Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

about that night of March 7, 1991? That should count.”
    I watched as she thought back to the night of March 7, 1991. Suddenly her face reddened, as if I’d humiliated her. “No,” she said indignantly, “it doesn’t! That was an indecent act, an attempted rape!”
    Shocked and angered by her characterization, I asked myself how I could have been worried about losing a woman who could turn on me like that? Shangguan Jintong, after a lifetime of tears and snivel, isn’t it time you took a stand for a change? She can have the shop, she can have everything, except for my freedom. “All right, then, when shall we file for divorce?”
    She took out a slip of paper. “Sign this, and it’s done. Naturally,” she added, “as a fair and decent person, I’m giving you thirty thousand yuan as a settlement. Sign here.” I did. As she handed me a bankbook in my name, I asked her, “Don’t I need to appear in court?” “Everything’s been taken care of,” she said as she tossed me the divorce papers, which had already been filled out. “You’re free,” she said.
    Now that the final curtain had fallen on this drama, I really did feel as free and easy as I’d ever felt before. Before the night was over I was back home with Mother.
    In the days before Mother died, Dalan’s mayor, Lu Shengli, was found guilty of accepting bribes and sentenced to death, with a one-year reprieve. Found guilty of paying bribes, Geng Lianlian and Parrot Han were put in chains and thrown into prison. Their “Phoenix Plan” had been a gigantic hoax, and the loans of millions to the Eastern Bird Sanctuary, guaranteed by Lu Shengli, as mayor, were, for the most part, used as bribes; what little remained was simply squandered. The interest on the loans was never recovered, let alone the loans themselves, but the banks did nothing for fear that the sanctuary would go belly-up; that, in fact, was a worry shared by all of Dalan City. Eventually, this farce of a sanctuary closed its doors, the birds all gone, weeds covering the feathers and bird droppings all over the compound, the workers off to their next employment. But it continued to exist on the books of all the local banks, as the interest mounted.
    Sha Zaohua, who had been missing for years, returned from wherever she’d been; she’d taken good care of herself, and looked like a woman in her thirties. But when she went to the pagoda to see Mother, she received a cold reception. In the days that followed, she carried a torch for Sima Liang, who had returned to town. She produced a glass marble, which she said was an expression of his love for her, and a mirror, which was to be her gift to him. She said she’d saved herself all these years for him. But in his penthouse apartment at Osmanthus Mansions, Sima Liang had too much on his mind to give any thought to rekindling the love affair with Zaohua. Yet she followed him everywhere, which nearly drove him crazy. “My dear cousin,” he bellowed one day, “just what do you think you’re doing? I’ve offered you money, clothes, jewelry, but you don’t want any of those. What do you want?” Pulling her hand off of the hem of his jacket, he sat down hard on his sofa, angry and frustrated, accidentally knocking over a flower vase with his foot; a dozen or more purplish red roses lay strewn limply over the now water-soaked table. Zaohua, who was wearing a diaphanous black dress, got down on her knees on the wet carpet and stared up into Sima Liang’s face. He couldn’t help but look at her out of the corner of his eye. She had a small head and a long neck on which only a few fine lines spoiled the perfect texture. Given his vast experience with women, he knew that the neck was the one place that always gave away a woman’s age. How had Zaohua, a woman in her fifties, kept her neck from looking like either like a length of sausage or a piece of dried-out wood? From there his gaze moved down to the hollows just below her shoulders and the cleavage above the scoop neck of her dress, and nowhere did she have the appearance of a woman in her fifties; rather, she looked like a flower that had been kept in cold storage for half a century, or a bottle of fine liquor that’s been buried for fifty years at the base of a pomegranate tree. A chilled flower is just waiting to be picked; a bottle of old liquor demands to be drunk. Sima Liang reached out and touched her gently on the knee; she moaned and her face flushed bright red, like a