Yu Hua - Cries in the Drizzle

As I nervously delivered this greeting, overwhelmed by a sense of impending doom, I experienced at the same time an excitement I had never known before.

What we learned from Su Hang was that to go out after dinner was more fun than staying home, no matter how severely we might be punished at the end of the evening. He also educated us about the kind of girl that we should admire, emphasizing that we could not judge girls in terms of their academic achievements, but should base our selection of love interests on the size of their breasts and buttocks.

Although these were his criteria for evaluating the local talent, he himself was smitten with the skinniest girl in the class. She had a round face and two perky little pigtails, but apart from her dark eyes we could not for the life of us see what was so attractive about her. Su Hang's infatuation left us bemused, and one of us was moved to question his choice: “But what about her chest? There's nothing there! And she's got no tush to speak of, either.”

Su Hang responded in the voice of experience. “You need to think ahead. Within the next year her boobs and her butt will fill out nicely, and then she'll be the prettiest girl in the whole school.”

Su Hang's approach to courtship was simple and direct. He wrote a note full of compliments and endearments and slipped it inside the girl's English textbook. In English class that morning, she suddenly gave a yelp that made us quake and then burst into a long wail that hung in the air, like a note played on the organ. Su Hang, whom I thought bold and dauntless, turned white as a corpse.

But after leaving the classroom Su Hang quickly recovered his customary cool. When we got out of school that morning, he walked over to the girl, whistling nonchalantly, and accompanied her out the gate, making faces at us as he did this. The poor girl was again reduced to tears. At this point one of her friends, a well-built girl, came to her defense. She thrust her way in between them, quietly but indignantly cursing him. “You lowlife!”

Su Hang spun around and blocked her way, not so much angry as excited that she had provided an opportunity to show his mettle. We heard him cry menacingly, “Say that again!”

She was not intimidated, and said, “Lowlife, that's what you are!”

We would never have guessed that Su Hang would raise his fist and hit her right between her ample breasts. She wailed in anguish, then ran off crying, her face in her hands.

When we joined Su Hang, he was gleefully rubbing the index and middle fingers of his right hand. He told us that when he punched the girl those two fingers felt something silky soft, a marvelous sensation denied the other three digits, which was why he was not bothering to rub them. “An unexpected bonus, really an unexpected bonus,” he sighed.

I owed to Su Hang's teachings my earliest conceptions of female anatomy. One evening in early spring a bunch of us were walking with him through the streets. He told us that his parents had a large hardbound volume in which there was a color picture of a woman's pudenda.

“They have three holes,” he said to us.

His tone evoked an air of mystery that was heightened by the occasional pounding of footsteps farther down the street, and I found myself short of breath. I was both frightened and attracted by the unfamiliar knowledge that he was imparting.

A few days later, when Su Hang brought the hardback to school, I was confronted with a difficult choice. Naturally I was just as excited as the other boys, but when classes had finished and Su Hang got ready to open the book I fell into a complete funk. With the sunlight blazing down, I lacked the courage to engage in an activity that seemed to me so ill-advised. So when Su Hang said that someone had to keep watch by the doorway, I gratefully undertook this commission. In my post outside the classroom door I was assailed by desire, and the gasps from inside the room — some long, some short — made my pulse race.

Having missed this opportunity, I found it difficult to get a second chance. Although Su Hang was later to bring the book to school quite regularly, it never occurred to him that he should let me have a look. I knew that I had no standing in his eyes, being just one classmate out of the many in his entourage and the most insignificant of them to boot. And besides, I was never able to overcome my shame and did not take the initiative to make any such request. It would be another six months before the color photo was revealed to me by Su Yu.

Su Hang was sometimes so daring as to take one's breath away. As time went on, he felt it was no fun just to show the photo to other boys. One day he actually went over to a female classmate, book in hand, and the next thing we saw was her fleeing in panic across the playground and bursting into tears by the perimeter wall. Su Hang returned to us, laughing heartily. We warned him anxiously that she might report him, but he was not in the least perturbed, reassuring us, “No chance ofthat. How could she possibly say anything? Can you see her saying, ‘Su Hang showed me a picture of…’? She wouldn't be able to go on. There's nothing to worry about. Relax.”

Afterward, the fact that there were no repercussions whatsoever proved Su Hang's point. His success in this adventure triggered even more bold exploits during the subsequent summer vacation. At lunchtime one day in the middle of the agricultural busy season, Su Hang walked idly along in the sunlight accompanied by a classmate named Lin Wen. I can imagine them expressing their preference for one girl or another in the crudest language possible. Lin Wen had attained his status as Su Hang's best friend during this period by using a mirror to peep at girls in the toilets. This brazen act had not enabled him to see anything of significance, but this is not to say he learned nothing from it. When Su Hang was contemplating testing the mirror's efficacy, Lin Wen, the voice of experience, counseled against it, saying, “With a mirror in the toilet, a girl can see a boy clearly enough, but there's no way that a boy can get a clear view of a girl.”

Immersed in topics such as this, they walked the countryside, and when they entered a village the only sound they heard was a whir of cicadas, for at this time of day all able-bodied people were in the fields harvesting rice. As they strolled under the trees, the topic at hand inflamed them more than the summer heat itself, and the sun-baked scene before them seemed reminiscent of a disaster zone, brought to ruin by desire run amok. When this restless pair saw smoke rising from the chimney of a cottage, Su Hang crept over and took a peep through its window, then signaled to Lin Wen to do the same. Lin Wen's pleasurable anticipation did not last long, because when he sidled up to the window the scene that met his gaze left him disappointed: all he saw was an old woman in her seventies, tending a fire beneath the stove. But he noticed that Su Hang's breath had become labored and heard Su Hang ask him tensely, “Do you want to see the real thing?”

Lin Wen now understood what Su Hang had in mind. Pointing at the old woman, he asked in astonishment, “You want to see hers?”

Su Hang smiled with some embarrassment. “Let's do it together,” he proposed eagerly.

Despite the enterprise he had shown by testing the utility of mirrors in toilets, Lin Wen was not immediately persuaded. “Such an old woman?” he queried.

Blushing, Su Hang quietly exclaimed, “I know, but it's the real thing!”

Lin Wen could not bring himself to participate directly in the proposed inspection, but Su Hang's excitement stirred a tremor within him, and he said, “You go ahead. FU keep watch for you.”

When Su Hang looked back and shot him an awkward smile just before climbing inside, Lin Wen knew that his was the more interesting vantage point.