Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

quickly closed her mouth again. “Mother,” Second Sister said, “I’ll get down and kowtow to you again.”
    She fell to her knees and banged her head on the ground, then buried her face in Mother’s legs. But then she parted Mother’s legs and quickly crawled out of the room.

5
    The nineteen heads of the Sima family hung from a rack outside the Felicity Manor gate all the way up to Qingming, the day of ancestral worship in the warmth of spring, when flowers were in full bloom. The rack, made of five thick and very straight China fir boards, looked something like a swing set. The heads were strung up with steel wire. Even though crows and sparrows and owls had pecked away most of the flesh, it still took little imagination to distinguish the heads of Sima Ting’s wife; his two foolish sons; the first, second, and third wives of Sima Ku; the nine sons and daughters born to those three women; and the father, mother, and two younger brothers of Sima Ku’s third wife, who were visiting at the time. The air hung heavy over the village following the massacre, the survivors taking on the appearance of living ghosts, cooping themselves up in dark rooms during the daytime, daring to emerge only after night had fallen.
    There was no news at all of Second Sister after she left us that day. The baby boy she left behind caused us no end of trouble. Mother had to nurse him to keep him from starving to death during those days we spent in our cellar hideaway. With his mouth and eyes opened wide, he greedily sucked up milk that should have been mine. He had an astonishing capacity, sucking breasts dry and then bawling for more. He sounded like a crow when he cried, or a toad, or maybe an owl. And the look on his face was that of a wolf, or a dog, or maybe a wild hare. He was my sworn enemy; the world wasn’t big enough for the two of us. I howled in protest when he took Mother’s breasts as his own; he cried just as loud when I tried to take back what was mine. His eyes remained open when he cried. They were the eyes of a lizard. Damn Zhaodi for bringing home a demon born to a lizard!
    Mother’s face turned puffy and pale under this double onslaught, and I sensed dimly that little yellow buds had begun to sprout all over her body, like the turnips that had been in our cellar over the long winter. The first of them appeared on her breasts, and that resulted in a diminished supply of milk, with a sweet, turnipy taste. How about you, little Sima bastard, has that scary taste eluded you? People are supposed to treasure what’s theirs, but that was getting harder and harder to do. If I didn’t suckle, he would for sure. Precious gourds, little doves, enamel vases, your skin has withered, you’ve dried up, your blood vessels have turned purple, your nipples are nearly black; you sag impotently.
    In order for both me and that little bastard to survive, Mother courageously led my sisters out of the cellar into the light of day. The grain in our family storage room was all gone, as were the mule and the donkey; the pots and pans and all the dishes had been smashed; and the Guanyin Bodhisattva in the shrine was now a headless corpse. Mother had forgotten to take her foxskin coat into the cellar with her; the lynx coats belonging to my eighth sister and me were nowhere to be seen. The fur on the other coats, which the rest of my sisters never took off, had by then fallen off, giving them the look of mangy wild animals. Shangguan Lü lay beneath the millstone in the storage room. She’d eaten all twenty or so of the turnips Mother had left for her before moving into the cellar, and had shat a pile of cobblestone-looking turds. When Mother went in to see her, she picked up a handful of the petrified turds and flung them at her. The skin of her face looked like frozen, decaying turnip peels; her white hair looked like twisted yarn, some sticking straight up, some hanging down her back. A green light emerged from her eyes. Shaking her head, Mother laid several turnips on the floor in front of her. All the Japanese — or maybe it was Chinese — had left for us was a half cellar of sugar beets that had already begun to sprout. Overcome by disappointment, Mother found an unbroken earthenware jar in which Shangguan Lü had hidden her precious arsenic. She poured the red powder into the turnip soup. Once the powder dissolved, a colored oil spread across the surface of the soup and a foul smell filled the air. Mother stirred the