Banished!

11. Striking Root

E LEV E N ~ Striking Root 1 Yu Youfu was the poorest of the poor in Sanyu Village , apart from those men who could not afford a wife. Youfu did have a wife, and a son too. Their thatched, three-room house stood on its own to the west of the village. Just like those of the other villagers, their house was bordered on all sides by a stream. And just like the others, they had a plot of land in front and behind, on which they grew crops and vegetables. First, let me tell you about Mrs. Youfu. She had apparently been a prostitute in Wangji Market and had then married Yu Youfu and become respectable. She was in her forties and peculiarly ugly, with a long, pockmarked face and protruding teeth. Unlike most farming folk, she was tall and lean. Her husband was in his fifties; he had married late and would probably still have been a bachelor had he not found this former prostitute. Then there was their son: he was fifteen or sixteen years old and still in the second year of Sanyu Primary School. He had already been there several years when young Tao arrived. They were classmates for a year, and then Tao transferred to Gezhuang Primary Youfu's son remained in Sanyu Primary, and in fact he was still in the second year there when Tao started Hongze Middle School. Even when Youfu's son was not at school, his parents did not send him out to the fields (although he had to do his bit for Mr. Jin on the school allotment). The boy sat around at home all day, his face so pale it looked almost bloodless. Physically, he was tall and lean like his mother and walked with little short steps. His eyesight was poor, and when night fell, he could see nothing at all. The villagers called him "Sparrow Eyes." In fact he suffered from 181 night blindness, caused by a poor diet and a lack of vitamin A. His mother proudly said that she was going to get him fitted with glasses, just like the Taos. Another thing that made Sparrow Eyes stand out from the crowd was that he wore dark green clothes. There was nothing like them in Sanyu, and even the Taos found them rather odd. The material often caught the light, although it was hard to tell exactly what it was. The rumor (never questioned by the villagers) was that Mrs. Youfu had made the outfit from some garment left over from her days as a prostitute. The boy constantly had a runny nose and wiped it with his hand before drying his hand on his green outfit. According to young Tao, who had watched him do this many times, the material's sheen actually came from this coating of snot. The main reason the villagers looked down on Yu Youfu and his family, however, was their inability to look after themselves. They should have been able to get by quite well, as two of the three of them could work. Yet their roof had no chimney, and for cooking they used a "pot cooker." This was an earthenware crock with a hole in one side. The pan sat on top of the crock, and fuel was fed in through the hole. Because there was no chimney, smoke billowed up every time they cooked so that the house itself became a chimney and seemed to be on fire. Mrs. Youfu coughed and coughed and her eyes streamed with tears until finally the food was done. It was a slovenly way of doing things and wasteful of fuel, so when winter came the family had no firewood to burn. Then Youfu would climb up to the roof and pull off the rice straw. With holes in the thatch, the roof let in the rain and snow. When the rain poured outside, it would be drizzling inside. It was just not the way normal people lived. As for their allotment, it was odd that whatever they planted failed. Pests ate the vegetables, and the wheat harvest was poor, sometimes less than the seeds they had sown. Their trees were felled and used as cooking fuel before they had matured. The Youfus had been married a good number of years now and their son was a big boy, but their plot was still a wasteland-the most desolate in all of Sanyu. Even their pigs were runts...