Pow!

they said, ‘please eat us too. Even though that bastard Huang Biao doused us with his urine, we're still much cleaner than any meat on the street. We are free of toxins, we are highly nutritious, we are clean. Please eat us, Xiaotong, we beg you…’

    That did it—my tears dripped onto the pieces of meat on the platter, and that made them even sadder. They rocked back and forth in anguish, causing the platter to bounce on the stool and nearly breaking my heart. That's when I finally grasped the reality that the world is a very complicated place. No matter what he's dealing with, even if it's a piece of meat, a person must let love flow from his heart if he is to be repaid in kind—that is the only way to truly appreciate what is good and decent. In the past, I'd hungered for meat but had not loved it enough, even though meat had been so good to me, the person it had picked out of the vast sea of humanity to be its friend, to my enduring shame. I surely could do better. All right, meats, dear meats, the time has come for me to feast on you so as to be worthy of your abiding love. To be loved and respected by such fine, uncontaminated meat has made Luo Xiaotong the world's happiest person.

    With tears in my eyes, I began eating you. I heard you cry in my mouth but I knew that you were shedding tears of joy. Tearfully I ate the tearful meats, and felt that we had embarked on the path to spiritual awakening. This was a first for me, and my relationship with meat underwent a fundamental change. As did my approach to my fellow humans. I heard an old greybeard from deep in the mountains say to me: ‘There are many paths a human can take to achieve immortality.’ ‘Is eating meat one of them?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he replied with a sneer, ‘and so is eating shit.’ I understood everything, then. The day I found myself able to hear meat speak I knew that I was different. That was one of the reasons I'd left school. What could I learn from any teacher that I couldn't learn from meat?

    While I ate, Huang Biao stood watching me like a fool. I had neither the energy nor the interest to look at him. As I continued my intimate relationship with the meat, the kitchen and everything in it ceased to exist. But when I came up for air, those glittering little demon's eyes of his were reminders that he too was a living creature.

    Little by little, the plate grew empty at the same time as my stomach grew full. Soon I realized that if I ate any more I wouldn't be able to breathe. But the remaining meat kept calling out to me, while the meat in the pot continued its complaints in loud, grudging tones. My dilemma suddenly became clear—my stomach could hold only so much, but the amount of meat in this world stretched out into infinity. And all that meat longed for me to eat it, which was in perfect accord with my desires. I did not want any of it to wind up in the bodies of people who had no understanding of it but I lacked the power to see that that did not happen. In order to ensure that I continue to dine on meat thereafter, I shut my still-greedy mouth and tried to stand. I couldn't. With difficulty, I looked down at my hideously swollen belly and tried my best to ignore the meat on the platter and its sweet yet mournful appeals. I knew that I'd die if I took another bite, so I gripped the edge of the stool and somehow managed to stand. I was a little light-headed from all the meat—‘meat dizzy’, a not-totally-unpleasant sensation. Huang Biao held me up by the arm and, in a voice dripping with admiration, said: ‘You've earned your reputation, my young friend. That performance was an eye-opener.’

    I knew what he was getting at. My meat-eating ability and my hankering for it were no secret in Slaughterhouse Village.

    ‘To be a carnivore you must have a prodigious stomach,’ he said, ‘and you were born with the stomach of a tiger or a wolf. The heavens have sent you down here, my young friend, for one purpose only, and that is to eat meat.’

    I knew that there were two levels of meaning in his words of praise. One was that I had truly opened his eyes by my capacity for meat, and that deep down he admired me. But on another level he wanted his fine words to buy my silence over the fact that he'd pissed in the pot.

    ‘Meat finds its way into your stomach, my young friend, the way a beautiful woman finds her way into the arms of a staunch man and the way a finely worked saddle finds its way onto the back of a