Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

to the rhythms of the straw hat song. With Apricot Garden birds singing and a morning glow lighting up the sky, my first mating went off without a hitch.
    As I lowered myself from Butterfly Lover’s back, I spotted Ximen Bai walking unsteadily, aided by a homemade cane, baskets of food over her shoulder. Calling upon what energy remained, I leaped over the wall and into my pen to await Ximen Bai’s food delivery. The scent of black beans and bran made me drool. I was famished. Ximen Bai’s face, burnished red by the morning glow, appeared above the wall of my pen. There were tears in her eyes. Nearly overcome by emotion, she said:
    “Sixteen, Jinlong and Jiefang are now married, and so are you. You are all grown-ups. . . .”

30

Miraculous Hair Brings Xiaosan Back to Life
The Red Death Wipes Out the Swine Horde
    The weather during the eighth month of that year was sweltering, with so much rain it was as if the heavens had sprung a leak. The canal running alongside the pig farm swelled with floodwaters, the saturated ground rising like dough in the oven. Several pathetic old apricot trees, unable to withstand the watery onslaught, shed their leaves and waited for death to claim them. Branches of poplars and willows that served as roof beams above the pigpens sprouted fresh appendages, while fences made of sorghum stalks were covered with gray spots of mildew. Pig waste that had begun to leaven filled the air with a moldy smell. Frogs that ought to have gone dormant instead began mating, interrupting the nightly stillness with croaks that kept the pigs from their sleep. And then a powerful earthquake struck the city of Tangshan, its shock waves collapsing more than a dozen pens with weak foundations and causing my roof beams to creak and sway. That was followed by a meteorite shower, with meteors streaking across the sky, accompanied by great explosive rumblings and blinding lights in the black curtain of night; the earth shook. All this occurred as my harem of twenty or more pregnant pigs awaited the impending birth of their litters, teats swelling with milk.
    Diao Xiaosan was still my neighbor. Our violent struggles left him with one totally blind eye and one with seriously impeded vision. That constituted his great misfortune and my deep remorse. During that spring, two of the sows failed to get pregnant even after several couplings, and I thought about inviting him to try his luck with them as an expression of my regret over what had happened. Imagine my surprise when he responded somberly:
    “Pig Sixteen, I say, Pig Sixteen, you can kill a warrior but you mustn’t humiliate him. You beat me, Diao Xiaosan, fair and square, and all I ask is a measure of dignity. Do not disgrace me with such an offer.”
    Deeply moved, I was forced to view this onetime bitter foe with renewed respect. I tell you, in the wake of our fight, Diao Xiaosan became a very somber pig, one whose gluttony and talkativeness ended abruptly. But, as they say, calamities never come alone: a far greater tragedy was about to befall him. Seen from one angle, what happened involved me; seen from another angle, it did not. Pig farm personnel wanted Diao to mate with the two sows I was unable to impregnate, but he merely sat behind them, quietly, not aroused, like a cold stone carving, which led those people to assume that he had become impotent. In an attempt to improve the quality of meat of retired boars, castration was called for, a shameful human invention. Diao Xiaosan was fated to suffer that cruelty. For an immature male pig, castration is a simple procedure accomplished in a few minutes. But for a grown pig like Diao Xiaosan, who must have enjoyed hot, passionate romance back in Mount Yimeng, it was the sort of operation that could leave his life hanging by a thread. A squad of ten or more militiamen held him down beneath the crooked apricot tree and encountered resistance the likes of which they hadn’t seen before. At least three of the men suffered disfiguring bites on their hands. In the end, one man grabbed each of his legs and flipped him onto his back, while two others pressed his neck down with a stick, and one of the others crammed a stone into his mouth, one too large either to spit out or swallow. The man wielding the knife was an old-timer with a shiny bald head surrounded on the sides and back with a few scraggly gray hairs. I harbored a natural loathing for that man; the mere mention of his name — Xu Bao — called to