The more daring contemporary writers refer to them variously as ‘curvaceous pillows’, ‘tender dumplings’, ‘rose petals’, ‘ripe grapes’ and my longed-for refuge’. When describing the experience of touching a breast for the first time, they claim they ‘joined the immortals’, ‘fainted with delight’, ‘tottered on the precipice between life and death’. As a reaction against this sentimentality, avant-garde writers prefer to use words like ‘tits’, ‘knockers’ and ‘withered strawberries’.
With the advent of the Open Door Policy, a few facts about breasts have entered the public consciousness:
Large, round breasts signify a virtuous wife and able mother. Good marrying material.
Medium-sized, pert breasts with pale pink nipples signify the ideal mistress. (Breasts like these make artists drool with desire.)
Wobbly or drooping breasts, whether large or small, indicate a woman who has indulged excessively in sensual pleasures, and is past her prime.
Women with very small breasts are usually chaste and demure, and tend to be highly intelligent. Their lack of self-esteem produces a particular sensitivity, and they often show a talent for poetry or academic work. When attempting to seduce a man, they drape themselves in loose garments, turn the lights down and whisper sweet words into his ear. They gaze up at him affectionately, and try to divert his eyes away from their chest to their shapely legs, full lips, soft hands, flowing hair, or gracefully arched eyebrows. They secretly buy themselves breast pumps — a product available on the market since the Open Door Policy — and as soon as they return home, they bolt their doors and start pumping. A local department store received two thousand pumps one day, and sold out in under two hours.
A Japanese businessman investigated the Chinese breast market and decided to open the town’s first cosmetic surgery. Women were offered injections of fluid that swelled the breasts for three days. During this time, their boyfriends could fondle and squeeze them without causing any pain. These injections were ideal for women who were approaching their wedding night, or a date which promised a night of passion. The clinic was also able to heighten flat noses, cut creases into hooded eyelids, smooth out wrinkles, pluck bushy eyebrows into elegant thin lines, or remove the eyebrows completely and replace them with tattooed arches. If you were unhappy with the size of your chin, width of your forehead, shape of your teeth or mouth, they could help you put them right too.
A few months later, the papers reported news of a great advance in scientific discovery. Following a hundred days of experiments, Chinese scientists had successfully produced a breast-enlarging cream. One technician carelessly smeared some of the product over her mouth during the tests, and a few minutes later her lips swelled to double their previous size. The manufacturers claimed that if a flat-chested woman rubbed two jars of the cream onto her chest, she would develop breasts the size of small dumplings. The papers also mentioned that foreign scientists had created a breast-enlarging technique that entails stuffing sacs of sticky translucent fluid inside the skin above the ribcage.
It seems that breasts play a very important part in our lives.
The young woman who had recently been assigned to the town’s Cultural Propaganda Department owned the type of breasts that signify a good wife and able mother. When she was at university, the sight of her breasts caused male students to walk straight into the trees and lampposts by the side of the road. When she entered the cafeteria, the male students dropped their chopsticks, overcome with lust and awe. She realised that she was one in a thousand, the owner of two priceless treasures. But she also knew that she would have to spend the rest of her life worrying about when to hide them and when to show them off. She could close her eyes and be able to guarantee that her figure was more attractive and shapely than that of any of the girls surrounding her.
She had not always been so proud of her breasts. When the two lumps of flesh started protruding from her chest, she assumed she had contracted some disease, and was too afraid to tell her mother. When she understood that she was in fact becoming a woman, she felt guilty and ashamed. She sensed the eyes of the crowd focus on the breasts that stuck out so visibly from her tight shirt and wobbled from side to side as she walked down the street. She found it hard to get used to the scrutiny of the crowd, and spent her early teenage years with her shoulders hunched.
Women with pretty faces but flat chests know the importance of flicking their hair back flirtatiously. Some even learn to wiggle their bottoms when they walk past a man, expose some thigh when crossing their legs, or whisper suggestive words between their pink lacquered lips. Women who are neither pretty nor buxom have to rely on their intelligence, wide reading and refined manners if they want to arouse a man’s desire. But before she had even left university, this girl was already aware that her soft, pale breasts were destined to be the overriding reason for men’s interest in her, and the source of her future happiness. Having felt ashamed of them in the past, she now regarded them as mysterious and fascinating objects.
After she graduated from university, she moved to this town and took up the job assigned to her by the Party. She was to spend every day in an office with the same four women and one man. Had she not suffered the problems she encountered during her first month, she could have retained her post until she was sixty-two years old, then retired peacefully. It was a secure job. The first day she arrived in the office, the two cactus plants that had been hovering between life and death suddenly burst into a blaze of white flowers. The atmosphere immediately relaxed. She knew she was brimming with youth, and that each breath she exhaled filled the air with the scent of spring. Although her female colleagues felt secretly threatened by her arrival, they gave her a courteous welcome. But as soon as she left the room, they would start discussing whether her pale complexion was the result of an application of the imported ‘Snowflake’ cream, or whether her seemingly slender waist was in fact held in by a corset.
‘Her stomach looked a little wobbly,’ the elderly book-keeper informed the others after following the girl into the women’s toilets.
The middle-aged translator looked up from her typewriter. ‘Her face is so plump she has dimples in her cheeks already,’ she said. ‘When I turned forty, the skin on my face was still tight and smooth.’
‘Not yet twenty years old, and she’s already got the breasts of a matron,’ Chairwoman Fan, the fifty-five-year-old virgin smirked. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s had an abortion.’
The young secretary who had recently married joined in and said, ‘Maybe she’s injected them with something.’
‘It looks to me like she’s been rubbing them with cream,’ the old virgin opined, returning to her seat by the window. ‘Or else, she’s let too many men squeeze them. Why else would they be so big?’ If you had been observing Chairwoman Fan closely, you would have noticed a malicious spark in her eyes. She had worked at her desk by the window in the corner of the room for the last thirty years. Before the girl with big breasts arrived in the office, she had never bothered to engage in idle chatter with her colleagues. No one ever dared approach her desk, or even so much as glance out of her side of the window. She always ensured that the half of the window that her desk touched was kept immaculately clean. She stuck a ‘No Smoking’ sign over the top pane, and hung a length of cloth over the two lower panes to block out the sun’s rays that hit her desk in the afternoon. Her corner of the room always smelt of wet galoshes and moth balls. The girl with big breasts was assigned the desk opposite her. From the old virgin’s vantage point, the girl’s bosoms did indeed look extraordinarily large. They protruded so far, they seemed as though they were about to attack the desk.