Just finished a novel I picked up in Garden Books in Shanghai a few weeks ago. It's the first novel of 余华 Yu Hua, a contemporary writer whose name came up over and over in my class at Renmin. (Yu Hua's China in Ten Words was one of the first things I read when I was in China in 2014-15, and one of the most illuminating.) His most celebrated novel 活着 To Live (also made into a film) was the topic of several final essays offering a Chinese comparison to Job. Cries in the Drizzle (1991) is apparently less well known even in China, the translator tells us. Beautifully crafted, it anticipates many of Yu Hua's later works. I found the mordant moral of To Live already here, for instance: Apart from life itself I cannot conceive of any other reason for living. (282)在细雨中呼喊 Cries in the Drizzle (originally 呼喊于细雨) is a sort of Bildungsroman. The narrator grew up in rural Zhejiang in the 1960s and 1970s as Yu Hua did. But the book ends up describing a world whose characters (the narrator only partially excepted) can't escape it. It conveys this through a narration which moves first forward from a point when the narrator was twelve, then deeper and deeper into the past, before ending back at the very moment it began. At least in his narrative, everyone's fate is already set. From the start Cries in the Drizzle is also masterful in conveying the strangeness of memory, indicating where and how it fills in what the narrator saw with things he heard, things he imagines others must have seen, even things others experience but cannot communicate with anyone else. Here he describes the death of his younger brother Sun Guangming, a death he's already told us was going to happen several times before.
A blurry picture appears before my eyes, as though I can see time in motion. Time becomes visible, a translucent gray whir, and everything has its place within that dark expanse. Our lives, after all, are not rooted in the soil so much as they are rooted in time. Fields, streets, houses - these are our companions, placed like ourselves in time. Time pushes us forward or back, and alters our aspect.
When my little brother left the house that fateful summer day, his leave-taking was entirely routine - he must have left the house a thousand times before in just the same way. But because of the outcome of this particular departure, my memory has altered the particulars of that moment. When I traverse the long passage of memory and see Sun Guangming once more, what he was leaving was not the house: what he exited so carelessly was time itself. As soon as he lost his connection with time, he became fixed, permanent, whereas we continue to be carried forward by its momentum. What Sun Guangming sees is time bearing away the people and the scenery around him. And what I see is another kind of truth: after the living bury the dead, the latter forever lie stationary, while the former continue their restless motion.
trans. Allan H. Barr (Anchor, 2007), 34
