Boy in the Twilight: Stories of the Hidden China

TIMID AS A MOUSE

1

There’s an expression that fits me to a T: timid as a mouse. That’s what my teacher said, back when I was in primary school. This was one autumn, I remember, in Chinese class. The teacher stood on the dais; he was wearing a dark blue cotton jacket over a clean white shirt. I was sitting in the middle of the front row, looking up at him. He held a textbook in his hand and his fingers were coated with red, white, and yellow chalk dust. As he read the lesson aloud, his face and his hands and his book towered above me and his spittle was constantly spraying my face, so that I had repeatedly to raise my hand and wipe it off. He noticed that his spittle was sprinkling my face and that I would blink my eyes fearfully when it came flying my way, so he stopped reciting and put down his book, then stepped down from the dais and walked over to me, stretched out his chalk-stained hand and patted my face, as though giving it a wash. Then he went back to the desk to retrieve his book and began to walk around the classroom as he recited the lesson. He had wiped dry the spittle on my face, but in so doing had left my face blotched with red, white, and yellow chalk dust. My classmates began to titter, because my face now looked as gaudy as a butterfly.

It was at this point that the teacher came to the place in the text where the expression “timid as a mouse” was introduced. He laid the upturned book against his thigh. “What is meant by ‘timid as a mouse’?” he said. “It’s an expression, used to describe somebody who has no more courage than a mouse …”

His mouth stayed open, for he had something more he wanted to say. “For example …”

His eyes scanned the room. He wanted to find an analogy. The teacher loved analogies. If he was trying to explain the word “irrepressible,” he would have Lü Qianjin stand up and he’d say, “For example, Lü Qianjin — he’s irrepressible. It’s as though he’s got a straw stuck up his ass all the time — he’ll just never sit still.” Or when he came to the expression “if the lips are gone, the teeth are cold,” he would ask Zhao Qing to stand up: “For example, Zhao Qing. Why does he look so miserable? That’s because his father died. His father is the lips, and if the lips are gone the teeth will chatter.” That’s the way our teacher made his analogies: “For example, Song Hai … For example, Fang Dawei … For example, Lin Lili … For example, Hu Qiang … For example, Liu Jisheng … For example, Xu Hao … For example, Sun Hongmei …”

Now he spotted me. “Yang Gao,” he said.

I got to my feet. The teacher looked at me a moment, then waved his hand. “Sit down.”

I sat down. The teacher tapped his fingers on the desk. “All those afraid of tigers, raise your hands.”

Everybody in the class raised their hands. The teacher surveyed the room. “Put your hands down.”

We put our hands down. “All those afraid of dogs, raise your hands,” the teacher said.

When I raised my hand, I heard a lot of giggles. I found that the girls had raised their hands, but none of the other boys had. “Put your hands down,” the teacher said.

The girls and I put our hands down. “All those afraid of geese, raise your hands,” the teacher now said.

Once more I raised my hand. The whole classroom erupted in laughter. This time I was the only person to raise a hand — none of the girls had. My classmates were in hysterics. The teacher did not laugh; he had to tap sharply on the desk to restore order. He looked out into the room, not at me. “Put your hand down,” he said.

I was the only person who had to do that. Then he directed his gaze at me. “Yang Gao.”

I stood up. He pointed at me. “For example, Yang Gao, he’s even afraid of geese …”

He paused for a moment, then went on, in a loud voice, “ ‘Timid as a mouse’—that’s Yang Gao.”

2

It’s true I’m timid as a mouse. I don’t dare go near the river and I don’t dare climb trees, and that’s because, before my father died, he would often say: “Yang Gao, you can go play in the school playground or along the sidewalk or at a classmate’s house. Any place is fine — just don’t go near the river and don’t go climbing trees. If you fall into the river, you might drown. If you fall out of a tree, you might break your neck.”

That’s why I was standing there in the summer sun, watching from a distance, as Lü Qianjin, Zhao Qing, Song Hai, and Fang Dawei, along with Hu Qiang, Liu Jisheng, and Xu Hao, played about in the river, watching as they splashed water, watching their glossy black heads and shiny white behinds. One after another they dived into the water and stuck their behinds into the air. They called this game “Selling Pumpkins.” “Yang Gao, come on in!” they shouted. “Yang Gao, hurry up and sell a pumpkin!”

I shook my head. “I would drown!” I said.

“Yang Gao, do you see Lin Lili and Sun Hongmei?” they asked. “See — they’re in the water. Girls get in the water, see? You’re a boy — how come you won’t join us?”

Sure enough, I could see Lin Lili and Sun Hongmei wading about in the river in their bright underpants and cheerful tank tops, but still I shook my head and repeated, “I would drown!”

Knowing I wouldn’t go in the river, they told me to climb a tree instead. “Yang Gao,” they said, “if you won’t come in, then go climb a tree.”

“I can’t climb trees,” I said.

“All of us can,” they said. “How come you’re the only one who can’t?”

“If I fall, I might break my neck,” I told them.

They stood in a line in the water and Lü Qianjin said, “One, two, three, shout …”

They shouted out in unison, “There’s a phrase ‘timid as a mouse,’ and who is it about?”

“Me,” I murmured.

“We didn’t hear that,” Lü Qianjin shouted.

So I said again, “It refers to me.”

After hearing this, they no longer stood in a line but went back into the water, and the water again began to roil and seethe. I sat down in front of a tree and went on watching as they fooled around in the river and sold those white pumpkins of theirs.

I am a biddable boy. That’s not my word — that’s what my mother says. She often sings her son’s praises to other people: “Our Yang Gao is just the most biddable boy. He’s so obedient, and such a hard worker. He’ll do whatever you tell him to do. He’s never got in trouble outside the house and never got into fights with people. Why, I’ve never heard him say any dirty words …”

My mother’s right. I never curse people and never pick a fight with anybody. But there are always people who like to come over and curse me or pick a fight. They roll their sleeves up above their elbows and their pants up above their knees, block my path, and poke me on the nose, spit in my face and say, “Yang Gao, have you got the guts to fight with us?”

“No, I don’t,” I tell them.

“In that case,” they say, “do you have the guts to curse us?”

“No, I don’t have the guts for that either,” I tell them.

“In that case,” they say, “we’re going to curse you. Listen up! You cretin! Cretin! Cretin! Cretin, and asshole too!”

Even girls — girls like Lin Lili and Sun Hongmei — give me a hard time. Once I heard other girls say to them, “You only know how to bully us girls. If you’re so tough, why don’t you go pick a fight with a boy?”

“Who said we’re afraid of boys?” they replied.

They came over and stood on either side of me, sandwiching me between them. “Yang Gao,” they said, “we want to pick a fight with a boy, so how about if we pick a fight with you? We won’t both fight with you, we’ll fight one to one. So pick between us, Lin Lili or Sun Hongmei.”

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.

Actually, when we just started, it was Lü Qianjin who was the janitor and me who was the fitter. Lü Qianjin refused to be janitor and went off to see the manager, a chisel in his hand. He stuck the chisel in the manager’s desk and said he would not be janitor, he insisted on being reassigned. So that’s how Lü Qianjin and I came to exchange positions, with him becoming a fitter and me becoming janitor. After he became a fitter, he handed me the chisel and told me to stick it in the manager’s desk just as he had. I asked him why.

“If you stick it in his desk,” he said, “you won’t have to be janitor anymore.”

“What’s wrong with being janitor?” I asked.

“Damn it, you’re such a blockhead,” he said. “Being janitor is the most demeaning job of all — don’t you realize that yet?”

“Yes, I realize that. I know none of you are willing to be janitor.”

He put his hands on my shoulders and started pushing me. “If you’re clear on that, that’s fine then,” he said. “Off you go.”

He pushed me out of the shop. I took a few steps forward, and then I turned around and went back in. Lü Qianjin blocked my path. “What are you doing back here?” he asked.

“If I stick the chisel in the manager’s desk, but he still wants me to be janitor,” I said, “what do I do then?”

“That’s not what’s going to happen!” said Lü Qianjin. “All you need to do is stick the chisel in the desk and the manager will be scared. If he’s scared, he will let you go back to being a fitter again.”

I shook my head. “The manager won’t get scared so easily.”

“What do you mean?” said Lü Qianjin. He started pushing me again. “I scared him, didn’t I?”

“You scared him,” I said, “but I wouldn’t scare him.”

Lü Qianjin looked at me intently for a moment and then withdrew his hands. “You’re right,” he said. “You wouldn’t scare the manager. You wouldn’t fucking scare anybody. You were fucking born to sweep the floor.”

Lü Qianjin is right. I was born to sweep floors. I like sweeping floors. I like sweeping the shop floor until it’s squeaky clean. I like walking back and forth in the shop with the broom in my hand, and even when I sit down to take a break I like to hold the broom. The guys in the shop say, “Yang Gao, the way you hug that broom of yours, it’s like you’re feeling a woman up.”

I know they are having a joke at my expense, but I pay them no mind, because they are always making fun. I have no idea why they love to laugh at me so much. If I’m sweeping the floor, they watch me and roar with laughter; if I’m walking along, they point at me and laugh fit to burst. When I clock in before them, they think this a great joke, and when I finish work later than them, they think that a great joke too. Actually, I start and finish just at the proper time, at the time fixed by the factory, but they make fun of me all the same, because they always start late and knock off early. “Yang Gao,” Lü Qianjin once said, “everybody else starts late and finishes early, so why do you start on time and finish on time?”

“That’s because I’m biddable,” I told him.

He looked at me and shook his head. “No, it’s because you’re timid.”

I feel it isn’t that I am timid, it’s because I like this job of mine. Lü Qianjin doesn’t like his job, doesn’t like this skilled fitter’s job that he got with the chisel, so he comes to work late every day. Not only does he turn up late, but he often drags an old mat over to a corner of the workshop and takes a nap there. Sometimes Song Hai and Fang Dawei come over to socialize, slipping away from their posts during work hours, and when they see Lü Qianjin snoring away on that old mat of his, they shout at him to wake up. “Damn, you really know how to make yourself comfortable, don’t you? Here you are, sleeping on the job. You might as well fetch your bed from home and move it right in.”

At moments like these, Lü Qianjin rubs his eyes and chuckles. “You guys not working today?” he’ll say.

“We’re working all right,” Fang Dawei and company say, “but we slipped out for a breather.”

“Well, aren’t you doing the same thing as me?” Lü Qianjin says. “You guys are pretty damn comfortable yourselves.”

Then Fang Dawei and the others call me over. “Yang Gao, every time we come over here we see you sweeping the floor. Why don’t you take a leaf out of Lü Qianjin’s book and take a nap on that old mat?”

I shake my head. “I never take a nap.”

“Why not?” they ask.

“I like my work,” I reply, broom in hand.

Hearing this, they roared with laughter. They find this very strange. “Can you believe it?” they say. “There’s still someone in the world who likes sweeping floors.”

It’s not strange to me, because I really do like sweeping the workshop till it’s spick-and-span. I wipe all the machinery in the shop until it is squeaky clean too. Because of me, our workshop has become the cleanest in the whole plant. The people in the other shops wish they could have me working for them, but the people in our workshop won’t let me go. Everybody knows that — in the plant, and outside too. Even my old classmates Lin Lili and Sun Hongmei know, because once they said, “Yang Gao, you’re the best worker in your factory, but every time they award raises or assign housing, you’re always left out … Look at that Lü Qianjin — he’s always napping on the job, but he gets a raise, he gets an apartment. He does no work, but he has his finger in every pie.”

“I’m not in his league,” I said to them. “Lü Qianjin has ways of getting things done. But not me. I have no way of getting anything done.”

“What are Lü Qianjin’s ways of getting things done? What else is there to it but threatening the factory manager with a knife?”

They got that wrong. Lü Qianjin never used a knife to threaten the manager. He did use a chisel when he first got his job assignment, but later he didn’t even use that. When he heard some workers were going to get raises, he went off empty-handed, went off to the manager’s office every morning as though that was his workplace, not our workshop. He would go into the manager’s office, sit down in one of the manager’s chairs, drinking the manager’s tea and smoking the manager’s cigarettes, talking to the manager for hours on end. That carried on until one day the manager said to him, “Lü Qianjin, the list of those getting raises has now been approved, and your name is on it.”

Lü Qianjin then returned to our workshop to work. Ever since, the old mat in the corner of the shop has never gone unoccupied — you can see a body stretched out there at all hours of the day.

Lü Qianjin’s wages keep on rising, while mine never change. Lü Qianjin has tried to educate me. “Yang Gao,” he said, “just think — when we first came to the plant, we had exactly the same pay. Years have passed, and I keep on napping every day and you keep on slaving away, and yet I’m paid more than you are. Do you know why that is?”

“Why?” I said.

“It’s because misery is the lot of the timid, and fortune favors the bold.”

I didn’t agree. I shook my head. “I didn’t go and see the manager, not because I’m timid, but because I feel I make enough money. So it doesn’t bother me that I make less than you.”

Lü Qianjin had a good long chuckle after hearing that. “You’re incredible,” he said.

Lü Qianjin is a good friend. He’s always got my interests at heart. After the factory built a new block of housing, he came to give me more advice. “Yang Gao, have you seen? That new apartment building is finally completed. It took a full three years to build it, damn it. We need to go and see the manager and demand that he assigns us new housing. What you have to realize is that after this housing is allocated there won’t be any new construction for another ten years, so we have to get our hands on an apartment now, no matter what it takes.”

“What do you mean, ‘no matter what it takes’?” I asked.

“Starting today,” he said, “I’m sleeping at the manager’s place.”

Lü Qianjin was as good as his word. At nightfall he went off cheerfully to the manager’s house, holding a quilt in his arms. Lü Qianjin spent only three nights there before he came into possession of the key to a new apartment. He waved the key in my face. “See this? This is a key! This is the key to my new apartment.”

I took Lü Qianjin’s key in my hand and inspected it. It was a new key, sure enough. “When you went to the manager’s house with a quilt in your arms, what did the manager say?” I asked.

“What did the manager say?” Lü Qianjin thought for a moment and shook his head. “I forget what he said exactly. All I remember is what I said to him. I said that my apartment was too small, that there was no room for me to sleep, so I was moving to his house for the night …”

I interrupted him. “Your apartment is bigger than everybody else’s. How could you say you have no room to sleep?”

“That’s called tactics,” said Lü Qianjin. “I put it that way so the manager would be clear that if he didn’t give me a new apartment I would stay on at his place. Actually, he knows perfectly well I have a large apartment, but he gave me this key all the same.”

After that, Lü Qianjin said to me, “Yang Gao, I’ll tell you what to do. Starting today, take all the trash you collect when sweeping the workshop floor and dump it outside the factory manager’s apartment. Within three days, the manager will put a new key in your hands.”

Saying this, he dangled his key in front of my eyes. “A key just as new as this one.”

I shook my head. “Although my apartment’s small, there’s plenty of space for my mother and me. I don’t need a new apartment.”

When he heard me say that, Lü Qianjin clapped me on the shoulder and chuckled. “You’re still a sissy, just like your dad.”

6

They all said my father was a coward. They said he never got mad at anybody and never raised his voice, even when others stuck their fingers in his face. They could grab him by the lapels of his jacket and hurl abuse at him, but he would never say a word of protest. They said he would bow and scrape to everyone he met, that his face would be wreathed in smiles even if he ran into a beggar who wanted to cadge a meal off him. Anyone else, they said, would send the beggar packing with a kick up his ass, but my father would wine him and dine him, a smile glued on his face the whole time. They told all these stories about my father being a timid creature, rounding them off with commentary on how he didn’t smoke and didn’t drink.

What they didn’t know was that my father looked really fine sitting in his truck. When my father walked toward his Liberation truck, his footsteps resounded with a louder ring than usual and his arms would swing in a wider arc. He would open the door, sit himself down in the cab, and slowly don a pair of white cotton gloves. He would lay his gloved hands on the steering wheel and his foot would press down on the accelerator, and off he would go in his Liberation truck.

They said my father never dared to curse anyone, not even his own wife and child, and they were quite right there — my father never cursed my mother and he never cursed me. But when my father was speeding down the highway in his truck, he did stick his head out the window and shout at pedestrians, “Are you trying to get killed?”

That’s when I was sitting in the cab next to him. I was watching the leaves and branches of trees as they flitted past the truck window, watching the road ahead as it glinted in the sunlight. I had a commanding view of the pedestrians who appeared on either side of the highway, and when one of them made a move as if about to cross the road, my father would shout, “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

My father would turn his head and glance at me. His eyes gleamed with the confidence of a man who was in complete control. “Yang Gao,” he would say, “keep a good look out and next time I’ll let you be the one to shout.”

So then I kept my eyes peeled, watching people walk by the roadside. I saw somebody up ahead begin to cross, only to change his mind and return to the shoulder. I gripped the window frame with both hands and my mouth opened, but no words came out. I was too afraid.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” my father said. “There’s no way he can catch up with us.”

I watched as our truck roared past. The man quickly became just a tiny figure receding in the distance, and I knew that my father was right — people on the road could not possibly catch up with us, and I could shout at them without the slightest scruple. I put my hands on the window jamb once again, and carefully surveyed the people walking by the side of the road. When another person tried to cross, I felt my body quivering all over and I gave a feeble shout: “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

“Not loud enough,” my father said. “You need to shout louder than that.”

In the rearview mirror I could see how the truck quickly left the man behind, and I shouted with all my might, “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

Then I set back against the seat. I felt utterly drained. My father was laughing as he held the steering wheel, and after a moment or two I began to laugh myself.

7

I like being with Lü Qianjin, because he’s such a daredevil. He’s more fearless even than Zhao Qing, Song Hai, Fang Dawei, Hu Qiang, Liu Jisheng, or Xu Hao. Though he’s the smallest and skinniest of the lot, he’s much the most daring. I often wonder if Lü Qianjin has eyes like a goose, so everybody looks puny in his eyes, so he’s afraid of nobody. He has three stab wounds on his face, all from cuts he inflicted on himself with a kitchen cleaver. He ran home after losing a fight, picked up the kitchen cleaver, and then chased after his adversary. When he caught up with him, he cut himself on the face, then raised the cleaver and advanced on his enemy, who took to his heels in fear.

Later, Song Hai and the others said, “Nobody would ever dream of cutting their own face with a cleaver, but Lü Qianjin will. That’s why everyone is afraid of him.”

“Why did you have to cut your face?” I asked him.

“That was to show the other guy I would stop at nothing,” said Lü Qianjin. “You know what they say: ‘The timid fear the bold, and the bold fear the reckless.’ ”

That’s when I realized Lü Qianjin was even more daring than the bold — he was reckless. “And what are reckless people afraid of?” I asked him.

“They’re not afraid of anything.”

There he was wrong. Reckless people actually have moments when they’re scared too, and Lü Qianjin is a case in point. There was one night — and very late it was — one night when Lü Qianjin and I had both been working on the final shift of the day. I left the plant ahead of him, and walked as far as a street that had no lights. It began to rain, so I took shelter under the eaves of a house and stood there in the dark for some time. Then I heard footsteps approaching, but I couldn’t see who it was — all I could make out vaguely was a low silhouette. As the figure came closer I could see he had a coat draped over his shoulders and was walking toward me with his head down. As he passed he gave a cough, and right away I knew who it was. It was Lü Qianjin. Because he had a cold he had been coughing the whole day through. When he coughed it sounded even more disgusting than the sound of someone throwing up — it was as though his throat was clogged with sand. He gave a drawn-out, hacking cough as he walked past.

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.

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.

They looked at the cleaver in my upraised hand; their mouths opened and laughter came out. I thought to myself, What’s the matter with them? Why are they laughing so hard? So I asked them, I said, “What’s so funny? What are you so happy about? Lü Qianjin, why are you laughing too? I’ve got an idea why Song Hai and the rest of them are laughing, but I can’t understand why you think it’s so funny.”

They just laughed all the harder. Lü Qianjin fell on the table, he was laughing so much. Song Hai and Fang Dawei stood next to him, one hand on their bellies and one hand on his shoulder. My ears were buzzing with the sound of their laughter. I stood there with the cleaver in my hand and didn’t know what to do. I watched as they laughed, watched as they gradually stopped laughing and wiped away their tears. Then Song Hai pressed Lü Qianjin’s head down on the table. “You need to offer Yang Gao your neck.”

Lü Qianjin raised his head and shoved Song Hai’s hand aside. “No way! No way am I going to offer him my neck.”

Song Hai persisted. “Come on, give him your neck. If you don’t do that, he won’t know what to do.”

Fang Dawei and company added their comments. “Lü Qianjin, if you don’t give him your neck, it won’t be any fun.”

“Fuck this,” said Lü Qianjin. Then with a laugh he laid his head on the table. Liu Jisheng and the rest pushed me over next to Lü Qianjin, and Song Hai took my hand and guided the cleaver to Lü Qianjin’s neck. When the cleaver made contact with his skin, his neck contracted, and he sniggered. “The cleaver’s making my neck all itchy,” he said.

I noticed some pimples on Lü Qianjin’s sunburned neck. “You’ve got a lot of spots,” I said. “Your system is out of whack. You must not have been eating enough vegetables lately.”

“I haven’t eaten any vegetables at all,” he said.

“If you don’t fancy vegetables, then watermelon will do just as well,” I said.

“Yang Gao, cut the crap,” Song Hai and the others said. “Weren’t you planning to carve up Lü Qianjin? Now you have his neck right underneath your cleaver and we want to watch how you do it.”

It was true. Lü Qianjin’s neck was at the mercy of my cleaver. All I needed to do was to raise my arm, chop, and his neck would be severed. But when I saw Song Hai and the others again killing themselves laughing, I couldn’t help thinking that the prospect of seeing me cut his head off was what made them so happy, and I began to feel distressed on Lü Qianjin’s account. “They’re supposed to be your friends,” I said. “But if they were really your friends, they wouldn’t be so happy. They should be trying to talk me out of it. They should be pulling me away. But look at them — they’re looking forward to me cutting your head off.”

Hearing this, they laughed all the louder. “See, there they go again,” I said to Lü Qianjin.

He was laughing too, still with his head against the table. “You’re right,” he said. “They’re not true friends of mine. But then neither are you. If you were really my friend, you wouldn’t be about to cut my head off with a cleaver.”

This made me uneasy. “The only reason I’m doing this,” I said, “is because you beat me up. I wouldn’t be doing it otherwise.”

“I just hit you a couple of times, that’s all,” Lü Qianjin said, “but here you are cutting me up with a cleaver. You’re forgetting how good I was to you in the past.”

This made me think. I recalled things that had happened earlier, times when Lü Qianjin had helped me out, when he’d got into a fight or a row with someone on my account, and lots of other things, but now I was trying to cut him up. Although he had given me a beating, he was still my friend. I put the cleaver to one side. “Lü Qianjin,” I said, “I am not going to cut you up after all.”

Lü Qianjin lifted his head off the table and gave his neck a rub. He looked at Song Hai and the others and laughed, and they looked at him and laughed.

“Although I’m not going to cut you up,” I went on, “I can’t just leave it like this. You slapped me and kicked me all over the place. I’m going to give you a slap now, and we’ll call it quits.”

I reached out and gave him a box on the ear. When people heard the whack of my hand hitting Lü Qianjin’s face, their laughter evaporated. I saw Lü Qianjin’s eyes widen. He pointed at me and cursed. “What the hell do you think you’re doing!”

He knocked over the chair and delivered four slaps to my face, hitting me so hard that my head lolled and my eyes went blurry, and then he punched me fiercely in the chest, so hard my lungs wheezed. I fell to the ground, and he kicked me in the belly, so hard my stomach churned. His foot delivered a series of kicks to my legs, hard enough to break my bones. As I lay on the floor, I heard a buzz of conversation, though I couldn’t make out what they were saying. All I felt was waves of pain from head to toe, as though my body was being wrung out like a wet towel.