Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

bridge to the southern bank of the river, he spotted the stately seven-story pagoda on the hill; the sun was just setting, and its fiery red rays seemed to set the bricks ablaze and turn the bits of straw between them to cinders. A flock of doves circled the structure, a single column of white smoke rose from the kitchen of the hut in front. The fields lay in a deathly silence broken only by the roar of heavy equipment at the work site. Jintong felt as if his head had been pumped dry, except for the hot tears slipping into the corners of his mouth.
    In spite of the pounding of his heart, he forced himself to walk toward the sacred pagoda. Long before he reached it, he saw a white-haired figure standing in front of the pagoda, leaning on a cane fabricated out of an old umbrella handle and watching his progress. His legs felt so heavy he could barely put one foot in front of the other. His tears continued to flow unobstructed. Like the straw in the building, Mother’s white hair looked as if it had caught fire. With a muffled shout, he fell to his knees and pressed his face up against her bony knees, deformed from a lifetime of physical labor. He felt like a man at the ocean bottom, where sounds and colors and shapes ceased to exist. From somewhere deep in his memory, the smell of mother’s milk rose, overwhelming all his senses.
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    Not long after returning home, Jintong fell seriously ill. At first, it was only a weakness in his limbs and soreness in his joints. But that was followed by vomiting and diarrhea. Mother spent all she’d accumulated over the years by collecting and selling scrap to pay doctors from all over Northeast Gaomi. But none of the injections or medicines made any difference in his health. One day in August, he took her hand and said, “Mother, all my life I’ve brought you nothing but trouble. Now that my life is about over, you won’t have to suffer any longer…”
    She squeezed his hand. “Jintong, I won’t permit you to talk like that! You’re still young. I may be blind in one eye, but I can still see good days ahead. The sun is bright, the flowers smell like heaven, and we have to keep moving into the future, son …” She spoke with all the energy she could muster, but sad tears had already dripped onto his bony hand.
    “Mother, talk all you want, but it won’t do any good,” Jintong said. “I saw her again. She had stuck a plaster over the bullet hole in her temple and was holding a piece of paper with her and my names on it. She said she’d gotten our marriage certificate and was waiting for me to marry her.”
    “Dear daughter,” Mother said through her tears to the empty space before her. “Dear daughter, you did not deserve to die, I know that, and you’re like my very own daughter. Jintong spent fifteen years in prison over you, and his debt has been paid in full. So I beg you to show some mercy and forgive him. That way this lonely old woman will have someone to look after her. You’re a sensible girl. As the saying goes, life and death are different roads, and you must take one or the other. Forgive him, dear daughter. This blind old woman begs you on her knees …”
    As his mother prayed, Jintong saw Long Qingping’s naked body in the sunlit window, her ironlike breasts covered with rust. She opened her legs wantonly, and out came a clump of round, white mushrooms. But when he looked closer, he saw that it was a cluster of rounded infant heads, not mushrooms, and that they were all joined together. Each tiny head had a complete face and was covered with downy yellow hair: tall noses, blue eyes, paper-thin earlobes, like the skin of beans soaked in water. All the infants were crying out to him, the sound soft and weak, but clear as a bell. Daddy! Daddy! The sound struck terror in his heart, so he closed his eyes. The infants broke free and rushed toward him, landing on his face and body, where they tugged at his ears, stuck their fingers in his nose, and clawed at his eyes, all the while calling out Daddy. He squeezed his eyes shut even tighter, but that did not block out the sight of Long Qingping scraping her rusty breasts with sandpaper, the sound grating on his ears. She stared at him with a mixture of melancholy and rage, still scraping her breasts until they looked as if they’d been turned on a lathe, shiny and brand-new, emitting a cold glint that gathered around the nipples and, like freezing rays, bore straight into his heart. He shrieked, and passed