Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

...”
    Grief and anger drove Hong out of his mind, and as he rolled on the ground, he lost sight of boundaries. He rolled onto Lan Lian’s land just as Lan was cutting down beans. Hong Taiyue, rolling on the ground like a donkey, rolled into the bean lattice, crushing the pods and sending beans popping and flying all over the place. Lan pressed Hong to the ground with his sickle and said unsparingly:
    “You’re on my land! We struck a deal many years ago, and now it is my right to sever your Achilles tendon. But I’m in a good mood today, so I’m going to let you off.”
    Hong rolled right off of Lan Lian’s land and, by holding on to a scrawny mulberry tree, got to his feet.
    “I refuse to accept it. Old Lan, after thirty years of struggle, you still wind up the victor, while those of us of unquestionable loyalty and hard, bitter work spend thirty years of blood and sweat, only to wind up the losers. You’re right and we’re wrong. . . .”
    “In the land distribution, you got yours, didn’t you?” Lan asked in a less confrontational tone. “I’ll bet you got every inch you had coming. They wouldn’t dare shortchange you. And you still receive your six-hundred-yuan cadre-level pension, don’t you? And will they take away your monthly army supplement of thirty yuan? Not hardly. You have nothing to complain about. The Communist Party is paying you for everything you did, good or bad, every month like clockwork.”
    “These are two different matters,” Hong replied, “and what I won’t accept is that you, Lan Lian, are one of history’s obstacles, a man who was left behind, and here you are, part of the vanguard. You must be proud of yourself. All Northeast Gaomi Township, all Gaomi County, is praising you as a man of foresight!”
    “I’m not the sage. That would be Mao Zedong, or Deng Xiaoping,” Lan Lian said, suddenly agitated. “A sage can change heaven and earth. What can I do? I just stick to one firm principle, and that is, even brothers will divide up a family’s wealth. So how will it work to throw a bunch of people with different names together? Well, as it turns out, to my surprise, my principle stood the test of time. Old Hong,” Lan Lian said tearfully, “you sank your teeth in me like a mad dog for half my life, but you can’t do that anymore. Like an old toad used to hold up a table, I struggled to bear the weight for thirty years, but now, at last, I can stand up straight. Give me that canteen of yours.”
    “What, you’re going to take a drink?”
    Lan Lian stepped over the boundary of his land, took the liquor-filled canteen out of Hong Taiyue’s hand, tipped his head back, and drank every last drop. Then he flung away the canteen, got down on his knees, and said with a mixture of sadness and joy:
    “You can see, my friend, I held out long enough, and now I can work my land in the light of day. . . .”
    I didn’t personally see any of this, so it has to be considered hearsay. But since a novelist by the name of Mo Yan came from there, fact and fiction have gotten so jumbled up, figuring out what’s true and what’s not is just about impossible. I should be telling you only stuff from my personal experience or things I saw or heard, but, I’m sorry to say, Mo Yan’s fiction has a way of wriggling in through the cracks and taking my tale to places it shouldn’t go.
    So, as I was saying, I hid in the shadows outside the gate of the Ximen family compound and watched as Yang Qi, who by then was pretty drunk, picked up his glass and, wobbling back and forth and swaying from side to side, made his way over to the table where the bad people from earlier days were sitting. Since they had gathered for a special occasion, everyone at the table was in an agitated mood as they recalled the wretched times they had survived, approaching a point where they could easily be intoxicated without the aid of alcohol. So they were shocked to see Yang Qi, the onetime head of public security, who, as representative of the dictatorship of the proletariat, had used a switch on them, shocked and angry, as he braced himself with a hand on the table and raised his glass with the other.
    “Worthy brothers,” he said, his thick tongue blurring the words a bit, “gentlemen, I, Yang Qi, offended all of you in the past, and today I come to offer my apologies.”
    He tipped his head back and poured the contents in the direction of his mouth, most making it only as far as his neck, where it