Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

will always be a pillow for you on Old Jin’s bed.”
    “But she’s a married woman …” Jintong’s face had grown pale.
    Mother threw down a challenge, her voice quaking with madness. “If you don’t show a little spunk, you’re no son of mine. Go see her. I don’t need a son who refuses to grow up. What I want is someone like Sima Ku or Birdman Han, a son who’s not afraid to cause me some trouble, if that’s what has to be done. I want a man who stands up to piss!”
3
    With newfound valor, he crossed the Black Water River, as Mother had told him to, and went to see Old Jin. With Mother’s help, this was to be the start of his life as a real man. But as he set out on the road to the newly created city, his courage left him like a tire with a slow leak. The high-rises, with mosaic inlays on the sides, were impressive in the sunlight, while at a number of work sites, the yellow arms of cranes swung massive prefabricated forms into place. Insistent jackhammers thudded against his eardrums, arc welders on steel girders near the sandy ridge lit up the sky more brightly than the sun. White smoke curled around a tower, and his eyes began to wander. Mother had given him directions to Old Jin’s recycling station, which was near the bay where Sima Ku had been shot all those years ago. Some of the buildings alongside the wide asphalt street had been finished, others were in the process of going up. No sign remained of the Sima family compound. The Great China Pharmaceutical Company was gone. Several large excavators were digging deep trenches in the ground. Where the church had once stood, a bright yellow, seven-story high-rise towered over its surroundings like a golden-toothed member of the nouveau riche. Red characters, each the size of an adult sheep, proclaimed in glittering fashion the power and prestige of the Dalan Branch Office of the China Bank of Industry and Commerce.
    Old Jin’s recycling station was spread out over a large area, behind a plaster board fence. The scrap was separated by type: empty bottles formed a great wall that dazzled the eyes, a mountainous prism of broken glass; old tires were stacked in heaps; a mound of old plastic rose higher than a rooftop; smack in the middle of discarded metal stood a howitzer minus its wheels. Dozens of workmen, towels covering the lower half of their faces, were scampering all over the place like ants. Some were lugging tires, others were doing the sorting, while still others were loading or unloading trucks. A black wolfhound was tied to the base of a wall with the chain from an old waterwheel, still wrapped in red plastic. It appeared far more ferocious than the mongrels at the labor reform camp; its fur looked as if waxed. Lying on the ground in front of the dog were a whole roasted chicken and a half eaten pig’s foot. The watchman had a mass of unruly hair, rheumy eyes, and a deeply wrinkled face; on closer examination, he looked like the militia leader of the original Dalan Commune. A large furnace stood in the yard for melting plastic. Strange-smelling black smoke was belching out of a squat sheet-metal chimney; dust skittered along the ground. A group of scrap vendors was gathered around a large scale, arguing with the old man in charge of the scale. Jintong recognized him as Luan Ping, a salesclerk at the old Dalan Co-op. A white-haired old man rode into the station on a three-wheeled cart; it was Liu Daguan, onetime head of the local branch of the Post and Telecommunications Bureau. Once known for the way he strutted around, he was now in charge of Old Jin’s workers’ dining hall. Feeling his nerve slipping away, Jintong stood in the yard looking helpless. But a window in the simple two-story building in front of him was pushed open, and there stood the capitalist, single-breasted Old Jin in a pink bathrobe, holding her hair in one hand and waving to him with the other. “Adoptive son,” he heard her shout brazenly, “come on up!”
    It seemed to him as if everyone in the yard turned to watch him walk toward the building, head down, their stares making every step an awkward one. What about my arms? Should I cross them? Let them hang straight down? Stick them in my pockets, maybe, or clasp them behind my back? Finally, he decided to let them hang at his sides, shoulders hunched, and walk the way he’d been trained during his fifteen years at the camp, like a whipped dog, slinking along with its tail between its legs, head bowed but