Cries in the Drizzle (20 page)

This was the darkest hour in my grandfather's early years. By now there was nothing left in the house worth pawning and during the holiday season no way to sell his labor to earn rice and firewood. At his wits’ end, braving a piercing wind, he ran toward town on the morning of the Chinese New Year, his father's body over his shoulder. He had come up with the idea of leaving his dead parent at the pawnshop, and as he ran he constantly apologized to the corpse on his shoulders, at the same time racking his brains to think of an excuse that would make him feel better. My great-grandfather's body had lain frozen for two days and two nights in the drafty thatched cottage, and was then carried by my grandfather for ten miles through the howling north wind. When he set it down on the counter of the pawnshop in town, it was as stiff as a board.

Tears welling up in his eyes, my grandfather threw himself on the mercy of the pawnshop proprietor, explaining that it wasn't that he was an unfilial son, but there was simply no other recourse open to him. He told the pawnbroker, “My dad is dead, and I have no money for his burial; my mom is alive, but ill in bed at home with no money for treatment. Do a good deed, will you? I'll redeem my dad in a few days’ time.”

The pawnbroker was an old man in his sixties; he had never in his life heard of using a corpse as collateral. Covering his nose with his hand, he waved him away. “No, that won't do, I'm afraid. We don't accept gold bodhisattvas here.” On the first day of the New Year he wished to strike a propitious note, and so he elevated Great-grandfather to the rank of a priceless treasure.

But my grandfather, refusing to take no for an answer, persisted with his entreaties, and so three clerks came forward and shoved my great-grandfather down off the counter. He fell as rigid as a flagstone, hitting the ground with a resounding thud. Sun Youyuan hastened to pick his father up and inspected him fearfully to see if any damage had been done. A spray of cold water then descended on his head, for without waiting for him to leave the shop the clerks had begun to clean the counter soiled by the unwanted pledge. This incensed Sun Youyuan, who swung a heavy fist in the face of one, knocking him to the ground with the force of a pellet hurled from a slingshot. My grandfather used his enormous strength to overturn the counter, but when several more clerks descended on him, cudgels flying, the only thing he could think of was to raise his father's corpse aloft, to ward off their blows and take the battle to them. In that chilly morning he brandished the rock-hard carcass and turned the pawnshop upside down. Brave Sun Youyuan gained strong support from his father's cadaver, beating the clerks till they did not know what to do. None of them dared to touch the corpse for fear of incurring a whole year's worth of bad luck, and the superstitions of the day, combined with Sun Youyuan's audacity, ensured that he encountered practically no resistance. But when my grandfather swung his father around and lashed out at the ashen-faced proprietor, it was Sun Youyuan's turn to be horrified, for in so doing he knocked his
father s head against a chair. An awful noise awoke him to the realization that he had committed a monstrous sin, using his father's remains as a combat weapon. His father's head had been knocked askew, and after a moment of shock my grandfather hoisted him onto his shoulder, dashed outside, and set off at a run through the icy wind. In the end he did, like a proper son, weep bitter tears— he was sitting under a winter elm then, cradling my damaged ancestor. It took a great deal of effort to twist his father's head back into its original position.

Sun Youyuan buried his father, but he had not buried poverty, and in the days that followed he could only dig up some herbs and boil them in a broth for his mother to drink. These were little pink and green plants that grew at the foot of the wall— motherwort, though Sun Youyuan did not know that. He was overjoyed to find that his ailing mother, after drinking the broth, was able to get out of bed and walk around. My slapdash grandfather found this a revelation, thinking naively that he now understood the true state of affairs, that those miracle-working physicians actually had no special skill at all, that there was nothing more to it than harvesting a pile of herbs and medicating a patient the same way you would feed a sheep. So he abandoned the idea of going to town to work as a laborer, and after being a mason all his life he decided he would now devote himself to health care.

Sun Youyuan was excited about the prospect. He knew that when starting out one needed to make house calls and interview patients; once his reputation was established he could sit at home and have the afflicted come to him for treatment. He threw a basket of herbs on his back and began an itinerant life, going from door to door, yelling like a rubbish collector in that ringing voice of his, “I'll swap my cures for your diseases.”

His innovative sales pitch attracted much interest, but his ragtag appearance left people unsure how seriously to take him. In the end a family engaged his services; the first (and last) patient of my grandfather's career was a boy with acute diarrhea. Sun Youyuan took a casual look at the ailing child, and without bothering to take his pulse or ascertain his symptoms he reached into his basket for a handful of herbs, which he handed to the boy's father with instructions to cook them into a soup. While the family eyed the herbs doubtfully, Sun Youyuan made a quick exit, picking up his refrain, “I'll swap my cures for your diseases.”

When the boy's father followed him out of the house, quizzing him in earnest perplexity, it astonishes me that Sun Youyuan still managed to tell him with supreme self-confidence, “That's right: he takes my medicine and I take his illness away.”

No sooner had the poor boy drunk the herb soup than he vomited and excreted copious amounts of green fluid, and within two days he had breathed his last. The result was that one afternoon my great-grandmother was treated to the alarming sight of a dozen men rushing furiously toward her house.

My grandfather maintained his composure. He told his frightened mother to go back into her room and closed the door behind her, and then he went out to meet the visitors with a welcoming smile on his face. The father and other relatives of the deceased child had come to make Sun Youyuan pay with his life. Though confronted by their livid and intransigent faces, Sun Youyuan still tried to disarm them with specious platitudes. They were in no mood to listen to his rambling and ridiculous speech and closed ranks tightly around him, with several shiny hoes aimed at his shiny shaved head. Having survived a hail of Nationalist bullets, Sun Youyuan was unperturbed, and he informed
them complacently that he didn't care if there were a dozen of them—even if there were twice that number, he would still beat them till they were covered all over with bruises. For Sun Youyuan to make such exaggerated claims when he was staring death in the face left them quite dazed. My grandfather untied the buttons of his jacket and said, “Let me just take this off, and then we can get on with it.”

So saying, Sun Youyuan thrust a hoe aside, walked back up to the house, pushed the door open, and coolly kicked it shut. After that, no further sound was heard from him; the avengers outside were rolling up their sleeves, unaware that my grandfather had already jumped out the back window and fled, and they continued to stand there, gearing up to do battle with their terrible foe. Only after waiting a while longer with no sign of Sun Youyuan did they sense that something had gone awry, and kicking the door open they found the house completely deserted. Then they saw my grandfather, with his mother on his back, fleeing down the road and already well off in the distance. My grandfather was no country bumpkin, after all; his improvised escape shows that he was more than just dauntless, he could be wily too.

It was not so difficult for Sun Youyuan to sling my great-grandmother over his back and take to his heels, but now that he had started running, it was not so easy to stop. He mingled with the streams of refugees just as my grandmother had done, and on several occasions he clearly heard the sound of Japanese guns at his back. Being the devoted son that his era expected him to be, he could not bear to see my great-grandmother lurching down the road in her bound feet, so he carried her on his back the whole way, sweat pouring down his face, panting for breath, following the refugees as they fled helter-skelter along dust-swirled roads.
His only respite came one evening when, reduced to a state of near-total exhaustion, he detached himself from the throng, set my great-grandmother down under a withered tree, and went off in search of water. Successive days of arduous travel had so worn out my feeble great-grandmother that she fell into a heavy sleep as soon as she lay down, and on that chilly moonlit night she was savaged by a wild dog. As a child, I found it hard to get my mind off this nightmarish scene: somebody falls asleep, and then—a bit here, a piece there—they are devoured by a wild dog; I could not imagine anything more gruesome than that. By the time my grandfather returned to the tree, my great-grandmother had been horribly mangled. The wild dog stuck out its long tongue and licked its nose, staring at my grandfather ferociously. His mother's shocking appearance made Sun Youyuan howl like a lunatic. He forgot for a moment that he was human, and he bared his teeth just like the wild dog and made a lunge toward it. It was my grandfather's roar that frightened the animal most, and it turned tail and fled. Sun Youyuan, in a towering rage, set off in pursuit, but the curses he rained down on the vile creature must have slowed his pace. Eventually, when the dog had completely disappeared from view, my grandfather returned to his mother's remains, rattled and tearful. He knelt at her side and punched himself viciously in the face, his piercing wails filling the night with gloom and dread.

After burying his mother, Sun Youyuan found his confidence at a historic low. Sick at heart, he randomly followed the swarms of refugees, though his mother's death had rendered his flight suddenly meaningless. That's why when my grandfather first saw my grandmother by a tumbledown wall a brook babbled in his heart. By this time all traces of my grandmother's lofty pedigree had been erased; she sat bedraggled on a bank of wild grass and saw my
grandfather's haggard face with blurry eyes, through disheveled hair. Reduced by hunger to utter debility before long she slumped on my grandfather's back and fell asleep. Young Sun Youyuan thus acquired a wife and brought to an end his life as an aimless vagabond. So long a victim of poverty and undernourishment, Sun Youyuan now strode forward with my grandmother on his back, his face glowing with hope.

IN THE FLICKERING LIGHT

After Grandfather sprained his back, an uncle suddenly impinged on my consciousness. An utter stranger to me, he apparently lived in a small market town and did a job that involved people opening their mouths and his reaching in and pulling out their teeth. According to reports, he shared a street corner with a butcher and a cobbler. My uncle inherited the medical career that my grandfather had once pursued in such absurd fashion, but he was able to sustain it indefinitely, which shows that his medical technique differed from my grandfather's utter hogwash. By the side of a noisy street he opened his broad oilcloth umbrella and sat down underneath it, as though he were out fishing. As soon as he donned his white gown with its motley collection of dirty blotches, he could claim to be a medical specialist. The small table in front of him was piled with several pairs of rusty pliers and several dozen bloodstained teeth. These pulled teeth served effectively as a
vehicle for self-promotion, advertising the high sophistication of his dental arts and drumming up business from customers with loose teeth.

When Granddad walked past us one morning without a word, a blue bundle over his back and a shabby umbrella in his hand, my big brother and I were taken aback. He said nothing to my parents as he left, and they gave no sign that there was anything unusual about his departure. My brother and I leaned up against the back windowsill, watching him shuffle off. It was Mother who told us, “He's gone to see your uncle.”

In his final years my grandfather's plight was like that of a rickety old chair that is abandoned and can only wait quietly for the advent of the fire that will consume it. On the day Granddad came to grief my brother Sun Guangping had been given a satchel, an accessory that, owing to the fact he was older than me, he received well before I did. That moment still glimmers in my childhood memory. Late one afternoon, on the eve of the start of the school year, my father Sun Kwangtsai sat on the doorsill, puffed up with unjustified pride, loudly instructing my older brother what to do if the kids in town got into an argument with him: “If there's just one of them, hit him; if there's two, scoot back home.”

Sun Guangping, then eight years old, gazed at Sun Kwangtsai with a look of mindless awe; it was during these years that he most idolized his father. His deferential expression inspired my father to patiently explain the reasoning behind this injunction, unconscious of what nonsense he was talking.

For a clodhopper, my father was very smart, and quick to pick up whatever fashion was in vogue. The first time my brother headed off for school with his satchel on his back, Sun Kwangtsai
stood at the entrance to the village and issued a final reminder. It was comical to see a grown man like him imitate the tone of a bad guy in a movie. “Password?” he barked out.

My older brother had a natural gift for putting things in a nutshell. When he turned around to deliver his response, he did not repeat his fathers fussy and complicated instructions but called simply “Beat one, flee two.”

In the midst of that gleeful exchange my aging grandfather slipped past silently, holding a length of cord: he was going up the hill to collect firewood. Seen from behind, he looked so tall and strong. I was sitting on the ground, and his forceful steps sprinkled dust over my face, blurring the jealousy I felt toward my brother and the unthinking excitement of the moment.

My grandfather's misadventure was intertwined with my big brother's jubilation. At that stage, more than twenty years ago, my younger brother and I were still happy just to forage for snails at the edge of the pond. But Sun Guangping, on his first day back from school, was all set to show off what he had learned. I'll never forget how he swaggered home with his satchel over his shoulder, then swung the satchel around so that it hung over his chest and put his hands behind his back. The latter gesture clearly was designed as an imitation of his teacher. He sat down next to the pond and pulled his textbook out, first letting the sunlight catch it, then reading it with great concentration. My little brother and I watched dumbfounded, the way two hungry dogs, their stomachs rumbling, might watch a bone flying through the air.