The April 3rd Incident

by Yu Hua

Genres: Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

From one of China's most famous contemporary writers, who celebrated novel To Live catapulted him to international fame, here is a stunning collection of stories, selected from the best of Yu Hua's early work, that shows his far-reaching influence on a pivotal period in Chinese literature.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Yu Hua and other young Chinese writers began to reimagine their national literature. Departing from conventional realism in favor of a more surreal and subjective approach inspired by Kafka, Faulkner, and Borges, the boundary-pushing fiction of this period reflected the momentous cultural changes sweeping the world's most populous nation.

The stories collected here show Yu Hua masterfully guiding us from one fractured reality to another. "A History of Two People" traces the paths of a man and a woman who dream in parallel throughout their lives. "In Memory of Miss Willow Yang" weaves a spellbinding web of signs and symbols. "As the North Wind Howled" carries a case of mistaken identity to absurd and hilarious conclusions. And the title story follows an unforgettable narrator determined to unearth a conspiracy against him that may not exist. By turns daring, darkly comic, thought-provoking, and profound, The April 3rd Incident is an extraordinary record of a singular moment in Chinese letters.

Release date: November 13, 2018

Publisher: Anchor

Print pages: 224

Sample

A History of Two People
 
1
 
In August 1930 a boy named Tan Bo and a girl named Orchid sat side by side on a step untouched by sunlight. Behind them stood a vermilion gate, its copper latch in the shape of a lion. Tan Bo, the young master of the family, and Orchid, a maidservant’s daughter, often sat together in this spot, while the maidservant went to and fro, carrying out her various duties amid the repetitive drone of the matriarch’s mutterings.
 
There on the step, in lowered voices, the children talked about their dreams.
 
In his, Tan Bo was often tormented by a need to urinate. He would search high and low for a chamber pot, for the one that lay next to his bed in his comfortable south-­facing room had vanished into thin air, and nowhere could he find the vessel that would release him from discomfort. Finally, in desperation, he would dash out to the main street, where rickshaws raced back and forth and beggars shuffled past. Unable to hold out a moment longer, Tan Bo would pee into the gutter.
 
Then the dream faded away. The sky was a patch of gray in the window as dawn began to break. What in the dream had been a street was actually a wooden bed, and as he woke Tan Bo felt a damp patch on the sheet and smelled a warm odor. Eyes wide with confusion, the boy painstakingly replayed the scenes from his dream but was soon jolted into full consciousness, and his wetting of the bed filled him with shame. As a bright glare began to fill the window, he closed his eyes once more and fell into a deep sleep.
 
“How about you?”
 
The boy’s inquiry was suffused with eagerness. Clearly he hoped that in her dream the girl would have had just the same experience.
 
But faced with this inquiry, she proved bashful, clamping her hands over her eyes as girls her age are wont to do.
 
“Did you do the same thing?” the boy persisted.
 
A long, dark alleyway lay before them, high gray walls on either side. In the cracks between the bricks the recent years had planted coy little bunches of grass that quietly swayed back and forth in the breeze.
 
“Tell me.” The boy’s tone became aggressive.
 
The girl blushed red with shame. Hanging her head, she related a similar sequence of events. In her dream she too was desperate to pee, and she too looked everywhere for a chamber pot.
 
“You peed in the street too?” The boy was excited.
 
But she shook her head. She always found the chamber pot in the end.
 
This discrepancy deeply embarrassed the boy. He looked up, and above the alley’s narrow walls he saw clouds floating through the sky and sunshine bathing the uppermost bricks.
 
Why can she find the chamber pot, when I can’t? he thought.
 
Jealousy burned like a flame in his heart.
 
“Was the bed wet when you woke up?” he asked.
 
She nodded.
 
So at least the ending was the same.
 
2
 
In November 1939, seventeen-­year-­old Tan Bo no longer sat with sixteen-­year-­old Orchid on the stone steps in front of the gate. Now he wore a black school uniform and held in his hand a collection of Lu Xun’s short stories and a book of Hu Shi’s poetry. He was always in good spirits as he went in and out of the family compound. Meanwhile Orchid had inherited her mother’s position. Dressed in a floral smock, she busied herself with household tasks amid the endless mutterings of old Mrs. Tan.
 
They were bound to exchange words from time to time, of course.
 
Youth surged through Tan Bo’s body, and sometimes he would stop Orchid in her tracks and with animated gestures expound to her some progressive idea. On such occasions Orchid would lower her head and say nothing—­the days when they shared everything without hesitation were long past, after all. Or perhaps Orchid was beginning to set store by Tan Bo’s status as the young gentleman of the house. But he, immersed in the spirit of equality and mutual love, was hardly likely to realize the distance that was quietly developing between them.
 
On the last day of November, Orchid was running her dust cloth over the rosewood furniture. Tan Bo sat by the window, reading Tagore’s lines about the stray birds of summer. Orchid did her utmost to clean the furniture without making a sound, as she glanced at Tan Bo in slight agitation. She hoped that the current silence would not be interrupted. But reading is tiring and Tan Bo was bound to say something once he closed the book.
 
As a seventeen-­year-­old, he often dreamt that he was traveling on an ocean vessel, rocking back and forth in the waves. In his waking hours a longing to leave home would seize him.
 
He began to tell her about the restlessness that now infected his dreams. “I want to go to Yan’an,” he told her.
 
She gazed at him in bewilderment. Clearly Yan’an was a meaningless blank as far as she was concerned.
 
He had no plans to make her understand anything further—­all he wanted to know was the dreams that she had been having. The habit formed in 1930 died hard.
 
She blushed hotly, just as she had nine years earlier. Then she related a somewhat similar dream. The difference was that she was not on board a passenger ship but sitting in a sedan chair carried by four men; on her feet were pretty cotton shoes. The sedan chair threaded its way through the many streets in town.
 
He gave a little smile. “Your dream is different from mine.” He paused. “You want to get married, I can see.”
 
By then the Japanese had occupied the town where they lived.
 
3
 
In April 1950, Tan Bo, director of a performance troupe in the People’s Liberation Army, a leather belt at his waist and puttees on his legs, returned to the home that he had not visited for ten years. The nation was now liberated, and between careers Tan Bo came back to have a look.
 
Orchid was still living in his house, but she no longer was his mother’s servant, for she had begun to enjoy an independent life. Two rooms in the house had been assigned to her as living quarters.
 
The sight of Tan Bo striding energetically into the house left a deep impression on Orchid. By this time she had several children and had lost the slender figure of yesteryear; the turn of her broad waist was enough to efface the beauty she had once possessed.
 
Orchid had dreamt that Tan Bo would return home in precisely the manner in which he did. So, early one afternoon, her husband having left for work, Orchid told Tan Bo the scene from her dream. “You came back just as I dreamt you would.”
 
She was no longer bashful and coy, for she was a mother of several children, of course. As she described the scene, there was no hint of lingering emotion—­her tone was as level and bland as if she were telling him that someone had left a bowl on the kitchen floor.
 
Tan Bo recalled a dream he had had on his way home. Orchid had appeared in that dream—­not the woman before him now, but the girl she had once been.
 
“I dreamt of you, too,” Tan Bo said.
 
Seeing Orchid so coarse and dumpy, he saw no point in describing her former charm. Dreams of her would now vanish from his sleeping consciousness.
 
4
 
December 1972. Tan Bo returned home in deep despondency, for he had been labeled a counterrevolutionary. His mother had died and he had come back to handle the funeral.
 
By this time Orchid’s children had grown up and gone their own ways. She was still without a formal occupation. When Tan Bo stepped in through the door, she was scrubbing plastic sheeting. This activity was her main source of income.
 
As he passed her in his tattered black padded jacket, he stopped for a moment and smiled at her awkwardly.
 
Seeing him, Orchid gave a little gasp of surprise.
 
Only then did he go on toward his room in relief. Before long, Orchid knocked on his door and asked, “Is there anything you need?”
 
Tan Bo looked at the tidy arrangement of the room and didn’t know what to say.
 
Orchid had made it her business to inform him of his mother’s death.
 
This time, neither of them had any dreams to share.
 
5
 
October 1985. Tan Bo, retired and living at home, spent the day sunning himself in the yard. It was autumn yet, but he was sensitive to cold.
 
Orchid, now a white-­haired old lady, was still hale and hearty. Though surrounded and sometimes harried by a flock of grandchildren, she took their demands in stride and never wearied of their company, while still attending to her chores, inside and out.
 
She laid a basin of clothes on the concrete pavers and began to do the laundry.
 
Tan Bo had to squint as he watched the vigorous movements of her arms. Amid her loud scrubbing he recounted with foreboding a couple of dreams that he kept having. A bridge collapsed just as he was crossing it. And when he was walking by the house, a roof tile hurtled toward his head.
 
Orchid said nothing and just kept on washing the clothes.
 
“Do you ever have dreams like that?” Tan Bo asked.
 
Orchid shook her head. “No, I don’t.”