The Butcher's Wife

by Li Ang, Howard Goldblatt (Translator), Ellen Yeung (Translator)

I came across this book today and flipped through it. At some point of time, I’d like to actually read it all the way through. It tells the story of the marriage of a young lady, Lin Shi, to a cruel husband, a butcher named Chen, her subsequent descent into madness and of her finally killing him at a time when it was assumed that a woman who murdered her husband had been committing adultery.

What little I read of the book reminded me of Blasphemy by Tehmina Durrani — another book which I couldn’t bring myself to read all the way through the first time I picked it up because of how horrendous it was.

The book describes how everyone in the neighbourhood knew of what was happening to Lin Shi although, far from doing anything helpful, they were cruel at times. For example, at one point, a lady called Ah-Wang said, “You know, you shouldn’t be screaming and carrying on all the time. Someone who didn’t know might think that Pig-Butcher Chen was abusing you,” to Lin Shi. What I found particularly sad though was that as disturbing as that was in the book, the truth is that that it is still how most people react to women who are subjected to domestic violence today.