Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

the window again. “I’m talking to you! Are you playing deaf or dumb or what? You haven’t heard a word I said!” “I heard you,” Mother sobbed. “Then what are you waiting for? Your father-in-law and your husband are out threshing grain, and I’ve swapped a broom for a hoe, so damned busy I wish I could be in four places at once. But you, like a pampered princess, lie there in luxurious comfort. Now, if you could bring a son into this family, I would personally wash your feet in a gold basin!”
    So Mother got out of bed, put on a pair of trousers, and wrapped her head in a filthy scarf; casting a longing glance at her baby, still covered with blood and muck, she dried her eyes with her sleeve and walked out into the yard on rubbery legs, putting up with the shooting pains the best she could. The glare of the midsummer sun nearly blinded her as she scooped up a ladleful of water from the vat and gulped it down. Why can’t I just die? she was thinking. Living like this is sheer torture. I could end it myself! But then she saw her mother-in-law was pinching Laidi on the leg with her tongs, while Zhaodi and Lingdi huddled fearfully in a pile of straw, not making a sound and wishing they could hide their little bodies by burrowing out of sight. Laidi howled like a pig being slaughtered and rolled around on the ground. “I’ll give you something to cry about!” Shangguan Lü growled as she pinched the girl’s legs over and over, putting her years of practice and strength as a blacksmith to work.
    Mother ran up and grabbed her mother-in-law’s arm. “Mother,” she pleaded, “let her go. She’s just a child, she doesn’t know anything.” She knelt weakly in front of her mother-in-law. “If you must pinch someone, pinch me …” Flinging her tongs to the ground in an explosion of anger, her mother-in-law paused for a second before pounding her own chest and crying, “My god, this woman will be the death of me!”
    Mother had no sooner dragged herself out to the field than Shangguan Shouxi hit her with a rake. “What took you so long, you lazy ass? Thanks to you, I’m about to die from all this work!” She fell to the ground in a seated position, and heard her husband, who had been baked in the sun until he looked like a bird roasted on a spit, yell hoarsely, “Quit faking. Get up and rake some of this grain!” He threw the rake down in front of her and wove his way over to a locust tree to cool off.
    With both hands on the ground, Mother managed to get to her feet, but when she bent over to pick up the rake, she nearly passed out. She propped herself up with the rake, as the blue sky and yellow earth whirled like gigantic wheels, wanting to topple her dizzily back to the ground. Somehow she managed to remain upright, in spite of the tearing pains in her belly and the excruciating contractions in her womb. Chilled, nauseating fluids kept leaking from between her legs, soiling her thighs.
    The sun’s diabolical rays burned their way across the land like white-hot flames; stalks of grain and the tassels that topped them happily gave up the last remaining moisture in the form of evaporation. Bearing up as best she could with the pain racking her body, Mother turned over the tassels on the threshing floor to speed up the drying process. She was reminded of what her mother-in-law had said: There’s water on the hoe, but fire on the rake.
    An emerald green locust that had ridden a tassel to the threshing floor spread its pink wings and flew onto Mother’s hand. She noticed the delicate little insect’s jadelike compound eyes, then saw that half of its abdomen had been lost to the sickle. And yet it lived on and could still fly. Mother found that indomitable will to live extremely moving. She shook her wrist to get the locust to fly away, but it stayed where it was, and Mother sighed over the sensation of the tiny insect’s feet resting on her skin. That reminded her of the time her second daughter, Zhaodi, was conceived, in her aunt’s tent in the melon field, where breezes from the Black Water River cooled purple melons as they grew amid the silver leaves of vines. Laidi was still nursing at the time. Hordes of locusts, with pink wings just like this one, raised a din all around the melon shelter. Her uncle, Big Paw Yu, knelt in front of her, pounding his own head. “Your aunt tricked me into this,” he said, “and I’ve not been able to live with myself since. I’ve given up the right to