Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

such incorruptibility.
    Dad, too, seemed shaken by what he heard. He quickly looked away and fixed his gaze on the hoe stuck in the ground at his feet.
    “Jinlong,” he said, “forget what I said. I’ll ease your concerns and, at the same time, carry out my pledge by tilling my land right next to yours. You can watch, and if you think it’s necessary to put your hoe to use, then go ahead. That way I won’t waste any more of your time.”
    He walked up to our ox, rubbed its ears, and patted it on the forehead.
    “Ox,” he whispered in its ear, “ah, my ox! It’s all been said. Keep your eye on the boundary marker and walk straight ahead. Don’t veer an inch!”
    After adjusting the plow and sizing up the boundary, he gave a low command, and the ox started walking. My brother picked up his hoe and stared with bulging eyes at the ox’s hooves. The animal appeared unconcerned about the danger lurking behind him; he walked at a normal pace, his body limber, his back so smooth and steady he could have carried a full bowl of water without spilling a drop. Dad walked behind, stepping squarely in the new furrow. The work was totally reliant on the ox; given that his eyes were on either side of his head, how he managed to move in a perfectly straight line was beyond me. I simply watched as the new furrow neatly separated our land from theirs, with the boundary markers standing between the two. The ox slowed down each time he neared one of the stone markers to let Dad lift the plow over it. Every one of his hoof prints remained on our side, all the way to the end; there was nothing Jinlong could do. Dad exhaled loudly and said to Jinlong:
    “You can head back home now, worry free, can’t you?”
    So Jinlong left us, but not before casting one last reluctant glance at the ox’s perfect, bright hooves, and I knew how disappointed he was at not being able to chop one off. The hoe, slung over his shoulder as he walked off, glinted silvery in the sunlight, and that sight was burned into my memory.

17

Wild Geese Fall, People Die, an Ox Goes Berserk
Ravings and Wild Talk Turn Into an Essay
    As for what happened next, should I continuing telling or do you want to take over? I asked Big-head. He squinted, as if he were looking at me, But I knew that his thoughts were elsewhere. He took a cigarette out of my pack, held it up to his nose to smell it, and curled his lip without saying anything, as if contemplating something very important. That’s a bad habit somebody your age should avoid. If you started smoking at the age of five, you’d have to smoke gunpowder when you reach the age of fifty, right? He ignored me and cocked his head; his outer ear twitched, as if he were straining to listen to something. I won’t say any more, I said. There isn’t much to say, anyway, since it’s all things we experienced. No, he said, you started, so you ought to finish. I said I didn’t know where to begin. He rolled his eyes.
    Begin with the marketplace, focus on the fun part.
    I saw plenty of people paraded through the marketplace, something that never failed to excite me, excite and delight.
    I saw County Chief Chen, the man who had been friendly to Dad, paraded publicly through the marketplace. His head was shaved, the skin showing black — afterward, in his memoirs, he said he’d shaved his head so the Red Guards couldn’t pull him by the hair — and a papier-mâché donkey had been tied around his waist. As the air filled with drumbeats and the clang of gongs, he ran around to the beat, dancing with a goofy smile on his face. He looked like one of the local entertainers at New Year’s. Because he’d ridden our family’s donkey on inspection trips during the iron and steel-smelting campaign, people had saddled him with the nickname Donkey Chief. Then when the Cultural Revolution broke out, the Red Guards wanted to enhance the pleasure, the visual appeal, and the ability to draw a crowd when they were parading capitalist-roaders, so they made him wear that papier-mâché donkey. Plenty of cadres later wrote their memoirs, and when they related what had occurred during the Cultural Revolution, it was a tale of blood and tears, describing the period as hell on earth, more terrifying than Hitler’s concentration camps. But this official wrote about his experiences in the early days of the Cultural Revolution in a lively, humorous style. He wrote that he rode his paper donkey through eighteen marketplace parades, and in