The Butcher’s Wife

By Li Ang 

Translated by Howard Goldblatt and Ellen Yeung

(1983, translated 1989)

Peter Owen Publishers


Li Ang was inspired to write The Butcher’s Wife after reading about a trial of a woman from mainland China who was accused of murdering and butchering her husband. The article was from Shanghai in the 1930s. Li was most struck not by the sensational elements of the crime, but by the perception that the wife must have been motivated by her own infidelity as if the only reasonable inference to be made was that the wife was in love with another man and killed her spouse to live life with her new lover. Li sets her tale of The Butcher’s Wife in a more familiar and intimate venue, the coastal village of Lusheng she grew up in in central Taiwan. Her heroine, Lin Shi, was just nine years old when her father died of tuberculosis. She and her mother were separated when she was thirteen when villagers responded to what they perceived as a moral outrage. Eventually, an uncle sells the child as a bride to a butcher in nearby Chencuo. Pig-Butcher Chen is a notorious womanizer, frequenter of prostitutes, drunk, and gambler. He is also a sadist. His intimate relationship with death makes him a doomed, taboo figure, and he is haunted by visions of hell and the souls of the animals he kills. He brutalizes his wife and starves her. Though she lives in fear of him, she enures herself to his assaults and looks to the local women to form a friend group. This group, led by the treacherous Auntie Ah-wang, rivals Pig-Butcher Chen in their capacity for cruelty. Li’s portrayal of the interior lives of the abusers and the abused is relentlessly graphic; Chen’s butchering of animals and his violent attacks on his wife are savage, carnal, and bloodthirsty. Chencuo appears to be a hell on earth for Lin Shi and for all the women in the town, who defend what little status they have by constantly campaigning against one another in physical and psychological attacks. Not surprisingly, the novel does not culminate in a trial, but in the gossip of the women who tolerate and abet the violent abuse of their own.  Notorious when first published, The Butcher’s Wife retains its power to shock today.

“Lowering her voice and and leaning in so close to Lin Shi that she could have bitten her ear, she added in a confidential tone: “That man of yours, once he mounts you he just goes crazy. Every time I hear you scream, I start chanting “Amitabha.”

The look of pity remained on Auntie Ah-wang’s face after she had said her piece, but almost immediately she made a sign with her eyes to the circle of women listening eagerly, and pouted in Lin Shi’s direction. The women who were nearest looked at Lin Shi knowingly, with a mixture of pity and scorn.”