Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

mixture with a wooden ladle until it was smooth, then picked it up and slowly poured it into the wok. The corner of her mouth twitched oddly. After ladling some of the turnip soup into a chipped bowl, Mother said, “Lingdi, give this soup to your grandmother.” “Mother,” Lingdi said, “you put poison in it, didn’t you?” Mother nodded. “Are you going to poison Grandma?” “We’ll all die together,” Mother said, to which my sisters responded by weeping, including my blind eighth sister, whose thin cries were little more than the buzzing of a hornet. Her large, black, but sightless eyes filled with tears. Eighth Sister was the most wretched of the wretched, the saddest of the sad. “But we don’t want to die, Mother,” my sisters pleaded tearfully. Even I took up the chant: “Mother… Mother “My poor, dear little children …” Mother said; by then she too was crying. She cried for the longest time, all the while accompanied by her sobbing children. Finally, she blew her nose loudly, took back the chipped bowl, and flung it and its contents into the yard. “We’re not going to die! If death doesn’t frighten a person, then nothing can!” With that comment, she stood up and led us out into the street to find food. We were the first villagers to venture out onto the street. When they spotted the heads of the Sima family, my sisters were afraid. But in a matter of days, it was just another village sight. Mother held the little Sima bastard in her arm, so he was directly opposite me. She pointed to the heads and said to him softly, “I don’t want you to ever forget that, you poor child.”
    Mother and my sisters walked out of the village and into a reawakened field, where they began digging up white grass roots, which they would boil after rinsing and mashing them. Third Sister, the smart one, found a nest of voles. What made that such a great find was not just the addition of meat to our diet, but that the food they’d stored away was now ours as well. After that, my sisters made a fishnet out of some hemp twine, which they used to snag some dark, thin fish and shrimp that had survived the winter in the local pond. One day, Mother put a spoonful of fish broth into my mouth; I spit it right back out and started bawling at the top of my lungs. Then she put a spoonful into the mouth of the Sima brat; the moron swallowed it right down. So Mother fed him another spoonful. He swallowed that too. “Good,” Mother exclaimed excitedly. “For all the bad karma, at least this kid knows how to eat.” She turned her gaze to me. “Now, what about you? It’s time you got weaned too.” Panic-stricken, I grabbed hold of her breast.
    The village began to come back to life, once we had taken the lead. It was a calamitous time for local voles; after them came wild jackrabbits, fish, turtles, shrimp, crabs, snakes, and frogs. All across the vast land, the only creatures that survived were poisonous toads and birds on the wing. And still, if not for the timely growth of edible wild herbs, most of the villagers would have starved to death anyway. After Qingming passed, the peach blossoms began to fall, and steam rose from fallow fields that cried out for a new planting. But we had no farm animals and no seeds. By the time fat little tadpoles were swimming in the marshes, and in the oval waters of the local pond, and in the shallows of the river, the villagers had taken to the road. By the fourth month, most had left; by the fifth month, most had returned to their homes. Third Master Fan said, “Here at least there are wild grasses and edible herbs to keep us from starving. That’s more than you can say about other places.” By the sixth month, outsiders had begun showing up in our village. They slept in the church, and on the ground in the Sima compound, and in abandoned mills. Like dogs driven mad by hunger, they stole food out from under us. Finally, Third Master Fan organized the village men to drive the outsiders away. He was our leader; the outsiders countered with a leader of their own — a young man with bushy eyebrows and big eyes. He was a master at catching birds, always seen with a pair of slingshots hanging from his belt and, over his shoulder, a burlap bag that was filled with pellets of dried mud. Third Sister saw him in action one day. A pair of partridges was in the midst of a mating ritual up in the air. He took out one of his slingshots and fired a mud pellet into the sky, seemingly