Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

on the other hand, could not be saved. In the aftermath of her death, a rumor spread that she had been involved with a dining hall worker everyone called Pockface Zhang, and that she always got larger helpings of food than the others. Someone said that on a Sunday night, during the movie, the two of them were seen slipping out in the dark into some tall grass.
    Huo Lina’s death hit Jintong especially hard, and he refused to believe that someone from a good family who had gone to school in Russia would give herself to anyone as ugly and as coarse as Pockface Zhang for a little extra soup. What happened later on to Qiao Qisha proved him wrong. For when a woman is so undernourished that her breasts lie flat on her chest and her periods stop coming, self-respect and chastity cease to exist. Poor Jintong was to witness the entire incident, from start to finish.
    During the spring, some plow oxen were delivered to the farm. Before long, they discovered there weren’t enough females for mating purposes, so they castrated four of the bulls to fatten them up for food. Ma Ruilian was still in charge of the livestock unit, but with significantly less power, now that Li Du was dead. So when Deng Jiarong walked off with all eight of the detached testicles, all she could do was glare at his back. When she detected the salivating fragrance of the testicles on Deng Jiarong’s grill wafting out of the breeding station, she told Chen San to bring some back. Deng demanded a quantity of horse feed in return, to which Ma Ruilian reluctantly agreed, exchanging a catty of dried bean cakes for one of the testicles.
    Jintong was given the job of walking the oxen at night to keep them from lying down and reopening the wounds. It was murky at dusk, and at the farm’s eastern irrigation ditch, he led the animals into a stand of willows, where he tied them to trees. Five nights in a row he had walked them, until his legs felt weighted down with lead. As he sat leaning against one of the trees, his eyelids grew heavy, and he was about to fall asleep when the soul-stirring, sweet and fresh aroma of freshly baked and still warm buns assailed his nose. His eyes snapped open. What he saw was the cook, Pockface Zhang, walking backward with a steamed bun on a skewer, waving it in the air like bait. And that’s exactly what it was. Some three or four feet away, Qiao Qisha, the flow r er of the medical school, was following him, her eyes fixed greedily on the bun. Weak light from the setting sun haloed her puffy face, as if coating it with the blood of a dog. She walked with difficulty, gasping for breath and reaching out with her hand. More than once she nearly touched it, but Pockface Zhang pulled it back each time, grinning maliciously. She whimpered like an abused puppy. But whenever her frustration nearly forced her away, the fragrance of the bun brought her back, as if in a trance. Qiao Qisha, who, at a time when everyone was given six ounces of grain a day, could still refuse to inseminate a rabbit with sheep’s sperm, had lost her faith in politics
and
science, now that the ration had dwindled to one ounce a day; animal instinct drove her toward the steamed bun, and it didn’t matter who was holding it. She followed it deep into the stand of willows. That morning, Jintong had spent his rest period helping Chen San cut hay, for which he’d received three ounces of dry bean cakes. That had given him enough self-control to resist the temptation to join the bun parade. Evidence would later show that during the famine of 1960, Zhang traded food for sex with nearly every female rightist at the farm. Qiao Qisha was the last stronghold he breached. The youngest, most beautiful, and most obstinate woman among the rightists turned out to be no harder to conquer than any of the others. In the blood-red rays of the dying sun, Jintong watched the rape of his seventh sister.
    What was a waterlogged catastrophe for the farm was a wonderful time for the willows. Red aerial roots sprouted on their black trunks, like the antennae of an ocean creature, which bled when they were broken off. The great canopies were like enraged madwomen, their hair flying. Tender, supple, watery leaves, normally a soft yellow, now pink in color, sprouted on all the limbs. Jintong had the feeling that both the branches and the leaves must be truly delectable, and while the episode ran its course in front of him, his mouth was stuffed with willow twigs and leaves.
    Finally,