Northern Girls: Life Goes On

by Sheng Keyi

  Xiaohong realised that Dr Lei and Xia had ganged up on her and she had been taken in. They had sent her down to the kitchen then conveniently arranged a replacement to come in and take her place, squeezing her out. And it was all because she had been appointed by Mr Liao, Dr Lei’s predecessor. With the change of regime, the fate of all the common workers and petty officials hung in the balance. When Mr Liao had been around, Xiaohong could jump from the reception desk to the publicity department, where she was in close contact with the powers that be, as well as staying in touch with the masses. When Dr Lei took office, Xiaohong had been relegated to a life of washing vegetables in the kitchen.

  Finally, Xiaohong couldn’t stand it anymore. She thumped the desk but the sound was not very loud. She had not said a word, though in her heart she had roared furiously, If I’m gonna wash vegetables and dishes, why the hell don’t I just go back to washing scalps? And you lot who are just wolves in sheep’s clothing, what’ll come of you? Xia, you’ve backed the wrong horse. If you think Dr Lei’s coming back here to be hospital chairman again, you really are an idiot! As for that pervert, if he doesn’t get executed, it’ll be a waste of the justice system. Xiaohong’s breasts quaked, undulating under her blouse like stones falling in a landslide.

  As she reached the first floor, the lift opened to deposit the next batch of sickly people at their destination. A familiar face with high cheekbones and tiny eyes was among them. The face was covered in a layer of skin deadened by acne. The hair was now cut short and the stomach protruded, though not necessarily in a way that indicated that she was pregnant. Yet, somehow, one could tell she was expecting at a mere glance.

  ‘Zhang Weimei!’ Xiaohong called.

  The pregnant woman turned and saw Xiaohong and was so surprised she nearly dropped the box of medicine she was carrying. She looked like she wanted to hide. Xiaohong caught her and said, ‘You’re married!’

  Weimei smiled reluctantly. A man of thirty or forty stood behind her, a vacant look on his face.

  ‘Your husband?’ Xiaohong whispered.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Let’s go and get something to drink and have a chat.’

  Meeting Weimei now, Xiaohong felt very warm towards her. She would never have expected this herself, nor would she have imagined Weimei would be so annoyed to see her. She would have hoped at least to provoke a trace of happiness. Xiaohong could not quite tell what she was thinking, so she grabbed the other girl’s hand and took her to the canteen.

  ‘They’re… big!’ Weimei hesitated a moment, but still went ahead and said it.

  ‘They’ve grown a lot. A real burden. I had them examined. It’s breast hyperplasia. I have to take medicine for it.’

  ‘I see. How’re Wu Ying and everyone? Still working at the Qianshan Hotel?’

  ‘Nah. Wu Ying got divorced then went to work in a factory. I haven’t heard from her in quite a while. Ah Xing’s a mother now. And married to Li Xuewen, of course.’

  ‘Mm-hm.’

  ‘You got your residency card settled?’

  ‘Nope. Can’t afford it.’

  ‘Even with that twenty thousand Hong Kong dollars?’

  ‘What twenty thousand? Where do you think I picked up twenty thousand from?’

  ‘That day when the cops investigated, they said it was twenty thousand.’

  ‘They’re full of crap. There was less than eight thousand.’

  ‘So little? That’s not even worth the trouble. Especially since you’ve had to stay in hiding for so long.’

  ‘There was over twenty thousand to begin with. But they took most of it and lost it gambling before I ever saw it. Anyway, I guess I should go. He’s waiting.’ Outside the window, the man of thirty or forty stood shifting his weight from one foot to the other, frequently looking at his watch. Weimei looked a little helpless.

  ‘Who is he, not your husband?’

  ‘No. I’m not married.’

  ‘The child’s his?’

  ‘I’ll give it to him when it’s born. He’ll pay me for it.’

  ‘You’re a surrogate for him?’

  ‘According to the ultrasound, it’s a boy. I’ll get twelve thousand kuai for it. The previous one was a girl. Only eight thousand.’

  ‘Weimei!’

  ‘Oh, it’s alright with me,’ she said quietly, putting a hand on the table to push herself up. She fiddled with her blouse, then stopped and said, ‘Ah Hong, would you be up for it? I can talk to him. You’re pretty. You’d fetch a higher price.’

  Xiaohong immediately shook her head.

  Weimei scrunched up her face, turning away awkwardly. Xiaohong watched her waddle out.

  The girl disappeared from view.

  IV

  The sun seemed swollen as it dropped towards the horizon, like a head burying itself under a blanket. It had a choking effect, making even the trees and plants look heavy. People walking along the road squinted. Only, having left the hospital for good, Xiaohong felt like she was floating. Her breasts were like wings, bearing her up over the city to fly in the air above. A bird’s eye view spread out beneath her. The air was cold and the wind grazed her ear. She was like a mermaid, trailing her tail behind her as she floated.

  Xiaohong grinned. Something salty trickled into the corner of her mouth. She wiped it away and found that she was covered in sweat. Her feet were still plodding forward at a steady pace, like an old beggar woman. She stopped on the pavement in the shade of a tree, using her hands to fan herself. She saw a bus stop about five hundred metres away. Five hundred metres! But honestly, even if it was just five metres, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to make it. She couldn’t carry on, couldn’t manage to move those two sacks of rice any further. She no longer thought of them as breasts, but as two beggar’s sacks, waiting to be filled up with life and achievement. They were not a source of happiness or pleasure. They just kept weighing her down, pulling her down towards the ground. She doggedly supported herself, not believing she could be crushed by parts of her own body. She had stopped caring long ago that no one touched them anymore. She didn’t bother about them any more than she did her feet, coldly ignoring them. And she didn’t even mind about those men who had climbed upon them. She only minded that they were still growing.

  Why did they just keep growing?

  It was only half-an-hour’s bus journey to Li Sijiang’s, but it was more trying than travelling from Hunan to Shenzhen. She stopped her flight, descending to earth once again so she could board the minibus.

  As she boarded, her right leg got caught in the door as it closed behind her. She thought that, with a bit of effort, she could force it free, making it keep up with the left leg as normal, and go and find a seat. But, after several tugs on it, she realised that each pull was weaker than the last. The people at the bus stop behind her just stared up at her arse, pressed up against the glass door of the bus and twisting this way and that, her left leg jerking inside her oversized trousers as she turned her hips. She just could not free it from the door.

  Finally, a kind man behind her gave her a push and she managed to get on to the bus. As she moved along the bus, she saw there was no seat. Breathing heavily, she leaned against the back of a seat and wiped the sweat away. When the bus moved, she began to shake badly. To be more accurate, it was her breasts that quivered badly, as if they’d come to life. Xiaohong was shoved further down the bus. She planted her feet firmly on the floor, one hand grasping the pole. But in the end, she could no longer hold on. When the bus accelerated again, she fell, breasts first, against the man who was sitting in front of her. He stood up, primly offering her his seat. She had never felt such sweltering heat. She sat, putting her breasts on her lap and wiping her sweat. Her clothes were soaked.

  The gate at Li Sijiang’s apartment was not locked. Xiaohong leaned against the wall and weakly knocked on the door. She thought Sijiang would open it immediately and offer her a cup of water to gulp down. After her bus ride in the heat, she felt she would die of
thirst.

  But no one answered.

  She knocked again. Still no one answered. Xiaohong felt something was wrong. She pressed her face up against the window. Through the glass, she saw Sijiang lying on the bed. Her hands and feet were spread out, rigid. She looked dead.

  ‘Li Sijiang! Open up!’ Xiaohong beat on the door with all her might. She banged on the window, but Sijiang was motionless. Xiaohong’s head was swimming as she tried to force the window open. She shouted for help. A few blue collar workers rushed over from the neighbouring flat. They smashed the window and climbed in.

  For a moment, Xiaohong was not even sure this girl was Sijiang. Her face was similar to Sijiang’s, but it was long, not round. The lips were pale, the face blanched. Blood ran constantly from her left wrist. Her tiny eyes were like a thread. She opened them a moment.

  ‘Sijiang! What have you done? Fuck!’ Xiaohong saw that familiar pair of eyes and she could not keep from swearing and crying. Someone wrapped Sijiang’s wound and several people rushed her to the hospital. Xiaohong’s tears flowed down her face. Her heart broke, shattered, splattering like a pile of pig manure dropped on the road.

  ‘Sijiang, Sijiang! What happened? What happened?’ Xiaohong moved as quickly as she could, following them to the hospital. It was like she was trying to keep up with the answer to that question. The blood from Sijiang’s body made her despair. Her clothes clung to her, clammy. They were wet, then dry, then wet again. She was cold. She wanted to burst out into mourning right there in the street. This gave her a strange expression. She was like a grief-stricken penguin. Her head and feet were small and her midsection inflated. She struggled to move her feet, paddling along with her legs. Where was she going? It wasn’t like she was trying to catch up with the half-dead figure of Li Sijiang at all. Rather, it was as if she were making her way to the vast sea to swim away.

  Sijiang woke up again just as the poignant light of dusk was entering the ward. Her face was tinged with sorrow. The sheets, not quite white, were stamped with a red cross. Sijiang’s left wrist was bandaged and her fingers, pale and weak, rested on the red cross. On the wall, the shadows of tree branches swayed. Sijiang wanted to speak but her lips were stuck together.

  ‘Don’t talk. I’ll get you some water.’

  Xiaohong tried to stand up. But it was as if her clothes were nailed to the chair. When she had raised herself just a few centimetres from the seat, she felt a weight pressing her back down. She turned awkwardly and slowly poured some water. Supporting Sijiang, Xiaohong wet her lips and let her have a sip. Her eyes opened wide and she looked in astonishment at the behemoths on Xiaohong’s chest.

  ‘Sijiang, why didn’t you call the police?’

  ‘I called 110. They said, “Your domestic problems are not our business.”’

  ‘But you can’t let Specs get away with this.’

  ‘Honghong, without him, I wouldn’t have got the sixty thousand in compensation anyway. It’s not losing the money that I mind. I just don’t like being played for a fool.’

  ‘Aiyah. People in this world, they’ve either got designs on others or they’re the victims of other people’s designs. Either they scheme or they’re the victims of others’ schemes. You’ve always been too trusting.’

  ‘I wanted to kill him.’

  ‘You wanted to kill him, then why did you end up cutting your own veins? Idiot… Sijiang, I’m really sorry. I should never have asked you to come to Shenzhen.’

  ‘Honghong, what’re you talking about? Look at yourself. They’re… what is it they’ve grown into?’

  ‘I don’t know. Before long, I won’t be able to stand up. Bloody hell! Hey Sijiang, look… if you want to go back home, you should go. Although there’s nothing much there to go back for.’

  V

  Throughout the journey, tears streamed down Sijiang’s thin face. When they had walked to the pedestrian bridge, Sijiang put down the bag she had carried with her when she first came to Shenzhen and wiped her face a couple of times with the back of her hand. On her wrist, a white scar wormed its way across the flesh. The spots on her long face were less obvious.

  ‘I’ll write to you when I have time. Don’t cry!’ Xiaohong kept repeating this refrain. But Sijiang was taking all her first-time experiences and leaving them in Shenzhen. If she didn’t cry, what was there to say?

  How had her fresh, apple-shaped face turned into this old pumpkin seed shape? No one could say for sure any more than they could say why Xiaohong’s breasts had suddenly become so huge.

  A plane flew overhead, drawing a line of smoke across the blue sky. Their loneliness was like the plane, no bigger than a solitary bird, drifting across that vast empty space.

  ‘Don’t cry. Stop crying or I won’t be able to stop myself either.’ Xiaohong suppressed her grief, desperately biting her lip as her eyes started to redden.

  ‘Honghong, work out what you’re going to do. Take care of yourself. I’ll go on my own from here.’ Sijiang nearly collapsed under the weight of her luggage. Resolute, she collected herself and strode ahead as quickly as she could.

  A minibus stopped. Opening its mouth, it swallowed Sijiang up and turned towards the train station.

  Xiaohong rested her breasts on the railing, watching the rear end of the vehicle carrying Sijiang until it was out of sight. She laboured, using her hands to lift first her left, then her right breast. Suddenly, she lost her balance, tilting under the weight of her right breast. She fell to the ground under the weight of her own bust. She clasped the railing, trying to stand up, like a boxer pulling himself up on the ropes. One… two…

  It was like her breasts were nailed to the ground. She could not move them. She was weighed down by them, kneeling with her face just inches from the ground.

  She heard the sound of footsteps and the wheels of cars. They banged past, shocking the eardrums. A deafening sound came from the gutter like the lecherous laughter of waves crashing against the shore.

  She sagged yet closer to the pavement. She found herself surrounded by a crowd of feet, some in shoes, some in sandals. Some were white, others black. Wide, narrow, large, small, expensive, cheap…

  In her mind’s eye, she saw a pair of black boots. The very boots that had walked up and down in the detention centre. Zhu Dachang’s voice was ringing in her ear, saying, ‘You take care of yourself.’

  Gritting her teeth, she bent her head and, hauling those two great sandbags up, she stood. She trudged out of the ring of feet surrounding her and pushed her way down from the pedestrian bridge.

  Then she faded into the crowds on the street.

  Afterword

  Northern Girls was my debut novel published in 2004 and I am so pleased that it is the first of my books to be published in English.

  I have a soft spot for this novel. Written when I was an inexperienced writer, it is a work that virtually erupted into being. It is primal, natural and vibrant and, at the same time, is heavily imbued with my personal style. Like many of my readers, I am drawn to Qian Xiaohong, the protagonist, and her genuine, charming approach to life.

  Qian Xiaohong is a familiar figure to me. She is typical of the people from my home village. When I started her story, I planned simply to write about the village, but once I began, I felt the place to be too restrictive for such a character. I wanted to toss her out into the wider world and see what she was destined to experience. Through the eyes of Qian Xiaohong and her companions – as well as the testimony of their bodies – we feel the cruel realities of the times and the difficulty of surviving.

  These are the women on the lowest rung of the social ladder, the real working class. A vulnerable group of marginalised people, they are almost never brought to the public’s attention. This often neglected segment of society demonstrates an instinctive ability to survive, and this, I thought, was something worth treasuring. They make up a large proportion of the population and do much of the nation’s dirty work, quietly enduring insult and injury. The hardships they encount
er are actually more shocking than anything I’ve recorded, reaching well beyond the scope of what is represented in my novel.

  Qian Xiaohong has character. She is a principled girl, unwilling to sell herself. She’s frank and kind and has a sense of responsibility. Like many who make up the lowest strata of society, she possesses an impregnable vigour and vitality. In her honest way of living, she penetrates the duality of those around her and demonstrates a desire for self-respect. Her primary motive is to carry on surviving and this drives her ever forward, constantly moving along at an untiring pace. In the wider context of rural China, being on the move like this is very much a reality that many are forced to live through.

  To have created a character with this sort of drive to keep on living has been, for me, a true joy.

  I want to express my gratitude to Shelly Bryant for doing the difficult job of translating my work. After our correspondence and discussions, I am filled with confidence in the English translation of Northern Girls and highly anticipate its release.

  I am especially grateful to Penguin’s Jo Lusby for her appreciation of Northern Girls. She is as rigorous as she is lovable. My friend Eric Abrahamsen, who has translated my short stories, has also offered much enthusiastic assistance. And I must thank my editor, Mike Tsang. One can just imagine how important he has been in the development of this work.

  I consider myself very fortunate.

  Sheng Keyi

  Beijing

  January 2012

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Australia) 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada) 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Canada ON M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)