Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

Everyone knew he was taking out his frustrations on the pig, but no one tried to stop him, even though they could see that the pig might well not survive the beating. Finally Jinlong stepped up and grabbed Jiefang’s arm. “Enough,” he said coldly. Diao Xiaosan’s blood stained the snowy ground. My blood was red, his was black. Mine was sacred, his was foul. In order to punish him for his wrongs, the people pierced his nose and put in a pair of rings. They also chained his front legs. In the days that followed, that chain rattled as he paced his pen, and every time the famous aria by Li Yuhe from the model revolutionary opera The Red Lantern —“These chains may shackle my hands and feet, but they cannot keep my aspirations and ideals from soaring into the heavens!”—blasted from the loudspeaker, for some reason I felt a tinge of respect for this mortal enemy, almost as if he’d become a hero, and I was the one who had sold him out.
    Yes, as Mo Yan wrote in his story “Revenge,” the Apricot Garden Pig Farm entered a period of crisis as the Lunar New Year approached. The pig food had all been eaten, so had the piles of rotten beans and leaves. There was nothing left but moldy cottonseed mixed with snow Desperate times. A time, as it turned out, when Hong Taiyue fell gravely ill; his heavy responsibilities now rested on the shoulders of Jinlong, just when he was experiencing emotional torment. The person he loved ought to have been Huang Huzhu, a relationship that began when she repaired a uniform for him. Their bonds had early on been consummated, when Huang Hezuo made her move, and they sported among the clouds and rain. As they all grew older, the Huang twins both clamored to marry Jinlong. Who knew these secrets? In addition to me, a pig that pretty much knew everything, only Lan Jiefang. I remained above it all, but you, whose love for Huang Huzhu was not reciprocated, were tormented and horribly jealous. That was one of the reasons you knocked me out of my tree with your whip and why you dealt so cruelly with Diao Xiaosan. Now that we can look back, don’t you think the feelings that tormented you at the time were pretty insignificant compared to what happened later? Besides, the world is unpredictable, and conjugal bliss is dictated by heaven. The person you are to marry has already been determined. Isn’t that so, since Huang Huzhu eventually shared your bed?
    During that winter, pigs that had frozen to death were dragged out of their pens every day, and every night I was awakened by the wails of grief-stricken Yimeng pigs whose pen-mates had died from the cold. Every morning I looked out through the metal slats of my gate and saw Lan Jiefang or somebody else dragging a pig carcass in the direction of the five-room building. The dead animals were skin and bones, their legs stiff as boards. Hot-tempered Howling Wolf died, so did the slutty Rape Flower. At first they died at the rate of three or four a day, but by the latter days of the twelfth month, as many as six or seven were dying each day. On the twenty-third of that month, sixteen dead pigs were dragged out of their pens. I did a quick calculation and came up with the figure of more than two hundred pigs that had departed for the Western Heaven by the end of the year. I had no way of knowing if their souls had gone down to hell or up to heaven, but their earthly remains were piled up in dark corners at the rear of the building, where they were cooked and eaten by Ximen Jinlong and the other humans. That is a memory that sticks with me even now.
    People sitting under lamplight around a blazing stove watching the meat of butchered pigs cooking is something Mo Yan wrote about in great detail in his “Tales of Pig-Raising.” He described the fragrance of the burning apricot branches, he described the stench of the meat cooking in the pot, he even described how the starving people bit off big chunks of it, a scene that would disgust people nowadays.
    I can add one thing to Mo Yan’s descriptions, and that is: As the day approached when all the pigs in the Apricot Garden Pig Farm would die of starvation, on the last day of the year, when firecrackers were noisily seeing out the old and welcoming in the new, Jinlong abruptly smacked himself on the forehead and announced:
    “That’s it! I know how to save the farm.”
    It wouldn’t be hard to eat pork from dead pigs like that once, but the smell would make me puke the second time. Jinlong