Yu Hua - Cries in the Drizzle

I could detect uneasiness in Su Yu's voice that night. In the aftermath of his father's escapade, Su Yu, sensitive and impressionable as he was, was easily thrown off balance simply by witnessing, say, a man and a woman having a personal conversation. Even though his parents had been careful to cover up his father's indiscretion, the facts of the matter gradually had become plain to him. Observing the carefree manner of his classmates, he would feel envy of them and esteem for their parents. It never crossed his mind that their parents might also be involved in some hanky-panky, and he was convinced that only his family could generate such a scandal. On occasion he even indicated that he felt a little jealous of me, although he was well aware of my miserable status in my family. As he looked at me with admiration, he did not know that my father, Sun Kwangtsai, was that very moment marching triumphantly into the widow's house with the foot basin that my grandmother once used slung over his shoulder. In the face of Su Yu's benign envy, I could only blush with shame.

In his last year in high school, as Su Yu approached full physical maturity, it became difficult for him to resist his burgeoning desires, urges whose intensity I was to feel to much the same degree when I entered high school. One summer lunchtime this yearning for the opposite sex led him on the path toward what we regarded at the time as fearful ruin. He happened to be walking along a quiet alleyway when he saw a full-breasted young woman approaching. He gave an involuntary shiver and in that moment his self-control was vanquished by the sheer force of his sexual need. As he walked in a daze toward her, he had no idea that he would end up putting his arms around her, and only when she shrieked in terror, pulled herself away, and ran off did he gradually realize what he had done.

Su Yu paid a heavy price, sentenced to a year of reform through labor. The day before his departure, he was led onto the rostrum next to the school playground with a wooden placard suspended from his neck, on which was written “Su Yu, Hooligan.” I watched as several classmates I knew well strode onto the rostrum, each clutching a sheet of writing paper, and delivered stern condemnations of Su Yu's crime.

I learned what had happened very late in the game. At morning recess on the day after the incident, I was on my way to Su Yu's classroom as usual when some older boys called out, “When are you making your first prison visit?”

I had no idea what they meant. When I got to the window and glanced toward Su Yu's desk, Zheng Liang saw me and signaled grimly. He came out and said, “Su Yu's in trouble.”

That's when I heard the whole story. Zheng Liang asked me tentatively, “Do you hate Su Yu?”

Tears spilled from my eyes, for my heart went out to my friend. “I could never hate Su Yu,” I told him.

I felt Zheng Liang's hand on my shoulder. As we began to walk, the boys who had jeered at me earlier yelled again, “When are you guys off for your prison visit?”

“Just ignore them,” Zheng Liang murmured.

At the west end of the playground I saw Su Hang. Together with Lin Wen he was busily sharing his worldly wisdom with other boys my age. Su Hang was unperturbed by his brother's disgrace and loudly declared, “I don't know what we've been fucking doing all this time! While we were fooling around, my brother goes off without a word and feels a woman up. I'm going to cop a feel myself tomorrow.”

Lin Wen chipped in, “Su Yu has shown what he's made of now. We're novices by comparison.”

Two weeks later, Su Yu stood on the stage, his head shaved. Those tight, short clothes of his clung to his puny frame, and under an overcast sky he looked too weak to withstand a gust of wind. Even though I knew this was coming, I was still shocked to see Su Yu reduced so quickly to such a pitiful state. The way he stood there, head bowed, threw me into a welter of confused thoughts. I peered through a crowd of heads in an effort to catch Zheng Liang's eye and I noticed that he likewise was looking over his shoulder to see how I was reacting. At this moment only Zheng Liang felt my anguish, and our eyes were seeking out each other's support. When the denunciation session ended, he made a sign and I ran over. “Let's go,” Zheng Liang said.

Su Yu had been led off the stage in preparation for being frog-marched around the town. Many of our classmates followed in his wake, laughing and joking, excited by all the drama. I noticed Su Hang, who not long before had been so impervious to his brother's misfortune. Now he walked by himself, a hangdog look on his face, clearly upset by what had happened at the denunciation meeting. When the parade turned onto the main street, Zheng Liang and I pushed our way to the front of the crowd. Zheng Liang cried, “Su Yu!”

Su Yu walked on unhearing, his head down. Zheng Liang flushed and a look of distress crossed his face. I called out too, “Su Yu!”

Immediately I felt blood surging to my cheeks. With everyone's eyes on me all of a sudden, I felt terribly self-conscious. This time Su Yu turned his head and gave us a relaxed smile.

We were bewildered by that smile of his, and it was not until later that I understood what lay behind it. Despite Su Yu's seemingly terrible plight he himself felt that pressure had been lifted from his shoulders. Afterward he was to tell me, “I understood how it was my father came to do what he did.”

In the wake of Su Yu's disgrace, the conduct of Zheng Liang and me — particularly our final farewell — was excoriated by our teachers, who ordered us to write self-criticisms. As they saw it, since we not only were not indignant about Su Yu's hooligan act but actually offered him our sympathy, this proved that we were ourselves would-be hooligans. On the way home from school once, I heard some girls behind me commenting, “He's even worse than Su Yu.”

We refused to write self-criticisms, no matter how the teachers threatened us, and when Zheng Liang and I met we would proudly say to each other, “Better to die!”

But not long afterward, Zheng Liang came to me looking dejected. I was shocked by his bruised and swollen face. “My dad did it,” he told me. Then he said, “I have written a self-criticism.”

I was appalled. “You have let Su Yu down,” I told him.

“I had no choice,” Zheng Liang replied.

I spun on my heel and as I walked away I said, “I will never write one!”

Looking back on it, I see that if I was brave then, it was because I was under no pressure at home. Sun Kwangtsai was absorbed by his aerobic exercises in the widow's carved bed, while my mother was quietly nurturing her animosity toward her rival. Only Sun Guangping knew what I was going through. But by then he was saying little; the day that Su Yu came to grief was the very day that the carpenter's daughter threw the melon seeds in his face. That time the older boys taunted me, I noticed my brother in the distance, watching me in a preoccupied way.

During this period, I was gripped by unquenchable rage. In the wake of Su Yu's departure, everything around me became hateful, infuriating. Sometimes, sitting in the classroom, I would look at the window glass and wish that it would shatter. Once, an older boy yelled to me in a provocative tone, “Hey, how come you still haven't made that prison visit?”

His big grin struck me as so despicable that, trembling with anger, I raised my fist and slammed it into his face.

His body swayed, and then I received a stinging blow to the head and slumped to the ground. As I tried to get to my feet, he kicked me in the chest, inflicting a sharp pain that made me want to vomit. Then somebody else flung himself at my tormentor, only to be knocked down too. It was Su Hang. I was startled to see Su Hang intervene in a fight that wasn't his. He got back on his feet and lunged out, grabbing the other boy by his waist. The two fell to the ground in a tussle. Su Hang's entry into the fray raised my fighting spirit and I seized hold of our opponent's flailing feet while Su Hang gripped his arms. I bit his leg and Su Hang planted his teeth in the boy's shoulder. He squealed with pain. Su Hang and I looked at each other and — perhaps through sheer excitement — we both burst into tears. How loudly we wept that afternoon, at the same time butting our heads against the older boy's pinioned body.