Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

postscript to his story “Tales of Pig-Raising” Mo Yan referred to this development, even claiming that he had been a coauthor, but I’m pretty sure that’s a bunch of bull. It’s true that Chang Tianhong came to our pig farm to get a feel for life here, and it’s true that Mo Yan tagged along behind him like a parasite. But coauthor? No way. Chang let his imagination soar for this contemporary Cat’s Meow production, giving the pigs speaking parts and separating them into two cliques, one of which advocated extreme eating and shitting to get fat in the name of revolution; the remaining pigs were hidden class enemies, represented by Diao Xiaosan, with Butting Crazy and his friends, who ate without putting on weight, as accomplices. On the farm it wasn’t just humans pitted against humans; pigs were also pitted against pigs, and these swine struggles comprised the production’s central conflict, with humans as the supporting cast. Chang had studied Western music in college, with a concentration on Western opera. His contributions to the Cat’s Meow production were not limited to innovations in content; he also introduced drastic changes to traditional Cat’s Meow melodies, including an aria for the major positive male role of Whitey, a truly wonderful movement. I always assumed that Whitey was a dramatic version of me, but in “Tales of Pig-Raising” Mo Yan wrote that Whitey symbolized a vital and upward-moving, healthy and progressive, freedom-and-happiness-seeking force. Man, could he stretch the truth, what nerve! I knew how much effort Chang put into creating this production, integrating local and Western traditions, brilliantly merging romanticism and realism, creating a model of serious ideological contents and moving artistic form that brought out the best in each. If Chairman Mao had died a few years later, there might well have been a ninth model opera: the Gaomi Cat’s Meow version of Tales of Pig-Raising.
    I recall one moonlit night when Chang Tianhong stood beneath the crooked apricot tree holding a libretto of Tales of Pig-Raising, with its squiggly musical notations, as he sang Whitey’s aria for the benefit of the youthful Jinlong, Huzhu, Baofeng, and Ma Liangcai (who was then principal of the Ximen Village Elementary School). Mo Yan was there too, with a water bottle in a holder of woven red and green plastic threads. Steeping in the bottle were a pair of medicinal fruit seeds, and Mo Yan was ready to hand the bottle to Chang if and when he needed it. In his other hand he held a black oilpaper fan with which he was fanning Chang’s back — I found his fawning behavior thoroughly disgusting. But that’s how he participated in the creation of the Cat’s Meow version of Tales of Pig-Raising.
    Everyone recalls how the villagers had once given Chang Tianhong the insulting nickname of Braying Jackass. Well, after the passage of more than ten years, the villagers’ outlook had gradually broadened, and a new understanding of Chang’s singing artistry had emerged. The Chang Tianhong who returned this time to get a feel for life in the village and create a new drama was a changed man. The superficiality and haughtiness people had found so off-putting was gone. There was a sense of melancholy in his eyes, his face had an ashen quality, stubble decorated his chin, and his temples had turned gray; he looked a lot like one of those Russian Decembrists. The people viewed him with reverence as they waited for him to sing, and with one front hoof on the quivering apricot branch and my chin resting on the other hoof, I settled in to enjoy an enchanting evening performance by the lovely youth. Laying her left hand on Huzhu’s left shoulder and resting her chin on her sister-in-law’s right shoulder, Baofeng gazed at Chang’s thin, moonlit face and naturally curly hair. Although her face was in the shadows, the moonlight revealed the sad helplessness in that look. On the farm even we pigs knew that Chang and Pang Hu’s daughter, Pang Kangmei, who’d been assigned out of college to the county production headquarters, were romantically involved and, we heard, to be married on October 1, National Day. She’d come to see him twice while he was on the farm. Endowed with a lovely figure and bright eyes, and refusing to put on airs as an urban intellectual, she made a fine impression on both the people and us pigs. Each time she came she inspected our production station — after all, she worked with