Frog

You’re right, I do digress when I’m talking — I’m old. After all that chatter, I still haven’t told you why I married Hao Dashou. Well, I announced my retirement on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, but that bastard Melon Huang wanted to keep me around and urged me to formally retire but remain on the payroll at eight hundred yuan a month. I spat in his face. I’ve slaved enough for you, you bastard. You have me to thank for eight out of every ten yuan this hospital has earned all these years. When women and girls come to the hospital from all around, it’s me they’ve come to see. If money was what I was after, I could have made at least a thousand a day on my own. Do you really think you can buy my labour for eight hundred a month, Melon Huang? A migrant worker is worth more than that. I’ve slaved away half my life, and now it’s time for me to rest, to go back home to Northeast Gaomi Township. He was upset with me and has spent much of the past two years trying to make me suffer. Me, suffer? I’m a woman who’s seen it all. As a little girl I wasn’t scared of the Jap devils, so what made him think I was scared of a little bastard like him now that I was in my seventies? Right, right, back to what I was saying.

If you want to know why I married Hao Dashou, I have to start with the frogs. Some old friends hosted a restaurant banquet on the night I announced my retirement, and I wound up drunk — I hadn’t drunk much, but it was cheap liquor. Xie Xiaoque, the son of the restaurant owner, Xie Baizhua, one of those sweet-potato kids of the ’63 famine, took out a bottle of ultra-strong Wuliangye — to honour me, he said — but it was counterfeit, and my head was reeling. Everyone at the table was wobbly, barely able to stand, and Xie himself foamed at the mouth till his eyes rolled up into his head.