Northern Girls: Life Goes On

by Sheng Keyi

  Contents

  A Note on Chinese Usage and Names

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Afterword

  Northern Girls

  Sheng Keyi was born in southern China’s Hunan province. After working in Shenzhen for many years, she now lives in Beijing. She is an award-winning author of several novels and collections of short stories and a key figure in China’s literary scene. Northern Girls is her first novel to be translated into English.

  For Feng Tang

  A Note on Chinese Usage and Names

  In Chinese, a person’s given name always follows their surname. Therefore, the protagonist of Northern Girls, Qian Xiaohong, has the surname Qian and the given name Xiaohong. Depending on the occasion and the familiarity between people, given names can be shortened to a repetition of the final syllable, such as Honghong for Xiaohong.

  In southern China, it is common for people to refer to one another by combining the sound Ah with the final syllable in their name, for example, Ah Hong. Whilst pinyin, the standard Romanisation method for Chinese characters, has been used throughout this novel, the word Ah has been written as such to avoid confusion with the word ‘a’.

  One

  I

  Her. Right there. That’s Qian Xiaohong, from Hunan province.

  A little over a metre and a half tall, sporting short black hair with just a hint of a curl, her round-faced look is pretty much that of a model citizen, good and decent. She’s just the sort of girl a guy wouldn’t mind taking home to meet his parents. However, her breasts – through no fault of her own – are much too large for civilised, polite society. Such breasts could not help but invite the same suspicion and groundless gossip normally saved for young widows.

  Xiaohong’s breasts, to put it bluntly, are gorgeous! Even observed through clothing, it’s easy to imagine their consistency. To touch them must be heavenly. To simply gaze upon them is to fall under their seductive power. The problem is that same unavoidable difficulty that always arises in tight-knit communities. When everyone is cast from the same mould, the person who stands out for any reason at all is sure to be seen as something of a maverick. And so, Xiaohong’s full figure has always made her just a little too striking in the eyes of those around her.

  Xiaohong’s mother died of cirrhosis of the liver at a young age. Her chest was as flat as could be so it’s clear the child gained nothing by inheritance. From then on, Xiaohong was brought up in the shelter of her paternal grandmother’s bosom.

  Her grandmother, a widow for fifty years, passed away at the age of eighty. She was the only one who knew the secret behind Xiaohong’s well-endowed physique, but she went to the grave without ever breathing a word of it.

  Ever since Xiaohong was in year five of school, rumours had surrounded her. There was always a stinging word hissed in her direction, ever a pointing finger trailing in her wake. All the other girls in the village dutifully hunched forward, guarding their chests under loose-fitting clothing, doing all they could to prevent their breasts from giving the slightest impression of sluttiness. Only Xiaohong allowed her twin bulging mounds to appear as openly and ominously as storm clouds descending upon an unsuspecting city. It was a rare gift she had, the way she carried that pair, and no one could deny that it required courage for her to do so.

  At the ripe old age of thirteen, Xiaohong lost all interest in her studies. As soon as she finished middle school, she dropped out, preferring to take life easy and hang around the village.

  Her father’s work regularly took him away from home for weeks at a time. When he was back, Xiaohong would run and sit on his lap like a little girl, cuddling up to him, cheek to cheek. The villagers would look at them askance. Clearly the affection between father and daughter made them uncomfortable. He worked as a contractor and, with his earnings, built a two-storey house with suites on each floor. Both the interior and the exterior of the house had a more cosmopolitan air than anything in the city. Xiaohong chose for herself a room on the upper floor with a private staircase running up the outer wall.

  Noticing that her family seemed to have a little money, some guys had hopes of becoming Xiaohong’s man. It was often said that her earliest involvement with the opposite sex came when she was in primary school, first hooking up with boys from the secondary school, and later moving on to the young men of the village. She brought them home, each leaving his impression on her bed. Some claimed that, during the summer months, she sometimes did it while out enjoying the cool evening breeze. She was even known to go at it in broad daylight inside the large culvert at the power plant. Such was Xiaohong’s reputation, and it rolled over the village in waves.

  Xiaohong’s only sibling was a sister eight years older than her. When she was ten, Xiaohong, her sister and their grandmother used to all squeeze into one room, the two girls sharing a bed. After her engagement, Xiaohong’s sister, assuming that the younger girl would be none the wiser, often welcomed her fiancé to join them in the crowded bed.

  Xiaohong and her brother-in-law got along well, very well indeed.

  While village tittle-tattle was not always to be believed, spine-tingling tales about the activities of Xiaohong and her brother-in-law ran rampant on the village grapevine, and the odds were that they were true, too. Things finally came to a head in the year following her grandmother’s death, when Xiaohong turned sixteen. That spring, the fields were wild. Oilseed rape plants spread out to the horizon, rippling like golden waves in the breeze. One day, she was about a mile outside of the village, working in the fields with her sister and brother-in-law.

  ‘I’m so thirsty,’ she said, and turned with a swing of her hips to head for home.

  The way her rump swayed as she retreated was all that was needed to turn her brother-in-law’s insides to jelly. As the poets say, spring – when the bees are dancing and the sun caresses your skin – is the time for mating. So who could blame the girl’s brother-in-law for wanting to sleep wrapped in the arms of a good woman? On most nights, his wife would lie beneath him just like the third-of-an-acre plot he worked all day, quietly letting him plough her as he had the soil – and just as unmoving in response to his touch. With this in mind, the poor man suddenly lost the will to continue his work. He twisted his body this way and that, contorting himself in the oddest manner, frowning intensely. After a few moments of letting it brew, he finally succeeded in emitting a loud fart.

  ‘Oh, my stomach!’ He shouted, ‘I think I’ve got the runs!’ The urgent expression he wore made it seem he was in a desperate state.

  ‘Ever notice how frequently lazy folks have to find a toilet?’ his wife said. ‘Go on. Looks like you’d better hurry.’

  He set off at a trot.

  The diligent woman kept at her work, placing each sprout neatly in its own hole and the pepper seeds in rows as orderly and pleasing as a well-embroidered fabric. When she’d finished, she looked over her handiwork with a maternal eye and smiled in contentment, her face as brown as the petals of a wilting flower. She was now in need of a little water herself, and the other two still hadn’t returned. The wind blew over her solitary figure, her dusty drab overalls covered in mud. With her feet immersed in the loose soil, she looked exceptionally short. After a while, she climbed the ridge. Bringing her right hand to her forehead, she sheltered her squinting eyes and looked towards the family home lying in the distance. The tiled walls her father had built glistened like gold in the sunlight, as if thousa
nds of precious jewels flashed before her, but there was no sign of her sister or her husband.

  Beginning to have some misgivings, she slapped her hands together to remove the clods of soil, left the patch of land she had been working, and made her way home dejectedly. She went to the outside toilet, but her husband was not there. Could he have gone to the kitchen to get some water? No one was there either. In her heart, she began to feel a sense of dread, some vague notion of what must be going on.

  She climbed the outer stairs to Xiaohong’s bedroom, one hand clutching her chest, the other braced against the wall. She opened her mouth wide to breathe, feeling a little dizzy in the bright afternoon sun.

  The door, unlatched, was open about an inch.

  ‘Feng Ge, you need to get dressed and go. She’s going to start suspecting something.’

  ‘She’s too blind to ever notice.’

  ‘But what if she does?’

  ‘She won’t.’

  ‘What if you knocked me up this time?’

  ‘You bear it, I’ll raise it.’

  Legs trembling, Xiaohong’s sister kicked the door open with a bang and stood there, the doorway framing her shape. With the sun behind her, she cast a long shadow that fell across the room and onto the bed, drawing a line between the two faces that lay there.

  A bee flew past her, buzzing into the room. Dust motes danced in the long rays of the sun.

  All was deathly silent.

  Without a hint of embarrassment, Xiaohong slowly sat up and began to dress herself. At first, she’d been afraid of hurting her sister, but now that they were face to face, she felt relief, as if a cairn of stones had tumbled to the floor. Saying nothing, she finished dressing, simply turning her back to the door as she waited for her sister’s tirade to begin.

  Her brother-in-law stood up, his naked body quivering all over, as if he had just completed the most exquisite act of his life. His wife stood there muttering, her face puckered in anger, wrinkly as a bitter gourd. She gazed breathlessly at his naked body. A sudden whoosh escaped her lips before she covered her face and ran. Rushing down the stairs, she came to an abrupt halt, feeling that things were the wrong way round. She thought, Isn’t that little bitch the one who should be ashamed? Why isn’t that bastard running away? I didn’t do a fucking thing wrong! Why am I the one fleeing?

  With that thought, she let it fly, her voice crashing through the house with her wailing and weeping.

  ‘You bastard! You shameless hussy! What a cheap, rotten pair! Don’t you even give a fuck about our reputation?’

  She raised her voice higher and higher, as if in hope that the whole neighbourhood would come to support her cause. And sure enough, no sooner had the cries of condemnation been raised than they all crawled out from their little holes, coming from all directions, like ants scurrying over a disturbed mound. They rushed madly to the scene, and gathered in a mass at the foot of the stairs.

  II

  ‘You’d better disappear from this place for a while. I’ll handle your sister.’ The way he spoke, it seemed as if her brother-in-law already had his wife well under control.

  ‘And you? Don’t you need to slink off somewhere and hide?’ she asked bitterly.

  ‘Nah. You gotta start thinking about marriage. Me, I’m a guy. So it makes no difference to me. No big deal,’ he said, flippantly.

  Xiaohong swallowed the words she wanted to say, thinking it best to keep her thoughts to herself.

  The next day, she set out for the county guesthouse to see if she could get a job as a receptionist.

  Upon arrival, she saw that the guesthouse was a three-storey building with plaster peeling off the outer walls. The road in front of it and the boundary walls were all of a uniform bare concrete, clearly neglected since the day they had been built. Xiaohong put what had happened in the village out of her mind, telling herself, It isn’t really incest when it’s with a brother-in-law. Men with their son’s wives, women with their husband’s brothers – it’s not like any of it is exactly rare. At first, she was afraid she would end up pregnant with her brother-in-law’s baby, but then her ‘Aunt Flo’ came right on schedule, signalling another turn in the cycle of life.

  Amongst the staff at the guesthouse, Xiaohong’s curvaceous figure was as eye-catching as ever. She carried herself with a measure of pertness, her tail wagging as she walked like a bitch in heat. The sight of those swaying hips inspired a lustful admiration in a good many of the guesthouse’s male patrons, who would call the reception desk and try to strike up a little banter with her. She was gracious enough to entertain their attentions, giving the odd coquettish giggle as if someone had tickled her under the arm.

  Once, Xiaohong was chatting away with a fellow from the northeastern region of China when he said, ‘Why don’t you pop in later and I’ll let you taste some special delicacies from the north?’

  When her shift ended at midnight, she went to his room. He opened the door and, as she squeezed past him into the small quarters, he poked her in the side and said, ‘What a tiny waist!’ Tickled, she twisted away from him. Her two grand peaks pressed flat up against the wall, only to bounce back into the fullness of their proper shape when he had closed the door. There was a musty smell in the cramped room, which had yellowing walls and a grungy quilt thrown across the narrow bed. Beside it was a nightstand topped with an ashtray holding a single smouldering cigarette butt. White smoke rose up from it in a wispy trail. Xiaohong’s acquiescence to the handsome northern guy’s skilful exploration of her body seemed to fill him with an even larger measure of courage. Apparently having never seen such voluptuousness, he pressed his hand to her breast with great fervour, as if wanting to confirm that what he held was indeed the real thing. His hands moved over her body at a giddying pace. He needed both hands to do justice to a single breast, squeezing it like a balloon between his palms. As he entertained himself in this way, Xiaohong’s moans in response tickled his eardrums like the hum of a mosquito. Suddenly remembering something, she pulled back. With a flick of her eyelashes, she asked, ‘Where are those northern delicacies you promised?’

  He leaned in close and murmured, ‘I’m right here.’

  She smirked in response.

  He boldly moved his hand to her lower parts, but again she pulled away.

  ‘You playing hard to get?’ he asked with a laugh.

  ‘It’s that time of the month,’ she replied. ‘I can’t do it.’

  Shrugging in obvious disbelief, he said, ‘I’ll pay you.’

  ‘See for yourself,’ she said, crudely raising her skirt and lowering her underwear.

  Seeing the spot of blood, the northern guy said, ‘Never mind that. I don’t care if things get a little messy. That should prove just how much I like you.’

  She thought about her hometown and the taboos she’d inherited in regard to the female cycle: don’t look, don’t touch. Ignoring those rules, everyone back home said, would bring a person the worst sorts of misfortune. City folk were certainly different.

  She turned her most charming smile on him and, noticing how pleasant-looking he was, said, ‘You look like a teacher.’

  ‘I am,’ he replied, ‘Secondary school.’

  She bit her lower lip then asked, ‘You aren’t married?’

  ‘I am,’ he said again. ‘This is all because I’m married.’

  Xiaohong didn’t see any logic to such a relationship.

  ‘It’s only after marriage that you can have an affair. Your mind can’t stray if you don’t already have a wife. But, I guess you wouldn’t understand,’ the northern guy said.

  ‘No, why would I?’ she retorted. ‘I’m going to clean up.’

  She went into the washroom and freshened up, enjoying the cool of the water as it splashed against her skin. When she had finished, she still felt a bit uncertain about going any further with the northern man. In the end, persuaded by her own body, she went at it with gusto. Gasping, the man showed equal enthusiasm, flipping her body first one way
, then the other, like a fish twitching back and forth at the end of a line.

  When they were done, he asked, ‘How much?’

  Dumbfounded, she replied, ‘Huh? How much what?’

  The guy froze for a second, his surprise seemingly even greater than her own. ‘Why … money.’

  ‘For what?’ she asked.

  ‘For hooking!’ he answered.

  III

  Cars passed back and forth, kicking up billows of dust, interrupted by long buses crunching their way along the gravelly road. Xiaohong wore a blue tank top and short skirt, exposing nearly as much flesh as an innocent nappy-clad infant. She stood beneath the sign at the bus stop cracking sunflower seeds, utterly bored as she watched the flow of traffic. Many things passed through her mind – like the first time she’d been with a boy and the whole mess with her brother-in-law. Standing there, it was as if all her random musings were being crushed beneath the passing tyres, drifting away on clouds of dust.

  Xiaohong’s cleavage was a deep gulley, forming an axis down the length of her body, a straight line flowing downward from the tip of her nose to the space where her thighs branched out to either side. It was to that critical spot that the imagination flowed, as all rivers flow to the sea, their natural destination. Everyone at the bus stop, both men and women, took note of her bust line, and it set their minds wandering. The women, filled with a mixture of reluctant admiration and envy, stuck their noses in the air indignantly. The men felt their bodies begin to stir, their minds coming to life to entertain all sorts of obscene fantasies.

  The bus rambled in like an old drunkard. As it pulled over, the eyes of all the passengers fell onto the bus stop through the window – or, to put it more accurately, onto Xiaohong’s cleavage. In a place this small, it took guts to show off so much skin. The men waiting for the bus, cursing their luck at its arrival, took one last long look at the girl, and then one by one climbed aboard. Xiaohong hummed the lyrics of a popular tune, her feet casually tapping the ground as she sauntered over to the bus queue.