Big Breasts and Wide Hips

by Mo Yan

  Peace returned to the room. The roar of a power saw came from the carpentry shop, merging with the whistle of a train entering the station. At that moment, Jintong heard the dreary sound of the wind whistling through the empty liquor bottles at home. Old Jin sprawled in front of him, and he saw her single breast splayed in all its ugliness across her chest, the dark nipple looking like a dried sea cucumber.

  She gave him an icy stare. “Can you do it like this?” she said. “No, you can’t, I know that. Shangguan Jintong, you’re dog shit that won’t stick to a wall, you’re a dead cat that can’t climb a tree. I want you to get your balls out of here, just like Fang Jin!”

  4

  Except for the fact that her head was on the small side, Parrot Han’s wife, Ceng Lianlian, was actually quite a stunning woman, especially her figure. She had long legs, nicely rounded hips, a soft, narrow waist, slender shoulders, full breasts, and a long, straight neck — from the neck down there was absolutely nothing to complain about, since she’d inherited it all from her water-snake mother. Thoughts of her mother reminded Jintong of that stormy night in the mill years earlier, back during the civil war. Her head, small and flat as the blade of a shovel, had swayed in the early-morning rain and mist, and she truly looked to be three parts human and seven parts snake.

  After Old Jin fired him, Jintong wandered the streets and lanes of the increasingly prosperous Dalan City. He didn’t have the nerve to go home to see his mother. He’d sent her his severance pay, even though he’d spent nearly as much time lined up at the post office to wire the money as it would have taken to go over to the pagoda, and even though she’d have to go to the same post office to get the money, and even though the clerk there would be puzzled by his action, that’s how he did it.

  When his steps took him to the Sandy Ridge district, he discovered that the Cultural Bureau office had set up two monuments on the ridge. One commemorated the seventy-seven martyrs who had been buried alive by the Landlord Restitution Corps, the other commemorated the courageous fight against the German imperialists by Shangguan Dou and Sima Daya, who had given their lives in the cause nearly a century before. The text, in virtually incomprehensible classical prose, made Jintong’s head swim and his eyes glaze over. A group of boys and girls — college students, by the look of them — was gathered around the monuments, discussing them animatedly before huddling together for group photos. The girl with the camera was wearing skintight blue-gray pants, the flared bottoms covered with white sand, and uneven rips at the knees, under an incredibly bulky yellow turtle-neck sweater that hung from her armpits like the sagging neck of a cow. A heavy Chairman Mao pin was pinned to her chest, and a camera vest with pockets of all sizes was draped casually over her sweater. She was bent at the waist, raising her backside in the air like a horse doing its business. “Okay!” she said. “Don’t move. I said don’t move!” Then she began looking for someone to take their picture. Her gaze fell on Jintong, who was still wearing the outfit Old Jin had given him. The girl said something in a foreign language, which he didn’t understand. But he sensed at once that she’d mistaken him for a foreigner. “Say, girl, if you speak to me in Chinese, I’ll understand you!” She gulped, probably surprised by his heavy local accent. For someone from a distant land to come to China and actually learn the Northeast Gaomi dialect was really something! is what he assumed she was thinking, and even he heaved a sigh. How wonderful it would be if a real foreigner could speak like someone from Northeast Gaomi. But, of course, there was such a person — the sixth son-in-law of the Shangguan family, Babbitt. Not to mention Pastor Malory, who had spoken better Chinese than Babbitt. “Sir,” the girl said with a smile, “would you mind taking our picture?” Infected by her vitality, Jintong forgot for the moment his current situation, shrugged his shoulders, and made a face the way he’d seen foreigners do in the movies. He was quite convincing. Taking the camera from her and watching as she showed him which button to push, he said Okay, followed by a few comments in Russian. That produced the desired effect; the girl stared at him with obvious interest, before turning and running over to the monuments, where she leaned on her friends’ shoulders. He looked into the viewer like an executioner, cutting all the girl’s friends out of the shot and zeroing in on her. Click. He pressed the button. “Okay,” he said. A moment later he was standing alone in front of the monuments, watching the youngsters as they walked off. An aura of youth lingered in the air, and he breathed in it greedily. He had a bitter taste in his mouth, as if he’d just eaten an overripe persimmon, a stiff tongue, and a bellyful of disapproval.

  Resting his hand on the monument, he was hopelessly mired in fanciful thoughts, and if his nephew’s wife, Geng Lianlian, hadn’t come to his rescue, he might have withered right there on the marble monument like a dead bird. She rode up from town on a green sidecar motorcycle. Jintong had no idea why she stopped by the monuments, but he gazed appreciatively at her lovely figure. “Are you my uncle, Shangguan Jintong?” she asked.

  He blushed in acknowledgment.

  “I’m Geng Lianlian, the wife of Parrot Han,” she said. “I know he’s had nothing but terrible things to say about me, as if I were some kind of female tiger.”

  Jintong nodded ambiguously.

  “I hear Old Jin showed you the door,” she said. “That’s no big deal, since I’ve come to hire you for our Eastern Bird Sanctuary. I’m sure you’ll be satisfied with your duties, salary, and benefits, so you needn’t even ask.”

  “I’m worthless, I can’t do anything.”

  She smiled. “We’ll give you something you can do,” she said, taking him by the hand before he could respond with more self-deprecating comments. “Come with me,” she said. “I’ve spent a good part of the day running all over town looking for you.”

  She seated Jintong in the sidecar along with a giant macaw tethered by a chain. It gave him a mean look and screeched. Lianlian reached over and tapped the bird before undoing the chain. “Old Yellow,” she said, “fly back and notify the manager that Uncle’s on his way.”

  The bird hopped awkwardly onto the edge of the sidecar and from there down to the sandy ground. Like a child learning to walk, it stumbled forward a few paces, spread its stiff wings, and rose into the air. After climbing thirty or forty feet, it wheeled and buzzed the motorcycle. “Old Yellow,” Lianlian said, looking up at the circling bird, “go on now. No more funny stuff. I’ll give you some pistachios when I get home.” With a cry of delight, the parrot skimmed the treetops and flew off to the south.

  Lianlian stepped down on the starter, then climbed onto the motorcycle, twisted the handlebar, and careened off down the street, the wind billowing her hair — his too. They sped down a newly paved road, quickly reaching a marshy area, where the Eastern Bird Sanctuary occupied a fenced-in area of at least two hundred acres. The garish entrance gate, which looked like a memorial arch, was guarded by two watchmen with Sam Browne belts across their chests and toy pistols on their hips. They saluted Lianlian as she drove past.

  Just inside the gate was a man-made mountain of stones from Taihu, fronted by a pond with a fountain that was surrounded by cranes that looked real, but weren’t. The macaw that had flown back ahead of them was resting alongside the pond. When it saw Lianlian, it fell in behind her, hopping awkwardly.

  Parrot Han, made up like a circus clown and wearing white gloves, ran out from a little building with beaded curtains over the door. “Well, Uncle, we finally got you to come. I always said that as soon as things picked up around here I’d start paying back my debts.” He waved a glittering silver baton as he spoke. “Heaven and earth may be vast, but not as vast as Grandma’s kindness. And so, the first debt I owe is to her. Sending her a sack filled with meat wouldn’t please her, nor would the gift of a gold cane. Finding work for her son, on the other hand, would please her no end.”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” Lianlian said, like a supervisor speaking to a subordinate. “Have you got the mynah bird trained? You swore you could
do it.”

  “Don’t you worry, my dear wife!” Parrot acted the part of a clown, bowing deeply. “It’ll be able to sing ten songs, you’ve got my word on that.”

  “Uncle,” Lianlian said turning back to Jintong, “we can talk about your new job, but first let me show you around.”

  As the new director of public relations for the Eastern Bird Sanctuary, Jintong was sent by Lianlian to a spa for ten days, where he was tended to by a Thai masseuse. Then he went to a beauty salon for ten facials. He emerged totally rejuvenated, a new man. Lianlian spared no expense, dressing him in the latest fashions, drenching him in Chanel cologne, and assigning a young woman to attend to his daily needs. All these extravagances made Jintong uneasy. Rather than give him any concrete job, Lianlian concentrated on filling his head with bird knowledge and taking him through blueprints for the sanctuary expansion plans. By the time they finished, he was convinced that the future of the Eastern Bird Sanctuary was in fact the future of the city of Dalan.

  One night, when all was quiet, sleep eluded Jintong as he tossed and turned on his springy Simmons mattress. As he took stock of his life up that point, he realized that the life he was enjoying at the bird sanctuary was nothing short of a miracle. Exactly what does this small-headed woman have in mind for me? Rubbing his chest and underarms, now nicely fleshed out, he finally fell asleep, and almost immediately dreamed that peacock feathers had grown on his body. Fanning his tail feathers, like a gorgeous wall, he saw thousands of little dancing spots. All of a sudden, Geng Lianlian and several mean-looking women came up and began pulling out the tail feathers to give as gifts to rich and powerful friends. He complained to them in peacock-talk. Uncle, Lianlian said, if you won’t let me pluck your feathers, what good are you to me? She grabbed a handful of his colorful tail feathers and pulled — Jintong shrieked, and woke himself up. His face was covered with a cold sweat, and he immediately noticed a dull pain in his rear. There was no more sleep for him that night. As he listened to birds fighting off in the marshland, he reflected upon his dream, trying to analyze just what it meant, a trick he’d learned back in the labor reform camp.

  The next morning, Lianlian invited him to breakfast in her office. Sharing this honor was her husband, the master bird trainer, Parrot Han. The moment Jintong stepped through the door he was greeted by a “Good morning” from a black mynah on a golden perch. The bird ruffled its feather as it “spoke,” and he wondered if his ears had deceived him. He walked around to see if he could find the source of the sound. “Shangguan Jintong,” the mynah bird said. “Shangguan Jintong.” The bird’s greeting shocked and elated him. He nodded in its direction. “Good morning,” he said. “What’s your name?” The bird ruffled its feathers and said, “Bastard! Bastard!” “Did you hear that, Parrot?” Lianlian said. “This is what you’ve been teaching your little pet!” Parrot slapped the mynah. “Bastard!” he cursed. “Bastard!” the dizzy mynah echoed him. “Bastard!” Obviously embarrassed, Parrot turned to Lianlian. “Damn,” he said, “have you ever seen the likes of this bird? It’s like a little child. You can try to teach him proper language till you’re blue in the face, but it’s no use. Then say a bad word, and he picks it up at once.”

  Lianlian treated Jintong to some fresh milk and a partially cooked ostrich egg. She had the appetite of a bird, while Jintong had the appetite of a pig. She drank a cup of wonderfully fragrant Nestlé’s coffee. “Uncle,” she said, “an army trains for a thousand days to fight for one. The time has come for you to display your skills.”

  Jintong gulped in surprise, which led to a series of hiccups. “Urn,” he stammered, “what can, what can I do …”

  Noticeably disgusted by the hiccups, she fixed her callous gray eyes on his mouth. Because of the callousness, her normally tender eyes were suddenly unbelievably intimidating, reminding him of her mother and of those marshland snakes that could swallow a wild goose. That thought cured his hiccups.

  “You can do lots of things!” Rays of tenderness shot from her gray eyes, returning them to their enchanted beauty. “Uncle,” she said, “do you know the one thing needed for us to turn our plans into reality? Of course you do, it’s money. The sauna resort cost money. The big-breasted Thai masseuse cost money. Do you know how much that ostrich egg you just ate cost?” She held out five fingers. “Fifty? Five hundred? Five thousand! Everything we do costs money, and for the Eastern Bird Sanctuary to prosper, we need a lot of it. Not eighty or a hundred thousand, and not two or three hundred thousand, but millions, tens of millions! And for that we need the support of the government. We need bank loans, and the government owns the banks. The bank managers do the mayor’s bidding, and who does the mayor listen to?”

  She smiled, looked at Jintong, and answered her own question.

  “You, that’s who!” More hiccups.

  “Take it easy, Uncle. Listen carefully. The new mayor of Dalan isn’t just anybody, it’s none other than your very own mentor, Ji Qiongzhi, and the first person she inquired about as mayor was you. Just think, Uncle, after all these years, you’re still in her thoughts. Emotions don’t get any deeper than that.”

  “So I go see her and say, mentor Ji, I'm Shangguan Jintong, and Fd like you to lend my niece several million yuan for her bird sanctuary, is that it?” Jintong said.

  Lianlian laughed hard. Gently pounding Jintong on the shoulder, she said, “Silly Uncle, my silly Uncle, you sure have earned your reputation as an innocent man. I’ll teach you how to do it.”

  Over the next couple of weeks, Lianlian put Jintong through the sort of day-and-night training that Parrot used on his birds, instructing him on what a powerful woman likes to hear. On the day before Ji Qiongzhi’s birthday Lianlian conducted a dress rehearsal in her bedroom. Dressed in a sheer white nightgown, she played the part of Mayor Ji, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of fine wine in the other, a love potion on the pillow, and embroidered slippers on her feet. Jintong, wearing a tailored suit and French cologne, was holding an array of peacock feathers in one arm and a trained parrot in the other as he gently pushed open the leather-trimmed door —

  — The moment he stepped into the room, Ji Qiongzhi’s prestige and manner froze him in his tracks. Unlike Lianlian, she wasn’t dressed in a revealing nightgown. Instead, she was wearing an old army uniform, buttoned all the way up to the neck. And she wasn’t smoking a cigarette or holding a glass of wine. Needless to say, there was no love potion on the pillow. In fact, she didn’t receive him in her bedroom. She was smoking a Stalin-era pipe filled with reeking coarse tobacco, and was guzzling tea from an oversized mug with chipped porcelain and the words “Flood Dragon River Farm” stamped on one side. Seated in a beat-up rattan chair, she had her feet, encased in smelly nylon socks, on the desk in front of her. She was reading a mimeographed document when he entered. She tossed it aside when she saw him. “Bastard! Lousy bedbug!” Jintong’s legs nearly buckled, and he all but threw himself to his knees in front of her. Taking her feet off the desk, she slipped into her shoes, caving in the backs, and said, “Come here, Shangguan Jintong. Don’t be frightened, that wasn’t meant for you.”

  In line with Lianlian’s instructions, Jintong should have bowed deeply at that moment, and then, with tears in his eyes, gazed at her soft bosom, but for only about ten seconds. Longer than that would give the impression of unwelcome intentions; less than that implied disrespect. Then he was to say, “My dear teacher, Ji Qiongzhi, do you still remember that useless student you once had?”

  But she’d called him by name before he could open his mouth and looked him over from head to toe, the same liveliness in her eyes as before. He felt prickly all over, and wished he could drop what he was carrying and get away as fast as his feet would carry him. She sniffed the air. “How much cologne did Geng Lianlian spray on you?” she asked mockingly.

  She got up and pushed open a window to let in the cool night air. Off in the distance, arc welders raised sparks on steel girders high above the ground, like holiday fireworks. �
��Have a seat,” she said. “I have nothing to offer you, except a glass of water.” She picked up a mug with a missing handle from the tea cart, studied the gunk at the bottom, and said, “Maybe not. It’s filthy, and I’m too lazy to go wash it out. I’m getting old. Time is unforgiving. After running around all day, my legs have swelled up like leavened bread.”

  “When she brings up her age and complains about getting old, Uncle, you mustn’t agree with her. Even if her face looks like a dried-up gourd, what you have to say is” — now he parroted the exact words Geng Lianlian had coached him to say: “Teacher, except that you’ve filled out a little, you look just the same as when you were teaching us songs all those years ago. You look like a woman of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, certainly no more than thirty!”

  With a sneer, Ji said, “Geng Lianlian told you to say that, didn’t she?”

  “Yes.” He blushed.

  “Jintong, you can’t sing a song well just by memorizing the lyrics. I assure you that that sort of ass-kissing is wasted on me. Under thirty, indeed! That’s crap! I don’t have to be told that I’m getting old. My hair’s turning gray, my eyesight’s getting worse, my teeth are threatening to fall out, and my skin sags. There’s more, but I’d rather not talk about it. People out there praise me to the sky to my face, but curse me behind my back, silently if not out loud. That old deadbeat! The old witch! Since you owned up to it, I’ll overlook it today. I could just as easily have thrown you out. But have a seat. Don’t just stand there.”

  Jintong handed her the array of peacock feathers. “Teacher Ji, Geng Lianlian asked me to give you these and told me to say, ‘Teacher, these fifty-five peacock feathers are a birthday gift that mirrors your own beauty.’” “More crap!” Ji said. “A peacock is beautiful. But a peahen is uglier than a roosting chicken. Take those feathers back to her. And what’s that, a talking parrot?” She pointed at the cage he was holding. “Uncover it and let me have a look.” Jintong removed the red silk cover and tapped the cage. The sleepy parrot inside ruffled its wings and said angrily, “How are you, how are you, Teacher Ji?” Ji Qiongzhi smacked the cage, throwing such a scare into the bird that it hopped up and down, its pretty feathers banging loudly against the cage. With a sigh, Ji said, “How am I? No damned good, that’s how.”