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

“In saying these things, I don’t have any special agenda,” I replied. “It doesn’t mean I would definitely want to marry Pingping. Whether I marry her is not something just for me to decide. Is that what she would want? I don’t know. All I meant was, if I were her husband.”

I looked at her. “Pingping, isn’t that so?”

The trouble was, she mistook my meaning. “I’ll be your wife,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “After hearing what you said just now, I’m happy to be your wife.”

I was struck dumb. What an idiot, I thought. I had laid a trap for myself and jumped right into it. When I saw relief blossoming on Pingping’s face, I knew my chances of getting out of this were growing more and more remote. Her beauty was now on full display, her lovely eyes glistening as she gazed at me, the tears still flowing. “Pingping, don’t cry,” I said.

She raised a hand and brushed away her tears. My head was about to explode, I was so carried away. I was out of my mind now. I found myself saying to Lin Meng, in the tone of Pingping’s husband, “It’s time you left.”

He nodded in agreement. “Right, I should be going.”

I watched him as he jubilantly made his escape, and a thought occurred to me. I got the feeling that for ages now this guy had probably been looking forward to this very moment — he just hadn’t anticipated it would be me who would take over from him. After Lin Meng left, Pingping and I sat there together for a long time, neither of us saying a word, just thinking. Later, she asked me if I was hungry and whether she should go to the kitchen and prepare something. I shook my head. I wanted her to stay sitting. We sat there silently for a while, and then Pingping asked me if I regretted marrying her. I said no. She asked me what I was thinking about. “I feel as though I’m psychic,” I told her.

Pingping didn’t understand, so I explained. “When I was leaving the house, I made up a story for my parents about how you and Lin Meng had been in a fight, how you had knocked Lin Meng around until he was black-and-blue, how Lin Meng had knocked you around until you were black-and-blue … and now the two of you really are getting divorced. Wouldn’t you say I was psychic?”

Pingping made no response. I knew she still didn’t understand, so I explained more fully, giving her all the details of the story I had cooked up for my mom and dad, including the one about how she had smashed an ashtray on the top of Lin Meng’s head. When she heard this, Pingping waved her hand in protest, saying she would never do something like that. I said I knew that, I knew she wouldn’t, I knew she wasn’t a battleaxe. I was telling her these things only so she would realize I was psychic. Now, she understood. She nodded her head and smiled. But as she nodded I was shaking my head. “Actually, I’m not really psychic,” I said. “Though I predicted the discord between you and Lin Meng, I didn’t foresee I would end up as your husband.”

I looked at Pingping pathetically. “I haven’t a clue why I have to get married.”

Kunshan left his house with a toothpick in one hand and a shiny kitchen cleaver in the other. He was threatening to slaughter Shi Gang. “Even if I decide to let him off with his life,” he said, “I’m still going to keep a piece of him as a souvenir.” As for just where this cut of meat would come from, Kunshan believed this would depend on how good a dodger Shi Gang proved to be.

It was lunchtime as Kunshan walked along the boulevard, chewing his toothpick, his eyes bloodshot, strands of tobacco caught in his mustache. As he walked, his lips were slightly curled and his jacket was open, revealing the work belt he wore inside. People could tell at a glance that he was off to have another fight. They tagged along behind, peppering him with questions. “Who is it?” “Kunshan, who are you after?” “Who is it this time?”

Kunshan cut an imposing figure as he marched along, and his retinue grew steadily more numerous. He came to a stop when he reached the bridge, and loudly spat the toothpick into the river below, then set down the cleaver on the concrete parapet and pulled a pack of Front Gate cigarettes from his pocket. He gave the pack a couple of shakes, and the tips of two cigarettes poked out. With his mouth he extracted one, then struck a match and lit up. He wasn’t sure yet in which direction he should go. He knew that to go to Shi Gang’s house he would need to turn west after crossing the bridge, and to go to the refinery where he worked he would need to go south. The problem was he didn’t know where Shi Gang would be just then.

As Kunshan inhaled, his nostrils flared. Now he began to scan the crowd of people gathered around him. As he looked grimly at their cheerful features, he noticed a thin bespectacled face. “Hey, you’re at the refinery, right?” he asked. The thin face moved closer. “You know Shi Gang?”

The man nodded. “We’re in the same shop.”

Kunshan soon established Shi Gang was still at work. He looked at his watch. It had just turned one, which meant Shi Gang’s shift had now ended and he’d be on his way to the bathhouse. Kunshan smiled thinly and went on leaning against the parapet. He took a few more puffs. It was at this point that he made his comments to the onlookers about slaughtering Shi Gang or, at the very least, chopping off a piece of him.

I was a boy of eleven then, on my way to the refinery. After lunch I had dumped my textbooks onto my bed, stuffed some clean clothes into my satchel along with a towel and soap, and asked my mother for ten fen. “I’m going to take a bath,” I told her.

With the satchel on my back I headed off, but not toward the public bathhouse in town. One had to pay for admission there, and I wanted to keep those ten fen for myself, so I headed for the refinery bathhouse instead. It was April, and the parasol trees were laden with broad leaves. The sun shone brightly, catching the dust thrown up from the street.

I left the house at eleven forty-five, having calculated the time carefully. I knew I should arrive at the main entrance to the refinery at twelve noon precisely, for that was when the old gatekeeper would be sitting in the reception office eating his lunch. He wore a pair of glasses with heavy prescription lenses, and I was confident that the steam rising from his bowl would completely obscure his vision. Besides, he liked to bury his head in his food. I regularly slipped in at this time, bending double as I crept underneath his window. At twelve thirty, I would be steeping naked in the refinery’s cozy little bathhouse. I would have the place to myself then, and the water would be so hot it would practically scald my bottom and the steam would be so thick it would hang motionless, as though painted on the wall. I would need to be out of there by one o’clock, rinsing off the soap before those greasy workers stepped into the water: when they marched in with their towels over their shoulders, I would have already dried myself, knowing it wouldn’t take long for them to fill the water with frothy white bubbles and turn it into bean milk.

But, this particular lunchtime, I stopped when I got to the bridge and lost all sense of time, forgetting that the old gatekeeper at the refinery would soon finish his lunch and then start pacing back and forth in front of the gate with his hands behind his back. It would be ages before he would stump back to his room and sit down, by which point the water in the bathhouse would be getting cold.

I stood on the bridge, squeezed between the midriffs of the adults there, watching Kunshan as he leaned against the parapet, smoking and spitting out large gobs of phlegm. He fascinated me, the way his mustache grew above his thick mouth, the way the muscles on his face shook like a flag in the wind when he talked. I was amazed by all the muscle this man had just on his cheeks, and after I’d inspected his chest — a thick chest that even a bayonet would not be able to pierce — and studied his arms and legs, I told myself this Shi Gang character was a goner.