原文 Original text
繁體 Traditional
Reader's edition
腰眼中冒出 Rope Thick As A Duck Egg
原來那女子們只解了上身羅衫，露出肚腹，各顯神通：一個個腰眼中冒出絲繩，有鴨蛋粗細，骨都都的，迸玉飛銀，時下把莊門瞞了不題。原来那女子们只解了上身罗衫，露出肚腹，各显神通：一个个腰眼中冒出丝绳，有鸭蛋粗细，骨都都的，迸玉飞银，时下把庄门瞒了不题。
逐句解 Line by line
原來那女子們只解了上身羅衫，露出肚腹，各顯神通：一個個腰眼中冒出絲繩，有鴨蛋粗細，骨都都的，迸玉飛銀，時下把莊門瞞了不題。
原来那女子们只解了上身罗衫，露出肚腹，各显神通：一个个腰眼中冒出丝绳，有鸭蛋粗细，骨都都的，迸玉飞银，时下把庄门瞒了不题。
In fact the women only loosened the gauze shifts on their upper bodies, baring their bellies, and each showed her power: from the hollow of every waist there came pouring out a silken cord, thick as a duck's egg, gurgling forth, spitting jade and flying silver, and in no time at all the farmstead was curtained over and hidden from view.
腰眼, the hollow at the small of the back, is where the thread comes from — the book puts a spider's spinnerets on a human waist and does not explain. 骨都都 is a sound word, a triple, for something welling out thickly. 迸玉飛銀 sets jade against silver for the shine of it. 中 is zhōng, within.
This is the reveal, and it is fifty-three characters long with no paragraph break. The clothes come off, the bellies are bare, and silk pours out of the small of seven backs.
What makes it land is that the book has spent two thousand characters establishing these women as women. They sewed, they played ball, they argued doctrine competently, they kept house. Nothing about them was wrong until the thread came out, and the thread comes out of a place a spider's would.
The sound word in the middle is worth hearing. Three identical characters for the noise of something welling up thickly and continuously — the kind of word this book uses for boiling, bubbling, gushing. It is doing more work here than any of the elegant images around it.