‘But it’s true!’ The girl’s head dropped in despair. She longed to extricate herself from this humiliating situation. ‘You still don’t believe me, do you?’
Without looking at one another, they quickened their pace, and the tenderness that had been established between them over the last weeks melted away. When they reached the bus stop, the girl joined the queue inside the barricade, while the secretary. stood outside. During the previous few days, the secretary had always waited for the girl to catch her bus before continuing her walk home.
‘Don’t take it so seriously! So what if they talk about you? They’re just jealous because they’re so flat-chested.’ Although the secretary’s breasts drooped a little, she still qualified as a ‘woman with breasts’.
‘I’ve never had injections or taken pills.’ A deep wrinkle wormed down the girl’s smooth forehead.
‘Times have changed. Those old matrons have been left behind. They’re jealous of you, that’s all. You’re only twenty. So what if you’ve let some boy squeeze them bigger?’ The secretary cast her eyes over the girl’s ample bosoms. She could guess that they had incited many illicit events. Looking at them brought to mind episodes in her past, and the pleasure she felt when her husband squeezed her own breasts. ‘As soon as men get near us, they want a feel. But I only let my husband suck mine before we go to sleep.’ The secretary couldn’t help revealing a few more details of her private life. Noticing that the girl was still frowning, she glanced towards the direction from which the bus was due to arrive, and swore at it for taking so long.
‘Why do they have to talk about me?’ The girl’s voice was still faint. Nothing the secretary said could console her now. ‘I was born this way,’ she muttered quietly.
The secretary smiled at her and said: ‘Don’t take any notice of them. Those women are past their prime. I understand you. I wouldn’t be shocked if you told me you were wearing a padded bra. There’s nothing wrong with big breasts. Those women would still be flat-chested even if they wore ten padded bras.’
‘I’ve never worn a padded bra in my life,’ the girl sobbed.
The young woman didn’t believe her for a second. ‘You don’t want them to be too big though, people will notice. Big breasted women like us don’t need to wear padded bras.’
The bus finally arrived, and the girl was carried aboard by the surging crowd. She felt as though her throat were stuffed with cotton wool. She carried her two heavy breasts back home and as soon as she opened her front door, ran to her bed and burst into tears.
‘Let the mirror be the judge,’ she whispered to herself as she stood in front of the rectangular mirror. For the first time in her life, she stared at length at the two large globes of plump flesh, each one crowned with a dried strawberry. The truth was, no man had ever placed his hands on them. At fourteen, when they first started to grow, they had caused her some pain. At university, they gave her a sense of pride. When she walked down the street and they shook up and down, they both annoyed and pleased her. From books she discovered that her type of breasts signify a good wife and able mother — exactly the kind of woman she longed to be. In her dreams, she would give birth to hundreds of children, and then stand in the middle of them, handing out apples. She would dress the children in pretty clothes and nourish them with the infinite streams of milk that flowed from her nipples. Her breasts could feed a multitude of children, and give men joy and pleasure. But today, these dreams were shattered. In other people’s eyes, she was a fraud, a girl who tried to entice men with fake breasts. They thought they had seen through her games. Everyone had reached the same conclusion, even the young man in the office who read books every day preparing for his postgraduate exams.
‘Let the mirror be the judge.’ She kept her voice down, because behind the curtain her entire family were eating dinner. Her bed lay in a corner that was blocked off from the rest of the room by a curtain. She stayed awake all night. The next morning she swallowed some sleeping pills and took the day off work.
(As the blood donor discusses her story, the professional writer is suddenly reminded of the actress who jumped into the tiger’s mouth. He asks, ‘Do you think that the girl was trying to escape this world too?’
‘No,’ the blood donor replies. ‘She was too young. She had nothing to escape from yet. She crumbled, not because of outside pressure, but because of her own weakness. If everyone were as feeble as her, we would have all lost our minds ages ago. She only ran through the streets naked once. It was no big deal.’
‘Perhaps her story is just not worth writing,’ the writer sighs wearily.
‘You’re wrong to think that every story must be connected with death. The problem is not death, but life, and life is just an act of endurance — you have to grit your teeth and get on with it. Just like I do. I put up with everything that life throws at me. I’ve suffered much more than you ever could in your carefree existence.’
The image of the girl’s large breasts is still flashing through the writer’s mind. The two raisin-coloured nipples stare at him entreatingly. Had the girl realised that it is already impossible in this world to distinguish the real from the fake, then perhaps she wouldn’t have reached for the sleeping pills so frequently.)
When her family discovered that she was swallowing sleeping pills every night, and that her health was seriously deteriorating, they had no choice but to take her to hospital. The secretary and Chairwoman Fan took her flowers, her pay cheque, a bar of soap and a pair of silk gloves. She lay calmly in her hospital bed, staring blankly at the white walls. A few days after she returned home, she took all her clothes off and ran through the streets naked. Racked by shame, the family left town and set up home in a farm in the suburbs. But her past caught up with her, and her parents were forced to send her to live in their old village. Some years later she married a peasant, but when he learned about her reputation, he became violent, and frequently beat her to within a breath of her life.
Chairwoman Fan had still not retired by then. After the girl with big breasts resigned from work due to ill health, the secretary moved to her desk. The two cactus plants on the window sill grew so tall, they had to be moved outside into the corridor.
The Abandoner or The Abandoned
The conversations between the writer and the blood donor never lead anywhere. Instead of prolonging an argument, they often choose to leave it hanging in mid-air. It is interesting to note, however, that during tonight’s conversation, the blood donor seems to be gaining the upper hand. The blood donor is by nature a profit seeker, believing that people should use all means possible to get what they need from this ugly world. The writer is an idealist, but when confronted by reality and his own failures, he overcomes his disappointment by adopting an air of indifference. He is a cripple who can think but not move. In his undernourished brain, he weaves the stories of the book he knows he will never write.
She emerged from between her mother’s thighs just a month before the One Child Policy was launched.
(In his mind, the professional writer sees the father carrying his retarded child down the street with a furtive look in his eyes. The father’s downturned mouth and sunken cheekbones speak of his despair. The little girl in his arms looks calm, but slightly perturbed. These two always seem to be on their way to somewhere.)
Since he was blood type A, and was born in the Year of the Ox, the father was both stubborn and shy. When he was twenty, a cabbage-faced old woman in a grain shop read the lines on his hand and told him he would never have a son. After he married, his wife produced a daughter with severe disabilities, and five years later, a second daughter, who was normal. The father then paid six yuan for a lame man called Zeng to read his fortune again. Zeng predicted that at forty-eight he would have a third daughter; at forty-nine, he would be promoted to a more senior position (he was now a middle-ranking accountant in the Municipal Treasury Board); at fifty, a gentleman would travel from the south-west and bring him good luck (he looked up all his friends and relatives who lived in the south-west, and discovered he had an uncle who was an ex-Guomindang general and was now living with a guerrilla force in Burma, although the family hadn’t heard from him for over thirty years); at fifty-seven, his mother would pass away and his wife would die of lung disease; at sixty, he would meet a widow with blood type A who was born in the Year of the Sheep, and she would marry him and give him a fourth daughter. Death was destined to strike him in his sixty-third year. He once asked the lame man Zeng if there was any way he could prolong his life span by a few years — just two more years would do — but the fortune teller insisted that it was impossible to alter the course of fate.