24
Brigade Members Light a Bonfire to
Celebrate Good News
Pig King Steals Knowledge and
Listens to Fine Words
Uncle, or should I say, Brother, Big-head Lan Qiansui said to me in the accent of a Beijing hoodlum, from here on let’s recall together that glorious late autumn, and the most glorious day in that glorious late autumn. The leaves in the apricot grove were red as cinnabar under a cloudless sky, as, for the first and last time in the history of Gaomi County, in support of the pig-raising program, an on-site conference was held at the Ximen Village Apricot Garden Pig Farm. It was heralded as an event of great creativity, a report to which the provincial newspaper devoted considerable space. County and commune cadres associated with this on-site conference were promoted in its wake, and in the area’s historical chronicles it constituted a glorious page for Ximen Village.
In planning for the on-site conference, members of the production brigade, under the leadership of Hong Taiyue, the direction of Jinlong, and the guidance of Guo Baohu, vice chairman of the Commune Revolutionary Committee, worked day and night for a week. Happily, it was a slack time in the fields, with no crops in the ground, so there was no interference with village farm work; but it wouldn’t have mattered even had it occurred during the busiest time of the season, since politics came first, production second. Raising pigs was a political enterprise, and politics was everything; all else had to give way to it.
News of the impending gathering lent a holiday mood to the village. Party secretary Hong Taiyue made the announcement over the loudspeaker, the excitement in his voice bringing villagers out of their houses, even though it was after nine at night, and the “Internationale” had already been played over that same loudspeaker. Normally, at this time, commune members would be in bed, including the newlyweds of the Wang family who lived at the western edge of the village, and who would be having sex about then. But the good news fired up the villagers and introduced a change in their lives. Now why haven’t you asked me how a pig living in a pen in the depths of an apricot grove would know what was going on in the village? Well, I’ll admit that by then I was in the habit of jumping over the wall at night to check out the other pigpens and flirt with the young sows from Mount Yimeng, and then take a risky stroll through the village, so I was privy to all its secrets.
The commune members paraded up and down the streets with torches in their hands and smiles on their faces. Why were they so happy? Because the village would derive great benefits from becoming a model. The procession ended in the brigade compound, where the people awaited the arrival of the Party secretary and other dignitaries. Hong Taiyue, a jacket draped over his shoulders, stood in the light of the gas lantern and said: Comrade commune members, holding a countywide pig-raising on-site conference in our village demonstrates the Party’s affection for us and, at the same time, is a test of our abilities. We must make every effort in planning for this gathering and take advantage of the east wind it creates to elevate our pig-raising to new heights. We now have only a thousand head, but we must increase that to five thousand, to ten thousand, and then when we reach twenty thousand pigs, we will travel to the capital to report to Chairman Mao!
The people were in no mood to leave after the Party secretary had spoken, especially young men and women, who were always looking for a way to release their bottled-up energy. They were fired up, ready to climb trees and go down in wells, to commit murder and arson, to fight the imperialists, revisionists, and reactionaries to the death; this was no night for sleeping! The four Sun brothers burst into the office without the Party secretary’s permission and took the cymbals and drums from the desk, where they had gathered dust for a very long time. Mo Yan, who always wanted to be a part of everything and was a real pain most of the time, someone who was not easily shamed and could not care less, led the way by putting the drum on his back; after that the other youngsters furnished themselves with Cultural Revolution banners, and the whole bunch of them formed a loud, colorful procession that wound its way from east to west, then turned and wound its way back from west to east, throwing such a scare into perching crows that they flew off with loud caws. The procession ended in the center of the pig farm. Slightly west of my pen and north of the two hundred pens holding the Mount Yimeng pigs, on the very spot where the wild boar Diao Xiaosan had gotten drunk, Mo Yan recklessly, if boldly, lit a bonfire of limbs and branches of apricot trees left over from construction of the pens. With flames licking upward and creating a sound like gale winds, the unique aroma of burning fruit trees spread throughout the compound. Hong Taiyue was of a mind to chastise Mo Yan until he saw the excitement on the faces of youngsters who danced around the fire and sang at the top of their lungs, so he changed his mind and joined in. The people celebrated boisterously; the pigs were frightened witless. As Mo Yan fed the fire, the flames cast a blinding glow onto his face, giving him the appearance of a freshly painted temple demon. Now, though I hadn’t formally been anointed Pig King, my authority among the pigs was well established. So I rushed up to the rows of pens.
“Don’t be frightened,” I announced at the first pen in each row. “The good times are on their way!
“A conference in conjunction with the pig-raising program will be held in our village, which means the good times for us are on their way,” I shouted before returning to my pen. I didn’t want people to be aware of my night roaming until I was anointed Pig King, though even if they’d known, there’d have been no way to stop me. I’d no sooner leaped over the wall than I heard a shrill cry as my hooves landed on something soft and springy. What I saw enraged me. My next-door neighbor, Diao Xiaosan, had made good use of my absence by coming into my home and sleeping on my bed. My skin began to itch and my eyes nearly popped out of my head when I looked down at that ugly, filthy body sleeping in my luxury quarters. Those poor golden wheat stalks! Those poor red and redolent apricot leaves! The bastard had soiled my bed, and I was sure it wasn’t the first time. Anger boiled up in me, my strength rose to my head, and I heard the gnashing of my own teeth. And damned if he didn’t look up with a smile, nod, and run over to the apricot tree to take a piss. As a cultured creature who valued hygiene, I always relieved myself out next to the southwest wall, where there was a hole. I made sure my stream went out through the hole, not leaving a drop inside my pen. The apricot tree, on the other hand, was where I did my daily exercise, since the ground there was smooth and clean, as if paved with marble. When I did my pull-up exercises, my hooves clicked on the ground when I landed. But now my beautiful spot was polluted by this bastard’s piss.
Concentrating all my strength up front, like a Qigong master who breaks rocks with his head, I took aim at the bastard’s rump — to be accurate, I took aim at the big pair of balls that hung just below there — and charged. I hit him and bounced backward; my hind legs crumpled and I wound up sitting on the ground. When I looked up, there he stood, rump high in the air, spilling a load of you-know-what just before he went headfirst into the wall, like a cannonball, and bounced right back. All that happened in a split second, and to me it seemed half real and half illusion. The reality part was seeing that bastard lying at the base of the wall like a dead pig, right where I had my bowel movements, just the spot for a smelly bag of shit like him to sleep in. The bastard was twitching, balling up, his back arched like a threatening cat, and all I could see of his eyes were the whites; the best comparison I can think of is the look of contempt a working man gives to a bourgeois intellectual. I felt a little dizzy, my nose hurt, and I had tears in my eyes.
The son of a bitch had to be dead, which, to be honest, was not what I wanted. I kind of liked his primitive wildness. So I tapped his belly. He twitched and he grunted. At least he wasn’t dead. That was good news. I tapped him again, and again he grunted, but this time his eyes began to return to normal, though his body remained motionless.
I’d read in Reference News that a virgin male animal’s urine had life-givin
g properties. The ancient physician Li Shizhen mentioned this in his classic compendium Materia Medica, but with few details. In the days I’m referring to, Reference News was the only newspaper in the country that printed a bit of the truth; only lies and hollow words found their way into the other media. For that reason I was so obsessed with Reference News that, if you want to know the truth, one of the reasons I went out walking at night was to sneak over to the brigade HQ to listen to Mo Yan read from Reference News, his favorite newspaper. At the time, his hair was dry and brittle, his ears covered with chilblains. He wore a tattered lined coat and a pair of beat-up straw sandals. When you add in his squinty eyes, you can see what an ugly sight he presented. But this strange apparition was a devoted patriot and a keen internationalist. He volunteered for the post of late-night HQ watchman in order to gain the privilege of reading Reference News.
I poured some of my urine into Diao Xiaosan’s mouth, and when I saw his blackened teeth, I thought, You bastard, I’m cleaning your damned teeth for you. Some of the urine splashed into his eyes, though I tried to control my aim. You bastard, I’m giving you eyedrops. He swallowed what for him was top-quality medicine and began to grunt. His eyes opened all the way; my magical tonic had brought him back from the dead. Shortly after I finished pissing, he stood up, took a few tentative steps; his hindquarters wobbled a bit, like the tail of a fish struggling in shallow water. He leaned up against the wall, shook his head, and came to, like waking from a dream.
“Ximen Pig,” he cursed, “fuck you!
The bastard knew who I was! That was a surprise. After several rebirths, I don’t mind admitting that I’d pretty much stopped linking myself with that poor bastard Ximen Nao of many years before. And one thing’s for certain, not a single villager knew a thing about my past. So you can imagine how puzzled I was that this Mount Yimeng bastard had called me Ximen Pig. But one of my greatest attributes was the ability to put anything that stumped me out of my mind. Ximen Pig was Ximen Pig, the victor, and you, Diao Xiaosan, the loser.
“Diao Xiaosan,” I said, “I opened your eyes today. There’s no reason to feel humiliated by drinking my urine. In fact, you should be grateful. Without it, you wouldn’t be breathing now, and if you weren’t breathing, you’d miss tomorrow’s festivities. And if you missed tomorrow’s festivities, you’d have lived a pig’s life for nothing.”
“You and I aren’t finished,” Diao said through clenched teeth. “One of these days you’ll feel the might of a Mount Yimeng pig. I’ll teach you that a tiger does not survive by eating corn cakes, and that the Earth God’s pecker is made of stone.”
I laughed off his threats and told him I accepted his challenge, that I’d be waiting: There can only be one tiger on a mountain, and two donkeys cannot be tethered to the same trough. The Earth God’s pecker may be made of stone, but his female counterpart does not have a clay receptacle. A pig farm can have but one pig king, and the day will come when you and I will fight to the death. Today’s run-in doesn’t count. It was just one louse pitted against another, pig against pig. But the next time it’ll be out in the open. In the interest of fairness and transparency, just so there’ll be no doubt as to the outcome, we can select several fair-minded, ethical old pigs who are familiar with the rules of competition and widely knowledgeable as judges. Now I ask only that the gentleman leave my quarters. I raised a front leg and saluted him, my hoof looking as if it were carved from fine jade in the light of the bonfire.
I’d expected the wild bastard to leave in spectacular fashion, but he disappointed me. He merely made himself as thin as possible and squeezed through the metal slats of the gate. His head was the hardest to get through, and required lots of bumping and clanging, but once that was through, the rest of his body followed easily. I didn’t have to see to know that was how he’d reenter his own pen. Crawling through openings to get into something is the way dogs and cats do it; no proper pig would ever lower himself to that sort of behavior. If you’re going to be a pig, then your schedule should be: eat and sleep, sleep and eat; fatten up for your owner, get good and meaty for your owner, then be taken by your owner to the slaughterhouse. Otherwise, be like me: Have a good time doing something that shocks them when they finally see it. And so, after seeing that mangy dog of a pig, Diao Xiaosan, slink his way through the slats of my gate, his stock plummeted in my eyes.
25
A High Official Speaks Grandly at an
On-site conference
An Outlandish Pig Puts on a Show beneath
an Apricot Tree
Sorry I’m only now getting around to talking about the glories surrounding the pig-raising local on-site conference. The entire commune was caught up in preparations for the gathering for a whole week, and I devoted an entire chapter to it.
Let me begin with the pig farm walls, which were newly whitewashed — to sterilize them, we were told — then covered with slogans in red, all pig-related, but also tied to world revolution. Who wrote them? Who else but Ximen Jinlong! The two most talented youngsters in Ximen Village were Ximen Jinlong and Mo Yan. Here’s how Hong Taiyue evaluated the two of them: Ximen Jinlong had upright talents, Mo Yan had deviant talents. Mo Yan was seven years younger than Jinlong, and when Jinlong was in the spotlight, Mo Yan was building up strength, like a fat bamboo shoot still in the ground. At the time, no one paid the kid any attention. He was almost unbelievably ugly and carried on in the most peculiar ways. Given to saying crazy things that had people scratching their heads, he was to some an annoyance and to others a pariah. Even members of his family called him a moron. “Mom,” his sister often asked their mother, “is he really your son? Couldn’t Father have found him abandoned in a mulberry grove when he was out collecting dung?” Mo Yan’s elder brothers and sisters were tall and good looking, easily the equals of Jinlong, Baofeng, Huzhu, and Hezuo. Mother would sigh and say, “The night he was born, your father dreamed that an imp dragging a big writing brush behind him came into our house, and when your father asked him where he’d come from, he said the Halls of Hell, where he’d been Lord Yama’s personal secretary. Your father was puzzling over the dream when he heard the loud wails of a baby in the next room, after which the midwife came out and announced: “Congratulations, sir, your wife has given you a son.” I suspect that Mo Yan’s mother made up most of this tale to give her son some respectability in the village, since stories like that have been a part of China’s popular tradition for a long time. If you go to Ximen Village today — the village has been turned into the Phoenix Open Economic Region, and the farmlands of those days have been supplanted by towering structures that look neither Chinese nor Western — people still talk — more than ever, actually — about Mo Yan, Lord Yama’s personal secretary.
The 1970s were Ximen Jinlong’s era; Mo Yan would have to wait a decade for his talents to be on display. For now, what I saw was Ximen Jinlong about to plaster slogans over all the walls in preparation for the pig-raising on-site conference. Wearing blue sleeve covers and white gloves, he was assisted by Huang Huzhu, who held a bucket of red paint, and Hezuo, who had yellow paint. The smell of paint was heavy in the air. Before that day, the slogans had all been written in chalk. The funds allocated for the gathering made it possible to buy paint. With his customary mastery of the written word, Jinlong painted the headings in red with a big brush, then outlined them in yellow with a small one. The effect was astonishingly eyecatching, like a woman made beautiful with red lipstick and blue eyeliner. The crowd watching him work was loud in its praise. The sixth wife of old Ma, who was a bigger flirt even than Wu Qiuxiang, said with all the charm she could manage:
“Brother Jinlong, if I were twenty years younger, I’d be your wife no matter how many women I had to fight off. And if not your wife, then your mistress!”
“You’d be last in line for anybody choosing a mistress!” someone commented.
Ma’s sixth wife batted her eyes at Huzhu and Hezuo.
“You’re right,” she said. “If these two fa
iries were in that line, I’d be last for sure. Shouldn’t you be plucking these two flowers, young man? You’d better move fast before somebody else tastes their freshness first!”
The Huang sisters blushed bright red; Jinlong was noticeably embarrassed too. “Shut up, you slut,” he said, raising his brush threateningly, “or I’ll paint your mouth shut!”
I know how the mere mention of the Huang sisters affects you, Jiefang, but I can’t omit them when I’m turning back the pages of history. Besides, even if I left them out of my narration, Mo Yan would be bound to write about them sooner or later. Every resident of Ximen Village will find himself in one of Mo Yan’s notorious books. So, as I was saying, the slogans were written and the trunks of apricot trees whose bark hadn’t been scraped clean were lime-washed; school kids, who climbed like monkeys, had decorated the limbs and branches with strips of colored paper.
Any campaign that lacks the participation of students lacks life. Add students, and things start to happen. Even if your stomach is grumbling, there’s a festive holiday spirit. Under the leadership of Ma Liangcai and the young teacher who wore her hair in a braid and spoke Mandarin, more than a hundred of Ximen Village’s elementary students scurried in all directions amid the trees, like an assembly of squirrels. About fifty yards due south of my pigpen there were two apricot trees roughly five yards apart at the base but whose canopies seemed to have grown together. Several excited, raucous boys took off their tattered coats and went naked from the waist, wearing only tattered pants, with moldy cotton leaking out of the crotches, like the dirty tails of Tibetan yaks, swinging from tough but pliable limbs like a bunch of monkeys until they were moving fast and far enough to let go and sail from one tree to the other.