Ma Jian - The Noodle Maker

‘What did she say about me?’ The girl’s face turned from red to white.

‘It’s your breasts,’ the secretary said, touching the girl’s arm softly. ‘It’s because you have such large breasts.’ She was now using the tone of voice women adopt when speaking about contraception and sexual matters.

The girl covered her face with her hands and stopped in her tracks. The sense of inferiority that she had buried years before suddenly welled up inside her and dragged her back to the times when she would walk through the crowd hunching her shoulders like an old woman, the two lumps of flesh on her chest filling her with shame and fear. She remembered the time her mother humiliated her in front of her classmates, saying, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself wearing that T-shirt. Everyone can see your nipples!’ That night, she borrowed her mother’s white bra and clamped her breasts to her chest. When she left her home the next day, she sensed that everyone knew that she was a girl with bound breasts.

The self-confidence she had worked so hard to achieve was now crumbling into pieces.

‘What did they say?’ The girl’s faint voice was almost drowned by the loud footsteps on the pedestrian flyover above. The secretary hadn’t expected the girl to be as embarrassed as this. She felt as though she were watching a lamb drowning in water, a lamb she could save with less energy than it would take to blow away a grain of dust. As a married woman, she knew many things the girl didn’t know, but longed to know. Yesterday, she had told the girl about the pleasure of feeling a man’s tongue run down her stomach. When she had brought up the subject of the girl’s breasts a few moments ago, she had felt a dampness seep from between her thighs.

The secretary ventured a further question. ‘Did you rub foreign creams on them, or inject them with something?’ She gazed enviously at the girl’s youthful complexion. It was as rosy as hers was before she married. She could sense how uncomfortable the girl was, and how fast her heart was beating.

In just a few seconds, the girl seemed to age ten years, her entire body appeared to shrink inwards. ‘Never, never,’ she protested. ‘I have never had any injections, or used any foreign cream.’

‘That’s what I guessed,’ the young woman continued. ‘Perhaps Chairwoman Fan was right then.’

‘What did she say?’ For the first time in her life the girl was forced to discuss her breasts in public.

‘That old virgin’s a sly one,’ the secretary said, glancing behind her to check that no one was listening. They had almost reached the bus stop. ‘She said you’ve made them bigger by letting men fondle them. Actually, that’s what I thought too, at first.’

The girl’s face turned red again.

‘Surely someone must have told you!’ the secretary laughed. ‘The more men fondle them, the bigger they get.’

‘I’ve never let any man fondle them!’ The girl’s throat went dry. ‘They’ve always been this big, ever since I was fourteen.’ Her blush was spreading to her ears and neck now.

‘There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.’ Although the secretary sympathised with her new friend, she still examined the girl’s face, searching for the truth.

‘But it’s true!’ The girl’s head dropped in despair. She longed to extricate herself from this humiliating situation. ‘You still don’t believe me, do you?’

Without looking at one another, they quickened their pace, and the tenderness that had been established between them over the last weeks melted away. When they reached the bus stop, the girl joined the queue inside the barricade, while the secretary. stood outside. During the previous few days, the secretary had always waited for the girl to catch her bus before continuing her walk home.

‘Don’t take it so seriously! So what if they talk about you? They’re just jealous because they’re so flat-chested.’ Although the secretary’s breasts drooped a little, she still qualified as a ‘woman with breasts’.

‘I’ve never had injections or taken pills.’ A deep wrinkle wormed down the girl’s smooth forehead.

‘Times have changed. Those old matrons have been left behind. They’re jealous of you, that’s all. You’re only twenty. So what if you’ve let some boy squeeze them bigger?’ The secretary cast her eyes over the girl’s ample bosoms. She could guess that they had incited many illicit events. Looking at them brought to mind episodes in her past, and the pleasure she felt when her husband squeezed her own breasts. ‘As soon as men get near us, they want a feel. But I only let my husband suck mine before we go to sleep.’ The secretary couldn’t help revealing a few more details of her private life. Noticing that the girl was still frowning, she glanced towards the direction from which the bus was due to arrive, and swore at it for taking so long.

‘Why do they have to talk about me?’ The girl’s voice was still faint. Nothing the secretary said could console her now. ‘I was born this way,’ she muttered quietly.

The secretary smiled at her and said: ‘Don’t take any notice of them. Those women are past their prime. I understand you. I wouldn’t be shocked if you told me you were wearing a padded bra. There’s nothing wrong with big breasts. Those women would still be flat-chested even if they wore ten padded bras.’

‘I’ve never worn a padded bra in my life,’ the girl sobbed.

The young woman didn’t believe her for a second. ‘You don’t want them to be too big though, people will notice. Big breasted women like us don’t need to wear padded bras.’

The bus finally arrived, and the girl was carried aboard by the surging crowd. She felt as though her throat were stuffed with cotton wool. She carried her two heavy breasts back home and as soon as she opened her front door, ran to her bed and burst into tears.

‘Let the mirror be the judge,’ she whispered to herself as she stood in front of the rectangular mirror. For the first time in her life, she stared at length at the two large globes of plump flesh, each one crowned with a dried strawberry. The truth was, no man had ever placed his hands on them. At fourteen, when they first started to grow, they had caused her some pain. At university, they gave her a sense of pride. When she walked down the street and they shook up and down, they both annoyed and pleased her. From books she discovered that her type of breasts signify a good wife and able mother — exactly the kind of woman she longed to be. In her dreams, she would give birth to hundreds of children, and then stand in the middle of them, handing out apples. She would dress the children in pretty clothes and nourish them with the infinite streams of milk that flowed from her nipples. Her breasts could feed a multitude of children, and give men joy and pleasure. But today, these dreams were shattered. In other people’s eyes, she was a fraud, a girl who tried to entice men with fake breasts. They thought they had seen through her games. Everyone had reached the same conclusion, even the young man in the office who read books every day preparing for his postgraduate exams.

‘Let the mirror be the judge.’ She kept her voice down, because behind the curtain her entire family were eating dinner. Her bed lay in a corner that was blocked off from the rest of the room by a curtain. She stayed awake all night. The next morning she swallowed some sleeping pills and took the day off work.

(As the blood donor discusses her story, the professional writer is suddenly reminded of the actress who jumped into the tiger’s mouth. He asks, ‘Do you think that the girl was trying to escape this world too?’

‘No,’ the blood donor replies. ‘She was too young. She had nothing to escape from yet. She crumbled, not because of outside pressure, but because of her own weakness. If everyone were as feeble as her, we would have all lost our minds ages ago. She only ran through the streets naked once. It was no big deal.’