Big Breasts & Wide Hips

were fair and plump, the palms nicely dimpled. He walked up to Mother and struck his gong with all his might. A gravelly klong wah-wah-wah-wah emerged from the cracked gong. Mother swallowed a sob, straightened her neck, and held her breath for at least a full minute. “What a tragedy!” Sima Ting said with an exaggerated sigh. Desperate grief was written on his lips, in the corners of his mouth, on his cheeks, even on his earlobes. And yet, despite the obvious sense of righteous indignation, there was an unmistakable hint of a smirk hidden in the space between his nose and eyes, a look of furtive glee. He walked up to the rigid body of Shangguan Fulu and stood woodenly beside it for a moment. Then he went over to the headless body of Shangguan Shouxi, where he bent down and looked into the dead eyes of the severed head, as if wanting to establish an emotional link. Saliva dribbled from the corner of his mouth. In contrast to the peaceful expression on Shangguan Shouxi’s face, Sima looked somewhat stupid, and savage. “You people wouldn’t listen to me, why wouldn’t you listen to me?…” He was scolding the dead men in a low voice, talking to himself. He walked back up to Mother: “Shouxi’s wife, I’ll get someone to take them away. In this weather… well, you see.” He looked heavenward, and so did Mother. The sky was an oppressive leaden gray, and off to the east, the sunrise, blood red, was being beaten back by dark clouds. Our stone lions were damp. “The rain, it’s coming. If we don’t carry them away, once it starts raining, and then the sun comes out, you can imagine what it will do to them.” Mother held my sister and me in her arms and knelt in front of Sima Ting. “Steward,” she said, “I am a widow with a brood of orphaned children, so we will have to rely on you from now on. Children, come bow to your uncle.” All my older sisters knelt in front of Sima Ting, who hit the gong – bong bong-with all his might. “Fuck his ancestors!” he cursed, as tears streamed down his face. “It’s all the fault of that bastard Sha Yueliang. His ambush infuriated the Japanese, who went on a murderous rampage against us common people. Get up, girls, all of you, and stop crying. Yours is not the only family that has suffered. Just my luck that the county head put me in charge of this town. He fled for his life, but I’m still here. Fuck his ancestors! Hey there, Gou San, Yao Si, quit your dawdling. Are you waiting for me to send a sedan chair for you?”

Gou San and Yao Si came running into the yard bent at the waist, followed by some of the town idlers. They were Sima Ting’s errand boys, his honor guard and his followers, his prestige and his authority, the means by which he carried out his duties. Yao Si held a notebook with a ragged-edged straw-paper cover under his arm and had a pencil stuck behind his ear. Gou San strained to roll Shangguan Fulu over, so he could look up into the red morning clouds. He sang out: “Shangguan Fulu – head crushed in – head of the family.” Yao Si wetted a finger, opened the household registration notebook, and thumbed his way through it until he found the Shangguan page. Then he took the pencil from behind his ear, knelt on one knee, and rested his notebook on the other; after touching the tip of his pencil to his tongue, he struck out Shangguan Fulu’s name. “Shangguan Shouxi” – Gou San’s voice suddenly lost its crispness – “head separated from body.” A wail tore from Mother’s throat. Sima Ting turned to Yao Si: “Go ahead, record it, you hear me?” Yao Si drew a small circle over Shangguan Shouxi’s name, without listing the cause of death. Sima Ting raised the mallet in his hand and thumped Yao Si in the head. “Your mother’s legs! How dare you cut corners with the dead, thinking you can take advantage of me because I can’t read, is that it?” With a drawn look on his face, Yao Si pleaded: “Don’t hit me, old master. It’s all right up here.” He pointed to his head. “I’ll not forget any of it, not in a thousand years.” Sima Ting glared at him. “And what makes you think you’ll live that long? A thousand years, you must be some sort of turtle spawn.” “Old master, it was only a figure of speech. Why start a fight?” “Who’s starting a fight?” Sima Ting thumped him on the head again. “Shangguan” – Gou San, who was standing in front of Shangguan Lu, turned to Mother and asked, “What was your mother-in-law’s maiden name?” Mother shook her head. Yao Si tapped the notebook with the tip of his pencil and said, “It was Lu.” “Shangguan nee Lu,” Gou San shouted as he bent down to look at the corpse. “That’s strange, there are no wounds,” he muttered, turning Shangguan Lu’s gray head this way and that. A thin moan escaped from between her lips, straightening Gou San up in a hurry. He backed off, gaping in astonishment and stammering, “She’s come back… back to life.” Shangguan Lu opened her eyes slowly, like a newborn baby, glazed and lacking focus. Mother shouted, “Ma!” She handed me and my eighth sister to two of the older girls and ran up to her mother-in-law, stopping abruptly when she noticed that the old woman’s eyes had settled on me as I lay in First Sister’s arms. “Everyone,” Sima Ting said, “the old woman has returned briefly from death to see the child. Is it a boy?” The gaze in Shangguan Lu’s eyes made me squirm, and I began to cry. “Let her look at her grandchild,” Sima Ting said, “so she can leave us in peace.” Mother took me from First Sister, got down on her knees, and shuffled up to the old woman, where she held me up close to her. “Ma,” she said tearfully, “I had no choice”… A light flashed into Shangguan Lu’s eyes when her gaze alit on that spot between my legs. A rumble emerged from her abdomen, followed by a rank odor. “That’s it,” Sima Ting said, “this time she’s really gone.” Mother stood up with me in her arms and, in front of a crowd of men, opened her blouse and stuffed a nipple into my mouth. With my face nestled against her heavy breast, I stopped crying. Sima Ting announced, “Shangguan nee Lu, wife of Shangguan Fulu, mother of Shangguan Shouxi, has died of a broken heart over the deaths of her husband and her son. All right, take her away!”

The corpse detail walked up to Shangguan Lu with metal hooks, but before they could place them under her, she stood up slowly, like an ancient tortoise. With the sun shining down, her puffy face looked like a lemon, or a New Year’s cake. She had a sneer on her face as she sat with her back against the wall, like a miniature mountain.

“Elder sister-in-law,” Sima Ting said, “you have a tight grip on life.”

Covering their mouths with towels sprayed with sorghum liquor to ward off the smell of rotting corpses, the town head’s followers carried up a door plank on which the remnants of a New Year’s couplet could nearly be made out. After laying the plank on the ground, four town idlers – now designated as the official town corpse detail – quickly picked Shangguan Fulu up by his arms and legs and laid him out on the plank. Then two of them carried the plank out the gate. One of Shangguan Fulu’s rigid arms hung off the side of the plank and swung like a pendulum. “Drag the old lady away from the gate!” one of the idlers shouted. Two men rushed over. “It’s old Aunty Sun. How could she have died there?” someone in the lane wondered aloud. “Put her on the cart.” The lane was buzzing with comments.

The door plank was laid out beside Shangguan Shouxi, who lay in the position in which he died. Transparent bubbles floated skyward from his mouth, opened in his screams to the heavens, as if a crab were hidden inside. The corpse detail hesitated, not sure what to do. “Oh, hell,” one of them said, “let’s get on with it.” He picked up his metal hook, but was stopped short by Mother’s shout: “Don’t use hooks on him!” She handed me to Shangguan Laidi, then, with a loud wail, threw herself on the headless corpse of her husband. She reached out to drag the head over, but drew her hand back when it touched flesh. “Let it go, sister-in-law!” one of the idlers said, his voice muffled by the towel covering it. “That head cannot be reattached. Go take a look in the cart out there. All that’s left of some of those bodies is a leg, after the dogs got to them. He could be in worse shape. Step aside, you girls. Turn your heads and don’t look.” He wrapped his arms around Mother and half-carried, half-pushed her to one side, along with my sisters. “Close your eyes, all of you!” he warned us once more.

By the time Mother and my sisters opened their eyes again, all the bodies had been removed from the yard.

We fell in behind the horse cart, piled high with corpses, dust rising in its wake. There were three horses, like the ones my sister Laidi saw that other morning: one apricot yellow, one date red, and one leek green. But now they plodded on dejectedly, their heads drooping, their coats dull. The apricot yellow lead horse had a gimp leg, and thrust its neck out with each step. The driver dragged his whip along the ground, his free hand resting on the shaft. The sides of his hair were black, the middle completely white, like a titmouse. A dozen or more dogs on the sides of the road stared hungrily at the corpses on the cart. A procession of survivors followed the cart, all but hidden in the dust; we in turn were followed by our town head, Sima Ting, and his underlings, led by Gou San and Yao Si. Some had hoes over their shoulders, others carried metal hooks; one man shouldered a bamboo pole with strips of red cloth tied to the end. Sima Ting was still holding his gong, which he struck every few dozen steps. And with every clang, the families of the deceased wailed. But they seemed reluctant to cry, and no sooner had the sound of the gong trailed off than the crying stopped. Rather than grieve for their family members, it appeared, they were carrying out duties given them by the town head.

And so it went, us following the horse cart, crying from time to time, past the church, with its collapsed bell tower, and the flour mill where Sima Ting and his younger brother, Sima Ku, had harnessed the wind five years earlier. A dozen or more rickety windmills still rose above the mill, creaking in the wind. On the right, we passed the site of a company created twenty years before by a Japanese businessman to grow American cotton. Then we passed the podium on the drying floor of the Sima compound where Niu Tengxiao, Gaomi’s county magistrate, had gotten the women to unbind their feet. Finally, the cart turned left, following the Black Water River, and drove into a