Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

your body!”
    “She’s not my daughter,” Mother told the leader.
    The leader, a member of the tractor unit, knew Jintong, so he handed him a slip of paper. “This is your sister’s letter. In the spirit of revolutionary humanism, we’ve brought her home to you. You can’t imagine how heavy she is — carrying her body has just about worn out these rightists.”
    Jintong nodded apologetically to the rightists before unfolding the slip of paper. On it were the words: I am Shangguan Pandi, not Ma Ruilian. After participating in the revolution for over twenty years, this is how I’ve ended up. When I die, I beg the revolutionary masses to take my body back to Dalan and turn it over to my mother, Shangguan Lu.
    Jintong walked up to the door leaf on which the body lay, bent over, and removed the white paper covering her face. Pandi’s eyeballs bulged and her tongue stuck halfway out. Quickly covering her face again, he threw himself at the feet of the eight rightists and said, “I beg you, please, carry her over to the graveyard. There’s no one here who can do it.”
    Mother began to wail loudly.
    After burying his fifth sister, Jintong walked into the lane, dragging a shovel behind him, where he was stopped by a gang of Red Guards. They placed a paper dunce cap on his head. He shook his head, and the cap fell to the ground; he saw that his name had been written on it, with a red X through it. The black and red ink had run together, like blood. Beneath his name were the words “Necrophiliac and Murderer.” When the Red Guards began beating him on the buttocks with a club, he set up a howl, even though his padded pants kept the blows from hurting much. One of the Red Guards picked up the cap, ordered him to squat down like the comic opera character Wu Dalang, and put the cap back on his head, then pounded it down so it would stay. “Hold it on!” a fierce-looking Red Guard demanded. “The next time it falls off, we’ll break your legs!”
    Holding the cap on with both hands, Jintong stumbled down the lane. At the gate of the People’s Commune, he saw a line of people, all wearing dunce caps. There were Sima Ting, his belly bloated, the taut skin nearly transparent; the grade-school principal; the middle-school political instructor, plus five or six commune officials minus their usual swagger, and a bunch of people who had once been forced by Lu Liren to kneel on the earthen platform in front of all the people. Then Jintong saw his mother. Next to her was little Parrot Han, and next to him was Old Jin, the woman with one breast. The words “Mother Scorpion, Shangguan Lu” were written on Mother’s cap. Parrot Han wasn’t wearing a cap, but Old Jin was, along with an old shoe that hung around her neck, as a sign of wantonness. With drums and gongs shattering the stillness, the Red Guards began the public parading of the “Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits.” It was the last market day before New Year’s, and the streets were packed with shoppers. People squatted on both sides of the street with piles of straw sandals, cabbages, and yam leaves, salable agricultural by-products. Everyone wore black padded jackets, shiny with a winter of snivel and greasy smoke. Many of the older men cinched up their pants with belts of hemp, and the general appearance of the people wasn’t much different from the Snow Festival fifteen years earlier. Half the people who had attended the Snow Festival had died during the three years of famine, and the survivors were now old men and women. A scant few r of them could still recall how graceful and elegant the Snow Prince, Shangguan Jintong, had looked at that last Snow Festival. At the time, none of them could have imagined that he would one day become a “Necrophiliac and Murderer.”
    The Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits walked on woodenly as Red Guards smacked them in the buttocks with clubs, more symbolic than real. The clanging of gongs and the beating of drums rocked the earth, the shouted slogans made eardrums throb. Crowds of people pointed fingers and engaged in animated discussions. As they walked, Jintong felt someone step on his right foot, but he let that pass. When it happened a second time, he looked up and saw that Old Jin’s eyes were on him, though her head was bowed and strands of yellow hair covered her reddened ears. “Goddamned ‘Snow Prince,’” he heard her say. “With all the living girls waiting for you, you had to do it to a corpse!” Pretending