Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

with iodine, he wrapped the babies in white gauzy cotton and gave Shangguan Lu injections to stop the bleeding. All the while the doctor was performing his lifesaving procedures on mother and children, a journalist was taking photographs from various angles. A month later, these photographs would appear in a Japanese newspaper back home to bear witness to the friendship between China and Japan.

Chapter Two
1
    The twenty-sixth year of the Guangxu reign of the Great Qing, the Manchu dynasty, the year 1900 in the Western calendar.
    My maternal grandfather, Lu Wuluan, was a martial arts practitioner who barely left footprints when he walked. As a leader of the Red Spears, he was active in training and arming troops and in building bunkers and moats to ward off attacks by foreign troops. But after several months of uneventful waiting, the local forces’ vigilance had slackened, and on the foggy seventh morning of the eighth lunar month, German forces under the leadership of County Magistrate Ji Guifen surrounded Sandy Nest Village in Northeast Gaomi Township. When the day’s battle was over, nearly four hundred Sandy Nest residents lay dead. That included my grandfather, who was killed by German soldiers after burying his spear in the belly of their comrade, and his wife, who had hidden her daughter, Xuan’er, in a large flour vat before hanging herself from the rafter to preserve her chastity. My mother, now an orphan, was six months old on that day.
    On the following day, my aunt and uncle found my mother in the flour vat, barely alive, her body coated with flour. After clearing the baby’s mouth and nose and patting her on the back, my aunt was relieved to hear her little niece cough and begin to cry.
2
    When Lu Xuan’er reached the age of five, her aunt fetched some bamboo strips, a wooden mallet, and some heavy white cloth. “Xuan’er,” she said to her niece, “you’re five years old, time to have your feet bound.”
    “Why do I have to do that?”
    “A woman without bound feet cannot find a husband.”
    “Why do I have to find a husband?”
    “You don’t expect me to look after you for the rest of your life, do you?” her aunt replied.
    Mother’s uncle, Big Paw Yu, was an easygoing gambling man. Fearless and swaggering out in society, at home he was docile as a kitten. He was sitting in front of a fire roasting some tiny fish to go with what he was drinking. His huge hands were not nearly as clumsy as they looked. The tantalizing aroma of the sizzling fish drifted into Xuan’er’s nostrils. She was particularly fond of this lazy uncle, because every time her aunt went out to work, he stayed home to eat what and when he wasn’t supposed to. Sometimes he’d fry eggs, at other times it was dried meat, but there was always something for Xuan’er, on condition that she didn’t say a word to her aunt.
    After scaling the little fish with his fingernails, he peeled off a strip, placed it on his tongue, and washed it down with a drink. “Your aunt’s right,” he said. “Girls who don’t bind their feet grow up to be big-footed spinsters that nobody wants.”
    “Did you hear what he said?”
    “Xuan’er, do you know why I married your aunt?”
    “Because she’s a good person.”
    “No,” Big Paw Yu said, “it’s because she has such tiny feet.”
    Xuan’er looked down at her aunt’s feet and then her own. “Will my feet look like yours?”
    “That depends on you. If you do as I say, yours will be even smaller.”
    Every time Mother talked about having her feet bound, it was a mixture of blood-and-tears indictment and personal glory.
    She told us that her aunt’s steely resolve and dexterity were renowned throughout Northeast Gaomi Township. Everyone knew she was the head of the household, and that Big Paw Yu was good for gambling and bird-hunting only. The fifty acres of land, the two donkeys that worked it, the household chores, and the hiring of workers all fell to Mother’s aunt, who was barely five feet tall and never weighed more than ninety pounds. That such a small person could get so much done was a mystery to everyone. When she promised to raise her niece into a fine young lady, she certainly was not about to cut corners on foot binding. First she bent the toes back with bamboo strips and wrapped them tightly, wrenching loud squeals of protest from her niece. Then she wrapped the feet tightly with the alum-treated white cloth, one layer after another. Once that was done,