up, puzzled and a bit put out. Mother patted me on the head and smiled apologetically. “Jintong,” she said, “you’re seven years old, almost a grown man. It’s time to stop the breast-feeding.” Before the echo of her words had died out, I heard a peal of crisp, bell-like laughter from Eighth Sister, Shangguan Yunii.
A curtain of darkness lowered before my eyes. I looked heavenward just before I fell to the floor. Suddenly forlorn, I noticed that Mother’s breasts, their nipples covered with a peppery coating, looked like a pair of red-eyed doves arching into the sky. In order to wean me, Mother had tried smearing her nipples with the juice of raw ginger, liquified garlic, smelly fish oil, even a bit of rancid chicken droppings. This time she’d used pepper oil. Each time she’d tried to wean me in the past, she’d relented when I fell to the floor as if struck dead. This time I lay on the floor, waiting for her to go in and wash her nipples, as she always had in the past. Scenes from the scary dream I’d had during the night unfolded before my eyes: Mother had sliced off one of her breasts and tossed it to the floor. “Go ahead, suck it!” she’d said. “Suck it!” A black cat had run up, snatched it in its mouth, and run off with it.
Mother picked me up off the floor and sat me down hard next to the dining table. She wore a grave expression. “Say what you like, but this time I’m going to wean you!” she said firmly. “Do you plan to suck until you reduce me to a piece of dry kindling, is that it, Jintong?”
The young Sima, Sha Zaohua, and my eighth sister, Yunii, were sitting around the table eating noodles. They turned toward me with looks of scorn. Shangguan Lu was sitting on a pile of cinders beside the stove, sneering at me. Her windblown skin was like coarse, flaky toilet paper. Young Sima lifted a long, squirmy noodle out of the bowl with his chopsticks and held it up in the air, trying to dazzle me. Then, like a worm, the noodle squirmed into his mouth – disgusting!
Mother put a bowl of steaming noodles down on the table and handed me a pair of chopsticks. “Here, eat,” she said. “Try some noodles your sixth sister made.”
Sixth Sister, who was feeding Shangguan Lu beside the stove, turned and gave me a hostile look. “Still breast- feeding,” she said, “at your age. You’re hopeless!”
I flung the bowl of noodles at her.
She jumped up, covered with squirmy noodles. “Mother,” she growled, “see how you’ve spoiled him!” Mother smacked the back of my head.
I ran over and threw myself against Sixth Sister, clawing at her breasts. I could hear them cry out in protest, like baby chicks being bitten by rats. She doubled over in pain, but I held on for dear life. Her long, thin face turned yellow. “Mother,” she cried out, “look at him, Mother!”
Mother attacked my head. “You swine!” she cursed. “You dirty little swine!”
I lost consciousness.
When I came to, I had a splitting headache. Young Sima was still playing with his noodles, unconcerned about what was going on around him. Sha Zaohua looked up from behind her bowl, noodles stuck to her face, and gazed timidly at me. But I couldn’t help feeling that there was respect in her eyes. Sixth Sister, her breasts hurting, sat in the doorway weeping. Shangguan Lu was staring malignantly at me. My mother, seemingly ready to burst from anger, was studying the mess of noodles on the floor. “You little bastard! You think these noodles come easy?” She scooped up a handful of the noodles – no, what she scooped up was a nest of squirmy worms – then pinched my nose shut, forcing me to open my mouth, and crammed the worms inside. “Eat those, every last one of them! You’ve sucked the marrow out of my bones, you little monster!” I threw it all up, broke free from her grasp, and ran out into the yard.
Shangguan Laidi was out there, still wearing the ill-fitting black coat she hadn’t taken off in four years, bent at the waist as she honed the edge of a knife on a whetting stone. She flashed me a friendly smile. But then her expression changed. “This time I’ll kill him for sure,” she said, grinding her teeth. “His time has come. I’ve got this knife sharper than the north wind, and cooler, and I’m going to make sure he understands that murderers pay with their lives.”
I was in no mood to pay her any attention, since everyone assumed she’d gone off her rocker. But I knew she was just faking madness, I just didn’t know why. That time in the west wing, where she was staying, she sat high up on top of the millstone, her legs, covered by the black robe, hanging straight down. She told me what it was like being part of Sha Yueliang’s marauding band, how she’d lived like royalty, and all the strange and wonderful things she’d seen. She’d owned a box that could sing and a glass that could bring distant objects right up under her nose. At the time I thought that was all crazy talk, but it wasn’t long before I saw one of those boxes that could sing. Shangguan Pandi had brought one home with her. During her stay with the demolition battalion, she’d lived a life of ease and comfort, and had gotten fat in the process, like a pregnant mare. She carefully placed the object, with its brass morning glory, on the
“Mrs. Sha,” Fifth Sister said sarcastically, “you needn’t show off around us. You’re a damned slut!” she added said hatefully. “They should have had you shot, and would have if not for me.”
“I could have killed him, and would have if you hadn’t stopped me!” First Sister said. “I want you all to look at her. Does she look like some young virgin to you? That Jiang fellow nibbled on those big breasts of hers until they looked like a pair of dried turnips.”
“Dogshit turncoat! Female turncoat!” Instinctively, Fifth Sister protected her sagging breasts with her arms, as she kept the curses coming: “Stinking wife of a dogshit turncoat!”
“Get out of here, both of you!” Mother said, spitting mad. “Go out and die somewhere, and don’t let me see you again!”
The episode instilled in me respect for Shangguan Laidi. She was relaxing in the donkey trough, which had been lined with straw, and said to me in a friendly voice, “You little idiot!” “I’m no idiot!” I defended myself. “But I think you are.” She abruptly lifted up her black coat, raised her legs high, and said in a muffled voice, “Look here!”
A ray of sunlight lit up her thighs, her belly, and her breasts, like a sow’s teats.
“Come here.” I saw a smile on her face at the far end of the trough. “Come here and suckle on me. Mother let my daughter suckle on her, so I’ll let you suckle on me, and that way no one owes anyone anything.”
I nervously walked up to the trough, where she was now arched like a leaping carp. She reached out and grabbed my shoulders and covered my head with the lower half of her black coat. My world turned dark. And in that darkness I began to grope, curious and tense, mysterious and enthralling. “Here, over here.” Her voice sounded far away. “Little idiot.” She stuffed one of her nipples into my mouth. “Start sucking, you little whelp. You’re not a true Shangguan. You’re a little hybrid bastard.” The bitter-tasting dirt on her nipple melted in my mouth. Her underarm sweat nearly smothered me. I felt I was suffocating, but she held my head in her hands and pushed her body up against mine, as if trying to cram every last bit of her large, hard breast into my mouth. When I reached the point where I could no longer stand it, I bit down on her nipple. Jumping to her feet, she sent me sliding down her body and out from under the coat, to lie huddled at her feet, waiting for the kick I knew was coming. Tears coursed down her dark, gaunt cheeks. Her breasts heaved beneath the black coat, and brought forth gorgeous feathers, until they looked like a pair of birds that had just mated.
Regretting what I’d done, I reached out to touch the back of her hand with my finger. She lifted her hand and rubbed it against my neck. “Good little brother,” she said softly, “don’t tell anybody what happened today.”
I nodded, and meant it.
“I’m going to share a secret with you,” she said. “My husband came to me in a dream and said he’s not dead. His soul has attached itself to the body of a blond, light-skinned man.”
My imagination ran wild over my secret encounter with Laidi as I walked down the lane, where a squad of five demolition soldiers had run out like madmen. A veil of ecstasy covered their faces. One of them, a fat man, shoved me. “Hey, little fellow, the Jap devils have surrendered! Run on home and tell your mother that Japan has surrendered. The War of Resistance is over!”
Out on the street I saw crowds of soldiers whooping and hollering and jumping around, a group of puzzled civilians among them. It was 1945; the Jap devils had surrendered, and I had been denied the breast. Laidi had given me hers, but she’d had no milk, and her nipple had been covered by a layer of cold, odorific grime; just
