“But she’s a married woman…” Jintong’s face had grown pale.
Mother threw down a challenge, her voice quaking with madness. “If you don’t show a little spunk, you’re no son of mine. Go see her. I don’t need a son who refuses to grow up. What I want is someone like Sima Ku or Birdman Han, a son who’s not afraid to cause me some trouble, if that’s what has to be done. I want a man who stands up to piss!”
3
With newfound valor, he crossed the Black Water River, as Mother had told him to, and went to see Old Jin. With Mother’s help, this was to be the start of his life as a real man. But as he set out on the road to the newly created city, his courage left him like a tire with a slow leak. The high-rises, with mosaic inlays on the sides, were impressive in the sunlight, while at a number of work sites, the yellow arms of cranes swung massive prefabricated forms into place. Insistent jackhammers thudded against his eardrums, arc welders on steel girders near the sandy ridge lit up the sky more brightly than the sun. White smoke curled around a tower, and his eyes began to wander. Mother had given him directions to Old Jin’s recycling station, which was near the bay where Sima Ku had been shot all those years ago. Some of the buildings alongside the wide asphalt street had been finished, others were in the process of going up. No sign remained of the Sima family compound. The Great China Pharmaceutical Company was gone. Several large excavators were digging deep trenches in the ground. Where the church had once stood, a bright yellow, seven-story high-rise towered over its surroundings like a golden-toothed member of the nouveau riche. Red characters, each the size of an adult sheep, proclaimed in glittering fashion the power and prestige of the Dalan Branch Office of the China Bank of Industry and Commerce.
Old Jin’s recycling station was spread out over a large area, behind a plaster board fence. The scrap was separated by type: empty bottles formed a great wall that dazzled the eyes, a mountainous prism of broken glass; old tires were stacked in heaps; a mound of old plastic rose higher than a rooftop; smack in the middle of discarded metal stood a howitzer minus its wheels. Dozens of workmen, towels covering the lower half of their faces, were scampering all over the place like ants. Some were lugging tires, others were doing the sorting, while still others were loading or unloading trucks. A black wolfhound was tied to the base of a wall with the chain from an old waterwheel, still wrapped in red plastic. It appeared far more ferocious than the mongrels at the labor reform camp; its fur looked as if waxed. Lying on the ground in front of the dog were a whole roasted chicken and a half eaten pig’s foot. The watchman had a mass of unruly hair, rheumy eyes, and a deeply wrinkled face; on closer examination, he looked like the militia leader of the original Dalan Commune. A large furnace stood in the yard for melting plastic. Strange-smelling black smoke was belching out of a squat sheet-metal chimney; dust skittered along the ground. A group of scrap vendors was gathered around a large scale, arguing with the old man in charge of the scale. Jintong recognized him as Luan Ping, a salesclerk at the old Dalan Co-op. A white-haired old man rode into the station on a three-wheeled cart; it was Liu Daguan, onetime head of the local branch of the Post and Telecommunications Bureau. Once known for the way he strutted around, he was now in charge of Old Jin’s workers’ dining hall. Feeling his nerve slipping away, Jintong stood in the yard looking helpless. But a window in the simple two-story building in front of him was pushed open, and there stood the capitalist, single-breasted Old Jin in a pink bathrobe, holding her hair in one hand and waving to him with the other. “Adoptive son,” he heard her shout brazenly, “come on up!”
It seemed to him as if everyone in the yard turned to watch him walk toward the building, head down, their stares making every step an awkward one. What about my arms? Should I cross them? Let them hang straight down? Stick them in my pockets, maybe, or clasp them behind my back? Finally, he decided to let them hang at his sides, shoulders hunched, and walk the way he’d been trained during his fifteen years at the camp, like a whipped dog, slinking along with its tail between its legs, head bowed but always looking from side to side, moving as rapidly as possible alongside a wall, like a thief. When Jintong reached the bottom of the stairs, Old Jin shouted from the second floor, “Liu Daguan, my adoptive son’s here. Put on a couple more dishes.” Out in the yard, someone – he didn’t know who – sang a nasty little ditty: “If a child wants to grow up strong, he needs twenty-four wanton adoptive mothers…”
As he climbed the wooden staircase, the heavy aroma of perfume floated down to him. He looked up timidly and saw Old Jin standing at the top of the stairs, her legs spread, a mocking smile on her powdered face. He stopped and clenched the metal banister with his sweaty palm.
“Come on up, adoptive son,” she welcomed him, her mocking smile now gone.
He forced himself to keep going, until a soft hand gripped his wrist. In the dark hallway it felt as if the odor of her body were dragging him along to a den of seduction, a brightly lit, carpeted room where the walls were papered; colorful balls made of paper hung from the ceiling. In the center of the room stood a desk, on which a fountain-pen holder rested. “That’s all for show. I don’t read or write much.”
Jintong stood rooted to the floor, unwilling to look her in the eye. All of a sudden, she laughed and said, “I can’t believe this is happening. This has to be an all-time first.”
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
