saw enraged me. My next-door neighbor, Diao Xiaosan, had made good use of my absence by coming into my home and sleeping on my bed. My skin began to itch and my eyes nearly popped out of my head when I looked down at that ugly, filthy body sleeping in my luxury quarters. Those poor golden wheat stalks! Those poor red and redolent apricot leaves! The bastard had soiled my bed, and I was sure it wasn’t the first time. Anger boiled up in me, my strength rose to my head, and I heard the gnashing of my own teeth. And damned if he didn’t look up with a smile, nod, and run over to the apricot tree to take a piss. As a cultured creature who valued hygiene, I always relieved myself out next to the southwest wall, where there was a hole. I made sure my stream went out through the hole, not leaving a drop inside my pen. The apricot tree, on the other hand, was where I did my daily exercise, since the ground there was smooth and clean, as if paved with marble. When I did my pull-up exercises, my hooves clicked on the ground when I landed. But now my beautiful spot was polluted by this bastard’s piss.
Concentrating all my strength up front, like a Qigong master who breaks rocks with his head, I took aim at the bastard’s rump – to be accurate, I took aim at the big pair of balls that hung just below there – and charged. I hit him and bounced backward; my hind legs crumpled and I wound up sitting on the ground. When I looked up, there he stood, rump high in the air, spilling a load of you-know-what just before he went headfirst into the wall, like a cannonball, and bounced right back. All that happened in a split second, and to me it seemed half real and half illusion. The reality part was seeing that bastard lying at the base of the wall like a dead pig, right where I had my bowel movements, just the spot for a smelly bag of shit like him to sleep in. The bastard was twitching, balling up, his back arched like a threatening cat, and all I could see of his eyes were the whites; the best comparison I can think of is the look of contempt a working man gives to a bourgeois intellectual. I felt a little dizzy, my nose hurt, and I had tears in my eyes.
The son of a bitch had to be dead, which, to be honest, was not what I wanted. I kind of liked his primitive wildness. So I tapped his belly. He twitched and he grunted. At least he wasn’t dead. That was good news. I tapped him again, and again he grunted, but this time his eyes began to return to normal, though his body remained motionless.
I’d read in
I poured some of my urine into Diao Xiaosan’s mouth, and when I saw his blackened teeth, I thought, You bastard, I’m cleaning your damned teeth for you. Some of the urine splashed into his eyes, though I tried to control my aim. You bastard, I’m giving you eyedrops. He swallowed what for him was top-quality medicine and began to grunt. His eyes opened all the way; my magical tonic had brought him back from the dead. Shortly after I finished pissing, he stood up, took a few tentative steps; his hindquarters wobbled a bit, like the tail of a fish struggling in shallow water. He leaned up against the wall, shook his head, and came to, like waking from a dream.
“Ximen Pig,” he cursed, “fuck you!
The bastard knew who I was! That was a surprise. After several rebirths, I don’t mind admitting that I’d pretty much stopped linking myself with that poor bastard Ximen Nao of many years before. And one thing’s for certain, not a single villager knew a thing about my past. So you can imagine how puzzled I was that this Mount Yimeng bastard had called me Ximen Pig. But one of my greatest attributes was the ability to put anything that stumped me out of my mind. Ximen Pig was Ximen Pig, the victor, and you, Diao Xiaosan, the loser.
“Diao Xiaosan,” I said, “I opened your eyes today. There’s no reason to feel humiliated by drinking my urine. In fact, you should be grateful. Without it, you wouldn’t be breathing now, and if you weren’t breathing, you’d miss tomorrow’s festivities. And if you missed tomorrow’s festivities, you’d have lived a pig’s life for nothing.”
“You and I aren’t finished,” Diao said through clenched teeth. “One of these days you’ll feel the might of a Mount Yimeng pig. I’ll teach you that a tiger does not survive by eating corn cakes, and that the Earth God’s pecker is made of stone.”
I laughed off his threats and told him I accepted his challenge, that I’d be waiting: There can only be one tiger on a mountain, and two donkeys cannot be tethered to the same trough. The Earth God’s pecker may be made of stone, but his female counterpart does not have a clay receptacle. A pig farm can have but one pig king, and the day will come when you and I will fight to the death. Today’s run-in doesn’t count. It was just one louse pitted against another, pig against pig. But the next time it’ll be out in the open. In the interest of fairness and transparency, just so there’ll be no doubt as to the outcome, we can select several fair-minded, ethical old pigs who are familiar with the rules of competition and widely knowledgeable as judges. Now I ask only that the gentleman leave my quarters. I raised a front leg and saluted him, my hoof looking as if it were carved from fine jade in the light of the bonfire.
I’d expected the wild bastard to leave in spectacular fashion, but he disappointed me. He merely made himself as thin as possible and squeezed through the metal slats of the gate. His head was the hardest to get through, and required lots of bumping and clanging, but once that was through, the rest of his body followed easily. I didn’t have to see to know that was how he’d reenter his own pen. Crawling through openings to get into something is the way dogs and cats do it; no proper pig would ever lower himself to that sort of behavior. If you’re going to be a pig, then your schedule should be: eat and sleep, sleep and eat; fatten up for your owner, get good and meaty for your owner, then be taken by your owner to the slaughterhouse. Otherwise, be like me: Have a good time doing something that shocks them when they finally see it. And so, after seeing that mangy dog of a pig, Diao Xiaosan, slink his way through the slats of my gate, his stock plummeted in my eyes.
25
A High Official Speaks Grandly at an On-site conference
An Outlandish Pig Puts on a Show beneath an Apricot Tree
Sorry I’m only now getting around to talking about the glories surrounding the pig-raising local on-site conference. The entire commune was caught up in preparations for the gathering for a whole week, and I devoted an entire chapter to it.
Let me begin with the pig farm walls, which were newly whitewashed – to sterilize them, we were told – then covered with slogans in red, all pig-related, but also tied to world revolution. Who wrote them? Who else but Ximen Jinlong! The two most talented youngsters in Ximen Village were Ximen Jinlong and Mo Yan. Here’s how Hong Taiyue evaluated the two of them: Ximen Jinlong had upright talents, Mo Yan had deviant talents. Mo Yan was seven years younger than Jinlong, and when Jinlong was in the spotlight, Mo Yan was building up strength, like a fat bamboo shoot still in the ground. At the time, no one paid the kid any attention. He was almost unbelievably ugly and carried on in the most peculiar ways. Given to saying crazy things that had people scratching their heads, he was to some an annoyance and to others a pariah. Even members of his family called him a moron. “Mom,” his sister often asked their mother, “is he really your son? Couldn’t Father have found him abandoned in a mulberry grove when he was out collecting dung?” Mo Yan’s elder brothers and sisters were tall and good looking, easily the equals of Jinlong, Baofeng, Huzhu, and Hezuo. Mother would sigh and say, “The night he was born, your father dreamed that an imp dragging a big writing brush behind him came into our house, and when your father asked him where he’d come from, he said the Halls of Hell, where he’d been Lord Yama’s personal secretary. Your father was puzzling over the dream when he heard the loud wails of a baby in the next room, after which the midwife came out and announced: “Congratulations, sir, your wife has given you a son.” I suspect that Mo Yan’s mother made up most of this tale to give her son some respectability in the village, since stories like that have been a part of China’s popular tradition for a long time. If you go to Ximen Village today – the village has been turned into the Phoenix
