Cries in the Drizzle (16 page)

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.”