The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature

by Yunte Huang

  “Minghua, don’t take the school entrance exam. Just look at Jin San. A couple of years studying only got him back to standing on the street and he doesn’t even make as much as Skinny does with his shoe repair shop and performing monkey.”

  “Xizi! Thinking about money at your age. . . .”

  “But my mom says so.”

  “Your mom is old-fashioned—narrow-minded. How many times has my granddad told you—you should go to school; you’re ten years old and here you are still waiting tables in the shop. Is that what you want to do with your life?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Xizi, somewhat at a loss.

  “Keep on like this and you’ll never find a wife.”

  “My mom says as long as you have money you don’t have to worry.”

  “Then you’re sure to get an idiot for a wife.”

  Xizi heard him out and started to giggle. He giggled like a little girl, his pinkie in the corner of his mouth, like a star towing a crescent moon.

  The monkey began to make his bows to the crowd and numerous coins again shot out at the animal’s hindquarters. The coins tinted the gray street bright and sparkling, like sunlight after a storm makes the bubbles in the hollows of the pavement glisten.

  Skinny guffawed. He had teeth the color of tea, a color that made you think of filth and unpleasantness. There was a weak, dirty look to the gummy matter borne out of the corners of his eyes when they watered.

  Seeing Skinny laugh, looking like a crook-necked willow tree, Xizi laughed too, laughed until he cried. Minghua pinched the boy’s ear between his fingers and scolded him for “laughing like an idiot.”

  OLD YU FA had shut up his pancake shop, blocking out the dusk by closing the shutters. Alone in the room, he stripped and began to wash himself with a towel dipped in tepid water, attacking his ears, neck, armpits with gusto. The neighbors were always complaining about his grubbiness. They said he had a strong smell about him. Never mind what the neighbors said, tonight he was going to have a thorough wash and then put on a spanking clean jacket and go see The White Snake with Xizi’s mom. That morning he had given the tickets to Xizi to take over with the instruction:

  “If your mom isn’t going, bring the tickets back.”

  The sun had been gone for some time now and so far Xizi hadn’t come back with the tickets. It looked as if his mom had accepted.

  Xizi’s dad had died of lung cancer. Someone’s getting cancer had the same effect on the folks of Calabash Street as a flash of lightning splitting the heavens: it terrified them; its dying brilliance made them gasp. It was with the same sort of emotion that Old Yu Fa had regarded Xizi’s dad’s death. He watched as Xizi’s dad, like a full moon on the wane, grew thinner day by day. Later he witnessed the man’s pallid face after he gave up the ghost in the emergency room and the worrisome, merciless oxygen tube sprouting from his nostrils. When he pulled the oxygen tube from the dead man’s nose, Xizi’s mom wailed and threw herself at Old Yu Fa, tearing at his face and neck. She swore at him for being wicked and cruel and ordered—begged—him to reinsert the tube. That was his first encounter with the violent yet docile female temperament. Unfortunately, taking place as it did in the emergency room, the experience made no soul-stirring impression on him. But the memory of that moment always aroused him.

  People said the look in Xizi’s mom’s eyes was too intense, too brilliant, her man couldn’t withstand her sexual appetites, she ate him alive. Though Old Yu Fa had no experience of women, his powers of imagination concerning sexual encounters were as prodigious as anyone else’s. From then on, whenever he beheld Xizi’s mom’s vivacious face and sultry eyes, he couldn’t resist further glances at the quivering breasts lurking under her blouse and her ample rounded buttocks, as a way of corroborating the opinion of others as well as his own imagination.

  These complicated emotions filled him now as he took a sponge bath. As he schussed the black balls of dirt from his chest to the floor, he began to whistle softly, a song learned in his days as a carter:

  A cart, a whip, a lone shadow, and a jug of wine,

  I can bear the wind and the snow in my face,

  Just let the sound of my hooves

  Carry to the mountain fastness, calling out—Sweetheart

  Bolt the door fast when night comes.

  A hot breeze crept into the room through a chink in the shutters like a soft fuzzy caterpillar. The odor of pancakes was as strong as ever. The cloying, sweet smell raised visions of autumn wheat fields in his mind’s eye, their grand vista of golden yellow spreading all the way to the horizon, right up to the setting sun. In the midst of the fields stood a yellow wattle hut; inside, Xizi’s mom went contentedly about her work. As he came in from the fields he could see from far off a wisp of cooking smoke floating tenderly into the sky, and at the same time, catch a whiff of what he’d been longing for.

  Someone was knocking on the shutters.

  “Pancakes!” came a shrill insistent voice.

  “Here!” Old Yu Fa responded immediately, as if he were a pancake himself.

  “I’m so hungry my stomach is shriveling up!” The tone was aggressive, rising to a note of dissatisfaction and doubt: “What are you up to anyway, shutting up so early?”

  “I haven’t done anything to be ashamed of!” Old Yu Fa, terrified that his innermost secrets might be found out, rushed to defend himself.

  He wrung out the towel, gave himself a once-over, and threw on his clothes. Then, taking two steps to his usual three, he unbolted the door.

  “Performance over, is it?”

  “Yep.”

  “And the monkey?”

  “Xizi’s keeping an eye on it.”

  “A good take, a washbasin full of coins, was it?”

  “Enough for pancakes.” Skinny licked at the sweat that was running down to the corner of his mouth.

  “Enough to get your brother a wife, then.” Old Yu Fa laughed.

  “Enough my eye! The price has gone up again. This morning she wanted seven thousand.”

  “Geez. She’s no fairy princess either. . . .”

  “Women are nothing but trouble.” The way Skinny shook his head implied he’d been cheated innumerable times by innumerable women.

  Old Yu Fa gave Skinny the leftover pancakes that had been wrapped up in cheesecloth and asked if he wanted some cucumbers. They’d only just been salted down and weren’t too salty yet, very cool and refreshing. “Mmm.” Skinny’s chicken-claw hand was into the plate of cucumbers on its own.

  Skinny had an older brother who was paralyzed, thirty-five years old, and unmarried. As Skinny’s dad lay dying, he’d been pointing at the paralytic and his eyes had refused to close. Skinny’s mother too was so broken up her hair turned white. Now Skinny had taken up shoe repair, a modest enough sort of trade, but it had brought brighter days to his impoverished family. To see the paralytic married was the one dream of his mother’s remaining days.

  “At the start, Yinhua asked for two thousand, after a year it went up to five, now she wants seven. Seems like she doesn’t want to marry my brother.”

  “Well, if Yinhua marries your brother, she’ll be like a widow with a living husband, won’t she?”

  “It’s only his legs that are out of commission.”

  “Haha, it’s still no good—a paralytic—think about it . . . you’d have to . . .”

  “Yinhua’s no prize either!”

  “Because she got pregnant once? It’s not as if it was her fault, she just picked the wrong guy and then he dumped her.” Old Yu Fa didn’t feel like arguing with Skinny anymore. All he could think of was sitting in the theater with Xizi’s mom to watch the opera as soon as possible; nothing could top that.

  “If you’ve got what it takes, get Xizi’s mom out from under the county magistrate’s thumb.”

  “What would I want to do that for?”

  “Cooking, cleaning, having kids.”

  “She’s too good at burying men alive.”

  “Is
n’t that just talk?” With one foot out the door, Skinny turned and said, “As for having what it takes, you’re no match for His Lordship.”

  “He can lick my boots!” Old Yu Fa flew into a sudden rage, cursing furiously. But the moment the words were out, he clapped a hand over his mouth, thinking fearfully to himself: “Lucky no outsider heard; you can’t badmouth somebody that important and get away with it.”

  Old Yu Fa knew the magistrate only too well. That whitish paved road led to the residence of the former county magistrate, Geng Ming. Old Yu Fa had taken his cart to the quarry to dig out the best gravel for it. Just after it was finished, Minghua’s granddad, county chief pro­curator at the time, just back from a meeting, found out about it. Subsequently, Old Yu Fa had seen with his own eyes how David took on Goliath. In the end, Geng Ming had been relieved of his post and transferred out of the county. The paved road had been a symbol of Geng Ming’s power; now it had also become a witness to the chief procurator’s strict enforcement of the law.

  Now Old Yu Fa ran this hole-in-the-wall pancake shop. How would someone with as little ingenuity as himself fare against the magistrate? He was nothing but the old nag that pulled the cart, while that other was the driver. It was fate. Old Yu Fa sighed. Even his enthusiasm for the opera had waned, and he stood there blankly.

  sKINNY WENT BACK to his shoe repair shop and had just taken up his work when Xizi ran in sputtering and shouting:

  “The monkey’s eaten some bananas!”

  “Whose?”

  “The state’s. I was picking the money up off the ground, not paying him any mind and he jumped up onto the state vegetable stall, ate the bananas, and left a whole pile of peels behind!”

  “Where were the stall-keepers?”

  “At the department store buying leather shoes at the sale.”

  “Serves them right.” Skinny sniggered.

  “You’ll have to pay.”

  “Like hell.” Skinny didn’t care.

  “Really, you will, they’ve caught the monkey.”

  “Shit.” Skinny cursed, closed up shop, and said:

  “Where’s Minghua’s grandaddy?”

  “Talking to my mom.”

  “Ask him to come out and act as judge.”

  As he thought, Skinny walked toward Xizi’s mom’s jellied bean curd shop.

  Daylight had gone, the last rays of the setting sun receding from the earth like an outgoing wave. . . . People didn’t feel its warm lingering breath—an altogether different feeling, cool and refreshing, swept over them.

  As they were walking along, Old Yu Fa came up to them and took Xizi to one side. Skinny observed them, one young, one old, jabbering together for some time. Finally, Old Yu Fa drew a ticket out of Xizi’s pocket, tore it into pieces in the breeze, and with a mixture of exasperation and relief patted Xizi on the head. Then, humming to himself, he drifted away.

  “Old fool,” Skinny whispered.

  “Hehe. Some fun.” Xizi giggled.

  “What’re you laughing at?”

  “I’m laughing at myself because I have such a terrible bad memory.” And Xizi scratched his cheek, just like the monkey.

  THINGS WERE PICKING UP on Calabash Street again. There were few vehicles left on the street, but the old folks gathered to chew the fat shone like the silvery snowflakes of midwinter scattered over the ground. They held mugs of tea, stools, even grandkids. Perspiration from the hot dinners they’d eaten filmed their foreheads. The curiously shaped clouds in the sky had thinned out, dispersing until finally you couldn’t make out the shapes, or even tell the clouds from the sky. . . .

  Just then a boy who’d been out searching for wild duck eggs suddenly ran up from the river to report:

  “Yinhua’s thrown herself into the river!”

  Even Calabash Street, that drunken Arhat, reeled with shock at the news.

  (Translated by Janice Wickeri)

  YU HUA

  (1960– )

  Born in Zhejiang, Yu Hua never went to college but had his literary training from reading books in mutilated form—in the age of censorship young Chinese readers often secretly circulated books with covers torn to conceal the titles and the authors. He worked as a small-town dentist for five years, and then shifted from looking at cavities in people’s mouths to cavities in a nation on the verge of an economic boom. His short story “On the Road at Eighteen” (1986) made him famous, followed by the novel To Live (1993), which was adapted for the screen by Zhang Yimou to international acclaim. Author of six novels and many stories and essays, Yu was awarded Italy’s Premio Grinzane Cavour (1998), France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2004), and other honors.

  On the Road at Eighteen

  The asphalt road rolls up and down like it’s pasted on top of ocean waves. Walking down this little highway in the mountains, I’m like a boat. This year, I turned eighteen. The few brownish whiskers that have sprouted on my chin flutter in the breeze. They’ve only just taken up residence on my chin, so I really treasure them. I’ve spent the whole day walking down the road, and I’ve already seen lots of mountains and lots of clouds. Every one of the mountains and every one of the clouds made me think of people I know. I shouted out each of their nicknames as I walked by. So even though I’ve walked all day, I’m not tired, not at all. I walked through the morning, now it’s the tail end of the afternoon, and it won’t be long until I see the tip of dusk. But I haven’t found an inn.

  I’ve encountered quite a few people along the road, but none of them has known where the road goes or whether there’s an inn there. They all tell me: “Keep walking. You’ll see when you get there.” I think what everyone said was just terrific. I really am just seeing when I get there. But I haven’t found an inn. I feel like I should be worried about that.

  I think it’s weird that I’ve walked all day and only seen one car. That was around noon, when I’d just begun to think about hitchhiking. But all I was doing was thinking about hitchhiking. I hadn’t started to worry about finding an inn—I was only thinking about how amazing it would be to get a lift from someone. I stood by the side of the road waving at the car, trying my best to look casual. But the driver hardly even looked at me. The car or the driver. They hardly even looked at me. All they fucking did was drive right by. So I ran, chasing the car as fast as I could, just for fun, because I still hadn’t started to worry about finding an inn. I ran until the car had disappeared, and then I laughed at myself, but I discovered that laughing too hard made it difficult to breathe, so I stopped. After that I kept walking, happy and excited, except that I started to regret that I hadn’t picked up a rock before I started waving at the car.

  Now I really want a lift, because dusk is about to fall and I can’t get that inn out of my goddamned head. But there haven’t been any cars all afternoon. If a car came now, I think I could make it stop. I’d lie down in the middle of the road, and I’m willing to bet that any car would come to a screeching halt before it got to my head. But I don’t even hear the rumble of an engine, let alone see a car. Now I’m just going to have to keep walking and see when I get there. Not bad at all: keep walking and see when you get there.

  The road rolls up and down from hill to valley, and the hills tempt me every time, because before I charge up to the top, I think I’ll see an inn on the other side. But each time I charge up the slope, all I see is another hill in the distance, with a depressing trough in between. And still I charge up each hill as if my life depended on it. And now I’m charging up another one, but this time I see it. Not an inn, but a truck. The truck is pointed toward me, stalled in the middle of the highway in a gully between two hills. I can see the driver’s ass pointing skyward and, behind it, all the colors of the approaching sunset. I can’t see the driver’s head because it’s stuffed under the hood. The truck’s hood slants up into the air like an upside-down lip. The back of the truck is piled full of big wicker baskets. I’m thinking that they definitely must be packed with some kind of fruit. Of c
ourse, bananas would be best of all. There are probably some in the cab too, so when I hop in, I can eat a few. And I don’t really care if the truck’s going in the opposite direction as me. I need to find an inn, and if there’s no inn, I need a truck. And the truck’s right here in front of me.

  Elated, I run down to the truck and say, “Hi!”

  The driver doesn’t seem to have heard me. He’s still fiddling with something under the hood.

  “Want a smoke?”

  Only now does he pull his head out from under the hood, stretch out a black, grimy hand, and take the cigarette between his fingers. I rush to give him a light, and he sucks several mouthfuls of smoke into his mouth before stuffing his head back under the hood.

  I’m satisfied. Since he accepted the smoke, that means he has to give me a lift. So I wander around to the back of the truck to investigate what’s in the wicker baskets. But they’re covered, and I can’t see, so I sniff. I smell the fragrance of apples. And I think: Apples aren’t too bad either.

  In just a little bit, he’s done repairing the truck, and he jumps down from the hood. I rush over and say, “Hey, I need a ride.” What I don’t expect is that he gives me a hard shove with those grimy hands and barks, “Go away!”

  I’m so angry I’m speechless, but he just swings on over to the driver’s side, opens the door, slides into the cab, and starts the engine. I know that if I blow this opportunity, I’ll never get another one. I know I should not just give up. So I run over to the other side, open the door, and hop in. I’m ready to fight if necessary. I turn to him and yell: “Then give me back my cigarette!” The truck’s already started to move by now.

  He turns to look at me with a big, friendly smile and asks, “Where you headed?”

  I’m bewildered by this turnaround. I say, “Doesn’t matter. Wherever.”

  He asks me very nicely, “Want an apple?” He’s still glancing over at me.