Winter gave way to spring. In April, the forsythia bloomed in the large and small flower beds throughout the factory grounds; spring rain followed in long, continuous spells, and the hazelnuts and thorny shrubs on the distant hills began to leaf out. The children shed their padded trousers and put on new white shoes — one new pair per year. To keep them pristine, the girls wrapped their freshly scrubbed shoes in tissue paper and set them out in the sunlight to dry. The boys were too lazy to scrub their shoes and simply rubbed white chalk over the uppers; as they walked, little puffs of white dust floated off with each step. By the end of May, the four factory primary schools were preparing for their joint sports meet. The physical education teacher dragged a lime-dispensing cart to paint the track lines, while students practiced blowing bugles and beating drums in a corner of the schoolyard. Someone wrote out the score on the drumhead. The young female music teacher said unhappily: “A score this simple and you still can’t remember it — is your brains all starch paste?” When everyone was tired of drumming, the music teacher cheered up and said: “Students, let’s learn a new song together — ‘The Girl Yeriya’!” The boys who hadn’t heard it clearly whispered back and forth asking one another: “What? ‘The Wild Donkey Girl’?”
On the day of the festival — the sixth of the first month — at the opening ceremony of the sports meet, the leading honor guard marched in first: four tall boys carrying the slogan iron frames, together swinging their heads toward the reviewing stand and shouting in unison: “Promote athletic activity, build up the people’s health!” Behind them came the bugle and drum corps playing the March — the boys puffed out their cheeks and blew “da-da-da-di-di, da-da-di-di-di,” while the girls beat the parade drums “boom-ta-la, boom-ta-la, boom-ta-la-ta-la-ta-la-boom.” The crowd of watching factory families was several rows deep. Everyone said: these drums and bugles are getting old — generation after generation of factory children have played them.
July was proper summer, and in the schoolless summer vacation, time was truly leisure time. The girls all put on skirts; the boys changed into plastic sandals. Cicada song filled every residential area, and horse-drawn carts selling watermelons parked along the roadside every day. Children in dual-worker households all wore nylon-string keys around their necks; they would watch television before finishing their homework. When their parents came home and felt that the back of the television set was still warm, they grabbed the broom and chased the children. Once, Xiao Man’s father chased him all the way out to the street, where he ran headlong into Xia Lei, who was being chased by his own mother.
Gasping for breath, Xiao Man called out to Xia Lei: “Your mom is fierce — she’s chased you all the way to Building 26!” Xia Lei replied: “Stop talking and run — your dad has an electrician’s belt in his hand!”
Learning from hard experience, the children started turning off the television earlier the next afternoon to let the warmth dissipate, but their parents still noticed. No one could figure out where they’d slipped up; the children gathered together to compare notes, and the conclusion they reached was that the adults had left some hidden mark on the television — some said it was a crease on the TV’s dust cover, others said it was a strand of hair wrapped around the power button.
Xiao Man had been called “No-Brains” since kindergarten, and he carried this nickname with him all the way through the red-banner class and into primary school. It wasn’t until third grade that the newly transferred Xia Lei was dubbed “Unhappy” by the teacher — which paired the two of them perfectly into the main characters of an animated film. Even as they grew up, people still called them by those names.
Among the forty students in the class, it was “No-Brains” Xiao Man who gave their homeroom teacher, Niu Laoshi, the most headaches. That summer before the school break, Niu Laoshi reminded the students about confidentiality requirements: “Our factory practices complete secrecy for all citizens, and primary school students are no exception. If you visit relatives in other places over the summer and they ask what our factory produces, you must say fertilizer and agricultural chemicals. Under no circumstances mention gunpowder.”
“But Niu Laoshi, haven’t you always told us to be honest?” Xiao Man raised his hand to challenge this. “We can’t lie!”
“You must be honest with your loved ones and your organization. Of course you must maintain secrecy from enemies and spies,” Niu Laoshi replied.
“What if my second great-aunt asks me? Should I tell her the truth?” Xiao Man pressed.
“It would be best not to,” Niu Laoshi considered and said. “Distant relatives don’t count as close relations, and might even be enemies or spies.”
“Why might distant relatives be enemies or spies?” Xiao Man grew more confused.
“Because we don’t know very much about distant relatives.”
“Then… why can’t close relatives be enemies or spies?”
“Well, that’s…” Niu Laoshi thought for a long time, feeling herself backed into a corner. “Xiao Man, just do as you’re told and stop arguing.”
“But if I tell my grandmother, and my grandmother tells her sister, isn’t it the same thing in the end?”
“Xiao Man! Are you genuinely No-Brains, or deliberately picking an argument?” Niu Laoshi impatiently closed the subject. “If anyone asks you again, just say you’re a pig and don’t know anything except how to eat. Will that do?”
Compared to Xiao Man, who always had the teacher fuming, Xia Lei paid careful attention in class, sat with his hands behind his back, and scored double hundreds on every monthly and end-of-term exam, placing first every time. Yet homeroom teacher Niu Laoshi still didn’t particularly like him. She felt he had an introverted and withdrawn personality, didn’t like to raise his hand and volunteer answers, and she rarely gave him little red flowers.
Once, the whole class was rehearsing a choral performance, and Niu Laoshi applied bright red circles on the boys’ and girls’ cheeks. “Our beautiful motherland is like a garden, the flowers in the garden are so vivid and bright” — as the song rang out, the students all wore flowery smiles, except for Xia Lei, standing in the front row, whose face was screwed up in an expression of misery, incapable of smiling.
“Think of something delicious, and smile from the heart!” Niu Laoshi encouraged him.
Xia Lei thought of the canned luncheon meat and malted milk behind the glass counter at the supply store. He swallowed a mouthful of saliva and produced a tight-lipped, strained smile.
“Heavens! That smile is like a bitter chrysanthemum!” Niu Laoshi cried out. “You ‘Unhappy’ — go stand in the back row!”
The inseparable pair — “No-Brains” and “Unhappy” — were known together throughout Factory Primary School No. 1, and their nicknames complemented each other perfectly. Everyone in Residential Area One recognized these two children; even the disturbed and simple-minded adults in the neighborhood knew their names.
The mentally ill and the simple-minded of Residential Area One all roamed freely, basking in the sun by the roadside during the day. Every time the morning exercise period came, they would come hurrying to the gates of Factory Primary School No. 1 to watch and gaze. No one knew what special appeal the calisthenics held for them, but whenever they got the chance, they would rush onto the schoolyard to do exercises alongside the students. Later the custodian locked the school gate, and the disturbed and simple-minded adults couldn’t shake the iron gate open, so they climbed the surrounding wall instead.
The top of the school’s surrounding wall was flat and less than two feet wide, with glass shards embedded in the concrete — yet even this couldn’t stop them. Every day when the loudspeaker sounded, they would scramble up to the top of the wall to do their exercises, in all manner of positions: some twisted like braids of dough, others shaped like potted bonsai.
The most earnest of the group was Liu the Madman, who wore a red badge. His movements were grand and expansive — so much so that he seemed to forget he was balanced on a narrow wall — and when he reached the jumping-jacks section, he landed unsteadily and toppled headfirst off the wall, landing with a nose bruised and face swollen. Everyone assumed Liu the Madman would retire from his wall-top performance stage, but the very next day at morning exercise time, he came back on schedule with his head wrapped in bandages, climbed the wall again, and stood there swaying in the wind. That day’s homework was to compose a sentence using the word “tenacious.” Every single student in third grade wrote the same sentence: “Liu the Madman’s tenacious spirit in doing exercises is a worthy model for us to learn from.”
Liu the Madman’s tenacity moved both teachers and students, and it also moved the school principal. Like the great Yu controlling the floods — better to channel than to block — the principal simply opened the school gate and let the disturbed people in, instructing the physical education teacher to arrange them in a row alongside the student formations to do exercises together. After a trial period showed no safety issues to speak of, the principal finally felt at ease. He often picked up the loudspeaker and lectured the students: “Listen up, all you little ones! Anyone who does morning exercises carelessly will be assigned to the row with the disturbed people! Did — you — hear — me?!”
Xiao Man had never been serious about morning exercises — either a beat too fast or a beat too slow — and one day was punished by being placed at the tail end of the disturbed people’s row. Liu the Madman in front turned to look at him and asked: “Are you ‘No-Brains,’ the one who fell through the ice last year?”
“How do you know?”
“I heard you’re way behind ‘Unhappy’ in your grades. How have you been studying?” Liu the Madman asked further. “Did falling into the river let water into your brain?”
“What? My bad grades are that well-known?” Xiao Man said to himself in resignation. “Even the madman knows.”
Xiao Man had grown up with his father after his parents divorced. His father was a fourth-grade fitter in the nitration workshop, nicknamed “Eight-Grade Du Kang” — a reference to his alcohol consumption. His alcoholic father’s parenting consisted of nothing beyond hitting and scolding. The moment Xiao Man spotted his father staggering home drunk and raising a hand, he would transform like Sun Wukong who had achieved enlightenment and bolt out the door in an instant, roaming until dark rather than dare go home. He would often climb up onto the exposed heating pipes and sit there, watching the windows of his own home a dozen or so meters away — waiting for the lights to come on, waiting for his father to sober up and come out looking for him.
In those days, the outdoor heating pipes in the residential area were not buried underground but ran overhead at a height of three meters. Standing on the heating pipes, you could look down into the small courtyards of every house and catch the smell of cooking drifting up from each kitchen. When Xiao Man tired of wandering, he would droop his legs and sit on the heating pipes, guessing that the braised belt fish was probably from Zhang Dashao’s in the front building, and the stewed sauerkraut was probably from Electrician Ma’s in the back courtyard. He would prop his chin in his hand, stomach growling with hunger, watching the setting sun in the west glow like a salted egg yolk and the rising moon in the east look like a steamed sponge cake.
When the lights in the house finally came on and the door opened, the sobered-up father would step out carrying a flashlight, glance over at the heating pipes as usual, and spot his son — seemingly perched in the evening clouds like Sun Wukong.
His father would call out: get down here, come home!
Sun Wukong would reply: promise you won’t hit me, and I’ll come down!
His father would say: no hitting today.
Sun Wukong didn’t bother bargaining for tomorrow as well — he was simply too hungry, and only wanted to fill his stomach immediately, so he would descend from the clouds and climb back down the rack of the heating pipes.
The heating pipes were like a miniature elevated walkway, connecting dozens of apartment buildings in the residential area with Factory Primary School No. 1. Other children walked the road to school and back; only Xiao Man walked along the heating pipes, his forehead pressed against the strap of his school bag, hands in his pockets, whistling as he went, striding through mid-air as casually as walking on flat ground. “Look at that motherless child, so wild he’s gone up into the sky!” the neighborhood grandmothers would often look up and sigh.
Residential Area One was made up of old brick buildings — the low-grade local version of the Khrushchevka apartment style, whose blueprints were said to have arrived in China together with the 156 Soviet-aided industrial projects, and could be found in many industrial cities across the country. Xia Lei’s family lived on the second floor of Building 42, and the heating pipes ran right past his window. Every Wednesday and Friday afternoon when there were no classes, Xiao Man would walk along the pipes to Xia Lei’s window and call for him to come out.
“I am Kecai, come to buy vegetables,” Xiao Man would call toward the window.
“Potatoes, fifty cents; greens, one yuan!” Xia Lei would open the window and answer back.
“Won’t sell for one, add two more!”
“Won’t sell for two, with kicks thrown in too!”
Hearing the two children exchange what sounded like coded criminal passwords, Xia Lei’s mother looked out the window and saw Xiao Man standing in mid-air with both hands in his pockets. She was startled and called out at once: “Come down — come inside and wait!”
“It’s fine here, Auntie,” Xiao Man replied.
“Get down — it’s so high up there, it’s dangerous!”
“It’s nothing. I go to school along this route.”
“If you don’t come down, you can’t come to find Xia Lei to play anymore!” Xia Lei’s mother pretended to scold.
Xiao Man had no choice but to climb down the heating pipes and go up the staircase into Xia Lei’s apartment.
Xia Lei’s mother had glimpsed Xiao Man from a distance before and assumed he was just an ordinary troublemaking boy. But that day, with him called inside and standing in the lamplight, she saw that the child’s jacket and trousers were covered in grease stains, yet his face was eight or nine parts refined and delicate-featured. You could foresee that he would grow up to be a handsome young man.
“Has Xiao Man eaten? Would you like to eat with Xia Lei?” his mother asked.
Xiao Man bowed his head and said nothing — he was too embarrassed to admit he hadn’t eaten.
Xia Lei’s mother could see his embarrassment and rephrased: “Come eat with Xia Lei — alright?”
“Alright!” Xiao Man nodded happily. The moment she went to the kitchen to turn off the stove, he quickly set up the folding table, picked up a cloth, and vigorously wiped down the surface.
Xia Lei’s mother was a nurse at the workers’ hospital; his father was a truck driver in the transport department. As both were workers on the factory roster, the family lived in Residential Area One. In ordinary times, Xia Lei’s mother focused on managing the household and supervising Xia Lei’s studies, rarely joining the neighbors in idle gossip. She had vowed to raise her son to go to Tsinghua or Peking University — to become Qian Xuesen, to become Qiao Guanhua. In the workers’ village of Residential Area One, this kind of soaring ambition was often laughed at by the sparrow-like neighbors around them, and so Xia Lei’s mother had acquired a nickname of her own: “Spiritual Ten-Thousand-Yuan Household.”
Xi Tie Cheng was too small, too enclosed. Parents and the children’s school teachers were constantly running into each other. Xia Lei’s mother would always encounter Niu Laoshi at the south road market. Even with a dozen or more meters still between them, her expression would shift into a face full of springtime warmth, and she would go over to greet her: “Niu Laoshi, you’re also buying groceries? You work so hard. How has Xia Lei been behaving lately — has he given you any trouble?”
“No trouble at all. Xia Lei is both smart and hardworking — nothing to complain about in terms of studies,” Niu Laoshi would say. “The child is just a little withdrawn and solitary. Besides getting along well with Xiao Man, his relationships with the other students are only so-so. When it came time to vote for the three-good student award, more than half the class didn’t raise their hands for him.”
“Is that so…” Xia Lei’s mother nodded. “How is Xiao Man doing in his studies? The child looks fine-featured, but he’s as wild as can be.”
“Though Xiao Man isn’t disliked, his grades are truly dreadful — everyone calls him ‘No-Brains,'” Niu Laoshi said. “His mother was apparently in the factory performance troupe at one point, but she left after the divorce long ago. There’s only the father, who drinks heavily all day. He doesn’t even come to parent-teacher meetings.”
Having heard enough, Xia Lei’s mother went home and encouraged Xia Lei: “Just focus on your studies. Things like relationships with classmates and group acts of studying Lei Feng — you can go through the motions. You and these workers’ children won’t be on the same road in life. Don’t lower your own standards.”
“I want to be a three-good student, but the classmates won’t raise their hands for me.”
“Xiao Man didn’t raise his hand for you either?”
“Xiao Man raised both hands, but Niu Laoshi said he was messing around.”
“That doesn’t matter,” his mother said with certainty. “Just focus on your studies. I’ll take care of the rest.”
One evening close to the end of term, “Spiritual Ten-Thousand-Yuan Household” — Xia Lei’s mother — paid Niu Laoshi a brief visit, bringing along malted milk and canned peaches. When the end-of-term honors were announced, Xia Lei received his three-good student certificate, just as he had hoped. He hummed happily to himself and pressed the certificate neatly flat behind glass on the wall.
Xia Lei was not unhappy by nature — it was simply that his mother’s strict management left him little chance to ever feel fully at ease. Xia Lei’s mother had two near-obsessive passions: one was sanitary disinfection, the other was supervising Xia Lei. The first was an occupational habit — she regularly sterilized sheets and pillowcases in a pressure cooker, claiming it was high-temperature, high-pressure disinfection, which filled the home with billowing steam as though the family lived in a fairyland. The second passion came from a deep sense of purpose. She bought her son a large stack of supplementary study books and calligraphy practice booklets, watching every day as Xia Lei wrote and calculated, rarely letting him out to play.
The only classmate his mother allowed Xia Lei to bring home was “No-Brains” Xiao Man. The first time Xiao Man walked into Xia Lei’s room, he was astonished: supplementary books stacked in piles, English phonetic symbols plastered all over the walls, and several calligraphy model books hanging from the coat rack.
“This is truly a mountain of books and a sea of learning — exhausting just to look at.”
“Every day I have to do five pages of extra exercises, read through the formulas and phonetic symbols on the wall five times,” Xia Lei counted on his fingers, “plus practice calligraphy for three pages, and before sleeping I have to drink milk and take calcium tablets.”
While Xia Lei practiced calligraphy from Yan Zhenqing’s Duobao Pagoda Stele, Xiao Man sat beside him and dozed. Not wanting Xiao Man to be bored waiting, Xia Lei’s mother also prepared a writing brush for him. Seeing the engraving on the brush handle — “Little White Cloud” — Xiao Man looked puzzled. Xia Lei explained: “A brush made from white sheep hair is called a white cloud brush.”
“So a brush made from black sheep hair would be called a black cloud?”
“There’s no such thing as a black cloud brush. There’s one called ‘wolf hair’ — made from weasel fur.” Xia Lei wanted to show off a little knowledge and stopped writing to quiz Xiao Man: “Actually, do you know why it’s called wolf hair?”
Xiao Man thought for a moment and said: “Is it because when they were pulling out the weasel’s fur, it hurt the weasel so much that it kept howling the whole time?”
Xia Lei and his mother burst out laughing, bending forward and falling back. They loved Xiao Man’s innocent, guileless nature.
Xiao Man didn’t enjoy calligraphy practice. He much preferred to help Xia Lei’s mother wind wool, and as they wound, she would chat with him about his life at home. Xiao Man barely remembered what his mother looked like anymore — since the divorce, she had never come back. Xiao Man’s midday meal every day was the leftover rice from the previous night, doused with boiling water, with a salted duck egg on the side.
“Maybe it’s because I eat too many duck eggs that I keep doing badly on exams,” Xiao Man said with a worried look. “If only my mother hadn’t left — I’d definitely eat better and study better.”
“Then come eat here often. Even plain, simple food is better than duck egg and hot water rice,” said Xia Lei’s mother. She took Xiao Man’s hands in hers and examined them, sighing: the child had long, fair, slender fingers — what a pity to have been born into such a family. Nine times out of ten he would end up as a worker when he grew up.
His mother’s rule was that going out to play could not exceed two hours, so the two of them competed against time, racing out the door the moment they were allowed. They ran to abandoned construction sites and peed on the leftover calcium carbide in the acetylene tanks, then threw in a match — the calcium carbide would burst into a whoosh of acetylene flame. They snuck into the test shooting range behind the mountain, waiting for stray bullets with trailing red light to fall and cool, then picking them up while the casings were still warm. They snuck into the grain store and wrestled in the rice pools, swatted each other with rice paddles, and walked home with rice grains still trickling from their trouser legs. They blended into the young workers’ dance parties and wildly hopped and jumped to “Dschingis Khan” and “cha-cha-cha” alongside the crowd of denim-clad hip-swaying men and women. The two of them went to the workers’ bathhouse every week and practiced the dog paddle in the hot water pool. They often served as the post-pillars for girls jumping elastic rope, and in the end, boys and girls all jumped together, singing: “The little river gurgles along, my sister and I sneak off to steal melons; my sister steals two and I steal three; my sister runs off and I get caught; my sister eats watermelon at home while I write a self-criticism at the police station; my sister cracks melon seeds at home while I catch bullets outside.”
Xiao Man and Xia Lei played all through Xi Tie Cheng, their faces often smeared with dust, their fingernail beds caked with black dirt, their trousers constantly worn through at the seams, and their red neckerchiefs reduced to red fringe. The factory grounds of ten miles in every direction were their playground of pure, carefree joy. In the bricks and stones, grass and trees, they found endless childhood delight — to them in their childhood, Xi Tie Cheng was the entire world.
During the summer vacation of fourth grade, the heat was stifling and unbearable. One Sunday afternoon, Xiao Man’s father sent him to collect popsicles.
In those days, many factory and mine work units made their own popsicles to distribute as welfare benefits. Workers collected popsicles in a thermos, just like collecting boiling water — placed in one by one, brought home, then poured out. The Xi Tie Cheng factory made slender popsicles no wider than a thermos mouth, known among the workers as “little white sticks.”
The place to collect popsicles was the cold beverages shop under the “General Logistics Collective.” The factory’s “General Logistics Collective” had been established to provide employment for the workers’ family members; it was an in-factory life services company with branches including a cold beverages shop, a workers’ canteen, a workers’ store, a workers’ bathhouse, a dairy, and a knitting factory. These logistics units served only factory workers, accepting coupons rather than money — food coupons, bath coupons, milk coupons, coal coupons, and popsicle coupons.
Xiao Man, clutching a popsicle coupon stamped with a large red “Thirty Units” chop, carried two empty thermoses and walked twenty minutes along the scorching road to the cold beverages shop. The shop had only one female attendant, whose expression was colder than a frosted “little white stick.” She took Xiao Man’s coupon, skewered it on the nail board, then scooped out a large pile of little white sticks from the freezer.
Xiao Man counted while loading them into the thermoses: packed to the brim, the two thermoses held twenty-five in total, but the last five absolutely would not fit in no matter what he tried.
“Auntie, I’ll come back for these five in a moment,” Xiao Man asked.
“No! Take them all with you — all of them! A sale is final!” the attendant said impatiently.
Xiao Man shook his head. He had no idea what “a sale is final” meant.
“The coupon has already been collected. What you do with them is your own problem — understood?”
“But I can’t just leave them either! Please help me, Auntie!” Xiao Man pleaded. He had no way of knowing that the remaining popsicles for the day would be taken home by the attendant herself.
“Figure it out on your own — I can’t help you!” the attendant said flatly. “If not, just forget about them. No family will miss five little popsicles.”
An ordinary child would have given up at that point — but not Xiao Man. He had so few snacks ordinarily that he naturally wasn’t willing to let go of five popsicles.
“Fine, don’t help me then!” Xiao Man grabbed the last five popsicles in one hand, squatted down outside the shop, and began wolfing them down voraciously. The heat outside was like fire falling from the sky; by the time he’d finished the second popsicle, the other three had already started dripping. By the time he finished the fourth, the fifth was barely clinging to its stick. He quickly tilted his head back and crammed the fifth one straight into his mouth, like a circus performer swallowing a sword. Five minutes — five popsicles, all delivered to his stomach!
Before he’d even had a chance to wipe his mouth, Xiao Man felt a headache coming on. He walked in circles at the entrance, slapping the back of his head. He had eaten far too fast! The popsicles felt like dull blades churning inside him, sending waves of piercing pain through the back of his skull.
“Whose silly child is this? Such a pigheaded little one-track mind!” The attendant covered her mouth and laughed mockingly from inside.
“And whose fault is it? Yours!” Xiao Man talked back with popsicle still in his mouth, lips and teeth half-numb.
“Hey! Little brat, who are you cursing?” The attendant thought he had insulted her, and yanked off her oversleeve with great force, then grabbed him by the throat: “Say that again, see if I don’t tear that dog mouth of yours apart!”
“Who cursed you? Are you deaf?” Xiao Man spat out half a mouthful of popsicle and leapt free of the attendant’s grip. “You’re a woman — and your mouth is this filthy? Pah! Pah, pah, pah!”
By the time summer ended and the cold beverages shop closed for the season, Xiao Man assumed he would never again encounter this sharp-tongued attendant. But then, one weekend in autumn, his father led the cold-faced, popsicle-cold attendant into the house.
Xiao Man and she stared at each other, both recalling the scene of their scuffle that summer.
His father was a simple-minded man who said everything straight out without any preamble, and told Xiao Man directly to call her mother. Xiao Man instantly felt the back of his skull begin to throb again. He twisted his neck in refusal, unable to make a sound. Seeing his father raise the electrician’s belt as a threat, he finally forced out a loud shout: “Dad, can’t we pick someone else? She’s not a good person at all!”
This remark sent his father into a rage; he swung the electrician’s belt and it came down for real — landing squarely on Xiao Man’s head.
“Dad! Get me a different stepmother — this woman is the flesh-eating White Bone Demon!” Xiao Man clutched his head and bolted for the door.
As dusk fell, Xiao Man — having wandered in a wide circle as usual — climbed back up onto the heating pipes and sat there waiting for his father to sober up and come looking for him.
But his father never came out. Xiao Man waited and waited; the lights in the room went out and his father still hadn’t appeared. “The White Bone Demon is something else — she’s bewitched Dad’s soul,” Xiao Man thought to himself. “This time Dad has truly defected — he even swung the electrician’s belt at my head!”
Dark clouds slowly covered the moon, and Xiao Man waited on, waiting for the clouds to clear and the moon to reappear.
But the clouds never cleared. The dark clouds quickly swallowed not only the moon but all the stars as well, and rumbling thunder began at the edges of the sky. By the time lightning was lashing across the sky from all four directions, and the first raindrop fell on Xiao Man’s face, his father still had not come out to find him.
Dad doesn’t want me anymore, Xiao Man thought in despair. He climbed down from the heating pipes and set off alone through the pouring rain toward his grandmother’s house five miles away. All the way there he was cold and hungry. He was sure he wasn’t crying, but why was the rain on his cheeks so warm?
From that time on, Xiao Man lived with his grandmother, and he never saw his father again after that. His grandmother told him that his father had married the attendant and gone south, and that they had had a child there together. Gradually, the money his father sent his grandmother grew less and less, until one day, all news of him stopped entirely. In order to raise Xiao Man, his grandmother — whose pension was meager — set up a small booth at the crossroads of Xi Tie Cheng and began selling seasoned cold dishes.
After entering fifth grade, Xia Lei won first prize in the Tiechen Children’s Calligraphy Competition. To celebrate the award, Xia Lei’s father decided to show off his skills and cook a few good dishes. Xiao Man happened to be visiting, and Xia Lei’s mother invited him to stay for dinner.
This time Xiao Man agreed without hesitation, and as always, with quick, capable hands, he set up the folding table, then asked Xia Lei’s mother whether she needed help chopping vegetables.
“Oh? Can you chop vegetables now?” she asked.
“Yes, my grandmother sells cold dishes, and I help her chop every day,” Xiao Man answered.
“What kinds of dishes does she have? Does she have a counter?” Xia Lei put down his book and asked with interest.
“No counter — she sells from a cart. There’s shredded kelp, dried tofu strips, shredded radish, and spicy cabbage,” Xiao Man counted on his fingers. “Next time I come, I’ll bring some of the kelp I cut myself.”
“You cut all the vegetables yourself?” his mother asked.
“Grandma’s health isn’t good, so the vegetable-cutting work has gradually passed to me.” Xiao Man extended his ring finger to show the callus on it.
“Such a pity — and you’re only in fifth grade…” Xia Lei’s mother stroked Xiao Man’s finger and sighed.
Xia Lei could already guess what his mother’s next words would be. He was just about to cover his ears when the flood came pouring out: “Xia Lei! Look at Xiao Man — is his life easy? In the time it takes you to read one page of a book, Xiao Man has to chop up a whole pile of vegetables! You’ve always had food served to you and clothes put on you — and the moment studying is mentioned you complain and moan about being tired. How about you and Xiao Man swap places for a while?”
“Mom, mom, mom!” Xia Lei held up his hands in a halt gesture. “Stop, stop, stop!”
“You don’t know how good you have it!” His mother shot him a look and went to the kitchen.
Xia Lei pursed his lips, closed the door, and asked Xiao Man in a low voice: “Does your grandmother nag a lot?”
“Not really. My grandmother is hard of hearing, so she doesn’t nag.”
“My dad doesn’t nag either. He always brings me good things when he comes back from long hauls.” Xia Lei crawled under the table, rummaged around as he spoke, then produced a mechanical action figure and handed it to Xiao Man.
“Wow, Tebot! The Hundred-Change Lion King!” Xiao Man couldn’t contain his excitement. “This is way more fun than a transforming dinosaur egg!”
“Wang Dongdong’s dinosaur egg was thrown out by his dad,” said Xia Lei.
“What? Why?”
“Dongdong didn’t do well on his monthly exam. His dad beat him and threw the dinosaur egg into the trash bin by the road.”
“Why didn’t he just go and get it back himself?”
“He didn’t think of it until the next day, but by then the garbage truck had already picked it up.”
“All the better then!” Xiao Man shot to his feet, put down the action figure. “I know where the garbage truck dumps things — it’s the garbage hill at the foot of the east mountain. I’ll go look for it right now, and if I find it, it’s mine.”
“That garbage hill is huge and smells absolutely awful,” Xia Lei wrinkled his nose.
“Well, what can I do? Grandma doesn’t have money to buy one, so I can only pick up a smelly one.”
“I’ll lend you mine — it’s the same. Play with it till you’re done and then give it back.”
“That’s not the same. Yours is yours; mine is mine. I’ll go look for it now!”
“What’s the rush? You could go after dinner, couldn’t you?”
“I’m afraid the old rag-pickers might get there before me.” Xiao Man flung open the door and headed straight out.
After dinner, Xia Lei asked his father for the bicycle key and rode over to the garbage hill. In those days, bicycle frames were tall, and a half-grown child would ride in a style called “threading through the crotch” — leaning forward and arching the back in a semi-squat, which from a distance looked rather like a little monkey clutching a big rifle, lurking through the streets.
The road to the garbage hill passed over a gentle ridge slope. Xia Lei was “threading through the crotch” and had coasted three loops from the top of the slope, just beginning to feel the pleasant sensation of the wind, when he suddenly noticed an old man walking up the slope from below. Unfortunately, Xia Lei hadn’t yet learned to steer around obstacles, and couldn’t brake in time — so he went hurtling straight toward the old man, bicycle and all. The old man was startled and leapt hastily to the side, barely managing to dodge. But poor Xia Lei lost his balance and, with a great lurch, fell at the old man’s feet.
“Whose little brat is this? Riding blind!” the old man cursed as he walked past Xia Lei, giving the still-spinning bicycle wheel a kick in passing.
Xia Lei lay flat on his back, one leg pinned under the bicycle. He looked up and recognized the old man as Xu the Great Horsewhip — one of the factory’s most universally despised figures, who had been a rebel faction member, liked to visit widows’ doors, cheated at cards, and dared to smash the windows at the security department.
“Xu the Great Horsewhip! You dare kick my bicycle?” Xia Lei scrambled up, rubbed his knee, and shouted the man’s nickname at him.
“Little brat dares to curse me?” Xu the Great Horsewhip turned back and reached out to grab Xia Lei.
“Xu the Great Horsewhip, old white hair, bends over asking to be scratched there; once scratched, big blisters swell, goes to the hospital to rub on toothpaste; toothpaste doesn’t work so well, runs home to flail about like hell…” Xia Lei ran away as he shouted, getting farther and farther with each verse.
Furious and disgraced, Xu the Great Horsewhip broke off a willow branch and wedged it into the chain guard of the bicycle, viciously prying the chain off the sprocket: “Ride, will you! Now you can push it home!”
After Xu the Great Horsewhip had walked away, Xia Lei came back to right the bicycle, only to see that the chain had completely come off the flywheel. He didn’t know how to put a chain back on a flywheel, so he had no choice but to push the bicycle back. He walked and wept, and from not far off he saw Xiao Man coming toward him from the garbage hill.
“What happened? Who hurt you?” Xiao Man asked, holding the transforming dinosaur egg in his hand.
“Xu the Great Horsewhip knocked my bicycle chain off,” Xia Lei wiped away a tear.
“Which way did he go?” Xiao Man’s anger flared at once.
“He went up the hill, toward the railway tracks,” Xia Lei pointed toward the middle of the hillside.
The two of them abandoned the bicycle and quietly followed Xu the Great Horsewhip up the hill. They saw him walk to the midpoint of the slope, where he met a gaudily dressed middle-aged woman at the entrance to the railway tunnel, and the two walked hand in hand into the depths of the tunnel.
Xiao Man had sharp eyes and recognized the woman as the factory’s infamous “loose woman,” Butterfly Craze. Rumor had it that in the sundry goods shop where she worked, several butchers had once fought over her in a fit of jealousy, brandishing deboning knives and nearly causing a deadly incident.
“What are those two going in there for?” Xia Lei asked.
“I’d guess they’re going to fool around,” Xiao Man speculated.
“Fooling around… what does that involve?”
“I don’t know exactly. Probably taking off their clothes and kissing.” Xiao Man picked up a handful of gravel from the railway embankment and handed some to Xia Lei. “In a bit, we both throw as hard as we can, then run — got it?”
“Why do we have to wait a bit?”
“I figure right now they’re still taking off their trousers…”
The tunnel was pitch black, and after two or three minutes, the sound of Butterfly Craze’s voice floated out — a sound that was somewhere between crying and laughing.
“Throw! Throw now!” Xiao Man gave the order, and the two of them swung their arms in wide arcs and hurled a dozen or more pieces of gravel deep into the tunnel.
First came the clear, crisp echo of stones hitting the ground — “clang, clang, clang.” Then came several dull thuds — the sound of gravel striking human flesh.
“Ah!” Butterfly Craze let out a shriek inside the tunnel.
“Damn it! Which little wretch out there is—” Then came the thunderous roar of Xu the Great Horsewhip.
Xia Lei and Xiao Man spun around and sprinted down the hill. They ran and laughed, both of them doubled over with a stitch in their sides. Below the slope, cooking smoke was rising from the cluster of buildings; in the distance, they could hear mothers in each household calling their children home for dinner. By half past six, storyteller Tian Lianyuan’s radio serial had begun.
Later, they overheard the adults in the residential area talking: someone had beaten Xu the Great Horsewhip in the dark, leaving injuries on his head and back. No one knew who had struck him so severely — it was generally assumed to be one of his rivals for Butterfly Craze’s affections at the sundry goods shop.
Xia Lei and Xiao Man never saw Xu the Great Horsewhip again after that — until much later, when the factory fell into decline and the workers’ club was converted into a dimly lit, wind-through-the-cracks dancehall. Xiao Man had grown into a strapping twenty-year-old, and he had swung a hook punch that sent Xu the Great Horsewhip crashing flat on his back in the middle of the dance floor. But that was a story for ten years hence.