Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

dangerous game of chess, like cutting off all avenues of escape. So I looked behind me out of the corner of both eyes, knowing I had to seize the moment, and saw the blood that was spurting from the savage beast’s wide-open mouth and the ominous glare in his eyes. La-ya-la – La-ya la-la-ya- la – My life was hanging by a thread, so I rested my front hooves on Butterfly Lover’s body and raised my rear legs, a sort of handstand, if you will, and when Diao came at me like a shot, he slipped under my belly, and all I had to do was settle back and I was astride him. He was totally defenseless. I stuck my hooves in his eyes – no more glare. La-ya-la- La-ya la-la-ya-la- Mama’s straw hat has flown up to the moon – Taking my loves and my ideals with it – Sure, the tactic was on the cruel side, but this was such an important moment that I couldn’t concern myself with sermons of hypocrisy.

Diao Xiaosan careened around frantically until he finally managed to throw me from his back. Blue-tinged blood oozed from his eye sockets. Covering his eyes with his hooves, he cried out in agony as he rolled on the ground:

“I can’t see… I’m blind…”

La-ya-la- La-ya-la- All the pigs were quiet, looking very solemn. The moon flew high up into the sky, the straw hat fell to earth, bringing an end to the straw hat song; now the only sounds swirling around the air of Apricot Garden were the agonizing shrieks of Diao Xiaosan. The castrated boars headed back to their pens, their tails between their legs, whereas the sows, under Butterfly Lover’s leadership, circled me and turned their heads outward, offering up their backsides to me. Master, they muttered, beloved master, we are yours, all of us, for you are the king, and we are lowly concubines fully prepared to become the mothers of your offspring… La-ya-la – La-ya la-la-ya-la – The straw hat that had fallen out of the sky was crushed beneath Diao Xiaosan’s body as he rolled on the ground. My mind was a blank, except for soft strains of the straw hat song, and those soft strains were, in the end, like pearls sinking to the bottom of a lake. Everything had returned to normal; the watery rays of the moon were chilled, causing me to shiver and raising goose bumps on my skin. Is this how territory was won? Is this how you gained dominance? I couldn’t possibly handle all that many sows, could I? To be perfectly honest, by then I’d lost interest in mating with any of them. But all those nice rear ends raised in my direction were like an indestructible wall penning me in, with no way out. How I wished I could escape on the wind, but a voice from on high made my position clear: King of Pigs, you have no right to escape, just as Diao Xiaosan has no right to mate with them. Mating with them is your sacred obligation! La-ya-la – La-ya la-la-ya- la – The straw hat song rose slowly to the surface like pearls. Yes, a monarch has no domestic affairs; politics rest on a monarch’s sex organ. It was necessary for me to faithfully discharge my duties by mating with those sows. I absolutely had to fulfill my obligation to deposit my seed in their wombs. It made no difference whether they were pretty or ugly, whether they were white or black, whether they were virgins or had already mated with other boars. The real problem that presented itself was selection. They were all equally demanding, equally passionate, so who was I to choose? Or, to put it differently, who was going to be honored by an imperial visit? With all my heart, I wished I could be aided in my selection by one of the castrated boars, but there was no time for that now. The moon, close to fulfilling its nightly obligation, had retreated to the western edge of the sky, until only half of its red face was still visible above the treetops. A shark’s-belly silver-gray sky had already appeared on the eastern horizon; dawn was breaking, the morning stars sparkled. I nudged Butterfly Lover’s rear end with my hard snout as notice that I had selected her for the first imperial visit. She moaned coquettishly. Ah, Great King, your slave’s body has long awaited this moment…

For the moment, I put aside all thoughts of past lives and gave no thought to what would follow my present life. I was a pig, through and through, so I rose up and mounted Butterfly Lover… La-ya-la – La-ya la-la-ya-la- The straw hat song rose triumphantly. As the background music swelled, a sonorous tenor voice rose into the sky: Mama’s straw hat has flown up to the moon – Taking my loves and ideals with it – All the other sows, free of jealousy, took the tail of the pigs in front in their mouths and began a circle dance around Butterfly Lover and me to the rhythms of the straw hat song. With Apricot Garden birds singing and a morning glow lighting up the sky, my first mating went off without a hitch.

As I lowered myself from Butterfly Lover’s back, I spotted Ximen Bai walking unsteadily, aided by a homemade cane, baskets of food over her shoulder. Calling upon what energy remained, I leaped over the wall and into my pen to await Ximen Bai’s food delivery. The scent of black beans and bran made me drool. I was famished. Ximen Bai’s face, burnished red by the morning glow, appeared above the wall of my pen. There were tears in her eyes. Nearly overcome by emotion, she said:

“Sixteen, Jinlong and Jiefang are now married, and so are you. You are all grown-ups…”

30

Miraculous Hair Brings Xiaosan Back to Life

The Red Death Wipes Out the Swine Horde

The weather during the eighth month of that year was sweltering, with so much rain it was as if the heavens had sprung a leak. The canal running alongside the pig farm swelled with floodwaters, the saturated ground rising like dough in the oven. Several pathetic old apricot trees, unable to withstand the watery onslaught, shed their leaves and waited for death to claim them. Branches of poplars and willows that served as roof beams above the pigpens sprouted fresh appendages, while fences made of sorghum stalks were covered with gray spots of mildew. Pig waste that had begun to leaven filled the air with a moldy smell. Frogs that ought to have gone dormant instead began mating, interrupting the nightly stillness with croaks that kept the pigs from their sleep. And then a powerful earthquake struck the city of Tangshan, its shock waves collapsing more than a dozen pens with weak foundations and causing my roof beams to creak and sway. That was followed by a meteorite shower, with meteors streaking across the sky, accompanied by great explosive rumblings and blinding lights in the black curtain of night; the earth shook. All this occurred as my harem of twenty or more pregnant pigs awaited the impending birth of their litters, teats swelling with milk.

Diao Xiaosan was still my neighbor. Our violent struggles left him with one totally blind eye and one with seriously impeded vision. That constituted his great misfortune and my deep remorse. During that spring, two of the sows failed to get pregnant even after several couplings, and I thought about inviting him to try his luck with them as an expression of my regret over what had happened. Imagine my surprise when he responded somberly:

“Pig Sixteen, I say, Pig Sixteen, you can kill a warrior but you mustn’t humiliate him. You beat me, Diao Xiaosan, fair and square, and all I ask is a measure of dignity. Do not disgrace me with such an offer.”

Deeply moved, I was forced to view this onetime bitter foe with renewed respect. I tell you, in the wake of our fight, Diao Xiaosan became a very somber pig, one whose gluttony and talkativeness ended abruptly. But, as they say, calamities never come alone: a far greater tragedy was about to befall him. Seen from one angle, what happened involved me; seen from another angle, it did not. Pig farm personnel wanted Diao to mate with the two sows I was unable to impregnate, but he merely sat behind them, quietly, not aroused, like a cold stone carving, which led those people to assume that he had become impotent. In an attempt to improve the quality of meat of retired boars, castration was called for, a shameful human invention. Diao Xiaosan was fated to suffer that cruelty. For an immature male pig, castration is a simple procedure accomplished in a few minutes. But for a grown pig like Diao Xiaosan, who must have enjoyed hot, passionate romance back in Mount Yimeng, it was the sort of operation that could leave his life hanging by a thread. A squad of ten or more militiamen held him down beneath the crooked apricot tree and encountered resistance the likes of which they hadn’t seen before. At least three of the men suffered disfiguring bites on their hands. In the end, one man grabbed each of his legs and flipped him onto his back, while two others pressed his neck down with a stick, and one of the others crammed a stone into his mouth, one too large either to spit out or swallow. The man wielding the knife was an old-timer with a shiny bald head surrounded on the sides and back with a few scraggly gray hairs. I harbored a natural loathing for that man; the mere mention of his name – Xu Bao – called to mind a previous life, when he’d been my mortal enemy. He’d gotten very old and had a severe case of asthma that had him gasping for air from the slightest exertion. He stood off to