Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

blasted into the air like darts aimed at birds overhead. Teacher Jin had cut off her braid for the performance and combed her hair in a style made fashionable by Ke Xiang, heroine of the Cultural Revolution drama The Red Lantern; that made her more valiant-looking and, at the same time, prettier and more competent than ever. I was watching people seated on the sides of the stage; all eyes were on her. Some of the men were gazing at her face, others were staring at her waist; the eyes of the first secretary of the Milky Way Commune, Cheng Zhengnan, were glued to her nicely rounded bottom. Ten years later, after a decade of hard times, Jin Meili wound up married to Cheng, now Party secretary of the County Politics and Law Committee. There was a twenty-six-year difference in their ages, which didn’t sit well with people then. Nowadays, who’d even notice?
    When she’d finished, Teacher Jin moved off to the side, where an accordion had been placed on a chair, its enamel buttons glittering in the sunlight. Ma Liangcai stood beside her with a bamboo flute, looking somber. After strapping on the accordion, Teacher Jin sat down and began playing beautifully; she was quickly joined by Ma, who produced a sound that could pierce clouds and shatter rocks. As they played a little introductory tune, a group of pudgy revolutionary piglet boys wearing red stomachers with the word loyalty embroidered on their breasts set their stumpy legs in motion and rolled and climbed their way onto the stage. They were such empty-headed, noisy, unthinking little pigs they needed a leader, which came in the person of a young female in red shoes, Little Red, who somersaulted onto the stage. Her mother was a rusticated, artistic woman from Qingdao, so she was blessed with good genes and a remarkable capacity for learning. Little Red’s entrance drew enthusiastic applause, whereas that of the little boy pigs drew only snickers. But they made me happy. Never in the history of the world had a pig performed on a stage for humans; it was a breakthrough that made us real pigs extremely proud. From where I sat in my tree, I raised a hoof and sent a revolutionary salute to Jin Meili, the teacher who had choreographed the performance. I wanted also to salute Ma Liangcai, who’d played the flute fairly well, and to Little Red’s mother, who deserved my respect for her ability as the wife of a peasant to produce such fine progeny. Passing on a talent for dance was worthy of respect, but even more worthy of respect was the way she remained backstage and provided the singing for her daughter’s dance. She had a strong yet mellow alto voice — in one of his later stories, Mo Yan would write that she had a low voice, which earned him derision from people who knew a thing or two about music — and when the notes emerged from her throat, they danced in the air like strips of satin. “We are revolutionary red pigs who have come to Tiananmen from Gaomi”—those lyrics would not be appropriate today, but they were right for their time, and history cannot be changed on a whim — the little boy pigs were walking on their hands, their red shoes lifted into the air and clapping. The applause was loud, long, and celebratory. . . .
    When the dance ended — successfully, I might add — it was my turn. Since being reborn as a pig, honesty compels me to say that Jinlong treated me well, and since we’d once enjoyed a special father-son relationship, I wanted to put on a show for the VIPs and make him look good in their eyes.
    I tried limbering up, but I was still dizzy, my vision was blurred, and there was a ringing in my ears. Some ten years or so later, I invited a bunch of my canine friends — hounds and bitches — to a party where we drank Sichuan Wuliangye liquor, Maotai from Guizhou, French brandy, and Scotch whisky, and it finally dawned on me why, that day at the pig-raising on-site conference, my head ached, my eyes were dazed, and my ears rang. It wasn’t my capacity for alcohol, but the rotgut sweet-potato liquor I drank. Of course here I must admit that while public morality was a sometime thing back then, at least people weren’t so immoral as to substitute industrial alcohol for fermented liquor. Some time later, when I was reborn as a dog, a friend of mine, an experienced, knowledgeable, and wise German shepherd assigned to guard a city government guesthouse, concluded: People in the 1950s were innocent, in the 1960s they were fanatics, in