Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

tonic had brought him back from the dead. Shortly after I finished pissing, he stood up, took a few tentative steps; his hindquarters wobbled a bit, like the tail of a fish struggling in shallow water. He leaned up against the wall, shook his head, and came to, like waking from a dream.
    “Ximen Pig,” he cursed, “fuck you!
    The bastard knew who I was! That was a surprise. After several rebirths, I don’t mind admitting that I’d pretty much stopped linking myself with that poor bastard Ximen Nao of many years before. And one thing’s for certain, not a single villager knew a thing about my past. So you can imagine how puzzled I was that this Mount Yimeng bastard had called me Ximen Pig. But one of my greatest attributes was the ability to put anything that stumped me out of my mind. Ximen Pig was Ximen Pig, the victor, and you, Diao Xiaosan, the loser.
    “Diao Xiaosan,” I said, “I opened your eyes today. There’s no reason to feel humiliated by drinking my urine. In fact, you should be grateful. Without it, you wouldn’t be breathing now, and if you weren’t breathing, you’d miss tomorrow’s festivities. And if you missed tomorrow’s festivities, you’d have lived a pig’s life for nothing.”
    “You and I aren’t finished,” Diao said through clenched teeth. “One of these days you’ll feel the might of a Mount Yimeng pig. I’ll teach you that a tiger does not survive by eating corn cakes, and that the Earth God’s pecker is made of stone.”
    I laughed off his threats and told him I accepted his challenge, that I’d be waiting: There can only be one tiger on a mountain, and two donkeys cannot be tethered to the same trough. The Earth God’s pecker may be made of stone, but his female counterpart does not have a clay receptacle. A pig farm can have but one pig king, and the day will come when you and I will fight to the death. Today’s run-in doesn’t count. It was just one louse pitted against another, pig against pig. But the next time it’ll be out in the open. In the interest of fairness and transparency, just so there’ll be no doubt as to the outcome, we can select several fair-minded, ethical old pigs who are familiar with the rules of competition and widely knowledgeable as judges. Now I ask only that the gentleman leave my quarters. I raised a front leg and saluted him, my hoof looking as if it were carved from fine jade in the light of the bonfire.
    I’d expected the wild bastard to leave in spectacular fashion, but he disappointed me. He merely made himself as thin as possible and squeezed through the metal slats of the gate. His head was the hardest to get through, and required lots of bumping and clanging, but once that was through, the rest of his body followed easily. I didn’t have to see to know that was how he’d reenter his own pen. Crawling through openings to get into something is the way dogs and cats do it; no proper pig would ever lower himself to that sort of behavior. If you’re going to be a pig, then your schedule should be: eat and sleep, sleep and eat; fatten up for your owner, get good and meaty for your owner, then be taken by your owner to the slaughterhouse. Otherwise, be like me: Have a good time doing something that shocks them when they finally see it. And so, after seeing that mangy dog of a pig, Diao Xiaosan, slink his way through the slats of my gate, his stock plummeted in my eyes.

25

A High Official Speaks Grandly at an
On-site conference
An Outlandish Pig Puts on a Show beneath
an Apricot Tree
    Sorry I’m only now getting around to talking about the glories surrounding the pig-raising local on-site conference. The entire commune was caught up in preparations for the gathering for a whole week, and I devoted an entire chapter to it.
    Let me begin with the pig farm walls, which were newly whitewashed — to sterilize them, we were told — then covered with slogans in red, all pig-related, but also tied to world revolution. Who wrote them? Who else but Ximen Jinlong! The two most talented youngsters in Ximen Village were Ximen Jinlong and Mo Yan. Here’s how Hong Taiyue evaluated the two of them: Ximen Jinlong had upright talents, Mo Yan had deviant talents. Mo Yan was seven years younger than Jinlong, and when Jinlong was in the spotlight, Mo Yan was building up strength, like a fat bamboo shoot still in the ground. At the time, no one paid the kid any attention. He was almost unbelievably ugly and carried on in the most peculiar