Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

oppression of these bloodsucking snakes,” Ji Qiongzhi intoned with apathetic fluency, “the residents of Northeast Gaomi Township were caught in an abyss of suffering, living lives worse than beasts of burden.” She pointed to a drawing of an old woman with a face like a camel. The woman is carrying a decrepit basket and a begging bowl; a scrawny little monkey of a girl is holding on to the hem of her jacket. Black leaves with broken lines indicating they are falling from the upper left-hand corner of the drawing show how cold it is. “Countless numbers of starving people had to leave their native homes as beggars, only to be attacked by landlords’ dogs that left their legs torn and bloody.” Ji Qiongzhi’s pointer moved to the next drawing: A black, two-paneled gate is opened slightly; above the gate hangs a gilded wooden plaque inscribed with two words: Felicity Manor. A tiny head in a red-tasseled skullcap is poking out through the gate opening — obviously the little brat of a tyrannical landlord. What I found strange was the way the artist had drawn this landlord brat: with his rosy cheeks and bright eyes, what should have been a loathsome image was actually quite fetching. A huge yellow dog had its teeth sunk into the leg of a little boy. At this point, one of the girls began to sob; she was a student from Sandy Ridge Village, a second-grade “girl” of seventeen or eighteen. All the other students turned to look at her, curious to see why she was crying. One of them raised his arm and shouted a slogan, interrupting Ji Qiongzhi’s account. Still, holding her pointer, she stood waiting patiently, a smile on her face. The one who had shouted the slogan then began to wail fearfully, although no tears appeared in his bloodshot eyes. I looked around; all the students were crying, waves of sound rising and falling. The principal, who was standing where he could be seen by all, had covered his face with his handkerchief and was thumping himself on the chest with his fist. Shiny dribbles of slobber ran down the freckled face of the boy next to me, Zhang Zhongguang, and he too was thumping himself on the chest, one hand after the other, either from anger or grief, I couldn’t tell. His family had been labeled tenant farmers, but prior to National Liberation, I’d often seen this son of a tenant farmer in the Dalan marketplace tagging along behind his father, who made a living from gambling; the boy would be eating a chunk of barbecued pig’s head wrapped in a fresh lotus leaf, until his cheeks, and even his forehead, would be spotted with glistening pork grease. Now slobber ran down the chin from that open mouth, which had consumed so much fatty pork. A full-bodied girl to my right had a tender, yellow, budlike extra finger outside the thumb of each hand. I think her name was Du Zhengzheng, but we all called her Six-Six Du. Those hands were now covering her face as she emitted sobs like the cooing of doves, and those darling little extra digits fluttered over her face like the curly tails of little piglets. Two gloomy rays of light emerged from between her fingers. Naturally, I saw a lot more students whose faces were damp with real tears, tears so precious no one was willing to wipe them away. I, on the other hand, couldn’t squeeze out a single one, nor could I figure out how those few badly drawn ink drawings could tear at the students’ hearts like that. I didn’t want to be too obvious, though, since I’d noticed that Six-Six Du’s sinister glare kept sweeping over my face, and I knew she hated my guts. We shared a bench in the classroom, and as we were sitting there one evening, doing our lessons by lamplight, she had touched my thigh with one of her extra fingers on the sly, without pausing in her recitation. Well, I had jumped to my feet in a panic, disrupting the entire class, and when the teacher yelled at me, I blurted out what had happened. It was a stupid thing to do, no doubt about it, since boys are supposed to welcome this sort of contact by girls. Even if you don’t like it, you don’t make a big deal out of it. But I didn’t realize that until decades later, and when I did, I shook my head, wondering why I hadn’t… But at the time, those caterpillar-like digits scared and disgusted me. When I exposed her, she looked for a hole to crawl into from shame; fortunately, it was an evening study session, and in the muted lamplight only a watermelon-sized halo of light lit up the