Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

to the pig farm and beyond, to the village itself — the stupid bastards couldn’t have chosen a worse location for the cremation — and I was forced to bury my nose in the dirt to blot out what must be the worst stench in the world. I later learned that Diao Xiaosan had escaped from the farm the night before the carcasses were burned; he swam across the canal and headed east into the wilds, which meant that the noxious air of latent death had no effect on his health.
    You weren’t witness to what happened after that, though I’m sure you heard all about it. An epidemic spread quickly through the farm and infected more than eight hundred pigs, including the twenty-eight pregnant sows. I was a rare survivor, thanks to my highly developed immune system and to the quantity of garlic Ximen Bai added to my feed. Sixteen, she said repeatedly, it’s peppery, but go ahead and eat it. Garlic protects against all kinds of poisons. Now I knew this was no common sickness, and eating some garlic was a cheap price to pay to avoid it. During those days it would have been more accurate to say I survived on garlic than on pig feed. Each peppery meal was accompanied by tears and sweat, and raised hell with my mouth and stomach. But the garlic did the trick — I survived.
    After the Red Death decimated the pig population, several more veterinarians crossed the river to our farm. One of them was a brawny, hardy woman with a bad case of acne whom everyone called Station Chief Yu. She had a firm hand and dealt with things decisively. When she placed a phone call to the county from the farm office, you could hear her a mile away. Under her supervision, the veterinarians gave the sows shots and drew blood from them. I heard that around sunset, a motorboat came up the river with badly needed medicines. But none of that kept the majority of pigs alive, and that spelled the doom for the Apricot Garden Pig Farm. Carcasses were piled so high there was no way they could be cremated, so a burial ditch was dug; but once again, water rose to the surface a couple of feet down, so that was out. Driven to desperation, farm personnel had no choice but to wait until the veterinarians left and, in the fading light of dusk, load the carcasses onto a flatbed wagon and haul them down to the river, where they were tossed into the water to float downstream — out of sight and out of mind.
    The disposal of pig carcasses wasn’t wrapped up until the early days of September, following a series of heavy rainfalls that eroded the shabbily constructed hog house foundations. Most of the buildings collapsed in a single night. I heard the loud laments of Jinlong in the northern row of buildings. Obsessively ambitious, he had hoped to move up the promotion ladder by displaying his talents during activities scheduled for the delegation from the Military Region Logistics Command, whose arrival had been delayed by the rainstorms. But now that would never happen. The pigs were dead, the farm was in ruins, and I was heartsick as I reflected on the glorious days now a thing of the past.

31

A Fawning Mo Yan Rides on
Commander Chang’s Coattails
A Resentful Lan Lian Weeps for Chairman Mao
    On the ninth day of September, an event occurred that was as cataclysmic as a mountain collapsing or the earth opening up. Despite all attempts to save him, your Chairman Mao passed away. I could, of course, have said our Chairman Mao, but I was a pig at the time, and that would have sounded disrespectful. The river behind the village had overflowed its banks and sent floodwaters that toppled a utility pole and snapped the phone line, turning the village phone into a mere decoration and muting the loudspeaker. So word of Chairman Mao’s passing came to us from Jinlong, who’d heard the news on the radio. That radio had been a gift from his good friend Chang Tianhong, who’d been taken into custody by the Military Control Commission for the crime of hooliganism, only to be released owing to a lack of evidence. He was in and out of trouble until finally being appointed assistant troupe leader of the county Cat’s Meow Drama Troupe. As a music academy graduate, he was an ideal choice for the position. He plunged enthusiastically into the work: not only did he adapt the eight model revolutionary operas for the Cat’s Meow stage, but he followed current trends by writing and directing a production of Tales of Pig-Raising based upon events at our Apricot Garden Pig Farm — in a