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 Lü 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 that topped them happily gave up the last remaining moisture in the form of evaporation. Bearing up as best she could with the pain racking her body, Mother turned over the tassels on the threshing floor to speed up the drying process. She was reminded of what her mother-in-law had said: There’s water on the hoe, but fire on the rake.
An emerald green locust that had ridden a tassel to the threshing floor spread its pink wings and flew onto Mother’s hand. She noticed the delicate little insect’s jadelike compound eyes, then saw that half of its abdomen had been lost to the sickle. And yet it lived on and could still fly. Mother found that indomitable will to live extremely moving. She shook her wrist to get the locust to fly away, but it stayed where it was, and Mother sighed over the sensation of the tiny insect’s feet resting on her skin. That reminded her of the time her second daughter, Zhaodi, was conceived, in her aunt’s tent in the melon field, where breezes from the Black Water River cooled purple melons as they grew amid the silver leaves of vines. Laidi was still nursing at the time. Hordes of locusts, with pink wings just like this one, raised a din all around the melon shelter. Her uncle, Big Paw Yu, knelt in front of her, pounding his own head. “Your aunt tricked me into this,” he said, “and I’ve not been able to live with myself since. I’ve given up the right to call myself a man. Xuan’er, take that knife and put me out of my misery.” He pointed to a gleaming melon knife on a shelf, as tears sluiced down his cheeks. Mother experienced a welter of emotions. She reached out to stroke the man’s bald head. “Uncle,” she said, “I don’t blame you a bit. It’s them, they drove me to this.” At that point, her voice turned shrill and she pointed to the melons on the ground outside the tent, as if they were people. “Listen to me! Go ahead, laugh! Uncle, life is full of twists and turns. I did my best to remain chaste and upright, and how was I rewarded? I was yelled at, beaten, and sent back to my childhood home. So what must I do to gain their respect? Get pregnant by other men! Sooner or later, Uncle, my boat is going to capsize, if not here, then somewhere else.” A wry smile twisted her mouth. “What is it they say, Uncle – Do not fertilize other people’s fields?” Her uncle stood up anxiously. She reached out, unladylike, and jerked his pants down.
Father and son rested in the cool shade near the Shangguan threshing ground; the family dog was sprawled out at the base of the crumbling wall, its pink tongue lolling to the side as the animal panted from the oppressive heat. Mother’s body was covered with rancid-smelling, sticky sweat. Her throat was on fire, her head ached, she was nauseous, and the veins on her forehead throbbed so violently they seemed about to burst. The lower half of her body felt as if it were cotton packed in a tub. Thoroughly prepared to die there on the threshing ground, she summoned up an astonishing amount of strength to keep working. Golden flashes of light on the floor made the tassels seem to come alive, like schools of tiny goldfish, or millions of squirming snakes. As she turned over the grain, Mother experienced a sense of tragic sorrow. Heaven, open your eyes and look around! All you neighbors, open your eyes and look around. Feast your eyes on this member of the Shangguan family, working on a threshing floor with the sun blazing overhead, after just giving birth, the blood not even dry on my legs. And what about my husband and father-in-law? Those two little men are resting in the shade. Pore over three thousand years of imperial history, and you’ll not find more bitter suffering! Finally, as tears slid down her cheeks, she passed out, overcome by the heat and her own emotions.
When she came to, she was lying in the thin shade at the foot of the crumbling wall, covered with mud that attracted swarms of flies, thrown there like a dead dog. The family mule was standing at the edge of the threshing floor, near Shangguan Lü, who was just then whipping her lazy husband and son. Covering their heads with their arms, those two little darlings filled the air with screeches as they tried, unsuccessfully, to avoid being hit.
“Stop hitting me, stop…” Mother’s father-in-law pleaded. “Venerable wife, we’re working, what else do you want?”
“And you, you little bastard!” she screamed as she turned her whip on Shangguan Shouxi. “Every time you two pull something off, I know it’s your idea!”
“Don’t hit me, Mother,” Shangguan Shouxi said, tucking his head between his shoulders. “Who would look after you in your old age or handle the funeral arrangements if you accidentally killed me?”
“Do you really think I’m depending on you to do that?” she said sadly. “I expect they’ll use my bones for kindling before anyone comes out to bury me!”
Father and son struggled to harness the mule; once that was done, they picked up their tools and headed out into the field.
Whip in hand, Shangguan Lü walked over to the wall. “Get up and go inside, my fine little daughter-in-law,” she said accusingly. “Why lie out here like that, just to make me look bad? To make it easy for neighbors to curse me behind my back, saying I don’t know the proper way to treat my daughter-in-law? I said, get up! Or are you waiting for me to hire an eight-man sedan chair to carry you inside? I don’t know what the times have come to when a daughter-in-law thinks she’s better than her mother-in-law. I hope you have a son one of these days, so you’ll get a chance to see what it means to be someone’s mother-in-law.”