Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

incorrigible animals. At the time, you and Hezuo were off working in the cotton processing plant, so he was feeling somewhat out of sorts. He dumped feed into the pigs’ trough and said to the hacking, feverish, whining Butting Crazy and his friends, What’s up with you little devils? Is this a hunger strike? Mass suicide? Fine with me, go ahead and kill yourselves. You’re not pigs anyway. You’re unworthy of the name. You’re nothing but a bunch of counterrevolutionaries who are wasting the commune’s valuable food.

The “Butting Crazies” lay dead the next day, their skin dotted with purple splotches the size of bronze coins, their eyes open, as if they’d died with unresolved grievances. As we’ve seen, it was a rainy month, hot and humid, ideal weather for swarms of flies and mosquitoes, so by the time the commune veterinarian had rafted across the rain-swollen river to the Apricot Garden Pig Farm, the pigs’ carcasses were bloated and foul-smelling. The old veterinarian wore a rain slicker and rubber rain boots. With a gauze mask over his nose and mouth as he stood outside the pen, he looked over the wall and said, “They died of what we call the Red Death. Cremate and bury them immediately!”

The pig farm personnel – including, of course, Mo Yan – dragged the five contaminated carcasses out of the pen, under the veterinarian’s supervision, all the way to the southeast corner of the farm, where they dug a hole. They hadn’t gone down more than a couple of feet before water began gurgling to the surface. So they flung the pigs in, doused them with kerosene, and tossed in a match. Since there were strong southeast winds, foul-smelling smoke was carried to the pig farm and beyond, to the village itself – the stupid bastards couldn’t have chosen a worse location for the cremation – and I was forced to bury my nose in the dirt to blot out what must be the worst stench in the world. I later learned that Diao Xiaosan had escaped from the farm the night before the carcasses were burned; he swam across the canal and headed east into the wilds, which meant that the noxious air of latent death had no effect on his health.

You weren’t witness to what happened after that, though I’m sure you heard all about it. An epidemic spread quickly through the farm and infected more than eight hundred pigs, including the twenty-eight pregnant sows. I was a rare survivor, thanks to my highly developed immune system and to the quantity of garlic Ximen Bai added to my feed. Sixteen, she said repeatedly, it’s peppery, but go ahead and eat it. Garlic protects against all kinds of poisons. Now I knew this was no common sickness, and eating some garlic was a cheap price to pay to avoid it. During those days it would have been more accurate to say I survived on garlic than on pig feed. Each peppery meal was accompanied by tears and sweat, and raised hell with my mouth and stomach. But the garlic did the trick – I survived.

After the Red Death decimated the pig population, several more veterinarians crossed the river to our farm. One of them was a brawny, hardy woman with a bad case of acne whom everyone called Station Chief Yu. She had a firm hand and dealt with things decisively. When she placed a phone call to the county from the farm office, you could hear her a mile away. Under her supervision, the veterinarians gave the sows shots and drew blood from them. I heard that around sunset, a motorboat came up the river with badly needed medicines. But none of that kept the majority of pigs alive, and that spelled the doom for the Apricot Garden Pig Farm. Carcasses were piled so high there was no way they could be cremated, so a burial ditch was dug; but once again, water rose to the surface a couple of feet down, so that was out. Driven to desperation, farm personnel had no choice but to wait until the veterinarians left and, in the fading light of dusk, load the carcasses onto a flatbed wagon and haul them down to the river, where they were tossed into the water to float downstream – out of sight and out of mind.

The disposal of pig carcasses wasn’t wrapped up until the early days of September, following a series of heavy rainfalls that eroded the shabbily constructed hog house foundations. Most of the buildings collapsed in a single night. I heard the loud laments of Jinlong in the northern row of buildings. Obsessively ambitious, he had hoped to move up the promotion ladder by displaying his talents during activities scheduled for the delegation from the Military Region Logistics Command, whose arrival had been delayed by the rainstorms. But now that would never happen. The pigs were dead, the farm was in ruins, and I was heartsick as I reflected on the glorious days now a thing of the past.

31

A Fawning Mo Yan Rides on Commander Chang’s Coattails

A Resentful Lan Lian Weeps for Chairman Mao

On the ninth day of September, an event occurred that was as cataclysmic as a mountain collapsing or the earth opening up. Despite all attempts to save him, your Chairman Mao passed away. I could, of course, have said our Chairman Mao, but I was a pig at the time, and that would have sounded disrespectful. The river behind the village had overflowed its banks and sent floodwaters that toppled a utility pole and snapped the phone line, turning the village phone into a mere decoration and muting the loudspeaker. So word of Chairman Mao’s passing came to us from Jinlong, who’d heard the news on the radio. That radio had been a gift from his good friend Chang Tianhong, who’d been taken into custody by the Military Control Commission for the crime of hooliganism, only to be released owing to a lack of evidence. He was in and out of trouble until finally being appointed assistant troupe leader of the county Cat’s Meow Drama Troupe. As a music academy graduate, he was an ideal choice for the position. He plunged enthusiastically into the work: not only did he adapt the eight model revolutionary operas for the Cat’s Meow stage, but he followed current trends by writing and directing a production of Tales of Pig-Raising based upon events at our Apricot Garden Pig Farm – in a postscript to his story “Tales of Pig-Raising” Mo Yan referred to this development, even claiming that he had been a coauthor, but I’m pretty sure that’s a bunch of bull. It’s true that Chang Tianhong came to our pig farm to get a feel for life here, and it’s true that Mo Yan tagged along behind him like a parasite. But coauthor? No way. Chang let his imagination soar for this contemporary Cat’s Meow production, giving the pigs speaking parts and separating them into two cliques, one of which advocated extreme eating and shitting to get fat in the name of revolution; the remaining pigs were hidden class enemies, represented by Diao Xiaosan, with Butting Crazy and his friends, who ate without putting on weight, as accomplices. On the farm it wasn’t just humans pitted against humans; pigs were also pitted against pigs, and these swine struggles comprised the production’s central conflict, with humans as the supporting cast. Chang had studied Western music in college, with a concentration on Western opera. His contributions to the Cat’s Meow production were not limited to innovations in content; he also introduced drastic changes to traditional Cat’s Meow melodies, including an aria for the major positive male role of Whitey, a truly wonderful movement. I always assumed that Whitey was a dramatic version of me, but in “Tales of Pig-Raising” Mo Yan wrote that Whitey symbolized a vital and upward-moving, healthy and progressive, freedom-and-happiness- seeking force. Man, could he stretch the truth, what nerve! I knew how much effort Chang put into creating this production, integrating local and Western traditions, brilliantly merging romanticism and realism, creating a model of serious ideological contents and moving artistic form that brought out the best in each. If Chairman Mao had died a few years later, there might well have been a ninth model opera: the Gaomi Cat’s Meow version of Tales of Pig-Raising.

I recall one moonlit night when Chang Tianhong stood beneath the crooked apricot tree holding a libretto of Tales of Pig-Raising, with its squiggly musical notations, as he sang Whitey’s aria for the benefit of the youthful Jinlong, Huzhu, Baofeng, and Ma Liangcai (who was then principal of the Ximen Village Elementary School). Mo Yan was there too, with a water bottle in a holder of woven red and green plastic threads. Steeping in the bottle were a pair of medicinal fruit seeds, and Mo Yan was ready to hand the bottle to Chang if and when he needed it. In his other hand he held a black oilpaper fan with which he was fanning Chang’s back – I found his fawning behavior thoroughly disgusting. But that’s how he participated in the creation of the Cat’s Meow version of Tales of Pig-Raising.

Everyone recalls how the villagers had once given Chang Tianhong the insulting nickname of Braying Jackass. Well, after the passage of more than ten years, the villagers’ outlook had gradually broadened, and a new understanding of Chang’s singing artistry had emerged. The Chang Tianhong who returned this time to get a feel for life in the village and create a new drama was a changed man. The superficiality and haughtiness people had found so off-putting was gone. There was a sense of melancholy in his eyes, his face had an ashen quality, stubble decorated his chin, and his temples had turned gray; he looked a lot like one of those Russian Decembrists. The people viewed him with reverence as they waited for him to sing, and with one front hoof on the quivering apricot