Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

of the river, heading west. Uncultivated fields stretched out south of me, nothing but scrubland to the north.
    When I reached the one-point-six-acre plot belonging to Lan Lian, I planted my hooves in the ground, having chased the moon westward to my destination. I looked off to the south, where Ximen Village Production Brigade land surrounding Lan Lian’s tiny strip was blanketed with mulberry trees, under whose lush foliage women were picking mulberries in the moonlight, and the sight stirred my emotions. I could see there were changes in farming villages following the death of Mao Zedong. Lan Lian was still planting an old variety of wheat, but the mulberry trees all around him were sapping the soil of nutrients, having an obvious effect on at least four rows of his cultivated land, with anemic stalks and tassels as tiny as houseflies. Maybe this was another scheme Hong Taiyue had dreamed up to punish Lan Lian: Let’s see how an independent farmer deals with this. By the light of the moon I saw the bare back of someone digging a ditch beside the mulberry trees, waging a battle against the People’s Commune. He was digging a deep, narrow ditch on the land between his and the mulberry plots belonging to the production brigade and chopping off the yellow mulberry roots that crossed that line with his hoe. That could have been a problem; on your own land you could dig as you wanted. But cutting the roots of brigade trees was considered destruction of property belonging to the collective. My mind was a blank as I gazed at old Lan Lian, bent over like a black bear clumsily digging away. Once the mulberries on both sides were tall, mature trees, the independent farmer would be the owner of a tract of barren land. But I soon learned how wrong I was. By this time, the production brigade had broken up and the People’s Commune existed in name only. Agricultural reform had entered the land-parceling phase, and the land surrounding Lan Lian’s plot had been distributed to individual farmers, who could decide on their own whether to plant mulberries or wheat.
    My legs carried me to the Apricot Garden Pig Farm. The apricot tree was still there, but the pigpens weren’t. The spot where I had once sprawled lazily to daydream was now planted with peanuts. I rose up on my hind legs and rested my front hooves on branches of the tree I’d practiced on every day as a young pig. It was immediately clear that I was a lot heavier and clumsier than I’d been back then, and I was obviously out of practice where standing upright was concerned. In sum, as I roamed the ground of the onetime pig farm, I couldn’t help feeling nostalgic, which in itself was a sure sign that I was well ensconced in middle age. Yes, I’d experienced a great deal of what the world had to offer a pig.
    I discovered that the two rows of buildings that had served as dormitories and workplaces for personnel who prepared our food had been converted to the task of raising silkworms. The sight of all those bright lights told me that Ximen Village had been added to the national electricity grid. And there, in front of a wide array of silkworm racks, stood Ximen Bai, her hair white as snow. She was bent over, the willow basket in her hands nearly filled with mulberry leaves, which she was spreading over the white silkworm beds. Crunching noises rose into the air. Your wedding suite, I noted, had also been converted to silkworm raising, which meant that you’d been given new quarters.
    I stepped onto the road that ran through the center of the village; only now it was paved and probably twice as wide as before. The squat rammed-earth walls on either side had been taken down and had given way to rows of identical buildings with red-tile roofs. North of the road stood a two-story building fronted by an open square in which a hundred or more people — mostly old women and children — were watching an episode of a TV drama on a twenty-one-inch Matsushita Japanese television set.
    I observed the crowd of TV watchers for about ten minutes before continuing on, heading west. You know where I was going. But now I needed to stay off the road. Causing the death of Xu Bao had made me a household name throughout Northeast Gaomi Township, and there’d be hell to pay if they spotted me. I wasn’t worried that I couldn’t hold my own if it came to that, but I wanted to avoid anything that might involve innocent bystanders. In other words, I was afraid, not of them, but of