“What is it you want to say?”
“Jinlong sent someone to tell me I should look after you…” She blushed. “I said if Secretary Hong has no objections, I’d be happy to look after him from now on…”
“Bai Xing, oh, Bai Xing, why were you a landlord?” Hong muttered softly.
“I no longer wear that cap,” she said. “I’m a citizen now, a member of the co-op. There are no more classes…”
“Nonsense!” Hong was now agitated. He walked up closer to her. “No cap doesn’t mean you’re not a landlord, it’s in your blood, poison running through your veins!”
Bai Xing backed up, all the way to the silkworm rack. The hurtful words emerging from Hong’s mouth belied the depth of feeling apparent in his eyes. “You will always be our enemy,” he roared. But a liquid light flashed in his eyes as he reached out and grabbed hold of Bai Xing’s breast.
With a defiant moan, she said, “Secretary Hong, don’t let the poison in my veins contaminate you-”
“You’re still the target of the dictatorship. I tell you, just because you’ve shed your cap, you’re still a landlord!” He wrapped his arms around her waist and pressed his reeking, stubble-covered mouth against her face; the two bodies crashed into the sorghum-woven silkworm racks and knocked them over. Bai Xing’s silkworms wriggled and squirmed beneath the bodies; those that weren’t squashed flat just kept chewing their mulberry leaves.
Suddenly a cloud floated in front of the moon, and in the haze all sorts of reminiscences of the Ximen Nao era – sweet, sour, bitter, hot – surged into my head. As a pig, my mind was clear, but as a human, there was only confusion. Yes, I knew that no matter how I’d died all those years ago, justly or not, fairly or not, Ximen Bai had every right to be intimate with another man, but I could not endure seeing Hong Taiyue do it to her while he was cursing her. What an insult, both to Ximen Bai and to Ximen Nao. To me it felt like dozens of fireflies were flitting around in my head. Then they came together to form a ball of fire that burned its way into my eyes and caused everything I saw to resemble a will-o’-the-wisp. The silkworms were a phosphorescent green; so were the people. I charged, initially intending only to knock him off her body. But his testes came in contact with my mouth, and I honestly could find no reason not to bite them off…
Yeah, a moment of rage had incalculable consequences. Ximen Bai hanged herself from a beam in the silkworm shed that night; Hong Taiyue was sent to the county medical center, hanging on to life by a thread. He lived, but as some sort of freak with a monstrous temper. Me, I was labeled a fearful murderer with the savagery of a tiger, the cruelty of a wolf, the craftiness of a fox, and the wildness of a boar.
Mo Yan wrote that after biting Hong Taiyue, I went on a rampage in Northeast Gaomi Township, wreaking destruction on the peasants’ field oxen, and even wrote that for the longest time the locals were afraid to relieve themselves out in the woods, afraid of having their guts pulled out through their anuses. As I indicated before, that’s bullshit! Here’s what really happened. After I had, in a moment of confusion, taken that mortal bite out of Hong Taiyue, I rushed back to Wu Family Sandy Mouth. A bunch of sows sashayed up next to me, but I shoved them away. I knew this was far from over, so I went looking for Diao Xiaosan to come up with a strategy to deal with the situation.
I gave him a quick rundown on what had happened. He sighed and said:
“Brother Sixteen, as I see it, love’s a hard thing to forget. I knew right off that you and Ximen Bai had something special. Now, what’s done is done, and there’s no use in trying to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong. Let us go raise some hell, what do you say?”
Mo Yan’s accuracy improved with events that followed. Diao Xiaosan got me to call all the young studs together on the sandbar, where, like a well-tested commander, he intoned the glorious history of their ancestors in struggles against humans and predatory animals. Then he related the strategies those ancestors had conceived:
“Tell these youngsters, Great King, how to cover themselves with pine tar, then go roll in the dirt, and repeat this procedure over and over…”
A month later, our bodies were covered with a natural golden armor no knife could penetrate and sounded like a rock or tree hit it when you bumped into it. At first, it slowed us down, but we quickly got used to lugging it around with us. Diao also taught us some battle techniques: how to set an ambush, how to launch a surprise attack, how to lay siege, how to retreat, etc. He spoke with the authority of someone with battle experience. We sighed with admiration. We told Old Diao he must have been a military man in his previous incarnation. He released an enigmatic snigger. Then that iniquitous old wolf foolishly swam over to the shoal. At first he probably thought we were no match for him, but after trying to take a bite out of our virtually impenetrable hide, which kept us safe from injury, his savagery left him. My sons and grandsons, as I said earlier, stomped him flat and tore him to pieces.
August was the rainy season, which raised the water level in the river to flood stage. On moonlit nights, great numbers of fish, drawn to the surface by the moon’s reflection, wound up beached on the shoal. This was the season when we fattened up on watery delicacies. More and more wild animals congregated on the shoal, which led to more violent fights over food. A fierce territorial battle erupted between the pigs and the foxes and ended when the armored cadre drove the foxes off the shoal’s golden hunting grounds and monopolized the triangular protuberance in the middle of the river. But not without a cost: many of my descendants received serious, even crippling, injuries in the battle with the foxes. Why? Because it was impossible to protect our eyes and ears with the armor that covered our bodies, leaving them vulnerable to attacks by the foxes, whose last-ditch tactic was to release noxious gases from their anuses. They proved lethal when they entered the eyes and nose. The stronger pigs managed to survive the attacks; the others slumped to the ground and were immediately set upon by foxes who bit down on their ears and gouged out their eyes with their claws. Afterward, under Diao Xiaosan’s command, we split up into two groups, one to launch an attack, the other to lay in wait. When the foxes released their gases, courageous warriors with mugwort stuck up their noses counterattacked. Our commander, Diao Xiaosan, knew that the foxes could not sustain the level of toxicity, that while the first gassing was lethal, those that followed were only mildly noxious. On top of that, pigs that had survived the first poisonous cloud fought courageously, wanting to latch on to their enemies, even if that meant their eyes might be gouged out and their ears bitten off. One assault followed another until at least half the foxes lay dead or injured; their corpses and broken bodies lay strewn across the shoal; bushy fox tails hung from the tips of red willows here and there. Sated flies darkened the willow branches and weighted them down, like heavy fruit, until they nearly touched the ground. The battle with the foxes turned the pig troops into a veteran fighting force. Serving as a training exercise for the pigs, it was a prelude for a war with humans.
Old Diao and I were prepared for an attack by hunters from Northeast Gaomi Township; but two weeks after the Mid-Autumn Festival, we were still waiting, so Old Diao sent a few of the cleverest pigs across the river as scouts. They never came back, and I figured they had fallen into some sort of trap, to be skinned, gutted, and chopped into filling for human consumption. By that time, the human’s standard of living was on the rise, and people, having grown weary of eating domestic fare, were on the lookout for wild, edible game. As autumn deepened, that development ushered in a campaign to “eradicate the wild boar scourge,” while in fact the goal was to put wild meat on the people’s tables.
Like so many major events in their infancy, the six-month-long pig hunt began in an atmosphere of fun. It all started on the first afternoon of the National Day holiday, a sunshiny early winter day when the shoal was bathed in the fragrance of wild chrysanthemums mixed with the aroma of pine tar and the pleasant medicinal odor of mug- wort. Naturally, there were less pleasant smells as well. The prolonged period of peace had taken the edge off our tension.
So on one lovely day, when a dozen or more boats sailed up the river, red flags at the mast and a steel drum on the lead boat loudly announcing their arrival, none of us believed that a pig slaughter was about to commence. We thought it was just members of a delegation of Communist Youth Leaguers on an autumn outing.
Diao Xiaosan and I stood on a rise watching the boats draw up our shoal and seeing the passengers come ashore. In a soft voice I reported to Old Diao what I was seeing. He cocked his head and pricked up his ears to hear exactly what was going on. There must be a hundred of them, I said. Tourists, it appears. A series of whistles has them forming up on the shore, I said, as if someone has called a meeting. The whistles and bits of conversation came to us on the wind. Someone is having them line up, he said to me, repeating what he heard. Close together, like a net, and don’t fire your guns. We’ll drive them into the water. What? They’re got guns? I said, shocked by the news. They’re coming for us, Old Diao said. Give the signal. Muster the troops. Diao Xiaosan took three deep breaths, raised his head, and, with his mouth half open, released a shrill sound from deep in his throat, like an air-
