by Ma Jian
When the girl walked back from the toilets and returned to her chair, the four other women fell silent. They savoured this moment of secret complicity – they felt united by their shared opinion concerning the new girl’s unusually large breasts. After that, when the girl strode into the office every morning, her eyes full of the joys of spring, the other women would assume fixed grins and exchange knowing looks.
Before she had received her first month’s pay cheque, the girl had already made friends with the secretary, who was the youngest of her four female colleagues. The secretary revealed stories of her husband’s violent temper in exchange for the girl’s descriptions of university love affairs; she offered her a piece of nougat her husband had brought back from a business trip, and the girl gave her a plastic key-ring. Soon they started making jokes about the older colleagues, and were even on the point of sharing secrets about their friends’ private lives.
The atmosphere in the office became strained. After the secretary broke ranks with the three older women, a cold war set in and the solidarity among the ‘old guard’ collapsed. If someone happened to bang a cup on the desk, a minute later, another colleague would slam a cup down more loudly. One morning, the translator walked in wearing a new flowery dress and announced that her chickens had stopped laying eggs and were only fit for the chopping board. Knowing that this was a veiled joke at her expense, the old virgin glanced at the translator and sneered, ‘Did your daughter buy you that dress? It really takes years off you.’ Their battles rolled over into the political study sessions. When the elderly book-keeper finished reading out a report about a local hero who had tragically drowned trying to save the life of a state-owned pig, the translator and the secretary appeared unmoved. They didn’t even attempt a show of grief. Chairwoman Fan noticed their behaviour, and made a record of it in her notebook.
‘They seem to have something against me,’ the girl told the secretary one day after work. By this time, they were already so close that they were sharing snacks at lunchtime. Relations in the office had entered the stage of ‘second-degree combat preparations’. Although one of the cactus plants was still blooming, the other had lost its flowers, and its needles had turned red and hard.
They walked towards the bus stop. For the last two days, they had taken to holding hands when walking outside together. The secretary led the way, and the girl allowed herself to be led. Every woman needs this kind of relationship. The secretary appreciated the intimacy, it compensated for all the domestic misery she had suffered since her wedding day. She enjoyed revealing the secrets of the bedroom to the girl who hadn’t commenced sexual relations (or ‘jumped into the sea’, as the new saying went). In return, she experienced pleasures she had never enjoyed before: the sensation of the girl’s innocent, warm hand in hers; the feeling of pity, similar to the pity a cat might feel before it strikes its prey; the knowledge that she had the power to control what might, or might not, happen to the girl. Her life suddenly seemed more interesting. She had tried to hold herself back time and again, but now she could contain herself no longer and she revealed at last the secret that she shared with her colleagues. ‘They have fallen out with each other because of you,’ she said.
‘What?’ The girl drew in a sharp breath of air. ‘Why?’
The secretary didn’t want to jeopardise her friendship with the girl. So, keeping the girl’s hand firmly in her grip, she said in a comforting tone, ‘Haven’t you noticed what’s been going on?’
The girl with big breasts had no idea what the secretary was talking about.
‘Tell me what you know,’ she cried. ‘Tell me now!’
‘Try and guess first.’
‘Don’t play games.’ The girl’s face turned red.
‘It seems Chairwoman Fan was right.’ The secretary was deliberately dragging things out.
‘Please, sister, I beg you. Tell me.’ The girl shrank back into the role of someone who needs to be protected.
This wasn’t the first time the secretary had been called ‘sister’, so her expression didn’t change. ‘She’s jealous of you – that stupid old hen who can’t lay any more eggs.’
‘What did she say about me?’ The girl’s face turned from red to white.
‘It’s your breasts,’ the secretary said, touching the girl’s arm softly. ‘It’s because you have such large breasts.’ She was now using the tone of voice women adopt when speaking about contraception and sexual matters.
The girl covered her face with her hands and stopped in her tracks. The sense of inferiority that she had buried years before suddenly welled up inside her and dragged her back to the times when she would walk through the crowd hunching her shoulders like an old woman, the two lumps of flesh on her chest filling her with shame and fear. She remembered the time her mother humiliated her in front of her classmates, saying, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself wearing that T-shirt. Everyone can see your nipples!’ That night, she borrowed her mother’s white bra and clamped her breasts to her chest. When she left her home the next day, she sensed that everyone knew that she was a girl with bound breasts.
The self-confidence she had worked so hard to achieve was now crumbling into pieces.
‘What did they say?’ The girl’s faint voice was almost drowned by the loud footsteps on the pedestrian flyover above. The secretary hadn’t expected the girl to be as embarrassed as this. She felt as though she were watching a lamb drowning in water, a lamb she could save with less energy than it would take to blow away a grain of dust. As a married woman, she knew many things the girl didn’t know, but longed to know. Yesterday, she had told the girl about the pleasure of feeling a man’s tongue run down her stomach. When she had brought up the subject of the girl’s breasts a few moments ago, she had felt a dampness seep from between her thighs.
The secretary ventured a further question. ‘Did you rub foreign creams on them, or inject them with something?’ She gazed enviously at the girl’s youthful complexion. It was as rosy as hers was before she married. She could sense how uncomfortable the girl was, and how fast her heart was beating.
In just a few seconds, the girl seemed to age ten years, her entire body appeared to shrink inwards. ‘Never, never,’ she protested. ‘I have never had any injections, or used any foreign cream.’
‘That’s what I guessed,’ the young woman continued. ‘Perhaps Chairwoman Fan was right then.’
‘What did she say?’ For the first time in her life the girl was forced to discuss her breasts in public.
‘That old virgin’s a sly one,’ the secretary said, glancing behind her to check that no one was listening. They had almost reached the bus stop. ‘She said you’ve made them bigger by letting men fondle them. Actually, that’s what I thought too, at first.’
The girl’s face turned red again.
‘Surely someone must have told you!’ the secretary laughed. ‘The more men fondle them, the bigger they get.’
‘I’ve never let any man fondle them!’ The girl’s throat went dry. ‘They’ve always been this big, ever since I was fourteen.’ Her blush was spreading to her ears and neck now.
‘There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.’ Although the secretary sympathised with her new friend, she still examined the girl’s face, searching for the truth.
‘But it’s true!’ The girl’s head dropped in despair. She longed to extricate herself from this humiliating situation. ‘You still don’t believe me, do you?’
Without looking at one another, they quickened their pace, and the tenderness that had been established between them over the last weeks melted away. When they reached the bus stop, the girl joined the queue inside the barricade, while the secretary. stood outside. During the previous few days, the secretary had always waited for the girl to catch her bus before continuing her walk home.
‘Don’t take it so seriously! So what if they talk about you? They’re just jealous because they’re so flat-chested.’ Although the secretary’s breasts drooped a little, she
still qualified as a ‘woman with breasts’.
‘I’ve never had injections or taken pills.’ A deep wrinkle wormed down the girl’s smooth forehead.
‘Times have changed. Those old matrons have been left behind. They’re jealous of you, that’s all. You’re only twenty. So what if you’ve let some boy squeeze them bigger?’ The secretary cast her eyes over the girl’s ample bosoms. She could guess that they had incited many illicit events. Looking at them brought to mind episodes in her past, and the pleasure she felt when her husband squeezed her own breasts. ‘As soon as men get near us, they want a feel. But I only let my husband suck mine before we go to sleep.’ The secretary couldn’t help revealing a few more details of her private life. Noticing that the girl was still frowning, she glanced towards the direction from which the bus was due to arrive, and swore at it for taking so long.
‘Why do they have to talk about me?’ The girl’s voice was still faint. Nothing the secretary said could console her now. ‘I was born this way,’ she muttered quietly.
The secretary smiled at her and said: ‘Don’t take any notice of them. Those women are past their prime. I understand you. I wouldn’t be shocked if you told me you were wearing a padded bra. There’s nothing wrong with big breasts. Those women would still be flat-chested even if they wore ten padded bras.’
‘I’ve never worn a padded bra in my life,’ the girl sobbed.
The young woman didn’t believe her for a second. ‘You don’t want them to be too big though, people will notice. Big breasted women like us don’t need to wear padded bras.’
The bus finally arrived, and the girl was carried aboard by the surging crowd. She felt as though her throat were stuffed with cotton wool. She carried her two heavy breasts back home and as soon as she opened her front door, ran to her bed and burst into tears.
‘Let the mirror be the judge,’ she whispered to herself as she stood in front of the rectangular mirror. For the first time in her life, she stared at length at the two large globes of plump flesh, each one crowned with a dried strawberry. The truth was, no man had ever placed his hands on them. At fourteen, when they first started to grow, they had caused her some pain. At university, they gave her a sense of pride. When she walked down the street and they shook up and down, they both annoyed and pleased her. From books she discovered that her type of breasts signify a good wife and able mother – exactly the kind of woman she longed to be. In her dreams, she would give birth to hundreds of children, and then stand in the middle of them, handing out apples. She would dress the children in pretty clothes and nourish them with the infinite streams of milk that flowed from her nipples. Her breasts could feed a multitude of children, and give men joy and pleasure. But today, these dreams were shattered. In other people’s eyes, she was a fraud, a girl who tried to entice men with fake breasts. They thought they had seen through her games. Everyone had reached the same conclusion, even the young man in the office who read books every day preparing for his postgraduate exams.
‘Let the mirror be the judge.’ She kept her voice down, because behind the curtain her entire family were eating dinner. Her bed lay in a corner that was blocked off from the rest of the room by a curtain. She stayed awake all night. The next morning she swallowed some sleeping pills and took the day off work.
(As the blood donor discusses her story, the professional writer is suddenly reminded of the actress who jumped into the tiger’s mouth. He asks, ‘Do you think that the girl was trying to escape this world too?’
‘No,’ the blood donor replies. ‘She was too young. She had nothing to escape from yet. She crumbled, not because of outside pressure, but because of her own weakness. If everyone were as feeble as her, we would have all lost our minds ages ago. She only ran through the streets naked once. It was no big deal.’
‘Perhaps her story is just not worth writing,’ the writer sighs wearily.
‘You’re wrong to think that every story must be connected with death. The problem is not death, but life, and life is just an act of endurance – you have to grit your teeth and get on with it. Just like I do. I put up with everything that life throws at me. I’ve suffered much more than you ever could in your carefree existence.’
The image of the girl’s large breasts is still flashing through the writer’s mind. The two raisin-coloured nipples stare at him entreatingly. Had the girl realised that it is already impossible in this world to distinguish the real from the fake, then perhaps she wouldn’t have reached for the sleeping pills so frequently.)
When her family discovered that she was swallowing sleeping pills every night, and that her health was seriously deteriorating, they had no choice but to take her to hospital. The secretary and Chairwoman Fan took her flowers, her pay cheque, a bar of soap and a pair of silk gloves. She lay calmly in her hospital bed, staring blankly at the white walls. A few days after she returned home, she took all her clothes off and ran through the streets naked. Racked by shame, the family left town and set up home in a farm in the suburbs. But her past caught up with her, and her parents were forced to send her to live in their old village. Some years later she married a peasant, but when he learned about her reputation, he became violent, and frequently beat her to within a breath of her life.
Chairwoman Fan had still not retired by then. After the girl with big breasts resigned from work due to ill health, the secretary moved to her desk. The two cactus plants on the window sill grew so tall, they had to be moved outside into the corridor.
The Abandoner or The Abandoned
The conversations between the writer and the blood donor never lead anywhere. Instead of prolonging an argument, they often choose to leave it hanging in mid-air. It is interesting to note, however, that during tonight’s conversation, the blood donor seems to be gaining the upper hand. The blood donor is by nature a profit seeker, believing that people should use all means possible to get what they need from this ugly world. The writer is an idealist, but when confronted by reality and his own failures, he overcomes his disappointment by adopting an air of indifference. He is a cripple who can think but not move. In his undernourished brain, he weaves the stories of the book he knows he will never write.
She emerged from between her mother’s thighs just a month before the One Child Policy was launched.
(In his mind, the professional writer sees the father carrying his retarded child down the street with a furtive look in his eyes. The father’s downturned mouth and sunken cheekbones speak of his despair. The little girl in his arms looks calm, but slightly perturbed. These two always seem to be on their way to somewhere.)
Since he was blood type A, and was born in the Year of the Ox, the father was both stubborn and shy. When he was twenty, a cabbage-faced old woman in a grain shop read the lines on his hand and told him he would never have a son. After he married, his wife produced a daughter with severe disabilities, and five years later, a second daughter, who was normal. The father then paid six yuan for a lame man called Zeng to read his fortune again. Zeng predicted that at forty-eight he would have a third daughter; at forty-nine, he would be promoted to a more senior position (he was now a middle-ranking accountant in the Municipal Treasury Board); at fifty, a gentleman would travel from the south-west and bring him good luck (he looked up all his friends and relatives who lived in the south-west, and discovered he had an uncle who was an ex-Guomindang general and was now living with a guerrilla force in Burma, although the family hadn’t heard from him for over thirty years); at fifty-seven, his mother would pass away and his wife would die of lung disease; at sixty, he would meet a widow with blood type A who was born in the Year of the Sheep, and she would marry him and give him a fourth daughter. Death was destined to strike him in his sixty-third year. He once asked the lame man Zeng if there was any way he could prolong his life span by a few years – just two more years would do – but the fortune teller insisted that it was impossible to alter the course of fate.
The father was in fact more upset about the la
ck of a son to carry on his family name than about the shortness of his own life. He pushed the thought of the widow to the back of his mind, and focused all his attention on procuring a son. Since their first daughter had been born disabled, his wife’s work unit had made an exception to the One Child Policy and granted her a quota of two children, but they would certainly never allow her to try for a third. The only way she could procure another pregnancy authorisation would be if one of their children happened to disappear. Had it not been for the family planning regulations, the couple would have been free to conceive one child after another until a son turned up, but as things stood, the accountant decided that his only hope lay in getting rid of his retarded daughter.
So he embarked on a battle against his fate. When his retarded daughter reached the age of seven, he grabbed her in his arms, carried her to a public park and attempted, unsuccessfully, to abandon her on a bench. After three further failed attempts, he took a day off work, hoping to finish the job properly. His future depended on ridding himself of her. Only with her gone could he try again for a son. The fortune tellers hadn’t mentioned that his first daughter would be born retarded, or that the government was planning to introduce a One Child Policy. If he had known at the time how the future would unfold, he would have told his wife to get an abortion the moment she first found out she was pregnant.