Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

entertainment. That gave the poor midwife a case of the nerves; she was afraid that monsters might come shooting out.
    The birth of Jinlong and Baofeng produced great joy in the Ximen household. But so as not to frighten the babies or their mother, I had the foreman, Old Zhang, and his helper, Lan Lian, buy ten strings of firecrackers, eight hundred in all, hang them on a wall on the southern edge of the village, and light them there. The sound of all those tiny explosions made me so happy I nearly fainted. I have a quirky habit of dealing with good news by doing hard work; it’s an itch I can’t explain. So while the firecrackers were still popping, I rolled up my sleeves, jumped into the livestock pen, and shoveled up ten wagonloads of dung that had accumulated through the winter. Ma Zhibo, a feng shui master who was given to putting on mystical airs, came running up to the pen and said to me mystifyingly, Menshi — that’s my style name — my fine young man, with a woman in childbirth in the house, you must not work on fences or dig up dirt, and absolutely must not shovel dung or dredge a well. Stirring up the Wandering God does not bode well for the newborn.
    Ma Zhibo’s comment nearly made my heart stop, but you can’t call an arrow back once it’s been fired, and any job worth starting is certainly worth finishing. I couldn’t stop then, because only half the pen was done. There’s an old saying: A man has ten years of good fortune when he need fear neither god nor ghost. I was an upright man, not afraid of demons. So what if I, Ximen Nao, bumped up against the Wandering God? It was, after all, only Ma Zhibo’s foul comment, so I scooped a peculiar gourd-shaped object out of the dung. It had the appearance of congealed rubber or frozen meat, was murky but nearly transparent, brittle but pliable. I dumped it on the ground at the edge of the pen to examine it more closely It couldn’t be the legendary Wandering God, could it? I watched Ma’s face turn ashen and his goatee begin to quiver. With his hands cupped in front of his chest as a sign of respect, he said a prayer and backed up. When he bumped into the wall, he bolted. With a sneer, I said, If this is the Wandering God, it’s nothing to fear. Wandering God, Wandering God, if I say your name three times and you’re still here, don’t blame me if I treat you harshly. Wandering God, Wandering God, Wandering God! With my eyes tightly shut, I shouted the name three times. When I opened them, it was still there, hadn’t changed, just a lump of something in the pen next to some horse shit. Whatever it was, it was dead, so I raised my hoe and chopped it in two. The inside was just like the outside, sort of rubbery or maybe frozen, not unlike the sap that oozes out of peach tree knots. I scooped it up and flung it over the wall, where it could lie with the horse shit and donkey urine, hoping that it might be good as fertilizer, so the early summer corn would grow in ears like ivory and the late summer wheat would have tassels as long as dog tails.
    That Mo Yan, in a story he called “Wandering God,” he wrote:
    I poured water into a wide-mouthed clear glass bottle and added some black tea and brown sugar, then placed it behind the stove for ten days. A peculiar gourd-shaped object was growing in the bottle. When the villagers heard about it, they came running to see what it was. Ma Congming, the son of Ma Zhibo, said nervously, “This is bad, that’s the Wandering God! The Wandering God that the landlord Ximen Nao dug up that year was just like this.” As a modern young man, I believe in science, not ghosts and goblins, so I chased Ma Congming away and dumped whatever it was out of the bottle. I cut it open and chopped it up, then dumped it into my wok and fried it. Its strange fragrance made me drool, so I tasted it. It was delicious and nutritious . . . after eating the Wandering God, I grew four inches in three months.
    What an imagination!
    The firecrackers put an end to rumors that Ximen Nao was sterile. People began preparing congratulatory gifts they would bring to me in nine days. But the old rumor had no sooner been cast aside than a new one was born. Overnight, word that Ximen Nao had stirred up the Wandering God while shoveling dung in his pen spread through all the eighteen villages and towns of Northeast Gaomi Township. And not just spread, but picked up embellishments along the way. The Wandering God, it was said, was a big meaty