Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

the few remaining shreds of tobacco floating in the air — this little trick of hers was enough to frustrate anyone scavenging cigarette butts on the ground. As she exhaled the last of the smoke, she asked her assistants, “Ready?” They responded by raising their insemination utensils. The blood rushed to her face as she wrung her hands and clapped uneasily. She then took out a handkerchief to dry her sweaty palms. “Horse sperm, who has the horse sperm?” she asked loudly. The assistant holding the horse sperm stepped forward and said, “Me, I’ve got it,” the words muffled by the mask over his mouth. Ma Ruilian pointed to the cow. “Give it to her,” she said, “inseminate her with the horse sperm.” The man hesitated, looking first at Ma Ruilian and then at his fellow assistants, lined up behind him, as if he wanted to say something. “Don’t just stand there,” Ma Ruilian said. “Strike while the iron’s hot if you want to get things done!” With a mischievous look, the assistant said, “Yes, ma’am,” and carried the horse sperm over behind the tethered cow. As her assistant inserted the insemination utensil into the cow, Ma Ruilian’s lips were parted and she was breathing heavily, as if the instrument were being inserted in her and not in the cow. But immediately afterward, she issued a stream of rapid commands: She ordered that the bull’s sperm envelop the sheep’s egg and that the ram’s sperm merge with the rabbit’s egg. Under her direction, the donkey’s sperm was inserted into the sow and the boar’s seed injected into the donkey’s womb.
    The editor of the farm newsletter’s face was lusterless, his mouth hung slack, and it was impossible to tell if he was about to burst into tears or burst out laughing. One of the assistants — the one holding the ram’s sperm — a woman with curled lashes above small but bright, jet black eyes with very little white showing — refused to carry out Ma Ruilian’s order. She tossed her insemination utensil into a porcelain tray and removed her gloves and mask, revealing the fine hairs on her upper lip, a fair nose, and a nicely curved chin. “This is a farce!” she said angrily.
    “How dare you!” Ma Ruilian snarled as she smacked her palms together, her eyes sweeping across the woman’s face. “Unless I’m mistaken,” she said darkly, “you have been capped.” She reached up as if taking a hat off her head. “Not a cap you can remove at will. No, you’re an ultra-rightist, and that will be with you forever, a rightist who will always wear the cap. Am I right?” The woman’s head slumped weakly to her chest, as if her neck were a frost-laden blade of grass. “You’re right,” she said, “I am a lifelong ultra-rightist. But, as I see it, these are unrelated issues, one scientific and one political. Politics are fickle, always shifting, where black is white and white is black. But science is constant.” “Shut your mouth!” Ma Ruilian jerked and sputtered like an out-of-control steam engine. “I am not going to let you spread your poison in my breeding farm! Who are you to be talking about politics? Do you know the name of politics? Do you know what it eats? Politics are at the heart of all labor! Science divorced of politics is not true science. There is no science that transcends politics in the proletariat dictionary. The bourgeoisie has its bourgeois science, and the proletariat has its proletarian science.” “If proletarian science,” the woman responded, risking it all, “insists on crossbreeding sheep and rabbits in the hope of producing a new species of animal, then as far as I’m concerned, that so-called proletarian science is nothing more than a pile of dog shit!”
    “Qiao Qisha, how can you be so arrogant?” Ma Ruilian’s teeth were chattering from anger. “Take a look at the sky and then look down at the ground. You should understand the complexity of things. Calling proletarian science dog shit makes you an out-and-out reactionary! That comment alone is enough for us to throw you in jail, even put you in front of a firing squad! But seeing how young and beautiful you are …” Shangguan Pandi, now Ma Ruilian, softened her tone. “I’m willing to let it go this time, but I demand that you carry out your breeding mission! If you refuse, I wouldn’t care if you were the flower of the medical college or the grass of the agricultural college. I can break that horse with the gigantic hooves,