Cries in the Drizzle by Yu Hua, Allan H. Barr Page A

“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'sstench, 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 asense 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,