Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

and how that cruel, evil mouth of his lost its insolence. The minute the jabbering began, my ox would lower his head and bellow, his eyes would turn red, and he’d tense before charging. All the panicky Hu Bin could do was hide behind my half brother, who never again raised his whip against my ox. Maybe he had an inkling of something. You two were, after all, father and son, and there must have been some sort of connection. As for his beatings of me, they too became more symbolic than real. That was in reaction to the bayonet I wore in my belt and the helmet I had begun wearing after that first violent struggle. I’d stolen the two additions from a scrap pile during the steel smelting campaign years before. After keeping them hidden in the ox shed for so long, it was time to put them to use.

16

A Young Woman’s Heart Is Moved as
She Dreams of Spring
Ximen Ox Displays His Might as He Plows a Field
    Ah, Ximen Ox! The spring planting season were happy days for us. The letter Dad brought back from the provincial capital served its purpose well. You’d grown into an adult ox by then, and had pretty much grown out of the cramped quarters our tiny ox shed provided. The young oxen belonging to the production brigade had already been castrated, and people were urging my dad to put a nose ring on you for purposes of work, but he ignored them all. I agreed, since our relationship had gone beyond that of farmer and farm animal; not only were we kindred spirits, intimate friends, we were also comrades-inarms walking hand in hand, standing shoulder to shoulder, united in our commitment to independent farming and our firm opposition to collectivization.
    Our three-point-two acres of farmland were surrounded by land belonging to the commune. Given the proximity to the Grain Barge River, our thick, rich topsoil was ideal for plowing. With these three-point-two acres and a strong ox, my son, you and I can look forward to eating well, Dad said. He’d returned from the provincial capital with a severe case of insomnia, and I often awoke from a deep sleep to find him sitting fully dressed on the edge of the kang, leaning against the wall and puffing on his pipe. To me, the thick tobacco smoke was slightly nauseating.
    “Why aren’t you sleeping, Dad?” I’d ask.
    “I will,” he’d say, “soon. You go back to sleep. I’ll go give the ox a bit more hay.”
    I’d get up to pee — you should know all about my bed-wetting. When you went out to graze as a donkey, I’m sure you spotted my bedding drying in the sun. Whenever Wu Qiuxiang saw my mother taking it out to dry, she’d call out for her daughters: Hey, Huzhu, Hezuo, come out here and take a look at the world map Jiefang drew on his bedding. The girls would come running with a stick to point at the stains on my bedding. This is Asia, this is Africa, here’s Latin America, this is the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean . . . humiliation made me want to crawl into a hole and never come out, and it sparked a desire to set fire to that bedding. If Hong Taiyue had witnessed that, he’d have said, Master Jiefang, you could throw that bedding over your head and charge an enemy pillbox. No bullet could penetrate it and a hand grenade would bounce right off it! — But what was the use in dredging past humiliations? The good news was, once I’d joined Dad as an independent farmer, my bed-wetting problem cured itself, and that was one of the more important reasons I stood up for independent farming and in opposition to collectivization. The moonlight, limpid as water, turned our little room silvery; even mice scrounging for scraps of food became silver rodents. I heard Mother’s sighs on the other side of the wall, and I knew she too suffered from sleeplessness. She couldn’t stop worrying about me, and she wished Dad would take me into the commune, so we could be a happy family again. But he was too stubborn to do that just because she wanted him to. The beauty of the moonlight drove away all thoughts of sleep, and I wanted to see how the ox spent his nights in the shed. Did he stay awake all night or did he sleep, just like people? Did he sleep lying down or standing up? Eyes open or eyes shut? I threw my coat over my shoulders and slipped out into the yard. The ground was cold against my bare feet, but I didn’t feel a chill. The moonlight was even denser out in the yard, turning the apricot tree into a silvery tower that cast a dark arboreal shadow on the ground. Dad