Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

willing to raise our pigs as their own sons and daughters.”

23

Piglet Sixteen Is Moved to a Cozy Nest

Diao Xiaosan Mistakenly Eats an Alcohol-laced Bun

Brother, or should I say, Uncle, you seem upset. Your eyes are hooded by puffy lids, and you seem to be snoring, Big-head Lan Qiansui said harshly. If you’re not interested in the lives of pigs, let me tell you about dogs.

No, no, no, I’m interested, I really am. You know, I assume, that I wasn’t always at your side during those years you were a pig. At first I worked in the pig farm, but my job was not to feed you. Then, later, Huang Hezuo and I were sent to work in the cotton mill, and most of what we learned about your illustrious accomplishments came to us as hearsay. I really want to hear you talk about your experiences, down to the last detail. Don’t give another thought to my puffy eyelids, because when my eyes are hooded, that means I’m concentrating.

The events that followed were varied and very complex. I can only touch on the highlights and the more spectacular incidents, Big-head Lan Qiansui said.

Even though Ximen Bai painstakingly fed my sow mother, I went on suckling like a crazed piglet – what you might call extraction – which led to the paralysis of the rear half of her body. Her hind legs were like dried-out loofahs, so she had to drag herself around the pen by her front legs. By this time I was nearly as big as she was. My hair was so glossy it looked waxed; my skin was a healthy red color with a wonderful odor. My poor mother’s skin was filthy, the foul-smelling rear half covered in shit. She howled every time I took one of her teats in my mouth, and tears spilled out of her tiny eyes. She dragged herself along the ground, trying to get away from me and pleading: Son, my good son, show your mother some mercy. You’re sucking the marrow out of my bones. Can’t you see the miserable shape I’m in? You’re a full-grown pig, so you should be eating solid food like me. I turned a deaf ear to her pleading, nudged her onto her side with my snout, and wrapped my lips around two teats at the same time. As my ears filled with her shrill cries of agony, I couldn’t help feeling that the teats that had once secreted that sweet-tasting milk had turned rubbery and tasteless and produced no more than a tiny amount of rank, salty, sticky liquid that was closer to poison than milk. In disgust, I rolled her over with my snout. I could hear the pain in her voice as she cursed me: Oh, Sixteen, you are a beast with no conscience, a demon. You were sired by a wolf, not a pig…

Ximen Bai was reprimanded by Hong Taiyue over my sow mother’s paralysis. “Secretary,” she said tearfully, “her son’s willfulness caused that, not negligence on my part. If you’d seen the way he eats, like a wolf or a tiger, you’d agree that even a cow would have wound up paralyzed with him at her teat…”

Hong looked into the pen; on an impulse I stood up on my hind legs, unaware that the only other pigs that could do that were trained circus performers. For me it seemed perfectly natural. With my front legs propped up on the wall, my head was right under Hong Taiyue’s chin. He backed up, obviously shocked, and looked around. Seeing they were alone, he said to Ximen Bai softly:

“It wasn’t your fault. I’ll isolate this king of pigs and assign someone to feed him.”

“That’s what I suggested to Chairman Huang, but he said he wanted to wait for you to return…”

“Any moron should be able to decide something as minor as this,” he grumbled.

“It’s the respect everyone has for you,” Ximen Bai said, glancing at him before lowering her head and murmuring, “You’re a veteran revolutionary who has great concern for the people and deals with them fairly-”

“That’s enough of that talk,” Hong said with a wave of his hand as he looked into Ximen Bai’s reddening face. “Do you still live in that cemetery hut? I think you’d better move over to the feeding shed. You can move in with Huang Huzhu and them.”

“No,” Ximen Bai said. “My background is no good, I’m old and I’m dirty, and I don’t want to displease the youngsters-”

Hong looked into Ximen Bai’s face, then turned and stared at the lush sunflowers. “Ximen Bai,” he said softly, “if only you hadn’t been a landlord…”

I grunted. I had to do something to give voice to my mixed feelings. To be honest, I wasn’t really jealous, but the relationship between Hong Taiyue and Ximen Bai, getting more intriguing every day, instinctively made me unhappy. There was no end in sight, and you know how tragically it ended, but I’ll fill in the details anyway.

They moved me into a large, newly built, single-occupant pen in a row of them about a hundred yards from the two hundred regular pens. The canopy of an apricot tree at the rear shaded half my pen. I lived in a shed that was open in the front, where the eaves were short, and the rear, where the eaves were long, so there was nothing to keep the sunlight from streaming in. The floor was laid with bricks, and there was a hole in one wall, covered by an iron grate that made it easy for me to relieve myself without dirtying my quarters. A pile of golden wheat stalks against my bedroom wall made the room smell fresh. I strolled around my new quarters, taking in the smell of new bricks, new earth, fresh parasol wood, and fresh sorghum stalks, and I was pleased. Compared to the squat, filthy quarters I’d shared with the old sow, my new digs were a mansion. They were airy, sunny, and constructed of environmentally appropriate materials that gave off no noxious fumes. Just look at that parasol wood beam, so newly hewn that puckery sap still oozed from the white interior of the cut ends. The sorghum stalks in the wall surrounding my quarters were also fresh, the fluid secretions still wet, still fragrant, and, I bet, still tasty. But these were my living quarters, and I wasn’t about to tear them down just to satisfy my appetite. That’s not to say I couldn’t take a bite just to see how it tasted. I could stand on my hind legs and walk like humans, but I wanted to keep that a secret as long as possible.

What thrilled me was that my new home was supplied with electricity. A lamp with a hundred-watt bulb hung from the beam. I later learned that all two hundred of the new pens had electricity, but they were lit with twenty- five-watt bulbs. The on-off pull string hung down alongside one of the walls, and all I had to do was reach up, catch the string in my cloven hoof, and tug lightly to make the light go on. That was great. The spring breeze of modernization had blown into Ximen Village along with the east wind of the Cultural Revolution. Quick, turn it off, don’t let them know I know how to do that.

I moved into my new quarters in the fall, when the sunlight was more red than white, and the red sun dyed the leaves of the apricot tree red. Each evening or early morning, when the sun was sinking or rising, breakfast and dinnertime for the pig farmers, the pens were unusually quiet. That’s when I stood up on my hind legs and, with my front legs curled in front of me, began eating apricot leaves right from the tree. Slightly bitter, but loaded with fiber, they helped lower my blood pressure and keep my teeth clean.

One day, when the apricot leaves were bright red, around the tenth day of the tenth lunar month – yes, that was the day, my memory’s still sharp – early on the tenth, just after the sun, big and red and gentle, had climbed into the sky, Lan Jinlong, whom I hadn’t seen in a very long time, returned. He was accompanied by the four Sun brothers, who attended to his every need and desire, and the brigade accountant, Zhu Hongxin, who had bought 1,057 pigs for the astonishingly low cost of 5,000 yuan, or less than 5 yuan apiece. I was performing my morning exercises when I heard the roar of motors. I looked outside in time to see three vehicles with trailers coming my way from beyond the apricot grove. They were so dusty they looked like they’d come straight from the desert, the hoods so dirty it was impossible to see what color they were. They bumped and rattled their way through the grove behind the new pigpens and into a clearing littered with broken bricks and tiles and mud-covered wheat stalks. Looking like long-tailed monsters, they took their time coming to a complete stop, after which I saw Lan Jinlong, his hair a mess and his face covered with grime, climb out of the first cab. Then Zhu Hongxin and Dragon Sun climbed out of the second vehicle, and finally, the remaining three Sun brothers and Mo Yan climbed out of the last one. All four faces in this last group were coated with dust, looking like the terracotta warriors of the First Emperor. Then I heard the oink-oinks of pigs in the three trailers, getting steadily louder, until it was a shrill chorus. Was I excited! I knew the day of the pigs had arrived. I couldn’t see these newcomers; I could only hear them and smell the strange odor of their droppings. I was ready to bet they were an ugly lot.

Hong Taiyue rode up like the wind on his brand-new Golden Deer; bicycles were a rarity at the time, and only the branch secretaries were permitted to buy them. Hong parked his bike at the edge of the clearing, up against an apricot tree, half of whose top had been cut off. He didn’t lock it, which shows how fired up he was. He greeted