What is it about jutting breasts that makes a girl beautiful and desirable? That had always puzzled her. For small-town girls, well-developed breasts were considered shameful by most people. She’d felt the same way until today, when she saw herself in the mirror and, for the first time, thought she understood. Her breasts, she discovered, were neither especially large nor too small, but when she threw out her chest, a mysterious arc shot out in the mirror. They were so much better looking jutting out than concealed. Still looking in the mirror, she stood up and moved around, examining herself from all angles, in profile and full on, to see which was the best view of her changing figure. But having no mother or sisters to guide her, she could not judge, nothing suggested itself. That left it up to her own reckoning and imagination. Thinking back to her experiences in the public bath house, she tried to recall what the older, good-looking women’s breasts looked like, their size and shape, but failed. Then she remembered something: all those women wore brassieres. Why were her breasts so unappealing? Because she didn’t wear a brassiere. Why didn’t she own one? Because she’d grown up on a Sunnyside Fleet barge, where none of the women did. She had an idea. Opening a drawer in Director Leng’s dresser, she took out three brassieres and tried them on, one after the other. She detected the feminine smell clinging to the material as the cups gently covered her breasts. The image in the mirror, now in a brassiere, was enhanced, but at the same time produced a feeling of unease, of ferment, of coquettishness. The brassiere carried a subtle fragrance.
Huixian decided to start wearing a brassiere. For other girls in Milltown, buying one was something that had to be kept a secret and was entrusted to mothers. But Huixian was motherless. None of her many surrogate mothers could be bothered with this task, so it was up to Huixian to buy her own. Once her mind was made up, she approached the situation with what could be termed fanaticism, an opportunity to do something for herself. She went to the department store determined to buy whatever style and colour she wanted, without a hint of embarrassment, making her selection with a hostile expression. The clerk was visibly intimidated. ‘This bra is too big,’ she said. ‘You want it to be unattractive, do you?’
‘What’s it to you. If it’s unattractive, that’s my business!’
Huixian began observing the chests of other girls and women, comparing herself to them and eyeing them critically. She was guided by curiosity, not malice. But the looks created a degree of pressure, and comparisons were inevitable. Between her and me, whose breasts are fuller and more attractive?
Back in their room, she paid particular attention to Leng Qiyun, her eyes glued to her when she got changed. Hurriedly covering her breasts, Leng demanded angrily, ‘What are you looking at?’
Huixian stifled a laugh. ‘I’m not a man,’ she said, ‘so what’s wrong with looking?’
Still angry, but now somewhat embarrassed as well, Leng replied, ‘You’re not a man, but that doesn’t mean you can look at me like that. What are you thinking?’
Huixian repeated what Zhao Chuntang had said: ‘I’m not thinking anything, but aren’t you the queen? What harm can a look do?’
Along with Leng’s responsibility came the authority to examine Huixian’s personal belongings. So when Huixian was out of the room, Leng opened Huixian’s chest, to find a number of racy brassieres hidden at the bottom, all exuding a worrisome air of sexuality. To Leng, this was clear evidence of the girl’s degeneration, but it was not something she could go to Zhao Chuntang to lodge a complaint about. Instead, she told the female officials, some of whom openly defended Huixian. ‘So what?’ they said. ‘She can buy all the brassieres she wants. No one can see them under her clothes.’
‘What about her motive?’ Leng said with a derisive snort. ‘Have you thought about that? No one can see them now, but sooner or later someone will. You just wait. If you let this go on, one day you might see her in one of those decadent miniskirts. She’s an accident waiting to happen!’
Little Liu’s visit had forced Huixian to put her disorienting girlhood behind her; she said goodbye with a brassiere, although it was a parting that brought her little joy. The decorations on Milltown’s once gaudy parade trucks had turned black in the farm tools factory warehouse, their treads missing, their wheels scattered on the floor. Teacher Song’s propaganda poster for the Red Lantern team still hung on the wall; the family in the drama now lived on a warehouse wall, three generations of revolutionaries staring down at abandoned objects, and left with nothing but cherished memories of past glory. The picture, locked away in this cold ‘palace’, attracted not the eyes of the masses, but mildew, dust and cobwebs. While Li Yuhe and Granny Li’s faces were covered with a layer of dust, Li Tiemei’s rosy cheeks and bright, staring eyes showed below her defiantly raised red lantern, which fought for space with cobwebs and struggled against the dust.
Whenever Huixian passed the warehouse, she hoisted herself up on to a windowsill to look through the glass at the poster, focusing on the fate of the poster’s Li Tiemei as if to somehow determine her own future. She cried on her windowsill perch one day, after seeing her disfigured face on the poster, half of it obscured by soot-like dust, while her lantern was losing its battle against a small spider that had circled its gleam with a web. The more she cried, the sadder she grew, and soon she attracted the attention of the factory workers. ‘Little Tiemei,’ the surprised workers asked, ‘what are you doing up there?’ How could they understand? She hurriedly dried her eyes, hopped down from the windowsill and ran off. Her heart ached, thanks to the factory, though she in fact already knew that it had all ended, whether or not she ever looked at what was stored inside. Li Tiemei would never again put on her make-up. Her glory had come out of the blue and then evaporated. It was over, all of it.
She was not Li Tiemei. She was Jiang Huixian, that’s all.
What to do about her waist-length braid caused her much anxiety. First she untied it and weaved it into a pair of braids, but after a while she didn’t like the way that made her look like a country girl. So she decided to coil her hair again, but instead of wearing it the old-fashioned way, at the back, she piled it up on top. That made her taller, and somehow fashionable, and brought her plenty of scrutiny. Her new hair-style caused a stir around town. Leng Qiuyun said it looked like a pile of horse dung, but no one could deny that after shedding her Li Tiemei appearance, Huixian continued to be someone to watch. Her sudden glow and new image, while gaudy and slightly frivolous, was uniquely hers. With her new stacked hairdo, she came and went at the General Affairs Building, the freshness of youth in full view; like a peacock fanning its feathers with blatant self-assurance, she elicited sighs of admiration from some, reproaches from others, and from one segment of the population, worry and unease.
Zhao Chuntang was particularly worried. A self-possessed man, his face never betrayed his emotions, but a good many occupants of the General Affairs Building could see that he disapproved of Huixian’s new hair-style. He had grown used to tugging on her braid. It had become a means of exercising leadership, whether in the building’s conference room or in the dining hall when he entertained guests. He made his instructions known by how he tugged the braid — to the side, downward, from the middle, or at the tip. But now that Huixian’s braid was stacked atop her head, when he reached behind her out of habit, what he held was not her braid but her lower back, an unintentionally inelegant and easily misconstrued action. Officials in the building frequently noticed a frown on Zhao’s face. ‘Take it down,’ he’d say to Huixian, pointing at her hair. ‘It looks like a pile of horse dung. You don’t really think it’s attractive, do you? It’s brazen and it’s ugly!’