Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

Pandi.
    Not until much later was Mother able to determine whether the father of her sixth daughter, Niandi, was Gao Dabiao or the skinny little monk at the Tianqi Temple. When Niandi was seven or eight years old, Mother could tell by the shape of her face, her long nose, and long eyebrows.
    In the spring of that year, Shangguan Lü contracted a strange illness, with itchy silvery scales erupting all over her body from her neck down; in order to keep her from scratching her skin raw, her husband and son were forced to tie her hands behind her back. The illness had this iron woman howling day and night; out in the yard, the wall and the stiff bark of the plum tree were blood-specked where she had rubbed her back to relieve the terrible itch. “I can’t stand it, this itching is killing me … I’ve offended the heavens, help me, please help me …”
    The two Shangguan men were so incompetent that a stone roller couldn’t get them to fart and an awl couldn’t draw blood, so the responsibility of finding help for her mother-in-law naturally fell to Mother. All in all, after riding the family mule from one end of Northeast Gaomi to the other, she engaged a dozen or more physicians, employing both Chinese and Western methods; some left after writing a prescription, others just left. So Mother brought in a shaman and then a sorcerer, but their magic potions and spirit waters also ended in failure. Shangguan Lü’s condition actually worsened daily.
    One day, her mother-in-law called Mother to her bedside. “Shouxi’s wife,” she said, “as the saying goes, fathers and sons are bound by kindness, mothers and daughters-in-law are linked by enmity. After I die, this family’s existence will depend upon you, because those two are a pair of asses who’ll never grow up.”
    “Don’t talk like that, Mother,” my mother said. “I heard from Third Master Fan that there is a wise monk at the Tianqi Temple in Madian Township who possesses remarkable medical powers. I’ll bring him to see you.”
    “It’s a waste of money,” her mother-in-law said. “I know the source of my illness. Back when I was first married, I killed a damned cat by pouring scalding water on it. That hateful animal kept stealing our chickens, and I only wanted to teach it a lesson. I never thought it would die, and now it’s wreaking its vengeance.”
    But Mother made the thirty-li trip on their mule.
    The pasty-faced, effetely handsome, fragrant-smelling monk counted the beads on his rosary as he listened to Mother. “Madam patron,” he said at last, “this unworthy monk sees patients here in the temple. I never make house calls. So you go back and bring your mother-in-law to see me.”
    And that is precisely what Mother did. She harnessed the mule to a cart and took her mother-in-law to Tianqi Temple, where the wise monk wrote out two prescriptions, one liquid to be ingested and another for washing the skin. “If these do not work,” he told them, “there is no need to see me again. If they do, then return and I will give you a new prescription.”
    Mother went immediately to a pharmacy, bought the medication, and returned home to prepare and administer them. After her mother-in-law ingested one of the potions three times and was bathed twice with the other, almost miraculously, the itching stopped.
    Deliriously happy, the patient withdrew some money from the family chest and sent Mother back to thank the monk and fetch the new prescription.
    While she waited for the new prescription, Mother asked the wise monk if there were some way he could help her bear sons rather than daughters. As their conversation grew more intimate — a passionate monk and a woman eager to produce a son — they became lovers.
    As for Gao Dabiao, the dog butcher at Sandy Mouth Village, his brief affair with Mother had whetted his appetite. So on the evening that Mother rode her mule home from Tianqi Temple, passing by the Black Water River as the moon was replacing the sun in the sky, Gao Dabiao leaped out from among the sorghum stalks and blocked her way.
    “Lu Xuan’er, you are a fickle woman!”
    “Dabiao,” Mother said, “I felt sorry for you, and that is why I closed my eyes and let you have your way a time or two. That is as far as it goes.”
    “You can’t toss me aside just because you got a piece of that little monk!”
    “That’s nonsense!”
    “You can’t fool me. Do as I say, or I’ll spread the word all over Northeast Gaomi Township