Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

cook them with eggs for the two men. And if you think you’ve got the strength, go draw some water to wash the vegetables. I don’t know how I get through the days anymore. I guess it’s as they say, I carry the rest of you on my back.”
    She turned and headed over to the threshing floor, muttering to herself.
    Thunder crashed and rolled that night, threatening the grain on the threshing floor, a whole year’s blood and sweat. So, her body still racked with pain, Mother dragged herself outside with the rest of the family to move the grain inside. By the time they’d finished, she looked like a drenched chicken, and when she was finally able to crawl into bed, she was convinced she’d wandered into the doorway of Yama, the King of Hell, and that his little demons had looped a chain around her neck to drag her inside.
    Instinctively, Mother bent down to pick up the pieces of the smashed bowl. She heard a bellowing roar that sounded like an ox as it raises its head out of water. That was followed by a blow on the head that knocked her to the floor. “Go ahead, smash it!” her mother-in-law screamed, the words exploding from her mouth as she flung away the now bloodstained garlic pestle. “Smash everything, since this family is falling apart anyway!”
    Mother struggled to her feet after the pestle had smacked the back of her head. Warm blood ran down her neck. “Mother,” she wept, “it was an accident.”
    “How dare you talk back to me!”
    “I’m not talking back.”
    With a sidelong glance at her son, the older woman said, “I can’t handle her, you worthless turd. Why not just put her on a pedestal and worship her?”
    Understanding exactly what she was getting at, Shouxi picked up a club lying in a corner and drove it into Mother’s waist; she crumpled to the ground. Then he began hitting her, over and over, as his mother looked on approvingly. “Shouxi,” his father intervened, “stop that. If you kill her, the law will be on us.”
    “Women are worthless creatures,” Shangguan Lü said, “so you have to beat them. You beat a woman into submission the way you knead dough into noodles.”
    “Then why are you always beating me?” Shangguan Fulu asked.
    Worn out from swinging the club, Shouxi dropped it to the floor and stood there gasping for air.
    Mother’s waist and hips were wet and sticky. “Damn, that stinks!” her mother-in-law exclaimed, sniffing the air. “A few swats and she shits her pants!”
    Propping herself up on her elbows, Mother raised her head and said, an unprecedented malicious edge to her voice, “Go ahead, Shangguan Shouxi, kill me while you’re at it. You’re a son of a bitch if you don’t…”
    The words were barely out of her mouth when she lost consciousness.
    She awoke in the middle of the night and saw a star-filled sky. And there, in the glittering Milky Way, on that night in the year 1924, a comet streaked across the heavens, ushering in an age of upheaval and unrest.
    Three helpless little creatures lay alongside her — Laidi, Zhaodi, and Lingdi, while Xiangdi lay at the head of the
kang
crying hoarsely. Worms were crawling in and around the eyes and ears of the newborn baby, the larvae of greenbottle flies laid earlier that day.
8
    Filled with loathing for the Shangguan family, for three straight days Mother gave herself to a bachelor named Gao Dabiao, a dog butcher. A man with bovine eyes and upturned lips, Gao was never seen, regardless of the season, without his padded jacket, so smeared with dog grease it looked like armor. Any dog, no matter how vicious, gave him a wide berth, then turned and barked at him from a safe distance. Mother went to see him one day when she was on the northern bank of the Flood Dragon River, where she had gone to look for wild herbs. He was, at the time, stewing a pot of dog meat. “Here to buy some dog meat?” he asked when she barged in the door. “It’s not ready yet.” “No, Dabiao, I’ve brought some meat for you this time. Remember that time at the open-air opera when you touched me when no one was looking?” Gao Dabiao blushed. “Well, today you don’t have to worry if anyone’s looking or not.”
    Once she was sure she was pregnant, Mother went to the Matron’s shrine at the Tan family tent, where she burned incense, kowtowed, made her vows, and handed over the little bit of money she’d brought with her when she was married. But that changed nothing — she had another girl, whom she named