Miss Vui was thirty-two years old, never married, destined maybe to never fall in love with anyone. Or, to be more accurate, it seems most unlikely that anyone would ever fall in love with her, not because she is bad in character or in looks, but because she is several inches taller than even the tallest men in the village. With such stature, she also has massively square shoulders, as if she were made for carrying baskets on a pole, with overly developed and rock-hard muscles. Her shoulders would fit well on a first-class martial artist. One of her hands could easily knock over a guy her age. She is in the mold of her father, Mr. Vang, formerly a famous martial artist in the three provinces on the western side of the Red River, who earned quite a bit of money prize-fighting all over the north. The village residents all agree she so resembles her father that if she shaved her head and stripped to a loincloth, she could enter the ring and make opponents shake with fear, as her father did when he was famous. Mr. Vang had a mole larger than a black bean in the middle of his neck. On this mole, hair always grew, each strand longer than three inches. Miss Vui also has a similar mole, but under her chin; each day she has to look in the mirror to cut the little tuft. If she gets lost in her work and forgets this task, the hairs grow long, oddly twisting. Perhaps all these peculiarities leave her unable to have a husband like other women. She turns every male fainthearted. Her looks as well as her strength are hot topics for the village men to discuss when they work on the cassava grass under the hot June sun or sit and smoke water pipes on rainy days. There are a thousand ways to bring up a funny story about her, usually with just a question, some fact common to both men and women in the upper hamlet:
“Yesterday I saw Vui carry beehives up the hills. Her legs moved differently.”
“Different how?”
“Her legs shifted out on both sides, as if something were tucked inside.”
“Something stuck between her legs, unless she tied there a coolee or a fox?”
“You crazy old man, just like a saint who lies…I think someone has crossed into paradise.”
“Fairy heaven or paradise: you black peasant who tries to be literary! Just say bluntly that someone jumped on her belly. Who would so dare risk his life? Maybe you? I see your face looking kind of guilty!”
“Me? It would be such an honor! Many times I wanted to try, but when I saw her my penis just shrank down like one on a three-year-old. Hey, I’ll step aside for you.”
“I’m very grateful to you; but not enough guts. I am afraid I might just turn off in the middle. And my kids are still chicken and duck eggs with nobody to raise them. I’ll step aside for anyone with stronger willpower.”
“Let’s bet: whoever dares touch Vui’s cavern will be feted for one whole month. The losers will take turns paying for good wine and juicy chickens.”
“Never; what value would your wine and chickens have?”
“OK, how about a young calf?”
“No young calf is worth the loss of half of one’s life.”
“How about three of them?”
“Three cows or ten cows, add in three bars of Kim Thanh gold, I will still decline.”
“Don’t joke around: three gold bars would build five brick houses.”
“So, then, why don’t you try?”
“I don’t bet on bluffs. If you all put in enough money to buy the gold, I will put my life on the line immediately.”
“You’d sacrifice yourself in public? Nobody believes that. Your wife is barely five feet and only ninety pounds yet she pouts and tells everybody that you are hopeless, that you pump three times and fall out of bed; before you get to the market, all your coins have already dropped out. Like that and still you boast.”
“Don’t believe a woman’s mouth. Are you in the bed with me to know anything?”
“OK, someday let’s have a contest. We’ll call out the administrative committee to judge; we’ll borrow Mr. Quang’s watch to check the time. You and your wife on the left, me and my wife on the right. Whoever loses must give up a cow. I won’t eat that cow alone but will grill it for everyone in the hamlet. So, are we on?”
“You are a little smart-ass. My hair is in two colors, I won’t be stupid enough to lose a cow to an oversexed guy like you. OK, I concede. If you believe you have an iron rod, why don’t you try it on Vui just once? Her family must have hundreds of gold bars, not just three. Everybody says that after Vang passed away, she pulled in the money. The old man must love his daughter to watch over her day and night. If you can get into bed with her, right away your life will really improve. Not like a mouse that falls into a basket of rice, but like one who lands in a jar of gold.”
“No way, not for money, gold, or jade, I won’t do it. I dare only to get on my wife’s belly or on some equally silly woman. But with Vui, we speak in the presence of Martial Artist Vang’s spirit: if I were to test her strength, for sure I would perish in the middle of the struggle. Perhaps I can only duck my head into the cavern and pop out again or put my foot into it for a little kick.”
Such chatty sessions could go on and on before becoming boring. No doubt the tedious, hard work in the countryside drives people to seek such distractions, even when they suddenly realize that the joking around can hurt another’s reputation or can even be cruel. On Miss Vui’s part, she doesn’t care what people say behind her back. She lives just like a man, doing all that only men can shoulder. She shows no sadness or loneliness like other women dreaming of happiness. Because they are married and have children, happy fortune rarely comes to them while hardships quickly arrive to wear them down. Sometimes when out briskly walking, with a face full of confidence, she makes even the most successful men envious, leaving them with an inexplicable hurt as if an invisible force has crushed them flat like a runaway fox killed by a horse cart. Especially after Mr. Vang passed on, anything she touched turned into money. When alive, he had built houses for his daughter, guessing that she couldn’t live an ordinary life. He taught her carpentry, bee farming, tea growing, and noodle manufacturing…anything that could turn into pieces of paper good for spending or that could entice somebody’s desires. Vui is smart, and has an unusual aptitude: she can learn any trade thoroughly. Her mother died in childbirth; she was raised by her paternal grandmother; and when that grandmother died, Mr. Vang gave up his travels and returned to Woodcutters’ Hamlet to be with his only daughter. People did not understand why he never remarried to provide a caretaker for his household, to have someone bear him a son. His only reply to the concerns of his neighbors was this brief comment:
“Is there ever a time when stepmother and stepdaughter will get along?”
When his curious relatives would question his personal situation, he would say casually:
“Having sex is easy; I can have it anytime I wish. Women secretly seek me out before I seek them. But that’s just a momentary satisfaction for the body. To remarry is totally another matter. I won’t bring trouble on Vui. Because of her birth, my wife died; I have no heart to betray her up in heaven.”
A husband so loyal is indeed hard to find; a father with that kind of love for a child is a rare thing in life. When Mr. Vang died, Miss Vui honored him with a three-day funeral commemoration, even though she was a Party Committee secretary and her Party superiors had forbidden people to spend money wastefully on festive celebrations or funerals. But always life bestows on some people privileges that put the law to shame, because beyond the laws set by those in power, there is a kind of law that people just naturally intuit which doesn’t need to be written down in black and white. Thus for three consecutive days, the sounds of drums and horns were heard throughout the entire village, and songs to send off the spirit poured down like a waterfall. Each day, cows, chickens, and pigs were slaughtered on the tiled patio. Village people, from old to young, with social prominence and with humbling poverty, leisurely enjoyed this banquet. So the passing of Martial Artist Vang resembled a celebration even though people would be reluctant to call it that. Right after her father’s funeral, Miss Vui suddenly gained powers outside the realm of formal regulation. Before, being only a secretary of the village Party Committee, she was the boss of teenagers and kids. After witnessing evidence of her dedicated filial piety, as well as of her uncanny generosity never before seen in a woman, the villagers totally changed their perception of her. Thus, from a girl that had missed her opportunity, who had been a never-ending subject of salacious jokes from the men, she became a village elder who should automatically participate in all important village projects, a role normally held by senior males and never by women. They don’t involve her when spouses quarrel, because that is the work of female cadres in the mediation section, but they will engage her when drenching rains flood the roads, when dispute over the land erupts with the next hamlet, when a school or a maternity clinic for the village needs to be built, when the district needs to be petitioned over the distribution of equipment and provisions; in short, for all those necessary and important issues that affect the future of the residents. That winter, for the first time, the kitchen in Miss Vui’s house replaced the now cold kitchen of Mr. Quang and his wife.