Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

while I’m small and have a baby face, no one in Ximen Village is as smart as me.”
    “Is that so?” Hong said with a smile as he glanced around the table. “I didn’t know you had reached the age of eighteen, and certainly didn’t know of your superior intelligence.” That was met by laughter all around.
    Mo Yan continued:
    So I kept smoking and said, with impeccable logic, that Jinlong and Jiefang’s unbalanced state came as a result of emotional disturbances. No medicine can cure that. Only ancient exorcisms will work. You must arrange marriages between Jinlong and Huzhu and Jiefang and Hezuo, what people call a ‘health and happiness’ wedding, but more accurately a ‘health through happiness’ wedding to drive away evil spirits.
    I see no need to debate whether or not it was Mo Yan who made the weddings between you brothers and the Huang sisters possible, but there’s no disputing that they occurred on the same day, and I personally witnessed them both from start to finish. Sure, they were hastily arranged, but Hong Taiyue assumed the responsibility of seeing that everything ran smoothly, and that what was normally considered a private affair became public. By mobilizing the talents of the village women, he ensured that it would be both a festive and a solemn event.
    The weddings took place on the sixteenth day of the fourth lunar month that year, under a full moon that was unusually bright and hung low in the sky, seemingly reluctant to leave the apricot grove, almost as if it had shown up in honor of the weddings.
    When the moon was at its height it looked down on me with cool detachment. I blew it a kiss and hightailed it to the row of eighteen buildings on the northern edge of the pig farm, near the main village road. That was where the pig tenders lived and where the animal feed was mixed, cooked, and stored; the buildings also housed the farm offices and the farm honor room. The three westernmost rooms were reserved for the two sets of newlyweds, the middle room to be used jointly, the outer rooms for their private use. In his short story Mo Yan wrote:
    “Wash basins filled with cucumbers with oil fritters and oil fritters with radishes had been placed on the ten tables set up in the spacious room. A lantern hanging from a rafter lit the room up bright as snow. ...”
    More trumped-up nonsense. The room was no more than twelve by fifteen, so how could they have fit ten tables in it? Nowhere in Northeast Gaomi Township, let alone Ximen Village, was there a hall that could accommodate ten tables set for a hundred dinner guests.
    The truth is, the wedding dinner was held in the narrow strip of open land in front of that row of buildings. Rotting limbs and branches and moldy grass and weeds were piled up at the far end of the strip of land, where weasels and hedgehogs had set up housekeeping. The reception required one table, the rosewood table with carved edges that normally sat in the brigade office; that’s where the wind-up telephone rested, along with two bottles of dried-up ink and a kerosene lamp with its glass shade. Later on, the table was taken over by Ximen Jinlong during his heyday — something that Hong Taiyue characterized as the tyrannical act of a landlord’s son to settle old scores with the lower and middle poor peasants — and wound up in his bright office to become a family heirloom. Hey! That son of mine, I don’t know if I ought to pat him on the back or kick him in the pants — Okay, okay, I’ll leave that for later.
    They carried out twenty black-topped double-student tables with yellow legs from the elementary school. The tabletops were covered with red and blue ink stains and dirty words cut in with knives. Also moved out of the school building were forty benches painted red. The tables were laid out in two rows, the benches in four, turning the strip of land into what looked like a site for an outdoor classroom. There were no gas lanterns or electric lights, just a single tinplate hurricane lantern in the center of Ximen Nao’s rosewood desk, which put out a murky yellow light, attracting hordes of moths that threw themselves noisily into the shade. Truth is, there was no need for the lantern, since the moon was so close to earth that night, its light bright enough for women to do embroidery.
    Roughly a hundred people — men, women, old, and young — sat on opposite sides in four rows of tables weighted down with good food and fine liquor, the looks on their