Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

announced at the first pen in each row. “The good times are on their way!
    “A conference in conjunction with the pig-raising program will be held in our village, which means the good times for us are on their way,” I shouted before returning to my pen. I didn’t want people to be aware of my night roaming until I was anointed Pig King, though even if they’d known, there’d have been no way to stop me. I’d no sooner leaped over the wall than I heard a shrill cry as my hooves landed on something soft and springy. What I saw enraged me. My next-door neighbor, Diao Xiaosan, had made good use of my absence by coming into my home and sleeping on my bed. My skin began to itch and my eyes nearly popped out of my head when I looked down at that ugly, filthy body sleeping in my luxury quarters. Those poor golden wheat stalks! Those poor red and redolent apricot leaves! The bastard had soiled my bed, and I was sure it wasn’t the first time. Anger boiled up in me, my strength rose to my head, and I heard the gnashing of my own teeth. And damned if he didn’t look up with a smile, nod, and run over to the apricot tree to take a piss. As a cultured creature who valued hygiene, I always relieved myself out next to the southwest wall, where there was a hole. I made sure my stream went out through the hole, not leaving a drop inside my pen. The apricot tree, on the other hand, was where I did my daily exercise, since the ground there was smooth and clean, as if paved with marble. When I did my pull-up exercises, my hooves clicked on the ground when I landed. But now my beautiful spot was polluted by this bastard’s piss.
    Concentrating all my strength up front, like a Qigong master who breaks rocks with his head, I took aim at the bastard’s rump — to be accurate, I took aim at the big pair of balls that hung just below there — and charged. I hit him and bounced backward; my hind legs crumpled and I wound up sitting on the ground. When I looked up, there he stood, rump high in the air, spilling a load of you-know-what just before he went headfirst into the wall, like a cannonball, and bounced right back. All that happened in a split second, and to me it seemed half real and half illusion. The reality part was seeing that bastard lying at the base of the wall like a dead pig, right where I had my bowel movements, just the spot for a smelly bag of shit like him to sleep in. The bastard was twitching, balling up, his back arched like a threatening cat, and all I could see of his eyes were the whites; the best comparison I can think of is the look of contempt a working man gives to a bourgeois intellectual. I felt a little dizzy, my nose hurt, and I had tears in my eyes.
    The son of a bitch had to be dead, which, to be honest, was not what I wanted. I kind of liked his primitive wildness. So I tapped his belly. He twitched and he grunted. At least he wasn’t dead. That was good news. I tapped him again, and again he grunted, but this time his eyes began to return to normal, though his body remained motionless.
    I’d read in Reference News that a virgin male animal’s urine had life-giving properties. The ancient physician Li Shizhen mentioned this in his classic compendium Materia Medica, but with few details. In the days I’m referring to, Reference News was the only newspaper in the country that printed a bit of the truth; only lies and hollow words found their way into the other media. For that reason I was so obsessed with Reference News that, if you want to know the truth, one of the reasons I went out walking at night was to sneak over to the brigade HQ to listen to Mo Yan read from Reference News, his favorite newspaper. At the time, his hair was dry and brittle, his ears covered with chilblains. He wore a tattered lined coat and a pair of beat-up straw sandals. When you add in his squinty eyes, you can see what an ugly sight he presented. But this strange apparition was a devoted patriot and a keen internationalist. He volunteered for the post of late-night HQ watchman in order to gain the privilege of reading Reference News.
    I poured some of my urine into Diao Xiaosan’s mouth, and when I saw his blackened teeth, I thought, You bastard, I’m cleaning your damned teeth for you. Some of the urine splashed into his eyes, though I tried to control my aim. You bastard, I’m giving you eyedrops. He swallowed what for him was top-quality medicine and began to grunt. His eyes opened all the way; my magical