Yan’s elder sister in their clean white work smocks with red “Apricot Garden Pig Farm” lettering on the breast, watching Master Lin, the barber sent over from the commune HQ, as he showed them how to use the scissors in their hands. Master Lin, whose hair was as coarse as pig bristles, had a thin, gaunt face and big, bony knuckles. He had such a heavy southern accent the girls could hardly understand a word he said. I watched the pigtailed Mandarin-speaking teacher patiently teach the youngsters how to dance and sing. We quickly learned that the skit was called “The Little Pig Red Girl Goes to Beijing,” a popular skit that borrowed music from the folk tradition. Playing the part of Red Girl was the prettiest girl in the village; the other parts were for boys, all of them wearing pig masks with foolish expressions. As I watched the children dance and listened to them sing, my artistic cells got the itch, and I started to move, which made the limbs I was standing on creak. I opened my mouth to sing, and surprised – no, frightened – myself by the loud oinks that emerged. All along I’d thought I’d be able to sing like humans, but what did I get? Oinks! How depressing! But I reminded myself that mynah birds can imitate human speech, and I have heard that dogs and cats can too, and by thinking hard, I recalled how, both as a donkey and an ox, at critical moments, I was able to squeeze human sounds out of my coarse throat that could rouse the deaf and awaken the unhearing.
My “speech” drew the attention of the girls who were learning how to give pig haircuts. Mo Yan’s sister was the first to react: “Look, there’s a pig in the tree!” Mo Yan, who’d tried everything to be assigned a job at the pig farm, only to be denied the opportunity by Hong Taiyue, squinted and shouted: “If the Americans can make it to the moon, why get excited about a pig in a tree?” His words, unfortunately, were drowned out by the girls’ screams; no one heard him. Then he said, “There’s a wild boar in the South American rain forest that builds its nest in the crotch of a tree. They’re mammals that have feathers and lay eggs that hatch in seven days!” Once again his words were drowned out by the girls’ screams, and no one heard him. All of a sudden I found myself wanting to become friends with this guy. “Pal,” I wanted to say, “as long as you understand me, when I have the time one day, I’ll treat you to a few drinks.” But that was drowned out by the girls’ screams too.
The thoroughly delighted girls came running toward me, led by Ximen Jinlong. I waved with my left hoof. “How do you do?” I said. They didn’t understand me, of course, but they knew it was a friendly gesture. But then they doubled up laughing. “What’s so funny? Behave yourselves!” I know, I know, those giggling girls still didn’t understand me. Crinkling his brow, Jinlong said, “This one’s got a trick or two up his sleeve. I hope he’ll climb that tree again at tomorrow’s gathering.” He opened the gate to my pen and said to the girls behind him, “Come on, girls, we’ll start with this one.” He walked up to the tree and scratched my belly with an experienced hand. It felt so good I could have died right then and there. “Pig Sixteen,” he said, “we’re going to give you a bath and a haircut. When we’re finished, you’ll be the handsomest pig in the world. I hope you’ll cooperate and set a good example for the rest of them.” He turned and gave the high-sign to four militiamen behind him who ran up and – you guessed it – each grabbed one of my legs. They were strong and, since they were used to treating people roughly, hurt me as they pulled me down out of the tree. “You pricks!” I cursed angrily. “Instead of lighting incense in the temple, you’re destroying the idol!” My curses went in one ear and out the other as they dragged me on my back up to the cook pot filled with salt water and tossed me in! Some deep-seated fear gave me strength I didn’t know I had, and the liquor I’d consumed turned to cold sweat. A thought hit me like a hammer: I recalled that before the new butcher law took effect, pork was eaten with the skin still on, and pigs scheduled for slaughter were tossed into just this sort of pot to soften up their bristles, which were shaved away before their heads and feet were cut off, their bellies slit open, and they were hung on a rack to be sold. The second my feet hit the bottom of the pot, I jumped out so fast I scared them all. Just my bad luck to jump out of one pot and into another, and this time the warm water swallowed me right up. I can’t tell you how good that felt. It broke my will. I didn’t have the strength to jump out this time. The girls surrounded the pot and started scrubbing me with coarse brushes under Ximen Jinlong’s direction. I moaned, my eyelids drooped, and I just about fell asleep. When they were finished, the militiamen lifted me out of the pot, and when the cool air hit my body, I was sluggish and light as a feather. So the girls started in with their scissors, trimming the hair on my head and then brushing the bristles on my back. Ximen Jinlong thought it would be nice to cut the hair on both sides in the shape of plum blossoms, but they wound up shaving it all off. There was nothing Jinlong could do about that except add slogans with red paint: “Mate for the revolution” on the left side, “Bring benefits to the people” on the right. Then he dressed up the slogans by adding plum blossoms and sunflowers with red and yellow paint, turning me into a sort of bulletin board. When he was finished, he stepped back to admire his handiwork, wearing a mischievous smile that couldn’t cover up the look of self-satisfaction. Everyone was shouting and calling me a great-looking pig.
If they could have beautified all the pigs on the farm the way they did me, then every one of them would have been a work of art. That would have been hard. Merely bathing them in salt water was out of the question, especially since the day of the on-site conference was rapidly approaching. Absent any obvious solution, Jinlong had to adjust his plans. What he came up with was to draw some simple but artistic samples of facial makeup, which he gave to twenty clever and skillful young men and women, along with a bucket of paint and two brushes, with instructions to paint the pigs’ faces while they were still under the influence: red paint for the white pigs, white for the blacks, and yellow for all the others. For a while, the youngsters threw themselves into their work, but slapdash results soon became the norm. Even though the late-autumn skies were clear and the air was fresh, a horrible stink hung over the pigpens, not the sort of atmosphere that fostered a good work ethic. The young women dedicated themselves to the task at hand from the start and refused to do sloppy work no matter how unhappy they might be. The young men would have none of that. They just slapped paint on the pigs’ bodies. White pigs wound up with red spots all over, as if they’d been hit by a shotgun blast with red pellets; black pigs were given white faces that made them look like sly old scoundrels or treacherous court officials. One of the youths, Mo Yan, to be precise, painted large-framed white spectacles on four black animals and red legs on four white sows.
Finally, the pig-raising convention got under way, and since I’d already given away my tree-climbing secret trick, there was no reason to hold back. In an attempt to keep the pigs from acting up and to impress the visiting VIPs, the quality of feed was raised and the quantity of liquor doubled. The pigs were blind drunk by the time the gathering was called to order. The smell of alcohol in the air was unmistakable, but Jinlong brazenly announced that what they smelled was a newly perfected fermented feed. He told everyone that the new feed required very little high-quality ingredients, but the nutritional value was surprisingly high and kept the animals from acting up or running around. They ate, they slept, and they put on weight. In recent years a lack of nutritional food, which had adversely influenced the birth rate of pigs, had become a matter of great concern. The creation of this new fermented feed solved that problem and paved the way for the commune to actively develop its pig-raising enterprise.
“Esteemed leaders, comrades, I am pleased to announce that our new fermented feed is an international breakthrough. We make it out of leaves, grass, and grain stalks. In other words, we’ve turned cast-off items into high-quality pork, which in turn produces a more nutritious food for our citizens and digs a grave for the imperialists, revisionists, and reactionaries.”
A cool breeze brushed my belly as I lay cradled up in the apricot tree. A cluster of audacious sparrows that had landed on my head were pecking away at crumbs from the corners of my mouth all the way back to my ears. Their pointy beaks had a numbing, even slightly painful effect on my ultrasensitive ears, with their tight web of capillaries and nerves, sort of like an acupuncture treatment. Such contentment, I could barely keep my eyes open. I knew Jinlong would have liked nothing more than for me to be fast asleep up there. That way he could put that oily mouth of his to use – he could talk a dead pig back to life – saying anything he wanted. But I didn’t want to sleep. In the long history of humankind, this was surely the first such meeting focused on pigs, and who could say if there would ever be a second? If I slept through such a momentous meeting, the remorse would last for three thousand years! Since I was a pampered pig, I could sleep pretty much whenever I wanted. Now was not one of those moments. I flapped my ears as a means of slapping my cheeks and letting everyone know I had standard ears, not the kind that adorned the heads of the Yimeng pigs, which stood straight up like dog ears. I realize, of course, that these days there are lots of urban dogs whose ears hang down like worn-out socks. Modern people have too much time on their hands, so they bring all sorts of unrelated animals together to mate and produce bizarre offspring, a true blasphemy to God, who will punish them one day. After flapping my ears vigorously to shoo some sparrows away, I picked a blood-red leaf from the apricot tree, put it in my mouth, and began to chew, its bitter, puckery taste working like tobacco to keep me wide awake. So then, from my commanding position, I began observing the goings-on around me to get a thorough grasp of what transpired at the pig-raising convention, taking comprehensive mental notes in a way that surpassed the most technologically advanced machines of today, since they are limited to recording sounds and images, while I could include overall flavors and my feelings.
