Six Hades Princesses Born While Hanging New Year Prints

In a northern mountain village in 1960, Wang Bisuo covered the kang with New Year prints of chubby little boys, waiting for his wife, Liu Yunyan, to give him a son. But the midwife carried out their first daughter, Wang Luoke. He crumpled the prints in his hands, yet that night he clumsily changed the baby's diapers.

Over the next ten years, their second daughter, Wang Gaigai, third daughter, Wang Zhouyao, fourth daughter, Wang Xia, fifth daughter, Wang Mei, and sixth daughter, Wang Juan, arrived one after another, filling their tiny adobe house to the brim. When the production team handed out grain, he clutched the ration booklet with its eight names and sighed. Then he turned around and used all the white flour to make noodles for his wife. When people gossiped that his family line would die out, he exchanged half a year's worth of cigarette money for floral cloth and made new clothes for his girls. When his sixth daughter was in a difficult labor, he knocked his forehead against the Kitchen God shrine until it was red, saying, “I can accept having no son.”

His six girls kept him on his toes. When Wang Xia fell out of a tree and broke her arm, he carried her ten miles to find a doctor. When Wang Mei secretly taught herself to read, he traded scrap metal for a dictionary. When Wang Zhouyao wanted to join an arts troupe in the army, he scolded her for being crazy, then secretly bought her a popsicle to send her off. He protected his daughters at struggle sessions, took them onto the roof to make repairs in the rain, and insisted on building six small rooms: “When my girls come home, each one gets a room.”

From willow-leaf soup in the famine years to college acceptance letters when the entrance exams resumed; from screenings of The Red Detachment of Women to the certificate naming them a ten-thousand-yuan household for their orchard, Wang Bisuo's pipe knocked old prejudices to pieces, while Liu Yunyan's needle and thread stitched together a new life. As the six sisters became a midwife, a tractor driver, a teacher, and more, the rough man who had once desperately longed for a son finally raised his glass on New Year's Eve. “I've had you six in my life. That's more than enough.”