Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

ways. Given to saying crazy things that had people scratching their heads, he was to some an annoyance and to others a pariah. Even members of his family called him a moron. “Mom,” his sister often asked their mother, “is he really your son? Couldn’t Father have found him abandoned in a mulberry grove when he was out collecting dung?” Mo Yan’s elder brothers and sisters were tall and good looking, easily the equals of Jinlong, Baofeng, Huzhu, and Hezuo. Mother would sigh and say, “The night he was born, your father dreamed that an imp dragging a big writing brush behind him came into our house, and when your father asked him where he’d come from, he said the Halls of Hell, where he’d been Lord Yama’s personal secretary. Your father was puzzling over the dream when he heard the loud wails of a baby in the next room, after which the midwife came out and announced: “Congratulations, sir, your wife has given you a son.” I suspect that Mo Yan’s mother made up most of this tale to give her son some respectability in the village, since stories like that have been a part of China’s popular tradition for a long time. If you go to Ximen Village today — the village has been turned into the Phoenix Open Economic Region, and the farmlands of those days have been supplanted by towering structures that look neither Chinese nor Western — people still talk — more than ever, actually — about Mo Yan, Lord Yama’s personal secretary.
    The 1970s were Ximen Jinlong’s era; Mo Yan would have to wait a decade for his talents to be on display. For now, what I saw was Ximen Jinlong about to plaster slogans over all the walls in preparation for the pig-raising on-site conference. Wearing blue sleeve covers and white gloves, he was assisted by Huang Huzhu, who held a bucket of red paint, and Hezuo, who had yellow paint. The smell of paint was heavy in the air. Before that day, the slogans had all been written in chalk. The funds allocated for the gathering made it possible to buy paint. With his customary mastery of the written word, Jinlong painted the headings in red with a big brush, then outlined them in yellow with a small one. The effect was astonishingly eyecatching, like a woman made beautiful with red lipstick and blue eyeliner. The crowd watching him work was loud in its praise. The sixth wife of old Ma, who was a bigger flirt even than Wu Qiuxiang, said with all the charm she could manage:
    “Brother Jinlong, if I were twenty years younger, I’d be your wife no matter how many women I had to fight off. And if not your wife, then your mistress!”
    “You’d be last in line for anybody choosing a mistress!” someone commented.
    Ma’s sixth wife batted her eyes at Huzhu and Hezuo.
    “You’re right,” she said. “If these two fairies were in that line, I’d be last for sure. Shouldn’t you be plucking these two flowers, young man? You’d better move fast before somebody else tastes their freshness first!”
    The Huang sisters blushed bright red; Jinlong was noticeably embarrassed too. “Shut up, you slut,” he said, raising his brush threateningly, “or I’ll paint your mouth shut!”
    I know how the mere mention of the Huang sisters affects you, Jiefang, but I can’t omit them when I’m turning back the pages of history. Besides, even if I left them out of my narration, Mo Yan would be bound to write about them sooner or later. Every resident of Ximen Village will find himself in one of Mo Yan’s notorious books. So, as I was saying, the slogans were written and the trunks of apricot trees whose bark hadn’t been scraped clean were lime-washed; school kids, who climbed like monkeys, had decorated the limbs and branches with strips of colored paper.
    Any campaign that lacks the participation of students lacks life. Add students, and things start to happen. Even if your stomach is grumbling, there’s a festive holiday spirit. Under the leadership of Ma Liangcai and the young teacher who wore her hair in a braid and spoke Mandarin, more than a hundred of Ximen Village’s elementary students scurried in all directions amid the trees, like an assembly of squirrels. About fifty yards due south of my pigpen there were two apricot trees roughly five yards apart at the base but whose canopies seemed to have grown together. Several excited, raucous boys took off their tattered coats and went naked from the waist, wearing only tattered pants, with moldy cotton leaking out of the