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

In the truck, I was crying. I couldn’t see my father, because he was completely surrounded. I wept and wailed as they kicked him. Only when they drifted away did I see him curled up on the ground, as though hugging himself. I was crying fit to burst, because I saw four of the men had opened their flies and were pissing on my father as he lay there, on his face and his legs and his chest. I sobbed and moaned, and through a veil of tears I saw them walk toward the tractor and climb back onto the trailer. The tractor began to chug, and off they went.

My father clambered to his feet and stood stock-still for a minute or two, his body stooped, as I wept and wailed. He turned around and came back to the truck, and when he opened the door I could see that his face was caked with blood and dirt and his hair and clothes were wet. He panted as he climbed into the cab. I was crying so much, my body was trembling all over. He reached over and rubbed my face with his grimy hand, lightly rubbing my face until my tears were dry. He laid his hands on the steering wheel and gazed at the tractor as it drove off into the distance. After a moment, he drew out his tea mug from its place by his feet and handed it to me. “Yang Gao, I’m thirsty,” he said. “Go down to the river and fill this up with water.”

Still sobbing, I took the mug from his hand, opened the door, climbed out, and walked down to the bank. I took a look back at my father. He was watching me with tears in his eyes. I went down to the river.

When I stood up after filling the mug, my father’s truck had begun to roll forward. I ran up the bank as fast as I could, spilling the water on the ground, but the truck just kept on moving. I stood and wailed at the side of the road, shouting desperately at the departing truck, “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!”

I ran after the truck, crying and screaming. I thought my father didn’t want me anymore, I thought he was deserting me. The truck was moving at full speed now, and I watched as it gained on the tractor. Then I heard a colossal roar and all I could see was a huge cloud of dust; black smoke was beginning to rise.

I stood rooted to the spot for some minutes. Vehicles had pulled over by the crash site, and passengers got out and gathered round. I went on walking — it was a long way ahead — and it was almost dark by the time I reached my father’s truck. Its front end had caved in and the door on the driver’s side was twisted out of shape; he lay sprawled over the steering wheel and his head was covered with broken glass. The steering column had punctured his shirt, punctured his chest; blood had stained his body red. The men had been thrown from the tractor: some were groaning, while others lay motionless. Sparrows were strewn everywhere, carpeting the ground as thickly as the vegetables in the fields. I realized they must have been killed by the sheer impact of that tremendous roar. They had been perched on a tree as happy as can be, but my father’s truck collided with the tractor and suddenly that was the end of them.

9

I left Sunnyside Bridge and went home. My mother was not there. The clothes she had washed that morning had been hung out to dry on the bamboo rails by the window. I saw they were dry, so I collected and folded them and put them away. I swept one more time the floor my mother had swept that morning, wiped the table she had wiped, put in order the shoes she had straightened, and filled up her cup with water. Then I took the cleaver from the kitchen and went out the door.

As I walked toward Lü Qianjin’s house, the cleaver in my hand, I passed Song Hai’s place. Song Hai stopped me. “Yang Gao, where are you off to? What are you doing with that cleaver in your hand?”

“I’m going to Lü Qianjin’s house,” I said. “I’m going to carve him up.”

Song Hai laughed. I heard his voice behind me. “Fang Dawei, do you see this? See the cleaver Yang Gao is holding? He says he’s going to carve up Lü Qianjin.”

Fang Dawei was coming my way. Hearing this, he stopped. “Are you really going to carve him up?”

I nodded. “I really am.”

Fang Dawei laughed just as loud and long as Song Hai. “He says he’s really going to carve up Lü Qianjin.”

“That’s right. That’s what he says.”

They laughed, and fell in behind me. They said they wanted to see with their own eyes how I was going to carve up Lü Qianjin. So there I was walking on in front and they were walking behind. When we passed Liu Jisheng’s apartment, Song Hai and Fang Dawei shouted out, “Liu Jisheng! Liu Jisheng!”

Liu Jisheng appeared in his doorway. He looked at us. “What’s up?” he said.

“Yang Gao is going to carve up Lü Qianjin,” they told him. “Don’t you want to get a view of the action?”

Liu Jisheng looked at me in amazement. “You’re going to carve up Lü Qianjin?”

I nodded. “That’s right,” I said. “That’s just what I’m going to do.”

Liu Jisheng laughed, just like Song Hai and Fang Dawei. “Are you planning to kill him? Or just do him some damage?”

“Maybe not kill him,” I said, “but at least leave him in pretty bad shape.”

Hearing this, they laughed so hard they had to put their hands on their bellies. It was a mystery to me why they found this so funny. “How come you guys are so pleased to hear that I’m going to carve up Lü Qianjin?” I said. “You’re his friends, after all.”

They laughed so much they squatted down on their haunches, and their laughter gradually turned to titters, a bit like the sound crickets make. I ignored them and went on ahead by myself. When I passed Hu Qiang’s place, I heard Song Hai and the others shout, “Hu Qiang! Hu Qiang! Hu Qiang!”

They were going to follow me the whole way, I realized. The result was that when I reached Lü Qianjin’s house, there were five people with me: Song Hao, Fang Dawei, Liu Jisheng, Hu Qiang, and Xu Hao. Laughing gaily, they pushed me inside.

Lü Qianjin sat at the table clutching a big slice of watermelon; some seeds were stuck to his cheeks. When he raised his head to look at us, he saw what I had in my hand. “What are you doing with that cleaver?” he mumbled, his mouth full of melon.

“Yang Gao is going to carve you up with it!” Song Hai and the others said gleefully.

Lü Qianjin’s eyes widened. He looked at me, then at Song Hai and the others. “What did you say?”

Song Hai and company burst out laughing. “Lü Qianjin,” they said, “death’s staring you in the face, and here you are eating watermelon. You’d better stop. The melon you’re eating won’t have time to turn into shit, because you’re about to die. Don’t you see the cleaver in Yang Gao’s hand?”

Lü Qianjin put down the watermelon. He pointed at me, then at his nose. “You’re saying he wants to carve me up?”

Song Hai and company nodded. “That’s right!” they said.

Lü Qianjin wiped his mouth with his hand and pointed at me a second time. “You’re telling me Yang Gao wants to carve me up with that cleaver?”

They nodded again. “You’ve got it!”

Lü Qianjin looked at me and burst out laughing, along with Song Hai and company. That’s when I spoke up. “Lü Qianjin,” I said. “You beat me up. You slapped me in the face, you punched me in the chest, and you kicked me in the stomach and kicked me on the knees, and my face and my chest and my stomach and my knees are still sore. When you were hitting me, I never once hit back. That wasn’t because I was afraid of you, it was because I didn’t know what to do. Now I know what to do: I want a tooth for a tooth. I’m going to carve you up with this cleaver.”

I raised the cleaver to show Lü Qianjin, and to show Song Hai and the others too.