Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

he’d read the Bible from cover to cover, and that’s what it all came to. Don’t worry about me. Your mother is like an earthworm — I can live wherever there’s dirt.” I said, “Mother, I’m going to watch what I eat so I can send you the surplus.” “I don’t want you to do that,” she said. “As long as my children eat their fill, that’s enough for me.” When we reached the bank of the Flood Dragon River, I said, “Mother, Zaohua has become an expert at…” “Jintong,” Mother said in frustration, “During all these years, not a single girl in the Shangguan family has taken advice from anyone.”
    Sometime in the middle of the night, a commotion broke out in the chicken house. I jumped to my feet and stuck my face up against the window, where I saw chickens seething under the tattered net like foam-capped waves. A green fox was leaping amid them in the watery moonlight, an undulating ribbon of green satin. Raising the alarm, the women next door rushed outside half dressed, one-armed Commander Long in the lead, armed with a black pistol. The fox had a fat hen in its mouth and was scampering along the base of the wall, the hen’s foot scraping the ground. Commander Long fired; flames shot from the muzzle of her pistol. The fox stopped in its tracks and dropped the hen. “You hit it!” one of the women shouted. But the glossy eyes of the fox swept the women’s faces. Its long face was haloed in moonlight; it wore a sneer. The women were stunned by that mocking grin, and Commander Long’s arm fell weakly to her side. But then she steeled herself and fired another round. It didn’t come close, did, in fact, raise a puff of dirt in the vicinity of the women. With no more concerns, the fox picked up the hen and slipped nonchalantly through the metal ribs of the enclosure, the women watching its exit as if in a trance. Like a puff of green smoke, the fox disappeared among the war relics in the scrapyard, where the grass grew tall and will-o’-the-wisps dotted the landscape — a fox paradise.
    The following morning, my eyelids felt weighted down as I pulled a full cartload of chicken droppings over to the pig farm. When I turned the corner of the scrapyard, I heard a shout behind me. I turned and saw the rightist Qiao Qisha running briskly toward me. “The director sent me to help you,” she said indifferently. “You push from behind,” I said, “and I’ll pull.”
    The two wheels of the heavy cart kept getting stuck in the soft earth of the narrow road, and each time that happened, I had to turn and tug with all my might, my arched back nearly touching the ground. At the same time, she pushed with everything she had. Once the wheels were free, she’d look over at me before I turned around. The sight of her jet black eyes, the fine hairs on her upper lip, her fair nose and nicely curved chin, as well as her expression, which was filled with hidden meaning, reminded me of the fox in the chicken coop. That look lit up a dark place in my brain.
    The pig farm was about a mile from the chicken farm, and the road passed by a fertilizer pit for the vegetable garden unit. My teacher, Huo Lina, walked past us carrying a load of manure, her slim waist compressed by the weight of her load until she seemed about to snap in two. At the pig farm, we delivered our chicken droppings to the woman in charge, Ji Qiongzhi, my former music teacher, who dumped the slimy, stinking mess into the pig troughs.
    One of the members of the food processing team was an athletic fellow who could high-jump nearly two meters using the latest flop method. Naturally, he was a rightist. He displayed a great deal of concern for Qiao Qisha, and was extremely friendly to me, one of those cheerful rightists, unlike the ones who went around scowling the day long. Wearing a towel draped around his neck and a pair of goggles, he worked happily on the pulverizer, which filled the air with dust. The leader of his team was another special case, an illiterate man named Guo Wenhao who created clapper-talk lyrics that were sung all over the farm. On our very first trip with coarse fodder made of yams, he entertained us with one of his lyrics:
    “There’s this animal farm leader, Ma Ruilian, who has a new vocation. She carries out experiments at the breeding station, mating a sheep and rabbit with high elation. She angered her assistant, Qiao Qisha, and hit her in the belly, ha ha ha. A horse and a donkey produce a mule, but a