Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

by Mo Yan

  “Boss Yang is buying today,” thick-tongued Dragon said, “so we ought to drink less.”

  “Is that an insult directed my way?” Yang Qi exclaimed as he banged his fist on the table. “I may not be rich,” he said with feigned anger, “but I won’t go broke buying a few drinks for you two.” He reached out and pinched Qiuxiang on the rear and said, “Okay, two bottles of Black Vat.”

  “Black Vat? Too low-class. For friends like this, the least you can do is treat them to some Little Tiger.”

  “Damn, Qiuxiang, you sure know how to take a hint and run with it,” Yang Qi said with a note of resignation. “All right, make it Little Tiger.”

  Lan Jiefang, I’m painting a detailed picture of what was going on in the Ximen family compound, describing what I heard and saw as a pig at the gate, in order to bring the conversation around to a very important individual, Hong Taiyue. After a new office building was built for the production brigade, the original headquarters — the five rooms belonging to Ximen Nao — were taken over by Jinlong and Huzhu as their living quarters. And there’s more. Immediately after announcing the rehabilitation of the bad elements in the village, Jinlong announced that he was changing his name from Lan to Ximen. All this held considerable meaning, and the loyal old revolutionary Hong Taiyue was greatly puzzled.

  Following his retirement, Hong began acting more and more like Lan Lian, cooped up at home during the day, and out the door as soon as the moon climbed into the sky. Lan Lian worked his land under moonlight; Hong roamed the village like an old-time night watchman, up and down all the streets and byways. Jinlong said: The old branch secretary’s level of consciousness is high as always — he’s out there every night protecting us. That, of course, wasn’t what Hong intended. He had a heavy heart over the changes that had occurred in the village and didn’t know what to do about it. So he walked and he drank out of a canteen people said had belonged to the Eighth Route Army. He wore an old army jacket over his shoulders, a wide leather belt around his waist, and straw sandals on his feet, topped by army leggings. The only thing that kept him from total resemblance to an Eighth Route soldier was the absence of a repeater rifle slung over his back. He’d take a couple of steps, then a swig from his canteen, and finally utter a loud curse. By the time the canteen was empty, the moon would be low in the western sky and he’d be falling-down drunk. On some nights he made it back to his bed to sleep it off; on other nights he’d simply bed down by a haystack or on an abandoned millstone and sleep till sunrise. He was spotted sleeping by a haystack by early-morning market goers, his brows and beard coated with frost, his face nice and ruddy, with no sign of feeling the cold. He’d be snoring away so peacefully no one wanted to wake him from whatever he was dreaming. Sometimes he’d head out to the fields on a whim and start a conversation with Lan Lian, but not by stepping on Lan Lian’s plot of land. No, he’d stand on somebody else’s property and engage the independent farm in a verbal battle. But since Lan Lian was busy working, he had little time for idle chatter, so he just let the old man talk, which he was only too happy to do. When Lan Lian did open his mouth, though, a pointed comment as hard as a rock or as sharp as a knife emerged and shut the old man up on the spot, so enraging him he could hardly stand. During the “Contract Responsibility System” phase, for instance, Hong Taiyue said to Lan Lian:

  “Isn’t this the same as bringing back capitalism? Wouldn’t you say it was a system of material incentives?”

  In a low, muffled voice, Lan Lian replied: “The best is yet to come, just you wait and see!”

  Then when that led to the phase of a system of “household responsibility for production,” Hong stood alongside Lan Lian’s plot of land and jumped up and down, cursing:

  “Shit, are they really giving up on the People’s Commune, ownership at the three levels of commune, brigade, and production team levels, with the production team as the base, from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs, all that?”

  “Sooner or later, we’ll all be independent farmers,” Lan Lian said coldly.

  “Dream on,” Hong said.

  “You just wait and see.”

  Then when the subsistence system went into effect, Hong got roaring drunk and came up to Lan Lian’s land, wailing and cursing angrily, as if Lan Lian himself were the person responsible for all the earth-shaking reforms:

  “Lan Lian, you motherfucker, it’s just like you said, you bastard. This subsistence system is nothing but independent farming, isn’t it? After thirty hard, demanding years, we’re right back to the days before Liberation. Well, not for me. I’m going to Beijing, right up to Tiananmen Square, and I’ll go to Chairman Mao’s Memorial Hall and weep to his spirit. I’ll tell Chairman Mao I’m going to file a complaint against all of you. Our land, the land we fought for and turned red, and now they want a new color. ...”

  Grief and anger drove Hong out of his mind, and as he rolled on the ground, he lost sight of boundaries. He rolled onto Lan Lian’s land just as Lan was cutting down beans. Hong Taiyue, rolling on the ground like a donkey, rolled into the bean lattice, crushing the pods and sending beans popping and flying all over the place. Lan pressed Hong to the ground with his sickle and said unsparingly:

  “You’re on my land! We struck a deal many years ago, and now it is my right to sever your Achilles tendon. But I’m in a good mood today, so I’m going to let you off.”

  Hong rolled right off of Lan Lian’s land and, by holding on to a scrawny mulberry tree, got to his feet.

  “I refuse to accept it. Old Lan, after thirty years of struggle, you still wind up the victor, while those of us of unquestionable loyalty and hard, bitter work spend thirty years of blood and sweat, only to wind up the losers. You’re right and we’re wrong. . . .”

  “In the land distribution, you got yours, didn’t you?” Lan asked in a less confrontational tone. “I’ll bet you got every inch you had coming. They wouldn’t dare shortchange you. And you still receive your six-hundred-yuan cadre-level pension, don’t you? And will they take away your monthly army supplement of thirty yuan? Not hardly. You have nothing to complain about. The Communist Party is paying you for everything you did, good or bad, every month like clockwork.”

  “These are two different matters,” Hong replied, “and what I won’t accept is that you, Lan Lian, are one of history’s obstacles, a man who was left behind, and here you are, part of the vanguard. You must be proud of yourself. All Northeast Gaomi Township, all Gaomi County, is praising you as a man of foresight!”

  “I’m not the sage. That would be Mao Zedong, or Deng Xiaoping,” Lan Lian said, suddenly agitated. “A sage can change heaven and earth. What can I do? I just stick to one firm principle, and that is, even brothers will divide up a family’s wealth. So how will it work to throw a bunch of people with different names together? Well, as it turns out, to my surprise, my principle stood the test of time. Old Hong,” Lan Lian said tearfully, “you sank your teeth in me like a mad dog for half my life, but you can’t do that anymore. Like an old toad used to hold up a table, I struggled to bear the weight for thirty years, but now, at last, I can stand up straight. Give me that canteen of yours.”

  “What, you’re going to take a drink?”

  Lan Lian stepped over the boundary of his land, took the liquor-filled canteen out of Hong Taiyue’s hand, tipped his head back, and drank every last drop. Then he flung away the canteen, got down on his knees, and said with a mixture of sadness and joy:

  “You can see, my friend, I held out long enough, and now I can work my land in the light of day. . . .”

  I didn’t personally see any of this, so it has to be considered hearsay. But since a novelist by the name of Mo Yan came from there, fact and fiction have gotten so jumbled up, figuring out what’s true and what’s not is just about impossible. I should be telling you only stuff from my personal experience or things I saw or heard, but, I’m sorry to say, Mo Yan’s fiction has a way of wriggling in through the cracks and takin
g my tale to places it shouldn’t go.

  So, as I was saying, I hid in the shadows outside the gate of the Ximen family compound and watched as Yang Qi, who by then was pretty drunk, picked up his glass and, wobbling back and forth and swaying from side to side, made his way over to the table where the bad people from earlier days were sitting. Since they had gathered for a special occasion, everyone at the table was in an agitated mood as they recalled the wretched times they had survived, approaching a point where they could easily be intoxicated without the aid of alcohol. So they were shocked to see Yang Qi, the onetime head of public security, who, as representative of the dictatorship of the proletariat, had used a switch on them, shocked and angry, as he braced himself with a hand on the table and raised his glass with the other.

  “Worthy brothers,” he said, his thick tongue blurring the words a bit, “gentlemen, I, Yang Qi, offended all of you in the past, and today I come to offer my apologies.”

  He tipped his head back and poured the contents in the direction of his mouth, most making it only as far as his neck, where it soaked his necktie. He reached up to loosen his tie, but wound up making it tighter, and tighter, until his face began turning dark. It was almost as if the only way he could rid himself of the torment he was experiencing was to commit suicide this way and expatiate his guilt.

  The onetime turncoat Zhang Dazhuang, at heart a good man, stood up to rescue Yang by removing his tie and hanging it from a branch of the tree. Yang’s neck was red, his eyes bulging.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “the West German chancellor got down on his knees in the snow before a memorial to the murdered Jews and asked forgiveness for the deeds of Hitler. Now I, Yang Qi, the onetime head of public security, kneel before you to ask your forgiveness.”

  The bright light from the lantern lit up his face, which had grown pale, as he knelt on the ground beneath the necktie that hung over his head like a bloody sword. How symbolic. I was deeply moved by the scene, even if it was slightly comical. This coarse, disagreeable man, Yang Qi, not only knew that the West German chancellor had gone down on his knees to ask forgiveness, but his conscience had told him he had to apologize to men he had mistreated in the past. I couldn’t help looking at him with new eyes, giving him a bit of grudging respect. Vaguely I recalled hearing Mo Yan say something about the West German chancellor, another piece of information he’d gleaned from Reference News.

  The leader of this band of onetime bad characters, Wu Yuan, ran over to help Yang Qi to his feet, but Yang wrapped his arms around a table leg and refused to stand.

  “I’m guilty of terrible things,” he wailed. “Lord Yama has sent his attendants to flay me with their lashes . . . ow . . . that hurts . . . it’s killing me . . .”

  “Old Yang,” Wu Yuan said, “that’s all in the past. Why hold on to those memories when we’ve already forgotten? Besides, society forced you to do what you did, and if you hadn’t beaten us, somebody else would’ve. So get up, get up now. We’ve come through it and have been rehabilitated. And you? You’ve gotten rich. And if your conscience still bothers you, donate the money you made to the cause of rebuilding a temple.”

  Racked by sobs, Yang roared: “I won’t donate money I worked so hard to put aside. How dare you even suggest that! . . . What I want is for you to come beat me the way I beat you years ago. I don’t owe any of you a thing. You owe me. . . .”

  Just then I saw Hong Taiyue walk up on unsteady legs. He passed right by me, reeking of alcohol. In all the years I’d been on the run, this was the first time I’d been able to closely observe the onetime supreme leader of the Ximen Village Production Brigade. His hair, which had turned white, still stuck up in the air like spikes. His face was puffy and he was missing several teeth, which gave him a somewhat dull-witted look. The moment he stepped through the gate, the clamor stopped abruptly, surefire evidence that the men in the compound had not lost their fear of the man who had ruled Ximen Village for many years.

  Wu Qiuxiang rushed up to greet him, and the onetime bad individuals jumped to their feet as a sort of conditioned reflex. “Ah, Party secretary!” she called out with enthusiasm and familiarity as she took Hong Taiyue by the arm, something he was not at all accustomed to. He jerked his arm free, nearly falling over in the process. Qiuxiang reached out and steadied him; this time he let her hold his arm as she led him to a clean table, where he sat down. Since it was a bench, Hong was in constant danger of falling backward; sharp-eyed Huzhu reacted by quickly moving over a chair for him. Resting one arm on the table, he turned sideways to stare at the people under the tree, his eyes bleary and unfocused. After wiping the table in front of Hong in a practiced move, Qiuxiang asked genially:

  “What can I get for the Party secretary?”

  “Let’s see, what’ll I have . . .” He blinked, his heavy eyelids moving slowly up and down. Then he banged his fist on the table, sending the dented old revolutionary canteen bouncing into the air. “What can you get?” he shouted in anger. “Liquor, that’s what! That and two ounces of gunpowder!”

  “Party Secretary,” Qiuxiang said with a smile, “I think you’ve had enough for one day. For now, I’ll have Huzhu make you a bowl of fish broth. Drink it hot and then go home and get some sleep. What do you say?”

  “Fish broth? Are you implying I’m drunk?” He glared at her, crusted material in the corners of his puffy eyes. “I’m not drunk!” he bellowed unhappily. “My bones and my flesh might be affected by alcohol, but my mind is as clear and bright as the moon or a shiny mirror. Don’t think you can put something over on me, no ma’am! Liquor, where’s the liquor? You small-time capitalists, you petty entrepreneurs, are like winter leeks. The roots may be withered and the outer skin dry, but the spark of life persists until the weather turns good and you start sprouting buds. Money is the only language you people speak. Well, I’ve got money, so bring me some liquor!”

  Qiuxiang winked at Huzhu, who carried a white bowl over to Hong.

  “Party Secretary, try this first.”

  Hong Taiyue took a sip and spit it out. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and said in a loud voice that sounded both dreary and tragic:

  “I never thought you’d gang up on me, too, Huzhu. I ask you for liquor, and you give me vinegar. My heart has been steeping in vinegar for so long that my spit is sour, and you give me vinegar. Where’s Jinlong? Call him over here so I can ask him if Ximen Village is still part of the Communist Party realm.”

  From the moment Hong walked into the compound, he was the focus of attention. All the while he was entertaining the crowd with witty remarks, everyone — including Yang Qi, who was kneeling on the ground — was enthralled, watching him with open mouths, not to snap out of it until Hong was drinking again.

  “All of you, come over here and beat me, give me back everything I gave you . . . ,” Yang Qi implored. “If you don’t, you have no right to call yourselves human, and if you aren’t human, then you must be the offspring of horses, mule spawn, sprung from the eggs of chickens, little bastards covered with fuzz . . .”

  “Yang Qi,” Wu Yuan, leader of the onetime bad elements, said, unable to hold back any longer, “Elder Yang, we give up, how’s that? When you were beating us you did so as a representative of the government to teach us a lesson. If you hadn’t done that, how could we ever have reformed ourselves? It was your rattan switch that made it possible for us to cast off our old selves and be transformed into new people, so get up, please get up.” Wu Yuan called the others over. “Come, let’s drink a toast to Yang Qi to thank him for educating us.” The onetime bad elements raised their glasses and offered a toast to Yang; he refused to accept it. “Stop that!” he insisted as he wiped the beer foam from his face. “That’s not going to work. I’m not getting up until you do as I ask. Murder demands the death penalty, and borrowed money has to be repaid. You owe me.”

  Wu Yuan looked around and, seeing no way out, said, “Elder Yang, since you’re going to be stubborn, it looks like hitting you is the only
way this will be settled. So on behalf of all bad elements, I’ll slap you across the face and the account will be settled.”

  “No way will one slap settle accounts. I gave you people no fewer than three thousand lashes, so you owe me three thousand slaps, not one less.”

  “Yang Qi, you son of a bitch,” Wu Yuan said as he walked up close to Yang, “you’re going to drive me out of my mind. A bunch of us who suffered for decades are here to enjoy ourselves, but you’ve made that impossible. You call this an apology? This is just another way for you to bully us. . . . Well, I’m not going to take it any longer. I’m slapping you today, no matter who you are.” And that’s exactly what he did, right across Yang Qi’s pear-shaped face.

  With the sound reverberating in the air, Yang wobbled on his knees, but managed to stay upright. “More!” he cried out fiercely. “That was one. You’ve just started. You’re not men if you don’t give me 2,999 more.”

  His shout hadn’t even died out when Hong Taiyue slammed his canteen down on the table and got to his feet, however unsteadily He pointed to the table where the onetime bad elements were sitting, his right index finger straight as the cannon on a sailing ship being tossed on the waves.

  “You’re rebellingYou bunch of landlords, rich peasants, traitors, spies, and historical counterrevolutionaries, enemies of the proletariat, every one of you, how dare you sit there like normal people drinking and enjoying yourselves! Stand up!”

  Hong had been relieved of his position of authority for years, but he was still a man to be listened to. He was used to ordering people around, and had the voice for it. The recently rehabilitated bad elements jumped up as if they were shot out of their seats, sweat dripping from their faces.

  “And you —” Hong pointed at Yang Qi, ratcheting up his anger a notch or two. “You damned turncoat, you lily-livered scumbag who kneels before class enemies, you stand up too!”