Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

feces. But electricity? What does it turn into? This leads me back to when Ximen Jinlong set up the machinery in the two red-brick rooms close to a tall apricot tree in the southeastern corner of the Apricot Garden Pig Farm. After working all day, he did extra duty at night with the aid of a lantern, work that was so mysterious it attracted hordes of curious villagers, including just about all the people I mentioned earlier, with that disgusting Mo Yan elbowing his way all the way up front. Not content to just watch, he talked nonstop, to Jinlong’s great annoyance. Several times Huang Tong grabbed Mo Yan by the ear and dragged him outside, only to have him reappear up front in less than half an hour, leaning up so close his slobber nearly fell on the back of Jinlong’s greasy hands.
    I didn’t dare press up to get a look, and I couldn’t climb that particular apricot tree, since the goddamned trunk was too slippery and the lower branches were too high. It looked like one of those white poplars up north, where the branches are all up high, giving it the shape of a torch. But heaven smiled down on me. Behind the rooms where this was all going on was a large grave mound where a dog that had died saving a child was buried. The dog, a black male, had jumped into the roiling waters of Grain Barge River to save the life of a girl who’d fallen in, but the effort had been too much for it, and it had died.
    By standing on the grave mound, I could look in through a hole in the wall where a window was supposed to go, and see everything that went on inside. The gas lantern lit the place up like daytime, while outside the sky was pitch-black. It was like they said about class warfare: The enemy is in the light, we’re in the dark. We see what we want to see; we can see them, but they can’t see us. I watched as Jinlong turned the pages of the grimy handbook and wrote things between the lines of a newspaper. Hong Taiyue took out a cigarette, lit it, and took a deep drag, then stuck it in Jinlong’s mouth. Revering intelligence and talent, Hong was one of the rare enlightened cadres of the time. Then there were the Huang twins, who kept Jinlong’s brow dry with their handkerchiefs. I saw you were unmoved when Huang Hezuo dried his sweaty brow, but noticed the look of jealousy on your face when Huang Huzhu did the same thing. You overrate your own appeal, and later events proved that the blue birthmark on your face not only did not keep you from attracting women, it actually was what drew them to you.
    I bring this up not to make fun of you. I respect you too much to do that. You must be the only deputy county chief in the country who’s willing to leave his lover without saying good-bye and make a living by the sweat of his brow.
    But enough small talk. After the motor was set up, they tested it and found it did in fact produce electric power. And Jinlong became the second most powerful person in Ximen Village. Now I know all about your prejudice against your stepbrother, but you benefited from that relationship. If not for him, would you have been put in charge of the livestock unit? Or would you have been fortunate enough to be assigned as a contract worker at the cotton processing plant in the fall of the second year? And without that experience, would you still have made it into the ranks of officials? You have only yourself to blame for the mess you’ve gotten yourself in now. It’s your fault you couldn’t be master of your own pecker. Ah, what good does all this talk do? Let Mo Yan write about this stuff in his stories.
    The meeting went forward without a hitch. After Jinlong outlined their advanced experience, he turned the microphone over to the uniformed production official to sum up. The man strode purposefully up to the table, where he spoke without a prepared speech, with eloquence and authority, although no one could hear him. A man who looked like his secretary ran up to the table at a crouch and bent the microphone straight up, but still not high enough to reach the official’s mouth. The secretary knew what to do intuitively: he placed the bench on top of the table and set the microphone on top of that. A decade later this quick-witted individual would be given the post of county revolutionary committee office manager, in part on the basis of this one incident. The immediate effect was to blare the powerful voice of the onetime regimental commander far and wide.
    “Every pig born is a cannon shell