Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

by Mo Yan

  Deeply moved, I was forced to view this onetime bitter foe with renewed respect. I tell you, in the wake of our fight, Diao Xiaosan became a very somber pig, one whose gluttony and talkativeness ended abruptly. But, as they say, calamities never come alone: a far greater tragedy was about to befall him. Seen from one angle, what happened involved me; seen from another angle, it did not. Pig farm personnel wanted Diao to mate with the two sows I was unable to impregnate, but he merely sat behind them, quietly, not aroused, like a cold stone carving, which led those people to assume that he had become impotent. In an attempt to improve the quality of meat of retired boars, castration was called for, a shameful human invention. Diao Xiaosan was fated to suffer that cruelty. For an immature male pig, castration is a simple procedure accomplished in a few minutes. But for a grown pig like Diao Xiaosan, who must have enjoyed hot, passionate romance back in Mount Yimeng, it was the sort of operation that could leave his life hanging by a thread. A squad of ten or more militiamen held him down beneath the crooked apricot tree and encountered resistance the likes of which they hadn’t seen before. At least three of the men suffered disfiguring bites on their hands. In the end, one man grabbed each of his legs and flipped him onto his back, while two others pressed his neck down with a stick, and one of the others crammed a stone into his mouth, one too large either to spit out or swallow. The man wielding the knife was an old-timer with a shiny bald head surrounded on the sides and back with a few scraggly gray hairs. I harbored a natural loathing for that man; the mere mention of his name — Xu Bao — called to mind a previous life, when he’d been my mortal enemy. He’d gotten very old and had a severe case of asthma that had him gasping for air from the slightest exertion. He stood off to the side looking as the others immobilized Diao Xiaosan. Once that was accomplished, he walked up, the light of occupational excitement flashing in his eyes. The old reprobate, who had lived longer than he had any right to, nimbly sliced off Diao Xiaosan’s scrotum, scooped a handful of lime out of a sack at his hip, and spread it over the wound before walking off with his prize — a pair of large purple ovals.

  “Uncle Bao,” I heard Jinlong call out, “should we sew this up?”

  “What the fuck for?” was the wheezy reply.

  With a shout, the men jumped back away from Diao Xiaosan, who slowly got to his feet and spit out the stone, quaking from excruciating waves of pain. The spiky hairs on his back stood up straight, and blood flowed freely from the open wound between his legs. Not a single moan escaped from Diao’s mouth, no tears fell from his eyes. He just clenched his jaw and ground his teeth with a loud scraping sound. Xu Bao stood beneath the apricot tree holding Diao Xiaosan’s testicles in the palm of his bloody hand and looking them over, unconcealed glee oozing from the deep wrinkles in his face. I knew how much the cruel old man liked to eat animals’ testicles, as I recalled the day he sneakily removed one of my three donkey balls and ate it with hot peppers. How many times I felt like leaping across the wall of my pen and biting off that bastard’s testicles to avenge Diao Xiaosan, to wreak some vengeance of my own, and to gain retribution for all the stallions, male donkeys, bulls, and boars who had suffered at his hand. I never knew what it meant to be afraid of a human being, but I must admit in all honesty that that son of a bitch — a malignancy in the lives of all male animals — scared the hell out of me. What his body gave off was neither an odor nor heat, but a bloodcurdling message.

  Poor old Diao Xiaosan walked laboriously over to the apricot tree and, with one side of his belly up against the trunk, lay down wearily. Blood was now spurting from the wound, staining his legs and the ground behind them. He was shivering despite the heat. He’d lost his vision, so his eyes gave away nothing of what he was feeling. La-ya-la— La-ya-la-la-ya-la— Notes from the straw hat song rose slowly in the air, but the lyrics had undergone a major change: Mama — My testicles are gone — The testicles you gave me are gone — Tears welled up in my eyes and, for the first time in my life, I understood the torment implicit in the saying “all beings grieve for their own kind.” I also regretted the underhanded tactics I’d used in my fight with him. I heard Jinlong curse Xu Bao:

  “What the hell have you done, Xu? You must have severed one of his arteries.”

  “There’s no need for you to seem so shocked, pal,” Xu replied coldly. “All boars like him are that way.”

  “I want you to take care of him. He’ll die if he keeps bleeding like that,” Jinlong said with mounting anxiety.

  “Die, you say? Isn’t that a good thing?” Xu Bao said with a false smile. “This one’s got plenty of fat on him, a couple of hundred Jin at least. The meat from a boar might be on the tough side, but it’s a far sight better than bean curd.”

  Diao Xiaosan did not die, though I’m sure there were moments when he wished he had. Any boar who has that punishment inflicted on him suffers not only physically but, to a far greater extent, psychologically There is no greater humiliation. Diao Xiaosan bled and bled and bled, at least enough to fill two basins, and all the blood was absorbed by the tree; the fruit produced by that tree the following year was yellow with streaks of red blood. He grew withered, sort of dried up, from the loss of all that blood. I jumped the wall between our two pens and stood by him hoping, but failing, to find words to comfort and console him. So I picked a plump pumpkin from the roof of the abandoned generator room and laid it on the ground in front of him.

  “Eat something, old Diao, it’ll make you feel better.”

  Raising his head off the ground, he looked up at me out of his good eye and managed to say through clenched teeth: “Pig Sixteen, what I am today is what you’ll become tomorrow . . . it’s the fate of all boars. . . .”

  His head dropped back to the ground, and all his bones seemed to come unglued.

  “You can’t die, old Diao,” I cried out, “you can’t! Old Diao . . .”

  This time he didn’t respond, and tears finally came to my eyes, tears of remorse. As I pondered what had just happened, I could see that while it may have seemed that Diao Xiaosan’s death came at the hands of Xu Bao, in fact I was the cause of his death. La-ya-la — La-ya-la-la la-ya-la — Old Diao, my good brother, go in peace. I hope your soul will soon find its way to the underworld, where Lord Yama will arrange a good rebirth for you, maybe even as a human being, at least I hope so. You can leave this world worry-free. I’ll avenge you by giving Xu Bao a taste of his own medicine. . . .

  As these thoughts raced through my mind, Baofeng came running up behind Huzhu, her medicine bag over her shoulder. By that time, Jinlong might well have been sitting in the rickety old armchair at Xu Bao’s house sharing a bottle with Xu Bao as they enjoyed Xu’s favorite dish — boar’s eggs. In the end, women are more kindhearted than men. Just look there at Huzhu, sweat beading her forehead, tears clouding her vision, as if Diao Xiaosan were her blood relative, not a scary-looking boar. By then it was the sixth lunar month, nearly two months after your wedding. You and Huang Hezuo had already been working in Pang Hu’s cotton processing plant for a month. The cotton was just then blooming; in three months it would be on the market.

  During those days, I — Lan Jiefang — along with the head of the cotton inspection office and a bunch of girls, was sent over from a number of villages and the county town to weed the enormous compound and prepare the surface for the cotton sale. The Cotton Processing Plant Number Five occupied a thousand acres of land and was ringed by a brick wall. The bricks had been taken from the graveyard as a cost-cutting measure initiated by Pang Hu himself. New bricks sold for ten fen; old bricks from the graves cost only three. For the longest time, none of the other workers knew that Huang Hezuo and I were man and wife, since I stayed in the men’s dorm and she stayed in the women’s. A place like the cotton processing plant, where employees worked on a seasonal basis, could not afford to supply married housing. But even if there had been quarters for us to share, we wouldn’t have wanted to, since our marriage was like a child’s game; at least it felt that way to me
. It was a sham, almost like being told upon awakening: From today on this is your wife. You are now her husband. How could anyone accept something that absurd? I had feelings for Huzhu, not for Hezuo, and this was the root of a lifetime of agony. On my first morning at the cotton processing plant I laid eyes on Pang Ghunmiao, a lovely six-year-old girl with pretty white teeth and red lips, eyes like stars and lustrous skin, a crystalline beauty. She was practicing handstands in the plant doorway. Her hair was tied with a piece of red satin, she was wearing a navy blue skirt, a white short-sleeved shirt, white socks, and red plastic sandals. Urged on by the people around her, she bent over, put both hands on the ground, and lifted her feet up in the air, until her body was arced at the right angle to begin walking on her hands to shouts and applause. But her mother, Wang Leyun, ran up and turned her right side up. Don’t be silly, my angel, she said. But I can keep doing it, her daughter said reluctantly.

  I can see this as if it had happened yesterday, not nearly thirty years ago. Even great seers like Zhuge Liang and Liu Bowen could not predict that many years into the future. I gave up everything for love. By running off with that little girl, I created a huge scandal throughout Northeast Gaomi Township. But I was confident that what began as a scandal would one day be seen as a true love story. At least that’s what my good friend Mo Yan predicted when we were at the end of our rope. . . .

  — Hey! Big-head Lan Qiansui pounded the table like a judge with his gavel and snapped me back to reality. Don’t start woolgathering, listen to me. You’ll have plenty of time to daydream about and ponder, even complain about that ridiculous affair of yours, but for now I want you to listen and listen carefully to my glorious history as a pig. So where was I? Oh, right, your sister, Baofeng, and your sister-in-law — there’s no other way to describe her — Huzhu rushed up to Diao Xiaosan, who was barely alive after a botched operation, as he lay beneath the crooked apricot tree bleeding to death. There was a time when the mere mention of that crooked romantic tree would have had you foaming at the mouth until you passed out. But now, we could put you on the ground right under it and you, like a battle-scarred veteran, would sigh emotionally on a visit to an ancient — for you — battleground. In the face of life’s great healer, time, no matter how deep the torment, all wounds will one day heal. Hell, I was a damned pig then, so what’s with the somber attitude?

  Anyway, as I was saying, Baofeng and Huzhu arrived on the scene to come to Diao Xiaosan’s aid. I stood off to the side, crying my eyes out like a dear old friend. At first, like me, they thought he had died, then they found that he had a heartbeat, but just barely. Baofeng took over immediately, taking a syringe out of her medical kit and giving Diao three consecutive injections: a stimulant, a blood thickener, and glucose, all intended for use on humans. But what I want to call your attention to is how she stitched up his open wound. Lacking both surgical needle and thread, she turned to Huzhu, who cleverly took a pin from her blouse — you know how married women carry pins on their clothing or in their hair. But what would they use for thread? As her face reddened, Huzhu said:

  “How about a strand of my hair, would that work?”

  “Your hair?” Baofeng asked, slightly incredulous.

  “Yes. My hair has capillaries in it.”

  “Sister-in-law,” Baofeng said with undisguised emotion, “your hair ought to be reserved for the likes of Golden Boy and Jade Girl, not a pig.”

  “Listen to you, sister,” Huzhu said with growing agitation. “My hair is worth no more than that of an ox or a horse. If not for my peculiarity, I’d have cut it all off long ago. But while it can’t be cut, it can be pulled out.”

  “Are you sure, sister-in-law?”

  Baofeng had her doubts, but Huzhu went ahead and pulled out two strands of the most mysterious and most valuable hair anywhere in the world, each roughly five feet in length, a dark golden color — at the time, hair that color was considered especially ugly, whereas now it’s considered by some a sign of elegant beauty — and so much coarser than normal hair that it appeared to the naked eye to have considerable heft. Huzhu threaded one of the strands and handed the needle to Baofeng, who cleansed the wound with iodine, held the needle with a pair of tweezers, and stitched up Diao Xiaosan’s wound with Huzhu’s miraculous hair.

  When that was done, both Huzhu and Baofeng spotted me, with my tear-streaked face, and were deeply moved by my deep concern and loyalty. Since only one of the strands was used to stitch up Diao’s wound, Huzhu threw the second strand away. Baofeng retrieved it, wrapped it in gauze, and placed it in her medical kit. The women waited; whether Diao would live or die was now up to him. We’ve done our best, they said as they walked off together.

  I couldn’t say if it was a result of the injections or if it was Huzhu’s hair, but Diao’s wound stopped bleeding and his heartbeat regained its strength and rhythm. Ximen Bai brought over a basin half filled with rice gruel and placed it in front of him. He got up on his knees and slowly lapped it up. It was a miracle he didn’t die that time. Huzhu told Jinlong that Baofeng’s skills deserved all the credit, but I couldn’t help feeling that Huzhu’s miraculous hair played a major role in the pig’s recovery.

  Postoperative Diao Xiaosan disappointed those who hoped he’d do little but eat and drink and gain lots of weight in a hurry. Fattening up after castration leads straight to the slaughterhouse. Knowing that, he ate in moderation; not only that, as I became aware, he did pushups every night in his pen, not stopping until every bristle on his body was wet with sweat. My respect for him increased daily, as did my sense of dread. Just what this victim of the ultimate humiliation, who had been brought back to life from certain death and who appeared to meditate during the daytime and work out at night, was up to escaped me. One thing was certain, however: he was a hero who was only temporarily lodged in a pigsty. At first he’d been an embryonic hero only. But after Xu Bao wielded that knife, a flash of understanding had sped up the process. I knew he’d be incapable of seeking a life of ease, content to grow old in a pigpen. A grand plan was surely taking form in his breast, with escape from the pig farm at its core. . . . But what could a nearly blind castrated boar do once he’d gotten free? I guess that’s a question for another time. Let’s continue the tale of events from August of that year.

  Shortly before the sows I impregnated were about to come to term, that is, on or about the twentieth of August 1967, following several unusual occurrences, a devastating epidemic struck the pig farm.

  The first signs occurred when a castrated boar named Butting Crazy developed a chronic cough, accompanied by a high fever and a loss of appetite. The disease spread to four of his sty mates in short order. All this went unnoticed, since Butting Crazy and his friends were thorns in the side of farm personnel, a bunch of pigs who refused to grow. From a distance, they looked like normal little piglets of three to five months, but up close they shocked the observer with their scraggly bristles, coarse skin, and hideous faces. They’d experienced pretty much everything the world had thrown at them, and showed it. Back at Mount Yimeng, they’d been sold off every couple of months, since their voracious appetites had no effect on weight gain. They were menacing eating machines, seemingly lacking normal small intestines. Whatever they ate, regardless of quality, it went from their throats to their stomachs and straight to their large intestines, where, in less than an hour, it emerged in horribly foul form. They squealed when they were hungry, which was all the time, and if they weren’t fed, their eyes turned red and they ran headfirst into a wall or a gate, more crazed by the minute, until they foamed at the mouth and passed out. But as soon as they regained consciousness, it was back to the head butting. Anyone who bought them and raised them for a month or so could see they hadn’t gained an ounce, so it was back to the marketplace, where they were sold for whatever their owners could get. People sometimes asked the obvious question: Why not just kill and eat them? Well, you’ve seen them, so I don’t need to tell you, but if the people who asked that question took one
look at Butting Crazy, you wouldn’t hear any more talk about killing and eating those pigs, whose meat was more disgusting than that of toads in a latrine. And that was how those little pigs got to enjoy considerable longevity. After being sold and resold on Mount Yimeng, they were bought for almost nothing and brought over by Jinlong. And you couldn’t say that Butting Crazy wasn’t a pig. He and his friends contributed to the pig population.

  Who would pay any attention to pigs like that just because they were coughing, ran a fever, and had lost their appetite? The person responsible for feeding them and cleaning out their pen was someone who has appeared and reappeared up to now and will continue to do so down the line, our old friend Mr. Mo Yan. By kissing up to any and everybody at the farm, he eventually realized his goal of becoming a pig tender. His “Tales of Pig-Raising” had gained him quite a reputation, since it was a work that was clearly related to his experience and position at Apricot Garden Pig Farm. There was talk that the renowned film director Ingmar Bergman thought about bringing “Tales of Pig-Raising” to the silver screen, but where was he going to find that many pigs? I’ve seen plenty of today’s pigs. Like chickens and ducks these days, they’re nothing but empty-headed animals, thanks to chemical feed and all sorts of additives, which have made them feebleminded. You won’t find any pigs as classy as we were these days. Some of us had strong, healthy legs, some had extraordinary intelligence, some were crafty old scoundrels, and others had the gift of gab. In a word, we were good-looking animals with strong personalities, the sort you won’t find again on this earth. Nowadays, you get moronic porkers that weigh three hundred jin at five months and couldn’t qualify as extras in any film. And that is why, to my way of thinking, Bergman’s planned filming will never take place. Yes, yes, yes, you don’t have to tell me, I know Hollywood, and I know all about digital special effects. But those are expensive and tricky. But most of all, I’ll never believe that any digital pig could come close to matching the style and substance of Pig Sixteen. Or for that matter, Diao Xiaosan, Butterfly Lover, even Butting Crazy.