Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

won’t die a martyr of any sort. As far as I’m concerned, living on like this would fill me with all kinds of meaningless grievances. There are too many things I don’t understand, which makes me uncomfortable, so dying is better. I put my pistol up to my temple and said, There’s an urn with a thousand silver dollars buried in the animal pen. My apologies, but you’ll have to dig through animal dung to get to it, which means you’ll cover your bodies with a foul stench before you hold the silver dollars in your hands.
    No problem, Hong Taiyue said. For a thousand silver dollars, not only are we willing to dig through animal dung, we’d roll around in a pool of shit if we had to. But I urge you not to kill yourself. Who knows, maybe we’ll let you live long enough to watch us poor peasants stand up and be counted, see us fill with pride, see us become masters of our own fate and create a fair and just society.
    Sorry, but I don’t feel like living. As Ximen Nao I’m used to having people nod their heads and bend low to me, not the other way around. Maybe we’ll see each other in the next life. Gentlemen! I pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, a dud. And when I lowered the pistol to see what was wrong, Hong Taiyue grabbed it out of my hand. His men rushed up and tied me up again. You aren’t so smart, after all, my friend Hong said as he held up the pistol. You didn’t have to check it. The virtue of a revolver is how often it misfires. If you’d pulled the trigger one more time, the next bullet would have spun into the chamber and you’d be on the floor chewing on a tile like a dead dog, if it too wasn’t a dud, that is. He laughed smugly and ordered the militiamen to go out and start digging. Then he turned back to me. Ximen Nao, he said, I don’t believe you were trying to trick us. A man who’s about to kill himself has no reason to lie. . . .
    Pulling me along behind him, my master managed to force his way in through the gate as, on orders from village officials, militiamen were shoving people out. The cowards couldn’t move fast enough, with rifles poking them in the backside, while some brave individuals were pushing their way in to see what was going on. You can imagine how hard it was for my master to lead a big strong donkey in through that gate. The village had planned to move the Lan and Huang families out of the compound so they could free up the entire Ximen estate for government offices. But since there were no vacant buildings in which to put them, and since my master and Huang Tong were not easy heads to shave, getting them to move would have been harder than climbing to heaven, at least for the time being. That meant that on a daily basis I, Ximen Donkey, was able to enter and leave through the same gate as the village bosses, not to mention district and county officials on their inspection tours.
    As the clamor persisted, the crowd in the compound pushed and shoved, until the militiamen, in no mood to strain themselves in quelling the uproar, moved away to smoke a leisurely cigarette. From where I stood, in my lean-to, I watched as the setting sun splashed its golden rays onto the apricot tree branches. A pair of armed militiamen kept guard beneath the tree, the object at their feet blocked from view by the crowd. But I knew it was the treasure-filled urn, with a surge of humanity pressing closer and closer to it. I swore to heaven that the riches in that urn had nothing to do with Ximen Nao — with me. But then, my heart skipped a beat when I saw Ximen Nao’s wife, Ximen Bai, walk out of the main building in the custody of a rifle-toting militiaman and the head of public security.
    Her hair looked like a ball of tangled yarn, and she was covered with dirt, as if she’d emerged from a hole in the ground. Her arms hung limp at her sides as she swayed with each step to keep her balance. When the raucous people in the compound saw her, they fell silent and instinctively parted to open up the path leading to the main building. The gate of my estate had once faced a screen wall on which the words “Good Fortune” had been inlaid, but that had been demolished by a pair of money-grubbing militiamen on a second inspection during Land Reform. They’d shared a dream that hundreds of gold ingots were hidden inside the wall, but all they retrieved was a pair of rusty scissors.
    Ximen Bai tripped on a cobblestone and fell to the ground, where she lay, facedown. Yang Qi kicked