Big Breasts and Wide Hips

by Mo Yan

  “Hear what I have to say — run fast and fly far, and don’t stop to do any more killing.”

  Silence returned to the sorghum field. The moonlight cascaded down like water. A tide of human sounds rushed toward us from the village.

  Wei Yangjiao led a ragtag bunch of local militia and district public security forces up to the kiln. Carrying lanterns, torches, rifles, and red-tasseled spears, they put on a show of surrounding the kiln. A public security officer named Yang, who had been fitted with a prosthetic leg, lay up against a pile of bricks and said through a megaphone, “Sima Ku, give yourself up! There’s no way out!”

  Officer Yang kept it up for a while, with no response from inside the kiln. So he took out his pistol and fired twice at the dark opening of the kiln. The bullets produced echoes when they hit the inside walls.

  “Bring me some grenades!” Officer Yang called out. A militiaman crawled up on his belly, like a lizard, and handed him two wood-handled grenades. Yang pulled the pin on one, tossed it in the direction of the kiln, then flattened out behind the bricks waiting for it to go off, which it did. Then he tossed the second one, with the same result. Concussion waves rolled far off into the distance, but still not a sound emerged from the kiln. Yang picked up his megaphone again. “Sima Ku, throw out your weapon, and we won’t harm you. We treat our prisoners well.” The only response was the soft chirping of crickets and the croaking of frogs in the ditches.

  Yang found the nerve to stand up, the megaphone in one hand and his pistol in the other. “Follow me!” he called out to the men behind him. A couple of brave militiamen, one with a rifle, the other with a red-tasseled spear, fell in behind Yang, whose prosthetic leg clicked with each lurching step he took. They entered the old kiln without event and reemerged a few moments later.

  “Wei Yangjiao!” Officer Yang bellowed. “Where is he?”

  “I swear I saw Sima Ku come out of that kiln. Ask them if you don’t believe me.”

  “Was it Sima Ku?” Officer Yang turned his glare on Wu Yunyu and Guo Qiusheng — Ding Jingou was lying unconscious on the ground. “No mistake?”

  Wu Yunyu glanced uneasily at the sorghum field and stammered, “I think it was…”

  “Was he alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he armed?”

  “I think… a machine gun … ammunition clips all over his body…”

  The words were barely out of Wu Yunyu’s mouth when Officer Yang and all the men he’d brought with him hit the ground like mowed grass.

  6

  A class education exhibit was set up in the church. No sooner had the students reached the front door than they burst into tears, as if on command. The sound of hundreds of students — Dalan Elementary had by then become the key elementary school for all of Northeast Gaomi Township — all crying together rocked the street from one end to the other. The newly arrived principal stood on the stone steps and announced in a heavy accent, “Quiet down, students, quiet down!” He took out a gray handkerchief, with which he first wiped his eyes and then blew his nose loudly.

  Once the students had stopped crying, they followed their teachers in single file into the church and lined up on a square drawn on the floor in chalk. The walls were covered with colorful ink drawings, all with explanations written beneath them.

  Four women with pointers stood in the corners.

  The first one was our music teacher, Ji Qiongzhi, who had been punished for beating up a student. Her face was a waxy yellow, her spirit obviously broken. Her once radiant eyes were now cold and lifeless. The new district head, a rifle slung over his shoulder, stood at Pastor Malory’s pulpit while Ji pointed to the drawings behind her and read the descriptions beneath them.

  The first dozen or so drawings described Northeast Gaomi Township’s natural environment, its history, and the state of society prior to Liberation. After that came the drawing of a nest of venomous snakes with red forked tongues. A name was written on each snake’s head, and on one of the largest heads was the name of Sima Ku and Sima Ting’s father. “Under the cruel oppression of these bloodsucking snakes,” Ji Qiongzhi intoned with apathetic fluency, “the residents of Northeast Gaomi Township were caught in an abyss of suffering, living lives worse than beasts of burden.” She pointed to a drawing of an old woman with a face like a camel. The woman is carrying a decrepit basket and a begging bowl; a scrawny little monkey of a girl is holding on to the hem of her jacket. Black leaves with broken lines indicating they are falling from the upper left-hand corner of the drawing show how cold it is. “Countless numbers of starving people had to leave their native homes as beggars, only to be attacked by landlords’ dogs that left their legs torn and bloody.” Ji Qiongzhi’s pointer moved to the next drawing: A black, two-paneled gate is opened slightly; above the gate hangs a gilded wooden plaque inscribed with two words: Felicity Manor. A tiny head in a red-tasseled skullcap is poking out through the gate opening — obviously the little brat of a tyrannical landlord. What I found strange was the way the artist had drawn this landlord brat: with his rosy cheeks and bright eyes, what should have been a loathsome image was actually quite fetching. A huge yellow dog had its teeth sunk into the leg of a little boy. At this point, one of the girls began to sob; she was a student from Sandy Ridge Village, a second-grade “girl” of seventeen or eighteen. All the other students turned to look at her, curious to see why she was crying. One of them raised his arm and shouted a slogan, interrupting Ji Qiongzhi’s account. Still, holding her pointer, she stood waiting patiently, a smile on her face. The one who had shouted the slogan then began to wail fearfully, although no tears appeared in his bloodshot eyes. I looked around; all the students were crying, waves of sound rising and falling. The principal, who was standing where he could be seen by all, had covered his face with his handkerchief and was thumping himself on the chest with his fist. Shiny dribbles of slobber ran down the freckled face of the boy next to me, Zhang Zhongguang, and he too was thumping himself on the chest, one hand after the other, either from anger or grief, I couldn’t tell. His family had been labeled tenant farmers, but prior to National Liberation, I’d often seen this son of a tenant farmer in the Dalan marketplace tagging along behind his father, who made a living from gambling; the boy would be eating a chunk of barbecued pig’s head wrapped in a fresh lotus leaf, until his cheeks, and even his forehead, would be spotted with glistening pork grease. Now slobber ran down the chin from that open mouth, which had consumed so much fatty pork. A full-bodied girl to my right had a tender, yellow, budlike extra finger outside the thumb of each hand. I think her name was Du Zhengzheng, but we all called her Six-Six Du. Those hands were now covering her face as she emitted sobs like the cooing of doves, and those darling little extra digits fluttered over her face like the curly tails of little piglets. Two gloomy rays of light emerged from between her fingers. Naturally, I saw a lot more students whose faces were damp with real tears, tears so precious no one was willing to wipe them away. I, on the other hand, couldn’t squeeze out a single one, nor could I figure out how those few badly drawn ink drawings could tear at the students’ hearts like that. I didn’t want to be too obvious, though, since I’d noticed that Six-Six Du’s sinister glare kept sweeping over my face, and I knew she hated my guts. We shared a bench in the classroom, and as we were sitting there one evening, doing our lessons by lamplight, she had touched my thigh with one of her extra fingers on the sly, without pausing in her recitation. Well, I had jumped to my feet in a panic, disrupting the entire class, and when the teacher yelled at me, I blurted out what had happened. It was a stupid thing to do, no doubt about it, since boys are supposed to welcome this sort of contact by girls. Even if you don’t like it, you don’t make a big deal out of it. But I didn’t realize that until decades later, and when I did, I shook my head, wondering why I hadn’t… But at the time, those caterpillar-like digits scared and disgusted me. When I exposed her, she looked for a hole to crawl into from shame; fortunately, it was an evening study session,
and in the muted lamplight only a watermelon-sized halo of light lit up the area in front of each student. She hung her head low, and amid the obscene snickers around her, stammered, “It was an accident, I just wanted to use his eraser …” Like a complete idiot, I said, “She meant it, all right. She pinched me.” “Shangguan Jintong, shut up!” So in addition to being ordered to be quiet by our music and literature teacher, Ji Qiongzhi, I had made an enemy out of Du Zhengzheng. One day later, I found a dead gecko in my school bag, and I figured she must have put it there. And now today, as this somber event was unfolding around me, I was the only one whose face was dry — no slobber and no tears. That could mean big trouble. If Du Zhengzheng chose this moment to get even … I didn’t even want to think about it. So I covered my face with my hands and opened my mouth to make crying sounds. But I couldn’t cry, I just couldn’t.

  Ji Qiongzhi raised her voice to drown out the sounds of crying: “The reactionary landlord class lived a life of luxury and excess. Why, Sima Ku alone had four wives!” Her pointer banged impatiently against one of the drawings, which was a portrait of Sima Ku, but with the head of a wolf and the body of a bear, his long, hairy arms wrapped around four alluring female demons: the two on the left had snake heads; the two on the right had bushy yellow tails. A clutch of little demons stood behind them, obviously the fruit of Sima Ku’s loins. They included Sima Liang, the hero of my youth. But which one was he? Was he the cat spirit, with triangular ears on both sides of his forehead? Or was he the rat spirit, the pointy-mouthed one in the red jacket, claws reaching up out of the sleeves? I felt Du Zhengzheng’s cold glare sweep past me. “Sima Ku’s fourth wife, Shangguan Zhaodi,” Ji Qiongzhi said in a loud but passionless voice as she pointed to a woman with a long fox tail, “feasted on so many delicacies from land and sea that the only thing left for her to eat was the delicate yellow skin of a rooster’s leg. So a mountain of Sima roosters was slaughtered in order to indulge her extravagant desire!” That’s a lie! When did my second sister ever eat the yellow skin of a rooster’s leg? She never ate chicken. And there was never a mountain of slaughtered Sima roosters! The slander they were heaping onto my second sister filled me with anger and a sense of betrayal. And tears of complex origins gushed from my eyes. I wiped them away as fast as I could, but they kept coming.

  Now that she’d completed her indoctrination duties, Ji Qiongzhi moved to one side, breathing heavily from exhaustion. Her place was taken by a woman who had just been sent down from the county government, Teacher Cai. She had thin brows over single-fold eyelids and a clear, melodic voice. Her eyes brimmed with tears before she even began speaking. This portion of the lesson had a fury-spewing topic: Monstrous Crimes of the Landlord Restitution Corps. Cai carried out her task scrupulously, pointing to each heading and reading it aloud, like a vocabulary lesson. The first drawing was of a crescent moon partially hidden behind dark clouds in the upper right-hand corner; in the upper left-hand corner were some black leaves trailing black lines. But this drawing was of an autumn, not a winter wind. Beneath the dark clouds and crescent moon, buffeted by icy autumn winds, the head of all of Northeast Gaomi evils, Sima Ku, in his military overcoat and bandolier — mouth open, fangs bared, blood dripping from his lolling tongue — held a bloody knife in one claw that poked out from his loose left sleeve and a revolver in his right, badly drawn flames spewing from the barrel, which had just fired several bullets. He was wearing no pants; his army overcoat hung all the way down to the top of his bushy wolf’s tail. A pack of savage, ugly beasts was right on his heels. The neck of one of them was stretched out straight; it was a cobra spitting red venom — “This is Chang Xilu, a reactionary rich peasant from Sandy Ridge Village,” Teacher Cai said as she pointed to the head of the cobra. “And this one,” she said as her pointer touched a wild dog, “is Du Jinyuan, the despotic landlord of Sandy Ridge Village.” Du Jinyuan was dragging a spiked club (dripping blood, naturally). Next to him was Hu Rikui, a soldier of fortune from Wang Family Mound; he looked more or less human, but with the long, narrow face of a mule. The reactionary rich peasant Ma Qingyun from Two County Hamlet was a big, clumsy bear. All in all, a pack of armed savage beasts, murderous looks on their faces as they made their assault on Northeast Gaomi Township under Sima Ku’s leadership.

  “The Landlord Restitution Corps engaged in frenzied class warfare, and in a matter of only ten days, using every imaginable cruel means at their disposal, killed 1,388 people.” Cai touched the images of one scene of brutal murder by landlord restitution members after another, drawing wails of grief from the students. It was like a magnified dictionary of shocking torture scenes that combined text and vivid drawings. The first few drawings showed traditional execution methods — decapitation, firing squad, and the like. But they gradually became more creative: “Here you see live burials,” Teacher Cai said. “As its name implies, the victim is buried alive.” Dozens of ashen-faced men were standing at the bottom of a large pit. Sima Ku stood at the edge of the pit, directing the gangster members of the restitution corps as they tossed in dirt. “According to the testimony of a survivor, old Mrs. Guo,” Teacher Cai read the text below the drawing, “the restitution corps bandits tired themselves out from their work, and forced the revolutionary cadres and ordinary citizens to dig their own pits and bury each other. When the dirt reached their chests, the victims had trouble breathing. Their chests seemed about to explode, as the blood rushed to their heads. At that point, the restitution corps bandits fired their weapons at their victims’ heads, sending blood and brain three feet into the air.” The face of Teacher Cai, who was feeling lightheaded to begin with, was white as a sheet. The students’ wails shook the rafters, but my eyes were dry. According to the time indicated at the bottom of the drawings, when Sima Ku was leading the restitution corps on the murderous frenzy in Northeast Gaomi Township, I was with Mother and revolutionary cadres and other activists on their retreat along the northeast coast. Sima Ku, Sima Ku, was he really that cruel? Teacher Cai rested her head against the drawing of the live burial. A little restitution corps member was raising a shovelful of dirt over his head, looking as if he was about to bury her. Translucent beads of sweat covered her face. She began to slide toward the floor, bringing the drawing down with her. Now she was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, the drawing covering her face. Gray flakes of the wall fluttered down onto the white paper.

  This turn of events brought to an end the students’ wails. Several district officials came running up and carried Teacher Cai out the door. The district chief, a middle-aged man with regular features, but moles all over the side of his face, kept his hand on the wooden butt of the rifle slung across his back as he said sternly, “Students, comrades, we now invite the elderly poor peasant from Sandy Ridge Village, Mrs. Guo, to report on her personal experiences. Send in Mrs. Guo!”

  We turned to look at the battered little door that led from the church to what had been Pastor Malory’s residence. Quiet, quiet, quiet that was abruptly shattered by a drawn-out wail that entered the church from the yard out front. A pair of officials opened the door by backing into it and entered, supporting Mrs. Guo, a gray-haired old woman who was covering her mouth with her sleeve and sobbing piteously. Everyone in the church joined her tearful outburst for a full five minutes, until she wiped away the tears, shook out her sleeve, and said, “Don’t cry, children. Tears can’t bring the dead back to life, and we must go on living.”

  The students stopped crying and gaped at her. To my ears, what she said was so simple, yet held profound significance. She seemed somehow reserved as she asked in a sort of confused manner, “What am I supposed to say? There’s no need to talk about the past.” She turned as if to leave, but was stopped by the director of the Sandy Ridge Women’s League, Gao Hongying, who ran up to her and said, “Old aunty, you agreed to address us, didn’t you? You can’t back out now.” Gao was visibly upset. The district head said genially, “Old aunty, just tell them how the members of the Landlord Restitution
Corps buried people alive. We need to educate our youngsters that the past cannot be forgotten. As Comrade Lenin said, ‘To forget the past is a form of betrayal.’“

  “Well, since even Comrade Lenin wants me to talk, that’s what I’ll do.” Mrs. Guo sighed. “There was a full moon that night, so bright I could have embroidered in its light. There aren’t many nights like that. When I was a girl, an old-timer told me he recalled a white moon like that way back during the Taiping Rebellion. I couldn’t sleep, worrying that something bad was about to happen, so I got up to go borrow a shoe pattern from the mother of Fusheng in West Lane and, while I was at it, talk to Fusheng about finding a wife, since I had a niece who had reached marrying age. As I was walking out the door, I spotted Little Lion, carrying a big, shiny sword, with Jincai’s mother and wife and his two kids, the older one only seven or eight years old, and the younger one, a girl, barely two. The older kid was walking with his grandmother, scared and crying. Jincai’s wife was carrying the little girl, who was also scared and crying. Jincai himself had a sword cut, a big, gaping, bloody wound on his slumping shoulder that scared me half to death. Three mean-looking fellows I thought I knew were walking behind Little Lion, also with swords, and I tried to hide so they wouldn’t see me, but it was too late, and that bastard Little Lion spotted me. Now Little Lion’s mother and I are some sort of cousins, so he said, ‘Isn’t that my aunt over there?’ ‘Little Lion,’ I. said, ‘when did you get back?’ He said, ‘Last night.’ ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just looking for a place for this family to sleep.’ That didn’t sound good, so I said, ‘They’re our neighbors, Lion, no matter how bad things get.’ He said, ‘There are no bad feelings, not even between them and my dad. In fact, my dad and his dad are sworn brothers. But he hung my dad up from a tree and demanded money from him.’ Jincai’s mother said, ‘He didn’t know what he was doing, so forgive him for the sake of the older generation. I’ll get down on my knees and kowtow to you.’ ‘Mother,’ Jincai said, ‘don’t beg.’ Little Lion said, ‘Jincai, you’re starting to sound like a man, so no wonder they made you head of the militia.’ ‘You won’t last more than a few days,’ Jincai said. ‘You’re right,’ Little Lion said, ‘I imagine I’ll last ten days or a couple of weeks. But tonight’s all the time I’ll need to take care of you and your family’ I tried to take advantage of my age by saying, ‘Let them go, Little Lion. If you don’t you’re no nephew of mine.’ He just glared at me and said, ‘Who the hell is your nephew? Don’t pull any of that relation stuff on me! The time I accidentally squashed one of your little chicks that year, you split my head open with a club.’ ‘Lion, what kind of human being are you?’ He turned and asked the men with him, ‘Boys, how many have we killed today?’ One of them said, ‘Counting this family, exactly ninety-nine.’ ‘You old woman, you’re such a distant aunt that you’ll have to sacrifice yourself so I can make it an even number.’ That made my hair stand on edge. That bastard was talking about killing me! I ran into the house, but could I really get away from them? Family meant nothing to Little Lion. When he thought his wife was having an affair, he buried a live grenade in the stove ashes, but his mother got up early to clean out the stove and she was the one who dug out the grenade. I'd forgotten that incident, and now I was going to suffer, all because of my big mouth. They dragged Jincai and his family, plus me, over to Sandy Ridge Village, where one of them starting digging a big pit. It didn’t take him long in that sandy ground. The moon was so bright we could see everything on the ground — blades of grass, flowers, ants, slugs — clear as day. Little Lion walked up to the edge of the pit to take a look. ‘Make it a little deeper, men,’ he said. ‘Jincai’s as big as a fucking mule.’ So the man continued, and wet sand flew. Little Lion asked Jincai, ‘Got anything to say?’ ‘Lion,’ Jincai said, ‘I’m not going to beg. I killed your dad, but if I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have.’ ‘My dad was a frugal man who sold seafood along with your dad. He saved up a little money and bought a few acres of land. Unfortunately for your dad, somebody stole his money. You tell me, what was my dad’s crime?’ ‘He bought land, that was his crime!’ ‘Jincai, tell me the truth, who wouldn’t like to buy some land? How about your dad, for instance? And you yourself.’ ‘Don’t ask me,’ Jincai said. ‘I can’t answer that question. Is the pit deep enough?’ The man said it was. Without another word, Jincai jumped into it. Only his head showed above the ground. ‘Lion,’ he said, ‘I want to shout something.’ ‘Go ahead,’ Lion said. ‘We’ve been friends since we were bare-assed naked kids, so you deserve special treatment. Go ahead, shout whatever you want.’ Jincai thought for a moment, then raised his good arm and shouted at the top of his lungs, ‘Long live the Communist Party! Long live the Communist Party! Long long live the Communist Party!’ Just three shouts. ‘That’s it?’ Little Lion said. ‘That’s it.’ ‘Come on,’ Lion said, ‘let’s hear some more. That’s some voice you’ve got.’ ‘No,’ Jincai said, ‘that’s it. Three times is enough.’ Little Lion nudged Jincai’s mother. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Now you, aunty’ Jincai’s mother fell to her knees and banged her head on the ground, but Little Lion merely took the shovel out of the other man’s hands and used it to push her into the sandy pit. The other men pushed Jincai’s wife and kids in. The kids were bawling. So was their mother. ‘Stop that!’ Jincai demanded. ‘Shut your mouths and spare me the shame.’ His wife and kids stopped crying. Then one of the men pointed to me and said, ‘What about this one, Chief? Toss her down there too?’ Before Little Lion could answer, Jincai shouted, ‘Little Lion, you said this pit was for my family. I don’t want any outsiders down here.’ ‘Don’t worry, Jincai,’ Little Lion said, ‘I understand you perfectly. For this old woman, we’ll —’ He turned to the others. ‘Men, I know you’re tired, but dig another pit to bury this one.’