Don’t argue with me. Pang Hu’s daughter messed up your mind so much that even though you’re only in your early fifties, your eyes are glazed over and your reactions are dulled, both warning signs of dementia. So I advise you not to stick stubbornly to your opinions or think you can debate me. I can confidently tell you that when the pig-raising convention was held in Ximen Village, the village was not equipped with electricity. That’s right, you yourself said it, people were burying concrete poles in the fields just outside the village at the time, but those were for high-voltage wires for the state-run farm, which belonged to the Jinan Military District and was designated an independent production and construction corps. Its leading cadres were military men on active duty, its laboring force made up of rusticated high-school graduates from Qingdao and Jinan. It goes without saying that an operation like that required electricity; we would have to wait a decade for electrification to reach Ximen Village. What that meant at the time was when night fell during the convention, except for the pig farm, blackness settled over the entire Ximen Village Production Brigade.
That’s right, my pen was lit up by a hundred-watt bulb, which I taught myself how to turn on and off. The electricity was supplied by the Apricot Garden Pig Farm. In those days we called it “self-generated power.” A twelve-horsepower diesel motor generated the power. It was Jinlong’s idea. Go ask Mo Yan if you don’t believe me. He came up with a wild idea that ended up very badly. I’ll get to that in a minute.
A pair of loudspeakers hanging from the sides of the stage amplified the words of Ximen Jinlong a good five hundred times, and I figured all of Northeast Gaomi Township was within range of his boastful speech. Six tables taken from the elementary school were lined up at the rear of the stage and covered with red cloth. County government and commune VIPs, in their blue or gray uniforms, were seated on six benches, also taken from the school. Fifth from the left, a man whose army uniform was nearly white from many launderings was a recently retired regimental commander who’d taken charge of the production division of the County Revolutionary Committee. Ximen Village Brigade Party Secretary Hong Taiyue sat to his right. He was freshly shaved and had just had his hair trimmed; the bald spot on top was covered by a gray army-style cap. His ruddy face looked like an oilpaper lantern shining through the darkness of night. My guess was that he was dreaming of moving up the promotional ladder. If the State Council established a “Pig-Raising” Command Post, he might possibly be tapped as commander. There were fat officials and thin ones, and they all faced the east, looked into the Red Sun, so their faces were always ruddy, their eyes in a perpetual squint. One of them, a dark, fat man, was wearing a pair of sunglasses, something rarely seen in those times. With a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he looked like the leader of a gang of thieves. Jinlong was sitting at a desk also draped with red cloth in front of the stage, speaking into a microphone wrapped in red satin. In those days, that was awesome high-tech equipment. Mo Yan, as always filled with curiosity, had sneaked up to the microphone and tested it out with a couple of dog barks. The magnified barking of dogs rocked the apricot grove and traveled out into the fields with astonishing effect. Mo Yan later wrote about this incident in an essay. This all goes to show that the power for the amplified microphone at the pig-raising convention was not supplied by high-voltage wires strung by the government, but by our own Apricot Garden Pig Farm diesel motor. A five-yard-long, twenty-centimeter-wide leather belt linked the turbine to a generator; when the motor was running, so was the generator, and electric power was the result, something that seemed nearly miraculous. It wasn’t only the more dull-witted residents of Ximen Village who were virtually dumbstruck by what they were witnessing; even I, a very smart pig, had no explanation for what was right in front of my eyes. That’s right, what in the world is this invisible thing called electricity? Where does it come from, and where does it disappear to? After a bonfire burns out, ashes are left behind; digested food becomes feces. But electricity? What does it turn into? This leads me back to when Ximen Jinlong set up the machinery in the two red-brick rooms close to a tall apricot tree in the southeastern corner of the Apricot Garden Pig Farm. After working all day, he did extra duty at night with the aid of a lantern, work that was so mysterious it attracted hordes of curious villagers, including just about all the people I mentioned earlier, with that disgusting Mo Yan elbowing his way all the way up front. Not content to just watch, he talked nonstop, to Jinlong’s great annoyance. Several times Huang Tong grabbed Mo Yan by the ear and dragged him outside, only to have him reappear up front in less than half an hour, leaning up so close his slobber nearly fell on the back of Jinlong’s greasy hands.
I didn’t dare press up to get a look, and I couldn’t climb that particular apricot tree, since the goddamned trunk was too slippery and the lower branches were too high. It looked like one of those white poplars up north, where the branches are all up high, giving it the shape of a torch. But heaven smiled down on me. Behind the rooms where this was all going on was a large grave mound where a dog that had died saving a child was buried. The dog, a black male, had jumped into the roiling waters of Grain Barge River to save the life of a girl who’d fallen in, but the effort had been too much for it, and it had died.
By standing on the grave mound, I could look in through a hole in the wall where a window was supposed to go, and see everything that went on inside. The gas lantern lit the place up like daytime, while outside the sky was pitch-black. It was like they said about class warfare: The enemy is in the light, we’re in the dark. We see what we want to see; we can see them, but they can’t see us. I watched as Jinlong turned the pages of the grimy handbook and wrote things between the lines of a newspaper. Hong Taiyue took out a cigarette, lit it, and took a deep drag, then stuck it in Jinlong’s mouth. Revering intelligence and talent, Hong was one of the rare enlightened cadres of the time. Then there were the Huang twins, who kept Jinlong’s brow dry with their handkerchiefs. I saw you were unmoved when Huang Hezuo dried his sweaty brow, but noticed the look of jealousy on your face when Huang Huzhu did the same thing. You overrate your own appeal, and later events proved that the blue birthmark on your face not only did not keep you from attracting women, it actually was what drew them to you.
I bring this up not to make fun of you. I respect you too much to do that. You must be the only deputy county chief in the country who’s willing to leave his lover without saying good-bye and make a living by the sweat of his brow.
But enough small talk. After the motor was set up, they tested it and found it did in fact produce electric power. And Jinlong became the second most powerful person in Ximen Village. Now I know all about your prejudice against your stepbrother, but you benefited from that relationship. If not for him, would you have been put in charge of the livestock unit? Or would you have been fortunate enough to be assigned as a contract worker at the cotton processing plant in the fall of the second year? And without that experience, would you still have made it into the ranks of officials? You have only yourself to blame for the mess you’ve gotten yourself in now. It’s your fault you couldn’t be master of your own pecker. Ah, what good does all this talk do? Let Mo Yan write about this stuff in his stories.
The meeting went forward without a hitch. After Jinlong outlined their advanced experience, he turned the microphone over to the uniformed production official to sum up. The man strode purposefully up to the table, where he spoke without a prepared speech, with eloquence and authority, although no one could hear him. A man who looked like his secretary ran up to the table at a crouch and bent the microphone straight up, but still not high enough to reach the official’s mouth. The secretary knew what to do intuitively: he placed the bench on top of the table and set the microphone on top of that. A decade later this quick-witted individual would be given the post of county revolutionary committee office manager, in part on the basis of this one incident. The immediate effect was to blare the powerful voice of the onetime regimental commander far and wide.
“Every pig born is a cannon shell fired into the stronghold of the imperialists, revisionists, and reactionaries…” He waved his fist as he shouted his incendiary message to the crowd. That shout and gesture reminded this wise and experienced pig of a movie scene and had me wondering whether being shot from a cannon would be a dizzying and shuddering experience. And what would happen if a fat pig suddenly fell into the stronghold of the imperialists, revisionists, and reactionaries? They’d probably die of sheer joy.
It was, by this time, ten in the morning, and there was no sign that the speech would end anytime soon. I looked over at a pair of green Jeeps at the edge of the clearing, where the white-gloved drivers were leaning against the cabs, one having a leisurely smoke, the other, clearly bored, checking his wristwatch every few seconds. Back then, a Jeep commanded greater respect than a Mercedes or BMW does today, and a watch was far more estimable than a diamond ring now. That watch sparkled in the bright sunlight and caught the eye of several youngsters. Hundreds of bicycles stood in neat rows behind the Jeeps, the means of transportation for all the grassroots attendees from the county, the commune, and the village. A dozen or so armed militiamen formed a protective semicircle around all this material wealth, a clear symbol of the status of the owners.
“We must ride the mighty east wind of the Cultural Revolution to carry out the pig-raising program outlined in the supreme directive of our great leader Chairman Mao, to study the advanced experience of the Ximen Village Production Brigade, and to elevate the raising of pigs to the level of politics…” The official spoke fervently, accentuating his speech with forceful gestures. Shiny saliva bubbles gathered at the corners of his mouth, like a
