Once those epithets began making the rounds, she could not hold her head up in the village. Worst of all, it had been her sister, not a stranger, who had coined those terms of abuse in front of a bunch of girls. There was no one else to blame. Piss Pot. And Shit Can. They had quickly become her nicknames. While a nickname isn’t a real name, often it can be more you than your real name. It zeroes in on your flaws and your most vulnerable sore spots.
Hearing one is like being skinned alive. Even ten thousand pairs of pants cannot cover up your shame. Nicknames are poison to the person they’re given to, everyone knows that. But they are not static; they have an uncanny ability to expand, and that is what Yuxiu found intolerable. Piss Pot for instance. Why not piss bottle, or vat, or jug, or jar, or ladle, or basin, or bowl, or saucer, or vase, or roof tile?
None of these had had any intrinsic relationship to Yuxiu, but that had all changed. Now they constituted a sinister threat, the ability to ruthlessly reveal the unspeakable secret of her shamed body.
These common objects could be found anywhere; and so could Yuxiu’s shame. She was not being paranoid, that was not it at all. When she was talking with someone who mentioned one of those objects, the person would stop and flash an apologetic look, pregnant with meaning. It was a true affirmation, binding all those everyday objects to Yuxiu, quietly but with inescapable permanence. Once something like that attaches itself to you, it strips you naked in front of a crowd. Covering the top exposes the bottom, and covering the bottom reveals the top. Sure, the crowd feels sorry for you. Out of sympathy they keep from saying anything, pretending, as if by mutual agreement, that they didn’t hear what was said. To protect your feelings, no one laughs. At least not out loud. But you can see laughter in their eyes, and that silent laughter is far more hurtful, holds greater cruelty than spoken curses. Like sharp teeth that can snap shut on you at any time, it is an embodiment of the explosive power of jaws that can crush you at will. Deadly. Too much for Yuxiu. Even the most tenacious head must bow before it. It is a situation against which no defense is possible. In her case, such indefensible situations did not always involve external forces. Sometimes they cropped up within Yuxiu herself. Shit Can is one example. It was a taboo, and so she avoided all words dealing with toilets and such, whether she was relieving herself or emptying the commode. And as the restrictions grew, her freedom of movement diminished. She hated having to use the commode, for big or for small. Every time she peed, it made a despicable sound, underscoring her loss of dignity, her shamefulness. If only she didn’t have to go. But she did. So she only went on the sly, each visit to the toilet making her feel like a thief. She held it in during the day and she held it in at night, and she even had nightmares about peeing that woke her up. In one of those terrible dreams she hunted for a place to pee, and this eventually led her to a deserted sorghum field. But she no sooner squatted down than a crowd of girls descended upon her. “Yuxiu,” they whispered, “Shit Can.” With a start she woke up. She saw people everywhere, faces with mouths and pairs of laughing eyes above them.
Worst of all for Yuxiu were the men. They never failed to give her the eye when they walked by and greeted her with salacious smiles, as if they were reliving indulgent pleasures. Such knowing looks were unspoken claims of mutual understanding as if the men were tied to her in countless ways. In front of others, the smiles were replaced by sanctimonious looks that said “Nothing wrong here.” How sickening. That’s not to say she was unaware that something had happened between them and her. But terrifying fear kept her from bringing it into the open. They, of course, weren’t about to either. Which made them coconspirators—joint keepers of a secret. She was one of them.
Fortunately Yuxiu had enough self-awareness to avoid crowds unless it was absolutely necessary. That brought her a measure of tranquillity, but not without a cost: She became unbearably lonely. As someone who was used to being popular, this change was especially hard to take. The only people she felt comfortable around were the most inferior, those shunned by everyone else. Either they came from families with bad backgrounds, or they weren’t very smart, or they were seen as flighty. Before all this had happened, Yuxiu would have shunned them too. Now that she had no choice, she derived little joy and rather a lot of unhappiness and bitterness from her association with them. But there it was again—she had no choice.
That’s not to say they didn’t get along, mainly because they idolized her and were proud to be seen as her friends. They looked up to her and saw her as their model, and she found that gratifying. They followed in her wake, emulating everything she did and said, as if she had joined their ranks. Their looks of pride, however, only made them appear even more stupid. If they had a disagreement with someone else, words that Yuxiu had used became their weapon.
“That’s what Yuxiu said,” was their declaration of war. “That’s how Yuxiu does it” would be spoken with passion, the speakers secure in the knowledge that they had nothing to fear. It removed all doubt. This gave Yuxiu a sense of accomplishment, for she placed great stock in the effect she had on people.
“Better to be the head of a chicken than the tail of a phoenix” was her motto. Everything seemed to be going well, but the good times could not last. One day she made such a fool of herself that she could no longer stay in Wang Family Village. The incident centered on Zhang Huaizhen, who lived nearby, one lane over. Although Zhang and Yuxiu had never been close in the past, she was an intelligent girl, not one to be taken lightly. Fate had dictated that she be born into the wrong family—a very bad family, in fact.
Just how bad was complicated and requires more than a brief explanation. The girl had reached marrying age, but none of the prospective matches had panned out. So the matchmaker proposed what she considered the perfect match—in this case, the grandson of a national traitor. The boy agreed and sent over a jin of brown sugar, another of white sugar, coupons for two jin of grain, a coupon for six chi of fabric, and two and a half jin of streaky pork. All in all, a generous amount of betrothal gifts. Huaizhen said no, and nothing could change her mind, not even her mother’s persuasive arguments.
She returned the gifts and immediately turned into a willing mute, going all day long without saying a word. People in the village assumed that the matchmaker had said something so hurtful that the girl had stopped talking. The matchmaker, who’d suffered a great loss of face, pointed at a bitch on the side of the road and said, “You think you can open those legs of yours and win over the masses. Well, dream on.” At that moment, Zhang Huaizhen vowed to never marry. From that day on, she walked around with the face of a widow, ignoring everyone who came to her door with marriage proposals.
Then for some reason she and Yuxiu became friends, able to talk freely about all manner of things. Having a friend like Yuxiu instilled a sense of pride in Huaizhen, who was transformed into a real chatterbox, never failing to sing Yuxiu’s praises to anyone who would listen. On this particular afternoon, she met Yuxiu on the bridge on her way home from the fields, carrying a hoe on her shoulder.
Huaizhen was not quite herself that day, possibly because there were so many people around. Wanting to show everyone that she and Yuxiu were more than ordinary friends, she ostentatiously draped her arm around Yuxiu’s shoulder just as a group of young men were walking up. Wanting to look good, Yuxiu tried to toss her hair, but it was caught under Huaizhen’s arm.
“Take your arm away, Huaizhen,” she said. But instead, Huaizhen hugged Yuxiu even closer, which pulled Yuxiu’s blouse to the side and gave her a slovenly look. Yuxiu was very unhappy, so she wrinkled her nose and said, “Huaizhen, why is your underarm odor so strong?”