Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

crab trussed up with rice straw.

“What’s going on?” Diao Xiaosan asked as he stood up in his urine-soaked quarters. He had a vacant look in his bloodshot eyes, showing the effects of the alcohol he’d drunk. I had no desire to engage the moron in conversation, but he rose up and rested his chin on the top of his wall to see what was happening outside. He was so hung over he couldn’t keep his balance, and he’d barely gotten his front legs off the ground when his hind legs gave out and deposited him in his own filthy leavings. The almost ridiculously unhygienic pig had piss and shit piled in every corner of his living quarters; just my bad luck to live next door to someone like that. There was white paint on his face and his protruding front teeth were yellow, like a couple of gold inlays favored by rich upstarts.

I saw a dark figure slip out of the audience – the meeting was well attended, anywhere from three to five thousand – and head for the big ceramic vat beneath the apricot tree, where the person bent over and looked inside. I knew what he wanted – sugar water. That was long gone. The people ahead of him had drunk deeply, not because they were thirsty, but for the sugar, one of the sparest commodities of the day, something you got only with a ration card. A mouthful of sugar back then was probably more satisfying than sex is today. For the sake of image, countywide, the leaders of the Ximen Village Production Brigade had called a meeting of commune members to go over all aspects of the on-site conference. One of the items was to forbid any commune member, adult or child, to help himself to sugar water; anyone who had the audacity to disobey would lose a hundred work points. The ugly looks on the faces of people from outlying villages as they fought over the drink was shameful, and I was proud of the Ximen villagers for their high degree of consciousness, or, should I say, their degree of self-control. I noticed the perplexed looks in their eyes as they watched the outsiders drink the sugar water, and though I knew those looks represented complex feelings, I admired the people nonetheless. Holding back like could not have been easy.

But there was one person for whom holding back was simply too difficult. I don’t have to name names for you to know who that person was. He leaned into the vat like a horse drinking water, trying to lick up the last few drops at the bottom. But his neck was too short, the vat too deep, so he found a ladle, strained to tip the vat over, then dipped the ladle into the pooled water. When he let go of his hand, the vat tipped back straight, and I could tell by how carefully he held the ladle that his effort had not been in vain. He either brought the ladle up to his mouth or brought his mouth down to the ladle, I’m not sure which. From the look on his face, I knew he was enjoying a brief taste of the good life. He scraped the last bit of sweetness from the vat with the ladle, making a sound that set my teeth on edge. It was worse than the blaring of loudspeakers and made me tense and uncomfortable. I wished someone would stop him from embarrassing all of Ximen Village; I was afraid I’d fall out of my tree if he kept it up much longer, and I could hear the other pigs stirring. “Stop that scraping,” they shouted through an inebriated haze. “You’re killing us!” Well, he tipped over both vats and crawled into one, probably to lick the bottom. It’s a true marvel to have such a greedy mouth. He reemerged after a while, his clothes shiny; he reeked of something sweet. If it had been springtime, he’d have been swarmed over by bees or butterflies, but it was wintertime – no bees, no butterflies. There were, however, ten or fifteen big, fat flies buzzing around him, two of which landed on his filthy, kinky hair.

“… and we must employ ten times the passion and put forth a hundred times the effort to expand Ximen Village’s advanced experience. Every member of the commune and production brigade must personally take charge. The workers, youth, women, and mass organizations must strive to work together. We must draw tight the class struggle bowstring and reinforce the control and surveillance of all landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists, and be on guard against sabotage by concealed class enemies…”

Mo Yan, smiling happily and whistling, caught my attention by strutting over to the generator room, so I followed him with my eyes, watching him go inside, where the diesel motor was humming along.

“The storekeepers of each brigade must rigorously protect against the theft of pesticides and their introduction into pig feed by class enemies…”

Jiao Er, the duty watchman for the generator, was leaning up against the wall, sound asleep in the warmth of the sun, which gave Mo Yan the opportunity to work his mischief. He undid his belt, dropped his pants, grabbed his pecker with both hands – up till this moment I had no idea what he was planning to do – and took aim at the fan belt, wetting it with a clear stream of piss. A strange sound preceded the slippage of the belt, which hit the ground like a dead boa. The loudspeaker went silent as the generator squealed, its motor spinning uselessly. The clearing and the thousands of people in it were, it seemed, submerged underwater, for the speaker’s voice was suddenly weak and drab, like the dull pops of fish bubbles as they reached the surface. The desired atmosphere was in a shambles. I saw Hong Taiyue stand up, followed by Ximen Jinlong, who got to his feet and strode toward the generator room. At that moment I knew that Mo Yan had done something terrible and that bitter fruit awaited him.

Too dumb to know what trouble he was in, Mo Yan stood in front of the slipped fan belt looking puzzled, wondering how the little bit of water he’d made had caused the belt to come off like that. The first thing Ximen Jinlong did when he burst into the room was slap Mo Yan on the head. The second thing he did was kick Mo Yan in the ass, and the third thing he did was bend down, pick up the fan belt, and replace it on the turbine. But as soon as he let go, off it came again. He tried again, this time using a metal pole, and managed to make it stay. He then coated the belt with a layer of wax, and it held.

“Who told you to do this?” he yelled at Mo Yan.

“Nobody…”

“Then why’d you do it?”

“To cool the belt off.”

The interruption caused by the loudspeaker failure had dealt such a blow to the production HQ VIP that he brought an abrupt end to his speech. After a brief flurry of confusion, the pretty elementary teacher Jin Meili mounted the stage to announce the program. In not-terribly-standard-but-pleasant-sounding Mandarin, she announced to the masses in the clearing and, more important, to the officials who had by then taken seats on both sides of the stage: “The Ximen Village Elementary School Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team theatrical performance will now begin!” By this time the electricity had been restored to the loudspeakers, from which shrill screeches blasted into the air like darts aimed at birds overhead. Teacher Jin had cut off her braid for the performance and combed her hair in a style made fashionable by Ke Xiang, heroine of the Cultural Revolution drama The Red Lantern; that made her more valiant-looking and, at the same time, prettier and more competent than ever. I was watching people seated on the sides of the stage; all eyes were on her. Some of the men were gazing at her face, others were staring at her waist; the eyes of the first secretary of the Milky Way Commune, Cheng Zhengnan, were glued to her nicely rounded bottom. Ten years later, after a decade of hard times, Jin Meili wound up married to Cheng, now Party secretary of the County Politics and Law Committee. There was a twenty-six-year difference in their ages, which didn’t sit well with people then. Nowadays, who’d even notice?

When she’d finished, Teacher Jin moved off to the side, where an accordion had been placed on a chair, its enamel buttons glittering in the sunlight. Ma Liangcai stood beside her with a bamboo flute, looking somber. After strapping on the accordion, Teacher Jin sat down and began playing beautifully; she was quickly joined by Ma, who produced a sound that could pierce clouds and shatter rocks. As they played a little introductory tune, a group of pudgy revolutionary piglet boys wearing red stomachers with the word loyalty embroidered on their breasts set their stumpy legs in motion and rolled and climbed their way onto the stage. They were such empty-headed, noisy, unthinking little pigs they needed a leader, which came in the person of a young female in red shoes, Little Red, who somersaulted onto the stage. Her mother was a rusticated, artistic woman from Qingdao, so she was blessed with good genes and a remarkable capacity for learning. Little Red’s entrance drew enthusiastic applause, whereas that of the little boy pigs drew only snickers. But they made me happy. Never in the history of the world had a pig performed on a stage for humans; it was a breakthrough that made us real pigs extremely proud. From where I sat in my tree, I raised a hoof and sent a revolutionary salute to Jin Meili, the teacher who had choreographed the performance. I wanted also to salute Ma Liangcai, who’d played the flute fairly well, and to Little Red’s mother, who deserved my respect for her ability as the wife of a peasant to produce such fine progeny. Passing on a talent for dance was worthy of respect, but even more worthy of respect was the way she remained backstage and provided the singing for her daughter’s dance. She had a strong yet mellow alto voice – in one of his later stories, Mo Yan would write that she had a low voice, which earned him derision from people who knew a thing or two about music – and when the notes emerged from her throat, they danced in the air like strips of satin. “We are revolutionary red pigs who have come to Tiananmen from Gaomi”-those lyrics would not be