by Mo Yan
“You should be goddamned ashamed of yourself, crying like that!” Shangguan Lü shouted. “You’ve eaten our food for three years and haven’t even presented us with a daughter, let alone a son! You’re eating us out of house and home! Tomorrow you can go back where you came from. I won’t let this family line die out all because of you!”
Not a minute passed that night when Xuan’er’s tears didn’t flow. When Shouxi wanted to have his way with her, she submitted weakly. “Nothing is wrong with me,” she said through her tears. “Maybe it’s you.”
Without climbing off, he growled, “A hen can’t lay an egg, so she blames it on the rooster!”
4
The harvest was in, and the rainy season was about to begin. Local custom demanded that new brides return to their parents’ home to pass the hottest days of the year. Most of those who had been married three years returned proudly holding the hand of one child, suckling a second, and carrying a third inside, plus a bundle filled with patterns for shoes to be made. Poor Xuan’er. All she brought home, besides her sadness, were scars and bruises bestowed upon her by her husband, the echoes of her mother-in-law’s curses, a pathetic little bundle, and eyes red and puffy from crying. Now, the most caring aunt is still no match for your own mother, so even though she returned with a bellyful of bitter complaints, she had to keep them to herself and put on the best face possible.
As soon as she stepped through the doorway, her keen-eyed aunt saw right through her. “Nothing yet, I see.”
That simple comment brought tears of pain gushing from Xuan’er’s eyes.
“Strange,” her aunt muttered. “You’d think three years would be long enough to produce something.”
At dinnertime that evening, Big Paw Yu spotted the bruises on Xuan’er’s arm. “That sort of wife-beating has no place in a modern republic,” he said angrily. “I’d like to burn that turtles’ nest of theirs to the ground!”
“I see that not even rice can stop up that foul mouth of yours!” her aunt said as she glared at her husband.
For a change, there was plenty of food in front of Xuan’er, but she forced herself not to overeat. Her uncle placed a large piece of fish in her bowl.
“You know,” her aunt said, “you can’t blame your in-laws. Why does anyone take a wife? To continue the family line.”
“You didn’t continue my family line,” her husband said, “and I’ve been good to you, haven’t I?”
“Who asked you? Get the donkey ready so you can take Xuan’er into town to see a woman’s doctor.”
Sitting astride the donkey, Xuan’er passed through the fields of Northeast Gaomi Township, which were crisscrossed with rivers and streams. The sun sent down blistering rays of heat, raising steam from the ground and drawing groans from the foliage around her. A pair of dragonflies, connected at the rear, darted past; a pair of swallows mated in the sky above. Baby frogs that had just shed their tails hopped across the roadway; locusts that had just emerged from eggs perched on the tips of roadside grass. A litter of newborn rabbits followed their mother in a hunt for food. Baby ducks paddled behind their mother, their tiny pink webbed feet sending ripples to the edge of a pond … rabbits and locusts can produce offspring, so why can’t I? She felt empty inside, and was reminded of the legend regarding a child-rearing bag that existed in the bellies of all women, all but hers, it seemed. Please, Matron of Sons, I beg you, give me a child …
Even though her uncle was nearly forty, he had not lost his playfulness. Instead of holding the donkey’s halter, he let the animal trot along on its own while he ran up and down the roadside picking wild-flowers, which he made into a wreath for Xuan’er — to keep out the sun, he said. After chasing birds until he was out of breath, he went deep into the field, where he found a fist-sized wild melon, which he handed to Xuan’er. “It’s sweet,” he said, but when she bit into it, it was so bitter it nearly paralyzed her tongue. Then he rolled up his pant cuffs and jumped into a pond, quickly catching a pair of insects the size of melon seeds and shaking them in his hand. “Change!” he shouted. Holding his closed hand up to Xuan’er’s nose, he asked her, “What do they smell like?” She shook her head and said she didn’t know. “Like watermelons,” he said. “They’re watermelon bugs. They come from watermelon seeds.”
Xuan’er couldn’t help thinking that her uncle was really just an overgrown, playful child.
The results of the doctor’s examination? There was nothing wrong with Xuan’er.
“The Shangguan family will pay for this!” Xuan’er’s aunt said indignantly. “They’ve got a sterile mule of a son, and have no right to take out their frustrations on Xuan’er!”
But she only made it as far as the door.
Ten days later, during a pouring rain, the aunt prepared a sumptuous meal, complete with some of her husband’s strong liquor. With her niece seated across from her, she placed one green cup in front of each of them. Candlelight cast her shadow on the wall behind as she filled both cups with liquor. Xuan’er saw that her hand was shaking.
“Why are we drinking liquor, Aunty?” Xuan’er asked. She had the uneasy feeling that something was about to happen.
“No reason. It’s a rainy, sultry day, and I thought we could stay inside and talk, just the two of us.” She raised her cup. “Drink up.”
Xuan’er held out her cup and looked at her aunt with fear in her eyes. The older woman clinked glasses with her before tipping her head back and draining the cup.
Xuan’er emptied her cup.
“What do you plan to do?” Xuan’er’s aunt asked.
With a sorrowful look, Xuan’er just shook her head.
Her aunt refilled both cups. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to accept things the way they are,” she said. “The fact that their son is sterile is something we have to keep in mind. They owe us; we don’t owe them. Girl, I want you to understand that in this world, some of the finest deeds are accomplished in the dark, out of sight. Do you know what I’m getting at?”
Xuan’er shook her head, completely mystified. Her head was already spinning from the two cups of strong liquor.
That night, Big Paw Yu visited Xuan’er’s bed.
When she awoke the next morning, suffering a splitting headache, she was surprised to hear someone snoring loudly beside her. With difficulty she opened her eyes, and there, lying naked beside her, was her uncle, one of his big paws cupping her breast. With a shriek, she pulled the blanket up to cover herself and burst out crying, waking Big Paw from his sleep. Like a child who’s gotten himself into trouble, he jumped out of bed, grasping his clothes around him, and stammered, “Your aunt… made me do it…”
The following spring, shortly after the Grave-Sweeping Festival, Xuan’er gave birth to a scrawny, dark-eyed daughter. Her mother-in-law knelt before the Bodhisattva’s ceramic icon and kowtowed three times. “Thanks to heaven and earth,” she announced gratefully. “The seam has finally split. Now I ask the Bodhisattva to look over us and deliver a grandson next year.”
She went into the kitchen and fried some eggs, which she brought in to her daughter-in-law’s room. “Here,” she said, “eat these.”
As Xuan’er looked into her mother-in-law’s face, her eyes filled with tears of gratitude.
Her mother-in-law looked down at the infant lying in the tattered cloth wrapping and said, “We’ll call her Laidi — Brother Coming.”
5
My second sister, Zhaodi — Brother Hailed — also came from Big Paw Yu’s seed.
After Xuan’er delivered two daughters in as many years, Grandmother’s unhappiness showed clearly. It didn’t take Mother long to realize the cruel reality that for a woman, not getting married was not an option, not having children was not acceptable, and having only daughters was nothing to be proud of. The only road to status in a family was to produce sons.
Mother’s third child was conceived in a reedy marsh. It happened at noon on a day shortly after Zhaodi was born. Grandmother had sent Mother
to the reed pond southwest of the village to catch snails for the ducks. That spring a man had come to the village selling ducklings. A tall, husky stranger with a piece of blue cloth over his shoulder and hemp sandals on his feet, he carried two baskets filled with downy yellow baby ducks. A crowd quickly gathered to gawp at the furry little animals, with their pink beaks and tiny quacks, as they tumbled all over each other in the baskets. Shangguan Lü stepped up and bought a dozen; others followed her lead, quickly snapping up the rest. The peddler took a turn around the village and left. That evening, as it turned out, Sima Ting was taken from Felicity Manor by bandits and not returned until the family had paid a ransom of several thousand silver dollars. People said that the duck peddler had really been an informer for the bandits, who wanted a detailed report on the layout of Felicity Manor.
But those were good ducks he sold. In five months they had grown to the size of tiny boats. Shangguan Lü, who loved those ducks, sent her daughter-in-law out to look for snails, anticipating the day when the ducks would begin laying eggs.
So Mother took an earthenware jar and a wire strainer on a pole wherever her mother-in-law told her to go. The ditches and ponds near the village had been picked clean of snails by villagers who were raising ducks, but on her way to the market at a place called Liaolan the day before, Shangguan Lü had seen that the shallows in a nearby pond were alive with snails.
When Mother got there, however, the surface of the pond was covered with green-feathered ducks that had eaten all the snails. Knowing she would be yelled at if she returned empty-handed, she decided to follow a muddy path that skirted the pond to see if she could find some water that hadn’t been visited by ducks, where there still might be snails she could take home. Sensing a heaviness in her breasts, she thought about her two small daughters at home. Laidi had just begun to walk and Zhaodi was barely a month old. But her mother-in-law placed greater value on her ducks than on her granddaughters, whom she refused to even pick up when they were crying. And as for Shangguan Shouxi, well, to call him a man was a terrible exaggeration. He was as useless as a gob of snot outside the house and totally subservient in front of his mother. But abject cruelty characterized his treatment of his wife. He had no use for either of the children, and whenever he abused Mother, she mused angrily, “Go ahead, you ass, beat me. Neither one of those girls is yours, and if I have another thousand babies, not one of them will have a drop of Shangguan blood running through their veins.” In the wake of her intimacy with Big Paw Yu, she did not know how she could face her aunt again. So that year she did not go home. “They’re all dead,” she said when her mother-in-law pressed her to return home for a visit, “so there’s nothing to go home to.” Big Paw, obviously, could give her only daughters, so she began the search for a better donor. Go ahead, Mother-in-law, Husband, beat me and curse me all you want. Just you wait, I’ll have my son one of these days, but he won’t be a Shangguan, and to hell with you!
Caught up in these thoughts, she walked on, parting the reeds that all but sealed off the path. The scraping sound and chilled, mildew-laden odor of water plants evoked a pale fear in her. Water birds cried out from the surrounding foliage as breezy gusts swirled among the plants. Up ahead, no more than a few paces, a wild boar blocked her path. Mean-looking horns poked out from the sides of its long snout; tiny staring eyes, surrounded by bristly brows, glared hatefully at her, accompanied by snorts of intimidation. Mother shuddered and awoke to unknown surroundings. How did I get here? she wondered. Everyone in Northeast Gaomi knows that the bandit hideouts are somewhere deep among the reeds. No one, not even armed troops, dares to set foot here.
Anxiously, Mother turned to head back, but she quickly discovered that human and animal traffic had formed a checkerboard of footpaths, and she couldn’t tell which one had brought her this far. Panic-stricken, she tried several of the paths, but they led nowhere, and she wound up crying over her predicament. Scattered shards of sunlight shone down on the ground, where years of fallen leaves rotted. Mother stepped into a pile of loose excrement, which, though foul-smelling, actually boosted her spirits; it could only mean there were, or had been, people in the vicinity. “Hello!” she shouted. “Is there anyone out there?” She listened as her shouts careened off of densely packed reed stalks before being swallowed up. When she looked down at her feet, she saw coarse vegetation amid the squashed pile of excrement, which meant it wasn’t human after all, but the droppings of a boar or other wild animal. Once again she headed down a footpath, but soon lost heart and sat on the ground, where she cried tears of despair.
Suddenly she felt something cold on her back, as if sinister eyes were watching from a hiding place behind her. She spun around to look — nothing but interlaced leaves of reed stalks, the top ones pointing straight up into the sky. A light breeze was born and died among the reeds, leaving behind only a soft rustle. Birdcalls from deep in the patch had an eerie quality, as if made by humans. Danger lurked everywhere. All those green eyes hidden amid the reeds, whose tips played host to will-o’-the-wisps. Her nerves were shattered, the hair on her arms stood on edge, her breasts hardened. As all rational thoughts fled, she shut her eyes and took off running, until her feet sank into the shallow water of a pond, startling clouds of dark mosquitoes into the air, and from there straight back to her, stinging her mercilessly; a sticky sweat oozed from her pores, attracting even more mosquitoes. At some point she’d lost her earthenware jar and wire strainer; now she was running to escape the mosquito onslaught and screeching pitifully. As she was about to give up hope altogether, her God sent a savior in the person of the duck peddler.
With a palm rain cape over his shoulders and a conical rain hat on his head, he grabbed Mother and led her to a high spot in the field, where the reed plants weren’t nearly as dense, and into an awaiting tent. A metal pot hung from a rack over a fire outside; millet was cooking inside.
“Please, kindly brother,” Mother said as she fell to her knees in the tent, “help me find my way out of here. I am the wife of blacksmith Shangguan.”
“What’s your hurry?” the man said with a smile. “I don’t get many visitors out here, so at least allow me to play the host.”
A waterproof dog pelt covered the bed on a wooden platform. “You’ve got mosquito bites all over,” the man said as he blew on a smoldering wick of repellent made of mugwort. “Mosquitoes around here can bring down an ox, so it’s no wonder they did such a job on your fair skin.”
Fragrant wispy smoke from the mugwort filled the tent as he reached into a basket hanging from one of the supports and took out a little red metal box filled with orange salve, which he rubbed on the swelling bites on Mother’s face and arms. The coolness penetrated deeply. He then took out a piece of rock candy and forced it into her mouth. What was about to happen, given the remote setting in which a man and a woman were alone, was inevitable, Mother was certain of that. With tears in her eyes, she said, “Kindly brother, do with me what you will, but please lead me out of this place as soon as you can. There are nursing children waiting for me at home.”
Mother gave herself to the man without a struggle, feeling neither pain nor joy. Her only hope was that he would give her a son.
6
After Lingdi, my third sister, came Xiangdi, the daughter of a quack doctor.
He was a rail-thin, hawk-nosed, vulture-eyed young man who roamed the streets and byways ringing a brass bell and chanting, “My grandfather was a court physician, my father ran a pharmacy, but I am penniless and in deep sorrow, which is why I must wander to and fro with my bell.”
As she was returning home from the fields with a load of grass on her back, Mother spotted him using tweezers to remove little white “tooth worms” from the mouth of an old man. When she got home she told her mother-in-law, who was suffering from a toothache, what she had seen.
After summoning the physician to the house, Mother held the lantern while he poked at Shangguan Lü’s aching tooth. “Madam,” he said, “your problem is wh
at we call ‘fire tooth,’ not tooth worms.” So he stuck some silver needles into Shangguan Lü’s hand and cheek, then reached behind him and removed some medicinal powder from a sack, blowing it into her mouth. That did it, the pain vanished.
His treatment finished, he asked to be put up for the night in the family’s eastern side room. The following morning, he offered them a silver dollar to let him use the room to treat patients. Since he had cured her toothache and was offering a shiny silver dollar, Grandmother was happy to accommodate him.
The man lived in the Shangguan household for three months, paying for his room and board on the first of each month. He was like a member of the family.
One day, Shangguan Lü asked if he had any sort of fertility drug. He did, writing out a prescription for Mother, which consisted of ten hen’s eggs fried in sesame oil and honey.
“I’d like to try some of that myself,” Shangguan Shouxi said.
One day Mother, who had developed a fondness for the mysterious physician, slipped into his quarters and revealed the fact that her husband was sterile.
“Those tooth worms,” he revealed to her, “were in my little metal box all along.”
Once he was sure that Mother was pregnant, it was time to be on his way. But before he left, not only did he hand Shangguan Lü all the money he’d earned treating patients at their house, but formally declared her to be his adoptive mother.
7
During dinner, Mother dropped a bowl and broke it. An explosion went off in her head, and she knew she was in for more misery.
Following the birth of my fourth sister, a pall settled over the Shangguan household. A permanent frown adorned my grandmother’s face, which had the hardened look of a sickle ready to lop off Mother’s head at the slightest provocation.
The age-old tradition of a lying-in month was abolished at the house. Before she even had time to clean up the mess between her legs after the birth of the baby, Mother heard the clang of tongs on the window frame and the voice of her mother-in-law: “You think you’ve made another contribution, don’t you? One fucking daughter after another, and you think you’ve earned the right to have your mother-in-law wait on you hand and foot! Is this the sort of training you got at the house of Big Paw Yu? You’re supposed to be the daughter-in-law of this family, but you act like you’re the mother-in-law. Maybe I disturbed some heavenly order by slaughtering an old ox in a previous life, and this is my retribution. I must have been out of my mind, blind as a bat, to find a woman like you to marry my son!” She banged the tongs against 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!”