Yu Hua - Boy in the Twilight - Stories of the Hidden China

Morning Tang nodded. “That’s true, you’ve got a point. I’ve had bad luck recently. The women I see all turn out to be with guys who want to pick a damn fight with me.”

Then Morning Tang and I, along with Li Shuhai, proceeded to Fang Hong’s house. We sat down in his living room, eating popsicles that he had taken out of the refrigerator. We watched Fang Hong, shirtless, go into the bedroom, and heard the murmur of voices on the other side of the door. We knew he was telling his wife what had happened and persuading her to let him go out on this hot night to lend Morning Tang a helping hand.

The bedroom door was open just a crack. We could see that the light inside was dimmer than the living room and we could hear their voices rise and fall. They were doing their utmost to talk quietly, so it sounded as though they weren’t talking so much as panting for breath.

After finishing the popsicles, we watched the head of the fan swing back and forth, blowing the hot air onto our sweating bodies. The three of us looked at one another and smiled, then stood up and took a couple of steps, then sat down again. We waited for a long time, and Fang Hong finally emerged. He carefully closed the bedroom door behind him and stood there looking grim. Then he pulled a white T-shirt down over his head and adjusted it. “Let’s go,” he said.

Now there were four of us. Streaming with sweat, we walked to Chen Lida’s apartment block. He lives on the sixth floor, the top floor. The four of us stood on the noisy street, surrounded by people trying to escape the heat inside their own apartments, and looked upward. We saw a light was on in Chen Lida’s apartment, and we called out, “Chen Lida, Chen Lida, Chen Lida.”

Chen Lida appeared on the balcony and poked his head over the balustrade. “Who’s there?” he called.

“It’s us.”

“Who?”

“Li Shuhai, Fang Hong, Morning Tang, and me,” I shouted.

“Hell, is it you guys?” Chen Lida gave a delighted cry. “Come on up.”

“No, we won’t,” we said. “You live too high up. Better if you come down.”

Now we heard a woman’s voice. “Come down and do what?”

We took a closer look. Chen Lida’s wife was on the balcony too. She pointed at us. “What is it you want to do?”

“Morning Tang’s in trouble,” I called. “We friends want to help him. Have Chen Lida come down.”

“What kind of trouble is Morning Tang in?” she asked.

“There’s someone waiting for him outside his house,” Li Shuhai said. “He wants to settle scores with him.”

“Why does this person want to settle scores with him?”

“Morning Tang has something going with this man’s wife,” Fang Hong said.

“I’ve got it now,” Chen Lida’s wife said. “Morning Tang’s been up to his old tricks again, so that man wants to kill him.”

“That’s right,” we said.

“It’s not that serious,” Morning Tang said.

“What’s the name of the woman he seduced this time?” Chen Lida’s wife asked.

We turned to him. “Who’s the woman this time?”

“Stop all this calling back and forth and letting so many people hear,” he said. “Can’t you see them all grinning? This is going to give me a terrible reputation.”

“What is Morning Tang saying?” Chen Lida’s wife asked.

“He told us to stop calling back and forth,” I said, “otherwise he’s going to end up with a bad name.”

“He already has a bad name,” Chen Lida’s wife shouted from the balcony.

“That’s true.” We agreed with her, and told him so. “Actually, you already have a bad name.”

“Fuck this,” he swore.

“What was that he said?” Chen Lida’s wife called.

“He says you’re right,” we answered.

So that’s how Morning Tang’s friends finally reached their full complement. On this August night, in a temperature of thirty-four degrees Celsius, the five of us walked along the still-steaming street toward Morning Tang’s apartment. On the way we asked him who the man was. He said he didn’t know him. Then we asked him who the man’s wife was. He said we didn’t know her. Finally we asked, How did he manage to seduce her? “What do you think?” he said. “It’s just the usual routine: first you meet her, then you take her to bed.”

“That simple?” we asked.

Morning Tang appeared to find our question too absurd to merit his attention. “You think there’s much more to it than there really is,” he said. “That’s why you guys are only fit to sleep with one woman all your lives.”

We stopped to buy cold drinks and stood outside the store, discussing how to handle the resentful cuckold. Li Shuhai said we should ignore him: all we had to do was see Morning Tang back to his house and let the husband know that Morning Tang has four friends like us, and the man would quickly give up on his crazy ideas. Fang Hong took the view that we should say a few words to the man, make him understand there was really no point in him giving Morning Tang a hard time, it was with his wife that he had scores to settle. What I said was: If it comes to a fight, what shall we do? Chen Lida said: If it came to a fight, all we had to do was simply stand to one side and cheer. Chen Lida felt that with us four to pep him up, Morning Tang would be sure to get the better of his adversary.

As we were debating, Morning Tang remained silent, and when we directly solicited his opinion we discovered he was busily casting flirtatious glances at a pretty girl. He hadn’t heard a word we were saying. We noticed that his eyes were gleaming. A few feet away to his right, a girl with shoulder-length hair was drinking a soda. She was wearing a black tank top and a long skirt with a floral pattern. As we sized her up, she turned her head a couple of times to look at us, and Morning Tang, of course, was included in her glance, though the glance seemed casual enough. After finishing her drink, she put her Coke bottle on the counter and walked briskly away. She looked pretty stunning, the way she held herself. We watched as she stepped along the sidewalk, and then we watched in surprise as Morning Tang began to follow her. “Morning Tang!” we couldn’t help but cry.

He turned and gave a chuckle, then moved off smartly, to stay close behind the pretty girl.

We were speechless. Now he was off on a search for new happiness, we realized. But what kind of time was this to choose? An enraged man was waiting outside his apartment, gnashing his teeth in his eagerness to destroy him. He had called us out from our homes, made us walk so far we were bathed in sweat, insisted we see him safely back to his house, but now he had forgotten all about that, abandoned us in front of a convenience store, and left without saying goodbye.

So we unleashed a torrent of abuse, denounced him as incorrigible, cursed him as a useless son of a bitch. We predicted he would come to a bad end. We were certain that one of these days he would be infected with syphilis, syphilis so bad his flesh would rot. At the same time we vowed never again to get involved in his affairs. Even if he ended up with his legs broken, his eyes gouged out, his balls cut off, we would just act as though nothing had happened.

We cursed till we were blue in the face, till our energy was spent, and then we quieted down. We stood there, looking at one another, and after a moment we started to wonder, What do we do now? “Do we go back home?” I asked.

None of them answered, and I realized this was a really dumb suggestion. Immediately I corrected myself. “No,” I said. “We’re not going to go home.”

They understood straightaway what I had in mind. “Right,” they said. “We’re in no hurry to go home.”

We realized it had been several years since we last got together. If it hadn’t been for Morning Tang, our wives wouldn’t have let us out, and we suddenly became aware how rare an opportunity this was. We headed for a little bar across the street.