Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

was never much of a farmer. His body may have been on the farm, but his mind was in the city. Lowborn, he dreamed of becoming rich and famous; ugly as sin, he sought the company of pretty girls; generally ill-informed, he passed himself off as a knowledgeable academic. And with all that, he managed to establish himself as a writer, someone who dined on tasty pot stickers in Beijing every day, while I, the classy Ximen Pig ... ah, the ways of the world are so incomprehensible it does no good to talk about them. Mo Yan wasn’t much of a pig raiser either, and it was my good luck that he was not assigned to take care of me. Fortunately, that assignment was given to Ximen Bai. I don’t care how fine a pig you have, let Mo Yan look after it for a month or so, and you’ll wind up with a crazed animal; so, as I saw it, it was a good thing Butting Crazy and the others had survived a sea of troubles in their lives, or they never would have survived being looked after by Mo Yan.
    To be sure, seen from a different angle, Mo Yan’s motive for joining the pig-raising enterprise was a good one. He was curious by nature and given to daydreaming. At first, he wasn’t terribly put off by Butting Crazy and his friends, believing that they were incapable of putting on weight no matter how much they ate because the ingested food spent so little time in their intestines, and all that was needed was for that passage to be slowed down enough for the nutrients to be absorbed into their bodies. This idea went to the heart of the matter, so he began to experiment. His rudimentary solution was to install a valve in the pigs’ anus, to be opened and closed by farm personnel. Obviously, this proved to be impractical, so he next turned his attention to food additives. Both Chinese and Western antidiarrhea remedies were available, but they were too expensive and hard to obtain if you didn’t know someone. So he tried mixing grass and tree ash into the feed, which drew a chorus of curses from the crazy pigs, not to mention a frenzy of head butting. But Mo Yan refused to relent, and eventually the crazies had no choice but to eat what was put in front of them. I recall hearing him pound on the feed bucket and say to Butting Crazy and his friends, Come on, eat up. Ash is good for your eyes and your heart and will make your intestines healthier than they’ve ever been. But when ash proved ineffective, Mo Yan tried adding dry cement to the feed. Now this did the trick, but nearly killed Butting Crazy and his friends in the process. They rolled around on the ground in agony and only escaped death when they were able to pass what looked like a bellyful of pebbles.
    Butting Crazy and his friends carried loathing for Mo Yan in their bones. He felt nothing but disgust for the incorrigible animals. At the time, you and Hezuo were off working in the cotton processing plant, so he was feeling somewhat out of sorts. He dumped feed into the pigs’ trough and said to the hacking, feverish, whining Butting Crazy and his friends, What’s up with you little devils? Is this a hunger strike? Mass suicide? Fine with me, go ahead and kill yourselves. You’re not pigs anyway. You’re unworthy of the name. You’re nothing but a bunch of counterrevolutionaries who are wasting the commune’s valuable food.
    The “Butting Crazies” lay dead the next day, their skin dotted with purple splotches the size of bronze coins, their eyes open, as if they’d died with unresolved grievances. As we’ve seen, it was a rainy month, hot and humid, ideal weather for swarms of flies and mosquitoes, so by the time the commune veterinarian had rafted across the rain-swollen river to the Apricot Garden Pig Farm, the pigs’ carcasses were bloated and foul-smelling. The old veterinarian wore a rain slicker and rubber rain boots. With a gauze mask over his nose and mouth as he stood outside the pen, he looked over the wall and said, “They died of what we call the Red Death. Cremate and bury them immediately!”
    The pig farm personnel — including, of course, Mo Yan — dragged the five contaminated carcasses out of the pen, under the veterinarian’s supervision, all the way to the southeast corner of the farm, where they dug a hole. They hadn’t gone down more than a couple of feet before water began gurgling to the surface. So they flung the pigs in, doused them with kerosene, and tossed in a match. Since there were strong southeast winds, foul-smelling smoke was carried