Yu Hua: Cries in the Drizzle

Feng Yuqing, blushing, continued on toward her house, her head lowered. Her mouth was bent a little out of shape, and it was obvious that she was trying to stifle a laugh.

In the autumn of that year Feng Yuqing's life took a new turn. I remember it all so clearly: how, as I crossed the wooden bridge on my way home from school one lunchtime, I saw a profoundly altered Feng Yuqing, clinging tightly to Wang Yuejin and surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. To me this scene came as a great shock. The girl who was the focus of all my desires eyed the spectators with a pleading, anxious look. They gave no sign of extending to her the sympathy she deserved, for they were animated by curiosity more than anything else. Wang Yuejin, still in her iron grip, said to them facetiously, “Just see how shameless she is!”

The laughter of the audience had absolutely no effect on Feng Yuqing, except perhaps to render her expression all the more sober and obstinate, and for a moment she closed her eyes. In that instant, a hundred thoughts ran through my mind. She was clinging to something that was not hers: it was just a matter of time before it would slip from her hands. When I gaze back at the past, it's as though I see her clutching not a man, but air. Feng Yuqing was quite ready to cast aside her natural reserve and forfeit her reputation in order to hold that vacuum in her arms.

Wang Yuejin tried everything under the sun, hurling abuse at her one minute, cracking jokes the next, but nothing he did succeeded in loosening Feng Yuqing's grip. He looked helpless and gave a sigh. “What a woman!”

Feng Yuqing never said a word in response to his insults. Perhaps she realized that she had no hope of winning the bystanders’ sympathy, for instead she shifted her gaze to the river's restless flow.

“What the hell does she want?” Wang Yuejin bellowed, angrily tugging at her hands. She was gritting her teeth as she turned her head.

When this effort failed, Wang Yuejin lowered his voice and said, “Come on, tell me. What is it you want?”

She answered quietly, “Come with me to the hospital while I have a checkup.”

She said this without any embarrassment, utterly serene, as though she felt reassured that she would achieve her goal. At that moment she glanced at me and I felt my body tremble under her gaze.

“You have to let go,” Wang Yuejin said. “Otherwise there's no way I can take you anywhere.”

Feng Yuqing hesitated for a moment, then relaxed her grip.Wang Yuejin, free at last, immediately took to his heels, shouting back at her as he left: “You want to go — then go by yourself!”

Feng Yuqing frowned as Wang Yuejin made his escape, then took a look at the people standing around and saw me a second time. She made no attempt to pursue Wang Yuejin, but set off alone for the hospital in town. A few village kids, back home after school, followed her all the way to the hospital, but I did not go with them; I simply stood on the wooden bridge and watched as she receded into the distance. As she left, her braid, disheveled in the tussle, unraveled, and I saw how she deftly reorganized her long black hair, tying her braid as she walked.

Feng Yuqing, normally so bashful, now seemed completely poised, and her inner turmoil was reflected only in the paleness of her face. She let nothing throw her off balance, and when she registered at the reception desk, she asked for an appointment with a gynecologist as calmly as a married woman might. She answered the doctor's questions just as calmly, saying, “I need a pregnancy test.”

The doctor noticed that she had checked the “Single” box on the medical form and asked, “You're unmarried?”

“That's right,” she said, nodding.

The three boys from my village saw her go into the women's toilet, clutching a tea-colored glass bottle. When she emerged, her expression was grave. As she waited for the results of the urine test, she sat on the bench in the corridor like any other patient, gazing blankly at the laboratory hatch.

Only later, when she learned that she was not pregnant, did she slowly lose her composure. She walked over to a cement power pole outside the hospital, leaned against it, buried her face in her hands, and wept.

Her father, once a young man who could consume a couple of bottles of spirits in no time at all, now an old man who could still put away well over a bottle, stood outside the Wang residence that afternoon as the sun went down, stamping his feet and unleashing a string of curses. Carried by the evening breeze, his obscenities drifted through the whole village. But as far as the younger folk were concerned, all his swearing paled in importance compared with his single bitter complaint, “You went all the way with my daughter!”

Deep into the night, this line lingered like snot on the lips of the village children. When they spotted him, they would chant from a safe distance, “You went all the way with my daughter!”

Of the weddings I witnessed in Southgate, Wang Yuejin's was the most memorable. This powerfully built young man, once forced to run for his life from Sun Guangping and his kitchen cleaver, wore on that morning a brand-new Mao jacket, and his complexion was as ruddy as that of an official from town. He was getting ready to go across the river and fetch his new bride. Everyone in his family was running around, hectically engaged in the final wedding preparations, while he, already dressed in his smartest outfit, was the one person who seemed at a loss for something to do. As I passed his house on the way to school, he was trying to persuade a young man from the village to accompany him on the trip to fetch the bride, saying to him, “Nobody else will do. You're the only bachelor.”

“I'm no virgin,” said the other man.

Wang Yuejin's attempts to persuade him were offhand and perfunctory, and it wasn't as though the other man was unwilling to go — he simply wished to register a certain lack of enthusiasm.

On the village drying ground, two pigs were slaughtered and several dozen grass carp met their end. Sprinkled with pig's blood and fish scales all morning, the ground had been swept clean by the time we came home from school and was now covered with twenty round tables. Sun Guangming's face was festooned with fish scales and he exuded a fishy odor. He walked over to Sun Guangping, saying, “Can you guess how many eyes I have?”

Sun Guangping adopted my father's dismissive tone: “Go wash your face.” I saw him grab our little brother by the collar and haul him off toward the pond. Guangming's pride was cut to the quick, and in his shrill little voice he cursed: “Sun Guangping, I fuck your mom!”

The wedding party had set off that morning. Amid a discordant clamor of gongs and drums, this purposeful but undisciplined band crossed the river that would later take Sun Guangming's life and marched off to collect Wang Yuejin's bed-mate.

When the chubby bride, who hailed from one of the nearby hamlets, coyly entered the village, she seemed to think that nobody knew how often (under cover of darkness) she had been a visitor during the preceding weeks, and she put on a bold and confident show of looking timid.

At the wedding feast Sun Guangming must have consumed over one hundred and fifty broad beans, with the result that he kept letting off the foulest farts, even when he was sound asleep that night. When Sun Guangping pointed this out to him the following morning, Sun Guangming had a fit of the giggles. He was pretty sure that he had eaten five fruit candies, but hadn't bothered to count all the beans. On the day before he died, my little brother would sit on the threshold and ask my big brother who else was going to get married soon, vowing to eat ten fruit candies this time around. As he said that, a dribble of snot was working its way toward his lips.