Yu Hua - Cries in the Drizzle

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.

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.