Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

are limited to recording sounds and images, while I could include overall flavors and my feelings.
    Don’t argue with me. Pang Hu’s daughter messed up your mind so much that even though you’re only in your early fifties, your eyes are glazed over and your reactions are dulled, both warning signs of dementia. So I advise you not to stick stubbornly to your opinions or think you can debate me. I can confidently tell you that when the pig-raising convention was held in Ximen Village, the village was not equipped with electricity. That’s right, you yourself said it, people were burying concrete poles in the fields just outside the village at the time, but those were for high-voltage wires for the state-run farm, which belonged to the Jinan Military District and was designated an independent production and construction corps. Its leading cadres were military men on active duty, its laboring force made up of rusticated high-school graduates from Qingdao and Jinan. It goes without saying that an operation like that required electricity; we would have to wait a decade for electrification to reach Ximen Village. What that meant at the time was when night fell during the convention, except for the pig farm, blackness settled over the entire Ximen Village Production Brigade.
    That’s right, my pen was lit up by a hundred-watt bulb, which I taught myself how to turn on and off. The electricity was supplied by the Apricot Garden Pig Farm. In those days we called it “self-generated power.” A twelve-horsepower diesel motor generated the power. It was Jinlong’s idea. Go ask Mo Yan if you don’t believe me. He came up with a wild idea that ended up very badly. I’ll get to that in a minute.
    A pair of loudspeakers hanging from the sides of the stage amplified the words of Ximen Jinlong a good five hundred times, and I figured all of Northeast Gaomi Township was within range of his boastful speech. Six tables taken from the elementary school were lined up at the rear of the stage and covered with red cloth. County government and commune VIPs, in their blue or gray uniforms, were seated on six benches, also taken from the school. Fifth from the left, a man whose army uniform was nearly white from many launderings was a recently retired regimental commander who’d taken charge of the production division of the County Revolutionary Committee. Ximen Village Brigade Party Secretary Hong Taiyue sat to his right. He was freshly shaved and had just had his hair trimmed; the bald spot on top was covered by a gray army-style cap. His ruddy face looked like an oilpaper lantern shining through the darkness of night. My guess was that he was dreaming of moving up the promotional ladder. If the State Council established a “Pig-Raising” Command Post, he might possibly be tapped as commander. There were fat officials and thin ones, and they all faced the east, looked into the Red Sun, so their faces were always ruddy, their eyes in a perpetual squint. One of them, a dark, fat man, was wearing a pair of sunglasses, something rarely seen in those times. With a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he looked like the leader of a gang of thieves. Jinlong was sitting at a desk also draped with red cloth in front of the stage, speaking into a microphone wrapped in red satin. In those days, that was awesome high-tech equipment. Mo Yan, as always filled with curiosity, had sneaked up to the microphone and tested it out with a couple of dog barks. The magnified barking of dogs rocked the apricot grove and traveled out into the fields with astonishing effect. Mo Yan later wrote about this incident in an essay. This all goes to show that the power for the amplified microphone at the pig-raising convention was not supplied by high-voltage wires strung by the government, but by our own Apricot Garden Pig Farm diesel motor. A five-yard-long, twenty-centimeter-wide leather belt linked the turbine to a generator; when the motor was running, so was the generator, and electric power was the result, something that seemed nearly miraculous. It wasn’t only the more dull-witted residents of Ximen Village who were virtually dumbstruck by what they were witnessing; even I, a very smart pig, had no explanation for what was right in front of my eyes. That’s right, what in the world is this invisible thing called electricity? Where does it come from, and where does it disappear to? After a bonfire burns out, ashes are left behind; digested food becomes