Yu Hua - Cries in the Drizzle

Granddad's tone of unshakable confidence made me begin to wonder if I was the one who had got things wrong. As I stood there uncertainly, he again gave me one of his terrifying smiles. My spirits crumbled and I hurriedly beat a retreat.

With the passage of days it was all the more difficult to blow the whistle on Granddad, and at the same time I realized that he stirred in me an indefinable phobia. If I ran home to pick something up and discovered that Granddad was watching me from his corner, I would tremble all over.

Through the depredations of my grandmother during the previous three decades, Sun Youyuan had lost his youthful energy, and now he had become a timid and servile old man. But as he deteriorated physically, his mental acuity sharpened. In the flickering light of old age Sun Youyuan recaptured the shrewdness and intelligence of his youth.

My father liked to scold Granddad over the dinner table, for it was at such moments that he was confronted with the most disagreeable evidence of the economic losses he was sustaining. Amid my father's bluster my grandfather would bow his head and assume an expression of anxiety. But this did not affect the pace of his eating, and the chopsticks in his hands conveyed food from plate to mouth with startling rapidity. He turned a deaf ear to Sun Kwangtsai's abuse, or seemed to treat it as a condiment that enhanced the pleasure of the meal. Only when the bowl and chopstickswere removed from his grip was he forced to stop. Sun Youyuan would then keep his head bowed and his eyes stubbornly glued to the dishes left on the table.

So it was that later on my father had Granddad sit on a low chair from which he could see the dishes on the table but not the food inside them. By then I had already left Southgate. My poor grandfather could only lay his chin on the table and stare as the others transferred food to their bowls. My little brother, being so short, suffered much the same inconvenience, but he could always count on my mother to help him. Sun Guangming liked to test the limits, and time and again he would stand up on his stool, rejecting his mother's help, and cater to his appetite through his own efforts. The silly boy would then incur a penalty quite out of proportion to the crime. In those days my father was not the least inclined to be lenient, and even for such a small thing he would subject my little brother to a pummeling, at the same time announcing, like a tyrant, “If anyone stands up again at the dinner table, I'll break their legs!”

Sun Kwangtsai's real goal in punishing my little brother so harshly was to cow his father into submission, as Granddad perfectly well knew. He sat meekly in his little chair, and for Sun Kwangtsai it was most gratifying to witness the old man's discomfort as he raised his chopsticks high in the air and struggled to pick up morsels from this awkward angle.

But my grandfather, like a rodent that digs a hole in a dike, found insidious ways of countering his son's malice. Having managed to shift the blame for the broken bowl onto my little brother, now he had his eye on him once more. Of course, it was only Sun Guangming who shared Granddad's discontent with the height of the table. But my little brother was conscious of this problem only during meals, for the rest of the time he was rushing madly all over the place like a wild rabbit. It was my grandfather, fixed for long periods in his corner, who had all the time in the world to figure out how to address the issue.

Over a period of several days, whenever my little brother came close to him, Sun Youyuan would mutter darkly, “The table's too high.”

These repeated murmurings inspired my brother, now nine years old, to stand between Granddad and the table and look back and forth between the two for some time. A light in his eyes told my grandfather that the little chap had ideas turning over in his mind.

Sun Youyuan, who understood my brothers psychology so well, coughed loudly — to cover up his own scheming, perhaps, for he was quite prepared to wait for Sun Guangming to come up with a plan.

Apart from his habit of slurring words, my little brother was strong in other areas. With his budding intelligence and the destructive urge typical of his age he immediately saw a way to address the table-height issue. He cried to Granddad triumphantly, “Saw it down!”

My grandfather assumed a look of astonishment, at the same time throwing my brother an admiring glance that surely encouraged him. Carried away by his own ingenuity, he said, “Saw a bit of the legs off.”

Sun Youyuan shook his head. “You wouldn't be able to handle the saw,” he said.

My little brother, in his innocence, was unaware that he was being led toward a trap. Provoked by Granddad's condescension, he cried out, “I'm strong!”

Sun Guangming felt that words alone were not enough, so he ducked underneath the table, lifted it up on his shoulders and shuffled a couple of steps forward, then slipped out again and declared, “I'm very strong!”

Sun Youyuan shook his head once more, as a way of letting Sun Guangming know that his hands were not as strong as the rest of him, that he still wouldn't be able to saw off the table legs.

When it first occurred to Sun Guangming that the legs could be sawn down, he was content simply to have identified this solution in the abstract. Sun Youyuans doubts about his strength were the impetus to put the idea into practice. That afternoon my little brother indignantly ran out of the house, heading for the home of a carpenter in the village in order to prove to Granddad that he could indeed put a saw to the table legs. He found the master of the house sitting on a stool, with a cup of tea in his hands. My little brother greeted him warmly. “How are things going?” Then he went on, “If you're not using your saw, you'll let me borrow it, won't you?”

The carpenter could not be bothered with him and waved him away. “Off you go, get out of here! Why the hell should I lend it to you?”

“I knew you wouldn't,” Sun Guangming said. “But my dad said you would. He said he helped you when you were building your house.”

Ensnared by Granddad, Sun Guangming had laid a snare for the carpenter. The carpenter asked him, “What does Sun Kwang-tsai want it for?”

My little brother shook his head. “I don't know.”

“All right, take it,” the carpenter relented.

With the saw over his shoulder my little brother went back home, where he knocked it loudly on the ground and asked Sun Youyuan in a piping voice, “Now do you admit I can do the sawing?”

Sun Youyuan shook his head, saying, “You can saw off one leg at most.”

That afternoon my little brother, so smart and so foolish, the sweat pouring down his face, sawed a length off all four table legs, turning round from time to time to ask Sun Youyuan, “Am I strong or not?”

My grandfather did not provide any direct encouragement, but he was careful to keep a look of amazement on his face the whole time. Just that was enough to motivate my little brother to finish sawing all four legs. Once he had completed the job, Sun Guangming did not have much chance to feel proud of himself, for my grandfather heartlessly revealed the awful fate that now awaited him, saying, “That's a terrible thing you've done! Sun Kwangtsai is going to kill you.”

My poor little brother was scared speechless, only now realizing what appalling repercussions were going to ensue. He looked at my grandfather with tears in his eyes, but Sun Youyuan simply rose to his feet and hobbled into his room. My little brother slipped out of the house and nothing more was seen of him until the following morning. Not daring to go home he spent the night in a rice field, fighting off the pangs of hunger. My father ran him to ground easily enough, standing on the raised path between the fields and spotting in the green expanse a patch where the rice had been flattened. Having howled with fury all night long, Sun Kwangtsai was still in a towering rage. He beat my little brother until his bottom was like an apple hanging from a tree, equal parts green and red, and it was a month before he was able to sit down on his stool again. Meanwhile, at mealtimes, my grandfather no longer needed to reach so high with his chopsticks. Only after this mutilated table was destroyed in the fire, on my return to Southgate when I was twelve, did the family no longer have to bend down low to eat their meals.