Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

devoted, filial son to his mother. Mo Yan introduced me to his friend as a means for me to earn a bit of extra money The director had a full beard, a pate as bald as Shakespeare’s, and a nose as crooked as Dante’s. As soon as he saw me, he slapped his thigh and said, I’ll be damned! We won’t have to worry about makeup!
    We were picked up by Ximen Jinlong’s Cadillac to be driven back to Ximen Village. The red-faced driver refused to let me get in, so your son scowled at him and said:
    “You think this is a dog, is that it? Well, he’s an apostle who loved my grandmother more than any member of the family!”
    We’d barely left the county town when snow began to fall, tiny flakes like salt crystals. The ground was blanketed with white by the time we reached the village, and we heard a distant relative who’d come to mourn Grandma’s passing shout tearfully:
    “Heaven and earth are weeping for you, Great-Aunt. Your goodness has moved the world!”
    Like a soloist in a choir, his wails were contagious; I could hear Ximen Baofeng’s hoarse crying, Ximen Jinlong’s majestic wailing, and Wu Qiuxiang’s melodic weeping.
    As soon as they stepped out of the car, Huzhu and Hezuo buried their faces in their hands and began to cry. Your son and Ximen Huan held their mothers up by their arms. In anguish I walked along behind them. My eldest dog brother had died by then, but doddering old Dog Two, who was lying at the base of the wall, greeted me with a low whimper; I was too upset to return the greeting. Streams of cold air seemed to crawl up my legs and into my body, where they turned my innards into ice, I was trembling, my limbs were stiff as boards, and my reactions were hopelessly dulled. I knew I’d gotten very old.
    Your mother was already in her coffin; the lid lay off to the side. Her purple funeral clothes were made of satin with dark gold longevity characters sewn in. Jinlong and Baofeng were kneeling at opposite ends of the coffin. Her hair was uncombed. His eyes were red and puffy; the front of his shirt was tear-stained. Huzhu and Hezuo threw themselves onto the coffin, pounded the sides, and cried bitterly.
    “Mother, oh, Mother, why did you have to leave before we came home? Mother, it was you who held us up, now we have nothing! How can any of us go on living?” Your wife’s lament.
    “Mother, oh, Mother, you suffered all your life, how could you leave just when you could finally enjoy life?” Huzhu’s lament.
    Their tears wetted your mother’s funeral clothes and the yellow paper covering her face. It almost seemed as if the paper had been wetted by tears from the dead.
    Your son and Ximen Huan knelt by their mothers’ sides; one’s face was dark as iron, the other’s white as snow.
    Xu Xuerong and his wife were in charge of the funeral arrangements. With a shriek of alarm, Mrs. Xu pulled Huzhu and Hezuo’s faces away from the coffin.
    “Oh, no, all you mourners, you mustn’t shed tears on her body. If she carries tears from the living, she may be stuck in a life and death cycle. ...”
    Master Xu took a look around.
    “Are all the close relatives here?”
    No response.
    “I ask you, are all the close relatives here?”
    The distant relatives exchanged glances, but no one responded.
    A distant cousin pointed to the west-side room and said softly:
    “Go ask the old gentleman.”
    I followed Master Xu over to the west-side room, where your father was sitting against the wall weaving a pot cover with dry sorghum stalks and hemp. A kerosene lamp hanging from the wall lit up that little section of the room. His face was a blur, except for his eyes, from which two bright lights shone. He was sitting on a stool, holding a nearly completed pot lid between his knees. A rustling sound emerged as he wove the hemp around the sorghum stalks.
    “Sir,” Master Xu said, “did you send a letter to Jiefang? If he can get here in the next little while, I think—”
    “Close the coffin!” your father said. “Raising a dog is better than raising a son!”
    When she heard I was going to be in a TV show, Chunmiao said she wanted to be in it too. So we went to Mo Yan, who went to the director, who, when he saw Chunmiao, said she could play the part of Blue Face’s younger sister. The series was planned for thirty episodes, with ten stand-alone stories, each dealing with a bandit annihilation campaign. The director gave us a summary of what we’d be doing: After the gang led by the bandit Blue