Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

Old women were crying, children were bawling. Goddamn it, you’re crushing my eggs! You’re trampling on my children! You broke my bowl, you bastards! A while before, when the wild geese were falling out of the air, the people had surged to the middle of the yard; now, with the running of the ox, the people were sprinting right and left to get out of its way. Piling up on each other, some ran to the wall, where they were flattened like thin cakes; others ran into the butcher’s rack, where they crashed to the ground along with the expensive raw pork, some winding up in their mouths. Before goring anyone in the ribs, the ox squashed a little piglet. The peddler, a butcher named Zhu Jiujie who was so outrageously rude he might as well have been a member of the imperial family, picked up his butcher knife and swung it at the ox’s head. With a loud clang, it struck one of the horns and flew off into the air, while the severed half of the horn wound up on the ground. The red banner jumped at that opportunity to detach itself from the ox’s head. The animal stopped dead in its tracks, panting loudly, belly heaving, foam gathering around its mouth, eyes bloodshot, as a liquid, flecked with blood, oozed from the stump of the severed horn. This liquid was the ox’s essence, what’s known as “ox-horn essence,” reputed to be an exceptional aid for male virility, as much as ten times more powerful than the palm tree extract found on Hainan Island. A particularly corrupt authority figure, a former member of the provincial Party Committee who was exposed by the Red Guards, had taken a girl in her twenties as his wife when he was already turning gray Too old to perform in bed, he asked around for something to restore his virility, and this ox-horn essence is what the people recommended. He sent some of his thugs out to force all the farmers in the county and those belonging to the province to send their uncastrated and unmated young bulls to a secret location, where their horns were cut off and the liquid extracted; then the bones were crushed and delivered to their boss, the senior official. Sure enough, his gray hair was black again, his wrinkles disappeared, and his organ stood up like a machine gun with a crooked barrel, to mow down a phalanx of women like rolling up a mat.
    I need to talk about my dad here. His injury was not yet healed. At first, everything he saw was veiled in red. Then this happened, and he had no idea where he was. All he could do was stumble along after the ox, but he quickly gave that up, wrapped his arms around his head, and was dragged behind the ox like an embroidered ball. Fortunately, he was wearing a padded coat that absorbed most of the bumps and he sustained no major injuries. When the ox lost its horn and stopped running, Dad wasted no time in standing up and untying the rope around his waist. If the ox started running again, this time he wouldn’t be dragged along. But then he looked down and saw the severed half of the ox’s horn on the ground, and cried out in horror, nearly passing out from the shock. My dad had said that the ox was his family, his whole family, so how could he not be anxious, be pained, be enraged, when his family suffered an injury? His gaze moved to the fat, oily face of the pig butcher, Zhu Jiujie. At a time in history when no Chinese had enough oil in their diet, the officials and pig butchers like him not only ate the fattest, oiliest food, but did so with smug self-satisfaction, proudly enjoying the good life that Communism offered. As an independent farmer, my dad had no interest in the affairs of the commune. But now this People’s Commune pig butcher had lopped off our ox’s horn, and my dad cried out in horror, My ox! before fainting dead away. I knew that if he hadn’t fainted at that moment, he’d have picked up the butcher knife and gone for the pig butcher’s big, fat head. I hate to think what that would have led to. I was glad he fainted. But the ox was very much awake, and you can imagine how losing that horn hurt. With a loud bellow, he lowered his head and charged the fat butcher. What caught my attention at that instant was the cluster of long hairs sticking out from the ox’s navel, like a fine, wolf-hair writing bush. It too was on the move, rising and falling, as if composing a line of seal characters. I looked away from this mystical writing brush just in time to see the ox twist his head to one side and bury his good horn in Zhu