by Keyi Sheng
Noticing that her family seemed to have a little money, some guys had hopes of becoming Xiaohong’s man. It was often said that her earliest involvement with the opposite sex came when she was in primary school, first hooking up with boys from the secondary school, and later moving on to the young men of the village. She brought them home, each leaving his impression on her bed. Some claimed that, during the summer months, she sometimes did it while out enjoying the cool evening breeze. She was even known to go at it in broad daylight inside the large culvert at the power plant. Such was Xiaohong’s reputation, and it rolled over the village in waves.
Xiaohong’s only sibling was a sister eight years older than her. When she was ten, Xiaohong, her sister and their grandmother used to all squeeze into one room, the two girls sharing a bed. After her engagement, Xiaohong’s sister, assuming that the younger girl would be none the wiser, often welcomed her fiancé to join them in the crowded bed.
Xiaohong and her brother-in-law got along well, very well indeed.
While village tittle-tattle was not always to be believed, spine-tingling tales about the activities of Xiaohong and her brother-in-law ran rampant on the village grapevine, and the odds were that they were true, too. Things finally came to a head in the year following her grandmother’s death, when Xiaohong turned sixteen. That spring, the fields were wild. Oilseed rape plants spread out to the horizon, rippling like golden waves in the breeze. One day, she was about a mile outside of the village, working in the fields with her sister and brother-in-law.
‘I’m so thirsty,’ she said, and turned with a swing of her hips to head for home.
The way her rump swayed as she retreated was all that was needed to turn her brother-in-law’s insides to jelly. As the poets say, spring – when the bees are dancing and the sun caresses your skin – is the time for mating. So who could blame the girl’s brother-in-law for wanting to sleep wrapped in the arms of a good woman? On most nights, his wife would lie beneath him just like the third-of-an-acre plot he worked all day, quietly letting him plough her as he had the soil – and just as unmoving in response to his touch. With this in mind, the poor man suddenly lost the will to continue his work. He twisted his body this way and that, contorting himself in the oddest manner, frowning intensely. After a few moments of letting it brew, he finally succeeded in emitting a loud fart.
‘Oh, my stomach!’ He shouted, ‘I think I’ve got the runs!’ The urgent expression he wore made it seem he was in a desperate state.
‘Ever notice how frequently lazy folks have to find a toilet?’ his wife said. ‘Go on. Looks like you’d better hurry.’
He set off at a trot.
The diligent woman kept at her work, placing each sprout neatly in its own hole and the pepper seeds in rows as orderly and pleasing as a well-embroidered fabric. When she’d finished, she looked over her handiwork with a maternal eye and smiled in contentment, her face as brown as the petals of a wilting flower. She was now in need of a little water herself, and the other two still hadn’t returned. The wind blew over her solitary figure, her dusty drab overalls covered in mud. With her feet immersed in the loose soil, she looked exceptionally short. After a while, she climbed the ridge. Bringing her right hand to her forehead, she sheltered her squinting eyes and looked towards the family home lying in the distance. The tiled walls her father had built glistened like gold in the sunlight, as if thousands of precious jewels flashed before her, but there was no sign of her sister or her husband.
Beginning to have some misgivings, she slapped her hands together to remove the clods of soil, left the patch of land she had been working, and made her way home dejectedly. She went to the outside toilet, but her husband was not there. Could he have gone to the kitchen to get some water? No one was there either. In her heart, she began to feel a sense of dread, some vague notion of what must be going on.
She climbed the outer stairs to Xiaohong’s bedroom, one hand clutching her chest, the other braced against the wall. She opened her mouth wide to breathe, feeling a little dizzy in the bright afternoon sun.
The door, unlatched, was open about an inch.
‘Feng Ge, you need to get dressed and go. She’s going to start suspecting something.’
‘She’s too blind to ever notice.’
‘But what if she does?’
‘She won’t.’
‘What if you knocked me up this time?’
‘You bear it, I’ll raise it.’
Legs trembling, Xiaohong’s sister kicked the door open with a bang and stood there, the doorway framing her shape. With the sun behind her, she cast a long shadow that fell across the room and onto the bed, drawing a line between the two faces that lay there.
A bee flew past her, buzzing into the room. Dust motes danced in the long rays of the sun.
All was deathly silent.
Without a hint of embarrassment, Xiaohong slowly sat up and began to dress herself. At first, she’d been afraid of hurting her sister, but now that they were face to face, she felt relief, as if a cairn of stones had tumbled to the floor. Saying nothing, she finished dressing, simply turning her back to the door as she waited for her sister’s tirade to begin.
Her brother-in-law stood up, his naked body quivering all over, as if he had just completed the most exquisite act of his life. His wife stood there muttering, her face puckered in anger, wrinkly as a bitter gourd. She gazed breathlessly at his naked body. A sudden whoosh escaped her lips before she covered her face and ran. Rushing down the stairs, she came to an abrupt halt, feeling that things were the wrong way round. She thought, Isn’t that little bitch the one who should be ashamed? Why isn’t that bastard running away? I didn’t do a fucking thing wrong! Why am I the one fleeing?
With that thought, she let it fly, her voice crashing through the house with her wailing and weeping.
‘You bastard! You shameless hussy! What a cheap, rotten pair! Don’t you even give a fuck about our reputation?’
She raised her voice higher and higher, as if in hope that the whole neighbourhood would come to support her cause. And sure enough, no sooner had the cries of condemnation been raised than they all crawled out from their little holes, coming from all directions, like ants scurrying over a disturbed mound. They rushed madly to the scene, and gathered in a mass at the foot of the stairs.
II
‘You’d better disappear from this place for a while. I’ll handle your sister.’ The way he spoke, it seemed as if her brother-in-law already had his wife well under control.
‘And you? Don’t you need to slink off somewhere and hide?’ she asked bitterly.
‘Nah. You gotta start thinking about marriage. Me, I’m a guy. So it makes no difference to me. No big deal,’ he said, flippantly.
Xiaohong swallowed the words she wanted to say, thinking it best to keep her thoughts to herself.
The next day, she set out for the county guesthouse to see if she could get a job as a receptionist.
Upon arrival, she saw that the guesthouse was a three-storey building with plaster peeling off the outer walls. The road in front of it and the boundary walls were all of a uniform bare concrete, clearly neglected since the day they had been built. Xiaohong put what had happened in the village out of her mind, telling herself, It isn’t really incest when it’s with a brother-in-law. Men with their son’s wives, women with their husband’s brothers – it’s not like any of it is exactly rare. At first, she was afraid she would end up pregnant with her brother-in-law’s baby, but then her ‘Aunt Flo’ came right on schedule, signalling another turn in the cycle of life.
Amongst the staff at the guesthouse, Xiaohong’s curvaceous figure was as eye-catching as ever. She carried herself with a measure of pertness, her tail wagging as she walked like a bitch in heat. The sight of those swaying hips inspired a lustful admiration in a good many of the guesthouse’s male patrons, who would call the reception desk and try to strike up a little banter with her. She was gracious enough to entertain their atten
tions, giving the odd coquettish giggle as if someone had tickled her under the arm.
Once, Xiaohong was chatting away with a fellow from the northeastern region of China when he said, ‘Why don’t you pop in later and I’ll let you taste some special delicacies from the north?’
When her shift ended at midnight, she went to his room. He opened the door and, as she squeezed past him into the small quarters, he poked her in the side and said, ‘What a tiny waist!’ Tickled, she twisted away from him. Her two grand peaks pressed flat up against the wall, only to bounce back into the fullness of their proper shape when he had closed the door. There was a musty smell in the cramped room, which had yellowing walls and a grungy quilt thrown across the narrow bed. Beside it was a nightstand topped with an ashtray holding a single smouldering cigarette butt. White smoke rose up from it in a wispy trail. Xiaohong’s acquiescence to the handsome northern guy’s skilful exploration of her body seemed to fill him with an even larger measure of courage. Apparently having never seen such voluptuousness, he pressed his hand to her breast with great fervour, as if wanting to confirm that what he held was indeed the real thing. His hands moved over her body at a giddying pace. He needed both hands to do justice to a single breast, squeezing it like a balloon between his palms. As he entertained himself in this way, Xiaohong’s moans in response tickled his eardrums like the hum of a mosquito. Suddenly remembering something, she pulled back. With a flick of her eyelashes, she asked, ‘Where are those northern delicacies you promised?’
He leaned in close and murmured, ‘I’m right here.’
She smirked in response.
He boldly moved his hand to her lower parts, but again she pulled away.
‘You playing hard to get?’ he asked with a laugh.
‘It’s that time of the month,’ she replied. ‘I can’t do it.’
Shrugging in obvious disbelief, he said, ‘I’ll pay you.’
‘See for yourself,’ she said, crudely raising her skirt and lowering her underwear.
Seeing the spot of blood, the northern guy said, ‘Never mind that. I don’t care if things get a little messy. That should prove just how much I like you.’
She thought about her hometown and the taboos she’d inherited in regard to the female cycle: don’t look, don’t touch. Ignoring those rules, everyone back home said, would bring a person the worst sorts of misfortune. City folk were certainly different.
She turned her most charming smile on him and, noticing how pleasant-looking he was, said, ‘You look like a teacher.’
‘I am,’ he replied, ‘Secondary school.’
She bit her lower lip then asked, ‘You aren’t married?’
‘I am,’ he said again. ‘This is all because I’m married.’
Xiaohong didn’t see any logic to such a relationship.
‘It’s only after marriage that you can have an affair. Your mind can’t stray if you don’t already have a wife. But, I guess you wouldn’t understand,’ the northern guy said.
‘No, why would I?’ she retorted. ‘I’m going to clean up.’
She went into the washroom and freshened up, enjoying the cool of the water as it splashed against her skin. When she had finished, she still felt a bit uncertain about going any further with the northern man. In the end, persuaded by her own body, she went at it with gusto. Gasping, the man showed equal enthusiasm, flipping her body first one way, then the other, like a fish twitching back and forth at the end of a line.
When they were done, he asked, ‘How much?’
Dumbfounded, she replied, ‘Huh? How much what?’
The guy froze for a second, his surprise seemingly even greater than her own. ‘Why... money.’
‘For what?’ she asked.
‘For hooking!’ he answered.
About the Author
Sheng Keyi was born in Yiyang in Hunan Province, and later moved to Shenzhen and Beijing. She is the award-winning author of several collections of short stories and novels, which include Northern Girls, published by Penguin Random House, and Death Fugue. Northern Girls was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Sheng Keyi’s works have been translated into more than ten languages, including English, French and German.
Shelly Bryant is a poet, writer, and translator. She is the author of nine volumes of poetry, a pair of travel guides, a book on classical Chinese gardens, and a short story collection. She has translated more than twenty books from the Chinese. She has translated Sheng Keyi’s Northern Girls, and her translation of You Jin's In Time, Out of Place was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2016.
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This paperback edition is published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2018
Text copyright © Sheng Keyi, 2018
Translation copyright © Shelly Bryant, 2018
Originally published in Chinese as Ye Man Sheng Zhang by Beijing October Literature Publishing House.
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ISBN: 978-1-760-14485-2