Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

strides. His muscles bulged, the plow shuddered, and great wedges of mud, shimmering in the sunlight, arced to the sides. Dad adjusted the plow as they went along to keep it from getting stuck. As a onetime farmhand, he knew what he was doing. What surprised me was that our ox, tilling a field for the first time, moved in a straight line, even though his movements were somewhat awkward and his breathing was, from time to time, irregular. Dad didn’t have to guide or control him. Our plow was being pulled by a single ox, the production brigade’s plows by teams of two, yet we quickly overtook their lead plow. I was so proud I couldn’t contain my excitement. As I ran back and forth, our ox and plow created the image of a sailing vessel turning the mud into whitecaps. I saw the production-brigade plowmen look over at us. Hong Taiyue and my brother walked up, stood off to one side, and watched with hostility in their eyes. After our plow had reached the end of our land and turned back, Hong walked up in front of our ox and shouted:
    “Stop right there, Lan Lian!”
    With fire in its eyes, the ox kept coming, forcing Hong to jump out of the way in fright. He knew our animal’s temper as well as anybody. He had no choice but to fall in behind our plow and say to Dad:
    “I’m warning you, Lan Lian, don’t you dare so much as touch land belonging to the collective with your plow.”
    Dad replied, neither haughtily nor humbly:
    “As long as your oxen don’t step on my land, mine won’t step on yours.”
    I knew that Hong was trying to make things difficult, because our three-point-two acres were a wedge in the production brigade’s land. Since our plot was a hundred yards long and only twenty-one yards wide, it was hard not to touch theirs when the plow reached the end or went along the edges. But when they plowed the edges of their land, it was just as hard to avoid touching ours. Dad had nothing to fear.
    “We’d rather sacrifice a few feet of plowed land than step foot on your three-point-two acres!” Hong said.
    Hong could make that boastful statement since the production brigade had so much land. But what about us? With the few acres we worked, we couldn’t sacrifice any. But Dad had a plan. “I’m not going to sacrifice even an inch of my land,” he said. “And you still won’t find a single one of our hoofprints on collective soil!”
    “Those are your words, remember them,” Hong said.
    “That’s right, those are my words.”
    “I want you to keep an eye on them, Jinlong,” Hong said. “If that ox of theirs so much as steps on our land—” He paused. “Lan Lian, if your ox steps on our land, what should your punishment be?”
    “You can chop off my ox’s leg,” Dad said defiantly.
    What a shock that gave me! There was no clear boundary between our land and that belonging to the collective, nothing but a rock in the ground every fifty yards, and keeping a straight line by walking was no sure thing, let alone an ox pulling a plow.
    Since Dad was employing the cleft method of plowing — starting from the middle and working his way outward — the risk of stepping on their land was minimal for a while. So Hong Taiyue said to my brother:
    “Jinlong, go back to the village and prepare the bulletin board. You can come back and keep watch on them this afternoon.”
    When we went home for lunch, a crowd had gathered around the bulletin board on our wall. Two yards wide and three yards long, it served as the village’s center for public opinion. In the space of a few hours my talented brother had made it a feast for the eyes with red, yellow, and green chalk. On the edges he had drawn tractors, sunflowers and greenery, commune members behind steel plows, their faces beaming, and oxen pulling the plows, their faces beaming as well. Then in the lower right-hand corner, in blue and white he’d drawn a skinny ox and two skinny people, one adult and one child — obviously, me, my dad, and our ox. In the middle he’d written in ancient block letters: spring plowing: people are happy, oxen are lowing. Below that in regular script he’d added: “A clear-cut comparison between the bustling activity of the People’s Commune and State-Run Farm as, bursting with energy, they engage in spring plowing, and the village’s obstinate independent farmer Lan Lian and his family, who tills his land with a single ox and plow, the ox with its head lowered, the farmer looking crestfallen, a solitary figure