Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

the 1970s they were afraid of their own shadows, in the 1980s they carefully weighed people’s words and actions, and in the 1990s they were simply evil. I’m sorry, I keep getting ahead of myself. It’s a trick Mo Yan uses all the time, and I foolishly let it affect the way I talk.
    Knowing he’d done something terrible, Mo Yan remained in the generator room meekly waiting for Jinlong to come punish him. When Jiao Er returned after his nap and found Mo Yan standing there, he lambasted him: “What are you standing here for, you little prick? Planning more bad tricks?” “Brother Jinlong told me to stand here!” Mo Yan replied, as if that were all that was needed. “So what!” Jiao Er said pompously. “Your ‘Brother Jinlong’ isn’t worth what’s hanging between my legs!” “Okay,” Mo Yan said as he started to walk off, “I’ll just go tell him.” “Stay right where you are!” Jiao Er said, grabbing Mo Yan’s collar and pulling him back, in the process sending the last three buttons of Mo Yan’s worn jacket flying; the jacket opened up to reveal his belly. “You tell him what I said and you’re a dead man!” He held his fist under Mo Yan’s nose. “You’ll have to kill me to stop me from talking,” Mo Yan replied, refusing to back down.
    Jiao Er and Mo Yan were two of Ximen Village’s worst citizens, so let’s forget about them. They can do what they want there in the generator room. Meanwhile, Jinlong led the throngs of attendees up to my pen, where I won over the crowd without a word of introduction. They’d seen plenty of pigs sprawled in the mud, but never one up a tree; they’d also seen lots of slogans painted in red on walls, but never on the sides of a pig. The county and commune VIPs laughed until it hurt; the production brigade officials laughed like little fools. The uniformed head of the production command stood there staring at me.
    “Did he climb up there by himself?” he asked Jinlong.
    “Yes, he did.”
    “Can he show us?” the commander asked. “What I mean is, can you have him come down from there and then get him to climb up again?”
    “I’ll try, but it won’t be easy,” Jinlong said. “He’s smarter than other pigs, and has powerful legs. But he can be stubborn and he likes to do things his own way. He doesn’t take orders well.”
    So Jinlong tapped me on the head with a switch and said in a voice that seemed to beg co-operation and promise lenience. “Wake up, Pig Sixteen, come down and relieve yourself.” Anyone could see he wanted me to perform for the VIPs. Relieve myself, what a joke! That made me unhappy, though I understood why he was doing it. I wouldn’t disappoint him, but I wouldn’t be docile in the process either; I wasn’t about to do what he wanted just because he wanted me to. If I did, instead of being a pig with an attitude, I’d be a lapdog performing tricks to please my master. I smacked my lips, yawned, rolled my eyes, and stretched. That was met with laughter and an interesting comment: “That’s no pig, it can do anything a man can do.” The idiots thought I didn’t understand what they were saying. For their information, I understood people from Gaomi, Mount Yimeng, and Qingdao. Not only that, I picked up a dozen Spanish phrases from a rusticated youngster from Qingdao who dreamed of studying abroad one day. So I shouted something in Spanish, and those morons froze on the spot. Then they burst out laughing. Go ahead, laugh, laugh yourself into your graves and save the country some rice! You want me to take a leak, is that it? Well, I don’t need to climb down for that. Stand tall, pee far. Just so I could have some fun with them, I let fly from where I was, alternating between fast and slow, spurting and dribbling. The morons couldn’t stop laughing. I glared at them. “What are you laughing at?” I said. I meant business. “Have you forgotten that I’m a cannon shell fired into the stronghold of the imperialists, revisionists, and reactionaries? If a cannon shell takes a leak, that means the powder got wet, so what are you laughing at?” The morons must have understood me, because they laughed until snot ran from their noses. The hint of a smile even appeared on the permanent scowl of an official who always wore an old army coat, as if his face were suddenly covered by a layer of golden bran flakes. He pointed to me.
    “What a wonderful pig!” he said. “He deserves a gold medal!” Now I was someone