Big Breasts & Wide Hips

Clapping her hands to loosen the dirt, Shangguan Lu muttered softly, “My good daughter-in-law, try your best! If this one’s a girl, too, I’d be a fool to keep defending you.”

Tears trickled from Shangguan Lu’s eyes as she bit down on her lip; holding up her sagging belly, she climbed back onto the dirt-covered kang.

“You’ve been down this road before,” Shangguan Lu said as she laid a roll of white cotton and a pair of scissors on the kang. “Go ahead and have your baby.” Then, with an impatient frown, she said, “Your father-in-law and Laidi’s daddy are in the barn tending to the black donkey. This will be her first foal, so I should be out there giving them a hand.”

Shangguan Lu nodded. Another explosion flew in on the wind, setting off a round of barking by frightened dogs. Sima Ting’s booming voice came in fits: “Fellow townsmen, flee for your lives, don’t wait another minute…” She felt the baby inside her kick, as if in response to Sima Ting’s shouts, the stabbing pains forcing drops of rancid sweat out of every pore in her body. She clenched her teeth to keep the scream inside her from bursting out. Through the mist of tears she saw the lush black hair of her mother-in-law as she knelt at the altar and placed three sandalwood joss sticks in Guanyin’s burner. Fragrant smoke curled up and quickly filled the room.

“Merciful Bodhisattva Guanyin, who succors the downtrodden and the distressed, protect and take pity on me, deliver a son to this family…” Pressing down on her arched, swollen belly with both hands, cold to the touch, Shangguan Lu gazed up at the enigmatic, glossy face of the ceramic Guanyin in her altar, and said a silent prayer as fresh tears began to flow. Removing her wet trousers and rolling up the shirt to expose her belly and her breasts, she gripped the edge of the kang. In between contractions she ran her fingers through her matted hair and leaned against the rolled-up grass mat and millet stalks.

The chipped quicksilver surface of a mirror in the window lattice reflected her profile: sweat-soaked hair, long, slanted, lusterless eyes, a pale high-bridged nose, and full but chapped lips that never stopped quaking. Moisture- laden sunbeams streamed in through the window and fell on her belly. Its twisting, swollen blue veins and white, pitted skin looked hideous to her; mixed feelings, dark and light, like the clear blue of a summer sky in Northeast Gaomi with dark rain clouds rolling past, gripped her. She could hardly bear to look at that enormous, strangely taut belly.

She had once dreamed that her fetus was actually a chunk of cold steel. Another time she’d dreamed that it was a large, warty toad. She could bear the thought of a chunk of steel, but the image of the toad made her shudder. “Lord in Heaven, protect me… Worthy Ancestors, protect me… gods and demons everywhere, protect me, spare me, let me deliver a healthy baby boy… my very own son, come to Mother… Father of Heaven, Mother of Earth, yellow spirits and fox fairies, help me, please…” And so she prayed and pleaded, assaulted by wrenching contractions. As she clung to the mat beneath her, her muscles twitched and jumped, her eyes bulged. Mixed in with the wash of red light were white-hot threads that twisted and curled and shrank in front of her like silver melting in a furnace. In the end, willpower alone could not keep the scream from bursting through her lips; it flew through the window lattice and bounced up and down the streets and byways, where it met Sima Ting’s shout and entwined with it, a braid of sound that snaked through the hairy ears of the tall, husky, stooped-over Swedish pastor Malory, with his large head and scraggly red hair. He stopped on his way up the rotting boards of the steeple stairs. His deep blue ovine eyes, always moist and teary, and capable of moving you to the depths of your soul, suddenly emitted dancing sparks of startled glee. Crossing himself with his pudgy red fingers, he uttered in a thick Gaomi accent: “Almighty God…” He began climbing again, and when he reached the top, he rang a rusty bronze bell. The desolate sound spread through the mist-enshrouded, rosy dawn.

At the precise moment when the first peal of the bell rang out, and the shouted warning of a Jap attack hung in the air, a flood of amniotic fluid gushed from between the legs of Shangguan Lu. The muttony smell of a milk goat rose in the air, as did the sometimes pungent, sometimes subtle aroma of locust blossoms. The scene of making love with Pastor Malory beneath the locust tree last year flashed before her eyes with remarkable clarity, but before she gained any pleasure from the recollection, her mother-in-law ran into the room with blood-spattered hands, throwing fear into her, as she saw green sparks dancing off those hands.

“Has the baby come yet?” her mother-in-law asked, nearly shouting.

She shook her head, feeling ashamed.

Her mother-in-law’s head quaked brilliantly in the sunlight, and she noted with amazement that the older woman’s hair had turned gray.

“I thought you’d have had it by now.” Shangguan Lu reached out to touch her belly. Those hands – large knuckles, hard nails, rough skin, covered with blood – made her cringe; but she lacked the strength to move away from them as they settled unceremoniously onto her swollen belly, making her heart skip a beat and sending an icy current racing through her guts. Screams emerged unchecked, from terror, not pain. The hands probed and pressed and, finally, thumped, like testing a melon for ripeness. At last, they fell away and hung in the sun’s rays, heavy, despondent, as if she’d come away with an unripe melon. Her mother-in-law floated ethereally before her eyes, except for those hands, which were solid, awesome, autonomous, free to roam where they pleased. Her mother-in- law’s voice seemed to come from far away, from the depths of a pond, carried on the stench of mud and the bubbles of a crab: “… a melon falls to the ground when it’s time, and nothing will stop it… you have to tough it out, za-za hu-hu… want people to mock you? Doesn’t it bother you that your seven precious daughters will laugh at you…” She watched one of those hands descend weakly and, disgustingly, thump her belly again, producing soft hollow thuds, like a wet goatskin drum. “All you young women are spoiled. When your husband came into this world, I was sewing shoe soles the whole time…”

Finally, the thumping stopped and the hand pulled back into the shadows, where its hazy outline looked like the claws of a wild beast. Her mother-in-law’s voice glimmered in the darkness, the redolence of locust flowers wafted over. “Look at that belly, it’s huge, and it’s covered with strange markings. It must be a boy. That’s your good fortune, and mine, and the whole Shangguan family, for that matter. Bodhisattva, be here with her, Lord in Heaven, come to her side. Without a son, you’ll be no better than a slave as long as you live, but with one, you’ll be the mistress. Believe me or not, it’s up to you. Actually, it isn’t…”

“I believe, Mother, I believe you!” Shangguan Lu said reverently. Her gaze fell on the dark stains on the wall, grief filling her heart as memories of what had happened three years before surfaced. She had just delivered her seventh daughter, Shangguan Qiudi, driving her husband, Shangguan Shouxi, into such a blind rage that he’d flung a hammer at her, hitting her squarely in the head and staining the wall with her blood.

Her mother-in-law laid a basket upside down next to her. Her voice burned through the darkness like the flames of a wildfire: “Say this, ‘The child in my belly is a princely little boy’ Say it!” The basket was filled with peanuts. The woman’s face was suffused with a somber kindness; she was part deity, part loving parent, and Shangguan Lu was moved to tears.

“The child I’m carrying is a princely little boy. I’m carrying a prince… my own son…”

Her mother-in-law thrust some peanuts into her hand and told her to say, “Peanuts peanuts peanuts, boys and girls, the balance of yin and yang.”

Gratefully wrapping her hand around the peanuts, she repeated the mantra: “Peanuts peanuts peanuts, boys and girls, the balance of yin and yang.”

Shangguan Lu bent down, her tears falling unchecked. “Bodhi-sattva, be with her, Lord in Heaven, come to her side. Great joy will soon befall the Shangguan family! Laidi’s mother, lie here and shuck peanuts until it’s time. Our donkey’s about to foal. It’s her first, so I cannot stay with you.”

“You go on, Mother,” Shangguan Lu said emotionally. “Lord in Heaven, keep the Shangguan family’s black donkey safe, let her foal without incident…”

With a sigh, Shangguan Lu reeled out the door.

3

The dim light of a filthy bean-oil lamp on a millstone in the barn flickered uneasily, wisps of black smoke curling from the tip of its flame. The smell of lamp oil merged with the stink of donkey droppings and urine. The air was foul. The black animal lay on the ground between the millstone and a dark green stone trough. All Shangguan Lu could see when she walked in was the flickering light of the lamp, but she heard the anxious voice of Shangguan Fulu: “What did she have?”