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 the yard like a dove. “My god, where did you learn that? I’m no tiger, you know, and I won’t bite that thing off!” She nudged him with her foot. “Get up, it’s bath time!”
She led Jintong into the bathroom, where she turned on the light and pointed to a pink bathtub beneath a crystal fixture with a frosted bulb, bordered by tiled walls, a coffee-colored Italian commode, and a Japanese water heater. “I bought all this from scrap dealers. Half the people in Dalan are thieves these days. I don’t have running hot water, so I need to heat my own bath water.” She pointed to four water heaters arrayed around the tub. “I spend half my day soaking in the tub. I never took a single hot bath the first half of my life, so I’m making up for that now. But you’re worse off than I, son, and I don’t imagine the labor reform camp supplied hot water for baths.” While she talked, she reached out and turned on all four heaters, from which hot water gushed into the tub and steam quickly filled the room. Old Jin, pushed him in, but he shrieked and jumped back out. She pushed him in again. “Tough it out,” she said. “It’ll cool down in a minute.” So he gritted his teeth, as all the blood in his body seemed to rush to his head. He felt a prickly sensation all over. Neither truly painful nor totally numbing, it fell somewhere between agony and bliss. He went limp, his body slipping weakly under the water, as the four jets pummeled his skin with watery arrows. Through the steamy air he saw Old Jin slip out of her robe, climb in like a big white sow, and cover him with her soft, lustrous body. The steam was suddenly perfumed. Picking up a bar of fragrant bath soap, she washed his head, his face, and his body, which was quickly covered with a rich lather. He submitted weakly, and when her nipple brushed against his skin, he nearly died of ecstasy. The dirt and grime fell away as the two of them moved and shifted in the tub; his hair, his stubbly beard, were cleansed of filth. An ordinary man would have thrown his arms around her, but he just lay there and let her scrub and pinch him all over.
After they emerged from the bath, she flung the rags he’d worn home from the camp out the window and dressed him in clean underwear. Then she helped him into a Pierre Cardin suit she’d readied for the occasion. After completing the outfit with a tie, with which she struggled for a moment, she combed his hair, adding some Korean hair oil, trimmed his beard, and splashed on some cologne. She then led him over to the dressing mirror, where a tall, handsome, impressive-looking Chinese man in Western garb looked back at him. “My dear,” Old Jin exclaimed, “you look like a movie star!” He blushed and turned away. But he’d liked what he’d seen. It wasn’t the Shangguan Jintong who had survived on stolen eggs at the Flood Dragon River Farm, and it surely wasn’t the Shangguan Jintong who had tended livestock in a labor reform camp.