Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

Sun, three totally different men, a woman who had experienced the heat of battle, wealth, and fame, and known the mad apex of joy with Sima Ku and the demeaning nadir of physical abuse at the hands of Speechless Sun, Birdman Han offered total satisfaction. His deeply grateful touch brought her the gratification of a father’s love; his clumsy innocence in bed brought her the gratification of a sexual mentor; and his greedy consumption of forbidden fruit and unbridled passion brought her sexual gratification and the gratification of vengeance against the mute. And so, every coupling was accompanied by hot tears and sobs, with no hint of lewdness, filled with human dignity and tragedy. When they made love, their hearts overflowed with unspoken words.
    The mute, a liquor bottle hanging around his neck, lurched down the crowded street. Dust flew as one gang of laborers pushed carts filled with iron ore from east to west, while another gang pushed carts of the same color from west to east. Mixed with the two crowds, the mute was leaping forward, a great leap forward. All the laborers gazed respectfully at the glittering medal pinned to his chest and stopped to let him pass, something he found enormously gratifying. Although he only came up to the other men’s thighs, he was the most spirited individual among them. From that moment on, he spent most of his daylight hours out on the street. He would leap from the eastern end of the street all the way to the western end, take a few refreshing drinks from his bottle, and then leap all the way back. And while he was engaged in his great leap forward, Laidi and Birdman Han would be performing their own great leap forward on the ground or in bed. Dust and grime covered the mute’s body; his stools had been worn down an inch or more, and a hole had opened up in the rubber mat attached to his backside. Every tree in the village had been cut down to stoke the backyard furnaces; a layer of smoke hung over the fields. Jintong had fallen in with the sparrow eradication corps, marching under bamboo poles with red strips of cloth and accompanied by the clang of gongs, as they stalked the sparrows in Northeast Gaomi Township from one village to the next, keeping them from finding food or a spot to perch, until they dropped to the streets from exhaustion and hunger. A range of stimuli had cured him of his lovesickness, and he had gotten over his obsession with mother’s milk and revulsion of food. But his prestige had plummeted. His Russian teacher, Huo Lina, to whom he was devoted, had been declared a rightist and sent to the Flood Dragon River labor reform farm, two miles from Dalan. He saw the mute out on the street, and the mute saw him, but they merely acknowledged one another with a wave before moving on.
    The raucous season of rejoicing, with flames lighting up the sky, came quickly to an end, replaced in Northeast Gaomi Township by a new and dreary age. One drizzly autumn morning, twelve trucks with artillery pieces rumbled down the narrow road from the southeast into Dalan. When they entered the village, the mute was lurching around on the wet ground, all alone. He had exhausted himself during the recent days of leaping, and had turned listless. His eyes were lifeless, and because of all the liquor he’d consumed, his legless torso had grown bloated. The arrival of the artillery company reinvigorated him. Inappropriately, apparently, he moved out into the middle of the road to block the convoy. The soldiers stood there blinking in the rain and looking at the strange half-man in the middle of the road. An officer, wearing a pistol on his hip, jumped out of the cab of his truck and cursed angrily, “Tired of living, you stupid bastard?” Incredibly, since the road was slick, he was truncated, and the truck tires were tall, the mute had leaped out into the road, well out of sight of the driver, who had seen a brown streak in front of the truck and slammed on the brakes, not quite in time to keep his bumper from touching the mute’s broad forehead. Although it didn’t break the skin, it raised a large purple welt. The officer wasn’t finished cursing when he saw the hawkish glare in the mute’s eyes and felt his heart clench; at that moment, his eye was drawn to the medal pinned to the mute’s tattered uniform. Drawing his feet together, he bowed deeply and shouted, “My apologies, sir. Please forgive me!”
    This gratifying reaction put the mute in high spirits. He