Yu Hua - Cries in the Drizzle

“Forget about the physical abuse,” he once told me. “She's making an emotional wreck out of me too.”

“Why did you marry her in the first place?” I asked.

“How was I to know she was a shrew?”

Along with other friends I urged him to get a divorce, but he ended up reporting our advice to his wife, holding nothing back. His betrayal resulted in an identical outcome for each of us, a threat-filled phone call from his wife. The curse placed on me was that I would die on the street on my twenty-fifth birthday.

In the spring ofthat year when I turned fifteen, I was dressing after a shower one lunchtime and discovered that my body had undergone a peculiar change. I noticed that some long hairs had appeared in my groin, which added a new layer of agitation to the inner turmoil generated by my nocturnal activities. Uninvited guests, these slender intruders had all of a sudden sprouted on my smooth skin. I stared at them stupefied, uncertain just how I should view their arrival, though I had the fearful sensation that my body had lost its carefree simplicity.

As I headed off for school through the sunlight, everything around me was just as it had always been — my body alone had changed. Something ugly was hiding in my underpants, making me feel that my feet were unbearably heavy. Although I hated those hairs I had to keep their existence a secret, because I could not deny that they were a part of me.

Soon after, hairs started springing up on my legs, too. I noticed this in the summer, when I no longer wore long trousers, and when I walked to school in my shorts the hairs’ obvious and inescapable presence made me feel hideously exposed. All it took to make me squirm was for a girl to glance in their direction. Even if I had uprooted the most flagrant offenders by the following morning, I was always worried that Cao Li would already have seen them.

The tallest boy in my class had legs densely covered with dark hairs but walked around casually all the same, flaunting them to the whole world. I went through a phase when I often felt anxious on his account, and if I noticed girls’ eyes fixed on his legs my concern for him only accentuated my own sense of unease.

Shortly before the start of the summer vacation, I came back to school early after lunch, but was deterred from entering by the sound of girls talking and laughing loudly inside. (Even now, if it is all women or all strangers in a room, I find it an intimidating experience to go in on my own. With so many eyes resting on me all at once, I am nervous and flustered.) I meant to walk away immediately, but I heard Cao Li's voice and her laughter kept me rooted to the spot. Next thing, I heard the others ask her which boy she liked most, a question that startled me with its boldness. What surprised me even more was that Cao Li was not the least embarrassed. There was a clear note of relish in her voice when she told them to guess the answer.

So tense was I that my breathing became labored. The girls came out with a whole string of potential candidates, including Su Hang and Lin Wen, but my name was conspicuously absent and I was mortified at having been overlooked. At the same time, Cao Li's total rejection of these possibilities gave me some fleeting hope. But soon a voice named the classmate with the hairy legs and Cao Li immediately responded in the affirmative. The girls greeted her admission with simultaneous peals of laughter, and amid the hilarity one voice chipped in, “I know what it is you like about him.”

“What's that?”

“The hair on his legs.”

For a long time I would puzzle in vain over the explanation Cao Li herself gave. She said that of all the boys in the school he looked the most grown-up.

I quietly edged away from the classroom door and Cao Li's wanton laughter pursued me all the way down the corridor. What I had just heard did not sadden me as much as shock me. In that moment, as never before, life had revealed to me a state of affairs that seemed utterly counterintuitive. The lanky schoolboy who couldn't care less about the hair on his legs would hand in essays littered with miswritten characters and there wasn't one teacher who didn't single him out for ridicule, but this very same student had gotten the thumbs-up from Cao Li. Precisely what I regarded as ugly was alluring to her. I walked all the way to the pond next to the school and stood there for a long time watching the sunlight and the foliage that floated on the water's surface, and my deep disappointment with Cao Li slowly evolved into self-pity. For the first time in my life a beautiful dream had been shattered.

A second disillusionment was brought home to me by Su Yu, and involved the secrets of the female body. By now I had a longstanding desire for the opposite sex, but I was still in the dark about women's anatomy. I had specially earmarked my purest notions, using them to construct in a vacuum my image of Woman. This specter had appeared at night in the shape of Cao Li but never emerged as a genuinely sexual being, and in the evenings I would content myself with glimpsing female figures of matchless beauty who were dancing in the dark.

It all started with that hardback volume on Su Yu's father's shelves. Su Yu was quite familiar with his father's library, but it was through Su Hang that he became aware of this particular title. Ever since leaving Southgate the Su family had lived in one of the apartment blocks for hospital staff, with Su Yu and Su Hang on the first floor and their parents on the second; the one chore the brothers were assigned was to mop the floors each day. In the first few years Su Hang took responsibility for mopping downstairs, for he was unwilling to carry the mop up to the second floor, with all the extra work that would entail. But later on Su Hang abruptly told Su Yu that he would take charge of cleaning upstairs. He did not provide any explanation, for he was already accustomed to ordering his older brother about. Su Yu accepted Su Hang's suggestion without comment, this minor change striking him as of no consequence. After Su Hang took charge of the second floor, two or three classmates would drop in every day and help Su Hang with the mopping. So it was that Su Yu downstairs would often hear a flurry of furtive comments from upstairs, as well as a puzzling assortment of whistles and sighs. Su Yu burst in on them one time and thereby learned their secret.

After this, when Su Yu and I met, there was often a morose look on his face. Like mine, his conception of women was constructed around fantasy, and he was thrown off balance when suddenly confronted by the banality of real life. I remember that one particular evening we strolled quietly along the road and later stood on the newly completed concrete bridge. Su Yu, deep in thought, stared at the moonlight and lamplight on the water and then said to me awkwardly, “There's something you need to know.”

That night I gave a little shiver under the moonlight, for I knew what I was about to see. My examination of the color photograph had been delayed until now; how bitterly I had regretted my offer to stand guard that day.

The following morning, I sat upstairs in the Sus’ house in a dilapidated rattan chair and watched as Su Yu picked the book off the shelf. He showed me the color plate.

My first reaction was, How lurid and gross! Once confronted with this photograph, the image of femininity that had formed in my mind collapsed in ruins. Instead of the beauty I had so anticipated, a grotesque sight met my eyes; there was something malignant about this tasteless illustration. Su Yu stood beside me, his face just as pale as mine. He closed the book, saying, “I shouldn't have shown it to you.”

The color plate had the same effect on me as it had on Su Yu, severing my attachment to an illusory perfection and thrusting me headlong into unvarnished reality. Although I persisted with my beautiful visions for a little longer, I was conscious that they were vaporizing.