Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

refuse even to admit defeat!”
    Everyone’s eyes were on my master, who looked down at the ground and fiddled with the cigarette lighter the war hero had given him. Click — flame — click — flame — click — flame — His wife nudged him to stop. He glared at her. “Go in the house!”
    “Lan Lian is an enlightened comrade,” Pang Hu said, raising his voice. “He led his donkey in courageously taking on the wolves and he led it again in coming to the rescue of my wife and child. His refusal to join the co-op results from a momentary lack of understanding, and you people must not coerce him into joining. I fully believe that Comrade Lan Lian will one day join the co-op and travel with us down the great golden highway.”
    “Lan Lian,” Hong Taiyue said, “if you still refuse to join the advanced co-op, I’ll get down on my knees to you!”
    My master untied my reins and led me over to the gate, the bell around my neck, the gift from the war hero, ringing crisply.
    “Lan Lian, are you going to join or aren’t you?” Hong shouted from behind.
    My master stopped just outside the gate. “Not even if you get down on your knees!” His voice was muffled.

9

Ximen Donkey Meets Ximen Bai In a Dream
Following Orders, Militiamen Arrest Lan Lian
    My friend, I shall now relate events of 1958 for you. Mo Yan did that in many of his stories, but he was spinning nonsense, not to be believed. What I am going to reveal is my own personal experience, a valuable window on history. At the time, the five children, including you, in the Ximen estate were all second-graders in the Northeast Gaomi Township Communist Elementary School. I shall omit any discussion of the great smelting campaign and the backyard furnaces; nothing of interest there. Nor will I touch upon the communal kitchens or the great movements of farmers throughout the county. Why prattle on about things in which you were involved? As for abolishing villages and amalgamating production brigades, creating a county-wide People’s Commune overnight, well, you know more about that than I. What I’d like to relate are some experiences I, a donkey raised by an independent farmer, had in 1958, a special year; they are the stuff of legend. That is, I assume, what you’d like to hear. I’ll do what I can to avoid political issues, but forgive me if they find their way into my tale.
    It was a moonlit night in May. Warm breezes from the fields carried delightful aromas: mature wheat, riverside reeds, tamarisk bushes growing on sandbars, felled trees . . . These aromas greatly pleased me, but not enough to bolt from the home of that stubborn independent farmer of yours. If you want to know the truth, what had the appeal to get me to bite through my halter and run away, whatever the consequences, was the smell of a female donkey, a normal reaction by a healthy adult male. Nothing to be ashamed of there. Ever since losing a gonad to that bastard Xu Bao, I couldn’t help feeling that I’d lost some prowess in you-know-what. Sure, I still had two of the things left, but I didn’t have much faith in them to do the job. Until that night, that is, when they awoke from their dormancy; they heated up, they expanded, and they made that organ of mine stand up like a steel rod, emerging time and time again to cool off. The image of a female donkey left no room in my mind for affairs that were capturing the hearts and souls of people at the time: she had a perfect body, with nice long legs; her eyes were clear and limpid; and her hide was smooth and glossy. I wanted to meet and mate with her; that was all that counted. Everything else was nothing but dog shit.
    The gate at the Ximen compound had been taken down and removed, apparently to be used as fuel for a smelting furnace. That meant that merely biting through my halter was an act of liberation. But don’t forget, years earlier I had jumped the wall, so gate or no gate, there was nothing to hold me back.
    Out on the street, I raced after that infatuating odor. I had no time to take in the sights along the way, all of which were related to politics. I ran out of the village, heading for the state-run farm, where the light of fires turned half the sky red. That, of course, was the largest furnace site in Northeast Gaomi Township Later events would prove that only what was produced in those furnaces could lay claim to the title of usable steel. Credit for that went to the congregation of veteran steel engineers who