Read the passage below from "everyday uses" and answer question. in real life i am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. in the winter i wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. i can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. my fat keeps me hot in zero weather. i can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing. i can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. one winter i knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall. what can best be inferred about mama based on the description above? mama is independent and has no desire for a husband. mama has been hardened by the realities of rural life. mama is a strong, hard-working, and independent woman. mama worked for many years in a slaughterhouse.

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serve the people! ,” smoothly translated by julia lovell, offers an initial sample of yan lianke’s writing to an english-speaking audience. a bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases mao zedong by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the chairman’s precepts too literally. to a western sensibility, the broad strokes of yan lianke’s humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. but then, part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a western sensibility. it lets the reader see — or rather, intuit — what jokes chinese officials don’t consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century china, more than three decades after the death of mao, a decade after the death of deng xiaoping and seven years since china entered the world trade organization, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.

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