Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

who had little interest in fame and fortune, but hearing such praise from the mouth of a high official turned my head. I wanted to learn how to walk on my hands from Little Red. Doing that up in a tree would be especially hard, but when I eventually mastered the technique, everyone would sit up and take notice. So I planted my front hooves in the crotch of the tree and raised my hind legs, head down until it was resting in a space between branches. But I’d eaten too much that morning, and my strength was affected by my heavy gut. I pressed down on the branch with all my might, causing it to shake and sway. Yes! I said. Okay, I can see the ground. All my weight was now on my front legs, and the blood rushed to my head. My eyes were getting sore, ready to pop out of their sockets. Hold on, hold on for ten seconds and you’ve done it! I heard applause. I’d done it. Unfortunately, my left front hoof slipped, I lost my balance, everything went dark, and I felt my head bang into something hard. Thud! I passed out.
    Damn it! That rotgut liquor really messed me up.

26

A Jealous Diao Xiaosan Destroys a Pigpen
Lan Jinlong Cleverly Gets Through a Bitter Winter
    The winter of 1972 was a test of survival for the Apricot Garden pigs. In the wake of the pig-raising on-site conference, the county government rewarded the Ximen Village Production Brigade with 20,000 jin of pig feed, but that was just a number. The actual delivery of the feed was entrusted to a man named Jin, a granary official whose nickname — Golden Rat — spoke to his fondness for rat meat. Well, this granary rat actually sent us some moldy dry-yam-and-sorghum mix that had lain in a corner for years, and far less than 20,000 jin of it. There was probably a ton of rat shit mixed in with the feed, which was why a peculiar cloud of rank air hung over the farm all winter. Yes, around the time of the pig-raising on-site conference, we were given tasty food and strong drinks, enjoying the decadent life of the landlord class. But after the conference, the brigade granary was critically low and cold weather was on its way, and it looked as if the snow, despite its romantic image, would bring us bone-chilling days. Hunger and cold were to be our constant companions.
    The snowfalls that year were abnormally heavy, and that’s no exaggeration. You can check the records of the county weather bureau, the county gazetteer, even Mo Yan’s story “Tales of Pig-Raising.”
    Mo Yan, always ready to deceive people with heresy, is in the habit of mixing fact and fantasy in his stories; you can’t reject the contents out of hand, but you mustn’t fall into the trap of believing everything he writes. The times and places in “Tales of Pig-Raising” are accurate, as are the parts dealing with the winter weather; but the head count of pigs and their origins have been altered. Everyone knows they were from Mount Yimeng, but in the story they’re from Mount Wulian. And there were 1,057 of them, though he gives the number at something over 900. But since we’re talking about fiction here, the details should not concern us.
    Now even though I was contemptuous of that gang of Mount Yimeng pigs, being a pig myself was a source of shame; when all was said and done, we belonged to the same species. “When the rabbit dies, the fox grieves, for his turn will come.” The Mount Yimeng pigs were dying off in twos and threes, and a tragic pall hung above Apricot Garden Pig Farm. To keep up my strength and lessen the dissipation of body heat, I cut back on the number of night rounds. I pushed the shredded leaves and powdered grass I’d used for such a long time into a corner of the wall, leaving a line of hoofprints that looked like a designed pattern. I lay down on this bed of leaves and grass, holding my head in my hands to gaze at the snowy landscape and smell the cold, fresh air that is so common to snowfalls. I was overcome by melancholy. To tell the truth, I wasn’t a pig normally given to sadness or emotionalism. Most of the time I was euphoric, either that or defiant. You’d be hard put to associate me with the petty bourgeois affinity for sentimentality.
    Wind from the north whistled, river ice splintered with ear-shattering crack crack crack crack, as if Fate had come rapping on a door in the middle of the night. A snow drift in front of the pen seemed to merge with sagging, snow-laden apricot branches. Throughout the grove, explosions of sound announced the snapping of