Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

then streamed down his face. Dad groaned in agony With the same degree of accuracy and the same speed, my sister and Huzhu, mortal enemies who had reached a silent agreement to work together, irrigated my dad’s other eye. They then washed them clean — left, right, left, right — over and over. Finally, my sister put eye drops in both eyes and covered them with a bandage. Jiefang, she said, take Dad in the house. I ran over and lifted him up by his armpits. Getting him to stand was like pulling a turnip out of muddy ground.
    At that moment a strange sound — somewhere between a cry, a laugh, and a sigh — emerged from the ox shed. It was our ox. Tell me, were you crying or laughing or sighing? Go on with your story, Big-head Lan Qiansui said icily. Don’t ask me that.
    —The startled crowd of gawkers turned to look at the shed, suffused with light. The ox’s eyes were like lamps giving off a blue light; golden emanations radiated from his body. Dad struggled to go into the shed. Ox! he cried. My ox! You’re all I have, my whole family! The note of despair in those cries chilled the heart of everyone who heard them. Jinlong may have betrayed you, but my sister, Mother, and I love you. How can you say that the ox is your whole family? His body may have been an ox, but his heart and soul were Ximen Nao, so all those people in the yard — his son, his daughter, his first and second concubines, as well as his farmhand and me, his farmhand’s son — produced feelings in him that were all jumbled up: love, hate, enmity, and gratitude —
    It may not have been as involved as you make it out to be, Big-head Lan Qiansui said. Maybe I made that strange sound because I had a clump of grass caught in my throat. But you’ve taken a simple matter and turned it inside out, deliberately complicating it in your jumbled narration.
    — It was a jumbled world back then, which makes it hard to speak with clarity. But let me pick up where I left off: The Ximen Village parade came over from the eastern head of the marketplace, accompanied by gongs and drums and red banners snapping in the wind. Brigade Commander Huang Tong was being paraded through the streets by Jinlong and his Red Guards, in addition to the former Party secretary Hong Taiyue, along with the onetime security head, Yu Wufu, the rich peasant Wu Yuan, Zhang Dazhuang the traitor, and Ximen Bai, wife of the landlord Ximen Nao, all old-line bad elements. My dad, Lan Lian, was also under escort. Hong Taiyue was clenching his teeth and staring straight ahead. Zhang Dazhuang wore a worried frown. Wu Yuan was weeping. Ximen Bai was slovenly and dirty. The paint hadn’t been cleaned off my dad’s face; his eyes were blood red and tear-filled. The tears resulted from damaged corneas, not any sort of internal weakness. On the cardboard sign around Dad’s neck Jinlong himself had written: “Stinking, Obstinate Independent Farmer.” Dad was carrying our plow over his shoulder, the one they’d given him during land reform. He had a hempen rope around his waist, which was tied to a set of reins, which in turn were tied to a bull ox. It was a reincarnation of the tyrannical landlord Ximen Nao; in other words, you. Feel free to interrupt me anytime and pick up where I leave off. You can relate what happened after that. I see the world through human eyes, but yours is an animal universe, so you can probably tell a more interesting story. No? All right, I’ll continue. You were a mighty ox, with horns like steel, broad shoulders, powerful muscles, and incandescent eyes that radiated malevolence. A pair of tattered shoes had been hooked on your horns. That was the brainchild of the Sun brother who was such an expert in the use of gas lamps. He meant only to make you look bad, not imply that you dallied with loose females, as such things symbolize. That son of a bitch Jinlong was going to include me in the public exposure parade, but I threatened him with my red-tasseled spear. I’ll stick this into anyone who tries to parade me like that, I said. That gave him a shock, but he chose discretion in the face of my intransigence. I couldn’t help thinking that if Dad had stood up like I did by taking down the hay cutter and brandishing it in front of the shed, threatening to use it, my brother would have backed down. But my dad was the one who backed down, letting them lead him away and hang a cardboard sign around his neck. If our ox had displayed its bullish temper, no one