Chapter 2
Chapter 2
At night, I always dream of Mother.
She would lean against the frame of our wooden door, which looked like it was about to fall apart.
“Still got a knot in your heart? It’s just a matter of closing your eyes and spreading your legs. Do you really think you’re some untouched maiden? Is it worth all those tears? What’s the difference between sleeping with one man a hundred times and sleeping with a hundred men once?”
She would put on her earrings in front of the mirror, her hair slicked back until it shone.
She didn’t care.
She rolled around in the haystacks with the old bachelor at the edge of the village, made a racket on that creaky, broken bed with the butcher, and snuck into the Village Chief’s backyard in the middle of the night.
Half the men in the village had been on her kang, while the other half gathered around to watch, laughing with drool running down their chins.
Grandmother would always use those hands of hers, withered like tree bark, to death-grip my thin wrists. “Qianqian! We are human beings!”
“We can’t learn from that animal!”
“We have to live with our backs straight!”
Straight?
Easier said than done.
Once, I was having a proper debate with a boy over a math problem. When he couldn’t win the argument, he got frustrated, his neck stiffening as he snapped, “Zhao Qianqian, what are you acting so arrogant for? For all I know, I might be your step-daddy!”
The whole class roared with laughter.
I wished I could turn into ash and seep through the cracks in the floorboards.
The village idlers, meanwhile, focused their stares beneath my faded blouse, specifically on the places that were starting to fill out.
“Look at that figure, she’s a carbon copy of her mother… it’s only a matter of time.”
“Dragons beget dragons, phoenixes beget phoenixes, and a rat’s son knows how to dig holes. What about a rat’s daughter? Heh, she *is* the hole!”
Elder Brother happened to walk by. “Zhao Si, your eldest son stole a bicycle in town the year before last and got his leg broken for it. By that logic, since the top beam is crooked, the bottom one follows-does that mean you’re the one stealing the village’s power cables?”
“Li Laowai, why did your grandfather kick your father out of the house? Because he was messing around with his own daughter-in-law. Following your theory, every eighty-year-old woman in the village needs to watch out for you.”
He sneered. “You haven’t even wiped the filth off your own backsides, so where do you get the nerve to throw dirt on a young girl?”
He turned back and saw me, his brow furrowing. “Go home!”