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

I shook my head. “No, I’m not going to pick between you. I’m not going to fight with you.”

I wanted to get away, but Lin Lili stretched out an arm and held me back. “You don’t want to fight with us?” she said. “Or you don’t have the guts to fight with us?”

“I don’t have the guts to fight with you,” I said.

Lin Lili let me go, but then Sun Hongmei grabbed me. “We can’t let him off that easy,” she said. “We need to have him say ‘timid as a mouse.’ ”

So Lin Lili put it to me, “There’s a phrase ‘timid as a mouse.’ Who does it refer to?”

“It refers to me,” I said.

3

When my father was alive, he would say to my mother, “This boy Yang Gao is too much of a sissy. Even when he was six, he didn’t dare talk to people. When he was eight, he was too scared to sleep by himself. Even when he was ten, he couldn’t summon up the courage to lean against the parapet on the bridge. Now he’s twelve, and geese still scare him.”

My dad was right. When I ran into a flock of geese, my legs would turn to jelly and there was nothing I could do about it. What frightened me the most was when they charged toward me, stretching out their necks and flapping their wings. I was forced to keep going in the other direction, past Lü Qianjin’s house. Past Song Hai’s house I went, and Fang Dawei’s and Lin Lili’s, but those geese just kept on chasing me, honk honk honk, in full cry all the way. Once they pursued me right out of Yang Family Lane and kept on my tail the full length of Liberation Road, right up to the school. As they followed me across the playground, still honking away, people gathered to watch and I heard Lü Qianjin shout, “Yang Gao, give them a kick!”

So I swiveled around, took aim at a goose in the middle of the pack, and gave it a little kick. But that just made them honk more fiercely and lunge toward me more aggressively. I turned right round and kept on going.

“Kick them!” Lü Qianjin and the others were shouting. “Yang Gao, kick them!”

I kept on moving as fast as I could, and as I went I shook my head. “They’re not afraid of my kicks.”

“Throw stones at them!” Lü Qianjin and the others shouted.

“I don’t have any stones,” I said.

They laughed uproariously. “Then you’d better run for your life!” they shouted.

I shook my head again. “I can’t run. As soon as I do, you’ll laugh at me.”

“We’re laughing at you already!” they said.

I took a good look at them. They were laughing so hard their mouths were open and their eyes were closed and their bodies were bent double. I thought to myself, it’s true, they are laughing at me, so I began to run.

“Geese’s eyes are the problem,” my mother explained to me later. “Geese see everything as smaller than it really is, and that’s why they’re so bold.

“Seen through a goose’s eye,” she went on, “our front door is like a hollow in the wall, our window is like the opening in the crotch of your pants, our house is as small as a hen’s nest …”

What about me, then? That evening, when I lay in bed, I kept wondering how big I was in the eyes of a goose. I decided the biggest I could possibly be was only as big as another goose.

4

When I was little, I often heard them talking about how timid I was. By “them” I mean Lü Qianjin’s mother and Song Hai’s mother, also Lin Lili’s mother and Fang Dawei’s mother. In the summer they would sit in the shade under the trees and gossip about other people’s affairs. They would chatter away, even louder than the cicadas in the tree above, they’d yak and yak until the conversation came round to me. They would talk about how often I’d been a coward, and once they talked about my father too and said he was just as much of a coward as I was.

I was upset when I heard that, and went and sat down by myself on the doorsill. I’d just heard something I didn’t know before. They said my father was the slowest driver in the world. They said nobody wanted to ride in his truck, because a trip that would take other drivers three hours my father wouldn’t manage to complete in five. Why? They said it was because my father was too timid. They said he got scared if he drove at all fast. Scared of what? Scared he’d crash and die.

Lü Qianjin and the others saw me sitting alone on the doorsill. They came over, stood in front of me, and said with a laugh: “Your father is a coward, just like you. Your cowardice is genetic. You got it from your dad, and he got it from your granddad, and your granddad got it from your granddad’s granddad …”

They went through a whole dozen or so of my ancestors’ granddads and then asked, “Does your father have the guts to drive with his eyes closed?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never asked him.”

Lü Qianjin said his father could swallow a whole Yorkshire pig in one go. Lü Qianjin’s father slaughtered pigs. “You’ve got eyes in your head,” Lü Qianjin said. “You can see for yourself my father is even stouter than a Yorkshire pig.”

Song Hai’s father was a surgeon. Song Hai said his father regularly operated on himself. “I often wake up in the middle of the night and see my father sitting by the dining table, his head down, a flashlight gripped between his teeth so that the light shines on his belly. He’s stitching himself up.”

Then there’s Fang Dawei’s father. Fang Dawei says his father can knock a hole through a wall with just one punch. Even Liu Jisheng’s father — who’s so thin there’s no flesh on his bones, who spends half the year in a hospital bed — Liu Jisheng says he can snap nails in half with his teeth.

“So how about your dad?” they ask. “What is it he can do? Does he have the guts to drive with his eyes closed?”

I shook my head again. “I don’t know.”

“Then hurry up and ask him.”

After they left, I went on sitting on the doorsill, waiting for my father to return. In the late afternoon, my mother came home and saw me sitting there in a daze. “Yang Gao, what are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m sitting on the doorsill,” I said.

“I can see that,” she said. “What I want to know is, what are you doing sitting there?”

“I’m waiting for Father to come home,” I said.

Mother started to prepare dinner. As she ladled water out of the vat to sieve the rice, she said, “Come inside and help me wash the vegetables.”

I didn’t go in. I stayed sitting on the doorsill, and though my mother called me time and again, I went on sitting there, right until nightfall, when my father came home. His heavy footsteps sounded slowly on the darkened street, and then he appeared at the corner, carrying that shabby old bag of his. As his black shadow approached, the light from the house shone on his foot, then climbed his legs. When it reached his chest, he stopped and bent down. His head was still in shadow as he asked, “Yang Gao, what are you doing here?”

“I was waiting for you to come home,” I said. I stood up and followed him inside. He sat down in a chair and put his arms on the table. He looked at me, and that was when I asked, “Do you dare to drive with your eyes closed?”

My father smiled and shook his head. “You can’t drive with your eyes closed.”

“Why not?” I said. “Why can’t you drive with your eyes closed?”

“If I was to drive with my eyes closed,” my father said, “I’d crash and die.”

5

My mother is right — I’m biddable. I’ve got a fine job now, on the janitorial staff at the machine plant. I am in the same factory and the same shop as Lü Qianjin. He’s a fitter, so he’s got oil all over his hands and all over his clothes, but he’s perfectly happy. He says he’s got a skilled job and he looks down on the work I do, saying my job is unskilled. It’s true there’s no skill involved in my job — all I have to do is take a broom and sweep the shop’s concrete floor. So I don’t have any skill, but I also don’t have any oil on my hands or clothes, while Lü Qianjin’s fingernails are dirty black. His nails have been like that ever since he came to the factory.