Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

difficulty and glared at him. “Stand up, my useless son!”
    Jintong got to his feet, while Guo Pingen signaled the Red Guards with their clubs, their gongs, and their drums to round up the Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits and recommence the parade through the marketplace. Resorting once again to his bullhorn to exhort the marketgoers to shout slogans along with him, the effect of his strangely altered voice was like feeding them poison. They frowned, but no one answered the call.
    Meanwhile, Jintong stood there caught up in a fantasy: A sunlit day. Armed with the legendary Dragon Springs sword, he has Guo Pin-gen, Zhang Pingtuan, Mousy Fang, Dog Liu, Wu Yunyu, Wei Yangjiao, and Guo Qiusheng dragged up onto the stage, where he forces them to kneel and face the glinting tip of his sword.
    “Get back there, you little bastard!” one of the little Red Guard generals growled as he drove his fist into Jintong’s belly. “Don’t you dare think of running away!”
    Jintong’s fantasy had brought tears to his eyes, but the fist in the belly brought him back to reality, which seemed worse than ever. The road ahead was an impenetrable haze. But at that moment, a dispute broke out between Guoping’s faction and the “Golden Monkey Rebel Regiment,” under the leadership of Wu Yunyu. And what began as a battle of words soon led to pushing and shoving, and, finally, to war.
    Wu Yunyu started it with a kick, which Guo answered with a punch. Then they tore into each other. Guo ripped off Wu’s cap, his prized possession, and scratched his scabby head bloody. Wu stuck his fingers into Guo’s mouth and pulled with all his might, opening a cut in one corner. As soon as the factions of Red Guards saw what was happening, they turned it into a gang war, and in no time clubs were cutting through the air, bricks were flying, leaving the participants bloody but determined to fight to the death. Wu Yunyu’s subordinate Wei Yangjiao stabbed two combatants in the gut with the steel tip of his red-tasseled spear; blood and some sticky gray oozed from the wounds. Guo Pingen and Wu Yunyu backed off to direct their troops in battle. At that moment, Jintong saw the veiled young woman he recognized as Zaohua pass in front of Guo Pingen, her hand seeming to brush his face as she passed; a moment later he set up a loud agonizing wail, a gash appearing on his cheek, almost as if he’d grown a second mouth. Blood gushed from the wound, a terrifying sight. He turned and ran in the direction of the commune clinic; nothing else mattered to him at that moment. Seeing that the battle had turned deadly and that blood might wind up on their hands, the peddlers packed up their goods and disappeared down a myriad of lanes.
    One of the two combatants with belly wounds died on the way to the clinic, while the other needed a blood transfusion before he was out of danger. The blood came from the veins of the Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits. Upon his subsequent release from the clinic, none of the Red Guard units wanted anything to do with him, since his poor-peasant blood had lost its purity; now the blood of class enemies — landlords, rich peasants, and historical counterrevolutionaries — flowed in his veins. According to Wu Yunyu, Wang Jinzhi was now a class enemy himself, like a grafted fruit tree, possessor of the five evils. Poor Wang had been a member of the fighting propaganda unit of the Wind and Thunder Faction. Given the cold shoulder and incapable of dealing with loneliness, he formed his own faction, the “Unicorn Struggle Team,” complete with official seal, banner, and armbands; he even talked those in charge of the commune public address system into giving him five minutes of airtime, all the news items for which he personally selected. They ran the gamut from developments in the Unicorn faction to historical anecdotes relating to Dalan, interesting tidbits, sex scandals, items of general interest, and so on. The show ran three times a day — morning, noon, and night. Before the PA began to broadcast, representatives from all the various factions sat lined up on a bench to await their turn. Unicorn was given the last slot, so when his five minutes were up, “The Internationale” was played, and that ended the broadcasting day.
    In an age when there were no radio dramas and no musical programs, the Unicorn five-minute program served as entertainment for the citizens of Northeast Gaomi Township. Whether tending their pigs, sitting down to