Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

Jin’s bedroom, his head cocked. Jintong shuddered when he saw him and pushed Old Jin to the side of the bed before scrambling to cover himself with the blanket. He recognized the man at once: it was Fang Jin, at one time in charge of the People’s Commune production brigade, Old Jin’s legal husband.
    Old Jin sat there with her legs crossed. “Didn’t I just give you a thousand yuan?” she asked, a sharp edge to her voice.
    Fang Jin sat down on the Italian leather sofa in front of the bed, where he had a coughing fit and spat a gob of phlegm onto the beautiful Persian rug at his feet. The glare of hatred in his good eye was hot enough to light a cigarette. “I didn’t come for money this time,” he said.
    “Then what do you want?” she asked irately.
    “Your lives!” Fang Jin pulled a knife out from under his jacket, jumped up from the sofa with an agility that belied his age, and threw himself onto the bed.
    With a shriek of horror, Jintong rolled to the far edge of the bed and wrapped the blanket around him. He was too petrified to move after that. He then watched in terror as the cold gleam of Fang Jin’s knife pressed toward his chest.
    Like a fish flopping on the ground, Old Jin placed herself between Fang Jin and Jintong, so that the tip of the knife was aimed at her chest. “If you’re not the illegitimate child of a first wife, you’ll stab me first!” she said coldly.
    Grinding his teeth, Fang Jin said, “You whore, you stinking whore …” Despite the savagery of his words, the hand holding the knife began to tremble.
    “I’m no whore,” Old Jin said. “Sex is how a whore earns her living. But me, I actually pay for it. I’m a rich woman who’s opened a brothel for her own pleasure!”
    Fang Jin’s gaunt face twitched like waves on the ocean. Beads of snot hung from the sparse ratlike whiskers on his chin. “I’ll kill you!” he said shrilly as he thrust his knife at Old Jin’s breast. But she spun out of the way, and the knife stuck into the bed.
    With a single kick, she knocked Fang off of the bed. After whipping off her martial arts belt, slipping out of her short robe, taking off her canvas bra, and kicking off her shoes, she slapped her belly wantonly, the hollow sound nearly frightening Jintong out of his skin. “You old coffin shell,” she shouted. “Can you do it? Climb on up if you can. If not, get the fuck out of here!”
    Fang Jin was sobbing like a baby by the time he rose to a stooped position. With his eyes on Old Jin’s jiggling pale flesh, he pounded himself on the chest and wailed in agony, “Whore, you whore, one of these days I’m going to kill you both …” Fang Jin ran away.
    Peace returned to the room. The roar of a power saw came from the carpentry shop, merging with the whistle of a train entering the station. At that moment, Jintong heard the dreary sound of the wind whistling through the empty liquor bottles at home. Old Jin sprawled in front of him, and he saw her single breast splayed in all its ugliness across her chest, the dark nipple looking like a dried sea cucumber.
    She gave him an icy stare. “Can you do it like this?” she said. “No, you can’t, I know that. Shangguan Jintong, you’re dog shit that won’t stick to a wall, you’re a dead cat that can’t climb a tree. I want you to get your balls out of here, just like Fang Jin!”
4
    Except for the fact that her head was on the small side, Parrot Han’s wife, Ceng Lianlian, was actually quite a stunning woman, especially her figure. She had long legs, nicely rounded hips, a soft, narrow waist, slender shoulders, full breasts, and a long, straight neck — from the neck down there was absolutely nothing to complain about, since she’d inherited it all from her water-snake mother. Thoughts of her mother reminded Jintong of that stormy night in the mill years earlier, back during the civil war. Her head, small and flat as the blade of a shovel, had swayed in the early-morning rain and mist, and she truly looked to be three parts human and seven parts snake.
    After Old Jin fired him, Jintong wandered the streets and lanes of the increasingly prosperous Dalan City. He didn’t have the nerve to go home to see his mother. He’d sent her his severance pay, even though he’d spent nearly as much time lined up at the post office to wire the money as it would have taken to go over to the pagoda, and even though she’d have to go to the same post office to get the money, and even