bag in one hand and leading a five-year-old boy with the other, she carefully stepped across the gangplank onto the shore. I imagine that her expression then was as bleak as the darkening sky; heartless fate left her standing awkwardly on the bank, her eyes full of uncertainty.

  Feng Yuqing did not go back to Southgate, but settled in town instead. A man of fifty, recently widowed, rented out a couple of rooms to her. The first evening, when he stealthily climbed into her bed, she did not refuse him. At the end of the month, when he asked her for the rent, she replied, “I gave it to you the first night.”

  That perhaps was the beginning of Feng Yuqings career in the sex trade. At the same time she took a job cleaning plastic sheeting.

  Feng Yuqing had completely forgotten me or, more likely, she had never really registered my existence. One afternoon before Lulu got out of school, I came by the place where they lived to find Feng Yuqing out in the empty lot in front of their house, where several clotheslines hung between the trees. Wearing a plastic apron, she tramped toward the well with a stack of dirty tarps clasped to her chest. When she lowered a wooden bucket into the shaft, it was with none of her old energy, and her hair had been cropped, the long braid that she once had sported now forever a memory left by the well in Southgate. She began to scrub the tarps, and the sun-baked afternoon resounded with the incessant rasp of her brush. Immersed in this mechanical repetition, Feng Yuqing turned a blind eye to me, though I was standing not far away. The difference between a girl and a woman was encapsulated in the contrast between the Feng Yuqing of South-gate days and the Feng Yuqing who made this her living now.

  Then she rose and walked toward me, clutching a tarp the size of a bed sheet, and as she approached the clothesline she shook the tarp so brusquely that I was sprayed with water. She seemed to notice, because she shot me a glance just before she tossed it over the line.