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

By this time I must have been standing under the ink-black eaves for a good ten minutes. Although the rain didn’t get my face wet, it had soaked my shoes right through. I was so pleased to see Lü Qianjin come along that I darted out and put my arms around him. I felt his body contract and heard him scream out in panic, “I’m a man! I’m a man! I’m a man!”

I’d never heard a scream like that — it was a bit like the crow a rooster makes, not at all like the kind of shout you’d expect to hear from Lü Qianjin. He had never spoken or shouted in that tone of voice before. He burst free from my grasp and started running for all he was worth, and in the blink of an eye he disappeared around the corner. He ran away so quickly, I didn’t even have time to tell him it was me. As soon as I put my arms around him, he screamed, and it startled me so much that by the time I had recovered from my surprise he had already vanished into the distance.

That night I puzzled over it, but I just couldn’t figure out why he shouted “I’m a man.” I knew he was a man, obviously — what I didn’t understand was why he had to say so. He didn’t need to say that for me to know he was a man. It wasn’t until the next day, at Song Hai’s place, when I was sitting around with Lü Qianjin, Zhao Qing, Song Hai, Fang Dawei, Hu Qiang, Liu Jisheng, and Xu Hao, that I learned why Lü Qianjin had screamed the way he did.

Lü Qianjin was sitting opposite me. With a cigarette in one hand and a cup of tea in the other, he said, “Somebody tried to rape me last night.”

“A woman tried to rape you?” asked Song Hai.

“A man,” said Lü Qianjin. “He took me for a woman …”

“How could he mistake you for a woman?” they asked.

“I had this bright-colored coat over my shoulders,” said Lü Qianjin. “It was raining when I got off work, so I grabbed the coat of one of the women in the workshop and threw it over my head. I went out the gate and got as far as Army Emulation Road. That fucking road hasn’t got a single streetlamp, and as soon as I started walking down the road, the rapist jumped on me from behind and put his arms around me …”

“So that’s why you screamed ‘I’m a man!’ ” I cried out in delight. “It’s because you had a woman’s coat on your shoulders …”

They interrupted me. “What did you do when he put his arms around you?” they asked Lü Qianjin.

He gave me a look. “I grabbed his two hands, and with a quick flick of my waist I threw him like a sack to the ground …”

“And then?”

“Then …” Lü Qianjin gave me another look. “I stuck my foot in his mouth and said, ‘I’m a man.’ ”

Having heard what Lü Qianjin had to say, Song Hai and the others turned and looked at me, as though they recalled what I had just said. Song Hai pointed at me. “What was it he said just now?”

I laughed. So they went back to quizzing Lü Qianjin: “What then?”

“Then,” Lü Qianjin continued, his eyes fixed on me, “I kicked him a couple of times, and then I picked him up and punched him in the face a couple of times, and then … and then …”

When Lü Qianjin saw I was laughing all the more heartily, he glared at me. “Yang Gao, what’s so funny?”

“Actually,” I said, “I had no idea you were wearing a woman’s coat. It was so dark, there was no way I could tell what you were wearing.”

Lü Qianjin turned pale. Song Hai and the others looked at me. “What did you say?” they asked.

I pointed at myself. “It was me who put my arms around him last night,” I said.

They were stunned. I looked at Lü Qianjin. “Last night you ran so fast I didn’t have the chance to tell you it was me. You ran out of sight in a flash.”

Lü Qianjin sprang to his feet, his face livid. He came up to me, raised his hand, and gave me two resounding slaps across the ears that left my head spinning. Then he picked me up by the lapels of my jacket and pulled me out of my chair. First he thrust his knee into my belly, so hard my stomach felt it had been hit by a sledgehammer, and then he planted a fist in my chest, so fiercely it knocked the breath out of me.

8

Afterward, I dragged myself up off the floor. I left Song Hai’s house and slowly followed Liberation Road until I reached Sunnyside Bridge. I stopped there for a while and leaned against the balustrade; the midday sun beat down so strongly I could hardly open my eyes. My body was still aching. I heard a boat pass under the bridge; it made a lapping sound as it cut its way through the water. I thought of my father, who died the year I turned twelve. I thought of the summer he died, of the Liberation truck he drove that summer and that battered old tractor.

My father let me sit in the cab of his truck. He was going to take me to Shanghai, to the big city. My father’s truck sped along the summer highway. The wind, warmed by the sun, ruffled my hair as I sat there in the cab and made my shirt flap. “Why don’t you close your eyes?” I said to my father.

“You can’t close your eyes when driving,” he said.

“Why not?” I said. “Why can’t you?”

“Do you see the tractor up ahead?” my father said.

I saw a tractor creeping along, with a dozen or so farm workers sitting in the cart it was pulling. They were all stripped to the waist, and they looked black and shiny, like loaches. “I see it,” I said.

“If I was to close my eyes,” said my father, “we would run right into the tractor, and the impact would kill us.”

“All I want is for you to just close them for a moment,” I said. “If you can just do that, then I can tell Lü Qianjin and the others about it. I can tell them you have the nerve to drive with your eyes closed.”

“Okay, I’ll just close them for a moment,” said my father. “Watch my eyes. I am going to close them on the count of three. One, two, three …”

My father closed his eyes. I saw it for myself — his eyes, for that moment, were completely shut. When he opened them again, our truck was about to crash into the tractor and the tractor was veering off to the left in alarm. My father jerked the steering wheel as sharply as he could and our truck just managed to scrape past.

I saw those dark, loachlike men in the cart shake their fists at us, and I knew they must be cursing. That’s when my father stuck out his head and shouted back, “Are you trying to get yourselves killed?”

My father turned to me and gave a smile of satisfaction. I smiled too, as our truck raced on along the summer highway and leaves and branches flitted past. I saw fields full of crops, a patch of this and a patch of that, houses and winding rivers, and people making their way along the paths between the fields.

But then my father’s truck broke down. He got out, opened the hood, and began to repair his Liberation. I stayed put in the cab. I wanted to watch my father as he worked, but the raised hood blocked my view and I had to content myself with listening to him making the repairs. He tapped away at things under the hood.

Time passed; finally my father jumped down and slammed the hood shut. He came round and fished out a cloth from under my seat, rubbed the oil off his hands, and then walked round to the other side. Just as he opened his door and was about to climb in, the tractor we had passed earlier rolled up, disgorging the men as dark as loaches, who made a beeline for our truck.

My father watched white-knuckled as they marched over. Hands grabbed his shirt collar — three hands, at the very least. “Who is trying to get killed?” I heard them ask. “Is it us, or is it you?”

My father said nothing. They dragged him to the middle of the road, and I saw their hands reach into my father’s trousers, take out his cash, and transfer it to their own pockets. After that, their fists started landing on his face, and the twelve of them together beat him up and knocked him to the ground.