Yu Hua - Cries in the Drizzle

Later I heard that Feng Yuqing had returned on a concrete boat, along with some peasants from out of town. At dusk one day, carrying a worn old duffel bag in one hand and leading a five-year-old boy with the other, she carefully stepped across the gangplank onto the shore. I imagine that her expression then was as bleak as the darkening sky; heartless fate left her standing awkwardly on the bank, her eyes full of uncertainty.

Feng Yuqing did not go back to Southgate, but settled in town instead. A man of fifty, recently widowed, rented out a couple of rooms to her. The first evening, when he stealthily climbed into her bed, she did not refuse him. At the end of the month, when he asked her for the rent, she replied, “I gave it to you the first night.”

That perhaps was the beginning of Feng Yuqings career in the sex trade. At the same time she took a job cleaning plastic sheeting.

Feng Yuqing had completely forgotten me or, more likely, she had never really registered my existence. One afternoon before Lulu got out of school, I came by the place where they lived to find Feng Yuqing out in the empty lot in front of their house, where several clotheslines hung between the trees. Wearing a plastic apron, she tramped toward the well with a stack of dirty tarps clasped to her chest. When she lowered a wooden bucket into the shaft, it was with none of her old energy, and her hair had been cropped, the long braid that she once had sported now forever a memory left by the well in Southgate. She began to scrub the tarps, and the sun-baked afternoon resounded with the incessant rasp of her brush. Immersed in this mechanical repetition, Feng Yuqing turned a blind eye to me, though I was standing not far away. The difference between a girl and a woman was encapsulated in the contrast between the Feng Yuqing of South-gate days and the Feng Yuqing who made this her living now.

Then she rose and walked toward me, clutching a tarp the size of a bed sheet, and as she approached the clothesline she shook the tarp so brusquely that I was sprayed with water. She seemed to notice, because she shot me a glance just before she tossed it over the line.

In that moment I had a clear view of her face, now ravaged by time, its wrinkles all too apparent. When her glance skimmed over me, it so lacked animation it was like a cloud of soot floating in my direction. Then she turned back toward the well, exposing her sagging buttocks and thickening waistline. At that point I slipped away, saddened not by Feng Yuqing's having forgotten me, but by my first glimpse of beauty's pitiless decline. The Feng Yuqing who stood combing her hair in the sunlight outside her home would, after this, always be blanketed with a layer of dust.

So two different jobs occupied her, one by day and one by night. Her night job made her vulnerable to professional rivalries, and the intervention of the police forced a different kind of life upon her.

By that time I had already left my hometown. Fate had finally smiled on me, and I had gratefully begun a brand-new life in Beijing. At the beginning, I was so enamored of the capital's broad boulevards that when I stood at a crossroads in the evening, the tall buildings on every side made me feel that the intersection was as spacious as a plaza. Like a lost sheep drawn to the green grass on a riverbank, I could hardly tear myself away.

On just such a night, policemen burst through the door of that ramshackle apartment in my hometown, catching Feng Yuqing completely naked, along with an equally naked client of hers. Lulu, who had been sleeping soundly seconds earlier, was woken by the bright lights and loud accusations, and he opened his big dark eyes to look with perplexity at these sudden developments.

After dressing, Feng Yuqing said to her son, “Close your eyes and go to sleep.”

So Lulu lay back down and closed his eyes. But he failed to follow his mother's instructions in full, for he did not go back to sleep. He heard all that was said, he heard the steps descending the stairs, and he suddenly became afraid that his mother might not come back.

During the interrogation at the Public Security Bureau, Feng Yuqing, normally so sparing with her words, proved quite eloquent. Calmly she said to them, “The clothes you wear, they're issued by the state, and your paychecks too. So long as you're taking care of state business, you're doing your jobs all right. But my vagina belongs to me — it's not government issue. Who I sleep with is my affair, and I can look after my own vagina perfectly well, thank you very much.”

At dawn the following day, when the gatekeeper at the Public Security Bureau opened the gate, he found that he was being watched somberly by a handsome young boy, his hair dampened by the early morning mist. Lulu told him, “I'm here to collect my mom.”

Though he claimed to be nine years old, he cannot have been more than seven. Feng Yuqing clearly had been hoping that he could make a contribution to the household income as early as possible, for when he was six she reported his age as eight, so that he could be admitted to primary school. Today he got the idea into his head that he would fetch his mother and take her home.

Before long, he realized that this goal was beyond his reach. He found himself facing no fewer than five police officers, who tried to cajole him into revealing the details of Feng Yuqing's career as a prostitute. Shrewd little Lulu saw through them straight away. “You're trying to fool me by making everything sound so nice. I'll tell you something,” the boy said vehemently, “I'm not going to tell you anything!”

Lulu learned that not only would his mother not be coming home, she would be sent to a labor reform camp instead. Tears spilled from his eyes, but he still stayed remarkably calm and protested sharply, “You can't send my mom away.”

Then, his tears welling up, he waited for them to ask why not. But none of them did, so he had to explain to them himself. “If you send my mom away, who's going to look after me?”

Lulu used his own abandonment as the ultimate threat; when he was waiting outside the gate he had already seen this as his trump card. He felt sure that in the face of this they would have no choice but to return his mother to him, but of course they did not give a second thought to a threat coming from a little boy like him. His attempt at intimidation did nothing to save his mother, and its only effect was that he was placed in a shelter.

When his mother was sent off to the camp, he was not informed. Practically every day Lulu would go to the Public Security Bureau and demand to see her; he drove them up the wall. Finally they told him: Feng Yuqing was now at the Seven Bridges labor camp, and if he wanted to see her he would have to go to Seven Bridges. He committed this name to memory. At the same time he was so shocked by the news that he just stood there crying. When they tried to usher him off the premises, he said, “Take your hands off me. FU make my own way out.”

As he turned around, he wiped away his tears with both hands, and he sobbed as he went off down the corridor, his shoulder brushing against the wall. Then he realized there was something he had forgotten to say, so he went back inside and told them with withering scorn, “Just wait till I'm grown up, and I'll make sure you all get sent to Seven Bridges!”

Lulu spent only a week at the shelter, in the company of a twenty-year-old blind man, a sixty-year-old alcoholic, and a woman in her fifties. These four misfits lived in a dilapidated courtyard on the west side of town. The alcoholic was always thinking about a woman named Fenfen with whom he slept when he was young, and he'd spend the whole day relating their exploits to the sightless but still vigorous blind man. His account was laced with erotic overtones: according to his description, Fenfen was a real peach. When he talked about how his fingers would caress Fenfen's sleek thighs, he would get quite carried away, unleashing a string of lascivious groans that left the blind man not knowing what to do with himself. Then the alcoholic would ask the blind man, “You've handled flour, right?”