Cries in the Drizzle by Yu Hua

Author:Yu Hua [Hua, Yu]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-01-31T23:00:00+00:00

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.

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