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didn’t seem to be a soul on the mountain – it was lonely out there on my own. I pulled myself together a bit, but when it got properly dark, the whole place was silent as the grave – except for a kind of crrr-crrr-crrrr-wour-wour-wour sort of noise – ’
    ‘Wour-wour-wour?’ My question slipped, almost involuntarily, out. Mrs Li gripped my hand to stifle any further interruption from me – as if speaking my mystification aloud would bring calamity down on her.
    ‘Just a frog. And then an owl – sends a shiver down your spine, an owl’s hooting… In the dark, you know, Mrs Li, a tree looks a lot like a man… Look again, and it’s a tree, ha! When the Long Hairs were on the run, people from our village chased them out with spades and hoes. There were only about a dozen of us, against a hundred of them, but none of them stopped to put up a fight. After that, there was the daily treasure hunt – that’s how Mr San from Hexu made his pile.’
    ‘Treasure-hunting?’ Yet again, I was mystified.
    ‘Whenever we were about to catch them up, the Long Hairs would throw bits of gold, silver or the odd jewel back at us to slow us down – so that we’d stop and fight over them. I got myself a beautiful pearl, big as a broad bean, but before I had time to count my blessings, Niu’er came and bashed me over the head with a club and ran off with it. I’d have been a rich man, otherwise – though never as rich as Mr San. Around this time it was, Ho Goubao, Mr San’s father, went back home to Hexu and found a young Long Hair, his hair tied back in a queue, lying inside a broken closet – ’
    ‘Bedtime,’ Mrs Li ruled. ‘It’s starting to rain.’
    ‘Not yet!’ I protested. It was like being tantalized by a cliffhanger at a chapter’s end – I had to hear right through to the end of the story. My amah wasn’t having any of it.
    ‘Bedtime! Up late tomorrow and you’ll get a taste of your teacher’s ruler.’
    Fat drops of rain tapped down on the great leaves of the plantain tree in front of my window, like a crab pattering over the sand. I lay on my pillow, listening to the sound gradually fade away.
    ‘Ow! I’ll work harder, I promise…’
    ‘Bad dream? You woke me up from mine… What was yours about?’ Mrs Li was by my bedside, patting me on the back.
    ‘Oh… nothing… What about yours?’
    ‘About the Long Hairs… Tell you about it tomorrow – go back to sleep, it’s past midnight.’
    Winter 1911

OUTCRY

PREFACE
     
    When I was young, I too had many dreams, most of which I later forgot – and without the slightest regret. Although remembering the past can bring happiness, it can also bring a feeling of solitude; and where is the pleasure in clinging on to the memory of lonely times passed? My trouble is, though, that I find myself unable to forget, or at least unable to forget entirely. And it is this failure of amnesia that has brought
Outcry
into existence.
    For four years of my childhood life, I divided my time between the pawnshop and the pharmacy. Which four years it was, I forget – all I remember is that the top of my head reached exactly up to the counter in the pharmacy, while in the pawnshop it was twice my height. I would push clothes and jewellery across the latter, take the money contemptuously slid back at me, then make my way over to the former – to buy medicine for my chronically ill father. Back home, there was still work to be done, because our doctor seemed to have built his substantial local reputation on prescribing the most elusively exotic adjuvants: winter aloe root, sugar cane that had survived three years’ frosts, monogamous crickets, seeded ardisia… Most of them were excessively difficult to get hold of. And still my father went on sickening, day by day, until finally he died.
    I think it’s true to say that any once-comfortable family that falls on hard times sees soon enough what the world really thinks of it. And so I made up my mind to enrol in the