by Yu Hua
Later my big brother charged over brandishing the kitchen cleaver, my little brother hot on his heels grasping a sickle. My big brother aimed a blow at Wang Yuejin's buttocks.
A dramatic reversal of fortune ensued. Under the onslaught of my brother's cleaver, the Wang brothers, who had seemed so invincible just moments earlier, retreated to their house in alarm. My brother chased them right to their door, where the Wang brothers grabbed fish spears in an effort to fend him off. But when he recklessly threw himself at them, cleaver flailing, they dropped the fish spears and ran for their lives.
Inspired by his big brother's example, my little brother raised his sickle high in the air and gave a battle whoop, quite the intrepid warrior. But he had trouble keeping his balance as he ran and tripped over himself several times.
Throughout the whole confrontation I remained rooted to my spot next to the pond, and it was because of my detached role as spectator that the villagers—no matter whether they were my father's supporters or his detractors (the Wangs included)—came to the conclusion that in all the world there could not be another person as degenerate as me, and it is not hard to imagine what kind of reception I got from my own family. My big brother, on the other hand, was proclaimed the hero of the hour.
There was a period when I would make a point of quietly observing the Su family as I sat by the pond or cut grass for the sheep. The two town boys did not emerge from their house all that often, and the farthest they ever went was to the cesspit at the edge of the village, where they immediately turned back. One morning I saw them come out of the house and stand between the two trees in the front yard, pointing at something as they talked. Then they walked over to one of the trees, and the older of the two squatted down on his haunches while the younger climbed onto his back. The one carried the other over to the second tree, where they exchanged positions and the younger boy carried his older brother back to the original spot. They repeated this routine over and over again, and each time one threw his weight on the other's back I could hear their infectious laughter. The two brothers’ laughs sounded very much alike.
Later on three bricklayers came from town, bringing two loads of red bricks. A wall was erected around the Sus’ house, enclosing the two trees, and I never again saw the Su brothers playing the game that so captivated me. But I often heard laughter from the other side of the wall, so I knew they still played it.
Their father, a doctor, worked at the hospital in town. Often I saw him strolling along the road late in the afternoon, a man with clear skin and a gentle voice. Once, however, he didn't come home on foot as usual, but sped past me, perched on the saddle of one of the hospitals bicycles. I was heading home with a basketful of grass and was startled by the sound of a bicycle bell behind me. He was calling his sons as he rode past.
The two boys went into ecstasies as soon as they came out the door and raced joyfully to meet the bicycle, while their mother stood by the side of the lane, greeting with a smile the returning man of the house. The doctor loaded his two sons onto the bicycle and rode off along a path between the fields. They shrieked with excitement, and the younger boy, who sat in front, rang the bell incessantly. This spectacle made the village children green with envy.
When I was sixteen, in my first year of high school, I tried for the first time to come to terms with the word family. I hesitated for a long time, faced with the choice between my home in South-gate and Wang Liqiang's home in Littlemarsh, and the understanding I finally reached was inspired by the memory of that particular scene.
My first contact with the doctor occurred some time before the argument over the private plots. I had been back at Southgate only a few months then, and Granddad was still alive. After staying with us for a month, he had gone off to my uncle's house. Meanwhile I had come down with a fever that left my mouth parched dry. I lay in bed for two days, all in a daze. Our ewe was just about to lamb and the rest of the family was out in the pen, so I was alone in the house, listening groggily to the noises outside. My brothers’ shrill voices were particularly audible.
Later my mother appeared by my bedside and said some-thing or other, then went out. Next time she appeared Dr. Su was by her side. He placed the palm of his hand on my forehead, and I heard him say, “Must be a hundred and two.”
After they left, the noise in the sheep pen went up a notch. Though the doctor had just laid his hand lightly on my forehead, it felt to me like a tender caress. Before long I heard the voices of the Su brothers outside; only later did I realize that they were delivering medicine.
Once I was on the mend, feelings of dependency began to stir. I had been close to my parents until I was six, when I left the village, and later, during my five years in Littlemarsh, Wang Liqiang and Li Xiuying had provided their care and support, but since my return to Southgate I had found myself suddenly abandoned and unprotected.
So around this time I would often stand by the roadside and wait for the doctor to pass on his way home from work. I watched as he approached, imagining the heartwarming things he might say to me, anticipating how his broad hand would pat me on the forehead.
But the doctor never paid me the slightest attention, and I realize now that there was no reason he should have given any thought to who I was or why I was standing there. He would brush past me, and if on occasion he threw me a glance it was only as one stranger looks at another.
Su Yu and Su Hang, the doctors two sons, soon afterward were inducted into the ranks of the village children. My brothers were trimming grass from the bank of earth between the fields, and I watched as the Su brothers walked hesitantly toward them, debating some point as they went. My older brother, who in those days tended to think he could take charge of anything, waved his sickle at them and said, “Hey, do you want to cut some grass?”
In the short time Su Yu spent in Southgate, he came over to talk to me only once. I still remember his shy expression, the unmistakable timidity in his smile as he asked, “You're Sun Guangping's younger brother, right?”
The Sus lived in Southgate for only two years. The sky was overcast on the afternoon they moved out. The very last cart of furniture was hauled away by the doctor himself, with the two boys pushing, one on either side, and their mother brought up the rear, clutching two baskets full of odds and ends.
Su Yu died of a brain hemorrhage when he was nineteen. I didn't hear the news until the day after it happened. On the way home from school I passed the house where the Sus had lived and sorrow surged through my heart, bathing my face in tears.
When my big brother went to high school his behavior changed quite markedly. (I find I now recall rather fondly my brother at the age of fourteen. Though he was a real dictator, there was something unforgettable about his arrogance. Sitting on the bank, directing the Su brothers’ grass-trimming activities—for a long time this was the image of him that was foremost in my mind.) Once he began to mix with the children from town, he became increasingly standoffish toward the village boys. As his town classmates became more regular visitors to our house, my parents felt that this reflected very well on them, and there were even some senior residents of the village who predicted that my brother would have the brightest future of any of the village children.
During this period two teenagers from town often came running out to the village early in the morning, shouting at the top of their lungs just for the heck of it. They yelled so much that they became hoarse, and their screeches made our hair stand on end. The villagers thought at first theywere hearing ghosts.
This made a deep impression on my brother, and I once heard him say darkly, “Here we are, wishing we could be townsfolk, but its entertainers that the townsfolk want to be.”
My brother was definitely the quickest of the youngsters in the village to spot developing trends, for it was already dawning on him that all his life he would never be able to compete with his classmates from town; this was his earliest sensation of inferiority. But at the same time his friendship with the town boys was
a natural extension of his customary self-regard: their visits unquestionably raised his standing within the village.
My brother's first love interest appeared when he reached the second grade of high school. He took a fancy to a strongly built girl, the daughter of a carpenter. Several times I saw him in a corner, taking a bag of melon seeds from his satchel and slipping it into her hands.
She would often emerge on the playground, munching our melon seeds, spitting out the shells with such gusto and expertise that you might have taken her for a middle-aged matron. Once, after she spit out a shell, I noticed that a long thread of saliva trailed from the corner of her mouth.
Around this time girls began to figure as a theme in conversations between my brother and his classmates. I sat by the pond behind the house, listening as they explored territory entirely new to me. Out of the window drifted brazen commentary on breasts, thighs, and other body parts, provoking surprise and arousal in me. In due course they moved on to their own experiences with girls. My brother kept quiet at first, but under pressure from his classmates he soon revealed his dalliance with the carpenter's daughter. So taken in was he by their vows of confidentiality that he let himself get carried away: it was obvious that he was exaggerating their intimacy.
Not long after that, the girl stood in the middle of the playground, surrounded by several other schoolgirls, all just as full of themselves as she was. She called him over.
My brother walked toward her nervously, for he may already have had some inkling of what was about to happen. It was the first time I saw him afraid.
“Did you say I have a crush on you?” she asked.
His face turned bright red. I did not stay to observe how my brother, usually so self-assured, now found himself reduced to helpless embarrassment. Encouraged by her classmates’ chortles, the girl threw the melon seeds in his face.
My brother returned home from school very late that day and lay down in his bed without having anything to eat. I was dimly aware of him tossing and turning practically the whole night through. Still, he managed to swallow his pride and go off to school as usual the following morning.
My brother knew that the town boys had sold him down the river, but he never showed any signs of resentment or even allowed the faintest hint of reproach to appear on his face. Instead he continued to fraternize with them as before, for he would have hated to let the villagers see that his townie classmates had dropped him all of a sudden. But in the end my brother's efforts all came to naught. After they graduated from high school, the town boys were assigned jobs one after the other, thereby forfeiting the freedom to loaf around, and the time came when he found himself ditched.
Late one afternoon, when my brother's classmates were no longer gracing our home with their presence, Su Yu arrived quite unexpectedly, the first time he had returned to Southgate since his family moved away. My brother and I were in the vegetable plot and only my mother was home, busy preparing dinner. When she saw Su Yu, she assumed he had come to see Guangping. Now, so many years later, I am still stirred by the memory of her standing at the edge of the village, calling him eagerly at the top of her voice.
My brother hopped onto the path and hurried home, but Su Yu's first words to him were, “Where's Sun Guanglin?”
My mother realized with astonishment that Su Yu had come to see me. My brother managed to take this in stride and he answered casually: “He's over in the vegetable patch.”
It didn't occur to Su Yu that he should take a moment to chat, and without further ado he turned his back on them and headed for the field where I was working.
Su Yu had come to tell me he had been assigned a job at the fertilizer plant. We sat on the bank for a long time, gazing at the Sus’ old house as the evening breeze began to pick up. “Who lives there now?” Su Yu asked.
I shook my head. I would see a little girl come out the gate, and her parents were often around, but I knew nothing about them.
Su Yu left as night fell. I watched as his stooping form disappeared on the road into town. Before the year was out, he was dead.
By the time I graduated from high school, the university entrance examinations had been reinstated. When I was admitted to college I had no chance to inform Su Yu as he had informed me about his job placement. I did see Su Hang on a street in town, but he and his buddies were on bicycles and they raced past me in high spirits.
I didn't tell my family that I was taking the entrance exam, and I borrowed the money for the registration fee from a classmate in the village. A month later, when I went to pay him back, he said, “Your brother already gave me the money.”
I was taken aback. After I received the notice of my admission, my brother put together some things that I would need. By this time my father was already having his affair with the widow across the way; he would often slip out of her bed halfway through the night and slip into my mother's. He was too preoccupied to give much thought to family matters. When my brother told him my news, he simply said offhandedly, “What! They're going to let him stay in school? The lucky devil!”
My father realized that this development signaled my long-term absence from home, and this put him in excellent spirits.
Mother had a fuller understanding of things. In the days immediately preceding my departure she would often look uneasily at my brother, for what she had really been hoping was that he would go to university. She knew that graduation from college assured your promotion to an urbanite.
When I left, only my brother saw me off. He walked in front, my bedroll on his back, and I followed close behind. Neither of us said a thing. Touched by the efforts he had made during the previous few days, I was looking for an opportunity to thank him, but the silence that enveloped us made it difficult for me to broach the topic. Only as the bus was about to depart did I blurt out: “I still owe you one yuan.”
My brother looked at me blankly.
“The registration fee, I mean.”
Now he understood, and a doleful expression appeared in his eyes.
“I'll pay you back,” I went on.
I watched him through the window as the bus lurched forward. My brother was standing underneath a tree, and I saw a stricken look on his face when the bus pulled away.
Not long after this, the land in and around Southgate was requisitioned by the county authorities for the construction of a textile mill, and the villagers were turned overnight into suburbanites. Although I was in faraway Beijing, I could easily imagine their excitement and anticipation. Even if some people ended up sobbing as they prepared to relocate, it seemed to me that their sadness was the inevitable sequel to the initial rejoicing. Old Luo, the storehouse janitor, shared with everybody one of his pearls of wisdom: “No matter how successful a factory may be, it will go bust eventually. You'll never be out of a job if you till the fields.”
But years later, when I returned to my home district, I ran into Old Luo in an alley in town, and the old man, dressed in a dirty, tattered cotton jacket, said to me proudly, “I'm living off my pension now.”
After I left Southgate for good, I never felt any attachment to my childhood home. For a long time I was convinced that memories of the past or nostalgia for one's birthplace really represent only a contrived effort to restore one's equilibrium and cope better with life's frustrations, and that even if some emotions arise these are simply ornamental. Once, when a young woman politely inquired about my childhood and hometown, I found myself enraged and retorted: “Why do you want me to accept a reality that I have already left behind me in the past?”
If anything about Southgate induces some nostalgia, it has to be the village pond, and when I heard that my birthplace had been appropriated for development, my first reaction was concern for the pond's future. That spot, which for me had been a source of comfort, would, I feared, just be buried and forgotten, the same way Su Yu had been buried and forgotten.
Some ten years later I went back to Southgate, returning alone one night to my home village. In
its new incarnation as a factory, Southgate no longer projected a faint odor of night soil wafting on the evening breeze, nor could I hear the gentle swaying of crops. Despite all the changes I could still identify exactly where my old home once stood and the pond once lay. When I moved closer my heart couldn't help but skip a beat, for the moonlight revealed that the pond of my childhood was still there. As it came into view, an upheaval stirred within me. The memory of this pond had always offered me solace, but its appearance in the present now brought to life the very fiber of my past. Gazing at the refuse that littered its surface, I realized that the pond was more than just a provider of consolations; it served, rather, as an emblem of days gone by: far from fading in my memory, it still clung stubbornly to its place on Southgate's soil, an eternal reminder of what had been.
WEDDING
In those early days when I sat beside the pond, Feng Yuqing inspired endless yearning when she walked by, exuding youth and buxom beauty, wooden bucket in hand. As she approached the well she would move more cautiously. This circumspection in turn stirred an anxiety in me, a concern that she might lose her footing on the moss growing around the edge of the well. When she bent over to lower the bucket into the shaft, her braid would flop down over her chest and swing in an exquisite motion.
