the shallow water of a pond, startling clouds of dark mosquitoes into the air, and from there straight back to her, stinging her mercilessly; a sticky sweat oozed from her pores, attracting even more mosquitoes. At some point she’d lost her earthenware jar and wire strainer; now she was running to escape the mosquito onslaught and screeching pitifully. As she was about to give up hope altogether, her God sent a savior in the person of the duck peddler.
With a palm rain cape over his shoulders and a conical rain hat on his head, he grabbed Mother and led her to a high spot in the field, where the reed plants weren’t nearly as dense, and into an awaiting tent. A metal pot hung from a rack over a fire outside; millet was cooking inside.
“Please, kindly brother,” Mother said as she fell to her knees in the tent, “help me find my way out of here. I am the wife of blacksmith Shangguan.”
“What’s your hurry?” the man said with a smile. “I don’t get many visitors out here, so at least allow me to play the host.”
A waterproof dog pelt covered the bed on a wooden platform. “You’ve got mosquito bites all over,” the man said as he blew on a smoldering wick of repellent made of mugwort. “Mosquitoes around here can bring down an ox, so it’s no wonder they did such a job on your fair skin.”
Fragrant wispy smoke from the mugwort filled the tent as he reached into a basket hanging from one of the supports and took out a little red metal box filled with orange salve, which he rubbed on the swelling bites on Mother’s face and arms. The coolness penetrated deeply. He then took out a piece of rock candy and forced it into her mouth. What was about to happen, given the remote setting in which a man and a woman were alone, was inevitable, Mother was certain of that. With tears in her eyes, she said, “Kindly brother, do with me what you will, but please lead me out of this place as soon as you can. There are nursing children waiting for me at home.”
Mother gave herself to the man without a struggle, feeling neither pain nor joy. Her only hope was that he would give her a son.
6
After Lingdi, my third sister, came Xiangdi, the daughter of a quack doctor.
He was a rail-thin, hawk-nosed, vulture-eyed young man who roamed the streets and byways ringing a brass bell and chanting, “My grandfather was a court physician, my father ran a pharmacy, but I am penniless and in deep sorrow, which is why I must wander to and fro with my bell.”
As she was returning home from the fields with a load of grass on her back, Mother spotted him using tweezers to remove little white “tooth worms” from the mouth of an old man. When she got home she told her mother-in- law, who was suffering from a toothache, what she had seen.
After summoning the physician to the house, Mother held the lantern while he poked at Shangguan Lu’s aching tooth. “Madam,” he said, “your problem is what we call ‘fire tooth,’ not tooth worms.” So he stuck some silver needles into Shangguan Lu’s hand and cheek, then reached behind him and removed some medicinal powder from a sack, blowing it into her mouth. That did it, the pain vanished.
His treatment finished, he asked to be put up for the night in the family’s eastern side room. The following morning, he offered them a silver dollar to let him use the room to treat patients. Since he had cured her toothache and was offering a shiny silver dollar, Grandmother was happy to accommodate him.
The man lived in the Shangguan household for three months, paying for his room and board on the first of each month. He was like a member of the family.
One day, Shangguan Lu asked if he had any sort of fertility drug. He did, writing out a prescription for Mother, which consisted of ten hen’s eggs fried in sesame oil and honey.
“I’d like to try some of that myself,” Shangguan Shouxi said.
One day Mother, who had developed a fondness for the mysterious physician, slipped into his quarters and revealed the fact that her husband was sterile.
“Those tooth worms,” he revealed to her, “were in my little metal box all along.”
Once he was sure that Mother was pregnant, it was time to be on his way. But before he left, not only did he hand Shangguan Lu all the money he’d earned treating patients at their house, but formally declared her to be his adoptive mother.
7
During dinner, Mother dropped a bowl and broke it. An explosion went off in her head, and she knew she was in for more misery.
Following the birth of my fourth sister, a pall settled over the Shangguan household. A permanent frown adorned my grandmother’s face, which had the hardened look of a sickle ready to lop off Mother’s head at the slightest provocation.
The age-old tradition of a lying-in month was abolished at the house. Before she even had time to clean up the mess between her legs after the birth of the baby, Mother heard the clang of tongs on the window frame and the voice of her mother-in-law: “You think you’ve made another contribution, don’t you? One fucking daughter after another, and you think you’ve earned the right to have your mother-in-law wait on you hand and foot! Is this the sort of training you got at the house of Big Paw Yu? You’re supposed to be the daughter-in-law of this family, but you act like you’re the mother-in-law. Maybe I disturbed some heavenly order by slaughtering an old ox in a previous life, and this is my retribution. I must have been out of my mind, blind as a bat, to find a woman like you to marry my son!” She banged the tongs against the window again. “I’m talking to you! Are you playing deaf or dumb or what? You haven’t heard a word I said!” “I heard you,” Mother sobbed. “Then what are you waiting for? Your father-in-law and your husband are out threshing grain, and I’ve swapped a broom for a hoe, so damned busy I wish I could be in four places at once. But you, like a pampered princess, lie there in luxurious comfort. Now, if you could bring a son into this family, I would personally wash your feet in a gold basin!”
So Mother got out of bed, put on a pair of trousers, and wrapped her head in a filthy scarf; casting a longing glance at her baby, still covered with blood and muck, she dried her eyes with her sleeve and walked out into the yard on rubbery legs, putting up with the shooting pains the best she could. The glare of the midsummer sun nearly blinded her as she scooped up a ladleful of water from the vat and gulped it down. Why can’t I just die? she was thinking. Living like this is sheer torture. I could end it myself! But then she saw her mother-in-law was pinching Laidi on the leg with her tongs, while Zhaodi and Lingdi huddled fearfully in a pile of straw, not making a sound and wishing they could hide their little bodies by burrowing out of sight. Laidi howled like a pig being slaughtered and rolled around on the ground. “I’ll give you something to cry about!” Shangguan Lu growled as she pinched the girl’s legs over and over, putting her years of practice and strength as a blacksmith to work.
Mother ran up and grabbed her mother-in-law’s arm. “Mother,” she pleaded, “let her go. She’s just a child, she doesn’t know anything.” She knelt weakly in front of her mother-in-law. “If you must pinch someone, pinch me…” Flinging her tongs to the ground in an explosion of anger, her mother-in-law paused for a second before pounding her own chest and crying, “My god, this woman will be the death of me!”
Mother had no sooner dragged herself out to the field than Shangguan Shouxi hit her with a rake. “What took you so long, you lazy ass? Thanks to you, I’m about to die from all this work!” She fell to the ground in a seated position, and heard her husband, who had been baked in the sun until he looked like a bird roasted on a spit, yell hoarsely, “Quit faking. Get up and rake some of this grain!” He threw the rake down in front of her and wove his way over to a locust tree to cool off.
With both hands on the ground, Mother managed to get to her feet, but when she bent over to pick up the rake, she nearly passed out. She propped herself up with the rake, as the blue sky and yellow earth whirled like gigantic wheels, wanting to topple her dizzily back to the ground. Somehow she managed to remain upright, in spite of the tearing pains in her belly and the excruciating contractions in her womb. Chilled, nauseating fluids kept leaking from between her legs, soiling her thighs.
The sun’s diabolical rays burned their way across the land like white-hot flames; stalks of grain and the tassels
