Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

shrill cries of agony, I couldn’t help feeling that the teats that had once secreted that sweet-tasting milk had turned rubbery and tasteless and produced no more than a tiny amount of rank, salty, sticky liquid that was closer to poison than milk. In disgust, I rolled her over with my snout. I could hear the pain in her voice as she cursed me: Oh, Sixteen, you are a beast with no conscience, a demon. You were sired by a wolf, not a pig. . . .
    Ximen Bai was reprimanded by Hong Taiyue over my sow mother’s paralysis. “Secretary,” she said tearfully, “her son’s willfulness caused that, not negligence on my part. If you’d seen the way he eats, like a wolf or a tiger, you’d agree that even a cow would have wound up paralyzed with him at her teat. . . .”
    Hong looked into the pen; on an impulse I stood up on my hind legs, unaware that the only other pigs that could do that were trained circus performers. For me it seemed perfectly natural. With my front legs propped up on the wall, my head was right under Hong Taiyue’s chin. He backed up, obviously shocked, and looked around. Seeing they were alone, he said to Ximen Bai softly:
    “It wasn’t your fault. I’ll isolate this king of pigs and assign someone to feed him.”
    “That’s what I suggested to Chairman Huang, but he said he wanted to wait for you to return. ...”
    “Any moron should be able to decide something as minor as this,” he grumbled.
    “It’s the respect everyone has for you,” Ximen Bai said, glancing at him before lowering her head and murmuring, “You’re a veteran revolutionary who has great concern for the people and deals with them fairly—”
    “That’s enough of that talk,” Hong said with a wave of his hand as he looked into Ximen Bai’s reddening face. “Do you still live in that cemetery hut? I think you’d better move over to the feeding shed. You can move in with Huang Huzhu and them.”
    “No,” Ximen Bai said. “My background is no good, I’m old and I’m dirty, and I don’t want to displease the youngsters—”
    Hong looked into Ximen Bai’s face, then turned and stared at the lush sunflowers. “Ximen Bai,” he said softly, “if only you hadn’t been a landlord . . .”
    I grunted. I had to do something to give voice to my mixed feelings. To be honest, I wasn’t really jealous, but the relationship between Hong Taiyue and Ximen Bai, getting more intriguing every day, instinctively made me unhappy. There was no end in sight, and you know how tragically it ended, but I’ll fill in the details anyway.
    They moved me into a large, newly built, single-occupant pen in a row of them about a hundred yards from the two hundred regular pens. The canopy of an apricot tree at the rear shaded half my pen. I lived in a shed that was open in the front, where the eaves were short, and the rear, where the eaves were long, so there was nothing to keep the sunlight from streaming in. The floor was laid with bricks, and there was a hole in one wall, covered by an iron grate that made it easy for me to relieve myself without dirtying my quarters. A pile of golden wheat stalks against my bedroom wall made the room smell fresh. I strolled around my new quarters, taking in the smell of new bricks, new earth, fresh parasol wood, and fresh sorghum stalks, and I was pleased. Compared to the squat, filthy quarters I’d shared with the old sow, my new digs were a mansion. They were airy, sunny, and constructed of environmentally appropriate materials that gave off no noxious fumes. Just look at that parasol wood beam, so newly hewn that puckery sap still oozed from the white interior of the cut ends. The sorghum stalks in the wall surrounding my quarters were also fresh, the fluid secretions still wet, still fragrant, and, I bet, still tasty. But these were my living quarters, and I wasn’t about to tear them down just to satisfy my appetite. That’s not to say I couldn’t take a bite just to see how it tasted. I could stand on my hind legs and walk like humans, but I wanted to keep that a secret as long as possible.
    What thrilled me was that my new home was supplied with electricity. A lamp with a hundred-watt bulb hung from the beam. I later learned that all two hundred of the new pens had electricity, but they were lit with twenty-five-watt bulbs. The on-off pull string hung down alongside one of the walls, and all I had to do was reach up, catch the string in my cloven hoof, and tug lightly to make the light