Chapter 2
FRIENDSHIP

After the Su family moved away from Southgate, I saw little of Su Yu and Su Hang until I entered high school, when we resumed contact once again. I found to my surprise that the two brothers, bosom friends during their Southgate days, were as remote from each other at school as I was from Sun Guangping, and not at all alike.

Though on the frail side, Su Yu behaved very much like an adult. He had outgrown his blue cotton clothes and once, when he was not wearing socks, his trouser legs were so short that I could clearly see his ankles when he moved. Like the other boys, Su Yu did not bother taking a satchel to school but simply tucked his textbooks under his arm. Where he differed from his classmates was that he never swaggered along in the middle of the road but instead walked circumspectly off to one side, his head lowered.

At the beginning it was not Su Yu who caught my attention but rather Su Hang, with his glossy well-groomed hair. When he whistled at female classmates, his hands in his trouser pockets, I was captivated by his debonair style. He would sometimes hold up a yellowing volume and softly read to us from it. “Do you want a girl? The price is very reasonable.” To us other schoolboys, so poorly informed about sex, he embodied a style we associated more with unemployed youths.

At that point I had a particular dread of being alone and hated having to stand around on my own in some corner during the break between classes. When I saw Su Hang laughing loudly amid a bunch of classmates in the middle of the playground, I moved in his direction, but with some diffidence, country boy that I was. I hoped desperately that Su Hang would greet me with a holler: “Hey, I know you!”

When I went up to him he made no effort to recall our association in Southgate, but neither did he tell me to go away, so with a glow of pleasure I understood this as his accepting me. And he did accept me to the extent that he let me hang around with him and his friends as they joked and shouted in the playground. In the evenings, on the darkened streets, he would share his cigarette with us. We roamed restlessly through the town, and when a girl appeared we would join him in a chorus of groans, which although uttered seemingly in pain actually gave us a lot of pleasure. “Hey sister, why are you ignoring me?” we would say.

As I nervously delivered this greeting, overwhelmed by a sense of impending doom, I experienced at the same time an excitement I had never known before.

What we learned from Su Hang was that to go out after dinner was more fun than staying home, no matter how severely we might be punished at the end of the evening. He also educated us about the kind of girl that we should admire, emphasizing that we could not judge girls in terms of their academic achievements, but should base our selection of love interests on the size of their breasts and buttocks.

Although these were his criteria for evaluating the local talent, he himself was smitten with the skinniest girl in the class. She had a round face and two perky little pigtails, but apart from her dark eyes we could not for the life of us see what was so attractive about her. Su Hang's infatuation left us bemused, and one of us was moved to question his choice: “But what about her chest? There's nothing there! And she's got no tush to speak of, either.”

Su Hang responded in the voice of experience. “You need to think ahead. Within the next year her boobs and her butt will fill out nicely, and then she'll be the prettiest girl in the whole school.”

Su Hang's approach to courtship was simple and direct. He wrote a note full of compliments and endearments and slipped it inside the girl's English textbook. In English class that morning, she suddenly gave a yelp that made us quake and then burst into a long wail that hung in the air, like a note played on the organ. Su Hang, whom I thought bold and dauntless, turned white as a corpse.

But after leaving the classroom Su Hang quickly recovered his customary cool. When we got out of school that morning, he walked over to the girl, whistling nonchalantly, and accompanied her out the gate, making faces at us as he did this. The poor girl was again reduced to tears. At this point one of her friends, a well-built girl, came to her defense. She thrust her way in between them, quietly but indignantly cursing him. “You lowlife!”

Su Hang spun around and blocked her way, not so much angry as excited that she had provided an opportunity to show his mettle. We heard him cry menacingly, “Say that again!”

She was not intimidated, and said, “Lowlife, that's what you are!”

We would never have guessed that Su Hang would raise his fist and hit her right between her ample breasts. She wailed in anguish, then ran off crying, her face in her hands.

When we joined Su Hang, he was gleefully rubbing the index and middle fingers of his right hand. He told us that when he punched the girl those two fingers felt something silky soft, a marvelous sensation denied the other three digits, which was why he was not bothering to rub them. “An unexpected bonus, really an unexpected bonus,” he sighed.

I owed to Su Hang's teachings my earliest conceptions of female anatomy. One evening in early spring a bunch of us were walking with him through the streets. He told us that his parents had a large hardbound volume in which there was a color picture of a woman's pudenda.

“They have three holes,” he said to us.

His tone evoked an air of mystery that was heightened by the occasional pounding of footsteps farther down the street, and I found myself short of breath. I was both frightened and attracted by the unfamiliar knowledge that he was imparting.

A few days later, when Su Hang brought the hardback to school, I was confronted with a difficult choice. Naturally I was just as excited as the other boys, but when classes had finished and Su Hang got ready to open the book I fell into a complete funk. With the sunlight blazing down, I lacked the courage to engage in an activity that seemed to me so ill-advised. So when Su Hang said that someone had to keep watch by the doorway, I gratefully undertook this commission. In my post outside the classroom door I was assailed by desire, and the gasps from inside the room—some long, some short—made my pulse race.

Having missed this opportunity, I found it difficult to get a second chance. Although Su Hang was later to bring the book to school quite regularly, it never occurred to him that he should let me have a look. I knew that I had no standing in his eyes, being just one classmate out of the many in his entourage and the most insignificant of them to boot. And besides, I was never able to overcome my shame and did not take the initiative to make any such request. It would be another six months before the color photo was revealed to me by Su Yu.

Su Hang was sometimes so daring as to take one's breath away. As time went on, he felt it was no fun just to show the photo to other boys. One day he actually went over to a female classmate, book in hand, and the next thing we saw was her fleeing in panic across the playground and bursting into tears by the perimeter wall. Su Hang returned to us, laughing heartily. We warned him anxiously that she might report him, but he was not in the least perturbed, reassuring us, “No chance ofthat. How could she possibly say anything? Can you see her saying, ‘Su Hang showed me a picture of…’? She wouldn't be able to go on. There's nothing to worry about. Relax.”

Afterward, the fact that there were no repercussions whatsoever proved Su Hang's point. His success in this adventure triggered even more bold exploits during the subsequent summer vacation. At lunchtime one day in the middle of the agricultural busy season, Su Hang walked idly along in the sunlight accompanied by a classmate named Lin Wen. I can imagine them expressing their preference for one girl or another in the crudest language possible. Lin Wen had attained his status as Su Hang's best friend during this period by using a mirror to peep at girls in the toilets. This brazen act had not enabled him to see anything of significance, but this is not to say he learned nothing from it. When Su Hang was contemplating testing the mirror's efficacy, Lin Wen, the voice of experience, counseled against it, saying, “With a mirror in the toilet, a girl can see a boy clearly enough, but there's no way that a boy can get a clear view of a girl.”

Immersed in topics such as this, they walked the countryside, and when they entered a village the only sound they heard was a whir of cicadas, for at this time of day all able-bodied people were in the fields harvesting rice. As they strolled under the trees, the topic at hand inflamed them more than the summer heat itself, and the sun-baked scene before them seemed reminiscent of a disaster zone, brought to ruin by desire run amok. When this restless pair saw smoke rising from the chimney of a cottage, Su Hang crept over and took a peep through its window, then signaled to Lin Wen to do the same. Lin Wen's pleasurable anticipation did not last long, because when he sidled up to the window the scene that met his gaze left him disappointed: all he saw was an old woman in her seventies, tending a fire beneath the stove. But he noticed that Su Hang's breath had become labored and heard Su Hang ask him tensely, “Do you want to see the real thing?”

Lin Wen now understood what Su Hang had in mind. Pointing at the old woman, he asked in astonishment, “You want to see hers?”

Su Hang smiled with some embarrassment. “Let's do it together,” he proposed eagerly.

Despite the enterprise he had shown by testing the utility of mirrors in toilets, Lin Wen was not immediately persuaded. “Such an old woman?” he queried.

Blushing, Su Hang quietly exclaimed, “I know, but it's the real thing!”

Lin Wen could not bring himself to participate directly in the proposed inspection, but Su Hang's excitement stirred a tremor within him, and he said, “You go ahead. FU keep watch for you.”

When Su Hang looked back and shot him an awkward smile just before climbing inside, Lin Wen knew that his was the more interesting vantage point.

Lin Wen did not stand right next to the window, for he was perfectly able to imagine how Su Hang would throw himself on the old woman. He concentrated instead on his mission as sentinel, taking a few steps back to assure a fuller view of any villager's approach.

He heard the sound of a body hitting the ground, followed by some shocked groans. At first the old lady must not have known what was happening. Once she did realize, Lin Wen heard a hoarse voice saying heatedly, “You bastard, I am old enough to be your grannie!”

This comment made Lin Wen chuckle. He knew that Su Hang was already halfway there. Then he heard her cry, almost penitently, “What a disgrace!”

She was not strong enough to withstand Su Hang's assault, and in her frail condition righteous anger could give way only to self-pity. Just at this moment—too soon for Su Hang—Lin Wen saw a man heading in their direction. Naked to the waist, sickle in hand, this apparition scared the daylights out of Lin Wen, and he rushed to the window only to see Su Hang kneeling on the floor, desperately tugging at the old woman's trousers, while she rubbed her shoulder (sprained, perhaps) and muttered something incomprehensible. At Lin Wen's warning, Su Hang rushed over and dived out the window with the furious energy of a rabid dog. Then they both raced madly toward the river. Su Hang kept throwing glances behind him, each time seeing a man with a sickle bearing down upon him. As Lin Wen fled for his life, time and again he heard Su Hang's despairing cry, “Can't! Not going to make it!”

As they dashed along the road toward town, through the midday heat, they threw up clouds of dust and their lungs protested furiously. Nauseated and caked in mud, they finally returned to safe territory.

Of my high school teachers, the music instructor, with his cultivated manners, made the deepest impression on me. He was the only teacher who spoke to the class in standard Chinese, and when he sat down in front of the organ to teach us a song I was captivated by his voice and demeanor. For a long time I would gaze at him in delight, and he became my ideal adult. What is more, he was the least snobbish of teachers, favoring all his pupils with the same smile. I still remember the first time he taught us. A songbook under his arm, dressed in a white shirt and dark blue trousers, he came into the classroom and told us solemnly, in the precise tone of a radio announcer: “Music begins where language disappears.”

My classmates, accustomed to hearing uncouth provincial teachers talking in local dialect, found this hilarious.

In the spring of my third year in high school, around the time that the color photograph was attracting so much attention, Su Hang, already regarded as a major headache by the school staff, used his crudity to make the music class an occasion for ridiculing the music teacher. He took off his gym shoes and laid them on the windowsill, then stuck both feet up on his desk. The foul smell issuing from his nylon socks permeated the entire room. In the face of this rudeness, our music teacher continued to sing lustily, his resonant voice creating a counterpoint to Su Hang's stench, exposing us to a collision between beauty and squalor. Only when the song was over did the music teacher push back from the organ, rise to his feet and say to Su Hang, “Put your shoes on, please.”

But this admonition succeeded only in reducing Su Hang to a paroxysm of mirth. Rolling about in his chair, he twisted around to us and said, “Can you believe it? He saidpleasel”

The music teacher, as courteous as ever, said, “None of that nonsense, please.”

This time Su Hang laughed even more wildly. Coughing ostentatiously, he patted his chest and said, “There he goes again with thatplease of his! This is cracking me up. Isn't he a riot?”

The music teacher was livid. Striding over to Su Hang s desk, he picked up his shoes from the windowsill and tossed them out the window. But as he turned around, Su Hang zipped over to the organ in his stocking feet, grabbed the songbook, and chucked it out of the window too. The music teacher was so stunned that he could only watch dumbly as Su Hang clambered out the window and then climbed back in again, shoes in hand. He returned the shoes to their perch on the windowsill, rested both feet on his desk, and gazed coolly at the music teacher, braced for action.

In the face of Su Hangs boorish behavior, the music teacher, so much admired by me, was utterly defenseless. He stood by the dais, his head slightly raised, and for a long time he said nothing at all. His face wore such a desolate look, you might have thought he had just received word of a death in the family, and it was ages before he finally said, “Could somebody go and fetch the song-book?”

After class, when many other boys crowded around Su Hang to hail his triumph, I did not join them. Somehow I felt a sense of loss, having just witnessed my role model being so easily humiliated.

It was not long after this that Su Hang and I went our separate ways. In actual fact, only I was aware of the rupture in our relations. All along he had regarded me as completely dispensable, and when I no longer joined the crowd clustered around him in the middle of the playground I alone was conscious of this change. Su Hang seemed unaware that I was now absent from his throng of adherents. He was in as high spirits as ever, whereas I now found myself alone. But I realized with surprise that the feelings I had experienced when I stood next to Su Hang were identical to my current sense of isolation. The only reason I had attached myself to Su Hang was to put on a show and try to look cool. Later, when I mentally reproached my brother Sun Guang-ping for sucking up to classmates from town, I sometimes would reflect ruefully that I had done much the same thing myself.

Now that I think about it, I am actually rather grateful for the beating that Su Hang administered that afternoon with the willow branch. But how shocked I was at the time—I had no idea that Su Hang would suddenly grab a branch and lay into me. A bunch of girls happened to be walking nearby, among them three whom Su Hang had fancied in the past. I could understand Su Hang's motive but I found it difficult to accept the way he chose to show off. At first I thought he was joking: he flogged me the way a carter might flog a recalcitrant mule, and I forced a smile and tried to get out of his way. But he persisted, and lashed me so fiercely across the face that my cheeks were stinging. When I saw that the girls had stopped and were looking on in wonder, my heart burned with shame. Intoxicated by his power, Su Hang kept turning his head and whistling at them, at the same time shouting at me to lie down. I knewwhy he wanted to hit me, but I neither lay on the ground nor seized hold of the willow branch, and instead headed off in the direction of the classroom. My classmates stood cheering as Su Hang pursued me and landed further blows on my back. I made no effort to resist but just kept on going. That afternoon my eyes blurred with tears of chagrin.

But in fact this humiliation made it possible for me to establish relations with Su Yu several months later. No longer did I claim to have lots of friends; I returned instead to solitude and began an independent life as the true me. Sometimes I found the experience so lonely that it was hard to overcome the emptiness inside, but I thought it better to maintain my self-respect than to gain superficial friends at the expense of shame. It was then I began to notice Su Yu, whose solitary manner as he walked down the side of the street made me sense a bond between us. Though still a teenager, Su Yu already projected an adult air of having lots of things on his mind, for he had yet to dispel the specter of his father's liaison with the widow back in Southgate. As I furtively took note of Su Yu, he likewise was quietly paying attention to me. I found out later that my utter indifference to my classmates had engaged his sympathy.

It did not take me long to realize that Su Yu found me intriguing. Often he would raise his head and look at me as I walked, silent and alone, along the other side of the street, while our classmates marched up the middle in groups of four or five, talking at the top of their voices. But Su Yu's carefree life in South-gate had left a deep impression, discouraging me from trying to forge any ties with him. Besides, the fact that I had no friends made it difficult for me to imagine that a boy two grades above me would come forward and greet me so cordially.

It was not until the term was about to end that Su Yu suddenly spoke up. We were walking down either side of the street, and when I looked over at Su Yu he surprised me by coming to a stop and smiling at me. Then—a moment I will never forget—he blushed with embarrassment. This self-conscious boy so soon to become my friend, called out “Sun Guanglin.”

I just stood there. I can no longer retrieve my precise emotions at that moment, but I know that I looked at him intently. Bunches of schoolchildren were walking along between us, and only when a gap appeared did Su Yu walk across and ask, “Do you remember me?”

When I first approached Su Hang, what I had been hoping was precisely that he would say something like this, but in the end I heard these words from his brother instead. Tears nearly came to my eyes as I nodded and said, “You're Su Yu.”

After this exchange, if we happened to run into each other at the end of the school day it seemed natural to stay together. Often I would see Su Hang not too far away, watching us with a bemused expression. After a while we did not feel ready to head off in different directions when we reached the school gate, and Su Yu began to walk me partway home, as far as the wooden bridge that led to Southgate. He would stand there and wave to me after I crossed to the other side, then turn around and disappear into the distance.

A few years ago, when I made a return visit to Southgate, the old wooden bridge had been replaced by a new concrete structure. I stood in the winter twilight, recalling things that happened that summer. My nostalgic gaze gradually obliterated the factory, the now-bricked-over riverbank, and the concrete bridge I stood upon. I saw once again Southgate s fields and the muddy bank covered with green. The concrete slabs beneath my feet turned back into the wooden boards of earlier days, and through the slits between the boards I watched the river flow.

In the chill winter wind I remembered the following scene. Late one summer afternoon Su Yu and I stood on the bridge together for a long time, and as he gazed sheepishly toward South-gate his eyes reddened in the sunset. In a tone as serene as the dusk itself, he spoke of a tranquil moment during his time there. It had been so hot one night that he couldn't bear to let down his mosquito net, so his mother sat by his bedside, fanning him and driving away mosquitoes; only after he had fallen asleep did she close the net around him.

When Su Yu first told me about this incident, I felt a pang, for by then it was almost unthinkable that I would receive any affection from my family.

Su Yu had had a nightmare later. “I seemed to have killed someone. The police were looking for me everywhere, so I ran back to the house to hide. But when my parents came home from work and found me, they took a rope and tied me to the tree in front of the house so that the police could come and take me away. I cried and cried, begging them not to do that. But they just kept cursing and cursing.”

Su Yu's wails woke up his mother. When she roused him from his dream, he was in a cold sweat and his heart was pounding. “What on earth are you crying about?” she scolded. “Are you out of your mind?”

The contempt in his mother's voice plunged Su Yu into despondency.

When the young Su Yu told this story to the younger me, probably neither of us could make much sense of it. More than ten years after Su Yu's death, as I stood alone with my memories on the bridge to Southgate, it dawned on me that Su Yu, such a sensitive soul, must always have oscillated between happiness and despair.

SHIVERS

When I was fourteen, under cover of darkness I discovered a mysterious activity that gave me a wonderful sensation. At the moment of climax, rapture arrived on the coattails of apprehension. After this, when I encountered the word shiver, I understood it in a sense different from the purely negative connotation ascribed to it by my peers, and perhaps more akin to what Goethe intended when he wrote, “To shiver is mankind's finest lot.”

During those long evenings when I first scaled the thrilling heights, only to enter a world of utter emptiness and discover a wet patch on my underpants, I could not help but feel anxious and bewildered. My initial sense of alarm did not trigger guilt as much as a fear that I had fallen prey to some physiological disorder. At first I assumed the moisture was caused by an escape of urine, and what embarrassed me, in my ignorance, was not the shamefulness of my action but rather the idea that at my age I might still wet my bed. At the same time I was in a panic because I wondered if I might be ill. Nonetheless, such was my craving for this momentary wave of pleasure that I couldn't stop myself from repeatedly undertaking the maneuvers that would culminate in that ecstatic shudder.

When I left the house after lunch one day, the summer I was fourteen, and walked toward the school in town, my face went pale under the dazzling sun, for at this very hour I was intending to perform the disgraceful deed in order to solve the mystery of my nocturnal emissions. Given my age at the time, I was no longer able to let everything happen in accordance with what were held to be correct principles, and my inner desires began silently to control some of my words and actions. For days now, I had been dying to know exactly what had been discharged. At home, I couldn't carry out my scheme, and my only recourse was to pay a visit to the school toilets at lunchtime, when nobody else would be there. Later on the memory of those ramshackle toilets made me cringe, and for a long time I couldn't help but despise myself for choosing the most sordid venue in which to engage in the most sordid activity. Now I refuse to indulge in that kind of self-reproach, because my opting for the toilets simply reflected the fact that in my youth I had no place to hide. My choice was forced on me by circumstances.

I prefer not to describe the grim ambience of the school toilets; just to recall the buzzing of flies and the din of cicadas in the trees outside is enough to make me tense. I remember that after leaving the toilets I felt completely drained as I walked across the sun-bleached playground. With my most recent discovery confusion had given way to bafflement. When I walked into the classroom opposite I was thinking I might lie down in the empty room, but to my alarm I saw a girl doing her homework there, and her serene expression instantly drove home to me the weight of my sin. I dared not enter the classroom, but stood miserably next to a window in the hallway. I had no idea what I should do next and felt as though the day of judgment was nigh. When an old cleaning woman went into the toilet I had just vacated, bucket in hand, I began to tremble.

Later I grew more accustomed to the sensation, and when darkness fell I was no longer so fearful of sinning. It had become apparent to me that self-reproach was ineffectual in the face of temptation, and night always accorded leniency and consolation. As I wearily drifted off to sleep, the sight that often met my eyes was a brightly colored jacket fluttering gently in a light gray sky, and the austere soul that had been wont to put me on trial disappeared in the distance.

But in the morning, when I started my walk toward the school, heavy chains dragged me down. As I approached the school and saw female classmates, so neat and tidy, I could not help but blush. The healthy life embodied in the sunlight by their gay laughter seemed to me the most wonderful thing in the world, and my tainted condition stirred in me a disgust with myself. What I found hardest to bear was the way their glowing eyes skimmed over me from time to time, because now all I felt was anxiety, and I was no longer able to enjoy the happiness and excitement of being warmed by a girl's glance. At moments like that I always vowed to reform, but with night I would return to my old ways. My self-contempt expressed itself through weak avoidance, and I would slip out to some empty spot at the intervals between classes and stand there blankly. I kept away from Su Yu, on whom I had become increasingly dependent, for I felt I didn't deserve such a good friend, and when I saw Su Yu (who was completely in the dark about my ordeal) approaching me in a friendly way, I was so distressed I scuttled off in the other direction.

My life organized itself into two parts, day and night. During the day I felt upright and fearless, but once night arrived my resolve quickly collapsed. The speed with which I fell into desire's embrace never ceased to astonish me. In those days my heart was in turmoil. I often felt that I was being torn in two, my dual identities glaring at each other like archenemies.

At night, as desire ran rampant, I increasingly felt a need of a female image for inspiration. I didn't really want to sully anybody's honor, but the urge was just too compelling. I chose a pretty girl in my class named Cao Li. She wore shorts to school that summer and other boys more physically advanced than me quite lost their heads over her, hot in their praise of her exposed thighs. I, on the other hand, still lacked a true awareness of the female body and was quite taken aback when I heard their muttered comments. It was incomprehensible to me that they did not single out her face for accolades, for at the time I felt she possessed a peerless beauty and was completely infatuated with her captivating smile. At night she became my fantasy companion. Although my attention to her physical assets was not nearly as down-to-earth as the other boys’, I noticed her thighs too, and their sleek luster made me quiver. But it was her face inspired my most fervent admiration. The sound of her voice, from wherever it came, was always tantalizing.

And so after nightfall, in my imagination, lovely Cao Li would appear by my side. In these moments I never had any improper designs on her body, for we would simply walk along a riverbank which we had all to ourselves. I made up the words she said and imagined the looks she gave me, and at my most daring I could even fashion a scent that emanated from her flesh, the smell of a meadow at daybreak. My only unseemly fantasy was that of stroking her hair as it stirred in the breeze. Later, when I prepared to caress her cheek, my nerve failed and I cautioned myself: No, you're not to do that.

Although I successfully prevented myself from stroking Cao Li's adorable face, with the arrival of daylight I still felt I had behaved indecently toward her, and as soon as I stepped inside the school I grew uneasy. I chose not to let my eyes rest on her, but I had no way of imposing similar control over my hearing, and the sound of her voice might wing its way toward me at any moment, making me happy and miserable all at the same time. Once she was tossing a paper ball toward one of her girlfriends, and it accidentally hit me instead. She just stood there, not knowing what to do, and then sat down amid the laughter of our classmates. Her face turned crimson as she bent her head to organize things in her satchel, and that flustered look stirred me to the core: if a trivial paper ball could embarrass her so acutely, then my nocturnal fantasies about her had to count as really filthy. But it was not so long afterward that I was to see a dramatic change in her.

Over and over again I vowed to cease my secret injuries to Cao Li, and on a trial basis I would fantasize about dating another girl, but it never took long before Cao Li's image took her place. Despite my best efforts I could never break free from her grip, and my only comfort was that no matter how often I molested her in my imagination she remained as beautiful as always, and when she ran across the playground her figure was just as vital and touching.

As I sank deeper and deeper into this quagmire of self-indulgence and self-laceration, Su Yu, who was after all two years my senior, noticed my haggard face and my strange insistence on avoiding him. Not only was seeing Cao Li a source of distress, encounters with Su Yu also left me acutely embarrassed. His cultured manner as he walked across the sunny playground evoked purity and an unruffled calm, and my dirty secrets had deprived me of the right to enjoy his company. After class I did not venture over to the older boys’ classroom to look for him as I had earlier done but made my way to the pond next to the school, enduring in silence and solitude all these problems I had created for myself.

Su Yu came over to the pond on several occasions. The first time he asked me what was wrong with such obvious concern that it brought me to the verge of tears. I said nothing and just went on watching the ripples on the surface of the pond. After that, if Su Yu came over he would not say a word, and together we would stand there quietly waiting for the bell to ring, when we'd head back to school.

Su Yu had no way of knowing what torments I was having to endure, and my manner made him suspect that perhaps I had begun to get tired of him. So he became more cautious in his approach and no longer came over to the pond to check on me. Close friends for so long, we found a barrier now lay between us and estrangement quickly ensued. Sometimes if we ran into each other on the road to or from school we both appeared nervous and ill at ease. I noticed that Zheng Liang, the tallest boy in the whole school, was now beginning to appear by Su Yu's side. The two would stand at the edge of the playground, and Zheng Liang would chat amiably with the more refined Su Yu, punctuating their conversation with his loud laugh. I watched in misery as Zheng Liang occupied the place that was rightfully mine.

I tasted to the full the bitterness of losing a friend, resentful that Su Yu had bonded so quickly with Zheng Liang. At the same time, when we ran into each other I was stirred by the expression of perplexity and hurt in Su Yu's eyes, and there was sparked in me a fervent desire to reestablish my old friendship with him. But as long as I was bogged down in my nightly sinning I felt it impossible to set about restoring our relationship. Daylight plunged me into a mood of unspeakable dread; under the blazing sun I always hated myself and Su Yu's remoteness simply intensified my self-contempt. So one morning I made up my mind to confess to him how low I had sunk. I wanted to do this partly to impose a real punishment on myself and partly to demonstrate my loyalty to him. I could perfectly well imagine Su Yu's shocked reaction to my revelations, for he could not possibly anticipate the extent of my wickedness.

But the morning I summoned up courage to call Su Yu over to the pond and was able to maintain this bold stance long enough to tell him everything, Su Yu showed not the slightest sign of alarm, instead saying earnestly, “What you're talking about is masturbation.”

His attitude astonished me. There was a smile of embarrassment on his face as he told me evenly, “I do it too.”

Tears seemed to spill from my eyes and I heard myself saying with vexation, “Why didn't you tell me that before?”

I will never forget that morning beside the pond with Su Yu. In the wake of his admission, daytime recovered its beauty. The grass and trees nearby gleamed in the sun and when some boys burst out laughing over some joke or other, Su Yu pointed at them and said, “At night they do it too.”

One evening not long afterward, at the tail end of winter, Su Yu and Zheng Liang and I were walking along a quiet street—the first time I was with Su Yu after dark. I remember I had both hands in my pockets, through habit ingrained by the winter cold, and it was only when I realized that my palms were breaking into a warm sweat that I asked Su Yu in surprise, “Is it spring already?”

I was fifteen that year, and to be going around with two friends considerably older than me was a memorable experience. Su Yu was on my right, his hand on my shoulder. Zheng Liang— my companion for the first time—was on his right. When Su Yu introduced me, Zheng Liang did not think any the worse of me for my shortness and even seemed pleased, saying to Su Yu, “Did you think I don't know who he is?”

Zheng Liang made a deep impression on me that evening. He had a way of swinging his arms as he walked, and in the moonlight his tall figure conveyed an air of complete self-assurance. It was on that occasion that the three of us quietly addressed the topic of masturbation. Su Yu, normally so laconic, was the one who started things off, and I was quite taken aback when he calmly broached the subject. It is only now, when I recall this scene after an interval of so many years, that I understand Su Yu's intentions. At the time I had yet to shake off all the baggage I had accumulated, and Su Yu brought the issue out in the open to help me put it in perspective. And it is true that only after this did I become truly relaxed about it. Now, as then, I feel there was something touching about the conspiratorial tone of the confidences we shared.

Zheng Liangs attitude was matter-of-fact. “If you can't sleep at night, it really does the trick,” he said.

Recalling how cruelly I had been punishing myself just a few days earlier, I shot him an admiring glance.

Although on that particular evening he put me entirely at ease, a casual remark of his somewhat later on created a new matter for concern. Zheng Liang, quite unaware that he was revealing his own ignorance, said to me, “That stuff is like water in a thermos—there's only so much of it in you. People who use it up quickly exhaust their supply by the time they're in their thirties, whereas people who save it up still have some when they're eighty.”

This comment sent me into a tizzy. Given my overindulgence during the preceding weeks, I thought it very likely that my stocks had been drained dry, and I was worried sick at night when I contemplated my future. As fear gnawed away, my romantic yearnings failed to reignite those fantasies that once kept me in their thrall and instead I became increasingly resigned to a life of loneliness. One evening I imagined myself as a doddery old man plodding alone through the winter snow, and I felt heartsick over my wretched lot.

For many nights after this I continued my nocturnal activities—not to satisfy physical urges but to determine the status of my bodily functions. Successful experiments gained me only momentary reassurance, for panic followed hard on their heels. I was well aware of the risks I was taking with each effort at verification and that the very last drops of fluid had just been discharged. Then I would bitterly regret the proof I had just completed. But within days anxiety about the prospect of internal depletion would stir me to renewed testing. My physical growth took place against the backdrop of a wan complexion, and often I would stand next to the pond in Southgate, looking at my reflection. I saw my emaciated chin and lackluster eyes drifting helplessly in the water, and faint ripples made me see a face covered in wrinkles. Especially when the sky was overcast I could clearly make out the gloomy features of a man grown senile before his time.

It was not until I was twenty years old that I learned the truth of the matter. I was at the university in Beijing at the time and happened to make the acquaintance of a poet who then enjoyed a considerable reputation. He was the first celebrity I had known and his offhand, distracted manner inspired me regularly to take a two-hour bus trip to reach the other side of town, just to enjoy a few minutes of conversation with him. After three such visits he was still vague about what my name was, but his friendliness and his scathing mockery of fellow poets more than compensated for this indignity. Though prone to holding forth at great length, he was also capable of listening attentively to my own scattered opinions while regularly correcting what he saw as erroneous views.

At the home of this forty-year-old bachelor I would encounter women of various stripes and hues, a reflection of the poet's catholic tastes. After our relationship developed, I once rather gingerly suggested that perhaps it was time for him to get married. This intrusion into his privacy did not seem to irritate him, for he answered casually, “What's the point of getting married?”

This put me on the spot. Out of concern for him as a man I much admired, I blundered on, “You don't want to use all that stuff up prematurely.”

This bashful remark left him incredulous. “How on earth could you think like that?” he asked.

So then I repeated what Zheng Liang had said that evening years earlier. His reaction to this account was a roar of laughter, and I still remember vividly the sight of him doubled up on the sofa, splitting his sides with mirth. Later he invited me for the first time to stay for dinner, a meal that took the form of two packets of instant noodles purchased from the convenience store downstairs.

The poet did get married when he was forty-five, to a woman in her thirties whose striking good looks were paired with a remarkably fierce temper. The poet, formerly such a free spirit, now found himself the cat's-paw of fate. Like a child in the hands of a stepmother, when he left his apartment the only money he had in his pocket was his round-trip bus fare. Control of the purse strings was just one of her areas of expertise. He often came over to my place, bruises all over his face, seeking temporary refuge, the reason being simply that a certain female had called him up. A few days later he would insist that I accompany him back home as he prepared to make an official apology. I said to him, “Don't look so dejected. You've got nothing to be ashamed of. You didn't do anything wrong.”

But he smirked and said, “Better to confess my errors.”

I remember how his pretty wife, from her perch on the sofa, said to her husband as he came in the door, “Take the garbage out!”

Our poet lifted the bulging basket of trash, a beam of pleasure on his face. He was wrong to assume that performance of this chore would secure him a clean bill of health, for on his return she gave me my marching orders, and after the door had closed behind me, I heard her launch forth like a parent lecturing a child. As his wife, she was of course fully aware that the object of her reprimands was a gifted poet. So it was that I heard a tirade that left me quite dumbfounded, so wide was its lexical range, incorporating references to classical poetry and contemporary political jargon, pop lyrics, and goodness knew what else. At intervals in between I heard her husband's pious utterances: “That's well put” or “You've set me straight on that.”

As the wife's voice grew ever more passionate, she was no longer censuring her husband as much as she was carried away by a pure love of invective. I hated to imagine what it would be like to be under her thumb on a daily basis: even if one could endure the black eyes and bloody noses, it would be hard to put up with her verbal incontinence.

Her most extreme measure was to decorate their apartment with her husband's letters of repentance, pledges to reform, and statements of self-criticism, as though they were some kind of design element that would impress her husband's friends when they visited. When she first stuck them up, his face was ashen, but with time he was able to pretend it was no big deal. “A dead pig's not afraid of being scalded with hot water” was his comment.

“Forget about the physical abuse,” he once told me. “She's making an emotional wreck out of me too.”

“Why did you marry her in the first place?” I asked.

“How was I to know she was a shrew?”

Along with other friends I urged him to get a divorce, but he ended up reporting our advice to his wife, holding nothing back. His betrayal resulted in an identical outcome for each of us, a threat-filled phone call from his wife. The curse placed on me was that I would die on the street on my twenty-fifth birthday.

In the spring ofthat year when I turned fifteen, I was dressing after a shower one lunchtime and discovered that my body had undergone a peculiar change. I noticed that some long hairs had appeared in my groin, which added a new layer of agitation to the inner turmoil generated by my nocturnal activities. Uninvited guests, these slender intruders had all of a sudden sprouted on my smooth skin. I stared at them stupefied, uncertain just how I should view their arrival, though I had the fearful sensation that my body had lost its carefree simplicity.

As I headed off for school through the sunlight, everything around me was just as it had always been—my body alone had changed. Something ugly was hiding in my underpants, making me feel that my feet were unbearably heavy. Although I hated those hairs I had to keep their existence a secret, because I could not deny that they were a part of me.

Soon after, hairs started springing up on my legs, too. I noticed this in the summer, when I no longer wore long trousers, and when I walked to school in my shorts the hairs’ obvious and inescapable presence made me feel hideously exposed. All it took to make me squirm was for a girl to glance in their direction. Even if I had uprooted the most flagrant offenders by the following morning, I was always worried that Cao Li would already have seen them.

The tallest boy in my class had legs densely covered with dark hairs but walked around casually all the same, flaunting them to the whole world. I went through a phase when I often felt anxious on his account, and if I noticed girls’ eyes fixed on his legs my concern for him only accentuated my own sense of unease.

Shortly before the start of the summer vacation, I came back to school early after lunch, but was deterred from entering by the sound of girls talking and laughing loudly inside. (Even now, if it is all women or all strangers in a room, I find it an intimidating experience to go in on my own. With so many eyes resting on me all at once, I am nervous and flustered.) I meant to walk away immediately, but I heard Cao Li's voice and her laughter kept me rooted to the spot. Next thing, I heard the others ask her which boy she liked most, a question that startled me with its boldness. What surprised me even more was that Cao Li was not the least embarrassed. There was a clear note of relish in her voice when she told them to guess the answer.

So tense was I that my breathing became labored. The girls came out with a whole string of potential candidates, including Su Hang and Lin Wen, but my name was conspicuously absent and I was mortified at having been overlooked. At the same time, Cao Li's total rejection of these possibilities gave me some fleeting hope. But soon a voice named the classmate with the hairy legs and Cao Li immediately responded in the affirmative. The girls greeted her admission with simultaneous peals of laughter, and amid the hilarity one voice chipped in, “I know what it is you like about him.”

“What's that?”

“The hair on his legs.”

For a long time I would puzzle in vain over the explanation Cao Li herself gave. She said that of all the boys in the school he looked the most grown-up.

I quietly edged away from the classroom door and Cao Li's wanton laughter pursued me all the way down the corridor. What I had just heard did not sadden me as much as shock me. In that moment, as never before, life had revealed to me a state of affairs that seemed utterly counterintuitive. The lanky schoolboy who couldn't care less about the hair on his legs would hand in essays littered with miswritten characters and there wasn't one teacher who didn't single him out for ridicule, but this very same student had gotten the thumbs-up from Cao Li. Precisely what I regarded as ugly was alluring to her. I walked all the way to the pond next to the school and stood there for a long time watching the sunlight and the foliage that floated on the water's surface, and my deep disappointment with Cao Li slowly evolved into self-pity. For the first time in my life a beautiful dream had been shattered.

A second disillusionment was brought home to me by Su Yu, and involved the secrets of the female body. By now I had a longstanding desire for the opposite sex, but I was still in the dark about women's anatomy. I had specially earmarked my purest notions, using them to construct in a vacuum my image of Woman. This specter had appeared at night in the shape of Cao Li but never emerged as a genuinely sexual being, and in the evenings I would content myself with glimpsing female figures of matchless beauty who were dancing in the dark.

It all started with that hardback volume on Su Yu's father's shelves. Su Yu was quite familiar with his father's library, but it was through Su Hang that he became aware of this particular title. Ever since leaving Southgate the Su family had lived in one of the apartment blocks for hospital staff, with Su Yu and Su Hang on the first floor and their parents on the second; the one chore the brothers were assigned was to mop the floors each day. In the first few years Su Hang took responsibility for mopping downstairs, for he was unwilling to carry the mop up to the second floor, with all the extra work that would entail. But later on Su Hang abruptly told Su Yu that he would take charge of cleaning upstairs. He did not provide any explanation, for he was already accustomed to ordering his older brother about. Su Yu accepted Su Hang's suggestion without comment, this minor change striking him as of no consequence. After Su Hang took charge of the second floor, two or three classmates would drop in every day and help Su Hang with the mopping. So it was that Su Yu downstairs would often hear a flurry of furtive comments from upstairs, as well as a puzzling assortment of whistles and sighs. Su Yu burst in on them one time and thereby learned their secret.

After this, when Su Yu and I met, there was often a morose look on his face. Like mine, his conception of women was constructed around fantasy, and he was thrown off balance when suddenly confronted by the banality of real life. I remember that one particular evening we strolled quietly along the road and later stood on the newly completed concrete bridge. Su Yu, deep in thought, stared at the moonlight and lamplight on the water and then said to me awkwardly, “There's something you need to know.”

That night I gave a little shiver under the moonlight, for I knew what I was about to see. My examination of the color photograph had been delayed until now; how bitterly I had regretted my offer to stand guard that day.

The following morning, I sat upstairs in the Sus’ house in a dilapidated rattan chair and watched as Su Yu picked the book off the shelf. He showed me the color plate.

My first reaction was, How lurid and gross! Once confronted with this photograph, the image of femininity that had formed in my mind collapsed in ruins. Instead of the beauty I had so anticipated, a grotesque sight met my eyes; there was something malignant about this tasteless illustration. Su Yu stood beside me, his face just as pale as mine. He closed the book, saying, “I shouldn't have shown it to you.”

The color plate had the same effect on me as it had on Su Yu, severing my attachment to an illusory perfection and thrusting me headlong into unvarnished reality. Although I persisted with my beautiful visions for a little longer, I was conscious that they were vaporizing.

When I started thinking about girls again, I found I had lost my original innocence, for the color plate had reoriented me toward practical physiology. I started to have all kinds of fantasies. Though I had a dreadful feeling that I was rapidly becoming decadent, raw desire made my resistance crumble. As I grew older the way I looked at girls changed drastically, for I began to pay attentionto their buttocks and breasts, no longer susceptible only to winsome eyes or a cute expression.

The autumn when I was sixteen, the film projection team from town visited Southgate for the first time in six months. In those days it was a big event for country folk to watch a movie in the evening and people from adjacent villages came hurrying over before dark, clutching stools in their hands. For years now the production team leader had been accustomed to planting his seat firmly in the center of the drying ground. I will never forget how he used to make his entrance. Just as night fell he would appear, brandishing the kind of long bamboo pole normally used for hanging out laundry, and swagger across the drying ground. After he sat down, he would lean the pole against his shoulder and if anyone in front of him obstructed his line of vision he would hold out the pole and give that person a tap on the head, to preserve his unimpeded view.

Children generally sat on the other side of the screen and watched the characters fire guns or write letters with their left hands. When I was little, my place had been in this juvenile section, but I ruled out such a viewing position now that I was sixteen. On this occasion the person immediately in front of me was a young woman from a nearby village, whose name I never knew.

It was so packed that I had to squeeze in behind her and peer over her head to see the screen. At the beginning I was quite relaxed, but the smell of her hair kept wafting over me, making me more and more unsettled. As people behind us pressed forward, my hand brushed against her buttocks; this brief contact electrified me. Temptation, when it comes one's way, is hard to resist: suppressing my inhibitions, I gave her a second little pat. When she did not react, this strengthened my nerve and I pressed my palm against her buttocks, ready to take to my heels should she begin to stir. But she stood as stiff and still as if she were carved out of wood. My hand could feel her warmth, and the part of her that I was touching seemed to get hotter and hotter. When I gently adjusted my position, she still made no response. I turned my head to look around and saw that the man behind me was a good bit taller than me. Emboldened, I pinched the young woman on the bottom, making her giggle. This sound was particularly noticeable, as it was emitted during the film's most tedious sequence, and it instantly deflated my courage. I squeezed my way out of the crowd, trying to assume a pose of nonchalance. But panic took over before I had gone very far and I bolted for home, where my heart continued to thump even after I had thrown myself down on my bed. Whenever steps approached our house I trembled all over, convinced that she must be coming with a backup to apprehend her molester. After the movie was over, the random patter of feet made me more agitated still, and long after my parents and my older brother had gone to bed I worried that the young woman might yet track me down. Only sleep rescued me in the end.

I could find no outlet for my desires, and Su Yu was in the same boat. The difference was that Su Yu's sexual frustrations at least distracted him from the anxieties that beset him during his stay at Southgate. Now, when I look back, the happy childhood that I associated with Su Yu from my pond-side observation point was actually just as unreliable as the breezes that blew across the water. I was vaguely aware at the time of his father's entanglement with the widow, but I had no idea of the full extent to which Su Yu was affected. In fact, just as my family's antipathy to me was growing daily more obvious, Su Yu had begun to suffer insecurities of his own following that act of his father's.

When the Sus moved to Southgate the widow was still in full flower, and she made no effort to conceal her interest in Dr. Su. For it was at this stage, before her vigorous appetite began to wane, that she developed a tendency one associates more with men—a taste for novelty. The guests she had received previously were all peasants with mud on their legs, and the appearance on the scene of Dr. Su struck her as a refreshing change. With his glasses and the whiff of ethyl alcohol that clung to him, this man of culture was an utter revelation, making her realize that however many visitors had honored her carved bed with their presence, they had all been patterned from a single mold. The doctor's arrival in the village excited her no end, and she would say to everyone she met, “These intellectuals are so adorable!”

To be fair, one has to point out that during those days she was so infatuated with the doctor she must have observed at least two weeks of celibacy, no longer accepting every volunteer who came along. She knew that doctors are particular about hygiene and didn't want to make things difficult. Her faked illness provided the occasion for seducing him. As he walked to her house to perform the examination, he had no idea that he was headed for a trap, and even when he stood by her bed and she looked doe-eyed up at him he failed to note the warning signs. In his usual even tone he inquired about the nature of her malady, and was told she had a bellyache. He asked her to pull back a corner of the quilt so that he could take a look at the problem area. Instead she kicked the quilt to one side, offering herself for his inspection in her birthday suit. This unexpected move took him completely by surprise. He found himself gazing at a female body in impressive physical condition. His wife's figure was not at all in the same league.

“You didn't…,” he stammered, “you didn't need to take it all off.”

“Come to me,” she said in an imperious tone.

The doctor could have taken to his heels, but instead he slowly backed away and shuffled toward the door. It was hard to say no to the widow's lusty body.

She jumped to her feet, and between her strength and his lack of resistance she found it an easy matter to maneuver him onto her bed. During the act that followed she heard him muttering again and again, “I am letting my wife down. I am letting the boys down.”

The doctor's incessant self-reproaches did not hinder his participation in their activity, and everything took its normal course. Afterward the widow told people, “You have no idea how bashful he is. What a sweet man!”

Nothing else happened between them, but for a long time afterward the villagers often saw the widow made up like some girl from Xinjiang, her hair twisted into little braids, pacing back and forth near the doctor's house playing the coquette. The doctor's wife would sometimes come out and look at her, then go back inside, without any words being exchanged. A few times she managed to intercept the doctor as he came down the road, and the villagers would see the doctor flee in embarrassment before her doting smile.

One evening in my second year at junior high, Su Yu pensively related to me the events of one other evening. His father's brief lapse had not created such a big stir as to seriously disrupt family life, but something untoward did ensue. One day their parents came home unusually late. Their mother was the first to return, well after dark, but when he and his brother went to greet her she ignored them. Instead she rummaged around in a trunk for some clothes, put them in a bag, and went off carrying the bag. Their father returned soon afterward. He asked them if their mother had come home at all. Told that she had, he went out again. They waited till midnight on empty stomachs, but with no sign of their parents’ return had no choice but to go to bed. When they woke up the next morning, their parents were in the kitchen preparing breakfast, just like any other day.

I could detect uneasiness in Su Yu's voice that night. In the aftermath of his father's escapade, Su Yu, sensitive and impressionable as he was, was easily thrown off balance simply by witnessing, say, a man and a woman having a personal conversation. Even though his parents had been careful to cover up his father's indiscretion, the facts of the matter gradually had become plain to him. Observing the carefree manner of his classmates, he would feel envy of them and esteem for their parents. It never crossed his mind that their parents might also be involved in some hanky-panky, and he was convinced that only his family could generate such a scandal. On occasion he even indicated that he felt a little jealous of me, although he was well aware of my miserable status in my family. As he looked at me with admiration, he did not know that my father, Sun Kwangtsai, was that very moment marching triumphantly into the widow's house with the foot basin that my grandmother once used slung over his shoulder. In the face of Su Yu's benign envy, I could only blush with shame.

In his last year in high school, as Su Yu approached full physical maturity, it became difficult for him to resist his burgeoning desires, urges whose intensity I was to feel to much the same degree when I entered high school. One summer lunchtime this yearning for the opposite sex led him on the path toward what we regarded at the time as fearful ruin. He happened to be walking along a quiet alleyway when he saw a full-breasted young woman approaching. He gave an involuntary shiver and in that moment his self-control was vanquished by the sheer force of his sexual need. As he walked in a daze toward her, he had no idea that he would end up putting his arms around her, and only when she shrieked in terror, pulled herself away, and ran off did he gradually realize what he had done.

Su Yu paid a heavy price, sentenced to a year of reform through labor. The day before his departure, he was led onto the rostrum next to the school playground with a wooden placard suspended from his neck, on which was written “Su Yu, Hooligan.” I watched as several classmates I knew well strode onto the rostrum, each clutching a sheet of writing paper, and delivered stern condemnations of Su Yu's crime.

I learned what had happened very late in the game. At morning recess on the day after the incident, I was on my way to Su Yu's classroom as usual when some older boys called out, “When are you making your first prison visit?”

I had no idea what they meant. When I got to the window and glanced toward Su Yu's desk, Zheng Liang saw me and signaled grimly. He came out and said, “Su Yu's in trouble.”

That's when I heard the whole story. Zheng Liang asked me tentatively, “Do you hate Su Yu?”

Tears spilled from my eyes, for my heart went out to my friend. “I could never hate Su Yu,” I told him.

I felt Zheng Liang's hand on my shoulder. As we began to walk, the boys who had jeered at me earlier yelled again, “When are you guys off for your prison visit?”

“Just ignore them,” Zheng Liang murmured.

At the west end of the playground I saw Su Hang. Together with Lin Wen he was busily sharing his worldly wisdom with other boys my age. Su Hang was unperturbed by his brother's disgrace and loudly declared, “I don't know what we've been fucking doing all this time! While we were fooling around, my brother goes off without a word and feels a woman up. I'm going to cop a feel myself tomorrow.”

Lin Wen chipped in, “Su Yu has shown what he's made of now. We're novices by comparison.”

Two weeks later, Su Yu stood on the stage, his head shaved. Those tight, short clothes of his clung to his puny frame, and under an overcast sky he looked too weak to withstand a gust of wind. Even though I knew this was coming, I was still shocked to see Su Yu reduced so quickly to such a pitiful state. The way he stood there, head bowed, threw me into a welter of confused thoughts. I peered through a crowd of heads in an effort to catch Zheng Liang's eye and I noticed that he likewise was looking over his shoulder to see how I was reacting. At this moment only Zheng Liang felt my anguish, and our eyes were seeking out each other's support. When the denunciation session ended, he made a sign and I ran over. “Let's go,” Zheng Liang said.

Su Yu had been led off the stage in preparation for being frog-marched around the town. Many of our classmates followed in his wake, laughing and joking, excited by all the drama. I noticed Su Hang, who not long before had been so impervious to his brother's misfortune. Now he walked by himself, a hangdog look on his face, clearly upset by what had happened at the denunciation meeting. When the parade turned onto the main street, Zheng Liang and I pushed our way to the front of the crowd. Zheng Liang cried, “Su Yu!”

Su Yu walked on unhearing, his head down. Zheng Liang flushed and a look of distress crossed his face. I called out too, “Su Yu!”

Immediately I felt blood surging to my cheeks. With everyone's eyes on me all of a sudden, I felt terribly self-conscious. This time Su Yu turned his head and gave us a relaxed smile.

We were bewildered by that smile of his, and it was not until later that I understood what lay behind it. Despite Su Yu's seemingly terrible plight he himself felt that pressure had been lifted from his shoulders. Afterward he was to tell me, “I understood how it was my father came to do what he did.”

In the wake of Su Yu's disgrace, the conduct of Zheng Liang and me—particularly our final farewell—was excoriated by our teachers, who ordered us to write self-criticisms. As they saw it, since we not only were not indignant about Su Yu's hooligan act but actually offered him our sympathy, this proved that we were ourselves would-be hooligans. On the way home from school once, I heard some girls behind me commenting, “He's even worse than Su Yu.”

We refused to write self-criticisms, no matter how the teachers threatened us, and when Zheng Liang and I met we would proudly say to each other, “Better to die!”

But not long afterward, Zheng Liang came to me looking dejected. I was shocked by his bruised and swollen face. “My dad did it,” he told me. Then he said, “I have written a self-criticism.”

I was appalled. “You have let Su Yu down,” I told him.

“I had no choice,” Zheng Liang replied.

I spun on my heel and as I walked away I said, “I will never write one!”

Looking back on it, I see that if I was brave then, it was because I was under no pressure at home. Sun Kwangtsai was absorbed by his aerobic exercises in the widow's carved bed, while my mother was quietly nurturing her animosity toward her rival. Only Sun Guangping knew what I was going through. But by then he was saying little; the day that Su Yu came to grief was the very day that the carpenter's daughter threw the melon seeds in his face. That time the older boys taunted me, I noticed my brother in the distance, watching me in a preoccupied way.

During this period, I was gripped by unquenchable rage. In the wake of Su Yu's departure, everything around me became hateful, infuriating. Sometimes, sitting in the classroom, I would look at the window glass and wish that it would shatter. Once, an older boy yelled to me in a provocative tone, “Hey, how come you still haven't made that prison visit?”

His big grin struck me as so despicable that, trembling with anger, I raised my fist and slammed it into his face.

His body swayed, and then I received a stinging blow to the head and slumped to the ground. As I tried to get to my feet, he kicked me in the chest, inflicting a sharp pain that made me want to vomit. Then somebody else flung himself at my tormentor, only to be knocked down too. It was Su Hang. I was startled to see Su Hang intervene in a fight that wasn't his. He got back on his feet and lunged out, grabbing the other boy by his waist. The two fell to the ground in a tussle. Su Hang's entry into the fray raised my fighting spirit and I seized hold of our opponent's flailing feet while Su Hang gripped his arms. I bit his leg and Su Hang planted his teeth in the boy's shoulder. He squealed with pain. Su Hang and I looked at each other and—perhaps through sheer excitement—we both burst into tears. How loudly we wept that afternoon , at the same time butting our heads against the older boy's pinioned body.

Because of Su Yu, a bond was formed between Su Hang and me, if only fleetingly Su Hang sported a little switchblade, and he and I would roam the school with ferocious looks on our faces. He vowed to me: The next person who dares to say anything bad about Su Yu is going to have a taste of this.

As time went on maybe attitudes changed. At any rate, nobody seemed to think about Su Yu for very long and we were never provoked again, so we had no further opportunity to develop our friendship. Just when we viewed the world with unrelieved hostility, the world suddenly grew more civil. Hatred united Su Hang and me, and as hatred dissipated our friendship withered on the vine.

Not long after this, Cao Li's affair with the music teacher became public knowledge. Cao Li's weakness for mature men had led her straight into his arms. When I first heard the news, I was dumbfounded. Although my own sense of inferiority had forced me to accept that I could never be the right match for Cao Li, she was, after all, a girl whom I had fancied and of whom I was still fond.

Urged to make a clean breast of it, Cao Li wrote a long confession. The math teacher was among the first to read it, and when he ran into the Chinese teacher on the staircase, he handed it on to him with a leer. The Chinese teacher, who was having a smoke, seemed unwilling to endure even a moment's delay, for he took the document out of its envelope and started reading right there on the stairs. His eyes bulged, and he forgot all about the cigarette in his hand; when it burned down to his fingers he simply gave a shiver and dropped it on the floor. But when Su Hang quietly slipped behind him, he somehow sensed his intrusion and emitted a series of disapproving grunts and snorts designed to drive the boy away.

Su Hang had managed to read only a single sentence, but it was enough to keep him in ecstasies the whole afternoon. He glibly reported the fruits of his spying to every single person he met, including me.

“I couldn't sit down afterward.'” He went on exultantly to explain. “That's what Cao Li wrote. Do you know what that means? Cao Li has had that thing of hers well and truly unsealed.”

For a full two days, “I couldn't sit down afterward” was constantly on the lips of the boys in school, and the girls greeted this incantation with hearty laughter. At the same time, in the staff room, the chemistry teacher—a woman—voiced strenuous disapproval of Cao Li's graphic confession. Shaking the hefty manuscript till it rustled and flapped, she cried indignantly, “Isn't this just going to give people ideas?”

Her male colleagues, who by now all knew stem to stern the details of Cao Li's trysts with the music teacher, sat very properly in their chairs, gazed poker-faced at the chemistry teacher, and said nothing.

At the end of the school day, Cao Li had finished answering the teachers’ questions, and she looked calm and composed as she went out the school gate. I noticed that she was wearing a black scarf around her neck that fluttered in the breeze along with her hair. Her face, slightly upturned, took on a rosy, diaphanous quality in the cold air.

A mob of schoolboys led by Su Hang had gathered at the gate to await her appearance, and as she approached they shouted in unison, “I couldn't sit down afterward!”

I was standing not too far away. I watched as she was swallowed up by their laughter, and then I observed the sharp edge of her personality. She came to a halt among them and turned her head ever so slightly as she said with loathing, “A bunch of hooligans, that's what you are!”

My classmates were reduced to a shocked silence, never having expected that Cao Li would have the spirit to fire back. She was quite far off in the distance before Su Hang finally pulled himself together, directing a string of insults at her receding back: “Fuck! You're the hooligan. A hooligan and a harpy too.”

Then I saw Su Hang turn to his pals, amazement all over his face. “And she says that we are hooligans!”

The music teacher went to prison, and when he regained his freedom five years later was banished to a school out in the countryside. Cao Li, like the other girls, went on to marry and have a child. But the music teacher has remained single. He lives in a tumbledown cottage and walks a muddy path to teach the local youngsters how to sing and dance.

I went home a few years ago and caught a glimpse of him when my bus pulled over at a little village stop. The elegant music teacher of yesteryear had aged, and his gray hair blew about every which way in the cold wind. He wore an old black padded overcoat streaked with mud, and as he stood next to a crowd of country folk only his scarf gave a hint of the poise he once possessed and made him look different from the other people. He was standing outside a steaming-hot shop that sold stuffed buns, waiting politely in line. Actually, he was the only one standing in line, for everyone else was trying to push their way to the front as he stood stiffly in his place. I could hear him saying in his mellow voice, “Stand in line, please.”

After Su Yu came back from reeducation, I was not able to see him as much. Zheng Liang had already graduated by that time and the two of them were often together. I could see Su Yu only if I went into town in the evening. As before, we did not say much when we were together, but I felt that Su Yu had gradually become more distant toward me. He still had that rather shy manner of speaking, but he was no longer so discreet in his choice of conversational topics. He told me quite bluntly what his sensation was when he put his arms around the young woman. A shadow of disappointment passed across his face as he told me that in that instant he realized that a real female body was quite different from what he had imagined. He said, “It felt pretty much the same as when I put my arm on Zheng Liang's shoulder.”

As he said this, Su Yu gave me a piercing look and I turned away in shame. I was stung by his remark, which sparked in me a jealousy toward Zheng Liang.

Later I realized that I was really at fault. When Su Yu came back from the camp, I never once asked him about his experience there, fearful that this would upset him. But it was precisely my caution that aroused his distrust. More than once he guided the conversation in that direction, but I would hastily change the subject. One evening when we had been walking along the riverbank for some time, Su Yu suddenly came to a halt and asked me, “Why do you never ask me about my time in the camp?”

In the moonlight Su Yu looked stern, and with him staring at me so intensely I was too taken aback to respond immediately.Then he smiled desolately and said, “As soon as I got back, Zheng Liang asked me about it, but you never have.”

“It didn't occur to me to ask,” I said awkwardly.

“In your heart you look down on me,” Su Yu said in a sharp tone of voice.

Although I denied this, Su Yu turned around resolutely, saying, “Good-bye.”

As Su Yu walked away along the bank, his back stooped, I was grief stricken at the thought that he was terminating our friendship. To me this was unbearable. I rushed to catch up and shared with him the story of how I pinched the girl at the film show. “I always meant to tell you about it,” I said, “but I didn't dare.”

Su Yu's hand rested on my shoulder as I so much hoped it would, and I heard him say gently, “In the camp, I was always so worried that I had lost your respect.”

Later we sat on the stone steps leading down to the river, and the water lapped around our feet. We sat there in silence for a long time before Su Yu said, “There's something I want to tell you.”

I glanced at him in the moonlight. He paused, and looked up at the sky. I too tilted my head back and gazed at the starry night. The moon was gliding toward a cloud, and we watched quietly as it drifted across the void. The moon drew nearer to the cloud, illuminating its dark borders, and disappeared inside. Su Yu went on, “You remember what I told you a few days ago—the feeling I had when I put my arms around that woman?”

In the darkness, Su Yu's face was indistinct but his voice was clear. When the moon pierced the cloud its light suddenly exposed his face, and he broke off to look up at the sky once more.

Then the moon sidled up to another cloud and slipped out of sight again. “It wasn't like putting my arm on Zheng Liang's shoulder,” Su Yu said. “It was like putting my arm on your shoulder. That was what I thought.”

Su Yu's face suddenly brightened and in the returning moonlight I saw him smile. His smile and bashful voice warmed me and sustained me that evening when the moonlight came and went.

THE DEATH OF SU YU

Su Yu, who always woke so early, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage one morning and fell into a coma. His mind, though weakening, forced his eyes partially open, sending out to the world through their feeble glance a final cry for help.

My friend used his life's fading light to gaze at the room in which he had lived so many years. It was a narrow and confining space in which to catch one's ultimate glimpse of the world. He was vaguely conscious of Su Hang's figure, still sleeping soundly in his bed, like a boulder blocking his exit. He was falling into a bottomless crevasse, but it seemed as though a luminous glow somehow held him loosely in its grip, slowing the pace of his descent. The brilliant sunshine outside was drawn to the blue curtains, making them glimmer with light.

After Su Yu's mother woke, she came tramping down the stairs. The sound of her footsteps triggered in Su Yu's failing life a fleeting throb, a longing for normality. When she picked up the empty thermos and discovered that Su Yu had not gone to the teahouse as usual to fetch hot water, she lost no time in registering her dissatisfaction with him. “Oh, for heaven's sake!”

She didn't even look at my friend as he struggled for survival.

The second person up was Su Yu's father. He had not yet washed his face or brushed his teeth when his wife told him to fetch the hot water. He gave a yell. “Su Yu, Su Yu!”

Su Yu heard a powerful noise coming to him from somewhere far away. His sinking body rose rapidly, as though a breeze propelled him up toward the surface. But he was unable to respond to the rescue call. His father strode over to his bed and fixed his gaze on him. Seeing that Su Yu's eyes were slightly ajar, he chided him. “Hurry up! Get out of bed and go fetch the water.”

Su Yu was incapable of answering and all he could do was look at his father in silence. The doctor had always been irked by Su Yu's uncommunicativeness and now he found his demeanor exasperating. He went into the kitchen, picked up the thermos, and said heatedly, “Where did this kid learn his manners, huh?”

“Oh, he got them from you, no?”

Everything disappeared, and Su Yu's body started sinking once more, like a pebble tumbling down through the air. Suddenly a beam of light shone in and stopped him in his tracks, but the brightness was instantly extinguished and Su Yu had a feeling of being hurled beyond its reach. When his father left, thermos in hand, it was as though the room had plunged into a fog. The noise his mother made in the kitchen was like a boat's sail far off in the distance, and Su Yu felt that his body was floating on some watery substance.

By now Su Yu could not distinguish among the different sounds in the kitchen. When his father came back, the sunlight from outside briefly shone in through the door and his body was momentarily uplifted. His parents’ conversation and the clatter of bowls and chopsticks caused him to linger in a field of gray. My friend lay becalmed in the quiet, just before the point of no return.

After they had finished breakfast Su Yu's parents passed by his bed, but they didn't give him another glance before going off to work. When they opened the front door, my friend once more was boosted by the sun's rays, only for the door to close again immediately.

Su Yu lay forever in the gloom, feeling his body slowly sinking as his life wearily approached its end. His brother slept right through till ten o'clock. When he got up, he went over to Su Yu's bed and asked him in surprise, “So you're sleeping in late today too, are you?”

Su Yu's eyes were already dim. To Su Hang, his expression was baffling. “What are you playing at?” he asked.

He turned and went into the kitchen, where he began a lengthy process of brushing his teeth and washing his face. Then he ate his breakfast. Like his parents, he crossed the room without giving his brother a second glance and opened the front door.

That was the last flood of light to enter the room, and it triggered a fleeting recovery of consciousness. Su Yu sent his brother a mental cry for help, but all that happened was that Su Hang closed the door behind him.

Su Yu's body finally found itself in an unstoppable fall that accelerated and turned into a tailspin. A stifling sensation held him in its grip for what seemed like an eternity, and then all of a sudden he attained the tranquility of utter nothingness. It was as though a refreshing breeze was blowing him gently into tiny pieces, as though he was melting into countless drops of water that disappeared crisply sweetly into thin air.

Su Yu was dead by the time I arrived. Noticing that the door and the windows were shut, I stood outside and called, “Su Yu. Su Yu!”

No sound came from within. I assumed that he must have gone out and I went away, crestfallen.

THE LITTLE COMPANION

In my last year at home, walking back to Southgate from school one afternoon, I came across three boys fighting outside a pastry shop. A small boy with blood dripping from his nose clung tightly to the waist of an older boy who was trying his best to pull the other's hands away, while the third boy stood to one side and shouted threateningly, “Are you going to let go now?”

Although little Lulu saw me approaching his jet black eyes gave no sign that he was appealing for help, and instead conveyed a total indifference to the prospect of impending punishment.

The boy who was being held said to his friend, “Hurry up and get him off me!”

“I can't pull him off. You need to shake him off.”

So the other boy swiveled around in an effort to dislodge Lulu. Lulu's feet left the ground but his hands maintained a tight grip on his adversary. He closed his eyes to avoid feeling dizzy. Despite spinning around several times, the boy failed to get rid of Lulu and succeeded only in tiring himself out. Panting, he cried to his buddy, “Get… him … off!”

“How?” The other boy was just as powerless.

At this moment a middle-aged woman emerged from the pastry shop and shouted at the children, “What, you're still at it?”

She turned to me and said, “They've been fighting for two hours already, can you believe it?”

The captive boy said in his own defense, “He won't let go of me.”

She began to reproach them. “You two shouldn't gang up on a smaller boy.”

“He hit us first,” the other boy replied.

“Who are you trying to kid? I could see perfectly well that you two were bullying him.”

“Well, he was the first to start hitting.”

Lulu looked at me again with his dark eyes. It seemed never to have occurred to him that he needed to tell his side of the story, as though what the other boys said was of absolutely no interest to him. All he did was look at me.

The middle-aged woman gave them a push. “I don't want you fighting in front of my shop. Clear off, the lot of you.”

The pinioned boy began, with great difficulty, to edge forward; Lulu hung to him grimly, his feet scraping along the ground. The other boy brought up the rear, with their two satchels in his hand. Lulu was no longer looking at me but was craning his neck around to look at his own satchel, which lay in the pastry shop doorway. When they'd gone some ten yards or so, the pinioned boy came to a halt, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and said to his buddy in annoyance, “Come on, get him off me, will you?”

“There's no way. Try biting his hand.”

The boy bent down and bit Lulu's hand. Lulu's dark eyes closed and I knew he had to be in a lot of pain because he pressed his head tightly against his adversary's back.

After a few moments the pinioned boy raised his head and continued to threaten him feebly with some unnamed reprisal. “Are you going to let go or not?”

Lulu opened his eyes and twisted his head to check on his satchel.

“Shit, this kid is too much!” The other boy raised his foot and gave Lulu a fierce kick in the buttocks.

The pinioned boy said, “Squeeze his balls. That should do it.”

His buddy looked around and, noticing me, he muttered, “No, I can't do that.”

Lulu was still looking back and when a man approached the pastry shop, he shouted, “Don't step on my satchel!”

This was the first time I heard Lulu speak. His piping voice made me think of the gaily colored butterfly bows in a young girl's hair. The pinioned boy said to his buddy, “Throw his satchel into the river.”

The other boy went over to the shop doorway, picked up the satchel, and crossed the street to the concrete balustrade next to the river. Lulu watched him anxiously. The boy laid the satchel on the balustrade and said, “Are you going to let go or not? If you don't, I'm going to toss it in.”

Lulu released his hands at last, and then he stood there with his eyes fixed on his satchel, unsure what to do. The freed boy picked up their two satchels from the ground and said to his friend, “Give his back to him.”

The boy flung the satchel on the ground and gave it a kick for good measure before running to join his friend.

Lulu shouted at them, “I'm going to tell my big brother! He'll settle accounts with you.”

Then he went to fetch his satchel. I could see that he had fine, delicate features, but the blood dripping from his nose left a trail of red spots down the front of his white T-shirt. He squatted down next to his bag, took out his textbooks and pencil case, and placed them back in proper order. As he squatted there in the twilight, his small figure made a touching sight. After rearranging things to his satisfaction, he stood up, clutching his satchel to his chest, and with a corner of his shirt rubbed away the dust that had settled on it. I heard him muttering to himself, “My big brother's going to settle accounts with you.”

He raised his hand to wipe away his tears and then went off, sobbing quietly.

After Su Yu's death, I once more was alone. Sometimes when I ran into Zheng Liang we would stand about and exchange a few words. But I knew that the sole connection between him and me— Su Yu—had disappeared, and so our relationship was expendable. When I saw Zheng Liang walking around in high spirits with his new pals from the factory, this only confirmed my assessment.

I often recalled how Su Yu would wait for me by the riverside, his head bowed, lost in thought. His death had transformed friendship from a wonderful anticipation of what would soon be to something fixed in place by what had been. I started to cultivate a stoop, slouching along the riverbank just as Su Yu did when he was alive, and I began to enjoy the action of walking, a love he had bequeathed to me. As I strolled along, I could reach back into the past and exchange a knowing smile with the Su Yu who once was.

That was how I spent my last year at home, and that was my inner life as I approached adulthood. It was the year that I met Lulu.

It was three days after that fight that I found his name. I was walking down a street in town when I saw him dashing across the sidewalk, his satchel clasped to his chest, with five or six boys about the same age in hot pursuit, crying, “Lulu, Lulu” and “You stupid idiot!”

Lulu turned around and yelled, “I hate you!”

After that, he ignored their shouts and stalked off. His rage was so out of proportion to his size that his body seemed to teeter under its weight, and his little bottom swayed as he disappeared among the pedestrians.

At the time I did not realize that a close friendship could develop between Lulu and me, despite the impression he had made. But that changed when I witnessed Lulu's next face-off. This time Lulu was up against seven or eight boys his age who were shouting madly, like a bunch of excited flies, as they rained blows down on him. The result once again was Lulu's defeat, but this did not stop him from shouting at them with a victors confidence: “Be careful my big brother doesn't beat you all up!”

The boy's antagonism to everybody and his friendless isolation struck a chord within me. From that time on I began to pay real attention to him. As I watched his boyish gait, a warm feeling coursed through my veins. It was as though I was seeing my own childhood self unrolling before me.

One day as Lulu came out of the school gate and headed off down the sidewalk, I couldn't help but call him back. “Lulu.”

He stopped, turned around, and studied me carefully, then asked, “Did you call me?”

Smiling, I nodded.

“Who are you?” he asked.

This abrupt inquiry took me by surprise; my being older did me no good at all. He walked away and I heard him muttering, “Why are you calling me, if you don't know me?”

The failure of this first approach was discouraging, and after this I began to be more circumspect when I watched Lulu leaving the school. At the same time I sensed with pleasure that I had provoked his interest, and he would often turn around and throw me a glance as he walked.

This impasse before we became friends seemed like a replay of the situation between Su Yu and me a couple of years earlier. We would both be surreptitiously watching each other, but neither of us would say a word. But one afternoon Lulu walked straight up to me, his dark eyes glowing with a winsome sparkle, and hailed me. “Uncle.”

The sudden greeting startled me. He went on, “Do you have anything for a kid to eat?”

Before this, it had seemed so difficult for us to have any kind of genuine interaction, but Lulu's question made this become a reality in no time at all. Hunger, you could say, was what initiated our friendship. But I was embarrassed, because although now almost eighteen years old—old enough to count in his eyes as an “uncle ”—I had not a penny in my pocket. I could only ruffle his hair with my hand and ask, “You haven't had lunch?”

The boy saw that I could not help him stave off his hunger pangs, and he bowed his head and said softly, “No.”

“Why haven't you eaten?”

“My mom wouldn't let me.”

He said this with no tone of reproaching his mother, just as a dispassionate fact.

Without realizing it, we had begun to walk, I with my hand on his shoulder. I thought of Su Yu, now so far away, and how he would put his hand on my shoulder as we started one of our intimate rambles. Now I was treating Lulu with the same affection that Su Yu had extended to me. We strolled down the street, next to people who had no interest in us.

Later Lulu raised his head and asked me, “Where are you going?”

“Where are you going?” I asked him.

“I'm going home.”

“I'll walk you there,” I said.

He put up no objection. My eyes began to mist, for I glimpsed the phantom of Su Yu standing on the wooden bridge that led to Southgate, waving his hand in farewell. What I experienced at that moment must have been the feeling that Su Yu had when he saw me home.

We entered a long, narrow alley. When we reached a rundown two-story house, Lulu's shoulder slipped from my grasp, and he climbed the staircase, his whole body swaying. Halfway up he looked back at me and waved just as an adult would do, saying, “Thanks, see you.”

I waved back as I watched him go up the stairs. Soon after he disappeared from view, I heard a female voice raised in anger, and there was the sound of something hitting the floor. Lulu reemerged on the landing and ran back down the stairwell, pursued by a woman who hurled a shoe at his retreating back. It missed him and rolled down by my feet instead. On seeing me, the woman adjusted her hair, which had worked itself loose in all the uproar, and stormed back inside.

I was taken aback by the sight of the woman upstairs, because I had seen her before. Her features, though cruelly altered by the passage of years, were unmistakably those of Feng Yuqing. The shy young girl was now a mother, self-assured and unconstrained.

Lulu, who just a minute ago had been fleeing his mother's onslaught, to my surprise came over to retrieve the shoe and then went upstairs again to return it. He clutched it tightly against his chest, the same way he would hold his satchel, and walked toward his punishment, his little body swaying. Feng Yuqing could be heard yelling, “Get out of my sight!”

He came downstairs with head bowed, looking hard done by. I went over and ruffled his hair, but he brushed aside my gesture of sympathy. With tears in his eyes he stomped off toward a clump of bamboo.

Our friendship quickly blossomed. Two years earlier, I had experienced the warmth of friendship thanks to Su Yu, my senior in years, and now when I was with little Lulu I often felt as though I were Su Yu, gazing at me as I once was.

I enjoyed my talks with Lulu, and even if he didn't fully understand a lot of what I said, the way he looked at me so attentively, his dark eyes gleaming with admiration, made me feel that I enjoyed the complete, unconditional trust of another human being. After I had finished saying something and shot him a smile, Lulu would open a mouth yet to accumulate a full set of teeth and beam at me with equal pleasure, no matter whether he had really taken in what I told him.

Only later did I realize that Lulu in fact had no siblings, but I kept quiet about that so that he would not feel I had noticed his invention. In forlorn, friendless moments, he turned to a fictitious brother for support. I understood how much he needed imagination and hope, for they were equally vital to me.

Just as I had been jealous of Zheng Liang on Su Yu's account, Lulu was jealous of him on mine. In fact, that time when Zheng Liang greeted me in the street he did not look so delighted to see me as to give Lulu much cause for complaint. Never having been more than a casual acquaintance, he simply came over to say a few words of greeting, and now that he had so many new pals his own age he made no effort to conceal his astonishment that I was with such a small boy as Lulu. While we chatted, Lulu was left out in the cold, and he soon announced in a loud voice, “I've got to go.”

He went off by himself, obviously nettled. I brought my conversation with Zheng Liang to an abrupt close and caught up with him. But his displeasure continued for at least another twenty yards, for he turned a deaf ear to what I was saying and then delivered a warning in his crisp little voice, “I don't like you talking with him.”

Lulu's exclusive and high-handed attitude to friendship threw me off balance any time we ran into Zheng Liang after that, and often I would pretend not to have seen him and hurry off. I did not find this confining, for I knew very well that Zheng Liang and I had no claims on each other; his friends were young factory workers who wore fashionable clothes and had cigarettes dangling from their mouths, talking loudly as they walked down the street. Lulu was my only companion.

Practically every day, when classes finished I would stand outside Lulu's primary school and wait for him to emerge. Despite his tender age, he was perfectly able to keep his feelings in check, and he never seemed overly excited to see me but would greet me with a composed smile. Only on one occasion—when I did not stand in my usual place—did Lulu betray some emotion: a look of anxiety appeared on his face as he came out the gate and failed to see me right away. He stood rooted to the ground, as though transfixed by shock, and with disappointment and uneasiness written all over him he looked around in every direction but toward where I was standing. Even as he dejectedly headed my way, he kept craning his neck to scan the crowd. Finally he saw me watching him with a smile on my face, and he cast restraint to the winds and ran to my side. When he clasped my hand in his, I found that his palm was damp with sweat.

But my friendship with Lulu did not last very long. He was always at odds with other children, and now, for the third time, I saw him in a ferocious fight. As he walked toward me from the school gate, a group of boys were making fun of him. “Lulu, where s your big brother? You don't have a big brother, do you? A big smelly fart is all you have.” And they waved their hands in front of their noses, grimacing as though they smelled something nasty. I watched as Lulu, livid, walked toward me, his thin shoulders shaking with rage. He had almost reached me when he suddenly turned around and charged the pack of boys, crying shrilly, “I'm going to teach you!”

He threw himself on them, hands and feet flailing. At first I could see him laying into a couple of boys, but then the others joined in and there was a general melee. When I next saw Lulu, the other boys were no longer beating him. He scrambled to his feet, his face covered in dust, bruises all over, and ran at them again, fists flying, so they all surged around and he became a punching bag once more. Shocked by the sight of Lulu's dirty, blood-streaked face, I rushed forward, giving one boy a good kick in the rear and grabbing another by the collar and pushing him away. These two boys quickly took to their heels when they saw I was getting involved, and the rest soon followed. After running off to a safe distance, they shouted at me indignantly, “What do you think you're doing, hitting us little kids?”

I ignored them and went over to Lulu (on his feet now), heedless of whatever protests other spectators might make, and said to him loudly, “Just tell them I'm your big brother.”

But Lulu looked so shocked that my feeling of noble munificence was immediately deflated. His face reddened and he went off by himself, head lowered. I watched in confusion as his diminutive figure disappeared into the distance; he never once looked back at me. The following afternoon I waited outside his school entrance for a long time, but he never appeared; he left through a side gate. Later, if I happened to see Lulu, he would nervously avoid me.

So I understood at last that in Lulu's mind his big brother had a very special place. I remembered a story that I had told him, randomly cobbled together by my threadbare imagination, a tale of how Daddy Rabbit battled fearlessly with a wolf in order to protect his son Little Rabbit, but in the end was killed. Lulu listened raptly, and when he later asked me to tell him another story I came out with much the same yarn, but replaced Daddy Rabbit with Mommy Rabbit. Once again he was entranced. Later still I changed the would-be protector to Brother Rabbit, but before I'd finished telling the story, Lulu, knowing that it would end with the brother's destruction, jumped up, tears streaming down his face, and rushed off crying, “I don't want to hear this!”

After I saw Feng Yuqing, I often recalled that time when she clung to Wang Yuejin on the wooden bridge, showing the same stubborn determination that I saw in Lulu when he held that older boy in his viselike grip. In that respect, mother and son had so much in common.

A sizable portion of Feng Yuqings life—from that moonlit evening when she vanished from Southgate until the day she appeared anew before my eyes—for me will always remain unknown. With Lulu, when I cautiously broached the topic of his father, he would look away and excitedly point out something quite boring, like ants or sparrows. I could not tell whether he truly knew nothing at all or was deliberately evading the issue. In the search for Lulu s father, I could only go back to a distant memory, the middle-aged man with the unfamiliar accent, sitting on the steps outside Feng Yuqings house.

Later I heard that Feng Yuqing had returned on a concrete boat, along with some peasants from out of town. At dusk one day, carrying a worn old duffel bag in one hand and leading a five-year-old boy with the other, she carefully stepped across the gangplank onto the shore. I imagine that her expression then was as bleak as the darkening sky; heartless fate left her standing awkwardly on the bank, her eyes full of uncertainty.

Feng Yuqing did not go back to Southgate, but settled in town instead. A man of fifty, recently widowed, rented out a couple of rooms to her. The first evening, when he stealthily climbed into her bed, she did not refuse him. At the end of the month, when he asked her for the rent, she replied, “I gave it to you the first night.”

That perhaps was the beginning of Feng Yuqings career in the sex trade. At the same time she took a job cleaning plastic sheeting.

Feng Yuqing had completely forgotten me or, more likely, she had never really registered my existence. One afternoon before Lulu got out of school, I came by the place where they lived to find Feng Yuqing out in the empty lot in front of their house, where several clotheslines hung between the trees. Wearing a plastic apron, she tramped toward the well with a stack of dirty tarps clasped to her chest. When she lowered a wooden bucket into the shaft, it was with none of her old energy, and her hair had been cropped, the long braid that she once had sported now forever a memory left by the well in Southgate. She began to scrub the tarps, and the sun-baked afternoon resounded with the incessant rasp of her brush. Immersed in this mechanical repetition, Feng Yuqing turned a blind eye to me, though I was standing not far away. The difference between a girl and a woman was encapsulated in the contrast between the Feng Yuqing of South-gate days and the Feng Yuqing who made this her living now.

Then she rose and walked toward me, clutching a tarp the size of a bed sheet, and as she approached the clothesline she shook the tarp so brusquely that I was sprayed with water. She seemed to notice, because she shot me a glance just before she tossed it over the line.

In that moment I had a clear view of her face, now ravaged by time, its wrinkles all too apparent. When her glance skimmed over me, it so lacked animation it was like a cloud of soot floating in my direction. Then she turned back toward the well, exposing her sagging buttocks and thickening waistline. At that point I slipped away, saddened not by Feng Yuqing's having forgotten me, but by my first glimpse of beauty's pitiless decline. The Feng Yuqing who stood combing her hair in the sunlight outside her home would, after this, always be blanketed with a layer of dust.

So two different jobs occupied her, one by day and one by night. Her night job made her vulnerable to professional rivalries, and the intervention of the police forced a different kind of life upon her.

By that time I had already left my hometown. Fate had finally smiled on me, and I had gratefully begun a brand-new life in Beijing. At the beginning, I was so enamored of the capital's broad boulevards that when I stood at a crossroads in the evening, the tall buildings on every side made me feel that the intersection was as spacious as a plaza. Like a lost sheep drawn to the green grass on a riverbank, I could hardly tear myself away.

On just such a night, policemen burst through the door of that ramshackle apartment in my hometown, catching Feng Yuqing completely naked, along with an equally naked client of hers. Lulu, who had been sleeping soundly seconds earlier, was woken by the bright lights and loud accusations, and he opened his big dark eyes to look with perplexity at these sudden developments.

After dressing, Feng Yuqing said to her son, “Close your eyes and go to sleep.”

So Lulu lay back down and closed his eyes. But he failed to follow his mother's instructions in full, for he did not go back to sleep. He heard all that was said, he heard the steps descending the stairs, and he suddenly became afraid that his mother might not come back.

During the interrogation at the Public Security Bureau, Feng Yuqing, normally so sparing with her words, proved quite eloquent. Calmly she said to them, “The clothes you wear, they're issued by the state, and your paychecks too. So long as you're taking care of state business, you're doing your jobs all right. But my vagina belongs to me—it's not government issue. Who I sleep with is my affair, and I can look after my own vagina perfectly well, thank you very much.”

At dawn the following day, when the gatekeeper at the Public Security Bureau opened the gate, he found that he was being watched somberly by a handsome young boy, his hair dampened by the early morning mist. Lulu told him, “I'm here to collect my mom.”

Though he claimed to be nine years old, he cannot have been more than seven. Feng Yuqing clearly had been hoping that he could make a contribution to the household income as early as possible, for when he was six she reported his age as eight, so that he could be admitted to primary school. Today he got the idea into his head that he would fetch his mother and take her home.

Before long, he realized that this goal was beyond his reach. He found himself facing no fewer than five police officers, who tried to cajole him into revealing the details of Feng Yuqing's career as a prostitute. Shrewd little Lulu saw through them straight away. “You're trying to fool me by making everything sound so nice. I'll tell you something,” the boy said vehemently, “I'm not going to tell you anything!”

Lulu learned that not only would his mother not be coming home, she would be sent to a labor reform camp instead. Tears spilled from his eyes, but he still stayed remarkably calm and protested sharply, “You can't send my mom away.”

Then, his tears welling up, he waited for them to ask why not. But none of them did, so he had to explain to them himself. “If you send my mom away, who's going to look after me?”

Lulu used his own abandonment as the ultimate threat; when he was waiting outside the gate he had already seen this as his trump card. He felt sure that in the face of this they would have no choice but to return his mother to him, but of course they did not give a second thought to a threat coming from a little boy like him. His attempt at intimidation did nothing to save his mother, and its only effect was that he was placed in a shelter.

When his mother was sent off to the camp, he was not informed. Practically every day Lulu would go to the Public Security Bureau and demand to see her; he drove them up the wall. Finally they told him: Feng Yuqing was now at the Seven Bridges labor camp, and if he wanted to see her he would have to go to Seven Bridges. He committed this name to memory. At the same time he was so shocked by the news that he just stood there crying. When they tried to usher him off the premises, he said, “Take your hands off me. FU make my own way out.”

As he turned around, he wiped away his tears with both hands, and he sobbed as he went off down the corridor, his shoulder brushing against the wall. Then he realized there was something he had forgotten to say, so he went back inside and told them with withering scorn, “Just wait till I'm grown up, and I'll make sure you all get sent to Seven Bridges!”

Lulu spent only a week at the shelter, in the company of a twenty-year-old blind man, a sixty-year-old alcoholic, and a woman in her fifties. These four misfits lived in a dilapidated courtyard on the west side of town. The alcoholic was always thinking about a woman named Fenfen with whom he slept when he was young, and he'd spend the whole day relating their exploits to the sightless but still vigorous blind man. His account was laced with erotic overtones: according to his description, Fenfen was a real peach. When he talked about how his fingers would caress Fenfen's sleek thighs, he would get quite carried away, unleashing a string of lascivious groans that left the blind man not knowing what to do with himself. Then the alcoholic would ask the blind man, “You've handled flour, right?”

Hearing an answer in the affirmative, the alcoholic elaborated with relish. “Fenfen's thighs were as smooth as flour.”

The pale-faced woman had to put up with this kind of thing practically every day, and after protracted exposure to such prattle she developed delusions, becoming convinced that the alcoholic and the blind man were conspiring to do her an injury. When Lulu first arrived, she nervously called him over and pointed at the two men in the next room, whispering, “They want to rape me.”

She would go to the hospital every morning, hoping that the doctors would be able to identify her illness so that she could be admitted to the hospital for treatment and escape the violation that was being plotted. But every day she would return despondently to the shelter.

Lulu spent a whole week in this company. Every morning he would go off to school with his satchel on his back, and return at the end of the day all black and blue and caked with dust. His injuries were contracted not from defending his imaginary brother, but because he was standing up for his very much alive mother. He had already decided what he wanted to do, but he did not share his plan with anyone else. In the shelter he learned the location of Seven Bridges by briskly quizzing the woman and the alcoholic. Early one morning he quietly rolled up his sleeping mat, tied it with a piece of string, and hung it on his back, then picked up his satchel and Feng Yuqing's big duffel bag and headed off for the bus station. He was full of confidence about his itinerary. He knew how much the ticket would cost and he knew there was no stop at Seven Bridges. To purchase the ticket, he handed over the five-yuan note that his mother had given him, and then, tightly clutching the remaining three yuan and fifty cents, walked over to a little shop next to the station, intending to buy a Front Gate cigarette to bribe the driver. What he found out was that it cost two cents to buy one cigarette, and only three cents to buy two. My little friend stood there in a quandary. In the end he decided to take out three cents and buy two cigarettes.

That morning on the verge of summer, Lulu sat in the bus heading toward Seven Bridges, holding in his left hand the remaining money, wrapped in a handkerchief, while his right hand gripped the two cigarettes. It was the first time he had ever been on a bus, but he was not in the least thrilled by the novelty of this experience and gazed solemnly out the window. At frequent intervals he checked with the middle-aged woman sitting next to him how far it was to Seven Bridges. Later, when he learned that Seven Bridges was just ahead, he left his seat and moved the duffel bag and bedroll to the doorway. Then he turned to the driver, passed him a cigarette now soaked with perspiration, and pleaded, “Uncle, could you please let me off at Seven Bridges?”

The driver took Lulu's gift, glanced at it, and then tossed the sodden cigarette out the window. Lulu noted the driver's disdainful expression and bowed his head in vexation. He now planned on walking back from the stop following Seven Bridges. But, as it turned out, the driver did stop the bus and let him off at Seven Bridges. It was almost midday now, and Lulu could see a high wall not far away, the barbed-wire netting on top confirming that this was indeed the labor camp. With the bedroll on his back, carrying a duffel bag that was practically his own size, he set off under a blazing sun.

When he got to the front gate, he saw an armed soldier on guard there. As he walked up to him, he eyed the cigarette in his hand. Mindful of how the driver had thrown his out the window, he dared not try the same thing with this cigarette, so he just smiled bashfully at the young guard and said, “I'm going to stay with my mom.” Pointing at the bedroll and the duffel bag, he said, “I brought all our stuff.”

It was afternoon by the time Lulu saw his mother. The guard had passed him on to someone else who delivered him eventually to a man with a beard. The bearded man led him to a small room.

That is how Feng Yuqing, dressed in her black prison uniform, saw her battle-scarred son. The realization that her little boy had made his way to see her all by himself brought tears to her eyes.

Despite the rigors of the journey, Lulu, far from being tearful, told her excitedly, “I've quit school. I'm going to study on my own.”

Feng Yuqing buried her face in her hands and wept, and this made Lulu cry too. Their meeting was very brief, and within a short time a man came to take her away. Lulu hurriedly picked up the bedroll and the duffel bag, planning to go with his mother. When he found his advance blocked, he cried sharply, “What's wrong?”

The man told him he had to leave. He shook his head emphatically, saying, “No, I'm staying. I want to be with my mom.” He cried to her, “Tell him I'm not leaving!”

But when she turned around, it was to tell him he could not stay. He dissolved into a flood of bitter tears, and he wailed to his mother, “I brought the bedroll too, so that I can sleep under your bed. I won't take up any room!”

In the days that followed Lulu began living an outdoor life. He laid the bedroll out underneath a camphor tree, used the duffel bag as a pillow, and lay there reading his textbooks. If hungry, he would take the money his mother left him and go to the snack shop nearby to have something to eat. Always on the alert, as soon as he heard the thud of well-regulated footsteps he would drop his book and sit up, opening his dark eyes wide. When a line of black-garbed prisoners trotted past, hoes on their shoulders, a head would turn to look at him and Lulu s rapturous gaze would meet his mothers eyes.