Cries in the Drizzle

by Yu Hua

  My father was outraged at my grandfather's temerity. “You stupid old fart, you're tired of living, aren't you?” he cursed.

  But Sun Youyuan repeated slowly, with emphasis on every word, “You go home.”

  My father was flummoxed. Standing there in the rain, he glanced around helplessly, and there was a pause before he finally said, “Shit, he's not scared of me anymore.”

  The village production team leader, as a member of the Communist Party, felt that worship of the bodhisattva had gone on quite long enough; he had a responsibility to curb this superstitious practice. With three militiamen in tow, loudly touting the principle of man's capacity to triumph over nature, he went from door to door in a hunt for effigies. He used his incontestable authority to intimidate the weak-kneed villagers, warning them that anybody who tried to harbor a bodhisattva would be punished as a counterrevolutionary.

  So that morning there was an uncanny convergence between the Communist Party's methods of dispelling superstition and my grandfather's approach of seeking divine intervention by punishing the bodhisattva. I must have seen at least a dozen clay bodhisattvas tossed out into the rain. My grandfather reprised his role of the previous afternoon, clutching his shabby umbrella and stumbling around from door to door, circulating his latest bulletin. Now that his teeth had all fallen out, his words undulated incoherently in the rain, as with a reassuring smile he told people, “The bodhisattva can't take more than a day of soaking. When he's had enough, he'll ask the Dragon King to stop the rain. Tomorrow will be dry.”

  My grandfather's confident forecast did not become a reality. The following morning Sun Youyuan stood underneath the eaves watching the billowing rain, his wrinkled face crumpled up with grief. I saw him stand there for a long time, and then, quivering, he turned his head upward, and for the first time I heard him bellow. It had never occurred to me that Granddad could express himself with such violent rage: Sun Kwangtsai's erstwhile tantrums were mere trifles compared to what Sun Youyuan came out with then. My grandfather turned to the sky and yelled, “God, you bastard! Why don't you get your cock out and fuck me, if that's what you want?”

  But then all of a sudden my grandfather looked lost. His mouth seemed to be frozen open, as if he were dead. His whole body tightened and he stood rigidly for several moments. Then he went limp and burst out wailing.

  What was curious was that at midday the rain stopped. The old folks were awestruck. As they watched chinks gradually appear in the clouds and the sun shine down at last, they could not help but recall the crazy behavior of Sun Youyuan earlier, which they had then regarded as sacrilege. These credulous villagers began to feel with wonder and trepidation that Sun Youyuan possessed the bearing of an immortal, and his ragged clothes made them think of the legendary mendicant priest Master Ji. In fact, of course, had the Communist Party member and team leader not commandeered the militiamen and conducted the search, the villagers would never have thrown their bodhisattvas out in the rain. But at the time nobody was in the mood to give the production team leader any credit, and the notion that Sun Youyuan might be an immortal spread like wildfire through the village for the next three days. Eventually even my mother wondered if there was some truth to it. But when she cautiously sounded my father out on this question, Sun Kwangtsai said, “What a load of crap.”

  My father was a confirmed materialist. He said to my mother, “It's his sperm that made me. If he's an immortal, then I've got to be one too, no?”

  FADING FROM VIEW

  Just before he died Sun Youyuan wore an expression very much like that of a water buffalo as it waited to be slaughtered. Though such an imposing animal in my eyes, the buffalo lay on the ground with legs splayed, meekly allowing itself to be trussed. I was standing off to one side of the village drying ground and my brothers were standing right at the front. The commentary of my little brother, who pretended to understand more than he actually did, drifted like dust through the morning air, interspersed with Sun Guangping's scoffing, “You don't know shit!”

  At first I was no smarter than my little brother, believing that the water buffalo didn't know what was going to happen to it. But then I saw its tears, the tears it shed after being trussed up; they sprayed the concrete floor like raindrops in a thunderstorm, for when facing extinction life reveals its infinite attachment to the past. It was not just grief that I saw in the buffalo's expression but also a kind of despair, and there is no more shocking sight than that. Later I heard my big brother tell other boys that the buffalo's eyes reddened as soon as it was tied up. In the years that followed I would recall with a shudder the scene just before the buffalo's death: the tattered images of its polite surrender and its unresisting submission reappeared before my eyes, leaving me troubled and uneasy.

  For a long time Granddad's passing was an enigma to me, its raw reality imbued with a mysterious ambience that made it impossible for me to ascertain the true cause of his death. “Joy at its fullest gives way to sorrow,” they say, and no sooner had my grandfather delivered his fearless challenge to the heavens on that rain-swept morning than he was cast back into an abyss of misgivings, dumbstruck and lost. At the moment when he opened his mouth to yell, he felt to his astonishment that there was something inside him desperate to find an outlet, something that took wing with sublime, birdlike ease. He wheeled around in alarm, crying pitifully, “My soul! My soul has flown away.”

  Like a little bird, his soul had flown out through his gaping mouth. To me at thirteen this was something startling and bizarre.

  That afternoon I saw on Granddad's face the look that I had seen on the water buffalo. By then the sky had cleared and the senior population in the village was marveling that Sun Youyuan's prediction had been fulfilled. My grandfather was in no position to enjoy his hour of glory, so grief stricken was he at the loss of his soul. Sun Youyuan sat tearfully on the doorsill, the returning sunshine in his face, and mournful whimpers came from his gaping mouth. He started crying after my parents went off to the fields and his tears were still gushing when they returned. I have never seen anyone cry for so long.

  When Sun Kwangtsai came back home at the end of the day and saw his father's tears, he preferred to think they were being shed out of concern for himself. “I'm not dead yet,” he muttered. “A bit early to mourn, isn't it?”

  Later my grandfather rose from the doorsill and brushed past us, sobbing. He did not join us for dinner as usual but went into the cluttered storeroom and lay down in his bed. Soon afterward, however, in a voice of unusual force, Sun Youyuan called his son, “Sun Kwangtsai!”

  My father ignored him, saying to my mother, “The old guy is giving himself airs. He wants me to bring him his dinner.”

  Granddad gave another shout, “Sun Kwangtsai, my soul has left me! I'm dying!”

  At this my father went over to the door and said to him, “How can you be dying when you can yell like that?”

  My grandfather started crying, his sobs punctuated by indistinct words. “Son, your dad is dying. I don't know what it's like to die. I'm scared!”

  Sun Kwangtsai had had enough of this. “I don't see there's anything the matter with you,” he pointed out.

  Encouraged perhaps by his son's responsiveness, Sun Youyuan stirred himself to call, at even higher volume, “Son, I really have to die! You just get poorer with every day I live.”

  The loudness of his delivery made my father uncomfortable, and he said with annoyance, “Keep it down, will you? If people hear that, they'll think I've been persecuting you.”

  To my young mind, there was something unnerving about Sun Youyuan's premonition of death and his handling of this foreknowledge. It seems to me now that when Granddad sensed his soul leaving him, he must have genuinely felt that this was what had happened; surely he would not have concocted this story as some kind of subterfuge, when his own life and death were involved. But perhaps after he injured his back he had begun to plan for his own demise, and it may be that he magnified what was simply a norm
al physical reaction to his yelling at the sky, imagining it to mark the departure of his soul and a portent of his death. That afternoon when the sky cleared, as Sun Youyuan wept incessantly, he had already finalized his own sentence. For this old man in the twilight of life, there was no real choice to make when faced with the prospect of being reunited with his wife and departing forever from the world. For nine long years he had hesitated. Now, when he finally felt that death was inescapably approaching him, his tears demonstrated how tightly he still clung to this mortal life, despite all its hardships. His one request was that Sun Kwangtsai agree to make him a coffin and send him off with pipes and cymbals: “Make sure the pipes are blown good and loud, so the news carries to your ma.”

  I was stunned by the idea that Granddad would just lie down and die. The image of him in my mind underwent a fundamental change. No longer did I think of him as someone who sat in the corner recalling his past, for now he was intimately connected to death itself. He became unutterably distant from me, fusing with the grandmother I barely remembered.

  My little brother showed a compulsive interest in Granddads imminent passing. He stood by the door the whole afternoon, peeping at him through the crack and running outside from time to time to report to my big brother, “Not dead yet.”

  He explained to Sun Guangping, “Granddad's belly is still moving.”

  As far as my father was concerned, Sun Youyuan's resolve to die was just empty posturing. As he left the house with his hoe on his shoulder, he had the unpleasant feeling that Sun Youyuan had simply found a new way to give him a hard time. That evening, however, after we had eaten and Granddad had still not emerged from his room, my mother took a bowl of rice in to him and we heard him whine, “I'm dying. I'm not eating.”

  Only then did my father take seriously Granddad's determination to die. With a look of surprise on his face he went into Granddad's room, and these two archenemies actually began talking to each other like devoted siblings. Sun Kwangtsai sat on Sun Youyuan's bed and talked to him in a good-natured tone that he had never used when speaking to him before. When he emerged, he was already convinced that his father would soon no longer be of this world. Beaming with joy, he made no effort to conceal his elation, indifferent to whether or not this would jeopardize his prospects of being seen as a proper son. He went out to spread the news that Sun Youyuan was about to die, and even from inside the house I could hear his ringing voice off in the distance. “How long can somebody live if they don't eat?”

  Having lain in bed expectantly all night long, Sun Youyuan nimbly propped himself up the following morning when Sun Kwangtsai came in. “What about the coffin?” he asked.

  It gave my father a shock to find that Sun Youyuan was not at his last gasp as he had been anticipating. He seemed a bit disappointed as he came out of the room, shaking his head and saying, “It looks like we're going to have to wait another couple of days. He still remembers about the coffin.”

  My father was perhaps concerned that when the next mealtime came around Sun Youyuan would emerge all of a sudden and humbly take his seat among us. Sun Kwangtsai did not rule out this possibility at all, so he felt compelled to give proper attention to the coffin that so preoccupied Granddad. That morning he walked in with two blocks of wood in his hand and with an air of exaggerated mystery instructed my little brother to knock the bits of wood together. I was taken aback to see my father, usually so careless and blatant, suddenly so stealthy and furtive. Then he stood erect, shoved open Granddad's door, and said to him in the tone of a filial son, “Dad, I've got the carpenter here now.”

  Through the half-open door I saw Granddad raise himself slightly and give a relieved smile. My little brother, who seldom performed any useful service, had now acquired a temporary occupation, and Sun Guangming brandished the two lengths of wood and knocked them together as though they were weapons in a lethal swordfight. But my little brother was a lover of freedom and could never accept space restrictions for very long. He soon became fully invested in these military operations and, like some general in ancient times, fought his way out of the house, perspiration pouring down his face. He had totally forgotten what his job was supposed to be, so carried away was he by the joy of fighting at close quarters. His wheezing war whoops gradually receded in the morning sunshine as he ran off who knows where, and he did not return until almost dinnertime, by which time his hands were empty. When my father asked him what he'd done with the pieces of wood, Sun Guangming looked baffled. He hemmed and hawed as though he had never seen them his entire life.

  After my little brother disappeared, I heard a restive shout from my grandfather's gloomy room: “The coffin!”

  With the silencing of the wood-tapping sounds that could appease his soul, a hungry rustle rasped in Sun Youyuan's flat and febrile voice. His last wish in life had been dashed by my little brother's insouciance.

  Later it fell to me to carry on the construction of the bogus coffin. My older brother, fifteen by this time, saw this as quite beneath him. Sun Kwangtsai grabbed me by the shoulder, having realized all of a sudden that this morose son of his could occasionally do something worthwhile. As he passed me the blocks of wood his face was the very picture of disdain. “You can't just eat free meals all the time.”

  For the next two days I gave grandfather the reassurance he sought by beating out a monotonous rhythm with the wooden blocks. But I found myself in a hopeless trough of despond. At thirteen I was sensitive enough to wonder whether I was hammering nails in my own coffin. Although Granddad had not offered me understanding or sympathy after my return to Southgate, because his status in the family was so like my own, when he gave an indication that he felt sorry for himself—as he was inclined to do—I considered, from my perspective, that his sentiments also contained an element of compassion for me. My disaffection with father and home was aggravated by the tapping sounds designed to hasten Granddad's death. Now, so many years later, I still feel that this was a cruel punishment for my father to impose on me, however unwittingly he may have done so. My sense at the time was that I was like a convict on death row who is forced to carry out the execution of another hapless inmate.

  The news of Sun Youyuan's impending death brought surprise and excitement to our normally torpid village. The old folks, who had regained a childish innocence after all their long years in the world, expressed an awed respect for Granddad's decision to die. His stance toward the bodhisattva gave them grounds to believe that he was most likely set on going home. According to one intriguing but far-fetched theory, at the time of his birth my grandfather had descended, like rain, from heaven; his foreknowledge of his own death proved that his assigned term in the dusty world had expired, and now he was returning to heaven, back to his true abode.

  People of the younger generation, steeped in the atheism promoted by the Communist Party, viewed these ideas with scorn. Just as Sun Youyuan had been castigated by Sun Kwangtsai, these endearing seniors were flatly told that age had done nothing for them, that they were just getting more stupid all the time.

  There I sat, in the middle of the room, the front door ajar, tapping out a monotonous rhythm. In the eyes of sundry spectators I was engaged in a ridiculous exercise. How did I feel about it? My fragile ego was hard put to keep shame and distress at bay, particularly with the village children pointing at me and giggling all the time.

  All the commotion outside the house distracted Sun Youyuan as he made ready to depart this life, and a scene from his youth reappeared before him, the time he fled from a hail of Nationalist bullets. Agitated, unsure what was happening outside, he called Sun Kwangtsai. As my father entered the room, Sun Youyuan summoned the energy to sit up in bed, and he asked Sun Kwangtsai if somebody's house had caught fire.

  When Granddad lay down in bed he had intended to die right away, but three days had passed and it seemed the longer he lay the more lively he felt. Even though Sun Youyuan yelled every dinnertime that his eating days were over, my mother still would wordlessly c
arry a bowl of rice in to him. Torn between an ideal death and all-too-real starvation, my grandfather hesitated agonizingly, but yielded in the end to hunger's authority. My mother always returned with an empty bowl.

  Patience had never been Sun Kwangtsai's strong suit, and seeing my grandfather had not arrived at death's door as soon as he had expected, he lost confidence that he would die at all. When my mother, bowl in hand, prepared to enter Granddad's room and my grandfather repeated his old trick of insisting that he was on a fast, Sun Kwangtsai shoved my mother aside and yelled at him, “If you're going to die, don't eat! If you're going to eat, don't die!”

  My mother found this rather shocking, and she whispered to Sun Kwangtsai, “That's going too far. The Lord will make you pay for that.”

  But my father couldn't care less. He stormed off and could be heard saying to people nearby, “Did you ever hear of a dead man eating dinner?”

  In fact, Granddad was not behaving as willfully as my father imagined. Sun Youyuan had the genuine sensation that his soul had flown, and he was firmly convinced that he was about to die. On the mental level he had already died, and he was simply waiting for his physical being to reach that same point of no return. Just as my father was growing more and more exasperated, Sun Youyuan himself was vexed that he was taking so long to die.

  At this final stage of his life Sun Youyuan employed his scattered wits to ponder the question of why he had not yet expired. As the rice swayed in the sunlight, soon to be harvested, an herbal aroma was carried in by the southeasterly breezes. I don't know if Granddad smelled it or not, but a peculiar notion persuaded him that death's delayed arrival was in some way linked to those heavy ears of grain.

  That morning Sun Youyuan again called loudly for Sun Kwangtsai. After venting so much rage, my father was now a bit despondent, and he walked listlessly into Granddad's room. Sun Youyuan told him in a conspiratorial whisper that his soul had not flown far away: it was still lingering in the vicinity, and that was why he had not died. (He said this so warily it was as though he feared his soul might overhear him.) The reason the soul had not flown far was that it was attracted by the scent of the rice field, and now his soul was mixed up with a flock of sparrows, the sparrows that were circling above the paddy at that very moment. Sun Youyuan asked my father to assemble some scarecrows and set them out in a circle around the house to frighten his soul away; otherwise his soul might reinhabit his body at any time. My grandfather opened his toothless mouth and said to Sun Kwangtsai with a mumble, “Son, if my soul returns, you'll be in the poorhouse again.”