Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

to never have a nose ring. But you chose to ignore the attempts to get you to move.
    “How does anyone get an ox to do what it’s told without a nose ring?” Fang Liu asked. “Does Lan Lian use magic incantations to get it to do what he wants?”
    Ximen Ox, my friend, they hogtied you and stuck a hot poker through the septum of your nose. Who did it? My brother Jinlong. I didn’t know then that you were a reincarnation of Ximen Nao, so I couldn’t appreciate what you were feeling at that moment. The person who fitted a brass ring through the burned hole in your nose was your own son. How did that make you feel?
    Once the nose ring was in place, they led you out into the field, where springtime, the season of rebirth, was making itself felt everywhere. But as soon as you reached the plot of land to be plowed, you lay down on the ground. All the farmers, veterans of many spring plowings, had watched you pull a plow by yourself, seemingly with ease, spreading waves of soil as you created one straight row after the other. They were curious, even mystified, by your behavior. What’s this all about? My dad was out on his narrow strip of land that day, a handheld hoe a substitute for an ox and a plow. Bent at the waist, eyes fixed on the ground at his feet, he moved slowly, one swipe of his hoe at a time. “This ox,” a farmer said, “wishes it could be working with him, the way it used to.”
    Jinlong stepped backward, took his whip off his shoulder, and brought it down on the ox’s back. It left a white welt on your hide. You were in the prime of your life then, so your hide was tough and resilient. Jinlong’s lashing did no serious damage. If you’d been old and weak or young and underdeveloped, it would have split your hide.
    There’s no denying that Jinlong was a very talented young man. Whatever he put his hand to, he did better than anyone. There weren’t more than a handful of men in the village who could handle one of those four-yard-long whips with accuracy, and he was one of them. The dull sound of the whip on your hide dispersed in the air around you, and I know Dad must have heard it. But he didn’t look up or pause in his work. I knew the depth of his feelings toward you, so the punishment you were taking must have hurt him a great deal. But rather than run over to protect you, he kept working. My dad was suffering as much from the lashing as you were!
    Jinlong gave you twenty lashes and only stopped from exhaustion; he was gasping for breath, his forehead was bathed in sweat. But you lay there, head on the ground, hot tears squeezed out of your tightly shut eyes and darkening your face. You didn’t move and you didn’t make a sound, but the spastic ripples on your hide proved that you were still alive. If not for that, no one witnessing the scene would have doubted that they were now looking at a dead ox. With a steady stream of curses on his lips, my brother walked up and kicked you in the face.
    “Get up, damn you,” he snarled. “Get up!”
    You stayed where you were, eyes still shut. Enraged by your defiance, he kicked you in the head and the face and the belly, over and over and over, and from a distance he looked like a shaman in a dance of exorcism. You put up with the assault without moving, while the Mongol ox beside you, your mother, trembled as she watched what was happening to you; her crooked tail went stiff, like a petrified snake. Out in the field, my father sped up the pace of work, digging deeply into the earth.
    The other farmers, having finished their plowing, returned, surprised to see that Jinlong’s ox was still lying on the ground. As they gathered round, the good-hearted rich peasant Wu Yuan said:
    “Is he sick?”
    Tian Gui, who consistently played the role of a progressive, said, “Look how plump he is, how glossy his coat is. Last year he pulled Lan Lian’s plow, this year he’s lying on the ground pretending he’s dead. This ox opposes the People’s Commune!”
    Hong Taiyue glanced over at my dad, who still hadn’t looked up from his labors. “The kind of master you have determines the kind of ox you get,” he said coldly. “Like master, like ox.”
    “Let’s beat him!” the traitor Zhang Dazhuang said. “I don’t believe he’ll keep lying there if we really beat him.” The others agreed.
    And so, seven or eight plowmen formed a circle around the ox, took their whips off their shoulders, held the handles, and let the lashes hang down behind