He looked at her doubtfully and said, ‘I dunno. I’m going where you’re going. Didn’t you want to go and see your cousin?’
Yongshan bent down to brush some dust off the suitcase and said, ‘Suppose we didn’t go?’ It seemed like she was soliciting her son’s advice. ‘I haven’t seen her in seven years.’ Her son said nothing, and a kind of pity, and lenience, began to emerge in his eyes as he looked at her.
‘Whatever.’ Then he joked, ‘You’re the boss; I’m just staff. I’ll go wherever you’re going.’
Night-time Licheng was nothing like it used to be. After seven o’clock the streets looked splendid all lit up, and Yongshan took her son to a famous local restaurant. They ate Licheng’s famous crab dumplings, noodles with congealed duck’s blood and fried wontons. After stuffing themselves with a filling meal, both of them felt their strength return, so Yongshan took her son to a large department store, where they walked around and rode up and down in the lift. Yongshan bought some of Licheng’s famous silk, as well as some other local specialities, for gifts. She got a pure wool sweater for her husband, and even bought her son some brand-name sneakers, which were on sale; he picked them out himself. Then they rolled their suitcase to the train station, one in front of the other, as before, except that now Yongshan was carrying a few shopping bags. One was an ordinary white plastic bag, but the other was a red bag with an elaborate design, covered in countless white pear blossoms.14
On the way to the station, Yongshan saw her son furtively take something out of his pocket and stick it into the suitcase’s inner lining. He had always enjoyed collecting, and he must have found the picture very amusing: four strangers in a family picture. Well then, let him keep it. Yongshan didn’t stop him. She was leaning on a lamp post, waiting for her son, when she took a deep breath and smelled something. ‘The air in Licheng is better than at home,’ she said, ‘I wonder what flower that is. Lovely smell. The air here is best in April and May.’
Then they walked with their luggage to the train station, looking very much like tourists who had come for the day on an organized trip. Yongshan was a very thrifty woman; they had walked all day and yet still she couldn’t bring herself to hail a taxi. She told her son, ‘We can rest once we’re on the train. Why should we pay for something we don’t need?’
The Giant Baby
The town doctor took a piece of bread out of his basket. Even this simple lunch had been delayed again and again on account of the sheer number of his patients: childless women who came to him looking for a cure to their infertility. To make matters worse, the bread was a few days old and already quite stale. Just as he was taking his army canteen off the wall to take a sip of water, footsteps sounded. They were followed by the appearance of a woman’s shadow swaying back and forth on the bamboo curtain before stopping by a very small window that had once been used to dispense medicine. Through it, the doctor could see a white blouse with red flowers, and underneath it the slight bulge of the woman’s breasts, though he couldn’t see her face.
‘Come in,’ said the doctor, biting off a mouthful of bread, ‘I can hardly examine you if you’re standing out there.’
‘Out here will be fine.’ The woman’s voice was very low, as if she feared that passers-by might hear her. Then she said, ‘Just give me some medicine, doctor. That’ll be enough. I have to rush home, so please hurry.’
The doctor laughed and took a swig of water from his canteen. ‘That’s a new one. How am I supposed to give you medicine without examining you? And what medicine do you need, anyway?’
‘The childbearing soup,’ she said in an even quieter voice. ‘Everyone says it works. But please hurry up, doctor, I have to get home straight away.’
Something about this woman was very odd, and so the doctor decided to go outside and get a good look at her from the steps of the clinic. She was wearing a straw hat with cotton cloth wound around it that covered her face. Because of the cloth, he couldn’t tell who she was or whether he knew her.
He decided to ignore this furtive woman, and instead he sat down, opened up his logbook and wrote down the date. Then, all the while loudly chewing his bread, he informed the woman outside, ‘I’m a doctor, not a temple god. My medicine might work well enough, but it’s not some kind of Taoist cure-all. I don’t know where you get your ideas from!’
At some point the woman had come inside. The doctor heard the creaking of the stool behind him, and at the same time he noticed a powerful, acrid smell of sweat. He looked behind him to find her sitting stiffly on the stool.
‘I won’t take off my pants,’ the woman said.
‘Nobody asked you to,’ the doctor replied, a little annoyed. ‘Is that why you think I became a doctor? Now just hold out your hand so I can take your pulse.’
Hesitantly, she did as she was told. Irritated as he was, the doctor pressed her hand roughly down on the table and took her pulse. Meanwhile, he occupied himself by staring at the profuse grime that had accumulated under her fingernails. Her hand emitted the slightly nauseating smell of chicken shit.
‘I suppose there is a man?’ the doctor asked casually. He knew that wasn’t the proper way to ask such a thing; but for some reason he felt thoroughly malicious towards this woman.
She hung her head and didn’t respond. He noticed that she had sweat stains all over her straw hat, just like a man. She also had a silver necklace on, which was the kind of old jewellery women in the town had long ago stopped wearing. She must be from the mountains, up by Wangbao, he thought, for that was the only area where women still wore necklaces like that.
‘Are you from the mountains? From Wangbao?’ The doctor listened carefully to the woman’s pulse, but her long silence aroused his suspicions, so he asked, ‘What is this, anyway? Do you mean to tell me there isn’t a man? Are you even married?’ The doctor stared at the cloth hanging from the straw hat and was suddenly seized by the desire to tear it off, but her reflexes were quick and she managed to dodge his lunging hand. The doctor scoffed at her, saying, ‘You’re nuts, do you know that? Do you want to get pregnant without a man? You can drink childbearing soup till hell freezes over before that happens!’
The woman’s body twisted on the stool, and her breathing became more rapid. Then the doctor heard the sound of her muffled sobbing. All of a sudden, she was down on her knees embracing the doctor’s leg and crying ‘Save me, doctor, give me a child, give me a son, so I can take revenge.’
Automatically, the doctor jumped up to free himself. His arm knocked off her hat, and she gave a sharp cry. At that moment the doctor saw the world’s most hideous face, the face of a severe burn victim. Apart from her unscathed eyes, the skin of her face resembled nothing more than blackened pine bark.
What happened next seemed to the doctor to be part of some kind of dream. He recalled that the woman picked up her hat and ran out, while he sat petrified by shock in front of the window. He thought she had left, but a moment later her filthy, grime-fingered hand thrust through the window and the woman said, ‘I beg you, give me the soup. Give me the soup, so I can take my revenge.’
In shock, the doctor picked up a pile of medicine packets and passed them to her, accidentally brushing her hand in the process. At this touch, he was seized by a sensation of intense dread, and grabbing at the woman’s fingers he said, ‘Revenge! Revenge for what?’ She freed her hand and said, ‘Wait till I have a son and you’ll find out.’
It was a summer afternoon and the weather was oppressive. The doctor remembered rushing out after her to see which direction she would take, and even then he had the premonition that this woman would one day become the subject of much tongue-wagging. He was about to call out to the people from the barber’s across the street, or from the cooperative next door, so that they too could come out and see the woman, but the ingrained idlers were all dozing behind their counters. Thus, the hideous mountain woman passed through the cobblestone streets of the town as if she were a normal farmer’s wife, without attracting anybody’s attention. The doctor watched as she turned off and disappeared into the cornfields, following the paths up to the mountains.