trash these days, but for a rural village in the early 1980s, it had a domineering presence. Obviously, Jinlong, a village branch secretary of the Communist Party, was somebody to reckon with. This signaled the beginnings of his progress up the ladder.
Jinlong strode confidently in through the gate, followed by his companions. All eyes were on the current top leader of Ximen Village. Hong Taiyue pointed to Jinlong and cursed:
“Ximen Jinlong, I must be blind. I thought you were born and grew up under the red flag, that you were one of us. I had no idea that the polluted blood of the tyrannical landlord Ximen Nao ran in your veins. Ximen Jinlong, you’re been a fraud for the last thirty years, and I fell for it…”
Jinlong signaled Panther Sun and the others with his eyes. They ran up and grabbed Hong Taiyue by the arms. He fought, he cursed:
“You’re a bunch of loyal sons and grandsons of counterrevolutionaries and members of the landlord class, running dogs and spitting cats, and I’ll never knuckle under to you!”
“That’s enough, Uncle Hong. This play is finished.” Jinlong hung the battered canteen around Hong Taiyue’s neck. “Go home and get some sleep,” he said. “I’ve spoken to Aunt Bai. We’ll pick a good date for the wedding. That way you can wallow in the muck with the landlord class.”
Jinlong’s companions spirited Hong away, his feet dragging along the ground like a couple of gourds. He turned his head, refusing to yield.
“Don’t think I’m giving up. Chairman Mao came to me in a dream and said there are revisionists in Party Central.”
Jinlong turned to the crowd and said with a smile, “You folks should go home now.”
“Party Secretary Jinlong, we bad elements would like to drink a toast to you.”
“Jinlong, you must be tired,” Qiuxiang said affectionately to her son-in-law. “I’ll have Huzhu make you a bowl of thin noodles.”
Huzhu was standing in her doorway, head down, her miraculous hair stacked up high, her hairstyle and facial expression reminiscent of a neglected palace girl.
Jinlong frowned. “I want you to close down this restaurant and put the compound back the way it was. And everybody has to move out.”
“We can’t do that, Jinlong,” Qiuxiang said anxiously. “Business is too good.”
“How good can it be in a little village like ours? If you’re looking for good business, open up in the township or the county town.”
Just then, Yingchun, a child in her arms, came out of the northern rooms. Who was that child? It was Lan Kaifang, the son born to you and Hezuo. You say you had no feelings for Hezuo. Then where did that child come from? Don’t tell me that they had test-tube babies back then. You’re such a hypocrite!
Yingchun turned to Qiuxiang. “Please keep your door shut. Arguing late at night, smoking and drinking, I don’t know how your grandson ever gets any sleep.”
All the players had shown up, including Lan Lian, who walked in the gate with a bundle of mulberry roots. Without so much as a glance at anyone else, he walked straight up to Wu Qiuxiang and said:
“Roots of the mulberry trees on your land crept into mine. I chopped them off. Here they are.”
“I’ve never seen a more stubborn man in my life,” Yingchun said. “What else are you incapable of doing?”
Huang Tong, who had been sleeping in a reclining chair, got up, yawned, and walked over.
“If you’re not afraid of tiring yourself out, go dig up all those trees. These days only the dumb pigs make a living off the land!”
“Everybody out!” Jinlong shouted with a frown before turning and walking into the main building of the Ximen family home.
The people left the compound in silence.
The Ximen compound gate closed with a thud. The village was shrouded in silence. Only the moon, with no place to go, accompanied me as I strolled around the area. The moon’s rays seemed to be made up of cold grains of sand falling on my body.
34
Hong Taiyue Loses His Male Organ In Anger
Torn Ear Turns Chaos Into the King’s Throne
In “Tales of Pig-Raising,” Mo Yan wrote in detail about how I bit off Hong Taiyue’s testicles and turned him into a cripple. He wrote that I waited until Hong was squatting beneath the crooked apricot tree doing his business and attacked him from behind. He made a great show of reporting truthfully by describing the moonlight, the fragrance of the apricot tree, the honeybees buzzing around the apricot blossoms as they gathered nectar, and ended it all with what appeared to be a sentence of great beauty: “Bathed in moonbeams, the road curved like a stream for washing water buffalo.” I came off looking like an abnormal pig strangely addicted to eating human testicles. Me, Pig Sixteen, a true hero for half my life, since when would I launch a sneak attack on someone taking a shit? His mind was in the gutter when he wrote that, and I was disgusted when I read it. He also wrote that during that spring I ran around Northeast Gaomi Township doing despicable things and that I bit to death sixteen head of cattle belonging to a peasant. He said I waited till they were doing their business and then ran up, sank my teeth into their anuses, and pulled out their twisted gray-white intestines. “The frenzied animals ran in excruciating pain, dragging their guts in the mud behind them until they fell dead.” The rat drew upon his evil imagination to make me look like some kind of monster. You know who really butchered those animals? A demented old wolf that came down from Mount Ghangbai, that’s who. He was so sneaky he left no tracks, so everybody pinned it on me. Later on that wolf slipped back to Wu Family Sandy Mouth and my savage sons and grandsons, without my even having to show my face, stomped him flat and tore him to pieces.
Here’s what really happened: I spent that night in the company of the lonesome moon wandering the streets and lanes of Ximen Village. When we made our back to Apricot Garden, I spotted Hong Taiyue under the crooked apricot tree taking a piss. His flattened canteen hung around his neck, resting on his chest. He reeked of alcohol. A man once known for his capacity for liquor, by now he was a drunk, plain and simple. As he was buttoning up his pants, he cursed:
“Let me go, you bunch of mongrels… you think you can keep me down by tying my hands and feet and putting a gag in my mouth. Not a chance! You can chop me up into little pieces, but you’ll never still the heart of a true Communist. Believe me, you little bastards. Who cares. All that counts is that I believe.,..”
The moon and I, attracted by his rants, fell in behind him, moving from one apricot tree to another, and whenever one of the trees bumped into him, he raised his fist and glared at it:
“I’ll be damned, even you come after me. Well, here’s a taste of a Communist’s steel fist…”
He wandered over to the silkworm shed, where he pounded on the door with his fist. The door was opened from the inside, lamplight spilling out into the night to merge with the moonbeams. I saw Ximen Bai’s bright face; she had opened the door while holding a basket of mulberry leaves. The crisp fragrance of the leaves and the sound of silkworms chewing their leaves, like the pitter-patter of an autumn rainfall, spilled out through the door with the light. I could see in her eyes that she was taken by surprise.
“Party Secretary… what are you doing here?”
“Who did you think it was?” Hong was obviously having trouble keeping his balance, his shoulders bumping into the racks of silkworm cocoons. “I heard you shed your landlord dunce cap,” he said in a strange voice, “and I’m here to congratulate you.”
“I have you to thank for that,” Ximen Bai replied as she set down her basket and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “If not for your support all those years, they’d have beaten me to death long ago…”
“Nonsense!” He was clearly angry. “We Communists have never ceased treating you with revolutionary humanitarianism!”
“I understand, Secretary Hong, in my heart I understand everything.” Somewhat incoherently, she continued, “I thought about talking to you back then, but the dunce cap was still on my head, and I didn’t dare approach you, but now, no more dunce cap, I’m a co-op member…”
