by Mo Yan
He looked up and met her seductive gaze. “Adoptive son,” she said, “don’t let your eyeballs drop out and injure your feet. Look at me. With your head up you’re a wolf; with your head down you’re a sheep. The most uncommon thing in the world is a mother arranging sex for her own son, and I’m impressed she even thought of it. Do you know what she said to me?” Old Jin made her voice sound like his mother’s: “‘If you’re going to save someone, dear sister-in-law, go all the way; if you’re seeing off a guest, take them to their door. You saved him with your milk, but you can’t feed him for the rest of his life, can you?’ She was right, since I’m over fifty already.” She patted the robe over her breast. “This treasure of mine won’t hold up for long, no matter how I use it. When you stroked it thirty years ago, it was, in the popular phrase of a few years back, ‘high-spirited and full of life, militant and ready for a good fight.’ But now it’s more a case of ‘the phoenix past its prime is no match for a chicken.’ I owe you from a previous life. I don’t want to think about why, nor is it important for you to know. All that’s important is the fact that this body of mine has simmered for thirty years, until it’s cooked through and through. Now it’s up to you to feast on it any way you want.”
Jintong stared at her single breast as if in a trance, greedily breathing in its fragrance and that of the milk it held, not even seeing the full thighs she exposed for his benefit. Out in the yard, the man in charge of the scale shouted, “This guy wants to sell this to us, Boss.” He held up some thick cable. “Do we want it?” Old Jin stuck her head out the window. “Why bother me?” she said unhappily. “Go ahead, take it.” She slammed the window shut. “Damn! I’ll buy anything someone has to sell. Don’t look so surprised. Eight out of ten of people with things to sell are thieves. I’ll get whatever’s being used at the work site. I’ve got welding rods, tools in their original packages, steel ribs, cement. I don’t turn anyone away. I pay scrap prices, then turn around and sell it as new, and there’s my profit. I know this will all fall apart one of these days, so I use half of every yuan I make to feed those bastards down there and spend the other half any way I want. I’ll tell you straight out that at least half of those clever, fancy men out there have visited my bed. Know what they mean to me?” Jintong shook his head. “All my life,” she said, patting her breast again, “this is what has gotten me where I wanted to go. Those idiot brothers-in-law of yours, from Sima Ku to Sha Yueliang, fell asleep with this nipple in their mouths, and not one of them meant a thing to me. In my lifetime, the only person who’s ever set my soul on fire is you, you little bastard! Your mother told me you’ve only been with a woman once, and that was a corpse, and she figured that’s the source of what’s bothering you. So I told her not to worry, that there’s at least one thing I’m good at. Send your son to me, I said, and I’ll turn him into a man of steel.”
Old Jin opened her robe seductively. She was wearing nothing underneath. The white parts were white as snow, the black parts black as coal. His face bathed in sweat, Jintong sat down weakly on the carpet.
She giggled at the sight. “Scared you, didn’t I? There’s nothing to be scared of, adoptive son. Breasts may be a woman’s treasure, but there are even greater treasures. You can’t eat steaming bean curd if you hurry it. Stand up and let me fix what’s wrong with you.”
She dragged him into her bedroom like a dead dog. The walls were ablaze with color; a large bed sat on deep pile carpeting near the window. She undressed him as if he were a naughty little boy. Beyond the sunlit window, the yard was alive with men walking around. Recalling Birdman Han’s movements, Jintong cupped his hands over his crotch and squatted down. He saw his reflection in a floor-to-ceiling dressing mirror — it was so disgusting it nearly made him puke. Old Jin doubled up with laughter — she sounded so young, so wanton, the laughter flying out into the yard like a dove. “My god, where did you learn that? I’m no tiger, you know, and I won’t bite that thing off!” She nudged him with her foot. “Get up, it’s bath time!”
She led Jintong into the bathroom, where she turned on the light and pointed to a pink bathtub beneath a crystal fixture with a frosted bulb, bordered by tiled walls, a coffee-colored Italian commode, and a Japanese water heater. “I bought all this from scrap dealers. Half the people in Dalan are thieves these days. I don’t have running hot water, so I need to heat my own bath water.” She pointed to four water heaters arrayed around the tub. “I spend half my day soaking in the tub. I never took a single hot bath the first half of my life, so I’m making up for that now. But you’re worse off than I, son, and I don’t imagine the labor reform camp supplied hot water for baths.” While she talked, she reached out and turned on all four heaters, from which hot water gushed into the tub and steam quickly filled the room. Old Jin, pushed him in, but he shrieked and jumped back out. She pushed him in again. “Tough it out,” she said. “It’ll cool down in a minute.” So he gritted his teeth, as all the blood in his body seemed to rush to his head. He felt a prickly sensation all over. Neither truly painful nor totally numbing, it fell somewhere between agony and bliss. He went limp, his body slipping weakly under the water, as the four jets pummeled his skin with watery arrows. Through the steamy air he saw Old Jin slip out of her robe, climb in like a big white sow, and cover him with her soft, lustrous body. The steam was suddenly perfumed. Picking up a bar of fragrant bath soap, she washed his head, his face, and his body, which was quickly covered with a rich lather. He submitted weakly, and when her nipple brushed against his skin, he nearly died of ecstasy. The dirt and grime fell away as the two of them moved and shifted in the tub; his hair, his stubbly beard, were cleansed of filth. An ordinary man would have thrown his arms around her, but he just lay there and let her scrub and pinch him all over.
After they emerged from the bath, she flung the rags he’d worn home from the camp out the window and dressed him in clean underwear. Then she helped him into a Pierre Cardin suit she’d readied for the occasion. After completing the outfit with a tie, with which she struggled for a moment, she combed his hair, adding some Korean hair oil, trimmed his beard, and splashed on some cologne. She then led him over to the dressing mirror, where a tall, handsome, impressive-looking Chinese man in Western garb looked back at him. “My dear,” Old Jin exclaimed, “you look like a movie star!” He blushed and turned away. But he’d liked what he’d seen. It wasn’t the Shangguan Jintong who had survived on stolen eggs at the Flood Dragon River Farm, and it surely wasn’t the Shangguan Jintong who had tended livestock in a labor reform camp.
Old Jin led him over to a sofa at the foot of the bed and handed him a cigarette, which he refused. Fearfully he accepted the tea she held out to him. She leaned against the folded comforter on the bed, spread her legs casually, and covered herself with her bathrobe, as she leisurely blew smoke rings from a cigarette she’d lit for herself. With the powder washed off in the bath, wrinkles and a few dark freckles showed on her face. When she closed her eyes to keep out the smoke, crow’s feet fanned out in the corners. “I’ve never seen a more innocent man in my life,” she said with a squint. “Am I just an ugly old hag?”
Unable to bear the penetrating glare that squeezed out from her slitted eyes, he lowered his head and laid his hands on his knees. “No,” he said, “you’re not old, and you’re not ugly. You’re the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“I thought your mother was lying to me,” she said, sounding demoralized. “But I see it was true, every bit of it.” She stubbed her cigarette out in an ashtray and sat up. “The incident with that woman, did it really happen?” He stretched his neck, unused to being confined by a starched collar and a tie; his face was sweaty. As he rubbed his knees, he felt he was on the verge of crying.
“That’s all right,” she said. “I was just asking. You’re such a little idiot.”
At noon, a dozen or so men in Western suits and leather shoes joined them for lunch. Holding his hand, she introduced him to her guests. “This is my adoptive son. Loo
ks like a movie star, doesn’t he?” The men gazed at him with their clever eyes. One of them, a man with slicked-down hair and wearing a gold Rolex, the band intentionally loose around his wrist, said with a salacious wink, “Old Jin, you’re an old cow feasting on tender new grass!” Jintong recalled that Old Jin had introduced this middle-aged man as the chairman of some commission or other.
“Up your mother’s ass!” Old Jin swore. “This son of mine is the Golden Boy at the feet of the Queen Mother of the West, a gentleman in every respect. Not like you horny dogs. You’re attracted to women like mosquitoes are drawn to blood. You’ll sink your teeth into them even if you get swatted flat in the process.”
‘Old Jin,” a bald man piped up, “you’re the one we want to sink our teeth into.” His jowls flapped when he talked, so badly he often had to cup his hands around his cheeks to keep his mouth from twisting out of shape. “Such tasty flesh!”
“Old Jin, you’re taking a page out of Empress Wu’s book,” said a husky young man with naturally wavy hair and eyes like a goldfish. “You’ve got yourself a little pretty boy!”
“You all have your second and third wives, but I can’t…” Old Jin stopped short. “Just shut your foul mouths. If you don’t watch out, I’ll make sure people find out about all your sneaking around.”
A heavy-browed, hollow-cheeked man held out his wineglass and walked up to Jintong. “Elder brother Shangguan Jintong, here’s to you and your release from the camp.”
Now that his secret was out, Jintong felt like crawling under the table.
“He was framed!” Old Jin shouted indignantly. “Jintong is an honest man who would never do what he was charged with.”
The men began whispering among themselves. Then they stood up and, one after the other, toasted Jintong. Since he’d never drunk alcohol before, it took little to set his head spinning. The men’s faces took on the appearance of sunflowers waving in the wind, and he had the baffling feeling that he ought to clear something up with these people. He held out his cup and said, “I did it… with her, but her body was still warm … eyes still open … she smiled …”
“Now that’s a real man!” he heard one of the sunflowers say, which made him feel better, just before he fell facedown into the food on the table.
He awoke to find himself stark naked on Old Jin’s bed. She was there beside him, also naked, leaning against the comforter, a glass of wine in her hand; she was watching a video. It was the first color TV Jintong had ever seen — at the camp he’d seen a tiny bit of TV on a black-and-white set, which was astonishing enough, but the color picture had him doubting his own eyes. Especially since a naked man and woman were cavorting right there on the screen. Feelings of guilt weighed his head down. He heard Old Jin giggle. “You can stop pretending, son. Raise your head and take a good look. You need to see how people do it.” Jintong raised his head and stole another look or two. Chills ran up and down his spine.
Old Jin leaned over and switched off the video. White dots filled the screen until she turned off the TV. When she adjusted the bedside lamp, a soft yellow light painted the walls. The light blue window curtains cascaded down to the bed mat like a waterfall. Old Jin smiled and began teasing him with her feet.
His throat was as dry as an abandoned well; the top half of his body was hot as cinders, the lower half was like a stagnant pond. His eyes were fixed on her full breast, which hung down to her navel and sagged slightly to the left. His lips parted as he moved over to take it into his mouth, but Old Jin moved it away and, at the same time, shifted provocatively. Irritated by her rejection, he grabbed her soft shoulders to roll her over. She turned toward him, her breast flashing into view like a frightened wild goose, but was quickly moved back out of sight. Before long, they were engaged in a wrestling match, one struggling to find the breast, the other fighting him off, until they were worn out. Finally, Old Jin was too weary to deny him any longer, and he buried his head in her bosom, with no thoughts for anything else, taking the nipple into his mouth with such force it’s a wonder he didn’t swallow up the whole breast. Once she’d surrendered her nipple, all the fight in her vanished. With moans of pleasure, she dug her fingers into his hair as he proceeded to suck her dry.
Jintong slept like a baby after emptying her of her milk. Old Jin, her heart on fire, tried every trick she knew to wake the man-child up, but he snored on.
The next morning, she awoke with a weary yawn and glared at Jintong. Her nursemaid brought over her baby for a feeding, and Jintong saw the infant, not yet a month old, in the nursemaid’s arms, staring at him with hatred in his eyes. “Not now,” Old Jin said to the woman, rubbing her breast. “Go get him a bottle of milk at the dairy farm.”
Once the nursemaid had made a tactful exit, Old Jin cursed, “Jintong, you bastard, you sucked so hard you drew blood.” He smiled apologetically and stared at the hand cupping her treasure. The demon of desire reappeared, and he began to make his move. But this time she stood up and took her breast into the other room.
That night, Old Jin wore a thick padded coat over a specially made canvas bra; she cinched her waist with a wide, brass-studded belt of the type used by martial arts masters. She had trimmed the bottom of the coat to just above her hips; tufts of cotton trailed from the un-hemmed opening. She was naked from the waist down, except, interestingly, for a pair of red high-heeled shoes. The moment Jintong saw how she was dressed he felt as if his insides were on fire, and he was quickly and impressively aroused to the point where his erection bumped into his belly. She was about to bend over like an animal in heat, but Jintong, too filled with desire to wait, threw her down on the rug like a tiger pouncing on its prey, and took her then and there.
Two days later, Old Jin introduced her new general manager, Shangguan Jintong, to the workers. He was dressed in a tailored Italian suit, with a Lacrosse silk tie and a camel-colored serge overcoat. The outfit was topped by a French beret, worn at a rakish angle. He stood with his hands on his hips, like a rooster that’s just hopped off of a hen’s back — weary yet haughty, as he faced the motley crowd of workers in Old Jin’s network. He made a brief speech, both the words and manner styled after the way the guards at the labor reform camp had reprimanded the inmates. He saw a mixture of envy and hatred in their eyes.
With Old Jin as his guide, Jintong traveled to every corner of Dalan, where he was introduced to people who had dealings — direct and indirect — with the recycling station and the various sales outlets. He took up smoking foreign cigarettes and drank foreign liquor, learned the ins and outs of mah-jongg, and mastered the arts of playing host, passing out bribes, and evading taxes; once he even took the delicate hand of a young waitress in the Gathering Dragons Guesthouse restaurant in front of a dozen or more guests; flustered, she dropped the glass she was holding, smashing it to pieces. He took out a wad of bills and stuffed them into the pocket of her white uniform. “A little something for you,” he said. She thanked him in a flirtatious voice.
Every night, like a farmer who never tires, he cultivated Old Jin’s fertile soil. His inexperience and clumsiness brought her special pleasure and a new kind of excitement; her shouts often woke the fatigued workers as they slept in their shacks.
One evening, a one-eyed old man strolled into Old Jin’s bedroom, his head cocked. Jintong shuddered when he saw him and pushed Old Jin to the side of the bed before scrambling to cover himself with the blanket. He recognized the man at once: it was Fang Jin, at one time in charge of the People’s Commune production brigade, Old Jin’s legal husband.
Old Jin sat there with her legs crossed. “Didn’t I just give you a thousand yuan?” she asked, a sharp edge to her voice.
Fang Jin sat down on the Italian leather sofa in front of the bed, where he had a coughing fit and spat a gob of phlegm onto the beautiful Persian rug at his feet. The glare of hatred in his good eye was hot enough to light a cigarette. “I didn’t come for money this time,” he said.
“Then what do you want?” she asked
irately.
“Your lives!” Fang Jin pulled a knife out from under his jacket, jumped up from the sofa with an agility that belied his age, and threw himself onto the bed.
With a shriek of horror, Jintong rolled to the far edge of the bed and wrapped the blanket around him. He was too petrified to move after that. He then watched in terror as the cold gleam of Fang Jin’s knife pressed toward his chest.
Like a fish flopping on the ground, Old Jin placed herself between Fang Jin and Jintong, so that the tip of the knife was aimed at her chest. “If you’re not the illegitimate child of a first wife, you’ll stab me first!” she said coldly.
Grinding his teeth, Fang Jin said, “You whore, you stinking whore …” Despite the savagery of his words, the hand holding the knife began to tremble.
“I’m no whore,” Old Jin said. “Sex is how a whore earns her living. But me, I actually pay for it. I’m a rich woman who’s opened a brothel for her own pleasure!”
Fang Jin’s gaunt face twitched like waves on the ocean. Beads of snot hung from the sparse ratlike whiskers on his chin. “I’ll kill you!” he said shrilly as he thrust his knife at Old Jin’s breast. But she spun out of the way, and the knife stuck into the bed.
With a single kick, she knocked Fang off of the bed. After whipping off her martial arts belt, slipping out of her short robe, taking off her canvas bra, and kicking off her shoes, she slapped her belly wantonly, the hollow sound nearly frightening Jintong out of his skin. “You old coffin shell,” she shouted. “Can you do it? Climb on up if you can. If not, get the fuck out of here!”
Fang Jin was sobbing like a baby by the time he rose to a stooped position. With his eyes on Old Jin’s jiggling pale flesh, he pounded himself on the chest and wailed in agony, “Whore, you whore, one of these days I’m going to kill you both …” Fang Jin ran away.