Yu Hua - Brothers

Baldy Li returned home looking like a defeated rooster in a cockfight. Disconsolate, he sat down, then furiously pounded the table while wiping the sweat from his brow. Song Gang sat on the bed holding a book, watching Baldy Li nervously. Baldy Li's appearance suggested to Song Gang what had happened, so he carefully asked, "Did Lin Hong go to the grove?"

"Yes," Baldy Li said angrily. "She fucking called me an ugly toad."

Song Gang watched Baldy Li distractedly as memories of his own encounters with Lin Hong rushed back to him: every word she said to him on the bridge, as well as while braiding her hair in her bedroom— these scenes were as clear as if they were playing right in front of his eyes. And now, in a moment of clarity, Song Gang finally became convinced that he was indeed the one whom Lin Hong liked. At that point, Baldy Li began to study the distracted Song Gang intently and said, as if he had suddenly made an unexpected discovery, "Maybe Lin Hong really fucking does like you."

Song Gang shook his head sadly, and Baldy Li asked him suspiciously, "Do you like Lin Hong?"

Song Gang nodded, and Baldy Li pounded the table and cried out imperiously, "Song Gang, Lin Hong is mine, and you can't fucking like her. If you like her, we can no longer be brothers but instead will become enemies, and more specifically class enemies."

Song Gang listened to Baldy Li's cries with his head lowered, and after Baldy Li had gone through all the curse words he could think of, Song Gang finally lifted his head and laughed miserably. "Relax, I won't get together with Lin Hong. I don't want to lose my brother."

"Really?" Baldy Li began to laugh.

Song Gang nodded earnestly, whereupon tears began to roll down his cheeks. After wiping his tears, he pointed to the bed on which he was sitting and said, "Do you remember? Before she died, Mother made me carry her home, and then she lay in this bed…"

"I remember." Baldy Li nodded.

"And do you remember how then you went out to buy some stuffed buns?"

Baldy Li nodded again, and Song Gang continued: "After you left, Mother took my hand and made me promise to look after you. I told her not to worry and said that I would give you my last piece of clothing and my last bowl of rice."

After he said this, tears ran down Song Gangs cheeks, and Baldy Li also began to cry, saying, "Did you really say that?"

Song Gang nodded, and Baldy Li wiped his tears and said, "Song Gang, you are really a good brother."

BALDY LI continued to pursue his beating to a pulp courtship stratagem, but never again did he ask Song Gang to accompany him. Baldy Li said that he would feel very uneasy if Song Gang and Lin Hong were so much as to catch sight of each other. Therefore, he asked that Song Gang avoid Lin Hong at all costs, and if he were to run into her in the street, he should avoid her as if she were a leper. Baldy Li then began to model himself after Song Gang, reasoning that if Lin Hong liked Song Gang, it must be because Song Gang was so refined and never cursed and was always studiously carrying a book around with him. Baldy Li therefore completely transformed himself, and whenever he was near Lin Hong he too would make sure to have a book with him. He also stopped bullying the other men of Liu; instead he smiled effusively like a politician on the stump, and every time he encountered someone he knew, he would greet them with a warm handshake. When the people of Liu saw this new Baldy Li, they all said that it was as if the sun had suddenly risen in the west. They always saw Baldy Li leafing through his book and muttering to himself like a Confucian scholar whenever he was at Lin Hongs side. Everyone muffled their laughter with their hands and whispered that Lin Hong had rid herself of a love-crazy hooligan but had gained a love-crazy monk. When Baldy Li noticed that the onlookers were very curious about his incessant reading, he proclaimed loudly, "Reading is good, and going a day without reading is even more uncomfortable than going a month without taking a shit."

Baldy Li said this for Lin Hongs benefit, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth he immediately regretted them, feeling that his comparison was perhaps too crass. After he returned home, he asked Song Gang for advice and subsequently changed his line to "Reading is good. You can go a month without eating, but you can't go a day without reading."

The people of Liu disagreed, pointing out that if you don't read for a day, you can still survive, whereas if you go a month without eating, you will surely die. Baldy Li dismissed the naysayers as a bunch of cowards and said valiantly, "If you go a month without eating, you would in fact starve to death, but if you go a day without reading, it would result in a life worse than death."

Lin Hong continued walking expressionlessly She heard this back-and-forth between Baldy Li and the onlookers and noticed the onlookers’ laughter and Baldy Li's excitement, but she herself maintained a studious indifference to it all.

After Baldy Li adopted the identity of a Confucian scholar, he became very bookish and would frequently spout pearls of wisdom, only occasionally straying into obscenity. When Lin Hong heard Baldy Li's obscenities, she thought to herself, You can't teach a dog not to eat shit.

Lin Hong knew what kind of scum Baldy Li was and didn't feel at all as though the sun were now rising in the west. Instead, she was convinced that he was up to his old tricks, and at the end of the day he was merely the same ugly toad and pile of cow dung, just as, at the end of the day, the Monkey King in Journey to the West was still, despite his seventy-two incarnations, merely a monkey.

On the night of the rendezvous in the grove, Lin Hong had been furious when Baldy Li, rather than Song Gang, appeared. She then attempted to excise Song Gang from her heart. When she glimpsed him on the street a few days later, she laughed coldly and thought to herself that this guy was a perfect idiot who wouldn't get another chance. She lifted her head high and walked toward him, telling herself that she wouldn't give him a second glance. The last thing she expected, however, was for Song Gang to run away as soon as he saw her coming. The next several days, every time Song Gang caught sight of her, he would run away as though she were a leper — exactly as Baldy Li had instructed. This ritual gradually ate away at her pride and left her feeling completely bereft.

In this way, Song Gang unintentionally made his way back into Lin Hong's heart. She noticed her heart's peculiar transformation: The more Song Gang avoided her, the more she liked him. Every night, rain or clear, Lin Hong would find herself remembering his handsome figure as she was trying to fall asleep — his smile, his bowed head and pensive appearance, his soulful look every time he saw her. She found everything about Song Gang as sweet as could be. After a while, her memories of him became an intense yearning, as if he were her lover from whom she was separated by a vast distance.

Lin Hong was convinced that Song Gang was secretly in love with her and that he was avoiding her on Baldy Li's account. The mere thought of Baldy Li turned her pale with fury. His fearsome appearance made all the other young men of Liu too terrified to court her— though, truth be told, in her eyes they were all worthless wretches. Song Gang was different, and Lin Hong would often fantasize that he was courting her. Each time after her daydream she would shake her head and sigh, knowing that he would never come visit her on his own accord. Deciding that it was time for her to take the initiative again, she resolved to write him a note — seven lines and eighty-three characters long, together with thirteen punctuation marks, to be exact. Of those eighty-three characters, she devoted fifty-one to cursing Baldy Li and the remaining thirty-two to urging Song Gang to come meet her at eight o'clock that evening under the bridge. Lin Hong folded the note into the shape of a butterfly and hid it inside a brand-new handkerchief, then waited in the street for Song Gang to get off work. The last sentence in the note asked that Song Gang return the handkerchief to her when he came to meet her. She felt that, by adding this line, she was guaranteeing that he would not stand her up.