Cries in the Drizzle

CHAPTER 1. SOUTH GATE

It was in 1965 that nighttime began to stir in me a nameless dread. I am thinking now of that evening when a light rain drifted down. In my bed I lay, a child so little you could have set me there as easily as a toy. The dripping from the eaves simply called attention to the silence that surrounded me, and the steady onset of sleep was but a gradual forgetting of the rain's patter. As I glided peacefully into slumber, it was as though a secluded path had appeared before me, opening a passage between trees and shrubs. Then from far away there came the sound of a woman's anguished wails. When those hoarse cries erupted so suddenly in the still of the night, the boy that I was then shivered and quaked.

I can see myself now, a startled child, eyes wide with fear, the precise outline of my face obscured by the darkness. The woman's cries persisted. Anxiously, I expected to hear another voice, a voice that would respond to her wails, that could assuage her grief, but it never materialized. I realize now why I was gripped by such intense disquiet: it was because I waited in vain for that answering voice. Surely there is nothing more chilling than the sound of inconsolable cries on such a desolate night.

A second memory comes hot on the heels of the first: three or four white lambs trotting across the grass by the riverside, a daytime image, a way of easing the agitation evoked by the previous memory. But I find it hard to decide just where I was when this sight left its mark on me.

Several days may have passed before I seemed to hear a voice that answered the woman's cries. It was late afternoon. A storm had just passed, and dark clouds filled the sky like billows of smoke. I was sitting by the pond behind the house, and out of the damp landscape a man I did not recognize walked toward me. He was dressed completely in black and as he approached his dark clothes waved like a banner under the gloomy sky. When this image began to close in on me it brought to mind the unmistakable sound of the woman's cry. Even from far off in the distance the stranger fixed me with a piercing gaze, and he continued to stare at me as he drew nearer. Just as I was about to panic, he abruptly changed direction, mounted the path on the edge of the field, and gradually moved farther and farther away, his loose black clothes flapping loudly in the breeze. Now, when I look back on the past from an adult point of view, I always linger long on this particular moment, puzzling over why it was that I interpreted the rustling of his clothes as a response to the woman's cries in the evening drizzle.

Then there is a morning I remember, a crystal-clear morning when I was scampering along behind some village boys, over soft earth and windblown grasses. The sunshine at that moment seemed to be a matter not so much of dazzling light as a warm color daubed on our bodies. Like the lambs on the riverbank we bounded along, running for ages, or so it seemed, until we arrived outside a dilapidated temple from which enormous cobwebs caught my eye.

It must have been a little earlier that one of the village boys had come tramping over from a spot far off in the distance. I still remember that his face was drained of color and his teeth were chattering. “There's a dead man over there,” he said.

The body was lying beneath the cobwebs. It was the same man who had walked toward me the day before. Although I try now to recapture my feelings at that moment, the effort fails. My memory of that incident has been stripped bare of the reactions I had at the time, and all that is left is the outer shell: the associations it now carries simply reflect my current outlook. For me as a six-year-old the sudden death of a strange man could have prompted only a quiver of astonishment and would not have been the occasion for much hand-wringing. He lay faceup on the moist earth, eyes closed, with a relaxed and peaceful expression on his face. I noticed that his black clothes were stained with mud, mottled the way a country path is spotted with somber, anonymous flowers. It was the first time I had seen a dead man, and it looked to me as though he was sleeping. That must have been the extent of my reaction then: that dying was like falling asleep.

After that I dreaded the night. I saw myself standing at the entrance to the village and pictured the gathering darkness surging toward me like floodwater, engulfing me and then swallowing up everything else. I would lie in the dark for ages, not daring to fall asleep, and the silence all around simply intensified my terror. Again and again I would wrestle with sleep. My antagonist strove with all its might to seize me in its powerful grip, and I desperately resisted. I was afraid that once I fell asleep I, like the stranger, would never wake up again. But in the end I was always reduced to exhaustion, sucked helplessly into slumber. When I woke up the following morning and discovered I was still alive, the sunlight poking through the crack in the door, I was overjoyed to find that I had been spared.

When I think back to when I was six years old, one last scene comes to mind. Here again I see myself dashing along at full speed, and in my memory I relive the former glory of the boat-builders’ yard in town, and the day when their first-ever concrete boat was making its way down the river into Southgate. My big brother and I were running toward the riverbank. How bright was the sunlight of those bygone days, illuminating my still-young mother, her blue-checked headscarf fluttering in the autumn breeze; my little brother was seated in her lap, his eyes wide with wonder. My father, with that penetrating laugh of his, clambered barefoot onto the ridge between the fields. But what was that tall man in the army uniform doing there? He seemed to have arrived by chance at my parents’ side, like a leaf blown into a thicket.

The riverside was packed with people. My brother showed me how to squeeze through their legs, and a clamor of voices enveloped us. When we finally crawled into a spot overlooking the river, we stuck our heads out between two grown-ups’ trouser legs and gazed around like a pair of turtles.

The moment of highest drama was announced by an ear-splitting din of gongs and drums and the cheers of the crowd assembled on the banks. The concrete boat was coursing toward us. Long ropes hung down its sides, with pieces of colored paper fastened to them like so many flowers blooming on a vine. A dozen young men on board were banging gongs and beating drums.

“Hey, what's that boat made of?” I called to my brother.

He turned his head and answered with a shout, “Stone.”

“Then why doesn't it sink?”

“You idiot,” he said. “Can't you see the ropes?”

It was at this point in my life that the burly figure of Wang Liqiang appeared in his military uniform, imposing on my memories of Southgate a five-year hiatus. He took me by the hand and led me off toward a steamboat with a piercing whistle. It would carry me down an endless river, to a town called Littlemarsh. I didn't know then that my parents had given me away and I was under the impression that this trip was going to be a pleasurable excursion. On the narrow dirt road I ran into my grandfather, now racked by pains and aches. I answered his troubled gaze with a complacent announcement: “I don't have time to talk to you now.”

Five years later, as I returned alone to Southgate, I was to run into Granddad again on this same road.

Not long after I moved back home, a family from town by the name of Su carne to Southgate to live. One summer morning the two boys of the Su family carried out a small round table and placed it in the shade of a tree. They began to eat breakfast.

This is what I saw then, when I was twelve. The two town boys were sitting there in their store-bought shirts and trousers while I sat alone by the pond in my homespun shorts. I watched as my fourteen-year-old brother led my nine-year-old brother toward our new neighbors. Like me, they were shirtless and dark as two loaches in the sun.

Just before this, I had heard my big brother say, over by the drying ground: “Come on, let's go and see what the townsfolk eat.”

Of the children who had congregated on the drying ground, my little brother was the only one prepared to join him in this inspection of the newcomers. Striding ahead with his chin up, my big brother was boldness personified, while my little brother trotted along at his heels. Baskets of grass cuttings dangled from their arms and swung back and forth as they made their way down the road.

The two town boys laid down their bowls and chopsticks and watched warily as the visitors approached. My brothers did not pause, but marched past the table with a swagger, then looped around the townspeople's house and walked straight back again. Compared with the image struck by my older sibling, my little brother's effort to project authority came across as rather unconvincing.

On their return to the drying ground, my big brother said, “The townsfolk eat pickles, just like us.”

“No meat?”

“No fucking good stuff at all.”

My little brother corrected him. “There's oil in their pickles. We don't have any oil in ours.”

My big brother gave him a shove. “Get out of here. What's so great about oil? We have oil at our house too.”

“But it's sesame oil they've got. We don't have that.”

“You don't know shit.”

“It's true — I could smell it.”

The year when I turned twelve Wang Liqiang died, and I made my own way back to Southgate. Once there, I felt as though I was experiencing the life of an adopted child all over again. In those early days, I often had the strange sensation that Wang Liqiang and Li Xiuying had actually been my natural parents and that this home in Southgate was no more than a kind of almshouse. It was the fire that first stirred those feelings of estrangement, for at the very moment that Granddad and I were walking back to South-gate after our chance encounter, our house was going up in smoke.

This coincidence made my father look at me and Granddad with intense suspicion in the days that followed, for all the world as if we were the ones who had started the blaze. If I happened to stand next to Granddad, he would erupt into howls of frenzied protest, as though he expected our newly erected cottage to burst into flames any second.

Granddad died the year after my return to Southgate. His departure from the scene allowed my father's paranoia about us to dissipate, but this did nothing to alleviate my plight. My big brother took his cue from my father and made no secret of his disapproval of me. Any time I made the mistake of appearing by his side, he would tell me to get lost. So I grew steadily more distant from my siblings, and as the village boys were always doing things with my big brother I became ever more remote from them too.

To compensate, I would immerse myself in nostalgia for my life in Wang Liqiang's home and for my childhood companions in Littlemarsh, recalling countless happy moments, yet assailed at the same time by sadder memories. As I sat alone by the pond, engrossed in reliving the past, my solitary smiles and copious tears left the villagers bemused. In their eyes I was fast becoming a freak. That's why later, when people got into rows with my father, I became a weapon in their arsenal, and they'd say that only defective genes could spawn a son like me.

In all the time I spent in Southgate, there was just one occasion when my big brother turned to me as a suppliant — the time he cut my head open with a sickle, leaving my face dripping with blood.

This was in our sheep pen. When his stinging blow struck my head, I wasn't at all clear what had happened, and what first caught my attention was the abrupt change in my brother's attitude. Only after that did I feel the blood coursing down my face.

He stood aghast in the doorway and begged me to wash the blood off. I shoved him aside and headed out of the village, toward the fields where Father was working.

The villagers were fertilizing the vegetables, and a faint odor of feces wafted on the breeze toward me. As I approached the vegetable plot, I heard several women give cries of alarm and dimly perceived my mother running toward me. When she arrived at my side she asked me a question, but I made no reply, carrying on doggedly toward my father.

In his hand he was holding a long ladle, which he had just lifted out of the honey bucket. He held it stationary in the air as he watched me walking toward him. I heard myself say, “It was big brother who did it.”

He hurled the ladle to the ground, leapt onto the path, and set off for home at a rapid pace.

What I didn't know was that after I left, my big brother had cut my little brothers face with the sickle. Just as my little brother was about to open his mouth and bawl, my big brother explained why he'd done what he did and begged his forgiveness. In my case his entreaties had fallen on deaf ears, but my little brother was more receptive.

And so, when I returned home I was greeted not by the sight of my older brother taking his punishment, but by that of my father waiting for me under the elm tree, rope in hand.

Owing to my little brother's false testimony, the facts of the case had now taken on a completely new cast: it was only because I had cut him with the sickle that my big brother had bathed my face in blood.

Father tied me to the tree and gave me a thrashing that I will never forget. During the beating the village children stood around in a circle and watched with rapt attention while my brothers complacently maintained order.

After this episode I made two marks, one large, one small, on the last page of my composition book. I kept a record of every beating I suffered at the hands of my father and my big brother.

Now, so many years later, I still have that composition book, but its mildewy odor makes it impossible to reexperience the urge for revenge that animated me then. It evokes instead a vague sense of wonder, which in turn brings to mind the willow trees of Southgate. I remember that one morning in early spring I noticed with surprise that their withered branches were dotted with tender green buds. This lovely image, when it now reappears in my consciousness so many years later, turns out to be intimately linked with the composition book that is the symbol of my childhood humiliations. Perhaps that is how memory works, outlasting loves and hates to make its entrance unaccompanied and unencumbered.

Just as my family situation was going from bad to worse, something else happened that created an unbridgeable gap between me and the other members of my household and also destroyed my reputation in the village at large.

Adjacent to our private plot was a tract tended by the Wang family, which included among its members a pair of brothers, the strongest men in the whole village. The elder of the two was married, his older son the same age as my little brother. Arguments over private plots were commonplace in Southgate and I can no longer recall exactly what triggered this particular dispute. All I remember is that it was late in the afternoon and I was sitting by the pond watching my parents and brothers as they engaged in an unending altercation with the six members of the Wang family.Our side appeared to be in the weaker position, or at least it was making less noise. This was particularly true of my little brother, who was still unable to enunciate swearwords as clearly as his opposite number in the Wang household. Practically everyone in the village was standing around watching, and a few came over in an effort to pacify the antagonists, only to be sent packing. Some time later I saw my father hurling himself at his adversaries, his fists flying. The younger of the two Wang brothers, Wang Yuejin, seized his wrist and with one blow sent him hurtling into the rice paddy. My father unleashed a string of curses and just as he tried to climb soggily to his feet, Wang Yuejin kicked him back into the field. Mother screamed and threw herself at Wang Yuejin, but he dodged to one side and gave her a shove that sent her headlong into the paddy as well. My parents floundered about clumsily, like chickens tossed into a lake. I bowed my head in distress at the sight of them thrashing around.

Later my big brother charged over brandishing the kitchen cleaver, my little brother hot on his heels grasping a sickle. My big brother aimed a blow at Wang Yuejin's buttocks.

A dramatic reversal of fortune ensued. Under the onslaught of my brother's cleaver, the Wang brothers, who had seemed so invincible just moments earlier, retreated to their house in alarm. My brother chased them right to their door, where the Wang brothers grabbed fish spears in an effort to fend him off. But when he recklessly threw himself at them, cleaver flailing, they dropped the fish spears and ran for their lives.

Inspired by his big brother's example, my little brother raised his sickle high in the air and gave a battle whoop, quite the intrepid warrior. But he had trouble keeping his balance as he ran and tripped over himself several times.

Throughout the whole confrontation I remained rooted to my spot next to the pond, and it was because of my detached role as spectator that the villagers — no matter whether they were my father's supporters or his detractors (the Wangs included) — came to the conclusion that in all the world there could not be another person as degenerate as me, and it is not hard to imagine what kind of reception I got from my own family. My big brother, on the other hand, was proclaimed the hero of the hour.

There was a period when I would make a point of quietly observing the Su family as I sat by the pond or cut grass for the sheep. The two town boys did not emerge from their house all that often, and the farthest they ever went was to the cesspit at the edge of the village, where they immediately turned back. One morning I saw them come out of the house and stand between the two trees in the front yard, pointing at something as they talked. Then they walked over to one of the trees, and the older of the two squatted down on his haunches while the younger climbed onto his back. The one carried the other over to the second tree, where they exchanged positions and the younger boy carried his older brother back to the original spot. They repeated this routine over and over again, and each time one threw his weight on the other's back I could hear their infectious laughter. The two brothers’ laughs sounded very much alike.

Later on three bricklayers came from town, bringing two loads of red bricks. A wall was erected around the Sus’ house, enclosing the two trees, and I never again saw the Su brothers playing the game that so captivated me. But I often heard laughter from the other side of the wall, so I knew they still played it.

Their father, a doctor, worked at the hospital in town. Often I saw him strolling along the road late in the afternoon, a man with clear skin and a gentle voice. Once, however, he didn't come home on foot as usual, but sped past me, perched on the saddle of one of the hospitals bicycles. I was heading home with a basketful of grass and was startled by the sound of a bicycle bell behind me. He was calling his sons as he rode past.

The two boys went into ecstasies as soon as they came out the door and raced joyfully to meet the bicycle, while their mother stood by the side of the lane, greeting with a smile the returning man of the house. The doctor loaded his two sons onto the bicycle and rode off along a path between the fields. They shrieked with excitement, and the younger boy, who sat in front, rang the bell incessantly. This spectacle made the village children green with envy.

When I was sixteen, in my first year of high school, I tried for the first time to come to terms with the word family. I hesitated for a long time, faced with the choice between my home in South-gate and Wang Liqiang's home in Littlemarsh, and the understanding I finally reached was inspired by the memory of that particular scene.

My first contact with the doctor occurred some time before the argument over the private plots. I had been back at Southgate only a few months then, and Granddad was still alive. After staying with us for a month, he had gone off to my uncle's house. Meanwhile I had come down with a fever that left my mouth parched dry. I lay in bed for two days, all in a daze. Our ewe was just about to lamb and the rest of the family was out in the pen, so I was alone in the house, listening groggily to the noises outside. My brothers’ shrill voices were particularly audible.

Later my mother appeared by my bedside and said some-thing or other, then went out. Next time she appeared Dr. Su was by her side. He placed the palm of his hand on my forehead, and I heard him say, “Must be a hundred and two.”

After they left, the noise in the sheep pen went up a notch. Though the doctor had just laid his hand lightly on my forehead, it felt to me like a tender caress. Before long I heard the voices of the Su brothers outside; only later did I realize that they were delivering medicine.

Once I was on the mend, feelings of dependency began to stir. I had been close to my parents until I was six, when I left the village, and later, during my five years in Littlemarsh, Wang Liqiang and Li Xiuying had provided their care and support, but since my return to Southgate I had found myself suddenly abandoned and unprotected.

So around this time I would often stand by the roadside and wait for the doctor to pass on his way home from work. I watched as he approached, imagining the heartwarming things he might say to me, anticipating how his broad hand would pat me on the forehead.

But the doctor never paid me the slightest attention, and I realize now that there was no reason he should have given any thought to who I was or why I was standing there. He would brush past me, and if on occasion he threw me a glance it was only as one stranger looks at another.

Su Yu and Su Hang, the doctors two sons, soon afterward were inducted into the ranks of the village children. My brothers were trimming grass from the bank of earth between the fields, and I watched as the Su brothers walked hesitantly toward them, debating some point as they went. My older brother, who in those days tended to think he could take charge of anything, waved his sickle at them and said, “Hey, do you want to cut some grass?”

In the short time Su Yu spent in Southgate, he came over to talk to me only once. I still remember his shy expression, the unmistakable timidity in his smile as he asked, “You're Sun Guangping's younger brother, right?”

The Sus lived in Southgate for only two years. The sky was overcast on the afternoon they moved out. The very last cart of furniture was hauled away by the doctor himself, with the two boys pushing, one on either side, and their mother brought up the rear, clutching two baskets full of odds and ends.

Su Yu died of a brain hemorrhage when he was nineteen. I didn't hear the news until the day after it happened. On the way home from school I passed the house where the Sus had lived and sorrow surged through my heart, bathing my face in tears.

When my big brother went to high school his behavior changed quite markedly. (I find I now recall rather fondly my brother at the age of fourteen. Though he was a real dictator, there was something unforgettable about his arrogance. Sitting on the bank, directing the Su brothers’ grass-trimming activities — for a long time this was the image of him that was foremost in my mind.) Once he began to mix with the children from town, he became increasingly standoffish toward the village boys. As his town classmates became more regular visitors to our house, my parents felt that this reflected very well on them, and there were even some senior residents of the village who predicted that my brother would have the brightest future of any of the village children.

During this period two teenagers from town often came running out to the village early in the morning, shouting at the top of their lungs just for the heck of it. They yelled so much that they became hoarse, and their screeches made our hair stand on end. The villagers thought at first theywere hearing ghosts.

This made a deep impression on my brother, and I once heard him say darkly, “Here we are, wishing we could be townsfolk, but its entertainers that the townsfolk want to be.”

My brother was definitely the quickest of the youngsters in the village to spot developing trends, for it was already dawning on him that all his life he would never be able to compete with his classmates from town; this was his earliest sensation of inferiority. But at the same time his friendship with the town boys was a natural extension of his customary self-regard: their visits unquestionably raised his standing within the village.

My brother's first love interest appeared when he reached the second grade of high school. He took a fancy to a strongly built girl, the daughter of a carpenter. Several times I saw him in a corner, taking a bag of melon seeds from his satchel and slipping it into her hands.

She would often emerge on the playground, munching our melon seeds, spitting out the shells with such gusto and expertise that you might have taken her for a middle-aged matron. Once, after she spit out a shell, I noticed that a long thread of saliva trailed from the corner of her mouth.

Around this time girls began to figure as a theme in conversations between my brother and his classmates. I sat by the pond behind the house, listening as they explored territory entirely new to me. Out of the window drifted brazen commentary on breasts, thighs, and other body parts, provoking surprise and arousal in me. In due course they moved on to their own experiences with girls. My brother kept quiet at first, but under pressure from his classmates he soon revealed his dalliance with the carpenter's daughter. So taken in was he by their vows of confidentiality that he let himself get carried away: it was obvious that he was exaggerating their intimacy.

Not long after that, the girl stood in the middle of the playground, surrounded by several other schoolgirls, all just as full of themselves as she was. She called him over.

My brother walked toward her nervously, for he may already have had some inkling of what was about to happen. It was the first time I saw him afraid.

“Did you say I have a crush on you?” she asked.

His face turned bright red. I did not stay to observe how my brother, usually so self-assured, now found himself reduced to helpless embarrassment. Encouraged by her classmates’ chortles, the girl threw the melon seeds in his face.

My brother returned home from school very late that day and lay down in his bed without having anything to eat. I was dimly aware of him tossing and turning practically the whole night through. Still, he managed to swallow his pride and go off to school as usual the following morning.

My brother knew that the town boys had sold him down the river, but he never showed any signs of resentment or even allowed the faintest hint of reproach to appear on his face. Instead he continued to fraternize with them as before, for he would have hated to let the villagers see that his townie classmates had dropped him all of a sudden. But in the end my brother's efforts all came to naught. After they graduated from high school, the town boys were assigned jobs one after the other, thereby forfeiting the freedom to loaf around, and the time came when he found himself ditched.

Late one afternoon, when my brother's classmates were no longer gracing our home with their presence, Su Yu arrived quite unexpectedly, the first time he had returned to Southgate since his family moved away. My brother and I were in the vegetable plot and only my mother was home, busy preparing dinner. When she saw Su Yu, she assumed he had come to see Guangping. Now, so many years later, I am still stirred by the memory of her standing at the edge of the village, calling him eagerly at the top of her voice.

My brother hopped onto the path and hurried home, but Su Yu's first words to him were, “Where's Sun Guanglin?”

My mother realized with astonishment that Su Yu had come to see me. My brother managed to take this in stride and he answered casually: “He's over in the vegetable patch.”

It didn't occur to Su Yu that he should take a moment to chat, and without further ado he turned his back on them and headed for the field where I was working.

Su Yu had come to tell me he had been assigned a job at the fertilizer plant. We sat on the bank for a long time, gazing at the Sus’ old house as the evening breeze began to pick up. “Who lives there now?” Su Yu asked.

I shook my head. I would see a little girl come out the gate, and her parents were often around, but I knew nothing about them.

Su Yu left as night fell. I watched as his stooping form disappeared on the road into town. Before the year was out, he was dead.

By the time I graduated from high school, the university entrance examinations had been reinstated. When I was admitted to college I had no chance to inform Su Yu as he had informed me about his job placement. I did see Su Hang on a street in town, but he and his buddies were on bicycles and they raced past me in high spirits.

I didn't tell my family that I was taking the entrance exam, and I borrowed the money for the registration fee from a classmate in the village. A month later, when I went to pay him back, he said, “Your brother already gave me the money.”

I was taken aback. After I received the notice of my admission, my brother put together some things that I would need. By this time my father was already having his affair with the widow across the way; he would often slip out of her bed halfway through the night and slip into my mother's. He was too preoccupied to give much thought to family matters. When my brother told him my news, he simply said offhandedly, “What! They're going to let him stay in school? The lucky devil!”

My father realized that this development signaled my long-term absence from home, and this put him in excellent spirits.

Mother had a fuller understanding of things. In the days immediately preceding my departure she would often look uneasily at my brother, for what she had really been hoping was that he would go to university. She knew that graduation from college assured your promotion to an urbanite.

When I left, only my brother saw me off. He walked in front, my bedroll on his back, and I followed close behind. Neither of us said a thing. Touched by the efforts he had made during the previous few days, I was looking for an opportunity to thank him, but the silence that enveloped us made it difficult for me to broach the topic. Only as the bus was about to depart did I blurt out: “I still owe you one yuan.”

My brother looked at me blankly.

“The registration fee, I mean.”

Now he understood, and a doleful expression appeared in his eyes.

“I'll pay you back,” I went on.

I watched him through the window as the bus lurched forward. My brother was standing underneath a tree, and I saw a stricken look on his face when the bus pulled away.

Not long after this, the land in and around Southgate was requisitioned by the county authorities for the construction of a textile mill, and the villagers were turned overnight into suburbanites. Although I was in faraway Beijing, I could easily imagine their excitement and anticipation. Even if some people ended up sobbing as they prepared to relocate, it seemed to me that their sadness was the inevitable sequel to the initial rejoicing. Old Luo, the storehouse janitor, shared with everybody one of his pearls of wisdom: “No matter how successful a factory may be, it will go bust eventually. You'll never be out of a job if you till the fields.”

But years later, when I returned to my home district, I ran into Old Luo in an alley in town, and the old man, dressed in a dirty, tattered cotton jacket, said to me proudly, “I'm living off my pension now.”

After I left Southgate for good, I never felt any attachment to my childhood home. For a long time I was convinced that memories of the past or nostalgia for one's birthplace really represent only a contrived effort to restore one's equilibrium and cope better with life's frustrations, and that even if some emotions arise these are simply ornamental. Once, when a young woman politely inquired about my childhood and hometown, I found myself enraged and retorted: “Why do you want me to accept a reality that I have already left behind me in the past?”

If anything about Southgate induces some nostalgia, it has to be the village pond, and when I heard that my birthplace had been appropriated for development, my first reaction was concern for the pond's future. That spot, which for me had been a source of comfort, would, I feared, just be buried and forgotten, the same way Su Yu had been buried and forgotten.

Some ten years later I went back to Southgate, returning alone one night to my home village. In its new incarnation as a factory, Southgate no longer projected a faint odor of night soil wafting on the evening breeze, nor could I hear the gentle swaying of crops. Despite all the changes I could still identify exactly where my old home once stood and the pond once lay. When I moved closer my heart couldn't help but skip a beat, for the moonlight revealed that the pond of my childhood was still there. As it came into view, an upheaval stirred within me. The memory of this pond had always offered me solace, but its appearance in the present now brought to life the very fiber of my past. Gazing at the refuse that littered its surface, I realized that the pond was more than just a provider of consolations; it served, rather, as an emblem of days gone by: far from fading in my memory, it still clung stubbornly to its place on Southgate's soil, an eternal reminder of what had been.

WEDDING

In those early days when I sat beside the pond, Feng Yuqing inspired endless yearning when she walked by, exuding youth and buxom beauty, wooden bucket in hand. As she approached the well she would move more cautiously. This circumspection in turn stirred an anxiety in me, a concern that she might lose her footing on the moss growing around the edge of the well. When she bent over to lower the bucket into the shaft, her braid would flop down over her chest and swing in an exquisite motion.

One particular summer — this was Feng Yuqing's last year in Southgate — I felt a different sensation as she walked by at midday. I caught a glimpse of her breasts quivering inside her floral blouse and my scalp went numb. A few days later, as I passed her house on the way to school, she was standing in the doorway, combing her hair in the first rays of the sun. Her head was slightly tilted to one side and the early morning sunshine bathed her sleek neck and caressed her shapely figure, while her raised arms clearly exposed to the daybreak breeze the lighter shade of hair in her armpits. These two scenes kept replaying in my mind, with the result that when I next saw Feng Yuqing I was conscious that I kept averting my gaze. My feelings for her were no longer as straightforward as they once had been, for budding desire was now bundled up with them.

I was surprised by something my brother Sun Guangping did one evening not long afterward. Now fifteen, he undoubtedly noticed her physical appeal earlier than I did. It was a moonlit night, and as Sun Guangping headed home with a bucket of water Feng Yuqing was walking in the direction of the well. In the instant when they passed each other, Sun Guangpings hand darted toward her breasts, only to rapidly withdraw. He then hurried homeward, while she was so shocked by his gesture that she stood there paralyzed, regaining her composure only when she saw me, at which point she continued on toward the well. I noticed that as she drew up the bucket she made a point of tossing her braid back over her shoulder whenever it fell over her chest.

For the next few days I was sure that Feng Yuqing would come to our house to lodge a complaint, or at the very least that her parents would. Sun Guangping often cast anxious glances out the door. But as time went on and the moment he was dreading never materialized, he gradually recovered his usual confidence. Once I saw him run into Feng Yuqing, and he gave an ingratiating smile while she simply brushed past him with a scowl.

Even my younger brother Sun Guangming was not immune to Feng Yuqing's charms. Ten years old, still clueless about sex, he greeted her once with a shout of “Big breasts!” He was sitting on the ground at the time, a grimy little boy toying with a scrap of brick. He gave a silly smile, and a thread of saliva dripped indiscreetly from the corner of his mouth.

Feng Yuqing, blushing, continued on toward her house, her head lowered. Her mouth was bent a little out of shape, and it was obvious that she was trying to stifle a laugh.

In the autumn of that year Feng Yuqing's life took a new turn. I remember it all so clearly: how, as I crossed the wooden bridge on my way home from school one lunchtime, I saw a profoundly altered Feng Yuqing, clinging tightly to Wang Yuejin and surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. To me this scene came as a great shock. The girl who was the focus of all my desires eyed the spectators with a pleading, anxious look. They gave no sign of extending to her the sympathy she deserved, for they were animated by curiosity more than anything else. Wang Yuejin, still in her iron grip, said to them facetiously, “Just see how shameless she is!”

The laughter of the audience had absolutely no effect on Feng Yuqing, except perhaps to render her expression all the more sober and obstinate, and for a moment she closed her eyes. In that instant, a hundred thoughts ran through my mind. She was clinging to something that was not hers: it was just a matter of time before it would slip from her hands. When I gaze back at the past, it's as though I see her clutching not a man, but air. Feng Yuqing was quite ready to cast aside her natural reserve and forfeit her reputation in order to hold that vacuum in her arms.

Wang Yuejin tried everything under the sun, hurling abuse at her one minute, cracking jokes the next, but nothing he did succeeded in loosening Feng Yuqing's grip. He looked helpless and gave a sigh. “What a woman!”

Feng Yuqing never said a word in response to his insults. Perhaps she realized that she had no hope of winning the bystanders’ sympathy, for instead she shifted her gaze to the river's restless flow.

“What the hell does she want?” Wang Yuejin bellowed, angrily tugging at her hands. She was gritting her teeth as she turned her head.

When this effort failed, Wang Yuejin lowered his voice and said, “Come on, tell me. What is it you want?”

She answered quietly, “Come with me to the hospital while I have a checkup.”

She said this without any embarrassment, utterly serene, as though she felt reassured that she would achieve her goal. At that moment she glanced at me and I felt my body tremble under her gaze.

“You have to let go,” Wang Yuejin said. “Otherwise there's no way I can take you anywhere.”

Feng Yuqing hesitated for a moment, then relaxed her grip.Wang Yuejin, free at last, immediately took to his heels, shouting back at her as he left: “You want to go — then go by yourself!”

Feng Yuqing frowned as Wang Yuejin made his escape, then took a look at the people standing around and saw me a second time. She made no attempt to pursue Wang Yuejin, but set off alone for the hospital in town. A few village kids, back home after school, followed her all the way to the hospital, but I did not go with them; I simply stood on the wooden bridge and watched as she receded into the distance. As she left, her braid, disheveled in the tussle, unraveled, and I saw how she deftly reorganized her long black hair, tying her braid as she walked.

Feng Yuqing, normally so bashful, now seemed completely poised, and her inner turmoil was reflected only in the paleness of her face. She let nothing throw her off balance, and when she registered at the reception desk, she asked for an appointment with a gynecologist as calmly as a married woman might. She answered the doctor's questions just as calmly, saying, “I need a pregnancy test.”

The doctor noticed that she had checked the “Single” box on the medical form and asked, “You're unmarried?”

“That's right,” she said, nodding.

The three boys from my village saw her go into the women's toilet, clutching a tea-colored glass bottle. When she emerged, her expression was grave. As she waited for the results of the urine test, she sat on the bench in the corridor like any other patient, gazing blankly at the laboratory hatch.

Only later, when she learned that she was not pregnant, did she slowly lose her composure. She walked over to a cement power pole outside the hospital, leaned against it, buried her face in her hands, and wept.

Her father, once a young man who could consume a couple of bottles of spirits in no time at all, now an old man who could still put away well over a bottle, stood outside the Wang residence that afternoon as the sun went down, stamping his feet and unleashing a string of curses. Carried by the evening breeze, his obscenities drifted through the whole village. But as far as the younger folk were concerned, all his swearing paled in importance compared with his single bitter complaint, “You went all the way with my daughter!”

Deep into the night, this line lingered like snot on the lips of the village children. When they spotted him, they would chant from a safe distance, “You went all the way with my daughter!”

Of the weddings I witnessed in Southgate, Wang Yuejin's was the most memorable. This powerfully built young man, once forced to run for his life from Sun Guangping and his kitchen cleaver, wore on that morning a brand-new Mao jacket, and his complexion was as ruddy as that of an official from town. He was getting ready to go across the river and fetch his new bride. Everyone in his family was running around, hectically engaged in the final wedding preparations, while he, already dressed in his smartest outfit, was the one person who seemed at a loss for something to do. As I passed his house on the way to school, he was trying to persuade a young man from the village to accompany him on the trip to fetch the bride, saying to him, “Nobody else will do. You're the only bachelor.”

“I'm no virgin,” said the other man.

Wang Yuejin's attempts to persuade him were offhand and perfunctory, and it wasn't as though the other man was unwilling to go — he simply wished to register a certain lack of enthusiasm.

On the village drying ground, two pigs were slaughtered and several dozen grass carp met their end. Sprinkled with pig's blood and fish scales all morning, the ground had been swept clean by the time we came home from school and was now covered with twenty round tables. Sun Guangming's face was festooned with fish scales and he exuded a fishy odor. He walked over to Sun Guangping, saying, “Can you guess how many eyes I have?”

Sun Guangping adopted my father's dismissive tone: “Go wash your face.” I saw him grab our little brother by the collar and haul him off toward the pond. Guangming's pride was cut to the quick, and in his shrill little voice he cursed: “Sun Guangping, I fuck your mom!”

The wedding party had set off that morning. Amid a discordant clamor of gongs and drums, this purposeful but undisciplined band crossed the river that would later take Sun Guangming's life and marched off to collect Wang Yuejin's bed-mate.

When the chubby bride, who hailed from one of the nearby hamlets, coyly entered the village, she seemed to think that nobody knew how often (under cover of darkness) she had been a visitor during the preceding weeks, and she put on a bold and confident show of looking timid.

At the wedding feast Sun Guangming must have consumed over one hundred and fifty broad beans, with the result that he kept letting off the foulest farts, even when he was sound asleep that night. When Sun Guangping pointed this out to him the following morning, Sun Guangming had a fit of the giggles. He was pretty sure that he had eaten five fruit candies, but hadn't bothered to count all the beans. On the day before he died, my little brother would sit on the threshold and ask my big brother who else was going to get married soon, vowing to eat ten fruit candies this time around. As he said that, a dribble of snot was working its way toward his lips.

I often think of my little brother, who died so young, and his gritty performance that afternoon as he fought for the candies and beans. When Wang Yuejin's sister-in-law came outside, basket in hand, Sun Guangming was not the quickest to react, but he was the first to fall flat on his face. She dumped the basket's contents in front of the assembled children as though she were feeding hens, and a cascade of beans tumbled to the ground along with just a few dozen candies. As my older brother bent down, another boy accidentally kneed him in the face. Always hot tempered, Sun Guangping concentrated on clobbering his assailant, with the result that he missed out on the plunder. With Sun Guangming, it was a different story: he threw himself on the candies and beans and withstood no end of pummeling. Afterward he just sat there, his face streaked with mud, grimacing as he rubbed his head and his ears, and he told Sun Guangping that his legs were covered in bruises.

Sun Guangming came away with seven fruit candies and a full handful of broad beans. He sat there meticulously removing earth and gravel from his booty. Sun Guangping stood off to one side, glaring at the children who gazed enviously at his little brother, deterring them from grabbing the delicacies he had claimed.

Of these items, Sun Guangming allocated to his big brother a small bunch of beans and a single candy. As he took them, Sun Guangping said in an aggrieved tone, “That's all I get?”

Sun Guangming rubbed one of his chafed ears and looked at Sun Guangping uncertainly, then offered an additional candy and a few more beans. When his big brother showed no signs of leaving, in his piping tone he delivered the following threat: “If you ask for any more, I'll cry!”

The bride had entered the village at noon. Though this round-faced, round-bottomed girl kept her head bowed, it was clear from her smile that she was pleased with the match. The bridegroom, buoyed by satisfaction as well, appeared to have forgotten all about his tussle with Feng Yuqing several days earlier, and when he came walking up, brimming with good spirits, he raised his right hand and waved it clumsily in our direction. At that moment I rejoiced: no longer would Wang Yuejin besmirch the Feng Yuqing whom I so worshipped. But when my gaze shifted to the house where she lived, an indescribable distress welled up within me, for I saw that the object of my fantasies had her eyes fixed on where we were. Feng Yuqing was standing in front of her home, disconsolately watching the ceremony in which she played no part. Of all those present only she felt the sting of exclusion.

Later the wedding guests sat out on the drying ground, eating and drinking. My father Sun Kwangtsai had sprained his neck when sleeping, and was sitting there, one shoulder bared, like an outlaw hero of old. My mother, standing behind him, swigged a mouthful of celebratory liquor and spat it onto his back. Kneaded and massaged by Mothers hand until he swayed back and forth, he emitted moans of pain that made him appear touchingly vulnerable, but this didn't get in the way of his doing some serious drinking. As he lifted his chopsticks and transported a large chunk of meat into his mouth, Sun Guangping and Sun Guangming stood off to one side, their mouths watering. Sun Kwangtsai constantly turned his head to shoo away his sons. “Get lost!” he said to them.

They ate from noon straight through to dusk, which was when the climax to the wedding took place. It was then that Feng Yuqing appeared unexpectedly, a rope in her hands. Wang Yuejin didn't see her approach because he was busy clinking glasses with another fellow from the village. By the time somebody tapped him on the shoulder, Feng Yuqing was standing right behind him. He instantly turned pale. I remember how a hush fell over the drying ground, which only seconds earlier had been buzzing with noise. The result was that, even from my distant observation post, I could clearly hear Feng Yuqing's words. “Stand up!” she said.

Wang Yuejin performed a replay of the panic he showed that day Sun Guangping pursued him with the cleaver. He rose to his feet as slowly as an old man. Feng Yuqing walked off with the stool he had been sitting on and set it down underneath a tree beside the drying ground. In full view of the assembled audience she clambered onto the stool. Under the autumn sky she stood tall, her figure, with its upturned curves, unutterably beautiful to my eyes. She tied one end of the rope to a tree branch.

That was when Old Luo yelled, “She's going to kill herself!”

Feng Yuqing, from her elevated perch, looked at him in seeming astonishment, then deftly looped the rope so that it formed a noose big enough to accommodate a human head. She jumped off the stool with a flourish and made a solemn exit.

On her departure, the drying ground once again buzzed with noise. Wang Yuejin, pallid and trembling, began at last to curse, but his outrage lacked conviction. I expected that he would go over and remove the rope, but instead he sat down on a stool that someone lent him and did not stand up again. His bride, who had put two and two together, was at this point distinctly more collected than he was. She sat there, eyes straight ahead, and her only action was to down in one gulp a bowl of spirits while he sneaked furtive glances at both her and the rope. Later his older brother removed this ghastly decoration, but it continued to prey on his mind and things continued in uneasy limbo for some time. The rope had come to the village just like a movie brought by a mobile projection team, introducing itself into the wedding to stunning effect, throttling the life out of the wedding while it was still in its prime.

Before long the bride was drunk. She gave a spine-chilling cry, rose unsteadily to her feet and announced, “I'm going to hang myself!” As she stumbled over to where the rope had once hung, she was firmly held back by Wang Yuejin's sister-in-law, a mother of two. “Hurry up and help her inside,” she shouted at Wang Yuejin.

As the bride was hustled into the house, she continued to yell stubbornly, “I'm going to hang myself!”

It was quite some time before Wang Yuejin and his friends reappeared. No sooner were they out of the house than the bride herself emerged, now brandishing a cleaver, which she pressed against her throat. People couldn't tell if she was crying or laughing, and all they heard was her shout, “Just watch me!”

Feng Yuqing sat on her doorstep, viewing these events from a distance. I will never forget her meditative look, her head slightly tilted, her chin cupped in her right hand, as the breeze blew her hair back and forth in front of her eyes. It was as though she was not so much watching this chaotic scene as looking at herself in a mirror. At that moment Feng Yuqing no longer cared about the wedding she was witnessing; she was perplexed about where her own life was taking her.

A few days later, a peddler appeared. A man in his forties, dressed in gray, he set down his load in front of Feng Yuqing's house. Speaking in an alien accent, he asked Feng Yuqing, standing in the doorway, for a bowl of water.

Village children gathered around in a circle and watched him for a while before dispersing. It must have been sheer happenstance that had brought the peddler into the village, for it was too close to town to be a worthwhile business destination for him. Nonetheless he sat there in front of Feng Yuqing's house until nightfall.

I walked that way several times that afternoon, and each time I could hear him describing wearily, in a hoarse voice, the hardships of his nomadic life; he looked pained even when he smiled. Feng Yuqing sat on the threshold with her chin in her hand and listened raptly to his stories, an opaque expression on her face. Only now and again, as though by accident, did the peddler turn his head to look at her.

That evening, as the village lay bathed in moonlight, the peddler left Southgate. His departure coincided with the disappearance of Feng Yuqing.

PASSINGS

One lunchtime that summer my little brother, Sun Guangming, who had learned how to swagger from my older brother, walked toward the river to catch snails. In my mind's eye I glimpse the scene once more. Dressed in shorts, he picks up his basket from the corner of the room and steps outside. The sunlight beats down on his bare back, so tanned that it seems to be glistening with oil.

A blurry picture appears before my eyes, as though I can see time in motion. Time becomes visible, a translucent gray whir, and everything has its place within that dark expanse. Our lives, after all, are not rooted in the soil as much as they are rooted in time. Fields, streets, rivers, houses — these are our companions, placed like ourselves in time. Time pushes us forward or back, and alters our aspect.

When my little brother left the house that fateful summer day, his leave-taking was entirely routine — he must have left the house a thousand times before in just the same way. But because of the outcome of this particular departure, my memory has altered the particulars of that moment. When I traverse the long passage of memory and see Sun Guangming once more, what he was leaving then was not the house: what he exited so carelessly was time itself. As soon as he lost his connection with time, he became fixed, permanent, whereas we continue to be carried forward by its momentum. What Sun Guangming sees is time bearing away the people and the scenery around him. And what I see is another kind of truth: after the living bury the dead, the latter forever lie stationary, while the former continue their restless motion. In the stillness of the dead, we who still roam can see a message sent by time.

A village boy, eight years old that year, waited outside the door for my little brother, basket in hand. I had noticed subtle changes in Sun Guangming. No longer did he tag along behind my big brother, for he preferred now to rub shoulders with other boys of seven or eight who were beneath Sun Guangpings notice, thereby enjoying the same kind of prestige among the village children that my older brother was himself accustomed to command. As I sat by the pond, I often saw kids who were still unsteady on their legs clustered around Sun Guangming as he bustled about self-importantly

That day I watched from the rear window as my little brother walked toward the river in my father's huge straw sandals, throwing up clouds of dust as he proceeded along the path, his angular behind and tiny head propelled forward by his oversize footwear. As he reached the house so recently vacated by the Su family, he balanced the basket on the top of his head with the result that his body, normally so unruly, suddenly acquired a stiff and erect posture. Sun Guangming hoped to maintain this balancing act all the way to the river, but the basket would not cooperate, tumbling into the rice field adjoining the path. He simply glanced back briefly before continuing his advance. His eight-year-old companion clambered down into the paddy and retrieved the basket. Sun Guangming walked complacently toward his demise, while the boy behind, who would have many more years to live, carried a basket in each arm and trailed wearily in the footsteps of his ill-fated mentor.

Death did not elect a direct approach but established contact through this intermediary. While Guangming stuck close to the riverbank as he foraged for snails, the other boy, unable to resist temptation, made a rash plunge into a spot where the water was deeper. In a second he lost his footing and tumbled headfirst into the river. As he struggled he gave a desperate cry, a cry that was to be my brother's ruin.

Sun Guangming drowned trying to save him. It would be going too far, of course, to present this as an act of heroic self-sacrifice. My little brother had not reached a level of such lofty.virtue as to be willing to exchange his own life for someone else's. It was his authority over the other boy that prompted his action. When death threatened his sidekick, he jumped to the conclusion that saving him would be easy.

The rescued boy was unable to recall what actually happened, and all he could do was stare dumbfounded at his questioners. Several years later, when people raised the topic with him, he seemed unconvinced that the accident had ever occurred, as though the story was all cock-and-bull. If one of the villagers hadn't witnessed the incident, people might well have thought that Sun Guangming drowned all by himself.

When it happened, the villager was crossing the wooden bridge. He saw how Sun Guangming gave the boy a shove and how the boy splashed his way frantically to the bank, leaving Sun Guangming to struggle in the water. When my brother stuck his head out for the last time, he gazed at the blinding sun with his eyes wide open, maintaining that posture for several seconds before he sank beneath the surface. Several days later, after my brother's burial, I sat by the pond at midday and attempted to look straight at the sun, but the glare forced me to avert my eyes. So I discovered a difference between life and death: a clear view of the sun is inaccessible to the living — only people who are about to die can see the sun as it is.

When the horrified onlooker came running over, I did not yet realize what had happened. His cries exploded in the air like shards of glass. Sun Guangping had been peeling a sweet potato with his sickle and was just about to eat it. He flung the tool aside and charged out the door. As he ran he called my father, who dashed from the vegetable plot, and the two of them raced toward the riverside. My mother also appeared on the road, and the scarf that she was clutching in her hand fluttered as she ran. I heard my mother's piercing wails and somehow they gave me the impression that even if my brother was still alive, he would die all over again.

I had always worried about some kind of disaster affecting our family. My eccentricity in operating outside the family circle was already taken for granted by the villagers, and as far as I was concerned it was better this way, better to be forgotten. If something went wrong at home, on the other hand, this would make me stand out and again be the object of peoples attention. So as I watched the villagers run toward the river, I felt a huge pressure bearing down on me. It would have been perfectly natural for me to have run to the riverside too, but my fear was that this would give both my family and the villagers the impression that I was actually rejoicing over misfortune. My best option at this point was to keep well out of the way, and only late that evening did I finally return home. At nightfall, when I went down to the riverside, the river gently murmured as it tossed a little flotsam about on the current, and the water's babble was just as soothing as it had always been. The river that had just swallowed up my little brother seemed as placid as ever. I saw village lights in the distance, and the breeze brought a hubbub of voices to my ears: my mother's intermittent wails, accompanied by sympathetic sobs from other women. There in the background was a scene of grief and lamentation, while in the foreground the river, fresh from its lethal exploit, behaved as if nothing had happened. It was at that point that I realized that the river was itself alive: it swallowed up my brother because it needed another life to supplement its own. The wailing women and grieving men off in the distance likewise needed other lives to enhance theirs. They were harvesting vegetables that had been happily growing just a moment ago, or they would slaughter a pig, taking lives just as offhandedly as the river flowing past me.

Sun Kwangtsai and Sun Guangping dove into the river, and between them they brought Sun Guangming up to the surface. They found his body under the wooden bridge, and when he was dragged onto the bank his face was the color of grass. Sun Kwangtsai, though already exhausted, grabbed Sun Guangming by the feet, slung him headfirst over his shoulder, and took off down the path on the run. Sun Guangming's body swayed violently on Father's back, his head knocking rhythmically against my father's shanks. My big brother ran along behind. On that summer day three bodies seemed to merge into one as they raced down the path, enveloped in clouds of dust. Behind them came my mother, still sobbing, still clutching her scarf, and a swarm of villagers.

As my father ran, his head gradually lolled back, he breathed more and more heavily, and his pace slowed. Finally he came to a complete stop and called Sun Guangping. My big brother slung Sun Guangming's body over his back and set off again at a smart pace. Sun Kwangtsai, now falling behind, shouted in short bursts: “Run … Don't stop … Run!”

My father had seen drops of water falling from my little brother's downturned head and he thought Sun Guangming was perhaps coughing up water, not realizing that my little brother was already gone.

After running some thirty yards or so, Sun Guangping began to stagger but Sun Kwangtsai kept on shouting, “Run! Run!”

In the end Sun Guangping collapsed on the ground and Sun Guangming tumbled down beside him. Sun Kwangtsai picked up his son once more and set off again at a running pace. Though he swayed from side to side, he was able to maintain an astonishing speed.

By the time Mother and the villagers arrived at our doorstep, it was already clear to my father that his son was dead. Utterly spent, he knelt on the ground retching. Sun Guangming's body lay sprawled underneath an elm tree whose leaves shielded it from the fierce summer sun. Sun Guangping was the last to arrive, and when he saw Father retching he fell to his knees not far away and followed suit.

At this moment, only Mother was expressing grief in a normal fashion. As she shrieked and sobbed, her body bobbed up and down. My father and brother, their retching over, remained on their knees, dumbly watching her ululations.

My dead brother was laid on the middle of the table, an old straw mat underneath him and a sheet on top.

As soon as my father and brother recovered, the first thing they did was to go to the well and fetch a bucket of water. Taking turns, they drank the whole bucketful and then each grabbed a basket and headed into town to buy bean curd. As he left, Father, grim faced, told the bystanders to take a message to the family of the boy whose life had been saved: “I'll go and see them when I come back.”

That evening the villagers sensed that something bad was likely to happen. When my father and brother returned and invited everyone to the wake, practically all the villagers went. Only the family of the rescued boy failed to make an appearance.

It was after nine o'clock that evening that the boy's father finally arrived. He came alone, without any of his brothers in attendance, prepared, it seemed, to bear all the consequences himself. He entered the room with all due ceremony, knelt in front of the body, and knocked his head on the floor three times. Then he stood up and said, “I can see everyone is here.” He acknowledged the presence of the production team leader. “Team Leader is here too. Sun Guangming died rescuing my son, and I am deeply grieved. There is nothing I can do to bring Sun Guangming back to life. All I can do is give you this.” He groped in his pocket and thrust a wad of bills in Sun Kwangtsai s direction. “This is a hundred yuan. Tomorrow I will sell everything in the house that is worth anything and give all the proceeds to you. We're neighbors, and you know how little money I've got — I can only give you as much as I have.”

Sun Kwangtsai stood up and found a stool for him, saying, “Please sit down.”

My father began to speak in impassioned tones, like a town official. “My son is dead, and nothing can bring him back to life. No matter how much money you give me, it cannot compensate for the loss of my son. I don't want your money. My son died saving someone else's life. He is a hero.”

Sun Guangping elaborated on this theme with equal fervor. “My brother was a hero, and my whole family is proud of him. We don't want anything you could give us. All we want is for you to spread the word so that everyone knows about my brother's heroic deed.”

Father rounded things off by saying, “Go into town tomorrow and have the radio station broadcast the news.”

Sun Guangming's burial took place the following day. He was buried between the two cypresses behind our house. During the funeral I kept my distance. Isolation and neglect had practically negated my existence as far as the village was concerned.Under the hot sun Mother's wailing cries pierced the air for the last time; the grief of my father and brother were not clearly visible to me from where I stood. Sun Guangming was carried out, wrapped in the straw mat, while the villagers stood in clusters along the road from the village to the burial ground. My father and my big brother laid Sun Guangming in his grave and covered him with earth. This was how my little brother officially terminated his stay in the world.

That evening I sat by the pond behind the house, gazing at the hump of my brother's grave in the quiet moonlight. He lay a ways off but somehow I felt he was sitting right next to me. In the end both of us had put a distance between ourselves and our parents, our older brother, and the village folk. We had taken separate paths, but the outcome was much the same. The only difference was that my younger brother's departure seemed much more decisive and carefree.

My alienation had kept me away from the scenes surrounding his death and burial, and I was anticipating that I would now be the object of even more forceful censure at home and in the village. But many days passed and nobody said or did anything different from before, which took me rather aback until I realized with relief that I had been utterly forgotten. I had been assigned to a position where I was recognized and at the same time repudiated by everyone in the village.

On the third day after the funeral the radio station publicized the heroic exploits of Sun Guangming, a young boy who had sacrificed himself to save another. This was the proudest moment for my father. During the three days leading up to it, whenever there was a local news broadcast Sun Kwangtsai would grab a stool and sit down right next to the radio. Now that his long wait had been rewarded, he was so exhilarated that he ambled about like a happy duck. That afternoon, when people were taking a break from work, homes throughout the village echoed with my father's resounding cry: “Did you hear?”

My older brother stood under the elm tree by the front door watching my father, his eyes gleaming. Thus began their splendid but short-lived days of glory. They felt sure that the government would immediately send someone to call on them. This fantasy originated at the district level, but in its more elaborate forms went all the way to Beijing. Their most impressive moment would come on National Day, when as the hero's closest kin they would receive an invitation to join the dignitaries at Tiananmen. My brother proved more astute than my father, for although his mind was filled with equally vacuous illusions, a fairly realistic thought occurred to him as well. He alerted my father to the possibility that my little brother's death might well elevate them to some kind of official status in the county. Though he was still in school, there was nothing to stop him from being groomed for public office. My brother's comments brought some substance to my father's dizzying fantasies. Sun Kwangtsai rubbed his hands with glee, scarcely knowing how to contain his excitement.

So elated were they that father and son shared their highly unreliable notions with the villagers on a variety of occasions. Thus it was that reports of the Sun family's imminent departure soon spread around the village, the most unnerving version of the story being that we might well be moving to Beijing. These speculations in turn were relayed back to my family, and one afternoon I heard my father gloating to my brother, “No smoke without fire! If this is what the villagers are saying, it must mean that the officials will soon be here.” My father had broadcast his own fantasies to the villagers and then used the ensuing gossip to reinforce his own illusions.

As he awaited the new title of “Father of a Fallen Hero,” Sun Kwangtsai decided his home needed a makeover. Such a disorderly household, he realized, might compromise the government envoys’ assessment of our credentials. The makeover began in the clothing department: with money he had borrowed, my father had a new outfit made for each of us. This made me an object of attention, and how to deal with me became a real headache for Sun Kwangtsai. More than once I heard him say to my brother, “It would all be so much simpler without him in the way.”

After ignoring me for so long, my family now acknowledged my existence, only to discover that I was a millstone around their necks. Nonetheless, one morning Mother came up to me, a set of new clothes under her arm, and asked me to put them on. Absurdly, we all wore the same color. Accustomed as I was to going around in tattered old clothes, I felt ill at ease the whole day through in this stiff new outfit. After gradually having faded from the consciousness of my neighbors and classmates, I once again was noticed. When Su Yu said, “You're wearing new clothes,” I was thrown for a loop, even though he delivered this line so calmly as to make me feel that nothing was wrong.

A couple of days later my father realized that his approach had failed to reap the expected dividends. He now felt that thrift and fortitude were the family virtues that ought to be showcased, and the most threadbare clothes in our possession emerged from hiding. My mother sat bent over under the oil lamp for a whole night, and the following morning we donned clothes with patches all over, like scales, and like four ridiculous fish we ventured out to greet the new dawn. When I saw my brother set off reluctantly for school, for the first time I felt that there were moments when he and I had the same reaction to things.

Sun Guangping lacked Sun Kwangtsai's unswerving confidence in the arrival of good fortune. He was the butt of so many jokes for wearing his ragged clothes to school that he refused to go on wearing them, even if their continued use should qualify him to become emperor. My brother thought up a compelling justification for his abandonment of this costume, telling my father, “To wear the kind of clothes that one could find only in old China is an insult to the new communist society.” This remark left Sun Kwangtsai quite rattled, and for the next several days he was constantly explaining to the villagers that we had just one purpose in dressing as we did and that was “recalling the bitter to think of the sweet”: “When we think of the miseries of the old society, we are all the more aware of how wonderful life is in the new society.”

The government representatives, so eagerly awaited, failed to show even after a month had passed. As a result, public opinion shifted, and this boded ill for my father and brother. Now, in the slack season, the villagers had more than enough time to get to the bottom of things, and they realized that all the reports they had heard ultimately emanated from my family. My father and brother came to be seen as comic figures and were made the target of their banter. Everyone would ask Sun Kwangtsai or Sun Guangping, in tones of exaggerated solicitude, “Did the officials come yet?”

The fantasy shrouding my family began to come apart at the seams. Sun Guangping was the first to retrench. With the ruthless practicality of youth he felt, sooner than my father, that none of it would ever materialize.

In the first few days of his disenchantment, Sun Guangping seemed glum and subdued, and often he just stayed in bed. Since my father remained firmly ensconced in the fantasy world, relations between the two of them became increasingly distant. Father had developed the habit of sitting by the radio with a foolish expression on his face, saliva dribbling from his half-open mouth. Sun Guangping clearly was tired of seeing him making such an ass of himself and once he said with exasperation, “Stop thinking about it!”

This had the effect of infuriating my father, who jumped up, spraying spit and cursing, “Get the fuck out of here!”

My brother came back with a stinging retort: “Try saying that to the Wang brothers.”

My father screamed like a child and threw himself at Sun Guangping. He didn't say he was going to kill him, but rather: “Let's have it out!”

Were it not for Mother, whose tears and diminutive figure were the only obstacles in the way of these two raging males, our home, already so ramshackle, might well have ended up a complete ruin.

As Sun Guangping marched out the door, his face livid, he happened to see me and said, “The old man can't wait to get in his coffin.”

My father was in fact quite isolated by this time. He and my brother had lost the sense of fellowship that had prevailed in the wake of my little brother's death, and it was now impossible for the two of them to sit together feverishly picturing their wonderful future. Sun Guangping's withdrawal left Father by himself in the fantasy world, and he alone had to contend with the dreadful thought that the government representatives might never show up. Just as Sun Guangping grew increasingly impatient with Father, Sun Kwangtsai likewise was on the lookout for opportunities to pick a fight with him. For a long time after that row, they were either looking daggers at each other or treating each other with coldness.

My father paid close attention to the little dirt road at the entrance to the village, on tenterhooks for the arrival of the government envoys in their formal wear. His secret was soon discovered by the village children, and often boys would run up to our front door and shout, “Sun Kwangtsai, the men in suits are here!”

The first few times he was thrown into a tizzy, as jittery as an escaped convict. I watched as he raced pale faced to the village entrance, then came back, utterly deflated. The last time that he was duped was during the onset of winter, when a nine-year-old boy ran over, shouting, “Sun Kwangtsai, lots of men in suits are coming!”

Sun Kwangtsai rushed out, clutching a broom. “I'm going to have the hide off you, you little bastard!”

The boy took off right away, and when he had reached a safe distance he shouted back, “If I'm lying, then my mom's a bitch and my dad's a dog!”

This oath, so disrespectful to his parents, left Sun Kwangtsai a bundle of nerves as he returned to the house and paced to and fro, wringing his hands and talking to himself: “If they really are here, what are we going to do? I've made no preparations.”

So anxious was he that he made another dash to the edge of the village, only to see empty fields and sparse, lonely trees. I was sitting by the pond, and watched as Father stood dumbly at the village entryway. He hugged his chest to shield himself from the gusting wind, and after a while he squatted down and began rubbing his knees. As dusk fell at the waning of the year, Sun Kwangtsai crouched there shivering, his eyes fixed on the track that wound its way toward him from the far distance.

Father clung to his dreams until, with the approach of Spring Festival, he had no choice but painfully to abandon them. From every house in the village came the sound of rice flour being pounded into New Year's cake, but our home, rent with divisions as it was, showed not the faintest sign of a holiday approaching. Finally Mother summoned up the courage to ask him, “What are we going to do for New Year?”

My father had been sitting dejectedly by the radio. After deep thought he said, “It looks like the officials are not coming.”

I began to notice that Father was sneaking glances at my big brother, and it was clear that he was eager they be reconciled. On the last day of the lunar calendar he finally spoke up. Sun Guang-ping had just finished dinner and was about to go out when Sun Kwangtsai called him back. “There's something I want to talk to you about.”

The two of them went inside and began to confer in whispers. When they emerged, both wore grim expressions. The following morning, the first day of the Chinese New Year, father and son set out to visit the family of the boy whose life had been saved.

Now that he had lost hope of becoming a hero's father Sun Kwangtsai drew inspiration from the prospect of monetary gain. He demanded that the family provide compensation for Sun Guangming's death, to the tune of five hundred yuan. Shocked by this exorbitant figure, the boy's kinfolk told their visitors that there was no way they could pay that kind of money. They reminded them that it was New Year's Day and asked them to please postpone discussion of the matter until another time.

The two guests insisted that the sum be paid immediately; otherwise they would smash all their furniture. Sun Kwangtsai said, “We're already doing you a favor by not demanding interest.”

Although I was nowhere near, the noise of the quarrel carried so far that I knew exactly what was happening. Later I could hear further commotion as my father and brother wrecked their house.

Two days later, three men in police uniform arrived in the village. We were having lunch, and some little boys came running up to the door, shouting, “Sun Kwangtsai, men in uniforms are here!”

When my father rushed out, broom in hand, he saw the three policemen walking in his direction and immediately put two and two together. “Are you here to make an arrest?” he bellowed.

This was Sun Kwangtsai at his most majestic. “Who do you think you are dealing with?” he shouted. Pounding his chest, he cried, “I am the hero's father.” Then he pointed at Guangping. “That's the hero's brother.” Then at my mother: “That's the hero's ma.” He glanced at me, standing off to one side, but offered no comment on my status. “So just who do you plan to arrest?”

The policemen were not the least bit impressed and simply asked coldly, “Which of you is Sun Kwangtsai?”

“I am!” cried Father.

“Come with us,” they said.

All along my father had been looking forward to the arrival of men in suits, but it was men in police uniforms who greeted him in the end. After he was led away, the production team leader came to see us, along with people from the house that had been vandalized, and announced to my brother and mother that we had to compensate them for their losses. I went over to the pond behind our house and watched our possessions being carted off.Items that had been purchased with such difficulty after the fire now became other people s property.

A fortnight later, when my father was released from jail, he was as white and shiny as a baby fresh from its mother s womb. In the past so coarse and slovenly, he now walked toward us as delicate and dainty as a town official. He would declare to all and sundry that he was going off to Beijing to protest the treatment he had suffered, but when people asked him how soon he would be leaving he told them that he needed to wait three months until he could cover his travel expenses. But three months later he had still not set off for the capital. Instead he had clambered into the bed of the widow whose house was diagonally opposite ours.

The image of the widow that lingers in my mind is of a woman in her forties, sturdy, full throated, striding rapidly along the path between the fields in her bare feet. Her most notable trademark was that she always tucked her blouse inside her trousers, with the result that her large bottom was invitingly conspicuous. For the widow to wear her clothes that way made her stand out, because in those days even an innocent young girl would not have dared so openly to flaunt her waist and buttocks. The widow had no waist to speak of, but the sway of her fleshy bottom conveyed a potent allure. Her chest failed to provide a comparable visual interest, replicating instead the flatness of the concrete streets in town. I remember Old Luo saying that the flesh on her chest had all moved to her behind. “That has its advantages,” he added. “If you pinch her ass, you're getting to squeeze her tits too.”

When I was young, as people knocked off in the afternoon, I would often hear the widow making a generous offer to some young man of the village: “Come over to my place tonight.”

The answer was always the same: “Who the hell wants to go to bed with you? That thing of yours has gone all slack.”

At the time I didn't understand what was meant, and only as I grew older did I begin to know more about the widow's happy life of sensuality. Then I heard the following joke. A man climbs through the window one night and gropes his way to the foot of her bed. Amid sounds of frantic panting and moans of ecstasy the widow is heard to murmur, “Not now, I have company.” As the latecomer slips away, she delivers a piece of sound advice: “Come a bit earlier tomorrow.”

This joke actually did make a point — namely that after dark the widow's bed was seldom anything less than fully occupied. Even on the most sweltering summer night the sound of the widow's groans would float over to the drying ground where the villagers were trying to cool off. This supplied Old Luo with more grist for his mill: “Such a hot night, too — she's really a Model Worker.”

Tall and fit as she was, the widow liked to sleep with young men, and in my mind's eye I can still picture her shouting lustily to the village women from her end of the field: “Young guys have lots of stamina, they're clean, and no bad breath.”

But when the former production team leader, then in his fifties (later to die of tuberculosis), arrived outside her bedroom, she received him with equal alacrity. At times she had to defer to authority, after all. Later on, her looks began to fade and she put out the welcome mat for middle-aged men more generally.

It was at this point in time that my father Sun Kwangtsai, as though motivated by some philanthropic impulse, clambered into the widow's now more lonely wooden bed. It was an afternoon early in the spring when my father entered the widow's house, bearing a large sack of rice on his back. She was sitting on a stool sewing shoes and she watched him out of the corner of her eye as he came in.

A grin on his face, my father dumped the bag of rice at her feet, then made as if to enfold her in a bear hug.

She stuck out an arm to repel his advances. “Hang on a minute there! I'm not so easily bought,” she said. She reached out a hand and felt around in his crotch.

“Well?” said my father with a leer.

“It'll do,” she responded.

After leading a respectable life for so long, my father found that his inhibitions had been weakened by the shattering of illusions and the tricks that life had played on him. From now on Sun Kwangtsai would often go about sharing his newfound wisdom with the village youths, saying in the smug tones of a man of experience, “While you're still young, you should make the most of it and sleep around as much as you can. Everything else is a scam.”

When he clambered so confidently onto the widow's ornate antique bed, this did not go unnoticed by Sun Guangping. Father's brazen visits to the widow's home provoked great chagrin on his part. One day, after my father had wined and dined to his satisfaction and was preparing to set off for the widow's house to digest his meal, my brother spoke up. “You should have had enough by now, surely.”

My father didn't let this faze him in the slightest. “You can never have enough of that,” he said.

So day after day Sun Kwangtsai would march briskly into the widow's house, emerging some time later a good deal worse for wear. Moved by a morbid curiosity, I stealthily observed my mother and tried to gauge her reaction to events. My mother, who said little but whose hands and feet were perpetually in motion, bore the humiliation in silence, as though it was a matter of complete indifference to her. I wondered what went through her mind late at night, when Sun Kwangtsai would leave the widow's side and clamber into her bed. Here my thoughts would linger, and though my speculations were fueled in part by malice, I felt sorry for her at the same time.

What happened later made me realize that Mother's nonchalance was simply a cover for her burning indignation. Her hostility to the widow, to my mind, demonstrated the narrow-mindedness of women. Inwardly I admonished my mother over and over again: it should be Father you resent, not the widow. When he climbs out of the widow's bed and makes his way over to you, you should refuse him. No matter what happened, she would never reject him, but always let him have what he wanted.

Mother's rage finally exploded one day when she was fertilizing the vegetable patch. The widow was walking along the path between the fields, looking very pleased with herself, and her manner instantly made Mother tremble all over with long-suppressed rage. She swung the dung ladle in her hand, and filthy water splattered over the widow's smug figure. The widow's voice rang out like a trumpet. “Are you blind?”

Beside herself with anger, Mother cried out in a voice shaking with emotion: “The town's the place for you! You can lie down on the sports ground there and have the men line up to fuck you.”

“Hah!” The widow gave as good as she got. “What makes you think you have the right to say that? Shouldn't you go on home and give yourself a good wash? Your man says that thing of yours stinks to high heaven!”

When these two sharp-tongued women laid into each other with such crude obscenities, quacking like two noisy clucks, the village — usually rather quiet at lunchtime — was thrown into disarray After some further exchanges, my mother, forgetting how thin and frail she was, charged fearlessly toward the widow and attempted a head butt.

Just at this moment Sun Kwangtsai happened to arrive back from town, a bottle of spirits swinging behind his back. All he saw at first, off in the distance in the vegetable patch, were two women wrestling with each other, hair all over the place, and this spectacle tickled him no end. After advancing a few steps and recognizing the combatants, my father, flustered, climbed onto a path between the fields and tried to beat a retreat. One of the villagers blocked his escape route, saying, “You'd better go and sort it out.”

“No way!” My father shook his head vigorously. “One's my wife and the other's my mistress, and I can't afford to get on the wrong side of either of them.”

By this time my mother had already been knocked off her feet and her adversary's large bottom had pinned her to the ground. When I saw this from my distant vantage point I was stricken with heartache. After all the humiliation Mother had suffered she had finally blown her top, only to suffer further ignominy.

Several of the village women, who perhaps found this onesided contest too embarrassing to watch any longer, ran over and dragged the widow off. She swaggered home victoriously, nose in the air, saying as she went, “What a nerve! That'll teach you to provoke me.”

Back at the vegetable patch my mother burst into tears and wailed: “If Sun Guangming were still alive, he wouldn't let you get away with this!”

My older brother, who had at one time brandished the cleaver so gallantly, was nowhere to be seen. Sun Guangping had shut himself in his room. He was perfectly aware of what was happening outside, but refused to get involved in what was to him a pointless squabble. Mother's weeping only intensified the shame that he felt for his family and did not stir him to indignation on her behalf.

In her defeat, the only champion Mother could imagine was my little brother, now no longer with us. It was the one straw that she could clutch at in her moment of despair.

My older brother's unresponsiveness I first interpreted as a reluctance to show his face when our family scandal was gaining such wide publicity. After all he was no longer the Sun Guangping of the private plot fracas. He had sunk into a deep gloom and his dissatisfaction with our home life was more and more evident in everything he did. Although he and I were still at odds with each other, our shared discontent made it possible for us to feel a subtle empathy at times.

Not long afterward — shortly before I left Southgate — I watched as late one evening a figure emerged from the widow's window and sneaked into our house. I recognized the arrival right away as Sun Guangping. Then I realized there was another reason he had been so passive during the altercation between Mother and the widow.

The day that my brother saw me off to the bus station, he carried my bedroll on his back, and Mother accompanied us as far as the entrance to the village. She stood there in the morning breeze and watched us walk away — a little lost, it seemed, as though still unsure what to make of the hand that fate had dealt her. When I looked at my mother for the last time I realized that her hair was streaked with gray. “Good-bye,” I said.

She showed no reaction, and her gaze seemed to be directed elsewhere. In that moment a warm feeling surged over me, for this image of my mother tugged at the heartstrings. But as I walked on, her fate seemed to change into a breath of wind and dissipate at once, leaving no trace behind. My feeling at the time was that I was never coming back. But, like Sun Guangming, I forsook her in a less callous fashion than my father and Sun Guang-ping, who not only deserted her but went to bed with her archrival, the widow. Unaware of that second betrayal, Mother was still devoting herself heart and soul to the family.

After I left, my father went full speed ahead in his campaign to be an utter scoundrel. At the same time he began to perform a deliveryman's duties, transferring a number of items from our house to the sturdy widow's, thereby lubricating their relationship and keeping things ticking over nicely. His show of loyalty was rewarded by a comparable demonstration on her part, for around this time her omnivorous tendencies moderated and she became quite abstemious. Now rounding on fifty, she was no longer inspired by the same lust that once used to sweep all before it.

Having lost the courage that he had at fourteen, Sun Guang-ping took his cue from Mother and swallowed his rage, watching in silence as my father did as he pleased. When Mother, much distressed, told him about this or that item that had been removed from our home, he would say consolingly, “We can always buy another one.”

As a matter of fact, Sun Guangping never harbored much resentment against the widow, and actually felt some gratitude.Those nights he made his way in and out of her rear window left him on tenterhooks for a long time afterward, and it was his nervousness on this score that explains why he could be no more than a spectator to my father's misdeeds and never once interfered. The widow, as it turned out, told no one about their affair, but this may simply be because she had no idea which young man it was who was sneaking in to see her. She was not in the habit of questioning the men who had designs on her body and could identify her visitors only in cases like that of Sun Kwangtsai, who bedded her in full daylight.

By the time Sun Guangping graduated from high school and returned home to work the land, his self-confidence had sunk to a new low. In the first few days he often just lay in bed, staring into space. His dazed look told all. Given my own mood at the time, I had no trouble figuring out that his most ardent wish was to leave Southgate and start a new life. More than once I saw him stand at the edge of a field, gazing as though in a trance as an enfeebled old man, his face lined with wrinkles, his body caked in mud, trudged across the farmland. I noted the misery in my brother's eyes. This grim sight struck a chord in him, making him wonder about the latter stages of his own life.

Once he had come to terms with reality, Sun Guangping soon became aware of a vague but persistent craving for a woman. It was a need quite distinct from that which the widow had satisfied. What he needed now was a woman who would stand by him and take care of him, a woman who could put an end to those nights of restless agitation and bring him contentment and peace of mind. So he got engaged.

The girl was quite average in looks. She lived in a two-story house in a village nearby; below the rear window of her house flowed the river that had claimed my little brothers life. As her family had been the first in the area to put up a house of more than one story, reports of their wealth had spread far and wide. Sun Guangping did not have his eye on their money for it was just a year after the house went up, and he knew that they still had loans to pay off and would not be in a position to offer an impressive dowry. Rather, this match was a gift presented by the village matchmaker, a woman who despite her bound feet hopped about as briskly as a flea. That afternoon when the matchmaker came walking over, her face wreathed in smiles, Sun Guangping knew what was about to happen, and knew too that he would agree to whatever was proposed.

My father was excluded from the negotiations preceding the engagement, and it was the widow, not Mother, who informed him of the outcome. On hearing the news, he realized at once that it was his responsibility to conduct an inspection. “What does she look like, this girl who's going to be sleeping with my son?” he asked.

Sun Kwangtsai set off at a brisk pace that morning, beaming happily as he walked, leaning forward with his hands clasped behind his back. He could see the fiancee's imposing home from quite some distance away, and the first thing he said to her father was, “He's a lucky bastard, that Sun Guangping.”

My father sat down in the girl's house as relaxed and at ease as if he was sitting on the widow's bed. Coarse language flowed from his lips as he conversed with her father. Her brother slipped out, bottle in hand, and brought it back full to the brim with spirits. Her mother set to work in the kitchen, and the noise of her preparations made my father's juices flow. He had already forgotten that the purpose of his visit was to inspect my future sister-in-law. Her father, however, had not.

He raised his head and called a name that Sun Kwangtsai forgot as soon as he heard it. The daughter, my might-have-been sister-in-law, called back from the second floor, but she was clearly reluctant to show herself. Her big brother ran up the flight of stairs and returned a few moments later with a smile on his face. He told Sun Kwangtsai, “She won't come down.”

My father showed himself to be a broad-minded man, saying airily, “That's all right, no big deal. If she won't come down, I'll go up.”

He poked his head into the kitchen for a moment and then went up to view the young lady. I think I can say with certainty that he tore himself away from the kitchen only with great reluctance. Not long after he had gone upstairs, the family down below heard a bloodcurdling shriek. Father and son remained glued to their seats in astonishment while the lady of the house rushed out of the kitchen in alarm. As they puzzled over what could possibly have precipitated that scream, Sun Kwangtsai came down the stairs with a big grin on his face, muttering, “Not bad. Not bad at all.”

From upstairs could be heard sobs so muffled it was as though they had been buried under a deep layer of cotton.

My father sat down unconcernedly by the table and as the girl's brother dashed upstairs Sun Kwangtsai said to her father, “Your daughter is really well put together.”

His host nodded uneasily, at the same time scanning Sun Kwangtsai's face with suspicion. “Sun Guangping is so damn lucky!” my father went on.

No sooner did he say that than the girl's brother careened down the stairs and with one enormous blow knocked Sun Kwangtsai to the ground, along with the chair he was sitting on.

That afternoon Sun Kwangtsai returned to the village with his face all black and blue, and the first thing he said to Sun Guangping was, “I canceled that match for you.” My father was outraged. “Those people are so unreasonable!” he cried. “I was just trying to look out for my son and make sure the girl was in good health. Can you believe how bad they beat me up?”

The reports that came from the neighboring village offered a different interpretation of the incident, according to which my father's first gift to his future daughter-in-law had been a breast massage.

My mother spent the whole day after the visit sitting by the kitchen stove, wiping away tears with the hem of her apron. Sun Guangping did not, as the locals were expecting, come to blows with Sun Kwangtsai, and his reaction was simply not to speak to anybody in the village for several days in a row.

In the two years that followed, my brother was never again to see the matchmaker approach him, her face wreathed in smiles. During that period he would think of his father only in bed at night, gnashing his teeth. Sometimes, as dawn approached, his thoughts would turn to his brother, far away in Beijing. I would often receive letters from him in those days, but they said nothing of substance and their vacuous contents made me realize how empty he felt.

When he turned twenty-four Sun Guangping married a Southgate girl. Yinghuas only family was her father, confined to bed after a stroke. The pond played a role in their union. Late one damp afternoon Sun Guangping looked out through the rear window and saw Yinghua washing clothes there. She was crouched down in her patched clothes, so overwhelmed by the hardships of life that she had constantly to wipe her tears away. The sight of her shivering in the chilly winter breeze triggered the same kind of heartache that his own plight inspired in him. The couple reached an understanding without the help of the matchmaker, who made a point of ignoring them.

Sun Guangping's marriage took place a year or so after he glimpsed Yinghua at the pond. The wedding arrangements were so skimpy that the older villagers were reminded of how a landlord s hired hands used to get married in the old days. Though meager, the wedding was not without its comic aspects, since the bride waddled about with a big belly. Before sunup the next morning Sun Guangping borrowed a flatbed cart and took Yinghua to the obstetric ward in the town hospital. For newlyweds, morning in the bridal chamber is normally a time of blissful cuddles, but Sun Guangping and Yinghua had to brave the piercing cold and rush into town to tap on the doors and windows of the hospital, still locked tight at that hour of the day. Two o'clock that afternoon, protesting furiously, a boy later to be named Sun Xiaoming came into the world.

Sun Guangping had entangled himself in a web of his own design. After his marriage he was duty bound to provide for his bedridden father-in-law. At this point in time, Sun Kwangtsai had not yet completed his career as a deliveryman, but to his family's relief he had restrained some of his impulses and was no longer in the habit of ostentatiously transferring property from our house to the widow's home. He did, however, reveal a new talent, an aptitude for pilfering things on the sly. Sun Guangping's financial and domestic difficulties continued for some years before his father-in-law — embarrassed, perhaps, at being such a burden — closed his eyes one night and never opened them again. For Sun Guangping, the greatest challenge was not his father-in-law's infirmity or his father's thievery but the period following Xiaoming's birth. During that time he was seldom seen just walking around the village, for he was in a blur of constant motion, scurrying from the fields to Yinghua's house, then to his own home, as nervous as a rabbit.

His father-in-law's death came as a relief to Sun Guangping, but a peaceful life remained far out of reach. Not long afterward Sun Kwangtsai was up to his old tricks again, reducing Yinghua to tears for a full three days.

This was in the summer of the year that Xiaoming turned three. As my father sat on the threshold and watched Yinghua fetch water from the well, he saw how the flowers imprinted on her shorts tightened and then loosened over her fleshy buttocks, and how her thighs gleamed in the sunlight. Worn out by the widow and by his advancing years, my father now had as little vitality as the dregs of an herbal medicine, but Yinghua's robust figure triggered in him a recollection of his exuberant energy of yore. This memory was not summoned up through mental effort as much as by a quirk of his withered body, which suddenly saw a revival of his once so irrepressible lust. As Yinghua walked over, bucket in hand, my father flushed and gave a loud cough. Although villagers were walking by not far away, the incorrigible lecher put his hands on the big red flowers on Yinghua's shorts and on the flesh underneath. My nephew heard his mother give a shocked screech.

Sun Guangping had gone to town that day, and when he came home he found his mother hunched up on the doorsill, tears streaming down her face, muttering to herself, “Such a sin!” The next thing he saw was Yinghua perched on the edge of the bed, sobbing, her hair in disarray.

Sun Guangping did not need to be told what had happened. As the blood drained from his face, he marched into the kitchen and emerged with an ax glinting in his hand. He walked over to where Yinghua was weeping and said to her, “You're going to have to look after Ma and the boy.”

When the meaning of this sank in, Yinghua burst out into wails of anguish. She clutched at his jacket and said, “No, don't! Don't do that!”

My mother threw herself on her knees in the doorway, stretching out both arms in an effort to block his way. Eyes wet with tears, she said gravely to Sun Guangping in a hoarse, wavering voice: “If you kill him, it's you who'll suffer.”

Her expression brought tears to his eyes. “Get up!” he shouted. “If I don't kill him, how can I ever show my face in the village again?”

My mother remained stubbornly on her knees and tried a different tack: “Think of your little boy. It's not worth it, going that far.”

He gave a bitter smile and said to her, “I can't think of any other way out of this.”

The outrage suffered by Yinghua made Sun Guangping feel that he had to have it out with Sun Kwangtsai once and for all. For years now he had been putting up with the losses of face that his father had inflicted upon him, but Sun Kwangtsai's latest affront had forced them, he knew, into a collision course. In his rage he saw with total clarity that if he failed to take a stand it would be impossible to hold his head up among the neighbors.

Everyone in the village was milling around outside that afternoon. In the dazzling sunlight and the glowing eyes of the spectators, Sun Guangping recovered the bravado he had exhibitedas a fourteen-year-old. Ax in hand, he strode toward my father.

Sun Kwangtsai was standing under a tree in front of the widows house, and he watched, perplexed, as Sun Guangping approached. My brother heard him say to the widow, “Can this joker really be out to kill me?”

Then he shouted at Sun Guangping, “Son, I'm your dad!”

Sun Guangping maintained a grim silence and a look of determination. As he came ever closer, a note of alarm crept into Sun Kwangtsai s voice. “You've got only one dad. If you kill him, that's it.”

By this time Sun Guangping was almost upon him, and Sun Kwangtsai could only mutter in panic, “He really does want to kill me!” So saying, he took to his heels, crying out to nobody in particular, “Help!”

A hush fell as my father, now in his sixties, set off on a run for his life. He grew increasingly exhausted as he ran along the narrow road into town, with Sun Guangping, brandishing the ax, hot on his tail. Sun Kwangtsai gave incessant cries for help, but his voice sounded so different from normal that Old Luo, standing at the entrance to the village, asked other onlookers, “Is that Sun Kwangtsai yelling?”

It was quite an achievement for my father to maintain such a blistering pace at his age. But he slipped and fell as he was crossing the bridge, and ended up sitting down there and bursting into tears, crying as lustily as a newborn babe. This was the shocking sight that greeted Sun Guangping when he reached the bridge. Tears had made my father's face as gaudy as a butterfly, and snot dribbled down his lips. He cut such a sorry figure that my brother suddenly felt that chopping his head off made no sense at all. Usually so decisive, for once he was rendered irresolute. But with the throng of villagers around him he knew he had little choice but to put the ax to use. I am not sure what led him to pick my father's left ear, but there in the afternoon glare he grabbed hold of this appendage and lopped it off as cleanly as one might snip through a bolt of cloth. My father's blood spilled out and within a few seconds it encircled his neck like a crimson kerchief. Sun Kwangtsai was so immersed in his own loud weeping that he did not realize the nature of his injury. Only when he grew alarmed by how many tears he seemed to be shedding and stretched out a hand to wipe his face did he see his own blood. He gave a cry of horror and fainted.

As my brother walked home that afternoon, his body was rent with shivers. On this sultry summer day he clutched his arms as tightly as if he was exposed to subzero temperatures. When he threaded his way through the crowd of villagers, they could clearly hear his teeth chatter. My mother and Yinghua blanched as they watched him approach, and both women saw black spots in front of their eyes, as though a horde of locusts was descending. Sun Guangping smiled faintly and went inside. He rummaged through the storage cabinets, looking for his padded jacket. By the time Mother and Yinghua were back in the house, he had already put it on. He was sitting on the bed, his face streaming with perspiration, while the rest of his body continued to shake uncontrollably.

A fortnight later, Sun Kwangtsai, his head swathed in bandages, had a scribe in town write a letter and send it to me in Beijing. This missive, along with much flattery and many endearments, emphasized his role in rearing me and closed with an injunction to seek redress on his behalf from the top officials in Zhongnanhai. The absurdity of this idea left a deep impression on me.

In fact, when my father wrote to me, Sun Guangping had already been arrested. As he was taken away, my mother tugged at Yinghua and blocked the policemen's path. She burst into tears and cried out to them, “Take us instead! Two of us for one of him — isn't that a better deal?”

Sun Guangping served two years, and by the time he came home Mother was already ailing. On the day of his release, Mother stood at the entrance to the village with five-year-old Sun Xiaoming. When she saw Sun Guangping and Yinghua walking toward her, all of a sudden she spat blood and fell to the ground.

After this, Mother's condition deteriorated and she tended to wobble as she walked. Sun Guangping wanted to take her to the hospital for treatment but she flatly refused, saying, “I am going to die anyway. The money's not worth spending.”

When Sun Guangping insisted on carrying her into town piggyback, Mother wept tears of rage and pounded his back with her fists, saying, “I'll hate you till the day I die!”

But Mother calmed down after they had crossed the wooden bridge, and as she clung to Sun Guangping's shoulders a girlish, bashful look began to appear on her face.

Mother died shortly before the Spring Festival that year. One winter evening she began to cough blood, and once it started, it wouldn't stop. When she first felt her mouth fill with blood, she did not spit it out, unwilling to soil the floor and give Sun Guangping more work. Though normally unable to rise from her bed unassisted, Mother still managed to get up and grope around in the darkness for a basin to set next to her bed.

The following morning, when Sun Guangping came into her room, he noticed that Mother's head was drooping over the side of the bed and that dark red blood had accumulated in the basin, leaving the sheets untouched. When he wrote to me later, he said the air outside was thick with driving snow. Her breath reduced to the merest wisp, Mother spent the last day of her life in bitter cold. Yinghua held vigil at her bedside the whole time, and Mothers expression as death grew near seemed peaceful and serene. But in the evening, this woman, hitherto so taciturn, began to rave with startling vigor. Sun Kwangtsai was the target of all her expostulations. Although she had not offered the slightest protest when he was shifting our household property into the widow's possession, her deathbed rants revealed that she had taken these losses very much to heart. In her final moments she cried over and over again, “Don't take the chamber pot away, I need it!” Or, “Give me that basin back!” She listed every one of the items that he had filched.

Mother's funeral was somewhat more lavish than my little brother's had been. She was buried in a coffin. Throughout the whole proceedings my father was assigned the same position that I had once occupied, banishment outside the family circle. Just as I had earlier been the object of reproach, Sun Kwangtsai became the butt of criticism because of his lack of involvement in the funeral, even though his relationship with the widow was now tacitly accepted. When he saw the coffin being carried out of the village he asked a villager in confusion, “The old woman is dead?”

They noticed he was drinking spirits nonchalantly in the widow's house all afternoon. But later, in the middle of the night, the locals heard a piteous wailing coming from outside the village. My brother recognized the sound as that of my father grieving by Mother's grave. After the widow fell asleep he had surreptitiously made his way to the burial site, and grief made him forget how loudly he was wailing. Not long afterward my brother heard the widows voice. Her scolding was followed by a clear order: “Get back here!”

Father, sobbing, tramped back to the widow's house, his steps as hesitant as those of a lost child. Now that her once unquenchable libido had dissipated, the widow recognized Sun Kwangtsai as her official sleeping partner.

In the last year of his life Sun Kwangtsai exhibited a limitless devotion to liquor. Every afternoon, rain or shine, he would go into town to buy a bottle and by the time he got home it would already be completely drained. I can imagine what a romantic figure my father must have cut as he walked along the lane, swigging spirits. Whether making his way through clouds of dust or squelching his way through mud puddles, encouraged by the alcohol, my father, stooped and bent though he was, was as exhilarated as a boy who sees his sweetheart's hair waving in the breeze.

It was his limitless devotion to liquor that did my father in. On that particular day he changed his normal routine and instead chose to do his drinking in a small tavern in town. Walking back home in the moonlight, completely sozzled, he stumbled into the cesspit at the entrance to the village. As he fell, he did not give a shout of alarm but only muttered, “Don't push.”

When he was discovered the next morning, he was lying facedown in the muck, covered with little white maggots. He could not have chosen a filthier place in which to lay himself to rest, but he was quite unaware of that in his final moments and had every reason to wear a contented expression, given that he died in such a painless fashion.

After Sun Kwangtsai had fallen into the cesspit that night, Old Luo, another famous drunkard, passed that way in a besotted haze. When, by the light of the moon, his eyes rested blearily on Sun Kwangtsai, he failed to realize that it was a dead man floating on the manure soup. He squatted down beside the cesspit for a few moments and asked himself, “Whose pig is this?”

He stood up and shouted, “Whose pig has fallen into …?”

Old Luo clapped his hand over his mouth and said to himself conspiratorially, “No shouting. I'll fish it out and keep it for myself.”

Still completely in alcohol's grip, Old Luo nipped home as effortlessly as if treading on air, fetched a rope and a bamboo laundry pole, and just as briskly returned. First he used the pole to steer the corpse to the opposite side of the pit; then he made his way over there, got down on his knees, and tied the rope around Sun Kwangtsai's neck. He said to himself, “Such a skinny pig! Whose can it be? Its neck's no thicker than a man's.”

He stood up, coiled the rope over his shoulder, and began to pull. “It seems on the lean side when you poke it,” he said with a chuckle. “But it's plump enough when you have to drag the thing.”

It was only after Old Luo had hauled the body up on the bank and bent down to untie the rope that he realized what he had retrieved. Sun Kwangtsai lay there grinning at him. Old Luo was startled at first, but then he was so angry that he punched him on the face several times and let loose a string of curses. “Sun Kwangtsai! Sun Kwangtsai, you old dog! Even when you die, you try to fool me into thinking you're a pig.”

Then with one swing of his leg Old Luo kicked Sun Kwangtsai back into the cesspit. The impact of the body's entry spattered him with filth. As Old Luo mopped his face he said, “Fuck! No end to your tricks.”

BIRTH

In the autumn of 1958, on the way to Southgate, a young Sun Kwangtsai ran into Zheng Yuda, future director of the commerce bureau. Late in life, Zheng Yuda described the scene to his son Zheng Liang. He was in the throes of lung cancer then and his lungs wheezed as he told the story, but even so Zheng Yuda was moved to throaty laughter by the memory of what had happened.

As a member of a rural supervisory team, Zheng Yuda was going to Southgate to check how things were being done. The young Zheng Yuda was dressed in a gray Mao suit, with a pair of Liberation gym shoes on his feet; his hair, parted in the middle, rippled in the breeze that blew over the open fields. My father was wearing a traditional-style jacket; his canvas shoes were Mother's handiwork, made by the light of their oil lamp.

A couple of weeks earlier Sun Kwangtsai had transported a boatload of vegetables to a neighboring county for sale. Then, in a flash of inspiration, he decided that a bus ride was an experience he deserved to enjoy, so he returned that way on his own, leaving two other villagers to scull the empty boat back.

Approaching Southgate, ruddy-faced Sun Kwangtsai caught sight of Zheng Yuda in his formal wear. The town official struck up a conversation with the farmer.

In the fields random and chaotic signs of prosperity were emerging. Small furnaces constructed out of dark bricks dotted the rice paddies. Zheng Yuda asked, “Are the People's Communes a good thing?”

“You bet,” said Sun Kwangtsai. “Meals are free.”

Zheng Yuda's eyes narrowed. “What a thing to say!”

Then Sun Kwangtsai asked Zheng Yuda, “Do you have a wife?”

“Of course.”

“Slept with her last night, did you?”

Zheng Yuda was unaccustomed to fielding this kind of inquiry. His face stiffened and he said sternly, “Don't talk nonsense.”

Sun Kwangtsai continued blithely, “It's been two weeks since I last slept with my wife.” Pointing at his crotch, he said, “This fellow here is mad as hell!”

Zheng Yuda turned his head away and paid him no more mind.

They parted company at the entrance to the village. Zheng Yuda carried on toward the houses in the center while my father headed for the vegetable plots around the edge, picking up speed as he went. My mother, along with a few other women, was hacking at weeds with a hoe. Her young face glowed with health, like a red apple, and her blue kerchief was spotless. The breeze carried her silvery laugh to Sun Kwangtsai's ears, stoking the fire in his loins. He spotted her now, her back swinging rhythmically as she hoed, and hailed her with an eager shout. “Hey!”

My mother turned around and saw her randy husband standing on the path. She returned his greeting. “Hi!”

“Come over here.”

Blushing, Mother removed her scarf. As she began to walk in his direction, she patted dust off her jacket. Her unhurried movements infuriated my father, who yelled, “I am dying for it! Run, can't you?”

Amid the laughter of the other women, Mother ran toward him, her body swaying.

My father's patience could not possibly last as far as their house, and as soon as they reached Old Luo's place at the entrance to the village, its door ajar, he called inside, “Anyone home?”

Having established that the house was unoccupied, he slipped in. Mother, however, stayed outside. My father found this maddening, “Come on in!” he cried.

Mother hesitated, “This is somebody else's house.”

“Come in, will you?”

Once she had entered, my father quickly closed the door and moved a bench from a corner into the center of the room. “Get your pants off,” he said.

My mother bowed her head, lifted the hem of her jacket, and began to unfasten her belt. But after some time she said apologetically, “There's a knot I can't untie.”

My father stamped his foot. “You're driving me crazy.”

She bent her head again and tried once more to loosen the knot, her face filled with contrition.

“Okay, okay, let me do it.”

My father squatted down and tugged at the belt with all his might. He succeeded in ripping off the belt, but in doing so pulled a muscle in his neck. Though in a paroxysm of lust, he still found time to clutch his neck and yelp with pain. My mother hurriedly started to massage the sprain, but he yelled in rage, “Lie down, damn it.”

She lay down meekly, raising one leg and letting it dangle in the autumn air as her eyes continued to rest uneasily on his neck.Still rubbing the injured spot, he clambered on top of her, intent on performing his lubricious mission right there on the bench. Some of Old Luo's hens clucked enthusiastically, as though eager to be part of the action and resenting Sun Kwangtsai's monopoly of the goodies. They congregated around his feet and pecked at his toes. At this moment, when he would normally be focusing all his attention on one thing, my father was forced to expend effort on waving his feet to drive away these pesky fowl. Once knocked aside, the chickens rapidly regrouped and continued to peck at his toes. He vainly shook his feet and, as the critical moment approached, he cried in exasperation, “To hell with them!”

A series of ecstatic moans ensued, followed by uncontrollable giggles.

After it was all over, my father left Old Luo's house and went in search of Zheng Yuda. Mother went home, clutching the top of her pants, in need of a new belt.

When my father found Zheng Yuda, he was sitting in the party committee office listening to reports. My father beckoned him mysteriously. When Zheng Yuda came out, my father asked him, “Quick, wasn't it?”

Zheng Yuda did not understand. “What was quick?”

My father said, “I already had it off with her.”

Communist Party cadre Zheng Yuda immediately assumed a severe expression and reprimanded him in a low voice. “Get out of here!”

It was only when he retold this story late in life that Zheng Yuda realized its comic aspects, and he expressed a tolerant, understanding attitude to my father's behavior that day. “What can you do?” he said to Zheng Liang, “That's peasants for you.”

My parents’ coupling on the bench that day marked the starting point of my life.

I came into the world during the busy season, when the rice was being harvested. My delivery happened to coincide with a time when hunger had driven my father, toiling away in the rice paddies, into a desperate fury. He later forgot about his stomach pangs, but he could clearly recall how angry he had been. My earliest knowledge of the circumstances of my birth came courtesy of my father's drink-soaked mouth. One evening when I was six years old he recounted the details without the slightest embarrassment. Pointing at a chicken that was strutting about nearby, he said, “Your ma squeezed you out as easily as that hen lays an egg.”

Because my mother was nine months pregnant by then, she did not go out to harvest the rice, even though it was the busy period when everybody was up at the crack of dawn. As she was to put it later, “It wasn't that I didn't have the energy, it was just that I couldn't bend down.”

But Mother did take on the responsibility of taking my father's lunch out to him. Under the dazzling sunlight Mother would waddle along, a basket under her arm, blue-checked scarf around her head, arriving in the fields at noon. To me, the thought of my mother trudging slowly toward my father with a smile on her face is very touching.

The lunchtime when I was born, Sun Kwangtsai wearily raised himself up dozens of times to scan the path, but my full-breasted, big-bellied mother just never appeared. Seeing the other villagers finish their lunch and pick up their work where they had left off, Sun Kwangtsai, tormented by hunger, stood at the edge of the field, furiously spewing obscenities.

Mother did not make her appearance until after two that afternoon. The blue-checked scarf was still wound around her head, but her complexion was pale and her body wobbled under the basket's weight.

My father, by now practically fainting, may have been vaguely aware that there was something different about my mother as she edged toward him, but he was in no mood to think about that, and as she came closer he bellowed at her, “You like to see me starve, don't you?”

“It's not that,” said Mother weakly. “I had the baby.”

It was only then that my father noticed that her rotund belly had shriveled.

Mother could bend at the waist now, and although this cost her fragile body a high price in pain she still managed to take the food out of the basket with a smile, at the same time saying to him softly, “The scissors were a long way away and it wasn't easy to pick them up. After the baby was born it needed a wash. I was going to bring you lunch ages ago, but I started getting cramps even before I left the house. I knew I was about to deliver and tried to fetch the scissors, but I was in such pain I couldn't get over there and—”

My father had heard enough of this tiresome recital and cut her off in midstream. “Boy or girl?”

“It's a boy,” Mother said.