Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

knows that an ox is a tool of production. Well, you listen to me. The commune oxen are tools of production, but an ox belonging to an independent farmer is a tool of reactionary production. You’re right, if an ox belonging to the People’s Commune butted someone, we wouldn’t dare kill it, but if an ox belonging to an independent farmer butts someone, I’ll pronounce the death sentence without delay!”
    Hong struck a pose like holding a sword, with which he could cut my ox in half. I was, after all, still young, and Father wasn’t around. I was over my head and spouting nonsense. I was totally deflated, and a horrifying scene popped into my head: Hong Taiyue raises a blue sword and cuts my ox in two, but another head comes out of its chest. Each decapitation produces another head. Hong throws away the sword and flees, and I laugh, Ha ha . . .
    “That kid must have lost his mind!” The people were buzzing, wondering why I was laughing at a time like that.
    “See the father and damned if you won’t know the son!” Huang Tong said
    Now that she’d gotten her breath back, Wu Qiuxiang railed at her husband: “You damned turtle, always tucking your head back in. You coward, instead of coming to my rescue when the ox butted me, you pushed me right into it. If not for Jinlong, I’d have been dead meat on that animal’s horns . . .”
    Once again, all eyes were on my brother. Brother? What kind of brother was he? But, after all, he and I had the same mother, and that isn’t a relationship you can forget about. Wu Qiuxiang’s gaze at my brother was different from the others. And that of her daughter, Huang Huzhu, simply dripped with emotion. Now, of course, I realize that my brother’s manner had already begun to take on the outline of Ximen Nao, and Qiuxiang could see her first man in him. She insisted that she’d been taken into the household as a maidservant, and then raped by the master, leading to a life of bitterness and taste for vengeance. But that’s not what happened. Men like Ximen Nao are masters at taming women, and I knew that in Qiuxiang’s heart, her second man, Huang Tong, was little more than a reeking pile of dog shit. And the emotion Huzhu felt for my brother? It was the budding flower of love.
    Look here, Lan Qiansui — calling you by that name isn’t easy for me — you’ve used Ximen Nao’s cock to complicate what should be a very simple world.

15

Ox-herding Brothers Fight on a Sandbar
Unbroken Lines of Fate Make an Awkward Dilemma
    In the same way the donkey wreaked havoc in the village government office and drew the widespread notice of the villagers, you, the bastard offspring of a Simmental ox and a Mongol ox, gained fame by disrupting the commune’s welcoming ceremony for Mother, Jinlong, and Baofeng. Someone else gained face that day — my half brother, Jinlong. People saw how his fearless heroics subdued you. According to Huang Hezuo, who later became my wife, her sister, Huzhu, fell in love with him when he jumped on your back.
    Father still hadn’t returned from the provincial capital, and there was no more feed for you, so, recalling what he had said to me before he left, I took you out to the sandbar on the Grain Barge River to graze. Since it was one of your old haunts when you were a donkey, you knew the place well. Spring came late that year, so ice on the river hadn’t melted, even though it was already April. The brittle reeds on the sandbar rustled in the wind when wild geese perched on them, which was often, and which usually frightened fat rabbits hidden among them. I occasionally saw a lustrous fox when it appeared suddenly among the reeds.
    We were not alone in suffering a shortage of animal feed: the production brigade also had to take its twenty-four oxen, four donkeys, and two horses out into the wild to graze, tended by the herder Hu Bin and Jinlong. My half sister, Baofeng, had been sent to train at the county health department; she would return as our first formally educated midwife. Both she and her brother were given important tasks as soon as they joined the commune. Now you might assume that midwifery was an important task, while tending livestock was not. But Jinlong was given the added responsibility of recording work points. Every evening he went to a small office, where he calculated the daily work activities of each commune member in a ledger. If that isn’t an important task, I don’t know what is. Seeing her children given such