Cries in the Drizzle

CHAPTER 4. THREATS

There was one lunchtime when I — an adult now — found my attention drawn to a charming performance by a brightly dressed little boy. He stood on the sidewalk in the full sunshine, stuck out a pudgy arm, and very intently executed a whole series of gestures that suggested a rich imagination, simple though they were. In the middle of this routine he suddenly stuck his hand into the crotch of his pants and scratched an itch, although his face continued to maintain a blissful smile. Undistracted by the din of the city streets, his mind still reveled in a fantasy world.

Later, when a troop of primary school pupils passed by, he discovered that he wasn't as happy as he thought. He watched agog as these older children walked off into the distance. Even without seeing the look in his eye I could feel his despondency at that moment. Satchels, slung casually over their owners’ shoulders, swayed in a gentle motion as the class moved off, surely a dispiriting sight to a boy who had not yet reached school age, and the fact that the children were walking in pairs can only have sharpened his feelings of envy, leaving him vexed and dissatisfied with life. He turned and stomped off down an alleyway, wearing a long face.

Twenty or so years ago, when my big brother strutted off with his satchel and my father issued his parting injunction, I realized for the first time how unfortunate I was. A year later, when I went off to school with a satchel on my back myself, I was no longer in a position to listen to any advice that Sun Kwangtsai might have had for me, and received another kind of counsel altogether.

By that time it was six months since I had left Southgate. The burly man who escorted me away from Southgate had become my father, while my mother, a petite woman with a blue-checked headscarf who used to walk briskly across the fields, had been replaced by the pale and listless Li Xiuying. One morning my new father gripped the handles of a heavy wooden trunk, effortlessly shifted it to one side, and from the trunk underneath brought out a brand-new green military satchel, which he said was mine from now on.

Wang Liqiang's perception of country boys would have been amusing were it not so annoying. Perhaps because he was himself a peasant's son, he never altered his conviction that village children, like dogs, were liable to answer the call of nature wherever they felt like it. During his first full day of parenting he underscored repeatedly the importance of the chamber pot. His concern about my excretory functions remained uppermost in his thoughts even as I was putting the satchel on my back, a moment that to me was sacred. He told me that once I was at school I could not just go to the toilet whenever I felt like it; first I needed to raise my hand and secure the teacher's permission.

I felt proud to be so neatly dressed, green satchel dangling from my shoulder, escorted by Wang Liqiang in his army uniform. That was how I arrived at school on my first day. A man who was busy knitting a sweater chatted quietly with Wang Liqiang, but I dared not laugh at his incongruous hobby because this man was to be my teacher. Then a boy my age ran toward us waving his satchel. He and I exchanged glances, and a cluster of children nearby took a good look at me. “Why don't you go and join them?” Wang Liqiang suggested.

I walked toward those unfamiliar faces. They eyed me inquisitively and I studied them with equal curiosity. I soon found that I had a significant advantage over the other children, for my satchel was bigger than any of theirs. But just when I was feeling rather pleased with my superior status, Wang Liqiang came across on his way out and delivered a loud reminder, “If you need to pee or drop your load, don't forget to raise your hand.”

My nascent self-esteem instantly bit the dust.

My five years of town life were spent in the company of an ill-matched couple, one all muscle, the other frailty personified. I had not been selected by the town because I was so adorable, nor was I, for that matter, so enthralled by the town; the crux of the matter was that Wang Liqiang and his wife needed me. They were childless, the reason being, according to Li Xiuying, that she was not strong enough to breastfeed. Wang Liqiang put it differently, telling me categorically that if Li Xiuying, with all her ailments, were to give birth, this would kill her right away — a remark that seemed quite shocking to me at the time. Neither of them liked babies, and they opted for a six-year-old like me because I could do some work around the house. To be fair, they were expecting to be parents to me their whole lives through, for otherwise they could perfectly well have adopted a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy whose performance of chores would have been more satisfactory. The problem was that a fourteen-year-old would already have well-formed habits that might give them a lot of trouble. Having chosen me, they fed and clothed me, saw me off to school, scolded and beat me, just like other parents would. And so I, the product of another marriage, became their son.

During the whole five years I lived with them Li Xiuying went out of the house only once, and after that unprecedented excursion I never saw her again. It was always a mystery to me exactly what was wrong with Li Xiuying, but I was left in no doubt about her devotion to sunlight. It was as though, without exposure to sunshine, this second mother of mine was shrouded in a perpetual drizzle.

The first time Wang Liqiang conducted me into her room, I was astonished to see the floor dotted with little stools, on which were draped an immense number of undershirts and underpants, illuminated by the sunshine that came in through the window. She seemed completely unaware of our entrance. Her outstretched arm was groping for the sunlight, as though tugging on a slender cord. As the sun's rays shifted their position, she would move the stools so that her motley collection of underwear would always be bathed in sunshine. So absorbed was she in this monotonous and barren activity that I must have stood there for quite some time. When she turned around, I saw a large pair of eyes so hollow that I draw a blank when I try to picture their expression. Then I heard a sound so thin it was as though a thread was passing through my ear, the way it might pass through the eye of a needle. She was telling me what would happen if she wore damp underwear: “I'd be dead in a second.”

I was startled to find this languid woman speaking about death with such finality. I had left the familiar and intimate surroundings of Southgate and parted from my parents and brothers who were all so full of life, and now, no sooner did I get here than the first thing this unnerving woman said to me was that she could die at any moment.

Later I came to feel that Li Xiuyings remark was not so exaggerated. During those periods when it rained day after day, she would run a fever and lie in bed mumbling. She looked so desperately ill at such moments that I often felt she was about to vindicate her own prognosis. But when sunlight shone through the window and illuminated her rows of stools, she accepted her survival with equanimity. She had an uncanny sensitivity to moisture and could even gauge the humidity in the air with her hand. Every morning when I pushed open her door and went to clean her window, she would extend a hand from her blue floral mosquito net and pat the air, just as if she was stroking something solid, in this way testing the dampness of the day that was just beginning. At first this scared me out of my wits, for her body was entirely obscured behind the mosquito net and all that could be seen was a white hand, its five splayed fingers in sluggish motion, like a severed limb floating in the air.

Sickly as she was, Li Xiuying naturally placed a high priority on hygiene. Her world was already narrow and confining, and if it was in a mess as well she would be hard put to sustain her fragile life. I was responsible for almost the entire job of keeping her room tidy. Window cleaning was the most important chore, to be performed twice a day so as to ensure that sunlight could reach her underwear unsullied by any impurities. The biggest challenge came when I opened the window, for I was expected to do a quick and thorough job of cleaning the outside of the pane, and it was a tall order for a child my age to perform this task with the requisite dispatch. Li Xiuying was truly too weak to withstand a gust of wind. She told me that wind was the worst thing in the world, for it blew dust, germs, and bad smells all over the place, making people sick, making people die. She made wind sound so dreadful that in my young imagination it almost took on the features of a green-faced, long-toothed monster, fastening itself to my window at night and rubbing the pane till it shook.

After concluding her vilification of the wind, Li Xiuying asked me in a conspiratorial hush, “Do you know where dampness comes from?”

Then she answered her own question. “It's blown here by the wind!” she exclaimed. The sudden fury with which she said this gave me such a fright that my heart started pounding.

Glass played a vital role in Li Xiuying's life, interposing itself in transparent form between her and the outside world, protecting her from the intrusion of wind and dust and at the same time safeguarding her special relationship with sunshine.

Even now I remember that in the afternoon, when the sunlight was blocked by the slope of the mountain opposite, Li Xiuying would stand in front of the window, gazing disconsolately at the red tint in the sky behind the mountain, as though she had been deserted and yet at the same time was unwilling to accept her abandonment. She told me softly, “The sun wanted to shine in my room, but on its way here the mountain abducted it.”

Her voice traverses time and carries to my ears today, as though to remind me how long she and the sunlight had enjoyed cordial relations. The mountain, by contrast, was a despot that had forcibly appropriated her sunshine.

Wang Liqiang was a busy man, away at work the whole day, and he did not count on me simply to pull my weight doing chores: what he seemed to be hoping was that the noise I made around the house would alleviate the melancholy to which Li Xiuying was prone. In fact, however, Li Xiuying did not set much store by my presence, for she preferred to spend her time bemoaning her fate and seldom concerned herself with me. She would harp on about how this was sore or that was giving her trouble, but when I nervously appeared in front of her, looking forward to doing some little job that would make her life easier, she would act as though I wasn't there. Sometimes my astonishment at her health problems would simply have the odd effect of making her feel proud of them.

Soon after I moved into her house, I noticed that a newspaper had been spread out on the floor of her room; on top of the yellowing pages a pile of little white bugs had been laid out to dry. Li Xiuying was in the habit of seeking medical advice from a variety of authorities, and these fearsome little insects were a folk remedy that she had just acquired. When she boiled them in water and swallowed them one by one as calmly as if they were grains of rice, I paled at the sight. My horror actually rather pleased her: she flashed me a smile and said contentedly, “These things are good for you.”

Li Xiuying could be terribly self-centered, but deep down she was ingenuous and kindhearted. If she was prone to suspicion, that's just a common failing in women. When I was new there, she worried that I would get up to no good, so she designed a trial. Once when I was cleaning the window of one of the other rooms, I found fifty cents on the windowsill. This was a startling find: for me at the time, fifty cents was a huge sum. When I took the money through and handed it to her, my surprise at the discovery and my honesty in reporting it took a big weight off her mind. She told me straightforwardly that this had been a test and praised me in a heartwarming tone of voice, complimenting me in such extravagant terms that I was almost moved to tears. Her trust in me never wavered throughout the whole five years, and when later I became the target of accusations at school she was the only person who believed in my innocence.

Strong and fit though he was, Wang Liqiang looked out of sorts when he was at home, and he often sat alone by himself with a frown on his face. But once during the first summer I was with them, he had me sit on the windowsill and told me about the river at the foot of the mountain and the wooden boats that plied its waters. His description, simple though it was, somehow managed to conjure up a clear picture in my mind. For the most part he was a mild-mannered person, but at times he would say shocking things. He had a favorite little wine cup, which was placed on top of the wireless and enjoyed the distinction of being the only decorative item in the whole house. So as to make sure I fully recognized its value he told me very sternly that if I was ever to break the cup he would wring my neck. At the time he was holding a cucumber, and with a sharp tearing sound he twisted it into two, saying, “Just like that.” This scared me so much I felt a chill around my nape.

As I approached my seventh birthday, the change that I had just gone through seemed to have made me a different person altogether. At this stage I must have been at a loss to know what to make of it all. Drifting with the tide, too young to fight the current, I had transformed in the blink of an eye from the Sun Guanglin of the rowdy Southgate house into a boy who was easily spooked by Li Xiuyings groans and Wang Liqiang's sighs.

It did not take me long to gain a familiarity with the town of Littlemarsh, but in the early days I was consumed by curiosity.Those spindly streets paved with stone slabs seemed to carry on forever, just like the river that flowed past Southgate. Sometimes at dusk when Wang Liqiang grasped my hand in a fatherly way and took me out for a walk, I would fondly imagine that if we just kept going we would eventually reach Beijing. But somehow, as my mind was following this train of thought, I would suddenly notice that we had arrived back home. For a long time I was perplexed by this enigma: though we seemed to keep walking in the same direction, we always ended up back at the house. Most of all I marveled at the pagoda that overlooked Littlemarsh, for out of one of its windows a tree was growing. Inspired by this sight, I once had the strange feeling that a tree might perhaps sprout from Li Xiuying's mouth, or if not a tree some grass at least.

The paving stones would often give a creak and rock to and fro when you stepped on them. Particularly on rainy days, if you stamped hard on one side, a spray of muddy water would shoot up from the other. For a long time I thought this was the most wonderful game, and whenever I had the chance to get out of the house it was the first thing I wanted to do. I was seized by an urge to splash the trousers of a passerby, but timidity made me resist the temptation, for I felt sure this would put me at the receiving end of some horrendous punishment. Later I saw three older boys walk along the street, picking up chamber pot covers propped up outside people s doorways. They tossed the lids up in a way that made them spin through the air delightfully. Outraged residents came rushing out of their houses, but could do little more than curse the boys while they ran off, laughing with glee. From this I realized the advantages of showing a clean pair of heels, for then punishment becomes unlikely and enjoyment is prolonged. So afterward, when I saw a girl walk by in a smart outfit, I stamped on a loose flagstone. As filthy water spattered her pants, I implemented the next phase of my plan — running away. Unfortunately even though my desire had been satisfied, no pleasure ensued. The girl did not unleash a torrent of abuse nor make any effort to pursue me, but simply stood there in the middle of the street, crying her heart out. The longer she went on crying, the more I felt panic rising inside me.

The house on the corner was home to a teenager who wore a peaked cap. He could make music by blowing on a bamboo tube, something that seemed as wonderful to me in my early days in Lit-tlemarsh as the tree that grew out of the pagoda window. I would see him ambling down the street, hands in his pockets, greeting grown-ups he knew, and I quietly attempted to imitate the way he carried himself. But when I stuck my hands in my pockets and did my best to strut around, the image that I had so proudly cultivated was spoiled by Wang Liqiang's rebuke. He said I looked like a juvenile delinquent.

Aside from his other tunes, the boy in the cap could also produce an amazing likeness of the jingle that the pear-syrup candy vendor used to play. When a few other greedy children and I dashed toward the source of the music, we found that it was not the street vendor at all, but this boy sitting in the window, laughing hard as could be. Our silly expressions provoked him to such mirth that he ran out of breath and ended up coughing.

No matter how often I was taken in, I couldn't seem to stop myself from heading over there every time. Summoned by those sounds, I ran with a blind and witless instinct, just so that he could have a joke at my expense. But once I was mortified to find that I was the only child to fall for the trick, and his gleeful laughter was a blow to my ego. I said to him, “The sound you make isn't like the candy seller at all.” Thinking myself clever, I went on: “I knew it was fake as soon as I heard it.”

To my surprise he laughed even harder, and asked me, “So why did you come running?”

I could think of no answer to this.

One lunchtime we crossed paths when I was out buying soy sauce, and he found a new way of mocking me. After walking past me in the street, he suddenly came to a stop and called me over. Then he bent down, stuck his buttocks in the air, and asked me to check if there was a hole in the seat of his pants, where two red patches had been sewn. Peering at his monkeylike bottom, I had no idea that I was falling into a trap. “I can't see any hole,” I said.

“Take another look.”

I did as he said, but still saw nothing. “Bring your head a bit nearer,” he urged. As I put my face as close as I could get, he let out a resounding fart so foul I was practically gassed, and walked off laughing heartily. I couldn't help admiring him, even if he never missed an opportunity to tease.

Immersed in this new life, I often forgot the Sun Guanglin who had been tearing around the fields of Southgate not long before. Occasionally while I drifted off to sleep I could dimly make out my mother's blue-checked headscarf floating in the air. At such moments as these a sadness stirred, leaving me anxious and uneasy, but once I was asleep I forgot all about it. One evening, though, I did ask Wang Liqiang, “When will you take me back?”

He and I were walking hand in hand along the street as the sun was setting. He did not answer my question right away, but first bought me five olives. Then he told me, “Once you're grown up, that's when I'll take you back.”

Wang Liqiang, always so harried by his wife's afflictions, ruffled my hair and told me gravely that I should be obedient and study hard when I went to school. If I met his standards, he said, “When you're grown up, I'll find you a strapping young woman to marry.”

I had been wondering what kind of reward he would give me, and “a strapping young woman” came as a big disappointment.

After Wang Liqiang gave me the five olives, I no longer felt in any hurry to return to Southgate. This being a place where olives were provided, I had no wish to leave it any time soon.

Just once was I seized with a real urge to reclaim my old life. One afternoon I mistook for my big brother a boy who had hung his satchel over his chest and put his hands behind his back. At that moment I forgot that I was in Littlemarsh and thought I was back by the pond in Southgate, watching my big brother showing off on his first day home from school. I raced toward him, calling “Sun Guangping!” But my excitement drained away as an unfamiliar face swung around, looking baffled, and only then did I remember that I had left Southgate long ago. The jolt back to reality left me feeling bereft. Sobbing, I went on my way as the north wind whistled in my ears.

I made friends with a boy called Guoqing, whose birthday was October 1, and another boy named Liu Xiaoqing. When I think of them now, my heart tingles. Walking along those stone-paved streets, we would jabber and quack like three little ducklings.

Of the two, I was more fond of Guoqing. He was a boy who loved to run around. The first time he raced up to me he was pouring with sweat. Though I did not know him at all, he asked me warmly, “You're good in a scrap, aren't you? From the look of it, you really know how to fight.” My bond with Liu Xiaoqing, on the other hand, was a by-product of his brother's delightful flute-playing. The fact that he was the brother of the boy with the peaked cap meant that my affection for him was colored by envy.

Guoqing was the same age as me, but already possessed leadership ability, and he won my loyalty by bringing spice and variety to my life. I'll never forget that time in the summer when he took me and Liu Xiaoqing down to the riverside to wait for the waves. Before that excursion I had no idea what wonderful pleasures were in store for me there. We stood in a row, evenly spaced along the riverbank, and after a steamboat passed its wake would lap over our bare feet and the waves would climb up our ankles. Our feet were like boats moored to the shore, swaying in the water. But soon I had to go home to clean the windows and mop the floor. As Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing watched a boat in the distance steadily steaming closer, I had to leave, rushing home as fast as my legs would carry me.

Another unforgettable joy was going upstairs in Guoqing's house to view the countryside off in the distance. In those days, even in a town, not many people lived in a two-story house. When Liu Xiaoqing and I went to Guoqing's place, we were as excited as two twittering sparrows. Guoqing, for his part, displayed the poise one would expect from a host. Walking between us, he rubbed his nose with his hand, concealing his childish pride with a grown-up's smile.

Then Guoqing knocked on a door. The door opened only a little, revealing half a wizened face. Guoqing called loudly, “Hi, Grannie.”

The door opened just enough to admit Guoqing, revealing the dim interior and the face of an old lady dressed in black. Her eyes were watching us with a brightness surprising for someone of such advanced years.

As Liu Xiaoqing started to go in, she swiftly pushed the door almost completely shut, leaving only one of her eyes visible. I heard her hoarse voice for the first time. “Let me hear you say ‘Grannie.’”

Liu Xiaoqing said the magic word and was admitted; then it was my turn. Again the door opened just a crack and a single eye peered out at me. The old lady gave me the creeps. But Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing were already pounding up the stairs, so I had no choice but to call out the required greeting, at the same time giving a shiver. I gained admission to the inner darkness, and after she had closed the door the only light came from the top of the staircase. As I climbed the stairs, I heard no sound of her steps moving away and realized with dismay that her sharp old eyes must be watching me.

In the two years that followed, my eagerness to visit Guo-qing's house was always tempered with dread at having to pass the old lady's gloomy checkpoint. Her face and her voice, which often figured in my nightmares, began to haunt me. In order to work up the courage to knock on the door, I had to remind myself there was no greater pleasure than leaning out the upstairs window with Guoqing.

Unusually, on one occasion, she did not ask me to call her “Grannie” and instead ushered me in with a mysterious smile. It turned out that Guoqing was not at home, and as I nervously came back down the stairs the old lady pounced on me the way a cat pounces on a bird. She took my hand and led me into her room. Her moist palm made me tremble, but I was too petrified to put up any resistance.

Her room, as it turned out, was bright and spotlessly clean. Many framed pictures hung on the wall, black-and-white photographs of old men and women, not one of whom was smiling. She said to me in a whisper, “They're all dead.”

She seemed to be speaking quietly for fear they might hear, and I hardly dared breathe. She pointed at a gentleman with a long wispy beard and said, “There's a good man. He came to visit me just last night.”

A dead man came to see her? I started to cry. She was not pleased and told me disapprovingly, “That's nothing to cry about.”

Pointing at another photograph, she said, “Now, her, she doesn't dare come to see me. She stole my ring, and now she's worried I'm going to ask for it back.”

This old woman who cuts such a daunting figure in my childhood memory would not let me leave that spooky room of hers until she had introduced the people in the pictures to me one by one. I never dared visit Guoqing's home again. Even if he was there to keep me company, I didn't want to have anything to do with this eerie old lady. Only much later did I realize there was actually nothing to fear from her. She was simply immersed in an isolation unfathomable to me at my age. She straddled the boundary between life and death, forsaken by both.

How amazed I was to see things so far away, that first time I went up to the second story of Guoqing's house. It was as though distance had shrunk and I suddenly had the whole world at my feet. Like the hills in the distance, fields spread out as far as the eye could see, and the tiny moving figures made me chuckle with delight. For the first time I truly understood the meaning of the word limitless.

Guoqing was an organized child. His clothes were always clean, and the little handkerchief he kept in his pocket was folded into a perfect square. When we lined up for physical education, he would delicately remove his handkerchief and wipe his mouth. I was very struck by that well-practiced action of his, because if I had a runny nose I was more than likely to let my shirt get stained. What is more, he had his own medical kit, just like a doctor — a small cardboard box containing five vials in a neat row. When he took the bottles out and explained their various applications, this boy of eight was the embodiment of carefulness and gravity, and in my impressionable eyes he seemed more like a distinguished medical practitioner than a boy my own age. He took his vials everywhere, and sometimes, just as he was running across the school playground, he would come to an abrupt halt and gesture to me that it was time to take a pill. So I would go into the classroom with him and watch him take the medicine kit out of his satchel, extract a tablet from a vial, and put it in his mouth. He could swallow it dry.

Guoqing's father I found intimidating. If he wasn't feeling well, he would turn to his son for a consultation. My classmate was invigorated on such occasions: he spoke with eloquence, in his piping voice, quizzing his father on every aspect of his ailment. Only when his father interrupted him would he break off questioning and open his sacred box with an expert flick. His hand would hover above the five vials and select the medication required. As he handed the medicine over, he would lose no time in asking his father for five cents. On one such occasion, his father was about to go and get the money, but Guoqing quickly handed him a glass of water, considerately letting his father take the medicine while he went over and stuck a hand into the pocket of the jacket that his father had thrown on the bed. Taking his hand out, he showed his father a five-cent coin, which he then deposited in his own pocket. But then, as we set off together for school, he dug out of his pocket two five-cent coins. Guoqing was a generous boy; he told me that he had taken the other five cents for me. Then he carried out his promise to buy us both an ice.

I never knew Guoqing's mother. Once the three of us were playing on top of the old town wall, waving willow branches and running on the yellow earth, enacting an imaginary battle, war whoops and all. Afterward we sat down in exhaustion, and Liu Xiaoqing suddenly asked about her. “She went to heaven,” Guoqing said.

Then, pointing at the sky, he said, “The Lord of Heaven is watching us.”

At that moment the sky was so blue it seemed unfathomably deep. Heaven was watching us. We three children were enveloped in a huge emptiness, and deep within me I gave a deferential shudder, for the endless sky left me no place to hide. I heard Guoqing go on, “Whatever we are doing, the Lord of Heaven can see it as clear as anything. Nobody can put one over on him.”

Xiaoqing's random inquiry about Guoqing's mother left me in awe of heaven — my earliest experience of a self-imposed constraint. Even now I sometimes have the sensation that I am being followed by a pair of eyes and have no safe haven, my secrets far from secure, but in danger of exposure at any moment.

In second grade Guoqing and I had a fierce argument triggered by the following question: if one tied together all the atom bombs on earth and detonated them, would the world be blown to pieces? It was Liu Xiaoqing who got us going on this, because he was the one who had the idea of roping all the atom bombs together, an idea that makes me smile when I think about it now. I clearly remember how Liu Xiaoqing looked when he said this: he broached the issue just after sniffing up a thread of mucus that was threatening to dribble into his mouth. He sniffed so loudly I could practically feel the snot slithering smoothly back inside his nose.

Guoqing agreed with Liu Xiaoqing, arguing that the world, or at the very least a big chunk of it, would surely be blown to pieces. We would be whipped all over the place by incredible gale-force winds, amid a terrible howling noise. Just like our physical education instructor, who had a hole in his nose — when he talked there was a wheezing sound, like the roar of the north wind.

I didn't believe that the world would be destroyed by the explosion; in fact I didn't even think there would be such a big crater. My reasoning was: atom bombs are made from things found in the world, and the world is bigger than atom bombs. How could something that's so big possibly be blown up by something that's so small? Carried away by the force of my argument, I put it to Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing, “Can you beat your dads in a fight? No way! That's because you're their sons. You're small, and your dads are big.”

Neither side could persuade the other, so we went to see Zhang Qinghai, the schoolmaster who knitted, hoping that he would serve as an impartial judge. This was during lunch break in the winter, and our teacher was sitting against the wall, sunning himself. His knitting hands flitted back and forth, as nimble as a woman's. Squinting in the sun, he listened as we presented our cases and then admonished us, “That's impossible. The peoples of the world are peace loving. How could they possibly tie atom bombs together and detonate them?”

We had been arguing about science, but he gave us an answer rooted in politics. So we had no choice but to continue our argument, which soon deteriorated into personal attacks. I said to them, “You don't know shit!”

“You don't know shit!” they fired back.

I was so angry I didn't know what I was doing, and I issued a most impractical threat. I said, “I am not going to have anything to do with you two from now on!”

“Who the hell wants to have anything to do with you?” they said.

After this, I had to bear the consequences of my reckless declaration. Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing turned their backs on me as they said they would. But I found that I lacked the determination needed to carry through with my threat. There were two of them and only one of me: that was the problem. They could steadfastly ignore me, but I could give them the cold shoulder only at great expense to my nervous system. I was now a loner, standing at the doorway to the classroom, watching them running joyfully around the playground. I was green with envy. Every day I hoped that they would come over and propose reconciliation, for in that way I could both maintain my integrity and have my friends back. But when they walked past they would be rolling their eyes or laughing their heads off. It was clear that they were ready to carry on like this indefinitely, for it cost them nothing. But I was paying a heavy price: when I walked home alone after school, it was as though I had a chinaberry in my mouth, bitter and hard to swallow.

I was stubbornly resolved to preserve my self-respect, but at the same time my wish to be with them intensified. These two contradictory impulses canceled each other out, until I hit upon an alternative form of intimidation.

I chose a spot on Guoqing's regular route home for delivery of this new threat; I ran ahead as fast as I could to wait for him there. As Guoqing approached my observation post, he — true to his proud nature — defiantly looked the other way. But I shouted with all the ferocity I could muster: “You stole your dads money!”

His confidence crumbled. He turned around and shouted at me, “No, I didn't! What a load of rubbish.”

“Oh yes you did,” I retorted. I reminded him of that time he asked for five cents from his father and took ten.

“I took those five cents for you,” he said.

I didn't care about that. Instead I shouted out my most potent line: “I'm going to tell your dad!”

My classmate went deathly pale. He bit his lip and did not know what to do. That's when I spun on my heel and left, striding along with my nose in the air like a rooster at daybreak. My heart filled with a sinful joy, stirred to elation by the look of despair on Guoqing's face.

Later on I was to threaten Wang Liqiang in much the same way. What I realized was that if there is something you really want you have to be prepared to stop at nothing to get it. My threat allowed me to reclaim our friendship and still keep my self-respect intact, so I felt that practical results were being achieved, however underhanded the methods.

The following morning, Guoqing sidled up to me and asked in a conciliatory tone if I wanted to go to his house and look at the scenery from the second floor. I said yes right away. This time he didn't invite Liu Xiaoqing; it was just the two of us. On the way there, he begged me not to tell his father about that earlier act of deception. But by this time, of course, he and I were already friends again, and I no longer had any desire to reveal his secret.

ABANDONED

One morning when he was nine, Guoqing woke up to find that he held his destiny in his own hands. Though far from being an adult and still under his father's sway, all of a sudden he was independent. Premature freedom made him carry his fate on his shoulder the way he might carry a heavy suitcase, staggering along a busy street, not sure which way to go.

My poor classmate was wakened that morning by a chaotic din. It was early autumn, and when he went to the door, still in just his underpants, his eyes heavy with sleep, he found his father and a couple of other men busily packing up household effects.

Guoqing at first was thrilled, for he assumed they were moving to a brand-new house. His joy was much like mine when I was leaving Southgate, but the reality that he was about to encounter was far worse.

Guoqing asked his father, in a voice as fresh as the morning itself, if they would be moving to a place where he'd see white horses with wings. His father, always so stern, saw nothing charming about this flight of imagination; on the contrary, he thought his son's question too ridiculous to deserve an answer. All he said was “Don't block the hallway.”

Guoqing returned to his room. He was the most worldly of the children in our class, but given his age at the time he could not possibly have anticipated what was about to happen. He set to work speedily organizing his possessions: his clothes, neither new nor old, as well as miscellaneous items like his screw nuts, his little scissors, and his plastic pistol. He was able to neatly pack them all into a cardboard box. He performed this task cheerfully against a background of bangs and thumps, often running out to the front door to watch with admiration as his father displayed his muscle power, shifting furniture. Then it was his turn. Although the box was about the same size as he was, he managed to lift it off the floor. He moved it slowly, edging along, brushing against the wall on the other side, for he knew the wall was a hand too, and a strong hand at that. Although he was fast running out of strength, there was a proud glint in his eye as his father came up the staircase. But his father said to him coldly, “Put that back where it came from.”

My friend had no choice but to make the reverse journey, straining with effort, having achieved nothing. His hair was dripping with sweat, and even after he patted it down it was still a disorderly clump. At this moment he really did not know what to do, and he sat down in a little chair to ponder the question. But it was impossible for him to envision his future in bleak terms, for life had not trained him to think along those lines. His thoughts bounced around like a ball on the playground and did not stay fixed on his father for very long. As his mind wandered, he looked happily through the window at the sky outside. Perhaps he was still imagining a white horse as it sailed through the air, its wings outstretched.

Grunts and thuds descended the stairs time and again. Guo-qing must have heard all this racket but he did not realize that the furniture had now been deposited on three flatbed carts, and he did not hear the wheels begin to turn. His thoughts had been whirring around like a bat, and when they finally stopped his father was in his room, and harsh reality faced him.

Guoqing did not give us a detailed account of what happened, and in any case Liu Xiaoqing and I were too young to understand. It was subsequent events that really drove home to me the fact of his abandonment. This was not the only reason I disliked his father. I had seen him on a number of occasions, and each time his manner was so severe as to give me the shivers. Now, as I try to recall him, I feel that there are some similarities between him and my grandmothers father. The first time I met him, he questioned me so closely about my background he might as well have been cross-examining me. When Guoqing tried to answer for me, he interrupted him, saying, “Let him speak for himself.”

His aggressive stare made me quake. When he entered Guo-qing's bedroom that day, I'm sure he fixed his son with the same stare. But his tone may have been calm, perhaps even gentle. He told Guoqing, “I'm going off to get married.”

Guoqing had to understand the change this entailed, which was very simple: his father could not possibly look after him anymore. Guoqing was too young to appreciate all the grim implications, and he just looked at his father in bewilderment. The heartless bridegroom-to-be left his son ten yuan in cash and twenty pounds’ worth of grain coupons, picked up a couple of baskets, and went downstairs. In the baskets he had put the last few items he was taking with him. My friend glued his face to the window, squinting in the sunlight as he watched his father saunter off.

It was when he went into the two rooms that had been emptied of belongings that Guoqing first began to feel sad. Even then he did not think his father had abandoned him forever; the sight of the deserted rooms alone was enough to prompt his tears. The pristine environment of his own room — which I had visited so often, whose window I so adored — helped Guoqing calm down, and he sat down on his bed to think things over. Only when he found me later that afternoon did he fully realize his predicament. I was busy cleaning Li Xiuying's favorite window when I heard him calling me from outside. I dared not leave the window before I had finished the job, but Li Xiuying could not stand Guoqing's shouts, which pierced the air like the sound of breaking glass. Sitting in bed, she said to me in dismay, “Oh, do tell him to shut up.”

How could I tell him to be quiet when he was in such a fix? We stood in the stone-paved street while the power lines above us maintained a steady hum. I still remember how pale Guoqing looked as he told me what had occurred — all in confused fragments, for he was still not really clear about it in his own mind. He presented his story as a series of random impressions, like flies that buzz around and abruptly change direction — from the enormous strength his father displayed when moving furniture to the look on his father's face when he went out the door holding the baskets. I had trouble sorting out which things happened first and which later. As he told me the story, Guoqing suddenly realized what it all meant, and his narrative petered out. Tears gushed from his eyes, and he said something that he and I both understood perfectly: “My dad doesn't want me anymore!”

We went to find Liu Xiaoqing and found him running toward the river, a mop over his shoulder. He was shocked by the sight of Guoqing's tears. I told him Guoqing had been abandoned. At first Liu Xiaoqing was as baffled as I had been earlier, but my wordy explanation, accompanied by frequent nods from Guoqing, eventually got the facts through to him. Right away he said, “Lets find my big brother!”

To consult the older boy in his peaked cap seemed an excellent idea, and for Liu Xiaoqing to suggest this so proudly struck me as quite natural. Who wouldn't want a brother like that? We went over to the window where he was sitting, and now it was Liu Xiaoqings turn to tell the story. Toying with his flute his brother heard him out. He seemed very indignant. “This is outrageous!” he said.

He stuck the flute in his pocket, jumped out the window, and beckoned us. “Come on, let's go and sort him out!”

We three children walked along the damp street. A rain shower early that morning had drenched the trees. Leading the way was Liu Xiaoqings brother — an older boy, to be sure, but rather skinny. He could play a fine tune on the flute, but could he get the better of Guoqing's father? The three of us followed him quietly, buoyed by his outrage. Reaching a tree heavy with rain, he seemed lost in thought, but when we caught up with him he raised his foot and kicked the trunk with all his might, at the same time darting off. Droplets showered down on us, soaking us to the skin. He ran off home, chortling.

His action, obviously, was most inglorious, for otherwise Liu Xiaoqing would not have turned red. Mortified, he said to Guoqing, “Let's go talk to our teacher about it.”

Now sopping wet, Guoqing shook his head and said with a sob, “I don't want to talk to anyone about it!”

And he stalked off. This clever little boy could rattle off the names of all his maternal uncles and aunts, and when he got home he thought of them and sat down to write them letters — in pencil, on paper torn from his exercise book. At this point, when he was still struggling to find words to describe his plight to us, he must have found it even harder to write about it. When every one of his mother's siblings rushed to his side soon afterward, this showed how well he had put things.

Precise as he was, Guoqing recalled the workplaces of all his uncles and aunts and wrote their addresses on eight envelopes. But he wasn't sure just how to mail the letters. With his customary concern for order, he folded the eight sheets of paper into eight little squares. He clutched them to his chest and made his way to the forest green post office.

He found a young woman behind the counter. Guoqing timidly went up to her, asking in a pathetic tone, “Auntie, can you tell me how to post letters?”

Rather than answering, she asked him instead, “Do you have money?”

To her surprise Guoqing brought out a ten-yuan note. She did help him then, but she looked at him warily, the way one eyes a pickpocket.

Once the eight brothers and sisters of Guoqing's mother had assembled, they made an impressive party. Together they marched off toward his father's new house, Guoqing in the middle, the grown-ups surrounding him with determined looks on their faces. Guoqing had worn an expression of sheer misery the past several days, but now, pampered by his aunts and uncles, he walked among them with his confidence fully restored. At regular intervals he would turn back toward Liu Xiaoqing and me and call: “Be sure to keep up with us!”

It was late in the afternoon by then. Walking with this group of adults, I felt very important, almost as important as Guoqing; Liu Xiaoqing was also looking cocky. Guoqing declared jubilantly that his father would soon be moving back home.

It was my first outing after dark since I had come to Little-marsh. When I asked Wang Liqiang's permission to leave the house I told him what had happened, and I was grateful to him for allowing me to go out so late in the day. While sympathizing with my desire to stand with Guoqing in his hour of need, he cautioned me not to open my mouth. In fact, however, Liu Xiaoqing and I would never have been allowed to enter Guoqing's father's new home; we had to wait outside. A squat little building stood before us, and we found it strange that Guoqing's father would leave the two-story house for such a modest dwelling.

“There's no view here at all!” Liu Xiaoqing and I agreed. We could hear the voices of the eight visitors from out of town. Their city accents evoked tall buildings and asphalt roads. At this moment two boys much younger than us came swaggering over and told us presumptuously to clear off. Only later did we realize that they were the darling sons of Guoqing's father's new wife. The idea that we could be driven away by two smaller boys was ridiculous, of course. We warned them that they'd better push off themselves. They spat at us then, and Liu Xiaoqing and I gave them each a punch in the face. These two little fellows were all bark and no bite, for they immediately burst out crying. But reinforcements arrived promptly, charging out of the house in the form of a woman as fat as a tub of lard. Guoqing's father's bride bore down on us with spit spraying from her mouth and such a murderous gleam in her eye that we fled in terror. She followed close behind, cursing us fiercely in language we thought only men were accustomed to using. One minute she threatened to toss us into the cesspit; the next minute she vowed to hang us from a tree, describing to us as we ran a whole series of awful fates. As I tired, I turned my head to look back; my scalp went numb when I saw the way her flesh wobbled as she ran. All she needed to do was sit on us and she would crush the life out of us.

Only after we ran across a stone arched bridge did we see her stop and turn around, still hurling curses. She probably felt that it was more vital that she go to the aid of her husband. After establishing that she was not waiting in ambush at some point along the road, Liu Xiaoqing and I fearfully edged our way back, vigilant as scouts in a movie who venture deep into enemy territory. By then the sky was dark, and when we returned to our original spot under the lamplight we still heard only the impassioned voices of the eight uncles and aunts. We wondered why Guoqing's father was saying nothing. After a long time we finally heard a different voice, the voice that had pursued us. His wife was saying to them, “Did you come here for a fight or for a discussion? For a fight you need a lot of people, but for a discussion one is enough. I want all of you out right now. One of you can come back tomorrow.”

When this vulgar woman opened her mouth, somehow she projected power. She told them to leave just as arrogantly as her sons had told us to clear off. For just a moment the eight urbanites were silenced, and then they all burst into frantic protest. Liu Xiaoqing and I could not make any sense of what was said: with so many people talking at once, the hubbub that reached our ears was just a wall of sound. Then Guoqing's father spoke up, just as we were becoming convinced he wasn't there. He yelled angrily at the eight uncles and aunts: “Why are you all shouting? How irresponsible can you be? With you all making so much noise, how am I going to live this down?”

“Who's being irresponsible?” A quarrel erupted, as loud as a house falling down, and it sounded as though several men wanted to beat Guoqing's father and several women were trying desperately to stop them. Guoqing's mother's brothers and sisters were reduced to a state of helpless indignation, for after they had exhausted themselves explaining the rights and wrongs of the case, the obstinacy of the newlyweds made them suddenly realize that it was impossible to have a serious discussion with them. The oldest brother, the most senior figure of the eight, decided against leaving Guoqing in the newlyweds’ care. He said to Guoqing's father, “Even if you wanted to raise him, we would absolutely refuse to let you. A man like you is just a beast!”

As the eight visitors came out the door, we heard a tumultuous expulsion of breaths. A traumatized Guoqing walked in the middle of the group, looking uncertainly at Liu Xiaoqing and me. I heard one of the men say, “How could Sis have married someone like that?” He was so exasperated that he had begun to think the fault lay with Guoqing's deceased mother.

The uncles and aunts assumed the responsibility of supporting Guoqing, and from then on they each sent Guoqing two yuan monthly. The forest green post office became the conduit for Guoqing's wealth. Several times each month he would announce to us proudly, “I have to go to the post office today.”

When Guoqing began to receive his sixteen yuan for living expenses, I was to enter the most extravagant phase of my whole childhood, and the same was true for Liu Xiaoqing and a few other classmates. We stuck close to Guoqing, who often hankered for candy and olives. He was a generous boy, sharing with us the same pleasures that he allowed himself. He squandered his limited fortune as recklessly as a rich man's son, and on our way to school every morning we secretly looked forward to his big spending. The result was that by the second half of that month Guoqing was flat broke, and he was forced to depend on our charity to stave off hunger. But none of us could throw money around as freely as he, and we began to pilfer things from our homes: a handful of steamed rice, a piece of fish, a chunk of meat, some bits of vegetable, wrapped up in dirty paper and presented to him. Guoqing would open up the packages and spread them out on his knee, then eat their contents with gusto. He would smack his lips so loudly that even we who had already had a full meal found our mouths watering. This situation did not last very long, for soon our teacher, Zhang Qinghai the knitter, made himself responsible for managing Guoqing's living expenses and gave him only fifty cents a month as pocket money. That still left him the most affluent of any of us.

After his abandonment Guoqing gradually got used to handling his own affairs. But he never truly reconciled himself to his father's departure, and he did not follow his father's lead and repudiate him in turn. On the contrary, his father continued to exert control over his thinking. Our teacher tended to forget about the change in Guoqing's circumstances, and he would still sometimes threaten to inform Guoqing's father as a way of cowing him into submission whenever he did something out of line. It seemed never to occur to Guoqing that he was now free as a bird, that his anxiety was quite unnecessary. In his mind his father seemed still to be always watching him, and he was naive enough to be unsettled by the possibility that the man might appear in front of him at any moment. In fact, if his father did show up, it was only in a chance encounter. The man's standoffish attitude demonstrated that he had no plans at all to drop in on Guoqing.

I remember that the three of us were once standing on the side of the road, throwing pebbles at the streetlamps. It was Guoqing's idea, but we were all gung-ho, each hoping we would be the one to smash a light. When an adult came over to intervene, Liu Xiaoqing and I took to our heels, but Guoqing didn't budge an inch. He stood his ground and said defiantly, “Hey, it's not your light.”

Just at that moment Guoqing's father appeared. Guoqing's nerve failed him; he went over, quaking, and called, “Hi, Dad.”

He tried to clear himself of any suspicion of wrongdoing, insisting that he wasn't involved, and he even went so far as to defect completely from our camp, pointing at Liu Xiaoqing and me and saying, “They're the ones doing it.”

But Guoqing's father said heatedly, “Who are you calling Dad?”

For him to forgo the right to punish his son was a much bigger blow to Guoqing than his refusal to look after him. How pitiful Guoqing now looked: when he crossed the street we saw that he had bitten his lip in a desperate effort to hold back the tears that were all ready to flow.

Even after this he still insisted that he would wake up one morning and find his father at his bedside. Once he told me with great conviction that when his father got ill he would “come and find me.” He asked me to confirm that his father sought his help whenever he was ill; again and again he would say, “You saw that, right? You saw it.” He no longer dipped into his little cardboard box, and even if he had a bad cough he wouldn't open one of his vials. Somehow he believed that as long as there was medicine in the pillboxes sooner or later his father would return.

Now when he talked about his mother, the past, though still remote, no longer seemed so hazy. He often used the expression “in those days”: in those days, when his mother was alive, how good things were. He never gave us specifics of his happy life then, but heaved plenty of wistful sighs, making us wildly envious of “those days.” He began to conjure up images of his mother; the imagination of this boy of nine was not focused on the future, but was connected — unusually for someone so young — to the past.

When we were small, we were fascinated by the horse on packs of Flying Horse cigarettes. The flatlands where we lived were traversed only by cows; the few sheep we glimpsed were always shut up inside pens. There were pigs, of course, but they left us cold. It was the white flying horses that we adored, for none of us had ever seen a horse. Later an army detachment came to Littlemarsh, and a horse-drawn carriage cut through the town in the early hours and rolled onto the high school grounds.

At the end of school that morning the three of us dashed toward the high school, waving our satchels. Guoqing ran ahead, spreading his arms wide like a huge bird. But it soon became apparent that I had misinterpreted his gesture, for he cried, “Hey, I'm a flying horse!” As Liu Xiaoqing and I ran behind, we followed his lead excitedly.

We were now a trio of flying horses, neighing with spirit and flying over the department store, the theater, and the hospital. But after sailing over this last building Guoqing let his arms drop to his sides, as though he had been shot; his ride was cut short. Looking miserable, he headed back in the direction from which we had come, hugging the wall. He did not say a word to us, and as we had no clue what had happened we chased after him seeking an explanation. But he just kept going, and when we tried to stop him he angrily pushed us aside and said with a sob, “Leave me alone.”

Liu Xiaoqing and I looked at each other and watched in astonishment as he walked off into the distance. Then we put him out of our minds altogether. Liu Xiaoqing and I flapped our arms and set off at a gallop once more, intent on seeing the flying horses.

What we found in the little grove next to the high school were two chestnut horses. One was drinking water from a wooden trough while the other kept rubbing its behind on the trunk of a tree. They had no wings whatsoever and their coats were filthy. Their rank, horsey smell made us grimace. I whispered to Liu Xiaoqing, “Are those horses?”

Liu Xiaoqing went up to a young soldier and asked him timidly, “How come they don't have wings?”

“What? Wings?” The soldier waved us away impatiently. “Get out of here! Off you go.”

We hurried away while the people around us tittered. I said to Liu Xiaoqing, “There's no way these can be horses! Horses should be white, surely.”

An older boy said to us, “You're right, they're not horses.”

“What are they, then?” Liu Xiaoqing asked.

“Rats.”

Could rats be as big as that? We were shocked.

Guoqing had seen his father at the entrance to the hospital. This was why he was so upset: his final hope had come to nothing, so he was in no fit state to enjoy the flying horses.

It was the next day that Guoqing told us why he had turned around and left so suddenly. He said in anguish, “My dad is not going to come looking for me again!” Then he cried, “I saw him go into the hospital! If he doesn't come to see me when he's ill, then he'll never come at all!” Guoqing stood there under the basketball hoop, weeping loudly. Liu Xiaoqing and I angrily drove away the classmates who had begun to gather around.

Guoqing, deserted by the living, began to develop a close relationship with the old lady downstairs who had been deserted by the dead. In her black silk clothes, with wrinkles in her face as deep as waves, she gave me the willies, but Guoqing was unafraid. He spent more and more time with the lonely old lady. Sometimes I would see them walking hand in hand down the street, and Guo-qing's features, normally so animated, seemed a little glum next to her. She was depleting Guoqing of his energy, and now when I think back on my childhood friend what I see in his young face are the dim shadows of decline.

I shuddered at the thought of them sitting together in that room, the doors and windows tightly closed, and felt convinced that they were headed for a collision with the spirit world. When the old lady talked about the dead, she spoke of them with a familiarity that I found chilling, but Guoqing was clearly intrigued, and now he often spoke of his mother with Liu Xiaoqing and me, of how she would come in silently before dawn to say a few words to him and then leave without a sound. When we asked him what she said, he told us gravely that this had to remain a secret. On one occasion his mother forgot that it was time for her to go back, and the cock's crow alarmed her. In her rush she did not leave through the door but went out through the window, taking off like a bird.This final detail enhanced the authenticity of Guoqing's account, but it also left me bewildered: Guoqing's mother's jumping out the window made me anxious on her behalf, for they lived on the second floor, after all. I asked Liu Xiaoqing in a low voice, “Couldn't the fall kill her?”

His answer was, “She's dead already, so she's got no reason to worry about being killed in a fall.” This sounded right to me.

When he talked about his reunions with his mother Guoqing was so earnest, so happy even, that we could hardly discount his reports. But I found his tone of voice disturbing, for the intimacy of his encounters with the dead reminded me so much of the old lady in the black clothes.

Another thing: Guoqing claimed often to have seen a bodhi-sattva as big as a house, as golden as the sun, who would appear suddenly in the sky above, then vanish like a flash of lightning.

Late one afternoon as we sat by the riverside I challenged him on this. I rejected the notion that such things existed, and to underscore my disbelief I heaped profanities on the bodhisattva's head. Guoqing sat there quite unmoved and after a moment he said, “It must be really scary to curse the bodhisattva.”

If he hadn't said that, I wouldn't have worried, but as soon as he did all of a sudden I felt frightened. Dusk was falling, and I saw darkness spreading across the sky; so unsettled was I that my breathing became ragged.

“People who have no respect for the bodhisattva,” Guoqing went on, “get punished.”

In a quaking voice I asked, “How are they punished?”

Guoqing thought for a moment and said, “Grannie would know.”

I did not find this reassuring.

Guoqing said softly, “When people are scared, that's when they can see the bodhisattva.”

I opened my eyes as wide as I could and gazed intently at the ash gray sky, but saw nothing. I was practically in tears by now. I said to Guoqing, “You're not trying to pull my leg, are you?”

Guoqing then showed me what a good friend he was, with gentle words of encouragement: “Take another look.”

I opened my eyes wide once more. By now the sky was completely dark. Through a combination of fear and zeal, I finally did see the bodhisattva, but I'm not sure if I really saw him or just imagined it. At any rate I did glimpse a bodhisattva as big as a house and as golden as the sun, though he disappeared in a flash.

The old lady, so close to the dead and so unconstrained in relaying their affairs, at the same time could not avoid contact with reality (for which she felt little affinity), because her life, much to her annoyance, showed no signs of ending. While she pacified Guoqing by means that I found unnerving, he for his part shielded her from the real world.

Her greatest source of anxiety was the brown dog that liked to sprawl in the middle of the alley. When she had no choice but to go out to buy rice or salt or pick up some soy sauce, the dog struck much greater terror into her heart than she had ever managed to instill in mine. Actually this ugly, unloved old dog barked at absolutely everyone, but she somehow got it into her head that she was its only enemy. As soon as the dog saw her it would put on a show of great ferocity, barking madly and threatening to leap at her, when in fact it was just jumping about in place. At moments like this the dead people on her wall were powerless to help her, and I saw her reduced to a quivering wreck. As she retreated headlong, her bound feet acquired an unexpected flexibility and her body swung from side to side like a fan in motion. This was before Guoqing's father moved out, and the three of us burst out laughing at the sight of her overreaction. As I walked to Guoqing's house that day, I had no need to fear her half face behind the door, for she was too busy crying to monitor our arrival. We glued our eyes to the door, admiring through the crack how she dried her tears with the hem of her jacket.

Later, through their common interest in the dead, she developed a special understanding with Guoqing and ended up benefiting from his protection. By having him accompany her every time she left the house, she relieved herself of a great deal of stress. When the brown dog barked and tried to block their passage, Guoqing would bend down and pretend to pick up a stone, and the dog would turn tail and dash off. As they proceeded on their way, the old lady would look at Guoqing adoringly and he would say to her with pride, “Even a dog meaner than that one would be afraid of me.”

So acute was her phobia that she would kneel down daily in front of her clay Guanyin, piously begging the bodhisattva to bless the dog with a good long life. Every time Guoqing came home from school, the first question she would ask would be whether the dog was still outside. If he said yes, she would smile with pleasure, for her biggest fear was that the brown dog might die before her. She told Guoqing that it was a very long way to the underworld, and dark and cold to boot; she would need to wear a padded jacket and carry an oil lamp. If the dog died before she did it would wait for her on the way to the underworld. When she got to this point, she would tense up and shake all over. With tears welling up in her eyes, she would say, “You won't be able to help me then!”

This lonely old woman possessed the earnestness and obduracy that were hallmarks of the era. She had been using the same oil bottle for decades, its capacity marked with a line on the outside of the glass. She did not trust the shop assistants, for she said they were always looking somewhere else when they were refilling the bottle. If the clerk overfilled the bottle, she would not be the slightest bit pleased, but would pour some oil out with annoyance. If the clerk failed to fill the bottle all the way up to the mark, then she would not leave until they did. She would stand there for ages, not saying a word, just staring obstinately at the bottle.

It seemed that her husband had gone to his last resting place many years earlier. He had been a strong man, with a strange fondness for snails. He liked to sit in the courtyard in the summer, waving his fan and feasting merrily on snails. During her long widowhood her finest tribute to his memory was not the maintenance of her chastity but rather her punctilious tribute to this predilection of his. When he was alive he claimed all the flesh in the shell, and she happily consumed the unappetizing little muscle at the base. In the several decades since her husband's death she had never once helped herself to snail meat, but contentedly ate the remainders, leaving the flesh to the husband hanging on the wall. For her, habit and remembrance were fused into one.

Guoqing did not like snails, but the old lady would suck them out of their shells with a slurp and lick the juice off her lips afterward, and the more this carried on the more trouble Guoqing had keeping his mouth from watering. His appetite stirring, he tried picking up a piece of snail meat from the table, but the old lady was shocked. She quickly slapped it out of his hand and said menacingly into his ear, “He saw that.”

It was true, in a sense: the dead man on the wall was watching them.

In the spring of the year that I turned twelve, the old lady at last was granted an unbroken slumber. She died in the street outside her house. She and Guoqing had gone out to buy soy sauce, and on her way home her legs seized up. She said she needed to rest a minute, and put her hand against the wall and sat down limply in the sun, clutching the soy sauce bottle to her chest. Guoqing stood next to her, and when she closed her eyes he thought she had fallen asleep. Bored, he looked around for distraction and noticed that grass was sprouting up next to the wall. The bright sun made him squint. At one point the old lady opened her eyes and in a faint voice inquired as to the dog's whereabouts. He saw it lying prone in the middle of the lane, observing them, so he said, “It's right over there.” She gave a deep sigh and closed her eyes again. Guoqing stood for awhile longer, watching with enjoyment as the sunlight played over the wrinkles on her face.

Guoqing told us later that she had lost her way and froze to death. According to him, she had been in too much of a hurry when going to the underworld, and had forgotten the padded jacket and oil lamp. She kept walking and walking along a road so dark you could not see the fingers of your hand, so she lost her way. A cold wind howled in her face, chilling her till she was shivering all over, and when she could not go another inch farther she sat down. That was how she froze.

When he was thirteen, Guoqing finally achieved a degree of personal liberation. He did not want to have to carry his satchel to school and put up with the teacher's endless dronings. When Liu Xiaoqing and the other classmates entered high school, he began to make a living.

By that time I was back in Southgate. As my wretched life at home began, Guoqing was fending for himself, working as a coal deliveryman. Like a real coolie, with a dirty towel hanging from his shoulder pole, his shirt open, grunting with effort, he would carry coal to the doors of his customers. Of his former habits, only the handkerchief in his pocket survived. When he set down a heavy load of coal, the first thing he did was to pull out the handkerchief and swab his lips. Even if sweat was pouring down his face, he just wiped his mouth. A little notebook and a pencil also took up space in his pocket. In his crisp voice, with naive courtesy, he would go from door to door asking if they needed coal. At first his age did not inspire confidence, and scanning his puny frame people would ask, “Can you carry coal?”

A canny smile would appear on Guoqing's face, and he would say, “If you don't let me try, how will you know?”

With his honesty and his careful arithmetic, it did not take long for Guoqing to win the trust of his customers. So vigilant was Guoqing that the shipper at the coal depot found it impossible to take advantage of him when weighing his consignment. In the end, Guoqing's innocent-looking appearance and his tragic circumstances (common knowledge to everyone) led the shipper to develop a soft spot for him, so he always slipped him a few extra pounds of coal. Of course it was the customers who reaped the greatest benefits, and their satisfaction in turn made Guoqing's career blossom. He practically put that rival of his out of business, despite his twenty years of experience in the trade.

I vividly recall Guoqing's fellow professional, for the simple reason that this little man was practically an idiot. Nobody knew what his name was, and he would answer to any name he was called. If he was walking by briskly with a load of coal on his back, he would not respond to our shouts; it was only when he was walking just as quickly, but with empty baskets hanging from his pole, that he would register our greetings earnestly, his head bowed, as we called him by any name we chose. I would call him “Guoqing” or “Liu Xiaoqing,” while they would address him by my name. Off he would go, giving a grunt of acknowledgment, and he never raised his head to look at us. He was always rushing down the street as though he had a train to catch. Once we called him “Toilet” and he answered to that too, reducing us to paroxysms of laughter. Though cavalier about his name, he was meticulous where money was concerned. And his speed in making calculations was astounding: as his customers were just beginning laboriously to compute how much money they owed him, the total was already on his lips. Those figures were the only words that Little-marsh residents ever heard him speak.

Guoqing made fun of him just like the rest of us, never imagining that he himself would wind up in the same line of work. Guoqing's entry into the trade knocked a big hole in the man's rice bowl, and he became less busy than before. This unfortunate fellow began to spend more time carrying empty baskets — still hurrying down the street, but looking more lonesome now that he was less in demand. He seemed not to be the slightest bit jealous of Guoqing, and I suspect he simply lacked the capacity to be so. Devoted to his job, he seldom let a smile appear on his face. After dumping coal into his customer's basket, he would take their broom and dustpan and scrupulously sweep up any coal slack that had fallen on the floor. Then he would lift up his empty pole and walk off, looking very solemn. But once when he saw Guoqing in the street, shouldering a pole identical to his own, he did break into a smile.

Nobody knew how these two became friends, but people began to notice how they would sit, still caked in coal dust, on the opposite sides of a table in the teahouse, drinking tea with smiles on their faces. The man of a million names — or of no name at all— sat like a servant, with both hands resting on his thighs, raising a hand only to lift his teacup to his lips. Guoqing cut a very different figure: he laid a handkerchief next to his cup, and would wipe his lips after every sip. In his tattered and dirty clothes Guoqing looked every inch the young gentleman down on his luck. Although they appeared to all the world like bosom pals, nobody had ever heard them have a conversation.

Not long after finding a career Guoqing found love as well. The girl that he fancied may have grown into quite a beauty later, but in those days it was too early to tell. I used to see the girl— Huilan, her name was — before I moved back to Southgate, and at the time Guoqing seemed to think her beneath his notice. Her house was down the same lane where Guoqing lived. Her hair tied into two perky pigtails, she liked to stand in the doorway, calling sweetly, “Brother Guoqing!”

The grapes that grew in her courtyard excited us to no end. One summer Guoqing, Liu Xiaoqing, and I developed an intricate scheme for stripping all the fruit from the vines under cover of darkness. Unfortunately their wall was too high for us to scale. That, however, was not the real reason we could not follow through; instead, it was the fact that none of us could leave our homes at night without the grown-ups knowing (this was before Guoqing's father had left him). When we thought of the fearful punishments lying in store for us, our plan, however sophisticated, remained only a fantasy.

As a result, when Guoqing ended up falling for this chit of a girl, Liu Xiaoqing, now in junior high, thought that he still had his eye on the grapes. He was so tactless as to ask Guoqing, “Shall we bring a few more people into it?” He told Guoqing that he could rope in some classmates from junior high and get hold of a ladder too.

Guoqing was furious. He said to Liu Xiaoqing, “How can you think of stealing my fiancee's grapes?”

Actually the seeds of their romance were sown before my return to Southgate. Now that there was nobody to oversee his activities, Guoqing liked to roam around at will during summer lunchtimes, barefooted, just wearing a pair of underpants. Huilan, two years his junior, joined Guoqing, and together they sneaked out to the countryside, where the two of them practiced skinny-dipping in a pond. Young though she was, Huilan already had an impulse to watch out for Guoqing's well-being. As they headed down the road out of town that day, the flagstones had been baking in the sun till they were scorching hot, and Guoqing could only hop desperately from foot to foot, like a frog. Huilan couldn't bear to see Guoqing suffering this way and took off her own little plastic sandals to offer to him. Guoqing was not yet aware of the importance of being nice to girls. He waved his hand in dismissal and said scornfully, “Who wants to wear girl's shoes?”

When at thirteen he came to court Huilan, Guoqing possessed the style of a more mature young man. Every afternoon Guoqing changed into a clean set of clothes and combed his hair so that it shone; then he waited outside the school gate at the hour that Huilan got out of class. This was the best possible reward he could give himself after a day of exhausting labor. The next thing one saw was Guoqing walking confidently in front with his hands in his pockets, while Huilan, her satchel on her back, trotted along behind.

At such times Huilan would pour out her woes, such as they were, telling him how such and such a boy had put a pinch of dirt in her textbook.

“Dirt? That's nothing.” Guoqing waved his hand airily, like an adult, and told his little sweetheart with pride, “I once put a toad in a girl's satchel.”

Their childish conversation made their romance seem innocent and artless. It was often only when they parted that Guoqing would take a piece of candy from his pocket — placed there carefully earlier in the day — and stuff it into Huilan's happy satchel.

From the look of it, Guoqing really did intend to marry Huilan and start a family; otherwise he would not have treated their relationship as seriously as he did. He was always trying to compensate for his still tender years, with the result that his gravity and earnestness took on comical proportions. Once these two children started going around together in the streets in such a public fashion, they gradually became famous in our little town. Guoqing misjudged grown-ups’ perspective on their relationship. Believing the bond between them to be entirely natural, he thought that other people likewise would take it in their stride.

Huilan's parents were both pharmacists at the hospital. Although they had been aware from early on that their daughter and Guoqing were playmates, they felt that there was nothing untoward about children being close. When other people said that the two children looked as if they were in love, they found this suggestion preposterous. Later it was Guoqing's behavior which made them realize that such reports were well founded.

One Sunday morning, when Guoqing was still thirteen, he bought a bottle of spirits and a carton of cigarettes, inspired by a strange fancy to pay a call on his father-in-law. I have to take my hat off to him for the nonchalance with which he entered the house. When he set the gifts down on the table, he beamed deferentially. Huilan's father, of course, was taken aback and asked Guoqing what this was all about.

“These are for you,” Guoqing said.

The pharmacist waved his hand in polite decline. “You have such a hard life. How could I possibly accept gifts?”

Guoqing had already sat down in a chair. He crossed his legs, but they were too short for his feet to touch the floor and dangled in the air instead. He said to Huilan's parents, “Please don't be so formal. These things are just a little token of respect from your son-in-law.”

This last sentence came as a great shock. It took a few moments before Huilan's mother recovered enough to ask, “What did you say?”

“Mother-in-law.” Guoqing addressed her in a dulcet tone and went on, “What I mean is—”

She did not wait for him to finish and was already screaming, “Who are you calling mother-in-law?”

Guoqing had no time to explain; the girl's father was now bellowing at him to leave their house immediately. Guoqing stood up, flustered, and tried to defend himself, using the formula so commonly recited by progressive couples: “We made this choice for ourselves.”

Huilan's father was so furious his face went completely pale. Seizing Guoqing by his collar, he dragged him out and cursed him roundly. “You little hoodlum!”

Guoqing struggled desperately, repeating another mantra, “This is the new society, not the old one!”

Huilan s father shoved Guoqing out the door and a second later her mother tossed the gifts out after him. The bottle of spirits hit the ground with a crash and spilled everywhere. By this time quite a crowd had gathered outside, but Guoqing did not seem to feel that he had been at all disgraced. Pointing at Huilan's house, he told the onlookers with feeling, “Gosh, her folks have a really bad case of feudal thinking!”

Huilans parents saw their innocent love as simply ridiculous. How could a thirteen-year-old boy and an eleven-year-old girl be engaged in a serious romance? Their daughter's conduct was an offense to public decency, and now they too had become a laughingstock. They could not tolerate this absurd liaison. They began to beat and scold their only daughter, and when Guoqing passed by their window and heard his sweetheart wailing, it is easy to imagine how upset he was. Huilan wilted under all the chastisement, but could not suppress her longing for those joyful moments with Guoqing, though I wonder if what she most hankered after was the candy in his pockets. They still had opportunities to meet, but all the pleasure was gone. Guoqing, moved now more by hate than by concern for Huilan, described to her, in a voice dripping with menace, the vengeance he was planning to exact from her parents. She listened with an expression of terror and tears tumbled from her eyes even before he had finished.

One afternoon Guoqing was passing by Huilan's house. He saw her leaning up against the window, her face dripping with blood, though actually it was just a nosebleed. Sobbing, she called to him, “Brother Guoqing!”

Guoqing was so angry he started shaking. At that moment he truly wanted to kill Huilan's parents. He ran home and then set off again for Huilan's house, this time with a kitchen cleaver in hand. A neighbor just happened to be coming out his door, and seeing Guoqing so strangely accoutered he asked him what he was doing. Seething with rage, Guoqing answered, “I've got some killing to do.”

Guoqing had rolled up his sleeves and his trouser legs. With the cleaver resting snugly against his shoulder, he headed toward Huilan's house, a fierce glint in his eyes. His passage along the lane was completely unimpeded, because none of the adults who saw him took the full measure of his grim belligerence. When he told them he was off to kill people, his juvenile tone and callow manner made them chuckle.

Guoqing entered the courtyard of Huilan's house without difficulty. Huilan's father was busy lighting their coal briquette stove; her mother was squatting on the ground feeding the hens. When Guoqing suddenly appeared on the scene, cleaver in hand, they were dumbstruck. Guoqing did not immediately proceed toward his goal, but first pompously explained why he had to kill them. Then he moved forward, brandishing his cleaver. Huilan's father took to his heels, scurrying behind the house, where he yelled, “Help! Murder!”

Huilan's poor mother was frozen in her tracks and watched in horror as the cleaver approached. The chickens rescued her, for although most of these terrified creatures fled in all directions, two of them spread their wings and ran in front of Guoqing. This gave Huilan's mother time to recover her wits and flee out the courtyard gate.

Just as he was about to give chase, Guoqing noticed Huilan, who stood with her hand on the door frame, her eyes wide with alarm. Forgetting about pursuit, Guoqing hurried over to her, but it displeased him to find that she was shrinking back in fear. “What are you so afraid of? I'm not going to kill you\” he said.

His reassurance had no effect. She still looked at him in terror, her eyes so wide they almost looked artificial. Guoqing said heatedly, “If I knew this was how you were going to behave, I wouldn't have gone this far!”

By this time both entrances to the courtyard had been blocked by spectators, and before long police were on the scene. The news that a boy was bent on slaughter had spread through the town like wildfire; people came swarming from all directions. The first policeman to arrive stepped into the yard and said to Guoqing, “Put the cleaver down!”

It was Guoqing's turn to be petrified. He was already alarmed by all the noise outside, and the sight of the policeman made him grab Huilan and put the cleaver to her throat, yelling shrilly, “Don't you dare come in! I'll kill her if you do.”

No sooner had the policeman issued his order than he found himself forced to retreat. Huilan, silent until now, burst out crying. Guoqing said to her fretfully, “I'm not going to kill you, I'm not going to kill you! I just said that to fool them.”

But Huilan went on wailing as before. Guoqing said peevishly, “Stop crying! I'm doing this for you, you know.” His face bathed in sweat, he looked around. “Now it's too late to run away.”

Meanwhile, outside among the milling crowd, Huilan's distraught mother was reproaching her husband for being so selfish, fleeing for his life without the slightest thought for his wife's safety. Her husband, listening to Huilan's wails on the other side of the wall, said to her with tears in his eyes, “This is no time to talk about that when your daughter's life is hanging by a thread.”

Just at this moment a policeman took a good grip on the eaves and in a single fluid movement sprang onto the roof. He planned to creep up behind Guoqing and jump down on top of him. This man enjoyed quite a reputation in Littlemarsh, for once he had succeeded in dealing single-handedly with five hoodlums, tying them up with their own shoelaces and marching them off to the Public Security Bureau like so many crabs hung from a string. The panache with which he leapt onto the roof won the appreciation of the assembled onlookers. He ducked down low and was making his way in catlike silence toward the other side of the building when he unfortunately slipped on a couple of loose tiles and tumbled off the roof, landing first on the grapevine trellis— the people outside heard a chaotic snapping of bamboo canes— before plunging down onto the concrete. Had the trellis not broken his fall, he might well have ended up a paraplegic.

The sight of someone suddenly falling from the sky scared Guoqing so much that he shouted again, “Get out, get out, or I'll kill her!”

The policeman pulled himself to his feet and said feebly, “All right, I'm going, see?”

The standoff lasted until the early evening, when a tall policeman came up with the solution. He changed into plain-clothes and went in through the back gate. When Guoqing screamed at him to get out, he put on a friendly smile and asked in a gentle voice, “What are you trying to do?”

Guoqing wiped the sweat on his forehead and said, “I've got some killing to do.”

“But it shouldn't be her that you're killing,” the policeman said softly, indicating Huilan. Then he pointed outside the courtyard. “It's her parents you should be killing.”

Guoqing could not help but nod. He was beginning to fall for the policeman's line.

The policeman asked, “Can a little boy like you kill two grown-ups?”

“I sure can!” Guoqing said.

The policeman nodded and said, “I believe you. But there are lots of other people outside, and they're going to protect the people you want to kill.”

Seeing that Guoqing was looking unsure of himself, he stretched out his hand and said, “I'll help you kill them, how would that be?”

His tone was so friendly. Finally somebody was offering to help. Guoqing was now completely under his spell, and when the policeman extended a hand Guoqing instinctively passed him the cleaver. The man tossed it aside at once. But Guoqing failed to notice this, for after feeling so misused and so afraid at last he had found support, and he threw himself into the man's arms and burst into tears. The policeman seized him by the collar and shoved him — almost carried him — out the gate. Guoqing tried desperately to raise his head as the tall officer propelled him forward and the crowd parted to let them pass. Even now the fact of his bloodless surrender had not quite sunk in. The policeman tugged so hard on the back of his collar that Guoqing was practically throttled by his top button, and as he gasped for air his sobs turned into a succession of uneven whimpers.

SMEAR

Our teacher was soft-spoken but intimidating. With his glasses he somewhat resembled Su Yu's father, whom I was to meet later. He always looked at us with a smiling face, but he meted out harsh punishments at the drop of a hat.

His wife, it seemed, sold bean curd in a small market town in the countryside. This young woman would visit the school in the first few days of each month, wearing a floral-patterned outfit, sometimes with two brightly dressed little girls in tow. She had a funny habit of scratching her behind. But we all thought she was very pretty, and in her hometown, we heard, she was known as the Tofu Belle. Our teacher would wear a frown every time she came to stay, because he had to surrender to her the wages he had just been given, only a small portion of which she would return to him. At such moments she would admonish him in a sharp voice: “What are you scowling about? You're happy enough to see me in the evening, when you need me, but when I ask for money you look as though you're about to cry.”

At first we couldn't work out why the teacher would smile so much in the evening. We gave his wife the nickname Imperial Army, because she made us think of the Japanese devils and their campaigns of loot and pillage: every month she would sweep in and clean out his money pouch.

I cannot remember now who came up with this name. But I'll never forget the time when Guoqing, then a second grader, ran into the classroom with a droll expression on his face. He tapped loudly on the dais with the blackboard eraser and solemnly announced that the teacher would be a little delayed, because “The Imperial Army is back …”

Guoqing was a real daredevil on that occasion, for he had the impudence to go on: “… escorted by the Chinese collaborator.”

Guoqing had to pay for being a smart aleck. There must have been at least twenty classmates who reported him at the same time. When our teacher took his place on the dais, his face was livid, and Guoqing was so frightened he was sweating mightily. I too had my heart in my mouth, not knowing how the teacher would punish him; even the classmates who had ratted on Guoqing now felt uneasy. Given our age at the time we quailed at the prospect of punishment, even if it was inflicted on children other than ourselves.

This angry expression stayed on the teacher's face for a good minute, and then suddenly he was all smiles. There was something eerie about the way his manner changed. In a velvety tone he said to Guoqing, “I'm going to punish you.” Then, turning to the rest of us, he said, “Now we'll start the lesson.”

Throughout the whole period Guoqing's face was pale as he awaited with foreboding and a kind of perverse longing the teacher's retribution. But when class was over the teacher picked up his notes and left the room without even looking at him. I don't know how Guoqing managed to get through the day. He remained glued to his seat, watching us timidly like a new kid in class. He was no longer the same boy who loved to race around in the playground, but more like a skittish kitten. Several times his mouth twisted unnaturally as though he were about to burst into tears. Only when school finished for the day and he was completely outside the school gate did he dash about like a panther kept too long in captivity. We now felt that nothing was going to happen after all and confidently assured him that the teacher must have forgotten about it. Besides, the Imperial Army was still here, and the teacher was bound to have a smile on his face again tonight.

But when school began the following morning the first thing that the teacher did was to tell Guoqing to stand up. Then he asked him, “How do you think I should punish you?”

Guoqing had forgotten all about it, and his whole body trembled. He looked at the teacher fearfully and shook his head.

“You can sit down now,” the teacher said, “and think it over.”

When the teacher said to think it over, he was really telling him to not forget to torture himself. For Guoqing the next month was sheer hell. If he ever forgot about the punishment and looked his cheerful old self, the teacher would appear out of nowhere and quietly remind him, “I have yet to punish you.”

This threatened but never-imposed sentence left Guoqing on tenterhooks every day. All it took was for the poor boy to hear the teacher s voice and he would quiver like leaves in a wind. Only when he went home after school did he feel more or less secure, but the feeling of apprehension would return on his way to class the next day. This life of anxiety did not really end until his father abandoned him, when it was superseded by far greater misery.

At that point, out of compassion perhaps, the teacher not only discontinued his intimidation of Guoqing but actually went out of his way to commend his achievements. Guoqing would get a perfect score for an essay even if he had written a couple of characters wrong, whereas I would get only ninety points for an essay with no mistakes at all. During the days before Guoqing's uncles and aunts arrived our teacher took him to see his father. In his kindly tone the teacher sang Guoqing's praises: such a respectful, intelligent boy, he reiterated — why, he was a favorite with every teacher in the school. After listening to these words, Guoqing's father said coldly, “If you're so fond of him, maybe you should adopt him as your own son.”

Our teacher had an answer to that. Smiling broadly, he said, “Actually, I was thinking of adopting him as my grandson.”

Until I myself was earmarked for punishment, I held our teacher in warm regard. When I went to school that very first time with Wang Liqiang, I was taken aback by the sight of him knitting, for I had never seen a man with a ball of wool in his hands. Only when Wang Liqiang brought me before him and told me to greet him as Teacher Zhang did I realize that this odd character was going to be my teacher. He seemed affable and considerate. I remember he put his hand on my shoulder and said something that I took as a compliment: “I'll make sure that you get a nice seat.”

He was as good as his word, assigning me a place in the middle of the front row. Apart from times when he needed to go to the back of the dais to write on the blackboard, the rest of the class period he was standing right in front of me. He would lay his notes down, rest both hands on my desk, and lecture away, ejecting saliva with the force of his delivery. As I listened, my upraised face was fully exposed to his spit, as though I was taking notes in a drizzle. When he noticed that my face was flecked with saliva, he would stretch out a chalky hand to wipe it away, and by the end of class my face was often stained in gaudy colors, like a cotton print.

The first time I was punished by him it was about halfway through third grade. A big snowfall that winter gave us schoolchildren an opportunity to engage in a wild exchange of snowballs in the playground. Woe befell me when one of my snowballs, aimed at Liu Xiaoqing, accidentally hit the head of a girl classmate, whose name I no longer remember. This girl wailed as loud as if I had made her an indecent proposal. She complained to the teacher.

He called me up from my seat, where I had just sat down, and told me to go outside and make a snowball. I thought he was mocking me and just stood there, not daring to move. He continued to teach the class, seemingly having forgotten about me, and it was a few moments before he said to me in surprise, “Why are you still here?”

I left the classroom and went to make a snowball. When I returned to the classroom, the teacher was reading aloud a story from the textbook about the selfless courage of Ouyang Hai. It was a spirited recitation, sweeping high and dipping low like a road through the mountains, and I stood by the door, not daring to interrupt. At last he finished reading a long section of the story and walked toward the blackboard, but to my dismay he still did not pay me the slightest attention. It was disconcerting to find that he had forgotten about me, and as he wrote on the board I said to him timidly, “Sir, I made the snowball.”

He shot me a glance and gave a grunt of acknowledgment, then continued to write. Finally he tossed the chalk into the box and turned to the girl. He told her to check to see if the snowball in my hand was as big as the one that had hit her. She, of course, had never seen the snowball, because it hit her on the back of the head and immediately disintegrated. Though some time had passed since she had been upset by the incident, she began to cry pitifully as soon as she arrived next to me, saying, “It was bigger than this one.”

So I was ordered out of the classroom by the teacher once more, to make a bigger snowball. When I came in holding a jumbo-size snowball in my hands, he did not ask the girl to once again certify that it had the correct dimensions. He walked around the classroom a couple of times and formally announced my punishment: I was to stand there and could not return to my seat until the snowball had melted.

That winter morning a north wind howled through the broken windows of the classroom while the teacher, his hands in his sleeves, recounted in the cold the story of heroic Ouyang Hai. I stood by the door, clutching my icy snowball. Gradually I felt a peculiar scorching sensation in my hands, as painful as if they were being sawn off. But I had to be careful not to let the snowball fall from my grasp.

The teacher came up to me at one point and said to me solicitously, “If you hold it a bit tighter, it will melt more quickly.”

The snow had not melted much by the time the class ended. After the teacher picked up his notes and slipped past me, my classmates gathered round. Their speculation about how long it would take for the snowball to melt simply intensified my distress, and I felt so misused I almost cried. Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing marched over to the girl's desk in a rage, cursing her as a snitch and flunky. The poor girl collapsed in a flood of tears, and after putting her satchel in order she stood up and headed out the door, saying she was going to report them to the teacher. It had not occurred to Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing that she would resort to this same tactic a second time; they rushed to restrain her, apologizing and begging forgiveness. By this point, my hands had gone completely numb— as hard as icicles — and the snowball fell from my lifeless fingers to the floor, where it broke up into slush. I was so horrified that I burst into slushy tears of my own, at the same time begging the classmates around me to bear witness: “I didn't do it on purpose! You saw what happened — I didn't do it on purpose!”

Our teacher's authority was not founded on correct judgments, but on draconian punishments that followed in the wake of the judgments that he did make. He was altogether too arbitrary in his decisions about right or wrong, and for that very reason his punishments would arrive suddenly and unpredictably. During my four years at the Littlemarsh elementary school he never once repeated a punishment. Because of his exceptional creativity in this area we were reduced to nervous wrecks at the very sight of him.

On one occasion a dozen of us were throwing a ball around in the playground, and by accident we broke a window in the classroom. In this case the penalty he imposed was light, but because I had not expected to be punished I performed a feeble act of resistance.

I still remember the look of misery on the face of the boy who broke the window. Even before the teacher stepped into the room he was already in despair, visualizing the awful punishment that awaited him. Then the teacher came in and stood beaming on the dais — I suspect that he was overjoyed every time there was an opportunity to punish a pupil. But as always he came out with a ruling that was not at all what we anticipated: he did not punish the guilty classmate directly but told all of us who had been playing ball to raise our hands. Then he said to us, “Each one of you is to write a self-criticism.”

Although this decree was perfectly in keeping with his trademark style, at the time I was really shocked. I felt that I had done nothing wrong, so why should I have to write a self-criticism? The voice of resistance stirred in my heart: I would simply refuse to do it. For the first time in my life I would defy an adult — defy moreover, the teacher who made every schoolchild quake in his boots.

I did my best to steady my nerves, though actually I was very unsure of myself. After class I tried to incite the other classmates affected to resist the teacher as well. They expressed their dissatisfaction just as heatedly as me, but they hemmed and hawed when it came to refusing to write the self-criticism. Guoqing shrugged it off, saying to me, “It doesn't matter if we write a self-criticism now, because there is no dossier on us yet. Its when you start working that you can't afford to write one, because then it goes into your file.”

I was on my own, clearly, but I took the plunge anyway. Loudly I declared that I would not write a self-criticism, no matter what. My classmates looked at me in wonder. My voice shook, and I felt that I, a ten-year-old, had truth on my side. Yes, I was right. The teacher had said so himself, that it's impossible not to have weaknesses. “The teacher sometimes can be wrong ”—that was what I told them.

I spent the whole day full of myself; here I was, just a child, but already I could recognize the defects of grown-ups! I imagined the following scene: the teacher and I would engage in a debate in class, and because I had justice on my side I would speak with great eloquence and brilliant witticisms would slip effortlessly from my tongue. Even though the teacher was an able debater, he could not call on truth to support him, so of course he would lose the argument. He would make a touching admission to this effect and praise me with fine words. The girls would all look at me with admiration — the boys too, of course — and they would praise me as well (by that age I already knew it was a pleasure to be liked by girls). At this point my imagination had to take a rest because tears filled my eyes. I wanted to savor this blissful scene.

While my emotions ran high, our teacher was cool and collected and paid me no mind. This made me nervous and I couldn't help but challenge my own judgment: could it be that the teacher was right? I had been involved in the game, after all, and if I hadn't thrown the ball to Liu Xiaoqing, who threw it to that other boy, how could he have broken the window? I ended up worrying myself sick, and the idea of debating the teacher in class seemed preposterous.

But then my confidence revived, courtesy of Li Xiuying. When cleaning the window, I could not stop myself from asking her if it was all right for me to throw a ball on the playground. Li Xiuying said that of course I could. Then I asked her whether I was at fault if one of my classmates broke a window. Her answer was even firmer: “If somebody else broke it, what has that got to do with you?”

Vindicated at last, I was no longer afraid of my own shadow. Nobody could alter my conviction that I was right.

In the face of the teacher's continued indifference, it was not long before this newfound self-possession began to wane, and dejection set in. At first I had been so looking forward to conducting a debate with the teacher. At night I would prepare feverishly, and in the morning give myself a pep talk. But at the sound of the class bell my heart would thump. My greatest worry was that I would have stage fright and be unable to say a word when the moment came. The teacher's lack of interest only fueled my insecurity. Eventually, however, my equilibrium was restored, as I put the incident behind me and began to forget about it. The teacher might well have forgotten about it ages ago, I told myself. The Imperial Army was in town again and he would be wreathed with smiles at the end of the day.

It was as though I had simply been arguing with myself in my own mind, playing both the teacher and myself at the same time, and now at last I abandoned the game out of sheer exhaustion. I threw myself instead into playground activities, reclaiming my childhood, running and shouting without a care in the world. But then Guoqing came over to tell me that the teacher wanted to see me.

At once I was seized by anxiety, and despite the bright sunshine I gave a shiver as I headed off toward the teacher's office. The carefree shouts of Guoqing and the others sounded behind me, and I knew that the moment I had been anticipating and now dreaded had finally arrived. Although I tried desperately to retrieve the brilliant arguments that I had been rehearsing for so long, not a single one now came to mind. I could feel my lips trembling and was on the verge of bursting into tears, but I urged myself not to cry, to be brave. No doubt the teacher would scold me most harshly, and maybe he would come up with some outlandish way of punishing me, but I must not cry, because I had done nothing wrong. That's right, I had done nothing wrong — it was the teacher who was wrong. That's what I should say to him. I needed to speak slowly and not be browbeaten by a burst of rage or alarmed by a cheery grin. With these thoughts swirling in my head I entered the teacher's office, relieved that I had recovered my courage once again.

The teacher nodded to me amicably. He was talking to another teacher, a smile on his face. As I stood there, I noticed that he was fiddling with a sheaf of papers in his hand, the first of which was Liu Xiaoqing's self-criticism. While he chatted with his colleague, he slowly turned over the pages, exposing all the confessions one after another. At the bottom of the pile I saw Guo-qing's self-criticism, written in very large characters. At this point the teacher turned around and asked me genially, “What about your self-criticism?”

That was when I fell to pieces. His display of my classmates’ confessions had sapped my courage, and I said with a stutter, “I haven't… quite finished it yet.”

“When will you have it done?” His inquiry was couched in a mild tone.

I replied eagerly, “I'll have it finished very soon.”

In my last year in Littlemarsh I entered fourth grade. One Saturday afternoon I was downstairs lighting the coal briquette stove when Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing ran up and delivered a sensational piece of news: somebody had written a slogan in chalk on the wall of our classroom, calling for the ouster of our teacher. “Down with Zhang Qinghai!” it read.

They seemed unusually excited, complimenting me, saying what guts I had, how that damned Zhang Qinghai should have been overthrown long ago, what fiendish punishments we had all suffered at his hands. I found their excitement infectious. By heaping such honor on me for having written the slogan, they made me really wish I had. But I knew I should be honest, and I told them with a trace of embarrassment, “I didn't do it.”

The disappointment that I saw on their faces left me feeling bad. They seemed crushed to learn that I wasn't the fearless author, that there was no truth to Liu Xiaoqing's assertion of just a moment earlier, “You're the only one who would have the guts to do that.”

To my mind Guoqing was more daring than I was, and I said so, not at all out of modesty. Guoqing clearly accepted my tribute, because he nodded and said, “If you'd asked me to do it, I would have written it too.”

Liu Xiaoqing quickly chimed in with an identical comment, forcing me to say the same thing. I hated to disappoint them a second time.

I had walked into a trap, never thinking for one moment that Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing had come at the teacher's behest to probe into my involvement. When Monday morning came around, fool that I was, I went off to school as happy as a lark. But before I knew it I had been led into a small room, where Zhang Qinghai and a woman teacher named Lin began to question me.

Teacher Lin first of all asked me if I knew about the slogan. There in that little room, with the door shut tight, the two grownups stared at me aggressively. I nodded and said I knew.

But when she asked me how I knew, I hesitated. Could I tell them how delighted Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing had been? If they too were called in, what would they think of me? Surely they would denounce me as a traitor.

I looked at them tensely, still unaware that they suspected me. The woman teacher inquired in a sugary voice if I had come to school on Saturday afternoon or Sunday. I shook my head. I saw her give Zhang Qinghai a smile. Then, quick as a flash, she swiveled around and asked me, “So how do you know about the slogan?”

Her sudden question startled me. Zhang Qinghai, who had said nothing up to this point, asked me softly, “Why did you write the slogan?”

I was quick to defend myself. “I didn't write it.”

“Don't lie!” Teacher Lin thumped the table and went on. “You know about the slogan, and if you haven't come to school, how else could you know?”

I had no option but to reveal the role played by Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing, otherwise I had no hope of clearing myself. But they showed not the slightest interest in my explanation of how I heard the news, and Zhang Qinghai told me point-blank, “I have compared the handwriting, and there's no question that it's yours.”

He said it with such confidence. Tears spilled from my eyes. I shook my head in desperation, pleading with them to believe me. By this time they were both sitting, and now they simply exchanged glances, paying no attention to my defense. My weeping was a magnet for my classmates, who clustered at the window to watch me cry — though the disgrace was the least of my problems. The woman teacher got up to drive them away and closed the window. First they had closed the door and now the window was closed too. Zhang Qinghai asked me, “Did you or did you not say that if you'd been asked, you would have written it?”

I looked at him, appalled. I had no idea how he knew this. Could he have eavesdropped on our Saturday-afternoon conversation?

The bell rang for the start of class, giving me a temporary respite. They told me to stand there and not move an inch while they went to teach their classes. After they left I stood alone in the small room; although there were chairs right next to me, I dared not sit down. There was a bottle of red ink on a desk, and I really wanted to pick it up and have a closer look at it, but they had said I was not to budge. All I could do was to look out the window at the playground. Children from higher grades lined up and then broke up into groups, to play ball or jump rope. Physical education was my favorite class. From the classroom opposite I could hear the faint sound of children reading aloud. I wished so much that I could be in among them, but I could only stand here in dishonor. Two older boys tapped on the window and I heard them calling, “Hey, why were you crying just now?”

More tears came, and I sobbed miserably. On the other side of the window they had a big laugh.

After the bell for the end of class I saw Zhang Qinghai leading Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing over. I wondered how they had come into the picture and thought it must have been because I had implicated them. They saw me through the window, and their eyes rested on me for just a second before turning away in scorn.

I was devastated by what happened next. Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing informed against me, testifying that on Saturday afternoon I had said, “If you'd asked me, I would have written it.” Teacher Lin pointed a finger in my direction as she turned to Zhang Qinghai and said, “If this is the way he thinks, then he's certainly up to writing that slogan.”

“But they said the same thing!” I protested.

Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing quickly put this in context for the teachers: “We said that only to draw him out.”

I looked at them in despair while they glared at me. The teachers told them to leave.

What a harrowing morning that was. The two grown-ups took turns attacking me, but I stuck to my story as the tears streamed down my face. They managed to cow me by yelling all of a sudden or banging the table impatiently, and there were several moments when I was so frightened that I trembled all over and could not say a word. Teacher Lin used every threat in the book, short of vowing to shoot me. In the end, she turned gentle and told me patiently that the Public Security Bureau had an apparatus used to analyse handwriting, and just a short test could establish that the writing in the slogan was identical to that in my homework notebook. This was the only ray of hope that came my way the whole morning, but at the same time I was worried that the device might make a mistake, so I asked her, “Could it get things wrong?”

“Impossible.” She shook her head emphatically.

This was an enormous relief, and I said to them happily, “Then hurry up and do the test.”

But they remained fixed in their chairs, looking at each other for quite some time. Finally Zhang Qinghai said, “You may go home for now.”

The bell for the end of the session had already rung by then, and finally I could leave the little room. Though I had temporarily regained my freedom, I was still confused about everything that had happened. Somehow, in my dazed state, I managed to make my way to the school gate, and there I spotted Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing. Tears spilled from my eyes at the thought of their betrayal, and I went up to them and said, “How could you do that?”

Guoqing looked ill at ease. His face reddening, he said, “You did something wrong, so we have to draw a clear line between us and you.”

For his part, Liu Xiaoqing said smugly, “I'll tell you what happened: the teacher sent us to monitor what you said.”

It had taken no time at all for adult authority to reduce to ruins what had been a beautiful young friendship. For many weeks following I did not say another word to them. Only when I was about to go back to Southgate and turned to Guoqing for help did he and I recover our closeness, but that was also the moment when we said good-bye. I never saw him again after that.

At the end of lunch break I was so silly as to sit down in the classroom in preparation for the afternoon's lessons. As soon as Zhang Qinghai came in, notes in hand, he saw me and asked me with a look of astonishment, “What are you doing here?”

What was I doing there? I was there to attend class, of course, but now that he had posed the question in this way I was no longer so sure. “Stand up,” he said.

I stood up, flustered. He told me to leave, so I went out, all the way to the middle of the playground, where I looked around, uncertain where he wanted me to go. After some hesitation I plucked up the courage to go back to the classroom, where I nervously asked Zhang Qinghai, “Sir, where do you want me to go?”

He turned and asked me in his gentle voice, “Where were you this morning?”

I looked back at the little room on the other side of the playground, and now I understood. “I need to go to that little room?” I asked.

He nodded approvingly.

So that afternoon I continued to be shut up in the little room, and my stubborn refusal to confess made them angry. The result was a visit to the school by Wang Liqiang. Dressed in his uniform, he listened attentively to their accusations, glancing at me several times with a reproachful look on his face. I was hoping that he would listen just as seriously to my side of the story, but after hearing the teachers out he showed not the slightest interest in learning what I had to say. He reminded them in an apologetic tone that I was adopted, and already six when I came under his charge. He said to them, “As you know, once a child reaches that age, it's hard to change his character.”

This was not at all what I wanted to hear. On the other hand, he did not press me to confess, as the teachers had done; in fact he said nothing along those lines whatsoever. Soon he stood up and said he had something to do and left, perhaps as a way to avoid causing me more distress. If he had stayed longer he would have found it difficult not to toe the teachers’ line, and now he could get clear of this embarrassing situation. Still, I was seething with indignation, for he had listened so earnestly to the teachers and never once asked me whether there was any truth to their allegations.

Were it not for Li Xiuying's expression of confidence in me later, I really don't know what I would have done. At this point, after being so misunderstood, I had sunk into deep despair, a sensation that left me constantly struggling for breath. Nobody believed me; everyone in the school was convinced that I was the author of the slogan. I had become a mendacious child simply because I had refused to confess.

When I got out of school that afternoon, I felt doubly tormented. Already I was oppressed by the feeling that my words had been twisted against me, and now I had to brace myself for another ordeal once I got home, for Wang Liqiang would surely have informed Li Xiuying. I had no idea how they would punish me and walked back to the house in hopeless gloom. As soon as she heard my footsteps, Li Xiuying called me over to her bed and asked me in a severe tone, “Did you write that slogan or not? Be truthful.”

The whole day through I had been peppered with questions, but not one had been couched in these terms. Tears rolled from my eyes, and I said, “No, I didn't write it.”

Li Xiuying sat up in bed. She called shrilly to Wang Liqiang, “There is no way that he wrote it, I can vouch for that. When he first arrived here I left fifty cents on the windowsill, and he handed it over to me like an honest lad.” Then she turned to me and said, “I believe you.”

From the next room, Wang Liqiang expressed some displeasure with the teachers, saying, “It was a dumb thing to do, but they shouldn't make such a big deal out of just scrawling some graffiti.”

Li Xiuying was irked by this remark and reproached Wang Liqiang. “How can you say that? That's tantamount to saying you believe he did it.”

However pallid her face, however eccentric her behavior, Li Xiuying at that moment touched me so deeply that my tears would not stop flowing. Perhaps because she had been shouting so vigorously, she fell back onto the bed in exhaustion, saying to me gently, “Don't cry, don't cry. How about… you clean the window now?”

I may have gained support at home, but this did nothing to alleviate my predicament at school. I spent another whole day in that dim room. Isolation exacerbated my fears. Although I came to school just like my classmates and went home just like them too, in between times I was here in this little cubicle, questioned in turn by two grown-ups who held a position of total superiority. How could I withstand such pressure indefinitely?

In the end they described for me an absorbing scenario. In tones of great admiration they told me about a child my age, just as smart as me (an unexpected compliment, this), who committed a misdeed. Angry no longer, they began to tell me his story, and I listened with rapt attention. This boy my age had stolen something from a neighbor, so he was reproached by his conscience, for he knew he had done wrong. Finally, after a series of mental struggles, he returned the item to the neighbor and confessed to the errors of his ways.

Teacher Lin asked me warmly, “Now guess whether he was criticized.”

I nodded.

“No,” she said. “On the contrary, he was commended, because he had already recognized his crime.”

That is how they worked on me, inducing me gradually to come around to the idea that to admit error after committing error is more praiseworthy than not to have erred at all. Having been made the target of such extreme criticism, I was all too eager for approval. Now fired with zeal and hope, I at last confessed to something that had nothing to do with me.

Having achieved their goal, the two grown-ups could finally relax. They leaned back in their chairs wearily and gave me an odd look, neither praising me nor scolding me. In the end Zhang Quagliai said, “You can go to class now.”

I left the little room, crossed the sun-baked playground, and walked toward the classroom, my heart drained and empty. When I got there many of my classmates turned their heads to stare at me, and I felt my face getting red.

Some three days later I went to school a little earlier than usual. I got a fright when I entered the classroom because I found Zhang Qinghai sitting by himself on the dais, with his lecture notes spread out in front of him. He beckoned me, and when I went over he asked me in a low voice, “You know Teacher Lin?”

How could I not? Her sweet voice had cursed me and intimidated me in that claustrophobic room, and she had told me I was smart too. I nodded.

A little smile played on Zhang Qinghai's face. In a conspiratorial tone he said to me, “She's been locked up. She's from a land-lord family, but she always kept this hidden. They sent someone to conduct an investigation, and the truth came out.”

I was stunned. Teacher Lin locked up? Just a few days before she had joined Zhang Qinghai in interrogating me. How stern and righteous, how forceful and eloquent she had been! And now she was behind bars.

Zhang Qinghai went back to his notes while I left the classroom. I looked over at the little room in the distance, mulling over the revelation that Teacher Lin was now in confinement. Other classmates went inside, and I could hear Zhang Qinghai quietly sharing the news with them too. The teacher's smile was chilling. In the little room he and Teacher Lin had seemed to be united in a common purpose, but now he was showing a different face altogether.

RETURN TO SOUTHGATE

My memories of Wang Liqiang and Li Xiuying, it is fair to say, remain fresh even now. I have often had it in mind to go back to Littlemarsh and have another look at the town that for five years I called home. What I wonder is whether Li Xiuying managed to keep herself going after the loss of her husband, and whether she is still alive today.

Although they did make me toil away at household chores, my adoptive parents often showed a touching concern for my welfare. When I was seven Wang Liqiang decided I was old enough to go on my own to the teahouse to fetch boiled water. He said to me, “If I didn't tell you where the teahouse is, how would you know where to go?”

I came out in a sweat trying to figure this out, but in the end came up with the answer, saying brightly, “I would ask somebody else.”

Wang Liqiang laughed just as brightly. When I picked up their big two-liter thermos bottles and got ready to leave, he squatted on his haunches, trying to shrink his height to my level. He kept emphasizing that if I found I really couldn't carry the bottles an inch farther, I should toss them aside. I found this an extraordinary idea, because to me two thermos bottles were colos-sally expensive items, and here he was telling me to throw them away.

“Why should I do that?”

He told me that if I really couldn't carry them and just dropped them on the ground, the hot water might splash, and I would get scalded. Now I understood.

With two cents in my pocket I proudly headed out, a thermos in each hand. I walked along the flag stones, asking people ostentatiously where the teahouse was. I didn't care whether further inquiries were redundant and kept on asking directions all the way down the street. My little stratagem worked like a dream, for my shrill queries elicited looks of surprise from grownups all along the street. When I entered the teahouse I placed my order in an even louder voice, and the old lady at the cash register gave a start. Patting her chest, she said, “You gave me such a fright.”

Her mock alarm made me chuckle, but soon her expression changed to one of genuine astonishment. As I left with my two brimming thermos bottles, I heard her saying anxiously to my retreating back, “You can't carry those, can you?”

How could I ever think of throwing the thermos bottles away? All these doubts about my capabilities served only to boost my self-importance. Wang Liqiang's injunction as I left the house was converted on the way home into a hope, conjuring up the following picture: when I arrived home with the bottles of water, Wang Liqiang would be so thrilled that he would give a shout to Li Xiuying, and she would get out of bed specially to witness my achievement, and they would shower me with praise.

That was my goal as I carried the bottles home, one in each hand, gritting my teeth with effort. I kept telling myself: no throwing, no throwing! I made only one rest stop.

But when I got home, Wang Liqiang disappointed me by showing not the least surprise and taking the bottles from my hands as though I had done only what he expected. As he bent over to put them on the floor, I still clung to a final shred of hope and gave him a little hint: “I stopped to rest just once.”

He stood up with a smile, as if there was nothing wonderful about that. I was so crushed that I went off by myself, thinking, “Where did I get the idea that he would congratulate me?”

One night I was so foolish as to interpose myself between Wang Liqiang and Li Xiuying, and the outcome was a beating. The nighttime interactions between husband and wife had always left me anxious and unsettled. When I first came to live with them, every few evenings after I had gone to bed I would hear the voice of Li Xiuying: pleading at first, and then with time her entreaties would change to moans. I found this quite frightening, but the next morning I would hear them chatting cordially enough, and their calm exchanges reassured me that nothing untoward had happened.

One evening I had already undressed and got into bed when Li Xiuying, who had lain in bed listlessly all day summoned me sharply. Shivering in the cold winter air, I put on my underpants and pushed open their bedroom door, only to see Wang Liqiang in the process of taking his clothes off. He flushed bright red and kicked the door closed, telling me angrily to get back to my room at once. I did not know what was wrong, but I dared not return to my bed because Li Xiuying was still calling me desperately. I lingered just outside the door, cold and scared, shivering from head to toe. Later Li Xiuying must have squirmed out of bed; though wearing just a slightly damp item of underwear could easily make her run a fever, she was now throwing caution to the winds. I heard Wang Liqiang calling in a low voice, “Are you crazy?”

The door was flung open, and before I knew what was happening Li Xiuying dragged me into bed with her. Panting from her exertions, she said to Wang Liqiang, “Tonight we'll sleep together, all three of us.”

She put her arms around me and tucked her face so tightly against mine that her hair fell over one of my eyes. She was all skin and bones, but her body was warm. With my other eye, I saw Wang Liqiang glaring at me. He said furiously, “Get out of here!”

Li Xiuying put her lips to my ear and said, “Say you won't.”

I was like putty in her hands. I hated the thought of leaving her cozy arms and said to him, “No, I won't!”

Wang Liqiang seized me by the arm, yanked me out of Li Xiuying's embrace, and shoved me to the floor. There was a fearsome bloodshot gleam in his eyes, and when I just sat there, unmoving, he yelled, “Get out, I said!”

This provoked my stubborn streak, and I yelled back, “No, I'm not leaving!”

Wang Liqiang stepped forward and grabbed me with both hands, but I clung for dear life to the leg of the bed and refused to loosen my grip no matter how he tugged. He then seized me by the hair and knocked my head against the bed. I could hear Li Xiuying screaming in the background. Pain finally made me relax my hold, and Wang Liqiang picked me up and flung me out the door, then locked it. By now I was in a frenzy too: scrambling to my feet I pounded on the door, wailing and cursing, “Wang Liqiang, you bastard! Take me back to Sun Kwangtsai!”

I wept pitifully, hoping that Li Xiuying would come to my rescue. At first I could hear her arguing with Wang Liqiang, but after a while all was quiet inside the room. Still I cried and wailed, still I shouted abuse, until I heard Li Xiuying call my name and say in a faint voice, “You go off to bed now. You'll freeze to death staying there.”

Suddenly I felt forlorn and had no choice but to make my way back to my room, sobbing as I went. On that inky winter night my heart seethed with hatred for Wang Liqiang as I slowly fell asleep. When I woke up the following morning, I knew that my face was aching painfully, but I did not realize that I had been beaten black and blue. As he was brushing his teeth, Wang Liqiang saw me and reacted with alarm. I ignored him and picked up the mop from the wall. He stretched out a hand to stop me, and through foamy lips said something unintelligible. I shoved his arm aside and carried the mop into Li Xiuying's room. She too gave a start and muttered a reproach to Wang Liqiang: “You didn't have to hit him so hard.”

Wang Liqiang bought a couple of dough fritters that morning — just for me, he said, and he laid them on the table. It was then, just as I had an appealing breakfast in front of me, that I chose to launch my hunger strike. I refused to eat a bite, no matter how they tried to persuade me. Instead I burst into tears and told them, “Take me back to Sun Kwangtsai!”

This was more a threat than an entreaty. Wang Liqiang knew he was at fault, and his efforts to appease me simply strengthened my resolve to remain at odds with him. As I went out, satchel on my back, he followed quickly on my heels and tried to put his hand on my shoulder, but I jerked away out of reach. When he dug in his pocket for ten cents’ snack money, I refused the bribe with equal determination, shaking my head and saying obstinately, “I don't want it.”

I insisted on savoring hunger to the fullest. Wang Liqiang's consternation at my fast had inspired me with the confidence to continue, and by inflicting hardship on myself I would get my revenge on him. At this stage I was proud of the stand I was taking. I vowed never again to let any food of his pass my lips, and at the same time I knew I would perish as a result; my eyes welled up with tears at the thought of my splendid martyrdom. My death by starvation would be the greatest retaliation against Wang Liqiang that there ever could be.

But when it came down to it I was simply too young to carry this through: my will was indomitable only so long as I had a full stomach and a warm set of clothes. When I was later to reach the point of practically fainting from hunger, I would find I just could not resist the temptation to eat. In fact, I was not then — and am not now — the kind of person willing to die for a conviction, so much do I value the sound of life flowing through my veins. Apart from life itself I cannot conceive of any other reason for living.

That morning my classmates noticed my bruised and swollen face, but they did not realize how much more painful was the hunger I was now experiencing. I had left home that morning on an empty stomach, and by the third period I was paying the price. First I was overcome with a vacant sensation: my insides felt as lonely as an alleyway late at night, windblown and desolate. Then the emptiness spread to all extremities, leaving my limbs powerless and my head groggy. Finally I came down with a stomachache, a pain more unbearable than the contusions on my face. Somehow I managed to make it to the end of the period, and then I dashed to the line of water faucets, put one to my mouth, and swallowed a whole bellyful of water. This gave me a shortlived respite from hunger. I leaned weakly against the water pipe and practically melted in the sunshine. The chilly winter water was so quickly absorbed into my system that I had to keep gulping it down right until the bell rang for the start of the next period.

After I left the water faucets, I found myself facing an even worse ordeal, for when hunger returned I had no resources to combat it. I collapsed on my chair like a sack of rice. Soon I was hallucinating that the blackboard was a cave and the teacher was pacing back and forth at the entrance to the cave, his voice booming as it echoed off the cave wall.

While my stomach was enduring one kind of pain, my expanding bladder inflicted a different sort of discomfort. It began to retaliate for my excessive fluid consumption. I had no choice but to raise my hand and ask Zhang Qinghai's permission to go out for a pee. We were only a few minutes into the period and he scolded me in very bad humor. “Why didn't you go during the break?”

I made my way gingerly to the toilet, not daring to run, because as soon as I tried that I could feel the water in my bladder sloshing back and forth. After finishing in the toilet, I grabbed the opportunity to drink another bellyful of cold water.

The fourth period that morning was perhaps the most trying hour of my whole life. Not long after I had been to the toilet, my bladder again became bloated and my face began to turn purple. When I really could not hold it another minute, I raised my hand a second time.

Zhang Qinghai eyed me suspiciously and asked, “You need to pee again?”

I nodded in embarrassment. Zhang Qinghai called Guoqing over and told him to go with me to the toilet to check whether I really had to pee. This time I didn't dare drink any more water afterward. On Guoqing's return, he loudly reported, “He passed more water than a cow!”

I sat down red faced amid my classmates’ titters. Despite my self-restraint during the last toilet break, it was not long before my bladder again became distended. Hunger had now become a matter of secondary importance; it was the bulging bladder that was my concern. I wanted to avoid raising my hand if at all possible and tried to endure the agonizing pressure, hoping that the bell would ring soon. I didn't dare adjust my position even slightly, feeling that the dam could burst at the least provocation. But later I just could not wait: time was passing so slowly and the bell would not ring. Timidly I raised my hand for the third time.

Zhang Qinghai was exasperated. “Are you trying to drown us?” he said.

The class erupted in laughter. Zhang Qinghai didn't let me go to the toilet again, but told me to go around by the window and pee on the outside wall of the classroom, because he wanted to see for himself whether I really had a call of nature to answer. When I splashed the wall with a powerful jet of urine, he was forced to accept the evidence. He walked a few steps away from the window and continued to conduct the class. It must have taken me a long time to empty my bladder, because Zhang Qinghai suddenly broke off from instruction and turned to me in surprise. “What, still not finished?”

Blushing hotly, I gave him a bashful smile.

I did not go home at the end of the morning session like the rest of my classmates, but continued my hunger strike. That whole lunchtime I lay underneath the water faucets, and when hunger pains gnawed I would raise myself up and consume a bellyful of water, then go back to lying there and feeling sorry for myself. By that time my pride was just for show; I was actually looking forward to Wang Liqiang finding me. I lay in the sunshine as the grass happily grew around me.

When Wang Liqiang did find me, it was afternoon, and classmates were arriving for classes. He discovered me sprawled next to the water faucets. I learned later from Li Xiuying that he had been anxiously waiting for me to come home ever since finishing his lunch. He helped me up, and when his hand grazed the bruises on my face I burst into tears.

He set me on his back, holding my thighs firmly with both hands, and set off for the school gate. My body swayed from side to side, and my feelings of pride, so dominant earlier that morning, gave way to dependency. Now I did not hate Wang Liqiang in the least, and when I rested my face on his shoulders I was thrilled to have a protector.

We entered a restaurant, and he set me down on the counter. Pointing at a blackboard that listed all kinds of noodle dishes, he asked me which I wanted. I scanned the menu but said nothing, for the remnants of pride were still circulating through my system. Wang Liqiang ordered a large bowl of noodles with three toppings — the most expensive option — and we sat down.

I will never forget the look in his eyes. Even now, so many years after his death, I feel a pang whenever I recall this moment. He gazed at me with such shame and affection that I say to myself: yes, I did have a father like that. But that was not how I responded at the time: it was only after he died, when I was back in South-gate, that I gradually became aware that Wang Liqiang was much more of a father to me than Sun Kwangtsai. Now, when it is all so far away, I realize that Wang Liqiang's death for me has been a lasting sorrow.

When the dish arrived, I did not start eating right away, but just looked at the steaming noodles — greedily, to be sure, but also with some reserve. Wang Liqiang read my mind: he stood up, saying that he had to get back to work, and walked out. As soon as he left I laid into the noodles with gusto. But my small belly was satisfied all too soon, and then I could only dejectedly pick up pieces of chicken and fish with my chopsticks, stare at them, and drop them back in the bowl, then dredge them up again; sad to say, I just could not eat any more.

By now I had recovered my normal energy and my unhappi-ness had vanished. I noticed an old man in tattered clothes across the table from me, who was eating a small bowl of the cheapest noodles. He watched attentively as I played around with my chicken and fish, and I could sense that he was looking forward to my leaving, so that he could help himself to the tasty morsels that I couldn't finish. This brought out my mean streak: I made a point of lingering over my meal and poked at the food in my bowl time and again. The old man, for his part, seemed to be making a point of eating very slowly. A silent struggle had developed between us. Soon I grew tired of this game and an entertaining new variation occurred to me. I chucked my chopsticks to one side, stood up, and swaggered out. As soon as I was out the door, I crouched down next to the window so I could observe his next move. He glanced toward the exit, and then speedily dumped his noodles into my bowl and placed his bowl where mine had been, after which he immediately resumed eating as though nothing had happened. I abandoned my place at the window and strode cockily back into the restaurant and over to the table where I had been sitting. I stared at the empty dish with feigned astonishment and was tickled to see the look of shame that spread over his face. Then I left in the best of spirits.

Once I reached third grade, I spent more and more of the day playing outside. By this time I was more familiar and comfortable with Wang Liqiang and Li Xiuying, and the trepidation that I felt early on had waned. Often I would be having so much fun that I would lose all sense of time, until suddenly it would occur to me that I needed to be home and I would race back to the house as fast as I could. I would be scolded, of course, but it was not so severe a reproof as to really scare me, and if I applied myself to chores and made a point of working up a good sweat, the reprimands died on their lips.

For a time I was especially fond of fishing for shrimp in ponds, and with this activity in mind practically every afternoon after school Guoqing, Liu Xiaoqing, and I would run off into the country. One day we had just put the town behind us when to my alarm I saw Wang Liqiang walking slowly along a path between the fields, a young woman just behind him. I quickly turned around and started running in the other direction, but Wang Liqiang had already spotted me, and when he called out, I had to stop and watch uneasily as he came walking up with his long strides. I should have been home by this point. Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing hurriedly explained that we were out to catch shrimp, not to steal melons. He smiled and to my surprise did not rake me over the coals, but put his big hand on my head and simply said that he and I would go home together. All the way he asked solicitously about things going on at school and showed no sign of trying to find fault with me, so I gradually relaxed.

Later, in what was for me a happy boyhood moment, we stood under the ceiling fan in the department store and ate ice pops. In those days there was no electric fan in Wang Liqiang's house, and I watched with fascination as the ceiling fan, so perfectly round, spun in a circle and glimmered like water in motion. I stood at the edge of the fan's draft and walked in and out, enjoying the contrast.

That time I ate three ice pops in a row. Wang Liqiang was seldom as generous as this. When I'd finished the third, Wang Liqiang asked me if I wanted another and I nodded. But then he hesitated and disappointed me by saying, “Better not. You might have a tummy upset.”

He compensated by buying me some candy instead. On the way home, he suddenly inquired, “Did you know that young lady?”

“Which young lady?” I didn't know who he was talking about.

“The one behind me.”

Only then did I remember the young woman on the path. I had no clear impression of when she had vanished from the scene, so intent had I been on putting distance between Wang Liqiang and me. I shook my head, and Wang Liqiang said, “I don't know who she was either.”

He went on, “It was only after I called you that I looked around and realized there was someone there.” He opened his eyes wide in such an exaggerated expression of surprise that it made me laugh out loud.

As we got close to home, Wang Liqiang got down on his haunches and said to me quietly, “Let's not say we went to the country, but say instead that we met in the alley. Otherwise she might be annoyed.”

I thoroughly approved, for I was not keen on Li Xiuying knowing that I had gone off to play again after school.

But six months later I saw Wang Liqiang and the young woman together again, and this time I found it hard to believe that they were strangers to each other. I made my getaway before Wang Liqiang could see me, and later I sat down on a rock to puzzle things out. At eleven I could put two and two together, even if it took a bit of effort. Understanding now the improper relationship between the woman and Wang Liqiang, I thought, with a sudden shock, what a wicked man he was. But when I got home I kept quiet about it. I cannot fully recall what led me to keep quiet, but I remember that when I contemplated reporting the matter to Li Xiuying I found myself quaking with dread. Years later I would still wonder naively what would have happened if I had told Li Xiuying, and whether the sight of her pale and powerless outrage might have had just enough impact on Wang Liqiang to forestall his death.

The fact that I kept silent on this matter later enabled me to blackmail Wang Liqiang into not punishing me when I should have been punished. Despite all my best efforts the little wine cup that rested on the wireless finally came to a bad end. As I swiveled around while mopping the floor, the handle of the mop knocked the cup from its perch, and it fell to the floor and shattered. Of the property owned by this humble household, this cup was the only decorative element, and its destruction left me a bundle of nerves. Wang Liqiang would wring my neck with the same crisp snap with which he broke that cucumber.

That had been my fear when I first moved in, and I now knew he would not really do that, but I certainly anticipated a towering rage and severe punishment. I needed to do everything in my limited power to avoid this unhappy fate, and a preemptive threat seemed the best approach. Li Xiuying was in another room, unaware of the accident, so I quietly swept the fragments into the dustpan. By the time Wang Liqiang came home from work, I was so keyed up that I began to sob. Puzzled, Wang Liqiang crouched down and asked me, “What's wrong?”

In a quaking voice I delivered my threat, “If you beat me, I am going to tell about you and that lady!”

Wang Liqiang paled. He shook me and said, “I won't beat you. Why should I?”

That's when I told him, “I broke the wine cup.”

Wang Liqiang looked blank for a moment, but then he realized what had triggered my threat and broke into a smile. “That wine cup means nothing to me,” he said.

Not sure whether to believe him, I asked him, “So you're not going to beat me?”

He promised he would not, putting me completely at ease. To reciprocate, I whispered in his ear, “I won't say anything about the lady.”

After dinner that evening Wang Liqiang took my hand and we went for a long walk. Often he would exchange greetings with people he knew. I did not know that this would be my last stroll with Wang Liqiang, and I was enchanted by the glow of the setting sun as it lingered above the eaves. Infected by my boyish enthusiasm, Wang Liqiang talked a lot about when he was small. The thing he said that most stands out in my mind was that until he was fifteen he was so poor he often had no pants to wear. As he told me that he said with a sigh, “Being poor's not so bad; its other things that make you miserable.”

Later we sat down by the bridge. He studied me and said worriedly, “You're a little devil, aren't you?” Then he changed his tone. “You're a smart boy, that's for sure.”

That autumn when I was twelve, Liu Xiaoqing's big brother — the musician I so admired — died of hepatitis.

By then he was no longer an idle teenager, for after graduation from high school he had been sent off to labor in the countryside. But he still wore his peaked cap and carried his flute in his jacket pocket. I heard that two boatmen's daughters had been assigned to work in the same village, and these two sturdy girls both fell in love with him. He played the flute so beautifully, it was no surprise they fell under its spell on those lonely nights in the countryside. But he found life there a trial and often sneaked back into town, playing the flute by his window, conjuring up the pear-syrup candy tune on our way home from school. He got a kick out of our silly faces and was loath to return to the village, even if there were two girls awaiting him there, poised with the love nets they had woven.

The last time he came back, he must have stayed a little too long. His father was on his case the whole day through, badgering him to hurry back to the village. Several times I heard him sobbing as I passed his window. He had no energy at all, he told his father pitifully — he could hardly eat, much less work.

None of them knew he had hepatitis. In the end his mother talked him into going back and boiled him a couple of eggs for the journey, but just two days after his return to the village he collapsed and lost consciousness. His admirers took turns carrying him home on their backs. After school I saw two sunburnt girls with mud on their legs and stricken looks on their faces come out of Liu Xiaoqing's house. His brother died that same evening.

I still remember his dismal expression when he left home that last time. He shuffled toward the steamboat jetty with a bedroll over his left shoulder and the eggs in his right hand. At this point almost all the life had been squeezed out of him, and he walked with the tottering steps of an old man not long for this world. Only the flute, jutting out of his jacket pocket, swung back and forth and projected a certain air of vitality.

Though death was lurking just around the corner, he still tried to tease me when he ran into me in the street. He asked me to see if there was a hole in the seat of his pants. Having fallen for that trick once already, I shouted back, “No way! You want me to smell your stinky farts.”

With a chuckle he released a tepid fart, then shambled off toward extinction.

In those days people had an exaggerated idea of how contagious hepatitis can be, and when Liu Xiaoqing came to school with a black armband the other children shunned him like the plague. With an ingratiating smile on his face the bereaved boy walked toward a bunch of classmates who were playing underneath a basketball hoop, but they instantly swarmed to another hoop, cursing him for all they were worth, while he kept smiling stiffly. I was sitting on the steps outside the classrooms and watched as he stood beneath the hoop, a lonely figure, his hands dangling by his sides.

Then he slowly walked toward me. He came to a halt not far away and pretended to be looking in another direction. After a moment, seeing that I had made no effort to put more distance between us, he sat down next to me. We had not spoken to each other since the graffiti episode — or even sat close to each other. His sudden isolation had brought him back to me, and he was first to break our long silence. “Why aren't you running away?” he asked.

“I'm not afraid.” I replied.

We were both a little embarrassed. We buried our heads between our knees and snickered. We had been ignoring each other for quite some time, after all.

I was to suffer two losses in as many days, for the death of Liu Xiaoqing's big brother was immediately followed by the death of Wang Liqiang. It's hard to judge just how much this combination of events was to affect my future, but my life undoubtedly took a new turn with the passing of Wang Liqiang. I had only just repaired my friendship with Liu Xiaoqing and still had not had time to make up with Guoqing when, that very night, Wang Liqiang was gone forever.

He and the young woman were doomed. With their hearts in their mouths they made it through two happy years, only to be caught in the act that evening.

The wife of one of Wang Liqiang's fellow-officers was a staunch guardian of the morals of the age. This mother of two made herself responsible for monitoring other people's love affairs, and according to her Wang Liqiang and his mistress had long been on her list of suspects. When the wife's husband was out of town on business, Wang Liqiang would take his young lover at night to the office that the two men shared. They cleared the desk and then used it as a bed, savoring their bittersweet happiness.

The officer's wife quickly unlocked the door with her husband's key and with equal speed turned on the light. Exposed, the couple stared at her in openmouthed horror. As she began to launch into a denunciation of their misconduct, Wang Liqiang and his desk partner did not bother to dress but threw themselves on their knees before her, pleading desperately for leniency. Wang Liqiang, so awesome and forbidding in my eyes, was reduced to tears and moans.

But after keeping them under observation for so long and now at last with such splendid results to show for it, how could their nemesis let them off so easily? She made it clear to them they were wasting their time begging for mercy. “It wasn't easy catching you,” she said.

Then she went over to the window and threw it open, clucking like a hen that has just laid an egg.

Wang Liqiang knew that the damage was done. He and his lover got dressed and seated themselves. When his colleagues from the security section arrived, he spotted the political commissar and said to him shamefacedly, “Sir, I've committed a lifestyle error.”

The commissar instructed several soldiers to keep Wang Liqiang under guard and told the young woman to go home. She was sobbing too much to speak, and when she got up to leave she shielded her face with her hands. The snoop was reveling in the moment. “Put your hands down!” she barked. “I didn't see you blushing when you were doing it with him.”

Wang Liqiang walked up to her and slapped her across the face.

I do not know much more about what happened then, but one can imagine how it must have made her blood boil to be struck by Wang Liqiang just when she was giddy with success. She lunged at him with fingers spread but stumbled over a chair and fell to the floor. Her fury gave way to humiliation, and she burst into tears. The commissar had the soldiers hustle Wang Liqiang away and told a few others to stay with the woman, who was now sitting on the floor and refusing to get up. The commissar himself went back to bed.

Wang Liqiang sat in a pitch-dark room until late in the night. Then he stood up and told the soldier guarding him that he needed to get something from his office. The bleary-eyed guard felt awkward in front of his superior; as he hesitated, Wang Liqiang said he would be back shortly and left without further ado. The soldier did not follow, but stood by the door and watched Wang Liqiang walk across in the moonlight toward the offices, until his sprawling shadow melded with the larger shadow of the office block.

Wang Liqiang did not go to his office: instead he unlocked the door to the armory. He picked up two hand grenades and went down the stairs. Sticking close to the wall, he walked quietly over to the dependent housing, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and came to a stop outside a window on the west side. He had visited this apartment on a number of occasions and knew where his colleague's wife slept. He pulled the pin on one of the grenades and then smashed the window and tossed the grenade inside. As he dashed toward the staircase, the grenade detonated, and a huge roar shook the old building so that it swayed back and forth, throwing up clouds of dust that settled on Wang Liqiang as he ran. He fled all the way to the perimeter wall and squatted in the shadow there.

The security department was thrown into such uproar it was almost as though war had broken out. He heard the commissar, now awake for the second time, heaping curses on the negligent soldier, and he heard someone crying for a stretcher. To Wang Liqiang, straining his eyes to see, the chaotic scene might as well have been a churning mass of locusts. Later he saw three stretchers being carried out of the building and heard someone shout, “Still breathing, still alive!”

He gave a start. When the stretchers were carried into an ambulance and driven out of the compound, he clambered over the wall and jumped down the other side. He knew he had no time to waste.

In the early hours a man with a grenade in his hand and a look of raw menace on his face appeared at the town hospital. The surgeon on duty when Wang Liqiang entered was a northerner with a beard. As soon as he saw the visitor, he knew that he must have something to do with the three patients who had just been carried in, and he fled down the corridor in panic, crying, “Help! The killer!”

The doctor was too flustered to express himself clearly, and it was a good half hour before he had calmed down. Now he stood next to a trembling nurse, and they watched as Wang Liqiang moved from room to room, grenade in hand. A sudden spark of courage led the doctor to propose that the two of them jump him from behind, and part of this idea certainly registered with the nurse, for as Wang Liqiang came ever closer she turned to him fearfully and implored, “Quick, you grab him now!”

The doctor thought for a moment and said, “Maybe I should report to the leadership first.” So saying, he opened a window, jumped out, and made his escape.

Wang Liqiang moved along the corridor, searching room by room. The shouts of panic grated on his nerves. When he pushed open the door to the nurses’ station, it snapped back and dealt his left wrist a stinging blow, pinning it against the jamb so painfully that he grimaced. By throwing all his weight against the door, he succeeded in knocking it open, to find four nurses weeping and wailing inside, but no sign of his quarry. He tried to calm the nurses, promising not to harm them, but they just continued to shriek, oblivious to everything he said. Wang Liqiang shook his head helplessly and withdrew. Then he went into the operating theater, abandoned long before by the terrified staff. He saw two boys lying on gurneys and recognized them as the woman's sons. They were dead, their bodies mangled. Wang Liqiang gaped in shocked disbelief that this could have happened. He retreated from the operating theater; with the deaths of the two boys, he had lost interest in searching for their mother. He slowly made his way outside and lingered momentarily by the hospital entrance, thinking that he ought to go back home, but then he said to himself, “Forget it.”

Soon he found himself surrounded. As he leaned back against a power pole, he heard the commissar yell, “Wang Liqiang, drop your weapon! Otherwise, you're a dead man.”

Wang Liqiang called back, “Sir, when Lin gets back, please tell him for me, I know I did him wrong. I didn't mean to kill his sons.”

The commissar thought this beside the point. Again he shouted, “Put down your weapon. You're a dead man if you don't.”

A wry answer came back. “Sir, I'm a dead man already.”

Wang Liqiang, who had shared his house with me for five years, who had loved me and disciplined me like a true father, suddenly found the pain in his injured wrist almost too much to bear, and in the moments before his death he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and meticulously dressed his wound. No sooner had he finished than he realized this made no sense and muttered to himself, “Why bother?”

As he looked at his neatly strapped wrist he forced a smile, and then he detonated the grenade. The force of the blast snapped the power pole behind him, and the brightly lit hospital was plunged into darkness.

The woman whom Wang Liqiang had been so determined to blow to pieces had emerged from the explosion with just some cuts and bruises. On the afternoon following Wang Liqiang's suicide, she left the hospital weeping and sobbing, still badly shaken. But before long she recovered her former self-confidence, and six months later, when she left the hospital once more, she was positively jubilant. The gynecologist's examination had confirmed that she was pregnant again, with twins to boot. During the next few days her standard greeting was, “He thought he'd got rid of my sons, but now their replacements are on the way!”

Li Xiuying was left to cope with the calamity of Wang Liqiang's death. Frail though she was, at first she seemed untouched by the enormous strain this placed on her. When one of Wang Liqiang's colleagues came to break the news on behalf of the security section, she managed to weather the initial blow. Keeping her composure, she simply scrutinized her visitor, so he was the one who was thrown off balance. Then she gave a piercing shout: “You people killed Wang Liqiang!”

The man had not anticipated this, and he began to repeat the story of how Wang Liqiang had taken his own life. Li Xiuying waved her slender arm dismissively and came out with an even more awful accusation. “You people — all of you — killed Wang Liqiang, and that's a fact. But it's me you really want to see dead.”

Her bizarre logic made the visitor realize to his dismay that it was going to be impossible to conduct a normal conversation with her. But there was a practical matter he needed to attend to. He asked her when she would like to collect Wang Liqiang's body.

Li Xiuying took her time to answer this. Then she said, “I don't want it. If he'd committed another kind of error, I'd say yes, but since he committed this kind of mistake, I'm not interested.”

That was the only thing she said that one could imagine an ordinary person saying.

After the man had left, Li Xiuying turned to me — I was still dumbstruck — and said resentfully, “They took a live man away from me, and now they're trying to fob off a dead one on me!”

She tilted her head up and said defiantly, “I refused.”

What a trying day this was — a Sunday, too — when I could only stay at home, whirled around in a jumble of emotions: bewilderment, anguish, and fear. I found it hard to accept that Wang Liqiang was dead; the whole episode had the unreal quality of a secondhand report.

Li Xiuying spent the whole day in her room, carefully attending to her underwear and adjusting the little stools’ positions in the shifting sunlight. But from time to time she would issue a scream so bloodcurdling it made me quake — the one way she could express her sorrow and despair. So piercing were her screams, they conjured up images of shards of glass whistling through the air.

Though it was daytime, I was petrified by the sound of these wild cries. Later I could not restrain my curiosity and surreptitiously opened the door to her room, to see her figure crouched over her underwear. Every so often her body would straighten, and she would raise her head and scream, “Aaaah!”

Early the next morning Li Xiuying set off for her maternal home. The sky was still dark when I was shaken awake. In the bright lamplight I saw a face mask looming over me, the body attached to it tightly encased in thick layers of clothing, and I was so startled that I gave a wail. Then I heard Li Xiuying's voice emerge from the mask. “Don't cry, don't cry. It's me.”

Li Xiuying must have been pleased with the effect achieved by her disguise, for she said to me triumphantly, “You didn't recognize me, did you?”

In my five years in Littlemarsh, this was the first time Li Xiuying had left the house. On a morning before the advent of winter Li Xiuying walked off in her winter clothes toward the steamboat wharf, and I struggled along in her wake, lugging one of her little stools.

Before daybreak the streets were quite deserted, apart from the occasional old man coughing heavily on his way to morning tea. Li Xiuying was not strong enough to walk more than a hundred yards at a time, and when she stopped to catch her breath I promptly set the stool down underneath her bottom. Thus we proceeded through the damp morning breeze, walking and stopping in turn. Once or twice I was about to say something, but she would cut me off with a quick “Shh!” and whisper, “Not a word, or you'll give me away.”

Her cloak-and-dagger manner gave me the jitters.

It was in this atmosphere of simulated mystery that Li Xiuying left Littlemarsh. What seemed to me then an interminable walk to the wharf is now reduced in my memory to just a few brief scenes. As this strange woman in her bulky clothes cleared the ticket inspection, she turned and waved. I pressed up against the ramshackle waiting-room window and watched as she stood uncertainly on the bank. She needed to cross a narrow gangplank to board the boat, and now she abandoned all precautions, heedless of whether this might blow her cover, and called out, “Can someone help me across?”

When she stepped inside the cabin, that was the last I saw of her. I stayed glued to the window until the boat sailed into the distance, where the river disappeared out of sight. It was only then that I confronted a terrible reality: what was I to do?

Li Xiuying had forgotten me. Through sheer grief, she had put everything apart from herself out of her mind. At the age of twelve, as dawn approached, I was an orphan.

I didn't have a penny in my pocket; my clothes and satchel were locked inside the house, and I did not have a key. My sole possession was the little stool that Li Xiuying had left behind. I slung it up on my shoulder again and left the wharf, sobbing.

Out of habit I went back to the house, but when I pressed my hand against the unyielding door all I succeeded in doing was making myself more miserable. I slumped down outside the door, crying as though my heart would break, and then sat there in a daze, my mind drained of thought, until Liu Xiaoqing came along on his way to school, when I burst into tears again. Our relations now mended, I held nothing back: “Wang Liqiang is dead and Li Xiuying has gone away! There's no one to look after me.”

Liu Xiaoqing was still wearing his black armband. “Come and stay at my house!” he cried with impulsive generosity. “You can sleep in my brother's bed.”

He ran back to his house, quick as a flash. But after a couple of minutes he returned, wearing a hangdog expression. Not only had his invitation been vetoed by his parents but he had received a tongue-lashing as well. He gave me an embarrassed smile. That's when I decided I would go back to Southgate, to be with my parents and my brothers. I told Liu Xiaoqing my plan, but added that I didn't have money for the boat fare.

His eyes lit up as he cried, “Borrow the money from Guo-qing!”

We found Guoqing on the school playground. When Liu Xiaoqing called him, he said, “I'm not going over there — you've got hepatitis.”

“How about if we come over where you are?” Liu Xiaoqing said pitifully.

Hearing no objection, we walked over to the boy with the deep pockets. Were it not for Guoqing's beneficence, I don't know how I would have made it back to Southgate. My two childhood playmates saw me to the boat that would take me away from Littlemarsh, and as we walked to the wharf Guoqing said to me airily, “If you're short of money in the future, just drop me a note.”

Liu Xiaoqing trailed along a step or two behind, an uncomplaining porter, the stool propped against his shoulder. But in the end I forgot to take it along, just as Li Xiuying had forgotten to take me. When the boat pulled away I saw Guoqing sitting cross-legged on the stool, waving to me, while Liu Xiaoqing stood next to him, saying something into his ear. The wharf and the embankment on which it rested quickly disappeared from view.

Late that autumn afternoon I stepped onto my native soil. Returning after five years away I asked directions to Southgate in an outsider's accent. As I began to walk toward the little road that would take me there, a child much younger than me stuck his nose against an upstairs window and called, “Kid! Hey, kid!”

To my ears, these words sounded like an exotic dialect. Fortunately I still remembered Southgate, and my parents’ and siblings’ names, and my grandfather's too. Memories from when I was six helped me sense which way to go, stopping occasionally to check with passersby That was when I met my grandfather Sun Youyuan, with his bundle on his back and clutching his oilskin umbrella to his chest. He had just spent a month at my uncle's and was on his way back to Southgate. Now in his final years, my grandfather lost his way on the one road that should have been most familiar to him, and it was there we met, although neither of us recognized the other.

At this point I had put the county town behind me, and the countryside lay ahead. At a crossroads I was unsure how to proceed. But I did not immediately feel anxious, because I was entranced by the sunset. Rolling black clouds were gradually flooded with crimson light; a red globe had settled on the distant horizon and was beginning its luminous descent. I stood in the glow of the setting sun, yelling, “Down, down!” A huge black cloud was moving toward the western sky, and I didn't want to see it swallow up the setting sun.

Only after the sun obligingly sank from view did I notice my grandfather Sun Youyuan. He was standing behind me, just a few inches away. He looked at me imploringly, and when I asked him, “Which way to Southgate?” he shook his head and mumbled, “I forgot.”

He forgot? I thought this a curious answer and said to him, “If you don't know, then why don't you just say so? What do you mean, you forgot?”

He smiled apologetically The sky was now beginning to darken, so I chose one road at random and hurriedly set off. After a while I realized that the old man was following me, but I paid him no attention. A little farther on, I saw a woman with a scarf on her head bent over in a field and asked her, “Is this the way to Southgate?”

“You're going the wrong way.” She straightened herself and said, “You should have taken that other road.”

By now it was almost dark, so I turned around abruptly and headed back. The old man did the same, and his eagerness to stay with me began to get on my nerves. I took to my heels and ran, and when I looked back I could see him staggering along in a desperate effort to keep on my tail. This made me angry, and when he came a bit closer I said to him, “Hey, stop following me! Go some other way.”

When I got back to the intersection, it was now completely dark. I could hear thunder; there was not even a hint of moonlight at this point. I groped my way to the other road and took several quick paces in that direction, only to find the old man still behind me. I turned around and yelled, “Stop following me! My family's got no money, and we can't afford to support you.”

Rain began to fall, and I ran ahead as fast as I could. Suddenly I saw flames in the distance. The rain grew heavier, pitting its strength against the fire, but the blaze, far from weakening, was crackling with even greater fury. It had asserted itself in the rain like an unstoppable cry, and now it was burning with a vengeance.

By the light of the fire I could make out the wooden bridge that led to Southgate, and memories from the past gave me the happy sensation that I was already home. As I dashed through the rain, a hot breeze swept over me and a tangle of voices reached my ears. By the time I arrived, the flames had died down, and now they were just licking the ground; the rain had dropped off. I entered the village of Southgate amid clamor and commotion.

My two brothers stood there in shock, sheets wrapped around them; I didn't recognize them as Sun Guangping and Sun Guangming. Nor did I realize that the woman kneeling on the ground and wailing was my mother. Next to them, in an untidy heap, were items rescued from the flames. Then I saw a man naked to the waist, his scrawny chest exposed to the chilly autumn wind. In a hoarse voice he was telling the bystanders how many things had been lost in the inferno. Tears rolled from his eyes. He smiled at them desolately and said, “You all got to see a big fire, didn't you? It was a grand sight, that's for sure, but it's cost me a right bundle.”

I did not know that he was my father, but something drew me to him, so I went up and loudly announced, “I'm looking for Sun Kwangtsai.”