Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

livestock at the production headquarters — and looked in on all the farm animals, mules, horses, donkeys, oxen. I was pretty sure Baofeng knew that Kangmei was slated to marry Chang, whom she had fallen for, and Kangmei seemed aware of Baofeng’s feelings. Around dusk one day, I saw them talking under the crooked apricot tree, and watched as Baofeng laid her head on Kangmei’s shoulder and wept. Kangmei, who also had tears in her eyes, stroked Baofeng’s head consolingly.
    None of this, of course, has anything to do with the story I’m telling. What I really want to talk about is that radio, a Red Lantern transistor radio made in Qingdao, which Chang Tianhong had given to Jinlong. No one said it was a wedding present, but that’s what it was. And while Chang gave him the gift, originally, Pang Kangmei had brought it back with her when she was sent on temporary assignment to Qingdao; and though Jinlong was the recipient, in fact Pang Kangmei personally gave it to Huang Huzhu and told her how to install batteries, how to turn it on and off, and how to find radio stations. Given my penchant for roaming, I saw it on the night of Jinlong’s wedding. For the wedding banquet, Jinlong had placed it on a table with a lit lantern. It was tuned to the loudest and clearest station he could find. Farm personnel — boys and girls, men and women — gathered round to listen excitedly Everyone felt like touching the obviously expensive object, but no one could get up the nerve to do it. What if they broke it? After Jinlong wiped the sides with a piece of red satin, the people crowded round to listen to a thin-voiced woman sing. What she sang did not concern them. They were too busy trying to figure out how she’d gotten into that little box. I wasn’t that stupid, since I was somewhat familiar with electronics. I not only knew that there were many radios in use in the world, but that there was something even more advanced — television. I also knew that an American had landed on the moon, that the Soviet Union had launched spaceships, and that the first animal to go into space was a pig. By “they” I was referring to the regular pig farm personnel. That did not include Mo Yan, who had learned many things by reading Reference News. There was, of course, another “them,” the critters that hid in or behind our haystacks. They too were mesmerized by the sounds emerging from the strange box.
    Here’s a rough summary of what happened at two o’clock that afternoon: We’ll start with the sky, which was, for the most part, clear, though there were some dark clouds. Gale-force winds blew from the southeast and served as a key to open up the sky, as northern peasants all know. As the clouds were blown across the sky, moving shadows skittered past Apricot Garden. Then there was the steaming ground, over which large toads were crawling. Finally, there were the people. A dozen or so farm personnel were spraying liquid lime over the still standing pigpens. Hardly any pigs were left alive, and the scene of desolation had thrown the people into a deep depression. They scrubbed the top of my wall with the liquid lime and did the same to the low-hanging apricot branches over my quarters. Was that going to kill off agents of the Red Death? Hell no! What a joke. From their conversation I discovered that, including me, only seventy pigs or so had survived. I’d pretty much stayed put while the epidemic was raging, so I was curious to learn as much as possible about the seventy other pigs that survived. What type were they, and were any of them my siblings? Were there any wild boars like Diao Xiaosan? Well, just as I was exercising my brain over such thoughts; and just as the farm personnel were trying to figure out what the future held; and just as the abdomen of a pig that had been buried burst under the blazing sun; and just as a bird with a brightly colored tail, one that even I, with all my knowledge and experience, had never seen before, flew in low and landed on the crooked, waterlogged apricot tree, which had lost all its leaves; and just as Ximen Bai spotted the bird, whose colorful tail hung down nearly to the ground, and shouted excitedly, her lips quivering, “Phoenix!” Jinlong stumbled out of his wedding chamber, clutching the radio to his chest. His face had lost its color and he looked like someone whose soul had left him. Staring wide-eyed, he announced hoarsely:
    “Chairman Mao is dead!”
    Chairman Mao is dead.