Big Breasts and Wide Hips by Mo Yan
Had Mother forgotten that she was being paraded in public? Whatever the answer, this elderly woman who had raised a houseful of daughters and was mother-in-law to many renowned young men flung down her dunce cap and hobbled toward the pond on bound feet. “How can you people just stand there when a man’s drowning?” she castigated the crowd. She picked up a broom from a nearby peddler. At the pond’s edge she shouted, “You there, nephew Fang, have you gone mad? Quick, grab hold of the broom and ITI pull you out!”
The brackish water had apparently changed Fang’s mind about ending it all, so he grabbed hold of the broom and, like a plucked chicken, dragged himself up onto dry ground. His lips had turned purple, and his eyes barely moved in their sockets; he couldn’t speak. Taking off her jacket, Mother wrapped it around his shoulders, which immediately turned him into a comic figure. The people didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. “Put your shoes on, young nephew,” Mother said, “then run home as fast as you can. Work up a good sweat, if you don’t want to die from the cold.” Unfortunately for him, his fingers were frozen stiff, and he couldn’t get his shoes on, so a few of the onlookers, moved by Mother’s kindness, managed to help him into his shoes. Then they picked him up and carried him off at a trot, his stiff legs dragging along behind.
Dressed only in a thin blouse, Mother hugged her shoulders to keep warm as she watched them drag Fang Shixian away. She was the recipient of admiring glances from many people. But Jintong was not one of them. It was Fang Shixian, after all, the man who the year before had been in charge of the farmers’ security unit. Every day, as the commune members headed home, he was the one who searched them and their baskets. On her way home one day, Mother had picked up a yam on the road and put it into her straw basket. Fang Shixian found it and accused her of theft. When Mother denied the accusation, the son of a bitch had slapped her, bloodying her nose; the blood had dripped onto the lapel of her shirt, the same white shirt she was wearing now. An idler like him, who strutted around just because he was categorized as a poor peasant, why not let him drown? His feelings for her at that moment bordered on loathing.
At the gate to the commune slaughterhouse Jintong spotted Zaohua standing in front of a red board with a slogan in yellow letters, and he was sure that she’d been involved in Fang Shixian’s misfortune. The youngster must have been her apprentice. If she was capable of stealing a diamond ring off the finger of Princess Monica under tight security at the Yellow Sea Restaurant, she certainly wasn’t interested in a worker’s uniform. No, that had been a payback for the bad man who had slapped her grandmother. Jintong’s view of Zaohua underwent an immediate change. As he saw it, thievery was a disgrace, and had been since time immemorial. But now he considered what Zaohua had done was right. There was no honor in being a common thief, of course, but someone like Zaohua, a thief for all ages, was worthy of high praise. In his eyes, the Shangguan family had raised yet another glorious banner to flap in the wind.
The little Red Guard leader, who was upset over what Mother had done, picked up a battery-powered bullhorn, a rarity those days, but well suited to and necessary for revolutionary activities, and, in the style of the leader of Northeast Gaomi Township’s land reform decades earlier, announced in a sickly, shaky voice, “Revolutionary — comrades — Red Guards — comrades-in-arms — low and middle poor peasants — do not be misled — by the phony kindness — of the old-line historical counterrevolutionary — Shangguan Lu — who is trying to divert the direction of our struggle —”
This Red Guard leader, Guo Pingen, was in fact the abused son of the eccentric Guo Jingcheng, a man who had broken his wife’s leg and then warned her not to cry. When people passed by their house, they often heard the sound of someone being beaten and a woman’s muffled moans. A good-hearted man by the name of Li Wannian once decided to try to put a stop to it, but had no sooner opened the door than he was struck by a rock that came flying out. Guo Pingen had inherited his father’s cruel, ruthless ways. As the Cultural Revolution progressed, he had already injured the kidney of a teacher by the name of Zhu Wen with a vicious kick.
His exhortation completed, he slung the bullhorn over his back, walked up to Mother, and aimed a well-placed kick into her knee. “Kneel!” he demanded. With a yelp of pain, Mother got down on her knees. He then grabbed her by the ear and demanded, “Get up!” She’d barely gotten to her feet when he sent her to the ground again with another kick and stepped on her back. All his beatings were administered to give concrete meaning to the popular revolutionary slogan: “Knock all class enemies to the ground, then step on them.”
The fires of rage burned in Jintong’s heart as he watched his mother being beaten; he ran up to Guo Pingen with balled fists, but was brought up short by Guo’s sinister glare. Two deep creases ran from mouth to chin on the face of this revolutionary leader, who was little more than a boy himself, which gave him the appearance of a prehistoric reptile. Jintong unclenched his fists, as if by instinct. His heart shuddered, and he was about to ask Guo what he thought he was doing when the young Red Guard raised his hand, and Jintong’s question emerged instead as a wail: “Mother …” He fell to his knees beside his mother, who raised her head with difficulty and glared at him. “Stand up, my useless son!”
Jintong got to his feet, while Guo Pingen signaled the Red Guards with their clubs, their gongs, and their drums to round up the Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits and recommence the parade through the marketplace. Resorting once again to his bullhorn to exhort the marketgoers to shout slogans along with him, the effect of his strangely altered voice was like feeding them poison. They frowned, but no one answered the call.
Meanwhile, Jintong stood there caught up in a fantasy: A sunlit day. Armed with the legendary Dragon Springs sword, he has Guo Pin-gen, Zhang Pingtuan, Mousy Fang, Dog Liu, Wu Yunyu, Wei Yangjiao, and Guo Qiusheng dragged up onto the stage, where he forces them to kneel and face the glinting tip of his sword.
“Get back there, you little bastard!” one of the little Red Guard generals growled as he drove his fist into Jintong’s belly. “Don’t you dare think of running away!”
Jintong’s fantasy had brought tears to his eyes, but the fist in the belly brought him back to reality, which seemed worse than ever. The road ahead was an impenetrable haze. But at that moment, a dispute broke out between Guoping’s faction and the “Golden Monkey Rebel Regiment,” under the leadership of Wu Yunyu. And what began as a battle of words soon led to pushing and shoving, and, finally, to war.
Wu Yunyu started it with a kick, which Guo answered with a punch. Then they tore into each other. Guo ripped off Wu’s cap, his prized possession, and scratched his scabby head bloody. Wu stuck his fingers into Guo’s mouth and pulled with all his might, opening a cut in one corner. As soon as the factions of Red Guards saw what was happening, they turned it into a gang war, and in no time clubs were cutting through the air, bricks were flying, leaving the participants bloody but determined to fight to the death. Wu Yunyu’s subordinate Wei Yangjiao stabbed two combatants in the gut with the steel tip of his red-tasseled spear; blood and some sticky gray oozed from the wounds. Guo Pingen and Wu Yunyu backed off to direct their troops in battle. At that moment, Jintong saw the veiled young woman he recognized as Zaohua pass in front of Guo Pingen, her hand seeming to brush his face as she passed; a moment later he set up a loud agonizing wail, a gash appearing on his cheek, almost as if he’d grown a second mouth. Blood gushed from the wound, a terrifying sight. He turned and ran in the direction of the commune clinic; nothing else mattered to him at that moment. Seeing that the battle had turned deadly and that blood might wind up on their hands, the peddlers packed up their goods and disappeared down a myriad of lanes.
One of the two combatants with belly wounds died on the way to the clinic, while the other needed a blood transfusion before he was out of danger. The blood came from the veins of the Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits. Upon his subsequent release from the clinic, none of the Red Guard units wanted anything to do with h
In an age when there were no radio dramas and no musical programs, the Unicorn five-minute program served as entertainment for the citizens of Northeast Gaomi Township. Whether tending their pigs, sitting down to eat, or lying in bed, the people would prick up their ears in anticipation. One night, the Unicorn announcer said, “Low and middle poor peasants, revolutionary comrades-in-arms, according to an authoritative source, the individual who attacked the onetime leader of the Wind and Thunder Faction, Guo Pingen, leaving a gash in his cheek, was the infamous thief Sha Zaohua. Thief Sha is the daughter of the traitor Sha Yueliang, who ran rampant for years in Northeast Gaomi Township, and Shangguan Laidi, who murdered a public servant and was herself executed for the crime. In her youth, thief Sha met a strange man at Southeast Lao Mountain, from whom she learned martial arts. She can fly over eaves and walk up walls, she is a master of sleight-of-hand who can pick a pocket or walk off with a purse right under your eyes, and you’ll never know it. According to my authoritative source, thief Sha sneaked back to Northeast Gaomi Township three months ago, and has already established secret contacts in every village and hamlet. Using intimidation and coercion, she has enlisted the services of underlings who report to her on everything and serve as a little army of spies. The youngster who stole the dogskin cap of poor peasant Fang Shixian at the Dalan marketplace was one of thief Sha’s accomplices. Thief Sha has plied her evil trade in large towns. She has many aliases, but the most commonly heard is Swallow Sha. Her purpose in sneaking back to Northeast Gaomi this time is to avenge the deaths of her father and mother, and the gash on Guo Pingen’s cheek signals the first stage of her class retaliation. Even cruder, even more terrifying incidents can be expected in the days to come. It has been reported that one of the tools of her trade is a bronze coin she placed on a railroad track to be run over by a passing train. It is thinner than paper and so sharp it can cut a hair in half by blowing on it. When it cuts skin it takes ten minutes for the wound to bleed and twenty for the victim to feel the pain. Thief Sha hides this weapon between her fingers, and with an unnoticeable flick can sever a man’s carotid artery, bringing instant death. Thief Sha’s skills are unmatched. When she was studying with her master, she tossed ten coins into a pot of boiling oil, then reached in with bare fingers and removed every single one without so much as singeing her skin. Her movements are so fast, and so precise, they are barely visible. Revolutionary comrades-in-arms, low and middle poor peasants, the enemies who use guns have been eliminated, but the ones who use coins remain among us, and they can be counted on to fight us with ten times the deceit and a hundred times the frenzy.” Time’s up, time’s up! That was what the listeners heard over the PA all of a sudden. “I’m almost done, almost done.” No, that’s it. The Unicorn can’t talk over uThe Internationale”! “Can’t we go on a little longer?” But the strains of “The Internationale” abruptly poured out of the PA.
The following morning, the PA broadcast the Golden Monkey Rebel Regiment’s detailed renunciation of Unicorn’s Sha Zaohua myth, and then laid all the crimes at the feet of Unicorn. The mass organizations broadcast a joint declaration retracting Unicorn’s broadcast privileges and ordered the faction’s leaders to disband within forty-eight hours and to destroy the official seal and all propaganda materials.
Even though the Golden Monkey Rebel Regiment denied the existence of a super-thief named Sha Zaohua, they nonetheless assigned secret agents and sentries to watch the Shangguan family. Not until the following spring, during the Qingming Festival, when a police van from the County Security Bureau came to take Jintong away, did Wu Yunyu, who by then had risen to the position of chairman of the Dalan Revolutionary Committee, relieve the agents and sentries, who were pretending to be wok menders, knife sharpeners, and shoe repairmen, of their duties.
When they were clearing out the Flood Dragon River Farm, a diary kept by Qiao Qisha was discovered. In it she recorded in detail the illicit relationship between Shangguan Jintong and Long Qingping. As a result, the County Security Bureau arrested Jintong on charges of murder and necrophilia and, even before the investigation began, sentenced him to fifteen years in prison, which he began to serve at a labor reform camp on the edge of the Yellow Sea.
Chapter Seven
1
During the first spring of the 1980s, Jintong, having served his time, sat in an out-of-the-way corner of a bus station waiting room, feeling shy and confused as he waited for the bus to Dalan, the capital of Northeast Gaomi Township.
The fifteen long years now behind him truly seemed like a bad dream. He thought back until his head ached, but all he could conjure up were memory fragments, all linked to bright light that stung his eyes like shards of glass imbedded in mud. He recalled the moment when handcuffs were first snapped on his wrists, and the reflected light that seared his eyes just before darkness enshrouded him and he heard his mother’s shouts in the distance: “What right do you have arresting my son? My son is a good man, he’s never hurt anyone” … and then he recalled the frightful days spent in the lockup awaiting sentencing, how every night by the muted light in his cell he had been forced to perform oral sex on the bearded guard … and he recalled the unbearable heat beating down on the labor camp salt works, creating even more blinding light. The guards wore sunglasses; the inmates were not permitted to. Wherever he looked the salty, corrupting, blinding light brought tears to eyes that were exposed to the salty air… then he recalled scenes of gathering kindling in the freezing cold of winter, sunlight sparkling on the snow-covered ground and glinting off the guards’ rifle barrels. The deafening crack of rifle fire straightened him up, and as he looked into the sun he saw a dazzlingly dark figure wobble and fall to the ground. He later learned that it was an inmate who had tried to escape, only to be shot by a guard … his thoughts then took him back to a summer when bursts of lightning the size of basketballs lit up the skies over the fields. Terrified, he fell to his knees. “Heavenly Father,” he prayed, “spare me. I did nothing wrong, please don’t strike me dead … let me go on living … let me live out my sentence and regain my freedom … I want to see my mother once more” … another blast of thunder rent the sky, and when he came to, a goat lay beside him, struck dead by lightning, the smell of burnt flesh hanging in the air …