Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

the first morning of 1948, the five members of our family, plus my goat, cautiously crossed the frozen Flood Dragon River and crawled up the opposite bank. Sha Zaohua and I helped First Sister drag the cart to the top, where we stood and gazed out at the patches of shattered ice, where artillery shells had landed, and at the water gushing out of the holes; as we listened to the crisp sound of ice cracking, we were thankful that none of us had fallen in. Sunlight fell on the battleground north of the river, where the smell of gunpowder lingered on; shouts, whoops of delight, and an occasional burst of gunfire kept the place alive. Fallen helmets looked like toadstools, and I was reminded of Big and Little Mute, whom Mother had placed in a bomb crater, where they lay uncovered, even by dirt. I told myself to turn and look toward our village, which had somehow avoided being reduced to rubble — a true miracle. The church was still standing, as was the mill house. Half of the tiled buildings in the Sima compound had been leveled, but our buildings were still standing, marred only by a hole from one of the artillery shells in the roof of the main house. We exchanged glances as we walked into the yard, as if we were all strangers. But then there were hugs all around, before we broke down and cried, Mother leading the way.
    The sound of our crying was abruptly drowned out by the precious weeping of Sima Liang. We looked up and spotted him crouching in an apricot tree, looking like a wild animal. A dog pelt was draped over his shoulders. When Mother reached out to him, he leaped out of the tree like a puff of smoke and threw himself into her arms.

Chapter Five
1
    The first snowfall of the era of peace blanketed the corpses, while hungry wild pigeons hobbled about on the snow, their unhappy cries sounding like the ambiguous sobs of widows. The next morning, the sky took on the appearance of translucent ice, and when the sun rose red in the eastern sky, the space between heaven and earth looked like a vast expanse of colored glaze. A carpet of white covered the land, and when the people emerged from their houses, their breath a steamy pink, they tramped through the virgin snow on the eastern edge of the open fields, their possessions on their backs, leading their cattle and sheep behind them as they headed south. Crossing the crab- and clam-rich Black Water River, they were setting out for the baffling, fifty-acre highlands, and Northeast Gaomi Township’s remarkable “snow market” — a marketplace erected on the snowy ground — for their snowbound business transactions, ancestral sacrifices, and celebrations.
    This was a rite for which people knew they had to keep all their thoughts bottled up inside, for the minute they opened their mouths to make them known, catastrophes would rain down on them. At the snow market, you engaged your senses of sight, smell, and touch to comprehend what was going on around you; you could think, but you mustn’t speak. Exactly what might befall you if you broke the speech proscription was something no one ever questioned, let alone answered; it was as if everyone knew, but participated in a tacit agreement not to divulge the answer. Northeast Gaomi Township’s survivors of the carnage — mostly women and children — all dressed up in their New Year’s finest and headed through the snow toward the highlands, their noses pricked by the icy smell of the snow at their feet. The women covered their noses and mouths with the sleeves of their thickly lined coats, and although it might appear that they were trying to ward off the biting smell of the snow, I was pretty sure it was to keep them from saying anything. A steady crunching sound rose from the white land, and while the people observed the practice of not speaking, their livestock didn’t. Sheep bleated, cows mooed, and those few aging horses and crippled mules that had somehow made it through the battles whinnied. Rabid wild dogs tore at the corpses along the way with their unyielding claws and howled at the sun like wolves. The only village pet to escape the ravages of rabies, the blind dog belonging to the Taoist priest Men Shengwu, followed its master bashfully through the snow. A three-room hut in front of a brick pagoda on the highlands was home to 120-year-old Men Shengwu, a practitioner of a magical art form known as eschewing grain. Rumor had it that he had not eaten human food for ten years, surviving exclusively on