Big Breasts and Wide Hips

Big Breasts & Wide Hips

by Mo Yan

In the Bosom of Communist China

A Review by Julia Lovell

As its title suggests, breasts have a considerable role to play in Mo Yan's saga of twentieth-century China. Not all are plain large: some are "high", "arching", "pert", "delicate, lovely, perky", and on occasion improbably mobile, "with slightly upturned nipples as nimble as the mouth of a hedgehog". One pair is described as a couple of "happy white doves", others are "like opium flowers or valleys of butterflies"; yet another resembles "a little red-eyed rabbit". But in whatever unpredictable form they manifest themselves, they are everywhere, prompting, with respect to Mo Yan, the question that John Lewis, the narrator of Kingsley Amis's novel That Uncertain Feeling, asks himself while contemplating a game of women's tennis: "Why did I like women's breasts so much?

I was clear on why I liked them, thanks, but why did I like them so much?".

In Mo Yan's case, there are two possible answers to this question: a short, globally male one that does not require glossing, and a longer, Chinese one that perhaps does. A charitably earnest reading of Big Breasts and Wide Hips could suggest that, in filling his historical novel with feisty women and their breasts, Mo Yan has a serious, politically subversive purpose in mind. Since the Chinese Empire came into existence, politics, history, literature -- all the most important founts of public power and prestige -- have been viewed as the rightful, exclusive preserve of men. Despite the invention of Chinese feminism about a hundred years ago, the twentieth century -- including five decades of Communist rule -- failed to transform radically or evenly this millennia-old, patriarchal status quo. In replacing the patriarchy with his bosomy matriarchy, in giving bumps and curves to the smooth, airbrushed, authoritarian face of Communist China, Mo Yan is mounting a barely veiled protest against the failures of China's oppressive, still

male-dominated political Establishment and its sanitized account of the recent past. Whether or not this conceit makes for a good novel with a convincing feminist message is less obvious.

Big Breasts and Wide Hips begins in high, blood-spattered style with the birth of its narrator, Jintong, as the Japanese Army surges into his village in north-east China in 1936. His mother, Shangguan Lu, has already produced seven daughters while waiting for a baby boy, and endured decades of abuse at the hands of her husband's family for her failure to generate a male heir. In the twenty-one years before Jintong finally makes his appearance, her in-laws have screamed at her, beaten her with rakes and clubs, and branded her with red-hot tongs. Following the birth of her son, however, her life takes a sudden, temporary turn for the better: as Jintong emerges, her brutish husband and father-in-law are killed by Japanese soldiers, and her appalling mother-in-law is incapacitated by a stroke.

Shangguan Lu subsequently becomes mistress of her extensive brood, whom she struggles to steer safely through the cataclysms of twentieth-century China: massacres by the Japanese, assaults by roving bandits, famine, civil war between Communists and the rightwing Nationalists, political persecution under Mao. Her daughters consistently refuse to accept her guidance, one by one choosing unreliable mates -- a bandit leader, a promiscuous local aristocrat, a flighty bird-catcher, a brutish mute, an American bomber pilot -- who draw them into war, treason, insanity and death. Telling the story is Shangguan Lu's favourite, Jintong, for much of the novel a non-participant thanks to his all-consuming obsession with breasts in general, and attachment to his mother's in particular (he is breast-fed until he is seven, and even reverts to the habit in his forties). By the 1980s, as the novel draws to a close, only Jintong and his mother remain alive, the rest victims of history or their own desires.

Until it reaches the Communist period, Mo Yan's attempt to rescue modern China from the bland platitudes of historical propaganda holds roughly together, thanks principally to its strident energy and raucous cast of lovers, bandits and freedom fighters. By omitting, for the most part, conventional calendar dates and direct mention of the Party affiliations and campaigns associated with standard histories of the period, Mo Yan manages to create an entirely localized Chinese world, set amid the wild rivers and fields of the north-east, isolated from any sense of centralized political control. Shangguan Lu's own body and straggling family -- raped, starved, driven out of their homes, sold into prostitution, managing untidily to survive and reproduce, while bandits, foreign invaders and Communist "liberators" tear the country apart -- are the provincial map on which the sufferings of China as a whole are scratched with bloody immediacy.

Beyond 1949, however, Mo Yan loses his shaky grip on technical consistency and control. He abandons his attempt to write a grass-roots history of modern China, increasingly orientating his plot to national, political landmarks, including two of the major mass campaigns of the Maoist years: the Anti-Rightist movement and the Great Leap Forward. After recklessly taking his foot off the narrative brake -- he covers forty years of Communist rule in fewer pages than he has devoted to the previous decade -- he begins to cram his pages with walk-on, walk-off bit-parts: inspirational teachers, thuggish peasants, a repressed female official, a rapist cook. Perhaps aware that he has

over-populated his pages, Mo Yan brusquely begins eliminating his lead characters, the Shangguan daughters (a curious choice of plot direction for a supposedly anti-patriarchal novel): by bomb explosion, firing squad, starvation, syphilis. After some 400 pages, his ingenuity for disposing of people exhausted, he has the blind youngest daughter wander out of the family gate and simply disappear. Later chapters are still dusted with the by now familiar sprinkling of noisy sex and violence -- most notably, the act of necrophilia by which Jintong loses his virginity -- but Mo Yan's literary shock tactics progressively lose their primitive potency through overuse across an overlong book, and quickly become little more than numbing.

The novel's lack of structural and psychological subtlety is aggravated by Mo Yan's stylistic weaknesses -- by language at times wordy and repetitive, at others

uninformatively hackneyed, at others again distractingly bizarre. On one page, as Jintong's bosom fixation -- not for the first time -- gets the better of him, the same pair of breasts are recounted twice over, both times with tired, bodice-ripper cliché "high, arching" and "pert". Admittedly, the gruelling frequency with which breasts pop up throughout the novel makes the task of finding fresh, original terms of description a linguistic challenge. When Mo Yan does reach for his thesaurus, the results can be puzzling. At one point, the narrator is obliged to feel 120 pairs of breasts in rapid succession, in his professional capacity as officiator of a local fertility cult. One pair, he records, "cackled like stubborn hens", another resembled "explosive quails, with brown feathers, unyielding beaks, and short powerful necks". The last in his mammary marathon, he reports, "was the warmest breast I'd ever felt, like a vaccinated rooster, so hot it nearly sparked".

If Mo Yan wants to remake the rigid mould of Chinese Communist Party-sponsored history with any meaningful degree of literary sophistication, he needs to use a sharper instrument than Big Breasts and Wide Hips. And if he thinks he is paying women a compliment by portraying them as significant for their multiform breasts rather than for their ability to think, reason, or even survive in twentieth-century China, it is a compliment they probably ought to think twice before accepting.