by Mo Yan
So Mother got out of bed, put on a pair of trousers, and wrapped her head in a filthy scarf; casting a longing glance at her baby, still covered with blood and muck, she dried her eyes with her sleeve and walked out into the yard on rubbery legs, putting up with the shooting pains the best she could. The glare of the midsummer sun nearly blinded her as she scooped up a ladleful of water from the vat and gulped it down. Why can’t I just die? she was thinking. Living like this is sheer torture. I could end it myself! But then she saw her mother-in-law was pinching Laidi on the leg with her tongs, while Zhaodi and Lingdi huddled fearfully in a pile of straw, not making a sound and wishing they could hide their little bodies by burrowing out of sight. Laidi howled like a pig being slaughtered and rolled around on the ground. “I’ll give you something to cry about!” Shangguan Lü growled as she pinched the girl’s legs over and over, putting her years of practice and strength as a blacksmith to work.
Mother ran up and grabbed her mother-in-law’s arm. “Mother,” she pleaded, “let her go. She’s just a child, she doesn’t know anything.” She knelt weakly in front of her mother-in-law. “If you must pinch someone, pinch me …” Flinging her tongs to the ground in an explosion of anger, her mother-in-law paused for a second before pounding her own chest and crying, “My god, this woman will be the death of me!”
Mother had no sooner dragged herself out to the field than Shangguan Shouxi hit her with a rake. “What took you so long, you lazy ass? Thanks to you, I’m about to die from all this work!” She fell to the ground in a seated position, and heard her husband, who had been baked in the sun until he looked like a bird roasted on a spit, yell hoarsely, “Quit faking. Get up and rake some of this grain!” He threw the rake down in front of her and wove his way over to a locust tree to cool off.
With both hands on the ground, Mother managed to get to her feet, but when she bent over to pick up the rake, she nearly passed out. She propped herself up with the rake, as the blue sky and yellow earth whirled like gigantic wheels, wanting to topple her dizzily back to the ground. Somehow she managed to remain upright, in spite of the tearing pains in her belly and the excruciating contractions in her womb. Chilled, nauseating fluids kept leaking from between her legs, soiling her thighs.
The sun’s diabolical rays burned their way across the land like white-hot flames; stalks of grain and the tassels that topped them happily gave up the last remaining moisture in the form of evaporation. Bearing up as best she could with the pain racking her body, Mother turned over the tassels on the threshing floor to speed up the drying process. She was reminded of what her mother-in-law had said: There’s water on the hoe, but fire on the rake.
An emerald green locust that had ridden a tassel to the threshing floor spread its pink wings and flew onto Mother’s hand. She noticed the delicate little insect’s jadelike compound eyes, then saw that half of its abdomen had been lost to the sickle. And yet it lived on and could still fly. Mother found that indomitable will to live extremely moving. She shook her wrist to get the locust to fly away, but it stayed where it was, and Mother sighed over the sensation of the tiny insect’s feet resting on her skin. That reminded her of the time her second daughter, Zhaodi, was conceived, in her aunt’s tent in the melon field, where breezes from the Black Water River cooled purple melons as they grew amid the silver leaves of vines. Laidi was still nursing at the time. Hordes of locusts, with pink wings just like this one, raised a din all around the melon shelter. Her uncle, Big Paw Yu, knelt in front of her, pounding his own head. “Your aunt tricked me into this,” he said, “and I’ve not been able to live with myself since. I’ve given up the right to call myself a man. Xuan’er, take that knife and put me out of my misery.” He pointed to a gleaming melon knife on a shelf, as tears sluiced down his cheeks. Mother experienced a welter of emotions. She reached out to stroke the man’s bald head. “Uncle,” she said, “I don’t blame you a bit. It’s them, they drove me to this.” At that point, her voice turned shrill and she pointed to the melons on the ground outside the tent, as if they were people. “Listen to me! Go ahead, laugh! Uncle, life is full of twists and turns. I did my best to remain chaste and upright, and how was I rewarded? I was yelled at, beaten, and sent back to my childhood home. So what must I do to gain their respect? Get pregnant by other men! Sooner or later, Uncle, my boat is going to capsize, if not here, then somewhere else.” A wry smile twisted her mouth. “What is it they say, Uncle — Do not fertilize other people’s fields?” Her uncle stood up anxiously. She reached out, unladylike, and jerked his pants down.
Father and son rested in the cool shade near the Shangguan threshing ground; the family dog was sprawled out at the base of the crumbling wall, its pink tongue lolling to the side as the animal panted from the oppressive heat. Mother’s body was covered with rancid-smelling, sticky sweat. Her throat was on fire, her head ached, she was nauseous, and the veins on her forehead throbbed so violently they seemed about to burst. The lower half of her body felt as if it were cotton packed in a tub. Thoroughly prepared to die there on the threshing ground, she summoned up an astonishing amount of strength to keep working. Golden flashes of light on the floor made the tassels seem to come alive, like schools of tiny goldfish, or millions of squirming snakes. As she turned over the grain, Mother experienced a sense of tragic sorrow. Heaven, open your eyes and look around! All you neighbors, open your eyes and look around. Feast your eyes on this member of the Shangguan family, working on a threshing floor with the sun blazing overhead, after just giving birth, the blood not even dry on my legs. And what about my husband and father-in-law? Those two little men are resting in the shade. Pore over three thousand years of imperial history, and you’ll not find more bitter suffering! Finally, as tears slid down her cheeks, she passed out, overcome by the heat and her own emotions.
When she came to, she was lying in the thin shade at the foot of the crumbling wall, covered with mud that attracted swarms of flies, thrown there like a dead dog. The family mule was standing at the edge of the threshing floor, near Shangguan Lü, who was just then whipping her lazy husband and son. Covering their heads with their arms, those two little darlings filled the air with screeches as they tried, unsuccessfully, to avoid being hit.
“Stop hitting me, stop …” Mother’s father-in-law pleaded. “Venerable wife, we’re working, what else do you want?”
“And you, you little bastard!” she screamed as she turned her whip on Shangguan Shouxi. “Every time you two pull something off, I know it’s your idea!”
“Don’t hit me, Mother,” Shangguan Shouxi said, tucking his head between his shoulders. “Who would look after you in your old age or handle the funeral arrangements if you accidentally killed me?”
“Do you really think I’m depending on you to do that?” she said sadly. “I expect they’ll use my bones for kindling before anyone comes out to bury me!”
Father and son struggled to harness the mule; once that was done, they picked up their tools and headed out into the field.
Whip in hand, Shangguan Lü walked over to the wall. “Get up and go inside, my fine little daughter-in-law,” she said accusingly. “Why lie out here like that, just to make me look bad? To make it easy for neighbors to curse me behind my back, saying I don’t know the proper way to treat my daughter-in-law? I said, get up! Or are you waiting for me to hire an eight-man sedan chair to carry you inside? I don’t know what the times have come to when a daughter-in-law thinks she’s better than her mother-in-law. I hope you have a son one of these days, so you’ll get a chance to see what it means to be someone’s mother-in-law.”
After Mother rose unsteadily to her feet, her mother-in-law took off her conical hat and put it on the younger woman’s head. “Go on, now. Pick some cucumbers in the garden. Tonight you can 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 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!”
&nbs
p; “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 that you had an affair with the little monk on the pretense of seeking a cure for your mother-in-law.”
Mother let Gao Dabiao carry her into the sorghum.
Her mother-in-law’s illness was completely cured, but word of Mother’s illicit relationship with the monk reached the older woman’s ears anyway.
So when Niandi was born, and her mother-in-law saw it was another girl, she picked the baby up by her legs and was about to drown her in the chamber pot.